Welcome to the panel where three founders talk about building a better business and a better life. I'm Justin Jackson, co founder of transistor.fm.
Jordan:And I'm Brian Casel, founder of Builder Methods. And I'm Jordan Gal founder at heyrosie.com. Gents, it's been a few weeks. We'll blame it on the summer.
Justin Jackson:Yep. It's
Jordan:good. Good to be back. A lot to talk about.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Good to be I I was on a two back to back trips. I know I missed the last episode, which I listened to while I was in an airport. I really enjoyed it. I I really I really felt like a typical listener of our shows where where I just wanna talk back to the radio, you know.
Justin Jackson:And
Brian Casel:I was texting you guys about that. But yeah, was a good time. I I two what, two weeks ago, I went out to The UK to speak at Brighton Ruby, which was, which was a really, really great time. Fantastic event. Andy How do you Crow
Justin Jackson:to speak? Because you haven't done a talk in a while, I think. Like how
Jordan:did So, that
Brian Casel:it's funny. I I don't really think that I'm a very good speaker on stage, like at live conferences, historically. Like I've done it a few times, but I've, but not super often. And the few times I have done it, especially with the larger audiences, I tend to get really nervous. I don't I'm I'm not a Justin Jackson up there.
Brian Casel:I don't have the stage presence, you know.
Justin Jackson:Dude, I get nervous too, but
Brian Casel:yeah. So this time Well, so this time, I was the first speaker at 9AM and which which feels like 3AM to me in my hours. And and I was my whole flight getting in was twenty four hours delayed. So I actually got in like a day before the conference, which should have been two days before the conference, which was a whole ordeal. So I think the fact that my body was basically asleep when I when I got on stage, like works to my advantage.
Brian Casel:Because I was because like I literally I I had a little butterflies walking but after thirty seconds, I was chill. And I, and I feel like I feel like it went like really well for the for like my forty five minute talk, you know?
Jordan:Oh, you what you need to do to prepare for next time.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And I also did like a private workshop there, which unfortunately, like I, I was supposed to land the day before my flights got all messed up and delayed and I landed two hours after the workshop started. So, and I'm supposed to be hosting this thing.
Brian Casel:So like, Andy kinda took over the load, but I came off of like a twenty hour travel fiasco and just like walked right into this workshop. It was crazy. Wow. And then, but it was a great time. Brighton, UK is unbelievable.
Brian Casel:I want to go back. It's such a cool town. It's a coastal town in The UK. Some incredible restaurants. It happened to be a heat wave, which was kind of bad, but great, really cool place.
Brian Casel:And then, then I was home for a week. And then this past week, got back like two days ago, we did a family road trip up to the Finger Lakes region in New York state. Sweet. Which is like not super far from the Canadian border from Niagara. Did a bunch of wine tasting.
Brian Casel:There's a lot of wine tasting on the lakes there and got a really nice Airbnb on the lake, you know, did some kayaking and hiking and stuff. But
Justin Jackson:Sweet.
Brian Casel:Good time. Oh, and I also, came up with an idea and built and shipped a new product from from the car. Oh, You know, in in the few hours kind of sitting around in in this Airbnb. And, and also I have a 30 new paying customers for that thing as of Wow.
Justin Jackson:There it is. There it is. It's kind of like saying, you went to Azusa and you're like, yeah, I just read books. Oh yeah. And then I did do a ton of cocaine.
Justin Jackson:There was that.
Jordan:What's the what's the time gap like from the time you had the idea to today? Like how long ago was that?
Brian Casel:So we were driving out to the Finger Lakes on we had to shift the thing because I had a unexpected doctor appointment that I had to come back for. I'm gonna have a small surgery in the next couple of weeks. But I'll be fine. Anyway, so we were driving out on Friday afternoon was when we drove out and I did most of the driving, but then like about three hours in, I was thinking about this idea. I
Jordan:have an idea. You got, you gotta drive.
Brian Casel:I was like, hey, I'm getting kind of tired. Amy, you want to take the wheel for about an hour? And so she did. And then we And then, literally from shotgun in the car, I'm on Claude code hashing out this idea for for a Mac app. I've never built a Mac app before.
Brian Casel:This was my first. Okay. And and it's a it's a markdown writing app. Here, here's the thing. Here's the pain point that I've had, that I have been feeling for several weeks now.
Brian Casel:Obviously we, a lot of us use Claude code for, obviously coding and stuff, but, but more and more people are using Claude code for things other than coding software. Right? So, I do a lot of work with content. I'm constantly developing scripts and articles and newsletters and strategy documents and notes. Like even for this episode, I jotted down some notes.
Brian Casel:I do all that in markdown files. And up until And and I always I didn't use Cloud Code for today's episode, but I do but I do use Cloud Code for lots of things like drafting stuff. And so, for the last couple months, I've been just resorting to the same app where I do my other Claude code work. It's, you know, a coding app. I happen to be using one called, called super engineering, sorry, super, superconductor.
Brian Casel:And there's a bunch of them out there, you know, like Aaron's solo app, seems really good. There there's, there's conductor, there's Versus code, there's cursor and the trend in all of these apps. And they're, they're moving toward this term like agentic development apps, right? The trend is that they are pushing you farther and further away from your actual files. So you open up a project and the premise now is like, you don't have to touch your files anymore.
Brian Casel:You only interact with your coding agent, your clog code or your codex or whatever it might be. And your agent is the one that writes the code for you and does all the things. And that is great in software development. And that is true. Like I don't write hand.
Brian Casel:I don't hand code any files for software anymore. I have Cloud Code do it. Yeah. Except when I want to write something, like an article or a blog post or an email, yes, I want Cloud Code to help me draft that, but I still want to hop in there and hand edit quite a bit.
Justin Jackson:Okay. This is my question.
Brian Casel:And, but the, but the thing is that these coding apps are not made for hand editing anymore. It's not, it's not a beautiful writing experience like you would get in like an Obsidian or a bear or like a notion, but those are, those are beautiful writing apps, but those don't have Claude code attached to them. So basically the idea with, with, with my new app called FlyWrite is it's a beautiful markdown editing writing app. All, all the formatting, all the customizations that you want, but it has an attached terminal so that you can run Claude code or Codex or any other agent that you want and collaborate. It's, it's basically like an app that functions similar to a Versus Code or a cursor, except it's made for the times when you want to actually write the file and you're not necessarily building a software app, you know?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I actually think the the marketing site, when I first saw it, I didn't really get it. But and maybe like a lot of these things, you need to have a use case. And I think the use case that came to mind for me, and I think this would work with this, is that I've been building a ton of marketing sites using basically just Astro as the framework. I everything's in GitHub.
Justin Jackson:GitHub deploys to Cloudflare pages, and I just interact with GitHub via the cloud the the Cloud Code app connected directly to GitHub. Right? And even that workflow is just I think when people listen and they think like, oh, I I guess you could do all that. Once you actually start using this, because I knew you could do this stuff in theory, like use the actual Claude code app, connect it to an actual repo instead of just your local files on your machine. Until you start using it, it's like you don't realize what an unlock that is.
Justin Jackson:But for writing, could I I could use Flywrite app to like write the blog posts.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:And then just say, hey, here's a blog post, and it would just automatically understand it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Has the built in. It it really functions just like a coding app, like a Versus Code. So like, so you can open you open up your project or you or you can clone a GitHub repo, and you could push, like you could use it just like you would a coding app, but it's really designed for the cases where you're not necessarily deploying to a server or building a code base. The thing that you're, that you're working on are the files themselves.
Brian Casel:The writing, the markdown, primarily markdown files. Right? So, so a lot of people are using it for like writing up documentation of stuff or, or content development. A lot of marketing people create content, create marketing or copywriting for something where you want Claude Code to draft half of it and then you wanna go in and tweak it yourself and then have Claude Code, you know, tighten stuff up and then you go in and tweak it some more and then it's ready and like, that's the thing. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:But it, but under the hood, it has a very simplified, like git integration. It has a terminal so that you can, you know, so so it's like, it's a very lightweight, text, like editor, but it's but it's made It's like, it's like the Versus Code except except it's for writing instead of like creating software.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I'm gonna have to try this out. I this astro using astro and all this stuff has just been such an unlock for me. I've been building tons of stuff with it. And one of the things I did was I said, you know what, I'm just gonna put the marketing for developers book online.
Justin Jackson:And to do that, I said, well, I need a way of writing every once in a while. And so I have I'm using this I can't remember what this is called. But some sort of editor that, you know, I can write and mark down and I can save it. It'll actually commit it to to GitHub and, and that put it live. But I would prefer actually to have just an app on my Mac where I could just not have anything even on the web and just interact with it that way.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Use Flyright now. Alright. So, let me tell you about Fables.
Jordan:So, it's a few days.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Let me tell you about the Okay. So, I'm in, I'm in the car, I have this idea. I, I sit in Shotgun, I open up just Claude web app and I discuss the idea. I scope it out.
Brian Casel:That's probably forty five minutes of work to get a really tight artifact that describes everything about what, what I just described here. Like what, like the idea for this markdown writing app with an attached terminal for, for running agents. That's the concept. I want it to be a Mac app. I've never built a Mac app before.
Brian Casel:So forty five minutes of back and forth, I hash that out. Then I take that into Cloud Code and I fire up Claude Fable and I say, have at it. Just build this whole thing in one shot. Knowing that like, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna do this. I'm gonna let it go.
Brian Casel:And, and I'm gonna sit here and I'm probably gonna start driving again and just let that go. And it's just running on my like cell phone data. And then by the, like within like the next, I forgot how long, like it might've taken about an hour and it built version one of this thing. And by the time we like arrived at our hotel. So, you know, so we're on vacation.
Brian Casel:We're with the kids and everything. So, so I'm like, alright, cool. Like, I've I've got this thing waiting for me on my, on my laptop for the next time I have some downtime. Cool.
Jordan:I'll pretend to be focused on my family.
Brian Casel:I'll pretend to not think about it.
Jordan:And of
Brian Casel:course I'm checking like the Claude mobile app and all this, you know, but the, okay. So, so I have a V1 of this thing that is like 75, like 80%. Like the, the core of it is all built. It's just that there's like little like UI and UX things that are like, not quite right. So over the, over the weekend, while, while I'm on vacation, you know, late at night, the kids are sleeping or, you know, we go out and we're hanging out on the lake, we're doing wine tasting.
Brian Casel:And then like in the afternoon, we're just, or other way around, or maybe in the morning we're chilling for like two, three hours, got some downtime, crack open the laptop. I would say a total number of hours over the next three, four days is probably four to five hours of like additional input from me. Meaning like in like thirty to sixty minute sprints, I'm going in and I'm like, oh, let's, let's clean up this UI. Let's refine that. Let's polish that up.
Brian Casel:Hey, let's fire up this one page marketing site for this thing. Let's, let's just polish it up and get this thing ready to, ready to go. Let's, let's design and generate like a pretty cool, app icon for this. Like, I don't know, four or five hours total of, of round trips of getting this thing. And then let's see.
Brian Casel:We came home, like it's basically done and ready by, by Tuesday. But Tuesday was the day we were driving home. Wednesday, I get home. I have this doctor appointment. And then I spent the day Wednesday, final polish.
Brian Casel:And I started sending out invites to the first, but I think, I think I announced the landing page from vacation probably on like Monday, Sunday or Monday. So I had about four days of like early access list signups in that time. Oh, and I, and I sent it to like my email list and everything. So I got maybe 300, three fifty signups on the early access list. And, and then on Thursday, yesterday, I started manually sending the first batch of invites.
Brian Casel:I made available the first 30 are going to get this lifetime deal. I think I sent maybe like 35 or 40 of those invites and 30 of them like bought it, you know, within the first couple of hours. And then, and so those have sold out and that takes us to now. And, and so now it's like open and available for anybody to sign up for and purchase. My initial crack, my initial thought at the pricing for this thing is let's do just $99 a year for a license.
Brian Casel:During the month of July, you know, there's a launch coupon to get $30 off of that, but that is where we're at. And so literally like less than 7 days later, I have a fully functional Mac app that I think is a joy to use. I've got a whole marketing site. I've got a Rails app that manages your license and, and the purchase flow. Wow.
Brian Casel:It's launched with, with 4 figures of revenue. And Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm drunk on Claude Fable.
Justin Jackson:I don't know.
Jordan:I don't what to tell Accurate.
Justin Jackson:I I feel personally, it is more like doing, like, like drugs than getting drunk, but I I think It's not a depressant. It's not
Brian Casel:a doubt. Yeah. An upward. Yeah. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan:It's it's the sativa of of AI models.
Justin Jackson:It is not an indica. That's right. That's right. Jordan, what have you been building? I want
Jordan:to ask. So I was overwhelmed with FOMO because everyone's building and I didn't really have anything to build. And so last night I just said, Okay, well, you know, my my wife is in New York right now with our oldest daughter. They're on like a graduation party with a few other moms and daughters. Cool.
Jordan:I got the little ones to myself. They are having a sleepover. I'm like, I got three hours to myself here. Do whatever I want. So I I thought back to an app that my brother had the need for while he was running his gym franchise locations.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And I just so in the past, have played around with, like, Base forty four and, like, the Lovable type apps because it feels, like, appropriate for me. Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:Because I
Jordan:I don't know what anything is. I don't know what terminal is. I don't have a GitHub account, all that. But this time I I said, okay, let me let me try with Fable. And it was the first time it helped me break through.
Jordan:Like, I set up GitHub Railway, and then I and then I watched it control my computer. Mhmm. And just do stuff and then say, hey, there's a pop up. Can you just say yes to the pop up and let me know when you've done it? It felt another level up in intelligence and interaction.
Jordan:And, like, it didn't hit roadblocks. It just kind of steamrolled through everything.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And it was like, oh, this thing happened. Oh, I got a bug. Give me a sec. It it, like, had this conversation with me and that I had to that I got to watch. I almost felt I felt stupid.
Jordan:It was asking me questions, and I, like, typed out this, like, clunky sentence. And I almost felt self conscious that this thing was smarter than I was, and I was asking a dumb question.
Justin Jackson:But isn't that freeing?
Brian Casel:I've had that I had that same feeling, but probably more so like a year ago when I was just getting used to interacting with these things. But then that then that started to develop this muscle like, oh, I could just ask it any dumbass question I ever want. Like Right.
Jordan:That that self consciousness filter that you have with a, you know, a colleague doesn't exist. I'm like, it'll understand the spelling mistake of this or the whatever. Yeah.
Brian Casel:So another, that's one of the differences between what I'm noticing with like fable and opus. There there's, there's many, I would say it's just a clear, huge step, step up. Well, one of them is like, you can be a little bit lazier, I think in your prompting, like obviously I I'm still a firm believer. Less precise? Yeah.
Brian Casel:Like I'm, I'm still a firm believer in like, we do at a professional level, we do need to over plan. We do need to spend a lot of time in like specs and PRDs and like when we're building something with that's like high stakes. And even though it can one shot a lot of stuff, my, my thing that I, that I talk about a lot is like, we still want to break it up into milestones because we have business decisions to make along the way. Right? But what I mean by it's, you can be lazier is like there now, like there's a lot of like prompts or design requests that I can say to it, all right, like we, we need to like migrate all these product docs over and, but we need to sort of change them around so that we're sort of positioning it this way and, and we need to do this and that.
Brian Casel:Like you, you sort of get what I mean. Right? Like go. Like, you know, like, like you can just sort of like assume that like it's going to sort of figure out the gist or the direction of what you're going for. Like you're assuming it's
Jordan:going to make, you're assuming it's going to make good decisions
Brian Casel:is the Yeah. Free again, there's, there's a give and take here. Like when you're working on something important and high stakes, you don't want to leave all these decisions to chance. You, you do want to build them into a proper plan for sure. But when you're working quick and you're on a road trip and you're trying to ship an MVP for a thing, can you be like, look, here's the, here's the idea.
Brian Casel:Like just have at it. And that's the kind of thing where previous models probably either would have stumbled or completely dreamed up the totally wrong thing. But Fable is just like, gotcha. I'm on it. And it, and it just does it.
Brian Casel:And then like the other thing is that like, does go an extra mile of like level of polish or, and also just like all the little, this doesn't quite work right. Or it's a little bit buggy here and there. It will find and fix and smooth all that stuff out before it says that it's done.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Also this automatic, like, except like it, what do you call that mode where it just it
Jordan:doesn't Auto ask you mode.
Justin Jackson:Auto mode is kind of built in. It's like the batteries are included and you can just go, you know?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, that's that's all all the models that, you know, been using that for a while, but but you you probably, but you do probably want to do that with Fable. Like you you wanna let it run-in auto mode, you know, and like there there were a few things where like it was a genuine blocker, like I didn't I didn't give it the right credentials to access some API and like Mhmm. It it just stopped and and told me that Yeah. I need that, you know.
Justin Jackson:For for Jordan, I'm curious about two things. One, I've never actually heard of Railway. So how did that was that suggested to you by Claude Code? And, two, what what did you build? Like, you built this app.
Justin Jackson:What was it?
Jordan:I think I had come across Railway at some point or another on Twitter, maybe the founder or something or
Brian Casel:some Some hosting provider for mostly mostly Rails apps, I think. Yeah.
Jordan:But it suggested it to me. And it was one of the first times that I felt this, know, a form of distribution people are talking about where allowing your service to be accessed easily and efficiently by agents puts you in a better position to grow because I wasn't really going to get in the way of the model's decision. It suggested railway and I was like, great. Like, you know, yes, you know, give me the URL and I'll sign up for an account.
Justin Jackson:So it did suggest it to you in Interesting. The test
Jordan:Yeah. It just assumed. And and in in truth, what I so so what the app does is it sends out phone calls and text messages to people before their shift starts. That's it. You need to open the gym at 6AM.
Jordan:You it's really, really painful for everyone involved if the person's fifteen minutes late. Because you got people who join the gym and they're like, I want to work out before work starts, and they show up at 06:01. And if the the opener doesn't show up for twenty minutes, like,
Justin Jackson:that's not cool.
Jordan:So it's a very painful problem. This tiny little thing, it doesn't really make sense to spend money on it. Like, my brother, like, you know, he hired people in The Philippines to call peoples. It was like a really weird problem. Wow.
Jordan:And he was like, build me an app that just sends out a text message with a little bit of like a math puzzle just so the person has to think and kind of acknowledge, yes, you know, 12 plus 12 is 24. Hit send. And so and so they're like acknowledging that they're awake. Like, that's it.
Justin Jackson:Wow. Right.
Jordan:So it's cool. But it involves telephony. Just got to send SMS and and, you know, I'm into the AI voice thing, obviously. So I'm like, yeah, make phone calls also and confirm that the person's up and they're going be on time. And if not, then go to the next person, all the stuff.
Jordan:So I had messed around previously on base 44 with it and use Twilio and it and it was it was the blocker. The thing that killed my momentum
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:Is the Twilio setup and account creation approval. Was like, geez.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's the worst.
Jordan:And so I just told it last time I did this on base 44, Twilio was a mess. Find me something else. And it was like, no problem. I recommend retail and I recommend Telnex. And this is what you need to do.
Jordan:It'll take two days. And so it, like, helped me overcome an actual issue that was out in the real world. It was like separate. You can't fix it with code that you got to like choose an account and a provider or all these other things.
Brian Casel:I do think that like the big difference between using like a base 44 or like a lovable or any of these and just going into like Clog Code or Codex is you're going to the source. Like you, like you go, you go to Clog Code, you, you have access to Fable or Opus, the best models available. You just, yeah. Whereas the, the base 44 is like, they're just like any other AI wrapper app. Like they base 44 is paying for those tokens.
Brian Casel:So they're going to charge it to you. So, so, but not, not only will they charge you for that, but like they're going to cut corners on has been
Jordan:my it's it's limited my experience in it. But but but going through this direction through Claude being very different from the lovable and base 44 experiments that I've done, I I have always felt intimidated to go straight to the source through Claude and GitHub because I felt like, well, maybe I can get something off the ground, but I don't know what to do from there. And so base forty four felt like safe. It was like, don't worry about the tech. It's kind of like, you know, Rosie is something for people who aren't technical right now.
Jordan:The good thing to say about Base 44 and those like it is because it's built for building SaaS apps. Really, that's what it's built for. It took a lot. It did a really good job on the UI and the UX and like the marketing site and like understanding what needs to happen, like a pricing page, all that stuff. But Fable, for some reason, helped me overcome that fear because now I feel like, okay, so it's in GitHub and it's direct and like, who cares?
Jordan:I I can still work with it in a similar way. And I I think you were you were saying something like this before. Something about Fable makes me feel confident that I don't really care what it comes up with in front of me because I can just change it. I can just change my mind. I could just go back.
Jordan:I can just say, oh, you know what? I didn't like that direction. Let's kind of go back in this direction. And in truth, what I actually did with it was I said everything's awesome. It works and this is great.
Jordan:But the UI and UX of the base 44 amp is much better. And it was like, cool. Give it to me. Mhmm. Okay.
Jordan:You know,
Justin Jackson:give me the
Brian Casel:UI and and let's go. I'll recreate it.
Jordan:Yeah. Yes. Yes. So this it's like it's gotten good enough that it kind of broke through a lot of friction and barriers and and gave me as a user this confidence. I'm like, oh, I don't I don't need as much guardrail holding me up that it's gonna be okay.
Jordan:It just does all that for me. So so I want to ask you guys like, I mean, Justin, you've you've gotten drunk too. I mean, I was about to expand that metaphor analogy right now. Going to stop now. What what differences do you feel in the work that you're doing?
Jordan:You've you kinda got some energy over the last week or two to build something. Is there a difference between a month ago and and now with Fable? What what is that difference? Is like is is all this hype justified? Like, what is what's going on out there with the models?
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I think it's it's like one is this deadline that it was gonna be available and then it was not gonna be available. So it was like
Brian Casel:That was a motive.
Justin Jackson:I gotta use this now. So why
Jordan:are they so good at playing us?
Justin Jackson:I know. And then they just keep they just keep putting it out. I know. Like and
Brian Casel:I finished my thing, like, just before the deadline on July 7. And then, like, two hours later, the tweet is like, we extended it to to July 12. It's like
Jordan:Yeah. This feels like In my Slacks, people are like, oh my god, my number's reset. And I'm like, well, it's on Twitter. And like, I'm not on Twitter. I just see it from this side.
Jordan:It's it's like Kim Kardashian but for like nerds. Yeah. You know, where she's like, you gotta do this new thing and everyone's like, oh my God, this thing
Brian Casel:is the
Jordan:greatest thing ever.
Justin Jackson:And again, like when interacting with your spouse or your family, it has that feel of like, hold on kids, like I gotta answer this thing on Twitter or I got to check out this thing everyone's talking about or okay, now I'm just I gotta get this done well before my fable expires, you know? So it was that. Was also the honestly playing around with Claude design more was such an a huge unlock. I'd I'd used it for a few things, but I didn't realize how interactive those prototypes could be. And so I was just like, I'm what is going on here?
Justin Jackson:You know, I I gotta check this out. And so I started I had this idea back in 2018 for spots.fm, a way to sponsor independent creators, YouTube, newsletter, podcast, whatever. John and I were thinking about building it. We bought the domain. We had to shelve it because we were just two people trying to get to profitability.
Justin Jackson:Is this the site from years ago? This is from 2018. Yeah. Oh, come on.
Jordan:Eight years.
Justin Jackson:And and I even before that in 2012, I've been doing the same thing where you could you could book a a spot on just product with like online and and pay for it. But this was the unlock was Claude design. Holy crap. The fact that it could be interactive and I could build all of this stuff in Claude Design and just really feel all of the pain and like, oh, I got to fix this. No, that's not right.
Justin Jackson:I don't want it this way. Oh, I think I want this. Let's see how that feels. And just to be able to build in all of these like pieces. How do I want this to look?
Justin Jackson:How do I want it to look? How do I want it to feel? And then to bring that into the Ruby on Rails app and have Fable basically take what was in Cloud Design and Okay. Build it for me And to be able to continue to iterate with it, like, I'll go back to Claude Design a lot and say, actually, the thing that Fable built isn't exactly what I want. I'm gonna mock it up here, drop the the mock up screenshot into the chat, and then and then have Fable build it into the Ruby on Rails app the way I want.
Brian Casel:And just to be clear, you're also using Fable in Cloud Design. Right? Like
Justin Jackson:Okay. So I I I don't even know what I'm doing in there.
Brian Casel:No. I'm using design is just another surface of Claude. You've got Claude, you've got Claude code, Claude co work, Claude design, all of those. And so, like, yeah, like Fable is gonna be a little bit better at designing these UIs in Claude design than Opus was.
Justin Jackson:Oh, actually, I'm I'm only using the Opus 4.8 model in cloud design. So I was gonna ask
Jordan:if there's the interaction there between like well, I had a similar experience with cloud design. I designed a new account creation screen as this latest experiment that we launched a few days ago.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And I I handed it over to my designer.
Justin Jackson:Yep. And then
Jordan:my designer came up with a bunch of ideas based off of it. And I like the I like the claw design better. It was like the first time where I was like, actually, I like the original.
Justin Jackson:And he was like,
Jordan:you know, whatever. I see. I'm I'm not gonna be afraid.
Brian Casel:It's really interesting. Yeah. So like like you can you can use Claude Fable. And so Claude Fable, I think is an an it really excels at design tasks. And like, so I also had it create, it created my whole slide deck for that Brighton Ruby thing.
Brian Casel:Okay. I, I also have like some, I do a lot of motion graphics now in my videos, which are all generated with, with Claude Fable and and, and some Hyperframe stuff. It's really, really good at that. Like, just the level of detail and the and the and the flow of like motion graphics and design and stuff like Fable is excellent. I I want to get to this question.
Brian Casel:You you posted it in the chat, Justin, but I I I know that we want to talk about it here on this. Yeah. Which is like, what does this mean? What what is the what does Fable mean in terms of software products, building tools, the future, you know, the age old question now, like the future of SaaS, the future of, but I want to illustrate that my answer to that is this. We can argue all day about like the future of SaaS.
Brian Casel:That's not really where I want to focus, if you want. But my thing is that the bar for creating tools, I'm not talking about products, I'm talking about tools, is becoming much, much lower. And it's going to continue to drop down to the point where building a tool for your work or building a tool for your business is just going to be another human skill that we have in a, in a long stack of, of AI power user skills. Like I could use, I could use cloud design. I can, I can do all this Excel wizard wizardry?
Brian Casel:I can write up Word docs and I can spin up tools as needed. Like, that's just going to be a thing that we do. And to illustrate this, I realized I have some experience that that helps me move fast with this kind of stuff, but the speed is real here. I, during this past week, I'm talking about yesterday, while I'm shipping this entirely new product with Flyrite, and while I'm doing some stuff with Builder Methods, and we're even onboarding a new employee at Clarity Flow, while I'm doing that, I also had Cloud Fable build me an entirely new funnel analytics tracking system. It's essentially its own app, but it's built into the backend of my builder methods app.
Brian Casel:And one of the things that I've been focused on in the builder methods department is like, I need to really dial in my funnels, right? Like how many people are coming in for this and that lead magnet, this free workshop, how many convert to Builder Methods Pro and where are they coming from and what's the drop off and all this different stuff. And I needed to slice and dice that data in many different ways. Now, historically you would reach for a Mixpanel or an Amplitude or Google Analytics or one of these fancy funnel analytics tools. And then you would probably spend hours, if not weeks on custom development to have that wired into all of your databases and your systems and your purchase data and your email marketing and all this crap.
Brian Casel:Because without that custom dev integration, the mix panels and amplitudes are just completely useless, frankly. And and I learned that the hard way so many times in in previous SaaS products. Yep. You can't just plug those in, you have to wire them into your database.
Justin Jackson:Mhmm. Which famously, Natalie from WildBit had this big post where she said, we just tore out all that stuff and built it internally because Exactly. It was better.
Brian Casel:A certain point, it's like we're spending so much why are we doing like pretzel why are we putting ourselves into pretzels to when we could just we we've already spent enough hours. We could have just built this. So that that's like exactly what I did yesterday during lunch.
Jordan:Like So so you're like you're like crossing over between product and tool. You're making a tool that replaces a product, but you're making a product and you're hoping a tool doesn't replace it and
Brian Casel:I mean, these are I'm what I'm saying is like, I spent forty five minutes writing up or creating a prompt and describing what I need to see in graphs and charts and, and the ability to spin up like custom funnel tracking going forward. Like I did that in my, in my builder methods repo with Cloud Fable. And then I went out to lunch and I came back and I have a high end dialed in, totally customizable funnel tracking system for me to And, and it's like, gives me like real insights into conversion rates and whatnot based on real data that I've been building up in my database. Forty five minutes, you know, like, while I'm doing other major projects, like, so, so what does that mean? It's like that's a tool that I, that I would have paid hundreds for with, with a Mitz panel a month I would have paid thousands to a developer to, to integrate it.
Brian Casel:But I have these like AI native skills now and access to a cloud fable and I can do forty five minutes. And now that's a tool that I will be using every day in my business. Yeah. I don't know what to tell you, but like that, that to me is like software is getting replaced.
Justin Jackson:I see multiple trends that I think are just gonna fuck shit up. One is there's just so many applications now where Claude is just eating those applications. Like, if Claude becomes my interface layer for my website, I no longer need to pay for a CMS. Right? I I actually no longer when it comes to something like Static, I I no longer need to pay for multiple tools in that chain.
Justin Jackson:I was using Forge to deploy and provision servers. Was using DigitalOcean. I was using Static and paying for that. And unfortunately, this new thing I'm really excited about is it eliminates basically everything in that stack except for Claude, Cloudflare pages, and Astra, which is this free open source framework. So that's gonna fuck shit up.
Justin Jackson:The other thing is every one of my Slacks, and even in this chat and everywhere, everybody's building software. So I I realize this is our bubble, but with way more software, this is supply and demand, classic supply and demand. Software has benefited from the fact that it's hard to build software. It's always been hard. You've always needed a team of engineers to do it.
Justin Jackson:And now that's not the case anymore. So fuck, the supply is gonna go through the roof. We're gonna have the same thing that happened in the App Store, the iOS App Store, is at first you could sell a $5 fart app, but now the, you know, you can't now you can't make would still pay $5. Now when, when everybody is making, like the value of the fart app goes down when everybody's making one, right? And our economy rewards things that are difficult.
Justin Jackson:Generally, way that's the way capitalism works is you get to charge more. You get rewarded more economically when things are hard, when things are difficult. And if that goes down, fuck. We're we're we're screwed. Here's here's what I am I don't think I'm screwed.
Justin Jackson:But I think
Brian Casel:I think Look, the rest of you,
Jordan:you're on your own. I I do think we we are inside of our own bubble of this very, very small percentage of people that interact with this stuff at the level that we do. I don't know what that means other than I don't think I would be selling software as a service to engineers and developers and people who are really engaged in the tech. That feels that, you know Right. But I don't know where it goes beyond our bubbles.
Jordan:This this makes me think of that podcast episode that I brought into our our our DMs. Yeah. From Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Invest Like Yeah. The He had this guy on I'm blanking on his name, if you could help me find that name. Find should give him some credit there.
Jordan:Jeremy something. Jeremy
Brian Casel:Giffen. Giffen. I listened to it, but I I never knew either of these guys. So
Jordan:Me neither. I think Jeremy Giffen used to work at Tiny with Andrew Wilkinson and then moved over into into, you know, whatever fund he he works at. And this was one of the more polarizing episodes I've listened to in a while. I did not know what to do with this episode. I, like, agreed with it and disagreed at the same time.
Jordan:I hated it and loved it at the same time. I thought the guy was brilliant and stupid at the same I I was so confused.
Brian Casel:There were like there were like a lot of ideas, like, you know, spewed out really quickly. Like, what was the big headline that that that you latched onto? Would you say?
Jordan:Okay. Like the, you know, the overall TLDR that I got out of it is that is that things are according to Jeremy, like his point of view is that capital follows narrative.
Brian Casel:Narrative. Right.
Jordan:Yeah. And and story and the power of influence on the timeline that goes beyond money into this other realm. And I just don't know if that is really spot on. And, like, these narratives are driving us in a certain direction, you know, SaaS is dying type of thing. That that's a narrative that's going in a particular direction.
Jordan:And where's the value going? And you can't sell to developers anymore and you need to be the AI labs because they're going to compete with everyone to eat. Like, you know, this narrative like drives capital in a certain direction where investment and attention goes. Or we're just in a little bubble staring at each other, playing these weird status games about who's the smartest And the real 95% of the rest of the economy is just doing its thing and doesn't care about
Brian Casel:our opinion. Do think that part of it did ring true for me. Yeah. That that's the big headline takeaway that I took from it as well. Was like capital or interest or momentum follows narrative.
Brian Casel:Right? And he was talking, he's, he's a VC. Right? Or, or he, he runs a fund. So he, he's talking it from that perspective.
Brian Casel:Right? He, and he was talking about how, the only real data or feedback that we get from the current market are founders telling stories, like giving us their quarterly updates and giving us their, their, their, their pitch decks. And like those are stories being told. And the question then for capital is like, which story do we believe and what are we going to invest in? Right?
Brian Casel:And, and I you, Jordan, you you would know much more about that side of the world than than I would. It's that that seemed to ring true. Like you need to be able to pitch and convince investors to invest in your thing based on your narrative. Right. But the way that I was listening to it, where I start to relate to it on a more personal level is like, I do the very same thing in my business, even though don't I have investors.
Brian Casel:I'm, I'm constantly telling myself the story and trying to
Jordan:see the future through
Justin Jackson:Like the
Brian Casel:I do a lot of business journaling because as a solo founder, I've really leaned heavily on like how to like, like self reflection and trying to get good at that. And as hard as it is to not have partners and to not have investors, I have to really rely on like finding ways to make decisions myself. The way that I've done that historically is a lot of journaling, a lot of like voice noting. And now I do that with Claude Code as a thought, or just Claude as a thought partner. But, but all of that is, okay, here's the story so far.
Brian Casel:And here's the story that I believe. Here's how I see the future. Push back on me. Tell me where, what I'm missing. Like, what's the story here?
Brian Casel:Right? Like another example of that is like, a few weeks ago, I've been trying to diagnose some funnel issues with builder methods. We had a crazy like March and then it sort of had a correction in April. Then, you know, like I've had all sorts of numbers going wild, both up and down over this year. And I was like, I got to make sense of this.
Brian Casel:So I opened up Clog Code. I think, I think this was before Fable came out. I think it was Opus. I gave it all of my Stripe data, all of my marketing data, all of my traffic data, all the YouTube data, all of it dumped it. Just dumped it into Clog Code.
Brian Casel:Here's the past year. I was like, tell me the story of my business. Okay. What happened? Like, what are you seeing?
Brian Casel:What are the trends? Where is this going? What, what are the gaps that I'm missing? And it was, it was very insightful and it helped me strategically. So anyway, like story, narrative, that's, that's kind of everything to me.
Brian Casel:I don't know.
Jordan:Justin, I want to put something to you. Dude, can
Justin Jackson:I, can I just, can I just Okay, go ahead?
Jordan:What, what? Go for it.
Justin Jackson:I just, I, because I listened to it and I was like, right away, I'm just detecting what I called broccoli headed Gen Z overconfidence. And then looking at this dude on Twitter, I'm like, dude, here he is, broccoli headed Gen Z millennial overconfidence. He said some stuff that I just think is just so silly. Like he said, billionaires have realized that money's actually not that powerful and that they're not as Yeah, there's a lot people in the world. It's actually posters that are the most powerful people in the world.
Justin Jackson:Right. I was just like, that's the stupidest thing. He's like, yeah, billionaires have realized they actually don't have much power. I'm like, what are you talking about? Billionaires are moving markets, billionaires are helping determine causes, governments.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. This is
Brian Casel:He also really emphasized Stupidest Twitter. He also really emphasized like the x timeline as being like the holy grail like, the the source of truth in the world.
Justin Jackson:And and the fact that
Brian Casel:And that that was where I was like, alright, you lost me.
Justin Jackson:The fact that like Marc Andreessen and all these people are bootlicking this guy, I'm like That's why
Jordan:people I must be
Justin Jackson:how dumb are are people on this timeline? It it feels ridiculous to me.
Jordan:Okay. So so let me let me do my middle sibling thing and just be like, okay. But there's some truth to the fact that, like, when you the billionaires still want to suck up to the people who have influence that aren't billionaires. Like like the power is not in a straightforward place. Oh, they have the most money.
Jordan:Have the most power. It's it's not really like that. And like the but but that's where I get into like, it's just a weird status game. And if you're a billionaire and you're kind of obsessed with not having enough followers, you're just an idiot too. You happen to be a billionaire.
Jordan:So I I hear you.
Justin Jackson:I don't I mean, I don't really see that. Also, the other funny thing is who controls the algorithms where posters post? It it's billionaires. It's Zuck. It's Elon.
Justin Jackson:Right. Individual companies.
Jordan:Yeah. Look, I I hear you. I like I said, I was confused and you see so much love for in the timeline. I'm like
Justin Jackson:This proved to me like I've always been critical of the venture capitalist class. I am I am more this was just like, okay, there this is
Brian Casel:I want a zero
Justin Jackson:I think it was
Jordan:a glimpse. It was a glimpse into the mindset of like what matters and it's pretty far away from adding value to customers who pay you. It's just It's a long
Brian Casel:distance between the two. Guys are
Justin Jackson:just so far out their own ass. I I can't believe like, I it was just so clear to be Like
Brian Casel:Here's what I wanna, I wanna draw a line here. I know this might not all make sense for those who haven't listened to this interview, we'll link it up. But there's like a half of this that I completely disagree with and a half of it that I think rings true. Like I was talking about the story and the narrative of how things happen, why, why people take actions and make the decisions that they do. I think that is all story based.
Brian Casel:Where he lost me was like the Twitter timeline. He said a thing where it was like, you know, all the, all the true, all the posters are like, they're defining what matters in the world. They're
Justin Jackson:the new priesthood.
Brian Casel:Yeah. You know, and, and like that, that reminds me daily now, like when I go onto Twitter, like I I've I've become like less interested in Twitter because I'm like, there's just all this nonsense that like, like I might be in into it interested, but like, it's, I know that it's a bubble and it has no relation to what my actual customers care about. Where the story really matters is like, am I speaking to real customers who have a real problem or need? And like, am I, am I delivering that? And what is their journey to connecting with me and connecting with my products and coming into my, my ecosystem.
Brian Casel:Like there's a real story there that happens with a real person on the other end who takes out their credit card and pays. And that's what I try to focus all my attention on is like, what's happening in that story for that person. But like and and the the more and more I I work on builder methods, the more I realize like that story is not the story that's happening on the Twitter timeline. Those are two completely separate things. Right.
Jordan:Many different stories at the same time. Alright. Justin, can I ask you something? Yes. If if you feel this way about where Fable's going and what it provides you, why do you not extend it into your own business?
Jordan:Meaning Why does it not go well? Okay. I have a podcast, and so dear fable, set me up with hosting and make sure that it posts to all these places at the same time. And also, want video. And so do this and this and this for me.
Jordan:Mean, I
Justin Jackson:think it it could get there. I I I don't think it I don't think it but the places I see winning are on the ground level, it's just even look what you did. You signed up for Railway, which is hosting. Hosting is like kind of the it's always been like this. Hosting is kinda like the bedrock.
Justin Jackson:Now, are just one abstraction away from that. And I still see a large number of our customers are technical and they're still signing up for transistor. Why? They wanna use our API. Why?
Justin Jackson:Because they wanna be able to talk to somebody. Why? Because podcasting is actually really complex and messy. And so there's still value there. Now, could somebody do it themselves?
Justin Jackson:Sure. And especially, you can see the writing on the wall, like where's Claude gonna go next? Hosting. Where's where's all of these LLMs gonna go? They're gonna they are gonna build more hosting
Brian Casel:in OpenAI has has already launched their website hosting service. Vibe code and host a website.
Justin Jackson:So I think I think it is a threat. I'm not as worried about it. Just because, again, maybe we'll see. Like once I start hearing people right now, all I'm getting is sign ups, people saying, we heard about you on Claude, we heard about you on ChatGBT. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:How did you find us? We look for best podcast hosting recommendations and you are recommended at the top of the list. And it's like, thumbs That's great. I am very, you know, like Michael Buckby was saying for years that LLMs are gonna become a increasingly, important refer. And I said, we'll see.
Justin Jackson:Like like right now, at that that moment, it was SEO for me. But as soon as it changed, I'm like, okay. Well, now, I've seen the actual behavior. I've actually seen the evidence that this is true. Likewise with spots.
Justin Jackson:Spots is one is the reason I'm interested in it is it's a hard thing. It's a double sided marketplace. What do you need in that marketplace? You need creators, which Transistor has 30,000 of, And you need buyers, which actually Transistor probably has thousands of
Jordan:Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:Already. So we have a connection with both sides of the marketplace. Might not work, but we this is not something you could just vibe code. It's the interstitial tissue that's actually the hard part, which is like, jeez, like to launch this app, I'd need thousands of people on this side and thousands of people on this side. So Yeah.
Justin Jackson:It feels like things like that are gonna be what's worth doing. As Jesse Hanley says, doing the hardest thing, meaning Yeah. The thing that is so difficult that most people won't do it, Not just because like the coding part might be easy, but every other part of it is tricky.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I do So like on the question like, what the the future of SaaS or whatever, like, I I my stance on it at this point is, is still like two things can, and I think will be true. And I think are true already now. There, there will always be markets for products to, to sell. And I think both of you, Jordan and Justin, like, I feel like you knowing your products and your markets, you, you are two of the more safe kind of product categories that I can think of maybe because I'm, I'm close to it.
Brian Casel:I know you guys, but like, like Jordan, like you're, you're, you're selling to, you know, I'm assuming like mostly non technical small business owners, you know, who's least
Jordan:likely to build their own.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And, and, and also like Justin, like even though your, a lot of your customers are technical, you're in the hosting game or at least you're one step above it, as you said. And there are all these like unique complications to pop. So like that's just like a level of hassle. That's like, I'm just not going to vibe code that, you know?
Brian Casel:Yeah. But at this, the, but at the same time, I think, I really think that tool building as a skill is going to become less and less expensive, less and less, out of reach for most high level professional people in the world.
Justin Jackson:Like it's
Brian Casel:tool building in most companies is going to become like a critical skill that companies hire for.
Justin Jackson:Yes. You know,
Jordan:like become common to solve your problems with tools and that yes, will definitely eat up some share of right now, people don't have the option to build the tools, so they buy the tools and then they mold them and there's some combination.
Brian Casel:And it's like, it's really category by category. There, there are plenty of categories that won't be touched by, by AI vibe coding anytime soon. Like, especially like critical infrastructure stuff, but like all, all the, all the CRM tools, all the little, like, like, help me just do this task a little bit better or, or my business, like every business has complex, unique, special processes. We need something that fits our biz our weird things about our business perfectly. Let's just build that instead of try to retrofit some off the shelf SaaS.
Brian Casel:Like, I, I just think that that's gonna happen more and more. Yeah. And, and, and look like one of, one of my thesis right now in builder methods, because I meet these people every day, like members in builder methods pro, are, they don't have software experience. They're not coders, but they are technical. They are systems minded.
Brian Casel:They have resources. They've, they've built really strong businesses. They are operations people. They, they built, they have really complex processes and they have really unique needs And they, and they are building tools like they are discovering Cloud Code and they are changing, they are changing the way that they build and operate their businesses with it. They're eager to learn.
Brian Casel:So like that, that is a growing group of people. Like
Justin Jackson:also want people to think about the adoption of Excel as a thing. So there was a time when most office workers did not know about Excel. And at some point, I lived through this, right? Excel came out in my lifetime. At some point, in an office, somebody put up their hand and said, hey, I think we should be using Excel for this.
Justin Jackson:Well, what's that? Oh, that's a Microsoft product you do. And at first, I'm sure adoption was slow. Right? But then people started realizing, oh, you can build stuff with Excel.
Justin Jackson:We can build reports. You can basically build software with Excel. And in this coworking place I'm in, you go out into that main work area and you look in people's screens, you know, three out of 10 screens might have Excel on it right now. The analyst class uses tons of knowledge workers use it. When Claude starts getting used by those folks, that's there's gonna be a similar, and I think probably even bigger change, the same way that really Excel and Microsoft Word kind of built Microsoft's business after operating systems, like that's how they made their money.
Justin Jackson:This is gonna infect every office. And it's not gonna be like they're not gonna consider themselves to be tool builders in the same way that somebody building a really complicated automated Excel sheet where you enter things here and then it cascades down to all the app the things and then you you know, everybody's
Jordan:not got necessary.
Justin Jackson:They're syncing it, you know, on the on the LAN and everybody's like using the same thing. Dude, they're gonna be in Claude and they're just gonna be like, build me the report. It's gonna build them with the part. They're gonna like, holy crap, this thing does this thing does charts, You know, this thing does interactive artifacts where I can drag the slider this way and this way and I can see different,
Jordan:you know I mean Google
Brian Casel:is rolling out like their next generation search results are gonna be that. Like they're not just gonna give you a list of links. They're not even gonna give you the answer in text. They're gonna, they're gonna quickly code up a whole diagram or a whole interactive UI based on your query. I That's happening.
Brian Casel:That's rolling out.
Justin Jackson:Think it's good. Because I'm using it all the time now. Like it's I don't use Excel anymore. I download the CSV and soon I'll just be connecting to it in Claude. I'll I won't even need to download the CSV.
Justin Jackson:I'll just be like, hey, connect to our Stripe data and pull all this for me and show us, you know, our top plans over the last six months and how each one's growing and how many upgrades. It's just gonna do that all for me. And there's so much work that gets done right now in offices that is gonna change so dramatically once the rest of the world starts figuring out what we know. And it's gonna have the same Excel was the same way. At first, only a few people knew what a spreadsheet was.
Justin Jackson:And then also everybody knows what it is.
Brian Casel:That gap between us and the rest of the world is so huge right now in terms of AI adoption. And you see it with Anthropic and OpenAI, like they are as huge as they are that yeah, they're growing by leaps and bounds. They've got all these billions of dollars. We get that. But you could see in their product moves that they are still struggling to crack the code on like, how do we get the masses, the general public to adopt AI in their daily lives and especially in their work lives, the way that the tech industry already is.
Brian Casel:Like, Oh, OpenAI just launched and they completely botched this like super app situation that at OpenAI, but like, but that is their that is their latest attempt at like, we gotta do something drastic to get the world to to wake up. Mean, they completely fucked it up, but they they're trying, you know.
Justin Jackson:And and don't count Google out. Google has lots of Google Workspace business enterprise users that use Google Sheets every day, that use Google Docs every day, that use Google Drive every day. And I mean, Gemini in Gmail is I use it all the time now. It's like, who did I do that meet up with in Montreal? Like, I think it was three, four years ago.
Justin Jackson:And it just gave me all the names of the people that were at the meet up.
Jordan:It's already there. Microsoft well positioned for that sort of thing.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Microsoft and Microsoft is coming. Don't count Microsoft or Google out. This was the Slack's classic mistake.
Jordan:They're planning on winning. Yeah. For sure.
Brian Casel:The new the new Siri is gonna drop in in people's iPhones everywhere in the next couple months, which is basically OpenAI, I think, under the Oh, no. Sorry. It's it's Google. It's Gemini under the hood.
Jordan:Got a I just got a a wave of fear when you said that, just so you know.
Justin Jackson:Siri? Yeah. The I've I've the last few days I've said, hey, Siri, compose a note and oh, look. It it it three times out of four, it tries to open up chat GBT. Or I
Brian Casel:say Right now. But next month, it's gonna be I don't know if you you follow the Apple, like, it's an all new Siri that is Gemini under the hood. It's it's basically gonna be AI for the masses on iPhones.
Justin Jackson:Just hoping that Siri in general gets better. Like, when I say compose a note, I want it to open up Apple Notes and compose a note.
Brian Casel:Yeah. Dude, that that's the new the new iOS or the new Siri is, it's an all new, it is They they have this deal with with Google that they have a special version of Gemini that will be used in all iPhones on Oh, okay.
Justin Jackson:I I'm actually good. Like that that is It's such a It We've talked about this a lot, like just how the interface layer is actually everything. I mean, we shouldn't have to use this Whisper app on our Macs and our iPhones. It should just be Yeah.
Brian Casel:Think what that's going to be like the new Siri is going to be the, the general public, like the, the simple, it's going be the replacement for ChatGPT in my opinion, like it's, it's going to be like, it's not going to be for the power user. It's not going to be for us to build stuff. It's just going be like, you pick up your phone and, and when you have a question that you would normally throw to ChatGPT or something, I think Siri And I And I'm someone who who has given up on Siri long ago.
Justin Jackson:That thing
Brian Casel:sucks. But the But this new one is gonna be basically Gemini in your pocket.
Justin Jackson:Here's a question though. Is does that kind of distributed UI then become the advantage? Because now what we've seen is the models actually don't matter that much. You can swap models. You can say, oh, we were using this and then we're gonna swap this.
Justin Jackson:So Apple has the key piece, which is they have people, if it's good, they wanna use the built in voice AI tool. Wanna be speaking to my phone all the time and have it intelligently understand what I'm talking about. If they get nail it and it's good and people just start using it all the time, Apple intelligence on the back end, Grok on the back end, it could be anything.
Jordan:Whoever pays more.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. It That's gonna be the that that might be the new and then I think we're gonna see a lot more companies like, I think Apple might be like, maybe we should have built a car because where else are people gonna be using an AI interface all the time when they're in the car? What are the other like touch points where people are interacting with devices? Mhmm.
Jordan:Yeah. This is like Tesla's future advantage in this gigantic network of basically hardware devices that move around. Mhmm. Yeah. Yep.
Jordan:Yeah. I mean,
Brian Casel:I I I love following that, like Go ahead, Jordan.
Jordan:Yeah. No. I I saw a conversation that I thought, would be interesting, around Figma. I I think it was a designer. I think his name was Gal.
Jordan:I remembered it because
Brian Casel:Oh, yeah. Robin obviously, he's making the rounds.
Jordan:Yep. And he kind of was throwing up his hands in in a bit of don't know
Brian Casel:if that was real or not.
Jordan:I I I think it was, you know, because the ensuing conversation assumed it was real. But it's basically a designer lamenting the the end of his career of his career and and really his interest in design. He was like, I I think I'm done. I think the AI is better than I am, and I've just put my entire career into this.
Brian Casel:Mhmm.
Jordan:And I don't literally, I raised the white flag. You know, that's straightforward. And then and then the founder of Figma replied and basically, yeah, tried to give the other side of it. And it's interesting to see. It's kind of like a it's not even like an industry.
Jordan:It's like a it's like a function. It's it's bigger than it's it's in our design is everywhere. It's in every industry.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Jordan:But definitely one of these things that people assumed would take a while to replace. And that assumption just steamrolled in like 12 This
Brian Casel:is a really hard mindset that is everywhere now, especially with designers and also developers like, don't code anymore. So my job is being replaced.
Justin Jackson:The white flag.
Brian Casel:Slide that I did at Brighton Ruby and I'm sort of repeating it in other places. It's a ladder. And the bottom of the ladder is writing code and maybe writing some tests for your code. Then as you get up and up in the ladder, you're going into strategic direction, vision, like architecture, design, like business direction. Like you're going up and up in like judgment and strategic decision making, whatever you want call.
Brian Casel:And that's where we all need to be moving up in that ladder. And for two reasons, number one, like, like the, the, the LLMs obviously can do those lower level jobs, the coding or, or just generating shapes on a page to make a nice looking logo. Of course, of course the LLMs can do that. But the higher level stuff, even though you, could re, it could do like reasoning and come up with ideas. Like it can't make actual decisions that matter for your business.
Brian Casel:Those are human decisions because humans do the business. Right? Yeah. So like, so, so the more that we get up into that, into that realm, and also like part of the part of what makes us as like the tech industry capable of like getting all this value. Like why, why do we actually adopt all these tools at such a high level right now?
Brian Casel:It's not just because they are powerful. It's because we are able to bring our human expertise to interact with, to unlock their actual power. Like we, we can't get the most out of fable or the average person can't get much out of fable unless they know something valuable to ask of it or to, or to use it for.
Jordan:So like,
Brian Casel:that's why that, so, especially I think design is like the perfect case for this. Cause like really what it means to be a great designer is like, you're, you're a problem solver. You're, you're taking constraints and you're, and you're solving a use case, like what it actually ends up looking like on the page. That's you're drawing a picture, but to solve a problem like that's, that's much bigger, you know,
Jordan:to a degree. What are going say, Justin? I almost was taking this toward art.
Justin Jackson:I think the challenge is it's not a ladder, it's a pyramid and there's not much room at the top. So the idea that that coding, like hand coding is bottom of the ladder. No. It's actually bottom of the pyramid. And as you go up the stack, it's like, yeah, you need more expertise, you need more product decisions, need but there's only a company can't have a thousand people up at the top of the pyramid.
Justin Jackson:That there's the the per people at the top of the pyramid are few, and they wanna keep their jobs, they wanna keep their position, and eventually, it's the owner, the CEO, whoever, the VP. And the VP, increasingly, these layers are getting collapsed. And so everybody is now feeling this pressure, like coders are like, you know what? We got to just we're not coders, we're problem solvers. So they try to go up the chain to where the product managers are or whatever.
Justin Jackson:And it's like, there's not that much room up there. There is going to be we've talked about this before. There's gonna be a real
Brian Casel:I mean, that's reality.
Justin Jackson:Reckoning here, which is gonna be the same thing that happens, but at a bigger scale, like Canva comes out and all of a sudden it's like, well, designers that are just kinda making these kind of templated designs, like, don't need you anymore. We we can have our the people up the the stack doing more of that. And
Brian Casel:If we go a level deeper, is that good or is that bad? Or what how how should we think about that? That reality because that is the reality.
Jordan:That seems to be the human question to ask. Yep. But it also is moot at the same time. Yeah. It's like, is it good or is it bad matters to us.
Jordan:And at the same time, it doesn't matter. It's gonna happen So, how how it yeah, I I I what it makes me think of Justin is makes me think of, like, my little organization. Teeny tiny little organization. Right? Five, six people.
Jordan:Mhmm. You can't eliminate the bottom. Look. It's not wouldn't work. Can't do it.
Jordan:Still need all these functions. Still need all these individual parts and people in them. But the people do more. It is a it is a confusing and shifting
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, I I think that the picture the picture of the organization from years ago and maybe just a year or two ago is going to look much different than the picture of a typical organization of the same size, same productivity in the next couple of years.
Jordan:Right. Not seem size, but seem like output productivity.
Brian Casel:Productivity. And I don't I don't I don't believe that it's necessarily gonna go down to zero or to like a 100 people down to one or two. I don't I don't really buy that vision because I do I do think that there's there's still you're still gonna wanna operate on multiple multiple cylinders, multiple people owning different parts of the things. But I, but I also believe that like the reality is like, it's just gonna be much fewer cooks in the kitchen on every, on every single thing. But there can also be a freedom that comes with that.
Brian Casel:Maybe four day work weeks become an, become the actual norm in the, in the world. Maybe, maybe less than eight hours a day becomes the norm, because we don't need it. Because we can get just as much, if not more done. Maybe more, more companies come out of this. I that's something I sort
Justin Jackson:of believe
Brian Casel:like this, this is gonna it's gonna create way, way more companies. So fewer people per company, but each company is still people.
Jordan:Yes. Right. Basically, what you're describing is like the most important economic factor in in modern economies is productivity. It's not the number of people. It's the productivity that gives it the leverage.
Jordan:And that's what really makes a difference in growth, in GDP, and so on. Yeah. I think And if productivity skyrockets, like, that is, I wanna say, all good. Maybe there's some disruption along the way, but it's definitely good.
Justin Jackson:It's it's productivity per capita that's gonna be the challenge because Sure. Productivity can increase, but unless it's per capita, it doesn't generally benefit everybody. I think the chef example is actually a perfect example. If the head chef can all of a sudden say, actually, I can automate everything that these lower level people are doing. So if the head chef is like, I got this idea for a dish, but yeah, I need somebody to clean the dishes and I need somebody to help do the prep here and but if the head chef can just say, if the head chef had an AI and he could just say, here's my vision for this dish.
Justin Jackson:You go out and make it happen. And if AI had arms and legs and etcetera and could execute on that, why would the head chef need anybody else?
Jordan:Because AI can't cook yet. Just like AI can can provide enormous amount of leverage to our support person that she can handle 2,000 customers, whereas normally it would be four people. Yeah. It does replace her though.
Justin Jackson:This is a metaphor for this is a metaphor for knowledge work. Like, it
Brian Casel:is I I just It's going to I I I like I sort of agree with the pyramid analogy, but I also don't I cause I think that there's still, there still needs to be human owners of all these domains in a, in a business organization. Right? Like, like, How many owners? Like, like customer support, customer support. Let's say like in a SaaS company.
Brian Casel:Right? Like you have head of have like product, you have customer support, marketing. Maybe some SaaS have like an infrastructure team, like, you know, like a finance, HR team, whatever it might be. So like, you're not going have like one person own all those functions, even though you, even though like Fable or whatever model can do a lot of the production work or the grunt work in most of that stuff, each area still needs higher level on the ladder, like the higher level decision maker, director, the prompter, if you will, the, you know, so like there's still going to be some form of a, of an org chart, you know?
Justin Jackson:Absolutely. Maybe. If look at some of
Jordan:the most successful AI companies, I think I saw something today that Harvey, the extremely successful legal AI company, is hiring 300 positions, all over $230,000 a year. Like, you know, an enormous investment in people. Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:Because they they gotta get
Jordan:the product out there. They gotta get the deals closed. They gotta get things signed. They got to get the exemplified In
Justin Jackson:some ways that's a good example though. If you're hiring 300 at that salary level, really what that means is in the five years ago, they would have hired So, three times so it has, it's just Yeah, both. It's moved up. There's there's less people in the bottom rung. It's moved up a notch.
Justin Jackson:And I I I'm conflicted about it. I think in some ways, I think I could see companies hiring more in a few places. I could see some but it does feel like it does feel like there's this challenge. And I know, for example, people in the agency world are already feeling this because a lot because why do you hire anything? Why do you hire a service or a product?
Justin Jackson:You are in motion and you hit a roadblock and you're like, I this is so painful. I need to keep moving. I will pay whatever it takes. And in the old days, it's like, we need to build a new website and then you start going and it's like, fuck, we can't do this. How much does it cost?
Justin Jackson:$30. Okay. We'll pay the $30 because we gotta get this thing going. Right? Yep.
Justin Jackson:But now, a lot of that work that agencies were doing, people are like, I did that in a day with Claude Design. Like, it I I'm done. So that's $30,000 of value that would have employed five, ten, 20 people. Yeah. Yeah.
Justin Jackson:Gone.
Jordan:But it shifts. I'm not I don't know if it's gone.
Justin Jackson:Where is it shifting shifting though? This is the thing. It's like Yeah.
Brian Casel:But there's there's design problems.
Justin Jackson:We have to have an example of of where because those
Brian Casel:New York City needs needs to needs to redesign their subway, map, their subway system. They're you know, you have the low the smaller, like build a website. Yeah. That stuff is
Justin Jackson:in trouble. My guess is that people that do city design is like in the hundreds worldwide or something. Maybe the thousands.
Brian Casel:What what I'm saying is like, that's one of thousands of examples where designers are still needed in the world.
Justin Jackson:What you guys have not answered yet is I'm saying there's a bulk of people. If there are millions of people who are web designers right now, where are they gonna go?
Brian Casel:If you are a web designer, like I was in my in my in the still make websites, but I started my career making a living as a web designer. You adapt because you have technical and design skills. You're you're tapped in. You you shift with the times. Yep.
Justin Jackson:In in all of this, just not
Brian Casel:how There's disruption to
Jordan:how how modern markets work. I mean, capitalism is the greatest thing ever because it acknowledges everyone acts according to their self interest. And all those web designers are going to act according to their self interest and will move around and find the opportunities and the gaps and the skill sets that they're missing. And that invisible invisible hand thing is real. We're buying the right price for those people skills on its own.
Jordan:We don't really have to worry about it. It's not a callous thing to not worry about it. It's just not our problem because we have our own problems and the best thing that we can do is act according to our own self interest.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And web design specifically was was disrupted way before AI came along by by the Squarespaces and the web flows and
Justin Jackson:all that. Yeah. And and Yeah. Yeah. I I think the one trend we should be looking at is, when did per capita productivity peak?
Justin Jackson:That's that's one. And when did real wages peak? That's two. In capitalism was great when every generation made more money than their parents. That is not the case anymore.
Justin Jackson:There is something we are, we are on the precipice of a new stage in capitalism that we've never seen since its advent. Every generation made more money than their previous generation basically. And the fact that per capita productivity is down, the fact that real wages are down, I think I I think it's a major red flag. It's like it means for the first time, there wasn't You're right. Somewhere else prod productive for people to move to.
Justin Jackson:So the invisible hand, the self interest isn't working anymore. There's nowhere else
Jordan:for people to nonsense. Actually, show me the passion. Nonsense.
Brian Casel:Me the proof. I agree with you Justin.
Jordan:All around. It's shorthy. Exactly. What in what how do back
Justin Jackson:that up?
Jordan:Back back what up?
Justin Jackson:You say nonsense. How do
Jordan:you back it up? What? That, like, capitalism is falling apart because technology and productivity is
Justin Jackson:I didn't say that. I said Okay. I said that the masses the now idea, like you said, that people have this self interest and that it always helps them to find a way. I'm saying that's falling apart now because productivity per capita is down for the first time ever and that real wages per capita is down for the first time ever. So that self interest, the idea that you could up train, you could go to university, you could learn a new skill, and then you could still make progress isn't happening anymore.
Jordan:I don't I I don't want to dismiss that there's a lot of difficulty and and a lot of people have a lot of difficulty, you know, that that can't be dismissed. Yeah. But it's not this straightforward answer that, like, the system isn't working. What we know for sure, for sure, is that this is still the best system.
Justin Jackson:I agree.
Jordan:That that doesn't mean it can't be improved. But trying to control and manipulate the market and the economy and people's outcomes according to what we want it to be does not work. The thing that works is incentivizing. Yeah. And and and pointing in in in a particular direction and helping people achieve things not through prescription, not through.
Jordan:Well, we're going to, you know, set aside this much more money for AI training. That shit never works. What works is putting policies in place that allow people to flourish and incentivize themselves toward being productive and making more money and keeping more of their own money and getting out of their way and making it easier to start businesses and making it easier to get licenses for things that they want to do in the economy and making it easier to open a restaurant and easier to build a new building so that there's more housing supply. That works. Yeah.
Jordan:Single time. The opposite doesn't, but there is a there's this empathetic response from people, especially people like us who are very far off of the bottom. We want people to do better. It is not a bad instinct to have. Yeah.
Jordan:It's just that we have to acknowledge that there's a history and a pattern to policies. When you try to mix the exact ingredients the way you want to have the right outcome that you want, it never works.
Brian Casel:I want to, I want to play the middle sibling here, here now. Like that now my turn to play that role. And I, I really do agree with both of you on, on two different levels. Like Jordan, I, I like, I kind of philosophically, you know, see the the world the same way you do on on what you were just describing. The the one caveat to that for me is is always just like the basic needs, like health care and like education, I I I wish got out of the way of the commerce side.
Brian Casel:Like that that's why I I support more of like the like, like, like a Canadian style system for like healthcare so that there could be more entrepreneurship. I think that's a big drag down on, on capitalism in my opinion. But, but that, that put aside, I think the, the, the fear and the risk that Justin is speaking to is very real in this transition phase. And we're definitely seeing it like the, the productivity per capita issue, which is a very real issue and problem, I would say. And it's going to be growing and more painful in the next couple of months and years.
Brian Casel:I think it's an open question on like, how painful does it get? And can we make it through that period, that period of pain? If we can, then I do believe that there is a better future or whatever, blah, blah, blah. Like, I think that that that's like that that's where, that's where the world is. It's a moot.
Brian Casel:Like we can't control it. Technology is going to take us to that future, whether we like it or not. We might go kicking and screaming, but that, that is, that is definitely already underway. The idea of like pausing or the idea of, of artificially, you know, keeping jobs around when they're not needed. Like that just doesn't make sense to me.
Brian Casel:But the, but, but the, but the, the pain and the slowness to adopt is the real bottleneck here. Like the models are capable now, Fables, Opus, GPT 5.6, like the, the technical capability is now possible. The big holdback is mostly larger organizations and universities and, and, and how kids are being educated and brought up and brought into the workforce. That is so far behind where the technology now is. And that's the, that's the source of, of, of all the pain.
Brian Casel:Like organizations have not adopted AI yet, you know, or they're starting to in some, in some areas. So, and there, and there is not a workforce ready to step in into this new model of working. Don't think going be huge amount of disruption.
Justin Jackson:I think that's the difference is that in the old days, it was like, Hey, software.
Brian Casel:But I mean like in the future that what I was saying was like, there, there are just going to be more companies or or more individuals being able to start companies.
Jordan:Yeah. Maybe that slowness But but that It's kind of like a more natural progression and evolution into into it.
Justin Jackson:I hope it's true. As someone who spent a lot of my life trying to teach people to be entrepreneurs, my worry is that there's just that what what I've learned is that if you have 200 people in a class, the people that can actually do it, because it's actually very difficult, all sorts of things have to happen for a business to work, even to make it so that you're making a living. It's like top two, three, 5% of any and these are people who have expressed interest. You know, I tried really hard to teach people how to be entrepreneurs, how to start their own businesses. And my experience is, it just feels like it it's not something that most people can do.
Justin Jackson:The the people that can do it and be successful at it are it's a small percentage. And so, I hope that that's true. Because if the only thing left to do is to become a solopreneur
Jordan:No. No. I don't I don't
Brian Casel:I don't know that it's that extreme. But I think I think I do think that entrepreneurs entrepreneurship is going to grow. Yeah. Because it is a more viable option for more people as the technology makes it available and hopefully as society makes it easier to, go that route. But I also think that there's just going be a lot more smaller companies.
Brian Casel:I feel like, I don't know if there's data on this, but there's, there's gotta be already trends that like more and more people are joining smaller businesses than, than like the big behemoths. And you stay there for thirty years like that, that model is going away.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. I mean, I can't.
Jordan:That's actually at least partly true. Overwhelming majority of Americans are employed by small businesses.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Yeah. I can tell you again, just in this little bubble, I'm in, I'm in this co working place and there's maybe we've got maybe twenty, thirty members. The amount of career disruption I've seen, the amount of people that have been fired and have had to find something else, it took them a lot longer to get hired back again, the number of people who had normal jobs, just like I'm an analyst, I'm a whatever, I'm a whatever. It's like I'm seeing the disruption happen in my little pocket, which has typically been a pretty good knowledge work category.
Justin Jackson:And so when I see real stuff happening on the ground, I go other thing I'm seeing, because I've I've got college aged kids and I'm friends with people with college aged kids, and I'm talking to universities, universities don't know what to train people for. Because not because they they they don't there's not things to teach people, but in terms of careers waiting for people. Their work placement programs are having a huge challenge filling roles, co op programs, huge roles, internships, huge problems filling those roles. Most people who are graduating with a degree right now are saying they're having a hard time finding a job. And so even if universities could catch up, there's no slots waiting for people right now.
Justin Jackson:And so we are in this challenging in between that I think
Brian Casel:Yeah, mean we're in it. Like, like welcome, welcome to the hard part. Like we are, we are now in, in the beginning, I think of, of the, of the hard period of, of transition, which who knows how, how long it's going to take, who knows how deep it's going to go. Yeah. But we are in it for sure.
Brian Casel:We're going to see it everywhere. We don't see it in every Like my brother is a farmer. Like he runs a dairy farm and he's actually killing it with, with some new yogurt products he's
Jordan:doing. Awesome.
Brian Casel:So it's like, like that's, that's real human to human. No, no. Like he, he won't touch AI. Like, you know, but like, you know, so like, it's, it's just gonna take a long time to sweep through. And, and I think, I, I do think it's an open question of like, I don't know.
Brian Casel:I don't know what the downside actually looks like, but like, will we, like, painful is this gonna get? Cause that could, it could get too painful where it's like, we don't make it through like that. That's where you get into some dark thinking. Like the
Jordan:I think the speed will help us. The fact that it's relatively slow. Same here, Brian. In the suburbs of Chicago, where everyone is a lawyer and a doctor and works at a health care company and a pharmaceutical company and and, you know, a homemaker, it's slow adoption. Yeah.
Jordan:It's cool. It's part of the conversation. Oh, we're doing this thing at work, but it is not disruptive yet. Mhmm.
Brian Casel:Right. Yep. Yep.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Well,
Jordan:we're playing out all the way at the top. We're playing at the edge. We are at the We're disrupting here. Advantages, disadvantages, wiping companies out, blowing companies up.
Justin Jackson:Yeah.
Jordan:But we're, that's where we live.
Brian Casel:That's Yeah. Like we're, we're in this little microcosm of like, yeah, like people are getting disrupted, like software coding developers, but like, but also our industry is like very quickly adopting. Mean, companies use Cloud Code for everything now in our, in our little world here. So it's like, it's a little microcosm, I think theoretically of what's going to happen to the rest of the world. The question is like, how, how long is it going to take for that to, And what kind of use cases, what patterns?
Jordan:The opportunities that I love is is in that gap between where we are and where the rest of economy And I don't know if it was YC or A16Z or one of those that put out a post that said something like, we don't want AI software for law firms. We want an AI law firm.
Brian Casel:Mhmm. Like, you
Jordan:see the difference there? Like, take an existing organization of 40 lawyers with partners and, you know, and inject AI into that is very different from how would you build a law firm if from the start you use these tools baked in. And I think that same concept goes for a lot of other companies. And there is a massive amount of opportunity to disrupt and do business a different way and be much more efficient and be much cheaper and be much faster. Whatever that combination of things is, In many ways, that creative destruction, I'm just going to fucking stuff the capitalism into this podcast over and over again, that that destructive creativity is going to cause job loss and is still better for everybody.
Jordan:It's still better. It's going to disrupt and crush things and eliminate companies and industries, and it will still be better off.
Brian Casel:I I mean, really, that that's my whole that's why I choose to be doing builder methods, you know, in, in these years for, for, for me personally, like, like I, I see it more as like on the individual level, the individual professional, person, whether they're a business owner or an operator in a business, like the we, as a, as a collect as like professionals in all different industries need to start to be like, have a, have a course coming up on like becoming AI native. Like, like we need to start to get comfortable, like thinking and working and creating with these tools, whether it's building tools or or just using agent skills and things like that. Like, these need to start to become common needs. Like and and the and the I mean, I have, like, people from well known universities coming into Builder Methods Pro, like, the universities are so far behind and they, the large companies like are so far behind on like the adoption and they don't even have like guide, like like guides or playbooks on like how do we go from we're in, like we we're we're bought in, like we need to go from A to B, but how do we get from A
Justin Jackson:to In the example that Jordan gave though, why would you? Because if if A 16 is saying in the future, there won't be law firms, there will just be AI law firms. That means you're not gonna need all the partners, you're not gonna need so if I was a lawyer right now, and it's like, oh, what I really gotta do is learn some skills, some AI skills, it'll benefit the 5% that can start their own one person law firm. Mhmm. It it the 95% of lawyers, it's not gonna benefit them because 90 most lawyers are work for a big firm, and a 16 is basically saying the the very problem, which is that in the future, there will be no law firms with a bunch of partners and expense and everything.
Justin Jackson:There will be AIs that do law. And it's where do those people go? Two hundred years ago, 98% of North America or something was farmers. And the reason that changed is because there was factories that opened up and they needed The massive amounts of different Yep. Difference in this economic change is now there's, it seems like there's nowhere for the masses to go.
Jordan:And that's No. No. How how do you get there? You you just named like several examples. Yeah.
Jordan:Going from one stage to the next. Going from almost everyone's a farmer to almost everyone's in a factory like that disruption did two things. One, it destroyed a lot of farming jobs. And two, it was still better off. Then everyone went into the factories.
Jordan:And then when automation came in, all those people lost their factory jobs and moved to something else toward
Justin Jackson:the
Jordan:Chinese And two things happened. It was terrible for factory workers. They lost their jobs and it was still better off. So why would this be any different?
Justin Jackson:That's what I mean, that's what a lot of smart people are debating is is is this?
Jordan:Focusing on the loss of the 95 of lawyers is ignoring what comes next. It's almost like it's like a it's almost it's like a pessimistic view of human nature. It assumes that these are victims. Oh, they lost their jobs as opposed to, well, now they're free to move into a different place.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. It's just it assumes that because we've never been at this stage of capitalism before, it assumes that there's always going to be somewhere else for people to go.
Brian Casel:I I but I believe that there is. Like there there There never has been There's always gonna be value for humans to find the the thing that that only humans can do, whether it's human to human, sales, community, like education, whatever. Like, there
Jordan:there's This is like the Maslow hierarchy of Medicine like being propelled by innovation and technology. Right. This is, you know, Elon is kooky, we know, but a lot of the stuff he says ends up feeling a lot more true and less kooky a few years later. And right now, Elon's mindset on this is we won't need to do this. There will be so much abundance.
Jordan:People will be able to live different lives. It is not a bad thing. Like, that's where this is heading. And again, that's that's an ideal version of far off into the future. But in this transition period, I I just don't know why it would be any different than any other time in human history where people went from hunting and gathering to cities, to farming, to more advanced agriculture.
Brian Casel:I think the one thing that that does scare me about this time compared to all the others is the speed and the scale of it is, is it unprecedented? Like how painful, how fast is it going to happen? Whereas like the, the, the transition from farm to factory or factory to automation, like it was painful, but that, but that played out over decades.
Jordan:Yeah. It was
Brian Casel:like, this is going to play out over two
Jordan:or three It was like a lifetime. Yeah. Goes through in a generation and people get brought up in a different world. They get educated for a way. I I hear you on that.
Jordan:Think And I think
Brian Casel:that there can be What what I what I get scared about with this transition, which I think is inevitable, it's gonna happen. The the second, third order effects, whatever, like strife, conflict, like, you know, like, when it's happening so fast Yeah. That's when things get scary, you know. Mhmm.
Justin Jackson:I think part of me is because I think Canada is actually a canary in the cold mine because when you look at our GDP figures, we don't have very many billionaires or trillionaires. And so our GDP per capita we're a first world country, g seven, like, we have lots of highest university educated population, you know. Our GDP per capita figures are concerning precisely because we don't have billionaires. So it's the accurate representation of how is the real economy affecting real people. And I'm just seeing like
Brian Casel:But do you do you like intentionally not have billionaires or it just the reality of your economy hasn't produced billionaires irrelevant.
Justin Jackson:It's it's that that's just a demographics issue. What I'm saying is that Not
Jordan:sure if that's irrelevant.
Justin Jackson:Well, is relevant because if you look at the the GDP per capita in The States is going up. Why?
Jordan:Oof. That graph is brutal, my friend. The GDP Yeah. Why?
Justin Jackson:Why? Why is the GDP in The US so much higher than Canada?
Jordan:What what happened right around that line? Which which government went out? Which government came in? No. No.
Jordan:No.
Justin Jackson:Did Steven Harper leave the scene? You're you're you're missing you're the point. You're missing the point about basic mathematics. It's if you have billionaires and trillionaires in your economy, GDP per capita goes up, but it only benefits five, ten, a 100 people. That's the difference.
Jordan:Do not accept this obsession with with the top. It doesn't it's I'm hurt anyone.
Justin Jackson:I'm not
Jordan:If if people are successful and wealthy, it doesn't hurt anyone.
Justin Jackson:I'm not
Jordan:saying this always ends up in the same place. You have two options. I'm not saying more equal, you have two options. You can raise the bottom up or you can bring the top down.
Justin Jackson:No. No. No. Mean, not saying
Jordan:anything about top and bringing
Justin Jackson:them math, Jordan. I'm just talking about if if you have a few people in any economy that make not just a thousand times more than the regular person, but a 100,000 times more. I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just saying that's why our GDP numbers are different.
Jordan:My friend, our GDP numbers are different because you guys in Canada are super into putting yourself in handcuffs and then shooting both of your feet and then shooting your other foot, and then once you recover, shooting your foot again. You guys are like the most resource rich nation in the world and you refuse to take advantage
Justin Jackson:of This is hyperbole versus math, brother. It it's just math. All I'm talking about is averages. That's all I'm talking about. It it is it's it's just math.
Justin Jackson:So, yes. And if I calculated The United States, if I remove billionaires from the per capita there's other ways economists track this. They say, okay, well we got to take the outliers out to get a more accurate picture of real productivity and real GDP per capita. They will remove the billionaires out, not because of any other reason, then we just need to see how the average person is doing. The US's numbers look the same regardless of president, regardless of party in power.
Justin Jackson:This is just an overall trend. This is just math.
Brian Casel:Well, if AI produces more of these Seinfeld memes that are like AI generated for 2026, I'm I'm all in because I'm I'm just eating these things up. I don't
Jordan:know if
Brian Casel:you guys have seen that. Have you seen those? Like, they're they're made like a like a modern day like George and Jerry and and Elaine. Oh, Oh, yeah. I have fantastic memes.
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Justin Jackson:Yeah. Hilarious.
Jordan:Yeah. Absolutely.
Brian Casel:But I thought I'd break up the conversation.
Jordan:Yeah. Bring up the World Cup, you know, early Holland or something. Can you believe Messi?
Justin Jackson:I mean, yeah, that's probably a good place to wrap. I think
Brian Casel:I think we
Jordan:got we
Justin Jackson:got into it. I'm glad we're talking about the hard stuff here.
Brian Casel:I like this episode. Oh, come on. Gonna enjoy, I think our audience will enjoy listening.
Jordan:And folks, if
Justin Jackson:you have something to say, go to our YouTube channel, Panel Podcast, leave a comment. You can also comment on Blue Sky. It'll actually show up on the episode show notes. You can write us an email that's in the show notes. You can even send us an audio or video message, cause I know there's gonna be people that were yelling at their radios.
Justin Jackson:Just turn that yelling into a audio video message and we'll talk about it next time. Alright, folks.
Brian Casel:Yep. Later. See you guys.