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

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

We’re back with part two of Hard Fork Live (see last week’s episode for part one). This week, Patrick Collison, Stripe’s chief executive, joins us onstage for a wide-ranging conversation about how Silicon Valley could unleash greater progress, from building new housing to curing diseases, and why he believes prestige television is a waste of time. Then, after a quick costume change, Kathryn Zealand, the chief executive of Skip, joins us to talk about her company’s robot pants. We test them out live on a StairMaster. Finally, we end the show by taking questions from audience members.Guests:Patrick Collison, Co-founder and C.E.O. of StripeKathryn Zealand, Founder and C.E.O. of Skip We want to hear from you. Email us at [e-mail]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Hard Fork Live, the podcast's inaugural event, was sponsored by premier sponsor IBM, associate sponsor Invesco QQQ, and supporting sponsor Intuit QuickBooks. Well, Casey, what was your favorite part of Hard Fork Live? I mean, there are so many things I choose from, Kevin. I think we know one thing comes to mind was when I showed up at the venue and they had no idea who I was and didn't want to let me in. I went right up to the security. I said, Hi, Casey, I'm here to co-host the show.

And they said, who? I said, oh gosh, am I going to have to pull up a website on my phone and show you my face? And I did. And then they let me in. That's good. What was your favorite part? I told them not to let you in. That's why that happened. Dang it, Roos, you got me again, you scoundrel.

My favorite part was definitely, so we had this, you know, bit where we're changing out of our regular pants into some mechanical robot exoskeleton pants for a demo. And we had practiced this the day before during rehearsal in sort of like an empty backstage area. And I'm taking off my pants and I look up and there's Patrick Collison just looking at my fleshy pale thighs.

Yeah, one of Silicon Valley's great thinkers and leaders, and there we are, our trousers dropped, and he's thinking, what kind of show is this exactly? Yeah, so suffice to say, if you weren't backstage on Hard Fork Live, you didn't see the whole show. Yeah. I'm Kevin Russo, tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

And this is Hard Fork. This week it's part two of Hard Fork Live. We'll talk to Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and try on some robot pants with Skip's Catherine Zeeland. Plus, members of the live audience asked us anything. Anything? And they did. Well, this next guest I'm extremely excited about. I have known Patrick Collison and his brother John since the early 2010s. They were recently arrived in the city.

They were starting to build a company called Stripe. And in the years since, it has grown into a juggernaut. And Patrick, I think, has become one of the most interesting and influential thinkers in tech outside of his day job. He and Tyler Cowan wrote a piece in the Atlantic about the need for a new science of progress. He also is the co-founder of the ARC Institute, which is doing a bunch of really important

biomedical research. And just to top it off, in April, he joined the board of Meta, which is currently reshuffling its AI team in ways that might be fun to talk about. So I'm extremely excited to welcome to the stage Patrick Collison. Hey! It's real!

Hi, how are you? Good to see you. All right. Patrick, thank you so much for coming. Thanks for having me. How are you? I'm doing well. It's wonderful to be here where I've come to so many long now talks here, and I'm excited

to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here. I for having me. How are you? I'm doing well. It's wonderful to be here, where I've come to so many long Now Talks here, and now it's you guys. There is no longer Now than a podcast, is what they say. So Patrick, you are a big proponent of what they call

the abundance agenda. I think I can say that without paying a royalty to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. What is the most urgent abundance-related need right now? Is it housing, land use, fast-tracking approvals for new drugs? What is it? Building. And why is that?

Well, I think, look, there are so many domains where we need more progress than we've garnered. The rate of improvement of life expectancies has really diminished, and you still get colds. That's crazy. We're on a trajectory supposedly to invent newt-deer fusion and AGI, but we haven't cured even the common cold. So there are a lot of challenges we face in many domains. There are many pursuits in science and technology where we should be going much faster. However, I think the place where the constraints are

most unnecessary, most self-imposed, and easiest to, at least in principle, easiest to address are in any kind of physical construction. And by the way, California and San Francisco used to stand for this, right? We have the Kaiser signs around the bay, and the Marine ship was in California, those stories of the ships that got built in a day, they happened here. And so I think California is kind of this funny superposition where in the 40s, 50s, 60s, I mean, actually,

my favorite example of this is Treasure Island we built to celebrate the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. We were just so drunk on the fervor of having finished the Golden Gate Bridge, we were just caught up in the momentum of it. And we were like, well, let's just go build another thing. And so we built an island.

And so California and San Francisco used to stand for this. And now California, my favorite example of this is we passed a ballot prop for California high-speed rail. And they used to have on the website, you had to go there and the forecast completion date was 2033. And now I just checked recently and they've now taken it down. So, you know, it used to be a 37-year project and now, you know, who knows?

And so... Yeah, it's so interesting. I was interviewing someone once about like their AI forecast and how everything was going to change in the next like two or three years. We were going to have super intelligence as a robot factories and we're sitting in Berkeley and looking out over the Berkeley sort of downtown. And said do you think any of that will get like permitted by zoning and he was like no so like even the people thinking about the wildest possible futures cannot imagine land use reform in the Bay Area. Yeah well another I think kind of funny example of this was you know there was the sort of

announced aspirational city project in Solano County back a couple years ago. You guys covered it on the podcast. But I thought the response was sort of funny, where thousands of times in its history, and America's history is only a couple hundred years, America decided, hey, let's build a city. And that is a thing that has, in fact, ensued. And there is a city there today.

And it's happened even recently, recently with Irvine and so forth. But the response to that was astonishment and people aghast. That kind of audacity was kind of offensive. But when somebody says, hey, we're going to create a super intelligence probably to Cosmos, we're like, yep, seems pretty reasonable.

When someone says we're going to build a new city in California, it's like, that's just ridiculous. I do think that there is an element separate from that, which is that with a lot of tech, I think some folks just feel like they've gotten a bad bargain. Maybe with social media, they don't quite like the bargain that they've gotten, or they worry about the environmental impact

of some of these technologies. And so sometimes I do think technologists come along and they say, we want to take a crack at this. And people just think, I don't actually trust you to do that. And I imagine you have done some thinking about this as somebody who is trying to bring your influence to bear on public issues. So how do you reckon with that?

Well, you have the homework hire problem. Nobody wants it. So I think that in many domains, I think it's the case that if you go and you talk to the insiders and the people who've been plowing some lonely furrow for a long time, they are brimming with ideas for how it could be done better. And it's not a matter of somebody careering in from outside with some delusions of grandeur and some sense for how it could all be done differently. I think in many cases it's actually about unleashing the ideas kind of inside the system that are existing and not yet manifested.

And one of my favorite examples and one of the most striking examples of this is we ran a survey a couple of years ago of practicing top-tier scientists. And we asked them not whether you had more money, but if you could spend your current funding dollars however you like. Because today, funding dollars come with all sorts of restrictions. And they're allocated by committees and by consensus

and with kind of type, excuse me, field definitions and so forth. We asked these scientists, if you could keep your current funding level, but if you could spend those dollars however you want, how much would your research agenda change? And I thought that the results might be striking, maybe a third of scientists would actually

like to be doing something else. 79% of respondents in that survey said they would change the research agenda a lot. And that just blew my mind, because we go to, I mean, these scientists, they're so self-sacrificing. They could go and make a bajillion dollars, or these days, 100 bajillion dollars, by doing something more lucrative.

And they've decided to try to better humanity by working inside the academy. They spend decades training. And then 80% are telling us that they would be doing something very different, again, not if they had more money, but if they had fewer strictures attached to their current money. So yeah, I think that's one striking example.

That was one of the influences for Arc, but I think in many of these cases, whether it's urban design and urban planning or any kind of construction or whatever, I think the insiders often know how to do a lot better. You mentioned the 100 million figure, so I have to ask you are on the board of Meta, which is currently reshuffling its AI teams, building a super intelligence team, and reportedly offering people $100 million to come work for them. Have you been helping with that?

And what kind of advice are you giving to Mark Zuckerberg about that? You add the payments guy to the board, and then all of a sudden, yeah. I've just had one board meeting, so I shouldn't comment. Okay, well, let me ask you about something you can't comment on then, which is this idea of agentic commerce,

which I've heard a bunch of times recently, and I think it means something like robots buying stuff. This is a big idea in the tech industry right now, that you're just going to have these bots going out and buying things on your behalf, or that there's going to be agents transacting with each other. Right now, Stripe is a platform to help people, human beings, pay for things. But I can go on Oper operator and have it buy me a pizza or a burrito.

If you have two hours for it to complete that process. I imagine you're planning for a world in which this kind of thing is happening more. What does that look like and is Stripe still necessary in that world? Stripe enables the transactions and the money movement beneath the surface. So we're, to some extent, agnostic about and enthusiastic about all the different modalities in which that might happen. And when Stripe started, mobile wasn't nearly as big a thing

as it is today. And stable coins didn't exist and so forth. So we're enthusiastic about the reinvention here. And from my standpoint, the variety that one can benefit from on the internet is tremendous. And I think it's amazing that you can have so many niche businesses that are serving these preposterously large global audiences and customer bases that couldn't exist without the internet, right?

Because if you're only restricted to the hinterland that you locally serve, you get much less as possible. But very few people say, you know, the thing I love about internet commerce is after I click on the things that I am brought to sort of a... Checkout flow. Yeah, like a 30 field form to fill out and then fax it and parts of it in Latin. Like it feels very antiquated.

And so I think the promise for these, I mean, I don't know, I think agents sounds very kind of highfalutin, but these critters to go and to... And to sort of be the paperwork minions for you, to sort of dispatch one and say, hey, go handle that and then I will resume whatever else I was doing. I think that's very promising and I think it's going to be better for everyone. Will the agents use dollars or crypto?

Well, I'm here with a well known crypto booster. I think they will use amounts denominated in the local currency. So I think in the US things will be in dollars and euros in Ireland and so forth. And I think there's kind of an irony where with the invention of crypto, I mean it is an amazing kind of computer science invention and technology and so forth. Obviously the sort of initial conception of Bitcoin was we're going to throw off the shackles of the monetary tyranny and oppression that we're subjected to and liberate ourselves with this new currency. And you look at Bitcoin, it's obviously garnered a lot of traction, but a majority of cryptocurrency transactions today are in stablecoins,

are dollar-denominated. And I think it might be the case with stablecoins, but what actually happens is rather than kind of overthrowing the dollar, it actually enables people outside the US to access the dollar in ways they couldn't previously. I think this is the biggest thing that's actually underappreciated by people here in America,

which is for outsiders, lots of currencies are not a great thing to hold savings in, or not a great thing to transact in. Like, for, you know, I don't want to name names and single any, you know, poor currency out, but like, you know, there's, there are many currencies where when you go to give them to your counterparty, they look at you funny and ask you, what is that? Cole's cash comes to mind. And there's a lot of currencies that have lost 75% of their value in the last five years. And so providing the ability for people outside the US to hold dollars is, I think, going

to be a big deal. And I think there's kind of an irony in crypto where one of the most important and consequential things it may end up enabling is the dollar's greater success. You are a co-founder of the Arc Institute, you mentioned it a moment ago, you also mentioned the persistent problem of the common cold. Do you think there is something that can be done about the common cold and are you gonna work on it? We have a big announcement tonight. That would be so dope. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. That mist on the way in was actually a vaccine. No.

Um. Uh. So, um. So, huma- humanity has, um, uh, this was only a penny that dropped for me, um, a couple of years ago. Humanity has never cured a complex disease. Uh, and what I mean by that is, uh, you know, there are some genes that are, excuse me,

there's some diseases, you know, infectious diseases, the cold, COVID, you know, what have you. Then we have monogenic diseases, you know, Huntington's, you know, things that are the product of, you know, some specific genetic abnormality. And, but then you have all these diseases that are some combination of the environment and, you know, your, whatever, what you do with your life and your genetic risk factors you might have so this is most cancers most cardiovascular disease most neurodegenerative disease Most autoimmune disease and so forth. We've never cured one of these and it's it's it's too complicated because you know figuring out How the genes and the environment and you know the the durations that elapse and so forth It's just it's it's it's kind of it's incorrigible. So

So we set up our institutes and try to, I mean, again, no, time will tell, you know, whether actually able to make any progress here. But the sort of the idea was, hey, can we try a different strategy for going after these complex diseases. And one of the things that has been a real boost for us over the last two years is actually AI, where I think the LLMs, as we interact with them, they're obviously wonderful and enable all sorts of productivity enhancements and so forth. But there's another language, DNA, the language of life,

and kind of hitherto, we haven't really, it's billions of base pairs, and we can't, at a human level, understand what's going on there. It's kind of beyond what any individual can comprehend. And what we've seen with some early work, and we published our first virtual cell model yesterday, actually, by coincidence. Yeah, tell us about that. What is a virtual cell?

So why haven't we cured cancer or any, again, complex disease? I mean, on some level, the problem is that experiments in biology are slow and expensive. Like, you're dealing with actual physical cells, and you have to wait for them to grow. and so if you have some hypothesis or some idea You do things to the cells and then you wait three months you wait six months So you have to purchase the reagents the ingredients they're expensive the supply chains, you know span multiple countries So just it's it's laborious. So, you know in software and engineering, you know, you you have an idea

You you know write a quick, you know command at the command line and you know you have an idea, you write a quick command at the command line, and 10 milliseconds later you have your response. In biology, that ripple takes months to kind of elapse. And so the idea behind a virtual cell, and others have had this idea, this is not Arc's idea, the kind of core idea is if you actually had a useful, accurate way to perform kind of computational experiments where you try the thing that you, in accordance with your hypothesis, in silico,

as the biologists say, because they always like to make things complicated and fancy. But really, if you just computationally do your thing, then again, if that was actually accurate, it would be an enormous accelerant. That's biology. So anyway, that's the kind of idea. We haven't done it recently. Is this too much biology? No, we like it.

Okay, all right. You guys like biology? Woo! Woo! And the last, one more thing, I'll stop. But in the last couple of years, we've got sort of technologies in three different domains that are really important.

So with, a computer is composed of the ability to read, to think, to compute, whatever, and then to write, you know, the course re-operations. In biology, in the last just couple years, we've got the ability to sequence individual cells, figure out what's going on in just like one cell, which is a big deal. We've gotten deep neural networks and transformers

and all that stuff so we can think over data of very significant complexity. And then we've had huge advances in functional genomics and CRISPR and the ability to make individual edits to individual cells. And so those are all big breakthroughs in their own right. But when you put them together, there's kind of this shimmering potential promise

that, hey, maybe you could for the first time enable these accurate computational predictions very quickly, very cheaply, and again if that worked it would be hugely unbiased. Very cool. You guys don't type, type of works. But. You are a voracious reader. What is your case for reading the whole book instead of an AI summary? Or is that not a case you would make? Gosh. Well,

I think reading the AI summary, I think it can be useful. I think it has a powerfully inoculating effect. Like sometimes, like I think it can be useful. I think it has a powerfully inoculating effect. I think TV is a waste, like long form, lots of episodes, TV is a waste of time. But it's- We told you there would be hot takes, right? But it's very tempting, right?

So like you watch an episode and you're like, oh geez, I really wanna know what happens here. And so I discovered a couple years ago, obviously the So like you watch an episode and like, oh geez, I really want to know what happens here. And so I discovered a couple of years ago, obviously the solution is you immediately go to Wikipedia and read the entire summary of the season and then you're cured of the desire to watch any more episodes. So there is a, I think there is a therapeutic benefit to AI summaries.

That is the most San Francisco thing I've ever heard. I love it. But it's, wouldn't it not derive any deep pleasure or betterment from it. So I've never written an AI book summary. Yeah. All right, Patrick, can we do some lightning round questions? Okay. What age will the media...

When do I get to ask for the Stripe feedback? Oh, well. Case in point, Stripe customer. I am a Stripe customer. Actually, very quickly, you're doing automated disputes now. Yes. Very excited to try this.

Okay, good. All right. And everything else is working well? Everything's all working great. Okay, great. All right, lightning round questions. What age will the median child born in 2025 in the US live to be?

25 today? Yeah. Yeah. Gosh. 95. Yeah, great. What is one thing you wish an agent could do, an AI agent could do for you reliably that it can't quite yet? an AI agent could do for you reliably that it can't quite yet? Reason over the scientific literature. It gets tripped up in the paywalls. Oooh. Well, we know how... And I think, like, why hasn't anyone that's faced done anything about it? Yeah.

We love paywalls in this house. We love pay walls in this house. Patrick, what trait do you hire for? Imagine if you had critters paying at them on behalf of unsuspecting people. Yeah, I love that. That's a business model for the media. I'm excited to present the critter strategy at the next meeting. What trait do you hire for that most companies undervalue? For Stripe, we really care about long-term thinking. Like infrastructure can happen overnight.

We've been working on it for 15 years. We still feel like we're just starting. And so if somebody, you know, like, our products don't have TikTok trajectories. And the super successful ones still take a decade to fully play out. And so, you know, I like the analogy that, you know, this kind of technology company's

building cars and roads. And you know, this kind of technology company's building cars and roads. And you know, we need cars, and cars are super cool and beautiful and all the things, but like, someone's got to build the roads, and Stripe looks for the kind of people who are predisposed to work on roads. Is there a book you read recently that made you say, everyone I know needs to read this?

Or even not that recently? I'll give you two. So the dream machine is like hands up here who feels like they really have a good understanding of the history of the internet. Shame on you. It's funny. Like Alan Kay once commented that computer science is a pop culture. He thought that we were kind were recapitulating the same ideas in blissful ignorance of our history.

And I think there is something kind of funny where we as technologists were not as into and fascinated by, I think, our own history as people are in other domains. And so the Dream Machine is the best history of the internet and the thinking around it, and the motivations around it. And it's also, yeah, it's Polish rice dry press.

And then what I read recently, recently that kind of blew my mind was the demon under the microscope, which was, you know, you all know that penicillin was the first antibiotic, except it wasn't. There was one before us, it changed the world. The story behind its invention is very interesting, so those are my two.

Great. Patrick Olsen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. When we come back, even more of Hard Work Live. Well, Casey, we are wearing what I would call robot pants. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah. And why are we wearing these robot pants? We are wearing these robot pants because it gives us a great excuse to talk to Catherine Zeeland.

Yeah, so Catherine Zeeland is the founder and CEO of Skip. They're the company that makes these pants. The company spun out of X, the Google Experimental Research Division, not the social media network owned by Elon Musk, in 2023. And since then, she's been working on this exoskeleton move-wear, like these pants, which have been called e-bikes for walking.

Let's bring on Catherine Zeeland from Skype. Catherine! Catherine! Thank you, Catherine. Of course, thank you. Good to see you. You guys didn't see, but backstage we just did the best quick change in theater history. I just took my pants off in front of Patrick Ollison.

So Katherine, in a few words, tell us who your products are for and what problem you're hoping to solve. So, I'm sure I'm not the only one here who's got a loved one that's struggled with movement or maybe you've got knee pain or had an injury. And so at Skip, what we want to do long term is help anyone achieve whatever they want to do, regardless of any kind of mobility impairment.

This is our first product. This is the MoGo. And this is actually aimed at people who want to go hiking. But often, they may be struggling a little bit either with knee pain or with a kind of reduced mobility. So an e-bike is a really great analogy. It just kind of particularly helps with the inclines, steep hills and stairs, things like that. But then eventually will help hopefully everyone. So tell us like what is in these pants, you know, folks who may be sitting a little further back

may not be able to see, but in addition to these pants, which I believe you partner with ArcDirects to make these pants, there's also some, you know, pretty heavy machinery on here. So what is this stuff doing? Yeah. So the real magic is kind of these lightweight motors. Here's one I prepared earlier. And really, it's only in the last decade or so that robotics has gotten efficient enough, affordable enough, light enough.

You can have something this small that can do up to maybe 40% of a healthy person's muscle forces. There's a motor that's providing physical oomph. Then built into the pant, those near the front can maybe see this a little bit of a cuss situation to help transfer that force to the body. I know that one of the things that these pants can do is help you stand up, which you were sort of explaining to me is so helpful for folks who are older and need some help with that.

And I thought, I need that help now. So I think your market may actually be larger than you first suspected. Yeah. And I'm actually having a similar problem because I don't know if you noticed, but I'm quite pregnant. I wasn't going to say anything. Thank you. It's eight months.

Catherine joined us at eight months pregnant, so please do give her a round of applause. And all of a sudden, yes, I also need help walking upstairs and standing up out of chairs. Now, do you envision a world where lots of people are wearing exoskeleton-type move wear, or do you think this will primarily be for people who have mobility issues? I think a bit of both. So I think if you're truly able-bodied, a product like this is probably just not worth your time necessarily. But there's a huge range of people who might be recovering from an injury,

they might be pregnant, they might have a joint pain, they might have had a surgery. And so I think probably most people at some point in their lives will use one of these products. And we also do R&D and things like Parkinson's disease and people who have more severe issues as well. But for sure it's much broader than the first set of products that you're seeing coming on now. As this technology develops and you're able to shrink it down, do you see a world where more able-bodied people might just choose to wear it because they like feeling a little bionic when they walk around town? I was gonna say, are you trying to dunk a basketball? Is that what you're thinking? I've been trying since 1992. For sure, yes. But I would say if you just want to make your

exercise harder, because this is something that some people ask, like, oh, can I get resistance mode? You could also try ankle weights. I think they're going to make a comeback. Yeah. That's good. Now exoskeletons are a staple of science fiction. I remember watching movies as a kid that had exoskeletons, and lots of other stuff in those movies has become commonplace, but not exoskeletons and this kind of hardware. So why is this taking longer than other types of futuristic technology? I think there's two reasons. One is that hardware is hard, and people are really sensitive to what's on their body. So you're wearing an early version of the prototype,

and it's probably not super comfortable, the fit's not always perfect. And you might tolerate an ugly or an imperfect robot if it's just in a factory, but when you've got to wear something, it's important that it's comfortable, that it fits really well, that it looks good. So the bar is really high for anything that's worn. I think the second reason is actually around AI. And so, historically exoskeletons and all robotics do very repetitive tasks. In a warehouse doing lifting was one of the first places you saw exoskeletons actually become used because it's the same task again and again. But when you think about maybe an older adult who wants to like move about their community, they're doing lots

of different movements and they're moving in weird ways. And I'm like a fidgeter. So, you know, in one of our early prototypes, I was sitting at a very important meeting with my boss, and I was tapping my foot, so I was a bit nervous. And all of a sudden it thought I was trying to stand up, and it turns on, and it like throws my leg up, and the whole table goes like, oh, and everyone's water spills, and there's chaos. That was actually the plot of Megan 2.0, that happened there.

Okay, well so, we've talked a bit about this product, anything else we should know about it before we see what it can do? You find the disclaimer, right, backstage? Uh, no. Nope, we're just gonna wing it. Excellent. So, Leah, let's stand up and maybe take us through the demo here. Yeah, so start by turning it on even while you're sitting if you want.

There's a little button at the back here. Press and release and the LEDs should change color. Mine is already blue. Does that mean it's on? No, that means it's now you're blue. Whoa, hello. And so now you can try standing up and sitting back down is a very common movement. OK, I feel like I'm, yeah, this is giving mecha.

Yeah, I feel like. Yeah, you can do some squats. It actually is helping me stand up. Yeah. No, this is great. I feel, yeah, like you know when you have like a spotter at the gym? You wouldn't know. It's like, it's like that feeling when you're just getting a little boost. Yeah.

Exactly. But the problem is you both strike me as quite fit, healthy people. Oh, thank you. We're always hearing that. Exactly. So, we were trying to think, like, what's a way that we could make this a little bit more challenging for you so you really can appreciate the technology? So, I don't...

Have you noticed that there's a StairMaster behind you? You know! That StairMaster! I did... Can I try? Yeah. With my... Okay, please clap. Yeah. Wow. It's yeah, it's wow. We're really doing it. Okay, let's put the stairs on. Okay. So you know, like about a level three or four. Okay, I'm at five. I like to live on the edge. Great, great. Okay, it's good. It's like, I feel like what I'm doing is not climbing stairs.

It's like climbing stairs adjacent. It's sort of like the physical equivalent of vibe coding. It's vibe, I'm vibe walking. Right. Okay. And one problem we have is like, your brain is amazingly good at getting used to a new feeling. so sometimes people they're not even sure how much it's helping. So if you want we could turn it off and then you might see the difference.

Oh, you're gonna remotely disable it? Yeah, please do. I was just saying we can if you want. No, do it, do it. I wanna experience this on my own two feet. Alright, we're gonna turn you off in three, two, one. Off. Oh yeah, that's much harder, I don't like that.

Can you turn it back on? You want it back on? Yes, this is how you get your customers, they can't go back. This is genuinely how you get customers. I heard of the hedonic treadmill, but this is ridiculous. Okay, you're back on now. Is that a bit easier?

That's good, that's good, thank you. Woo. Woo. Is that a bit easier? That's good, that's good, thank you. Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! I mean, I think that was all right, you know. I don't know that it could have been done better. Oh, would you like to try?

I, would it be okay if I tried? Hey, it's Casey, just cutting in from the studio here, and you're not gonna hear it in the podcast, but I do wanna tell you what happened immediately after this which is that I challenged Kevin to see if I could do better on the Stairmaster wearing the robot pants and I did while accompanied to the song Work Bitch by Britney Spears.

For copyright reasons, we're not going to include that in the show but you can just kind of hum it to yourself or maybe play it on Spotify later today. I think when I kicked my legs up, the Stairmaster stopped because it was afraid for me. Yeah, but it's always a good sign when the worst part of our demo that goes wrong is the Stairmaster. So that's a win. Absolutely.

That was incredible. Now, Catherine, tell people where they can find out more about these pants if they're interested. Yeah, so we're Skip. So skipwithjoy.com, I presume that'll be in the show notes. And you can pre-order them now, we'll be shipping next year. And we also do rentals and experiences, especially for folk who really want to achieve a dream hike, but they're not able to at the moment. We're trying to help them do that and get feedback.

And how much for the pants? A bit like an e-bike, so $5,000, there-ish. OK. And what would it take to bring that price maybe down a little? It would either take a discount code, if you know me, which I feel like we're all now friends, or improved international supply chains, which is a different conversation. All right, well, Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. We really had a good time. Yeah, of course international supply chains, which is a different conversation.

All right, well, Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. We really had a great time. Yeah, of course. Thank you. This was so fun. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, Kevin, as we say at the end of so many podcast segments, it's time to get out of these pants. Casey, what's next? Well, I know what you're thinking, which is, can the show possibly go on longer? And yes, it can. Because here's the thing, and this I mean from the bottom of my heart, the very best thing about this show is hearing from you all. It's look, when two men decide they love the sound of their own voices enough to start a podcast, you never know if you're gonna hear anything back.

But you guys email us each and every week, and we just wanted to talk to you directly. So here's what's gonna happen. We have some people with roving microphones. They're gonna be sort of scurrying around. And if you wanna ask us something, you can ask us now. And we're gonna let it go on for a little bit. So I don't know, let's get the energy up, ask fun questions questions if you have more of a comment, maybe save that for an Apple review

But we're excited here what's on your mind Can I say those of you who are wearing your hard fork hats you look so beautiful so good what what a memory You're creating for me. Okay, great. Now does anyone have a question for the hard fork program? We have a one right here, sort of middle. Hmm. Vampe a little while she's going up the stairs, Kevin. Nope. All right, we're good. Okay, this is a very hard question. Last week you introduced the nickname Chap-a-titi. Chap-a-atiti, yes. Which I have been using frequently and I would like to know what nickname you

would use for each of the popular models. Oh, let's see. I'm gonna let you handle that one Mr. Improv. Well of course I feel Jemini is kind of right there, bingalingaling. Sometimes I do say clowd just because I think it's like more of the authentic pronunciation. Make it two syllables. Thank you for asking that. I'm serious. That was the right energy. Okay.

What else would you like to know? Let's see. I see one back here. Oh, we see one right energy. Okay, what else would you like to know? Let's see, I see one back here. Oh, we see one right here. Who's pointing here? You know what, you point this one. Okay, let's go right there. Hi, I love listening to you guys, so thank you. It's a highlight of my week.

I feel like you have a better or a broader view of what's happening in the industry than maybe a lot of us do. So I might bring the vibe down a little bit, but what are you the most concerned about when you look at these evolving technologies and how they'll impact our lives? I think I'm most worried about the pace of change. I used to feel like when I left San Francisco,

I was going back in time about 18 months to anywhere else in the world, just in terms of the stuff we have here, the cars drive themselves, blah, blah, blah. Now I feel like that gap is opening up and I'm really worried that the society as a whole is just not prepared either in terms of safety nets for people who may lose their jobs as a result of AI

or other technologies, just in terms of like, it takes a lot of energy to absorb this much change all at once. And I'm just not, I'm not sure people sort of fully grasp what's happening. And I also, you know, we've been around the block, like, I know that the even the best intended technological projects have unintended consequences. So we saw this happen with social media, all these companies said, we're going to, you know, save the world and connect the world and everything's going to be great. And we've seen what's happened with that. So I these companies said we're going to save the world and connect the world and everything's going to be great. And we've seen what's happened with that.

So I just, I hope that the folks in Silicon Valley, including some of the folks we've had on the stage tonight are really thinking through some of the unintended consequences beforehand. Yeah, like to the extent that anything that happened over the past decade just made you concerned about the ability of lawmakers to regulate technology, we're now heading into an era where I do believe the technology is going to regulate technology. We're now heading into an era where I do believe the technology is going to be even more powerful than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat.

We still have not answered a lot of basic questions about, for example, how do children use this product safely? When should they start using it? When should they stop using it? We ran out of time. I really want to talk to Sam and Brad about the fact that the same week that they're signing a military contract the same week That the Times is publishing a story about people, you know experiencing these extreme mental health challenges with chat GPT

They're signing a deal with Mattel and they're saying we're gonna put it into toys Now, you know, I talked at open AI about that and they said well We're gonna build toys for families first and sort of kids 13 and up But there's just a lot of unanswered questions here. And if I learned anything from the past 10 years, it's that you unfortunately cannot count on lawmakers to do any meaningful pushback. So honestly, one of the reasons why we make this show is because we just like talking to you about, here is a problem that no one actually has a plan for. So we'll keep doing that.

Great question. I will call this person right here sort of in the dead center. It's going to be challenging to get the microphone. Just toss the mic. No. This will be fun. Everybody can sort of, how does the microphone get to this person? Okay.

And we're going to pass it down. And that's community. Beautiful. Hi, I'm Hendrick. I love this show. I listen to it every week with my family. I'm a 13 year old student and I've always felt that I don't see much AI in my classrooms, in my friends' classrooms. And I was curious just to get your guys' opinion on how much AI you

think maybe we should have in the classroom and how we should integrate it. Because I can see it from the teacher's perspective that it's like plagiarism. There needs to be like balancing act. But from my perspective and from how I've used it, I just feel like it's actually really useful. So I'm just curious to get your view. Thanks.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think this is really crucial. I think a lot of schools reacted to Chat GPT and other AI chat bots by just sort of trying to stamp it out, banning it, detecting it. I think that was a mistake and they now many of them have sort of come around to trying to say how do we teach with this technology and about this technology? I think AI literacy is a really important thing for schools to be teaching because these are tools that people are going to be using in their jobs when they graduate and go out into the

economy if there still are jobs. And I think it's really naive to think that you're just going to take it out of the classroom. Now I do think that teachers and schools need to revamp the way that they teach to sort of assume that people are going to have access to this stuff and maybe use class time more for discussion and face-to-face interaction and maybe assign homework differently. But I don't think this stuff is going away and so I think the sort of enlightened schools are the ones that are sort of planning around its existence for the future. Yeah, thank you for the question. Thank you for listening. I think, you know, if I were 13 in this moment, the main thing that I would want to make sure that I took away from school was the ability to think

critically. And I think the challenge is when I was in high school, I didn't know, like, how good is good enough at critical thinking? You know what I mean? I do believe that the more you use AI as a substitute for reading, for writing, your critical thinking skills are not gonna develop to where they otherwise might. And so I think that is a good reason to make sure that you are actually, you know, writing the essays that are assigned to you and, you know, reading one out of every three books

that's assigned to you. And I'll say that while so much focus is on the school stuff right now, I think very soon the conversation is gonna shift to AIs as companions. And I have to say, I'm so much focus is on the school stuff right now, I think very soon the conversation is going to shift to AIs as companions. And I have to say, I'm so much more worried about folks your age who feel like ChatGPT is a better friend to them than anyone they know in their real life. That is such a dark path and nothing is preventing us from walking down that path right now. So real friends over AI friends is what I would say about it.

Okay, great questions. You call the next slide. Let's go up here, the balcony. Do we have a mic up there? No, I picked the hardest possible spot. Okay, oh wow, you need the robot pants. Thank you very much, Kevin and Casey. Love the show. You guys are awesome. Of any of the stories that you've had in the last 18 months, I think about this a lot, which one would make the best Black Mirror episode?

The best Black Mirror episode to me is just you're trapped inside Italian brain rot. Like, you have an objective to accomplish, but like you have to get like crock of the leany bumblee on board. Yeah, that comes to mind for me. How about you? I think the AI friend stuff was, I liked when you had the conversation with Turing, my AI friend, he couldn't be here tonight by the way,

but he sends his regrets. It was a configuration error. Yeah. So yeah, that would be mine. Let's do a couple more. Casey, your call. Oh, how about right here? We didn't realize how big this venue was until we started asking people to run around with

microphones. You know, like a t-shirt cannon for microphones. Hi. So you've had at least two different speakers tonight say that hardware is hard. And you showed us a partial expensive exoskeleton. And that's promising. But I really want the AI to get into a robot, a personal assistant,

so that it can load my dishwasher, it can do the laundry, it'll fold the clothes, and it'll put them in the right drawer. Have you talked to anyone who has a realistic timeline and roadmap for this? It's funny. We talked to several robots. One thing we knew about this show was there was gonna be a damn robot on stage, okay?

And so we're so thrilled with Catherine bringing her rig. But there are a number of other companies in San Francisco who are working on stuff like this. One of them is called Physical Intelligence. They've raised billions of dollars over the past several years. And the reason is that you can actually take a large language model, you know, sort of similar to a chat GBT, put it inside a robot and it's much more useful than it was before. So that's kind of the reason that people think we're about to see the step change in function.

But to your point, hardware is hard. I would say that in 2028, you will probably still be folding your own laundry. But I could be wrong. I could be wrong. All right. Let's go right here. Less of a light question, but twice you mentioned that OpenAI has these new defense contracts, which to me is very concerning, especially when Homeland Security is grabbing people off the street. So I'm curious if you know more of the details of that and then just what your guys take our take is. The way that these contracts tend to start is like there should be an AI assistant inside the Pentagon and you could ask it like what missile do I put on this jet and it's like, you know, that's like, that's real.

That's like that's sort of what they are. And that's like the foot in the door. But to your point, yes, this goes so many dark places so quickly. Facial recognition technology is already basically perfect. You combine that with AI systems. Things get dark in a hurry. So I don't know what to tell you other than, yeah,

I'm super worried about it. And I actually think that a role of journalism in this moment is just to point out what tech companies are doing with the military and writing about what I imagine are gonna inevitably some dark things. Yeah, I don't love it either. I have some real qualms about it.

And it's interesting, like some of the people who are building this technology from the beginning were so concerned about the use of this technology for military applications that they actually started requiring clauses in their contracts and acquisition deals. DeepMind had a sort of famous clause in its Google acquisition deal that they couldn't use their technology for the military.

Now they've since sort of adapted that, but I think the tension here is that there's so much money to be made. Defense department has a huge budget. They're willing to spend lots of money to sort of catch up in AI. And yeah, it really, I don't love it. And I'm glad that there are people inside these companies

who are sort of resisting that pull. All right, I see somebody right here. Thank you so much, long time listener. And I just have to say, I hope you guys do this again here in San Francisco. Should we do it again? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I definitely feel like I'm listening to you right in my headphones. So whatever you're doing on stage is definitely trying to get me going. But you can't pause. And you can't make us faster, which. I was I was really hoping Sam Altman would be here tonight I'm so glad you guys got him. One of the questions I have for you

guys and maybe you know in your vast experience of covering AI and and everything that's has come about one of the important things to me is regulation and how that is that going to be someone you feel that comes forward from industry, who kind of makes a bundle, and then sort of sees the greater good and then really sort of goes from sort of poacher to gamekeeper and, and I mean, how that's going to be a real quantum leap to my mind to get Congress and people really educated into how things need to move forward for our safety. And whether it's military or kids or anything else, it's such a, it impacts so many different people

in so many different ways. I just thought, do you guys have someone in your mind who'd be like top of mind that you would nominate for that role today? Or do you see someone like Sam doing that in 10 years, 20 years? I think we cannot look to the industry to lead this, right? I mean, Kevin asked about this during the chat, but where a lot of these folks start is, oh no, the people building AI aren't safe enough. I'm going to do my own thing and I'm going to do it differently and safer and we're going to pass a lot of regulations. And then they get really successful Really successful and they're like I'm gonna amend my comments about what I said, right?

And so I think we just cannot sort of trust them to do that There are a number of nonprofits who are working in this space like the future of life institutes That have really mobilized around this potential 10-year moratorium that we're seeing But like I will just say 10 years to have no regulation at the state level is an extremely long time. If you believe anybody who's come on our show, in 10 years, that will be sort of the end of the ball game. Very powerful intelligence is here. So what I hope is that as people learn more about this stuff,

they push more. And I think we're going to need to see some sort of bottom up public participation here, because it's not going to come from the industry. All right, next. Yes. Love the show it's been said over and over. And I'll say we'll keep hearing it. Several people that you've interviewed on the show in technology leaders you know there's a lot of techno optimism and I think a lot of it is well warranted but one area where I'm kind of not buying it is the and

everybody will reap the benefits of the wealth and, you know, the monetary benefits of this and I Understand how the people who create the AI reap the benefits of the well But I have never heard anyone talk about how that trickles down or gets Redistributed and I'm wondering what you've heard. This is such a good question. This drives me insane When people just come on the show and they say, we had these guys on last week from Mechanize, they said, this is all going to trickle down. We're all going to have radical abundance. And it's like, that is a deliberate policy choice

that many people do not want to make. That does not happen automatically. And so I think if I were running these companies, which I thank god I'm not, but you actually do have to be out there advocating for the kind of world that you want to see. It's not just enough to build the technology. We also, I also, it drives me insane. I'm just going to get this off my chest. I'm popping off tonight. Preach it. People are always comparing this to the industrial revolution. During the industrial revolution, there was a 50 year period called

Engel's pause where productivity and profits went up but wages did not. So workers literally for 50 years did not see the benefits of the Industrial Revolution. What worries me when people say this is just going to be like the Industrial Revolution is that they have not actually read their history. It sucked for a lot of people for a long time and I want them to know that. Yeah, thank you. All right. I haven't really called on anyone over here, and I see a person at the farthest extreme of the theater.

And I would like to. We just want to make sure our mic runners are getting their steps in. Yeah, the steps are in. It's very important. The steps are in. Vamp, Casey. Oh, we're right there. Okay, great.

Right here, yeah, over here. Thank you so much. Love the show, I'll say it again. Yes. Long time listener. So, Casey in particular, I think you had mentioned a couple of weeks ago that you had a really clear picture of your definition of AGI.

And I wanted to hear more about that. And Kevin, interested in yours as well, but Casey seemed like you had a picture of it. And so I want to hear it. Yeah. And I want to say that I'm not necessarily advocating for this as a perfect outcome and I'm not rooting for this has happened as quickly as possible. But I work with an assistant who is amazing. She helps me schedule things.

She helps me sell advertising. She helps me help you with customer service if you're a platformer subscriber and you need to change your email address. So when people say AGI to me, I think, oh, it will do that. Do you know what I mean? And I think everyone in this room

has their version of that. There is kind of the subset of things that you do that are mostly routine, that feel a little bit like drudgery to you, that are not the sort of creative part of your job that's exercising all of your human muscles. And if 0789 can just kind of do that layer of things, that would be AGI to me.

Now, you know, I love my assistant, I wanna keep working with her, so one question would be like, well, is there some new set of tasks that she could work on? That's to be explored, but when everybody is like, AGI, it's just a marketing concept, it's so fuzzy, it's like, no, it would just do what my assistant did. Does that sound crazy?

A little bit. Okay. You did talk about having an assistant a lot. Let's do one more. A little bit. Okay. You did talk about having an assistant a lot. Let's do one more. Let's do one more and let's do it right up there. Yes. Okay.

I got it. So gentlemen, last week, standing in my kitchen, chopping vegetables, listening to you, earnestly try to give PR advice to mechanize, I almost cut my finger off because I was laughing so hard. Lose a lot of fingers that way. So I want to give the opportunity to give PR advice to four or five other companies that you think might need it right now. To PR advice.

Yeah. Let's see. Who needs it right now? Metta could use some PR advice, and here's why. They think that when you go around saying we're offering people $100 million, that people are gonna be like, wow, that's so cool. When what it really means is,

you would have to pay me $100 million to work at Meta. All right. dollars to work at Metta. Alright. I think that's everyone. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks everybody. Good luck. You did it. I'm gonna be the one to be the one to be the one to be the one to be the one to be the Heart Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roquet, Pat Gunther,

and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube, and you should, at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to the New York Times live event team, Hillary Kuhn, Beth Weinstein, Caitlin Roper, Kate Carrington, Chantaluhn, Beth Weinstein, Kaitlin Roper, Kate Carrington, Chantal Renier, Melissa Tripoli, Natalie Green, Angela Austin,

Kirsten Birmingham, Marissa Farina, Jennifer Feeney, and Morgan Singer. Thanks to everybody at SF Jazz, and thanks to the Brass Animals, our live band. Also special thanks to Matt Collette, Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Dalia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at hardforkatnytimes.com, but you should know that we're on vacation

right now. Thanks for watching!