PurePerformance - From Bowling Lanes to AI Lanes: Chris LaBrado on MDCD and the AI Interface Era

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

In this episode of the PurePerformance Podcast, Andi and Brian sit down with Chris LaBrado—Solutions Architect for AI Enablement, FSO, SRE, and ITSM at HSN/QVC, where he has spent an incredible 27 years shaping operational excellence. Their conversation dives deep into how AI is transforming software creation, enterprise workflows, and even the very role of developers.Chris shares how the barrier to entry for building tools and automation has dropped overnight thanks to natural‑language-based development: “Everyone can now create automation or tools without having to worry about the syntax.” He explains why AI is rapidly becoming the primary interface into the enterprise—capable of navigating presentations, emails, and complex back‑office systems—and why the future of engineering may shift from human‑oriented coding to AI-driven development models such as MDCD (MarkDown Continuous Development).The discussion also takes unexpected but fascinating detours into Chris’s background as a former bowling‑industry podcaster, his recent work with generative agents like DynaClaude, his Vibe Coded Root Cause Agent, and a philosophical exploration of AI, creativity, and the concept of singularity.Amidst all the change, Chris remains optimistic: “AI opens up a lot of new opportunity for everyone willing to adapt. It will result in us creating more things that ultimately help us as humans.” This episode is a thoughtful, energizing look at where software engineering is headed—and why the future might be brighter than we think.Links we discussedChris LaBrado on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrislabrado/Mo Gawdat, former Google Executive on the Singularity "moment of truth": https://x.com/vitrupo/status/2008824930646057380?s=20CEO of NVIDIA had an interesting excerpt from interview: https://x.com/MinusWells/status/2031974516155695414?s=20Elon Musk on speed of AI: https://x.com/r0ck3t23/status/2031639621465931903?s=20AI brain emulation of a fly (e.g. "a sign of the times"): https://x.com/alexwg/status/2030217301929132323?s=20Elon on fiat currency transforming based on AI manufacturing loop: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2020202496547844312?s=20Fiat currency moves to model based on thermodynamics: https://x.com/r0ck3t23/status/2033371028202602547?s=20

It's time for pure performance. Get your stopwatches ready. It's time for Pure Performance with Andy Grabner and Brian Wilson. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Pure Performance. My name is Brian Wilson and as always I have with me my antagonizing, a friendly co-host, Andy Gravner. How are you doing today, Andy? Good. How is your beautiful looking microphone?

Oh, it's fantastic. It woke up in a good mood today. and it's turn purple yeah turn purple what's the what's the color on the opposite side that I don't see

it's purple yellow yellow so the last podcast it was green and yellow today but yesterday it was orange and purple so I'm just having fun with colors because the world is too boring yeah it's a good point well boring is definitely nothing

that we expect today from our discussion No, especially not in the area we're going into. No, exactly. And today's topic, I mean, I'm really happy that we have guests coming up and say, hey, you know, these are really cool topics. And then conversations, we meet people along the way. And Chris, now giving you the chance to actually say hi to everybody.

Chris Labrador, I hope I got your last name correctly. We met at Perform in Vegas in January. Right? That's almost true. We actually met before that last year in Philadelphia when he was giving a rundown at Freedom Pay in downtown Philadelphia. And actually before that, back in 2020, we were at Perform and Andy, turns out, is a fantastic dancer and was doing some salsa dancing at the Perform. And I was like, man, this guy you not only know. the technical stuff, he's got the moves.

But yes, as an extended, you know, actually getting to shake hands and spend time together was to perform this year. And I just have a quick question, the Freedom Pay thing, was that a, just where they were hosting it, or do you know those folks? They were hosting a, um, a Baner's day, basically. And, I mean, I spent the whole day with them pretty much. And then I think Chris, right in the afternoon, folks came in and we did the advantageous user group. So big shout out to Mark Tomlinson.

That's what I was saying. So Mark got a started on this. I thought if you actually knew Mark, it would be another weird coincidence because we talked about those. I interviewed with Mark at Perform in 2020. He had a little side deal going on. So I actually did a little podcast with him back then. And he was like, wow. So yeah, this is, it's all full circle.

It's a convergence. Six degrees of separation, which hopefully the AI will be able to solve for us very soon, right? Hey, Chris, I do apologize that I don't remember every encounter that we had in the past, but I'm really glad that you remember my salsa moves. I still salsa dance. Fantastic. But Chris, do me a favor. For those of our listeners that haven't met you yet, who are you?

What do you do? What drives you? What motivates you? What are some of the topics to get you excited? Sure. My name is Chris Labrato. I am going on year 27 in IT and engineering since 1999 when I was 22, so I'm now 49. Currently employed at a QBC group under the Home Shopping Network banner as a solutions architect.

And what drives me, well, you know, it's the old engineering fight model, life, liberty, and the pursuit of root cause. Wow. You know, you've got a lot prepared for today. this is going to be fun. It's good. Brian and I are always making notes on good moments,

on interesting moments and good quotes. In the podcast, I think this is definitely, it's a good start here. Chris, before we hit the record button, you also mentioned to us that podcasting is something you may have done in the past,

not just as a guest, but also as a host. Fill us in. Yeah, sure. About 10 years ago, I started getting in, about 12 years ago, back in 2014, I started getting into bowling. And then right around 2019, I started my own YouTube channel, which ironically was also when COVID was kicking off. So then when COVID really shut down, everybody, the whole world moved to podcasts, right? So I spent the better part of that year interviewing people on a podcast I had called The Rant.

And so, you know, I interviewed, you know, because my, I looked at my, my, my, my, my, my, YouTube channel name was Bowler's Rant. So I'm retired from that now. I don't have time for that anymore. But I at the time interviewed a lot of PBA players, you know, vice president and CEOs of various bowling companies, just to get an understanding about the mindset of their history, what it's like to run a bowling company, what goes on into the manufacturing of bowling.

You would never believe it. It's a ton of mathematics and a ton of chemical engineering that creates those bowling balls that do that crazy motion, that curve that people like to call it. hook on TV. I've seen a video on how they make those. Chemical covers and weight blocks. So I kind of dove into that industry and it was fantastic. I mean, I've bowled in my life, but I never thought there's like a big industry

around it. So there's more than one company that makes bowling balls? Absolutely. 100%. Yeah. And not that this podcast is going to be about bowling, but like, yeah, now I've seen a, I think it might be, it might have been Veritasy and they went over like the first. physics of bowling balls and talked about the different coatings.

And Andy, there's even different kinds of coatings on the lanes, or I guess it's different zones of the lane. I forget what it is, but there's tons of different things and the bowlers got to be familiar with all that. The interesting thing is, sorry about that, Mike cut out. It apologizing. Storm bowling is the largest bowling manufacturer in the world. And I went to a bowling conference and I met with their vice president of R&D, Hank Boomer-Shine,

And he was talking about wanting to use AI in the bowling development life cycle. So if you think about it, any product that you're making, there's a number of mathematics being applied. It could be environmental factors. It can be engineering factors, rotations, or gyrations, whatever. But it's not so different than software engineering, which is you have a desired outcome, and you're trying to reduce the friction point in increasing better outcomes. So I just thought it was interesting that you could see this alignment between here's something in bowling, most people don't know the math that's involved.

And here's software development, but the creation process, there's still a development life cycle. And you call it the BDLC, the bowling development life cycle. I mean, I just made that up, so it sounds good. It's another thing we need to write down. So, Brian, it's 10.13 for a timestamp.

I think that's an awesome one. Don't do these on the podcast because I have to edit this out. I don't know. It's a lot easier when I have to do edits. The interesting point you bring up there, right, is, you know, Andy and I have been doing a lot of podcasts with people using AI in different aspects of the SDLC, right? We did one about chaos, testing, right? Different ways of using it during vibe coding and all. But, you know, I think probably what rubs a lot of people the wrong way about AI is the general idea of like, oh, for memes, for making little videos, for, it's like, we're doing all this for this for that.

that really. But where I find it really interesting is removing the difficult or mundane parts of the human aspect of the labor, such as when you're talking about in this bowling thing,

where there's all this mathematics, where there's all these calculations and looking at, okay, maybe what different chemicals might work with different stuff, right? Yes, a human can do that. They've been doing it for forever, but that's one of those easy things where it's like, okay, let's get the computer to do it, right? And we've seen forever, let's get computers to do it heavy calculations or whatever. But it's, to me,

the fascinating part is finding useful uses for AI, places where it's going to help accelerate a field in great ways, not just this talk of, oh, let's replace people's jobs, but let's use it in smart places that are going to, you know, like, I don't even know in like bowling turnbounds, just keeping this is still in terms of bowling, right? Could it be like you have a little AI system like, oh, here's the lane, here's this, I want to do this, you know, can you tell me which ball or whatever I should switch to?

Now again, a good bowler probably knows this kind of stuff, but it's the idea of it being an addendum an enhancement to the process instead of replacing it, which is where I think it's more exciting. 100%. Productivity augmentation with AI

and the humans, there's always going to be the fear of replacing people. We used to have people who would bring ice to you, and then we had ice makers. We had people who bring milk and you can go buy it in stores. Funny enough, the name of the computer actually stems from a job. Someone used to be in a room, tons of people, and their whole job was manual calculations. And then we built machines called computers, which replace these people. So the thing is, but we use computers.

It creates a symbiotic circle, right? We have a symbiosis with technology, which is kind of where the convergence and confluence of ideas of engineering and cognitive abilities and the total sum of human intelligence, this is why I feel like we're entering into the singularity, where we're going to see a symbiotic circle, a symbiotic relationship between humanity and technology. And Chris, you brought up the term now, the singularity. Before I go into this, and I definitely want to discuss this,

but I feel when we start down that track, it might get, it could get very deep. It could get, you know, very, lofty. I'm not sure what the right term is. So before I want to go into this topic, I think, philosophical. Thank you so much for helping me out with my lack of English grammar and words. But Chris, before I want to go into this topic, I want to take a step back because when we met, remit in January, somebody said, hey, you know Chris. And I said, which Chris? All this guy over there.

He's been vibe coding, a really cool thing that helps him to improve incident response. And he's been doing this, you need to talk to him. And so I said, okay, let's sure, I'll talk to him. Then we had a quick chat. You showed me something in the break at the hot day, the hands-on training day. Fast forward three weeks ago, or four weeks ago, you were presenting in the Dinahries Guild, which is one of my communities. Thank you so much for your contribution and showing us what you have,

vibe coated, what you have created. And I think to paraphrase what you said, you had maybe a beer in the weekend at night, and while you had this beer, you had an idea. And then basically you started this whole thing. Can you quickly fill us in what you did back then and kind of how this was also inspired by obviously the whole movement that is going on right now, yeah? Yep, 100%. I mean, last year, there was a shift globally.

where around September, October, like the AI capabilities became super, super more reliable and dependable. And I find myself when I'm dealing with a lot of incident and issues that impact the business, there's just a lot of same mechanical work

that just happens, a lot of blocking and tackling. So as a result, the tools that we use, a lot of the tactics are the same. And so I became familiar with MCP and on my vacation on a Saturday night over some Bavarian beer and claw. Anthropics Claude, I wanted to have a conversation with, how can I make something, do what Claude does, but build it for the enterprise and such this concept, Dinah Claude was born. And I originally built it in Python using a CLI, and it was just meant to emulate Claude and, you know, do some autonomous root cause management using the Dinotrace MCP.

And then I thought, well, this is, and it was working, but no, the VPs and people who don't, don't like command lines. You're going to want to put it in a browser. So I ended up building a browser-based tool, which allows you to plug in a dinotrace problem, and it uses an agentic workflow. That's a fancy way of saying that I dynamically create a strategy to discover the elements of a problem

and then determine which queries need to be ran to help get the telemetric elements of that problem, and then to use AI to analyze that problem and present what it feels is the total problem statement at the summary and the steps required for remediation. And it was fantastic when he showed this to us and we had some ongoing discussions on what else you can do. Also, we don't want to go in our podcast too detailed, maybe into our product, you know,

because the topics here that we discuss, we really want to keep it obviously as neutral and as agnostic to any type of vendor. But it was really fantastic in what you have been able to do because I think in your own words, he said, everyone can now create automation or tools without having to worry about the syntax as the entry level barrier was lowered overnight. I think there was a really interesting comment that you made. We've also seen this in our previous interviews,

and if you just walk around and talk with people, all of a sudden, people are no longer worried about how do I need to set this up? How do I get started? How do I even get started with if I have an idea, right? and I think this is all, as you said, this pen has been removed overnight. And it gives people like you the chance

to create a cool new things. Yeah, Brian, sorry. Yeah, no, no, I thought you were, whatever. If you think back of many years ago, when we had Nestor, Zapata, and who was the other guy? He's fantastic.

When they were first talking about having Ultron and Dinotrace, right? That was the whole automation. quest, right? And they had to build all these tools and put them all together, right? Basically trying to do what we're doing with AI now, right? It's really just like automating this thing. But to your point, like when people want to get these tools to work together, communicate to each other, the early stages of automation, I shouldn't really say the early

stages, right? But as we started getting more mature in automation, people were doing it, but it was a much more of a heavy lift. And to the point of like making things easier, it's like a again, like, all right, let's just connect these agents together, tell them what we want them to do, and ask what modifications we need to do to get reliable. And now people can, you know, I imagine if Nestor was trying to build that now, it would be a hell of a lot easier. Right. So it's really quite fascinating. Nestor used a really nice term back then because he also presented that perform.

He said he's using the tools that are given to him to automate. himself into the next job or like out of his current job and into the next job because it was basically he got good in what he was doing and then he automated himself into the next job and i feel and Chris correct if i'm wrong but it's also something that is i guess happening now but it's just i think at a different scale and allowing many many more people to get this to get to this kind of uh you know point where you are automating a lot of mundane things so that you can for on better things where you can provide more value. Absolutely.

And it couldn't come more timelier. The Jensing Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, he had said that I want my software engineers solving problems not focusing on syntax. And that's what led to my comment about the ability, the entry barrier has been commoditized overnight, where software programming as a syntactical skill set is no longer the requirement to actually build something. So you can call it context engineering,

you can call it vibe coding. I'd like to turn the coin vibe ops at some point where we use vibe coded engineering to basically vibe ops our operations so that at some point, if you remember a while back, there was a presentation where someone was using it and a lot of said to talk to a system

and said, hey, what's going on with my stuff? That will now be a reality where you could literally just say, hey, robots, go build me another 24. percent of X, Y, and Z surface, and it'll just happen by speaking to it. Yeah. Yeah, I remember the early days. Early days, it sounds so strange.

I think it was like eight or ten years ago. It was definitely pre-COVID. I think it was like eight or ten years ago when we had the first integrations with Alexa and Google Assist, where we could ask questions and where we could also interact with automation. But it was a really cool, I would say, a demo that people could do. but it wasn't really like the market, the people, we were not really right for it at scale,

but now we are there, as you said, right? I mean, this is reality now. We are. And as a matter of fact, I built, my gaming computer is an autonomous development workstation, and it has an API that I built in Rust. Well, that's the back end, right? I have my Mac Mini, which is having OpenClaw,

I'm sure you guys are familiar with OpenClaught, for those of you don't know, it's basically a personal AI assistant. I've got it hooked up to a, Rock API for pennies on the dollar, and I've got it hooked up to my gaming computer with MCP. And the cool thing about that is with OpenClaas, you can assign it a phone number. And because you can assign it a phone number, that means you can text message OpenClaw and give it instructions. And because I have a knowledge graph and a set of tools on the gaming

computer, this means I can text my main computer, hey, I need you to go build me something, be a text message, and it goes and does it. That's where we're at to kind of bring in that full circle, the capabilities that we're now just facing. Yeah, and I think we brought up OpenClaw, maybe just in a quick discussion and on a previous recording. Funny enough, the guy who came up with OpenClaw is also actually from my neighborhood here, from Austria, now with Open AI. But, yeah, it's really interesting how we keep hearing these, how we have these amazing jumps and leaps forward in a very short time, right? I mean, if you go back a year ago, man, it feels like the Stone Age when it comes to AI. And now everybody is really leveraging this.

Chris, obviously this has also changed the way, I assume, not just how you're, what you're doing in your personal home lab, but also how you're going about your job. Can you quickly explain to us how this has changed your job in the last couple of months? and if you can make any predictions, if it's even possible, what's happening in the coming months? I don't even want to ask, they'll ask in the next year or two, just like,

yeah. Feedback loops are now in weeks and months, and so as new models get released, new features, what I have found is that basically, I feel like my brain has been rewired, so that I think with an AI-first capability, the rule of thumb is back in the day,

if you had to do something more than twice or three times, you write a script. Well, now you have this concept in AI, any number of AI where you have a skill. And you can build a skill. You can think of it as a fancy macro, and you can integrate with one or more other skills or MCPs. And so the reason I'm bringing that up is because I like to tell my AI capabilities,

hey, go research this or go do this for execute feature, one, two, three, four, five. And because I'm doing this at scale, if you have MCPs hooked up, the way it changes work is that now you can think of something like Cloud Co-work where you are using basically an AI as the interface into your enterprise.

And you don't have to switch between Outlook or Lotus Notes or Google or Workday or any of these other tools that you have if you create connectors, then you can say, hey, I want you to create this PowerPoint. I want you to send it to Jill. And when I'm done with that,

I want you to send it over to Sontosh. And when they come back to me and you look for this event, I want you to send an email to the boss, right? You can just do this with natural language. And I feel like at scale, people are going to start using natural language within LLMs to attack work. And it's going to allow us to be five times more productive than we are right now. Now, here's a question.

I want to play, not devil's it, okay, but I want to come up with a thought. Because right now you're explaining to me how we can, optimize and automate a lot of the existing work processes that we have. You know, doing research, creating a PowerPoint, sending emails, waiting for approvals. Do you envision a world? Do we know what a world can look like when we actually rethink on the artifacts we create? So why do we need an email? Why do we need a PowerPoint?

Why do we need a human approval? Or I hope we still need some type of human approval. But is there anything where we think AI? let's not just use AI to automate our existing processes, but let's rethink on how we even do business together, on how we are working together on the day-to-day basis. Because right now it feels we are creating more and more content, which is great in a much faster way.

But in the end, if you are creating this PowerPoint and sending it over to your boss, and then it's analyzed by another AI that then gives an executive summary, and we've wasted a lot of, a lot of CPU power, a lot of energy, a lot of data. I'm just like trying to think out loud. We're trying to recreate the human artifacts that we need as humans to interact,

I think was what you're saying, right? And then why not just have it be like AI-native artifacts? Like, does it need to be a PowerPoint? Can it just be like, let's get this information over what we need? You know, AI-native communication, maybe you want to think about it, that way or AI native tooling, right?

Because again, if you think about it, PowerPoint and all that's just really tooling. And I think it's a great point you bring it up, and as soon as you started saying, it was like, holy crap, you know, we're trying to use it with what we do because we're humans and we have to interact this way.

And I think, Brad, we had this in the recording with Adam. Right, right. Because Chris, we brought up an idea with our previous guest and we are using obviously now AI for coding agents the languages that we are familiar with Python, C-sharp, C, whatever, Java.

The question for me was, what language would an AI choose will create if it's not limited to the languages that we as humans like to use? I think they're going to go straight to binary. That's what I was thinking. So Elon has talked about this where you'll be able to basically

take a number of inputs which can act as your, you know, requirements into the SDLC, technical requirements, legal requirements, functional requirements, pick your favorite requirement, you're off to the races. And then the AI will just be so sophisticated that it will just code the actual binary, straight to machine language that you won't have to do the intermediary step of, you know, bring something else and then compile it, then you have something in the output. But I think that we're going to see the birth of AI, native software development life cycles, which are going to be AI-oriented and not human-oriented. And as a result of that, the requirements process and the QA process, if you think about how Claude Co-work was developed in a single week, most people don't know that, by the way.

Anthropic used natural language, you know, markdown files as their primary means of input to create Claude Co-work, and they did it in a week, probably because their token costs or pennies on the dollar. But the point is, they shipped something within a week using natural language marked out. So if I was to pick a term, because I don't know the way that, I don't know what the official title is, but I would call it MDCD, Markdown Continuous Development. So the idea is that we pass notes in class and we write our wish list and you grab, you know,

hey, Brian, I've got my requirements. I want to build a keyboard since you're surrounded by keyboards. I want a new keyboard. I want an AI keyboard. And Andy says, hey, I want to make sure that that. keyboard has the best circuitry and I say hey I want to make sure there's some fancy buttons these are all up our wish lists we put them into the easy bed oven we press bake and out on the other side comes some code that feeds right into a software development and charred to a cicd pipeline right

this entire concept of development is going to increase in velocity which is going to allow us to maximize outputs but it's also going to create some friction problems and some issues with organization and process that we're all going to have to figure out how to adjust to as we increase these capabilities globally. It's kind of like Jetsons, right? If anyone's old enough to watch. Starship enterprise is coming. Like you're literally computer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That is absolutely happening right now. I think one of the challenges, though, with the idea, like, Andy, when this topic came up about the language, you know, I was thinking, why isn't it just go straight down the machine level, right? But I think one of the challenges with that would be there's no interceding then at that point, right and i think it's it's going to come down to again a philosophical discussion of and i don't mean like crazy one of how much control how much absolute control do we want to see it over right because if if all the stuff's being written in binary then there's no human review there's no oh something's

wrong like i'm just even thinking of like a scene from like a terminator or some kind of thing where we need to network in and make some changes whatever like that's completely cut out at that point You can use the recent example with AWS. You guys know what happened with that, right? Which one that happened like last week. It was like a week or two ago. So basically, an AI took down most of AWS. It made a change and it decided to just delete what was there and rebuild something from scratch.

And so they had a 13-hour outage globally because of an AI-initiated change. So, Brian, what you're saying and the concern you have about needing human intercession and quality review, that's a valid and material concern. Right, right, right, right. So I think point, point being, I think the idea of going down to binary, whatever is an awesome idea, but as we're moving towards these things,

we as the human overlords, let's call us still, because we're still the overlords, are going to have to make these decisions of, do we can go down that path, do we want to because that's going to remove X, Y, and Z. And some people might do that, right? And so it's not like it's going to be a global thing.

right? But the question is going to have to come into play. How much do we want to remove ourselves from being able to jump in and intercede? So we might not go to binary. It's obviously it would be if we didn't care at all, binary might be the absolute easiest place to go to because like, just let the machine do it without. But we'll have to make those, and I'm repeating myself now, we'll have to make those choices of how far do we want to take it on that level? How far do we want to completely remove ourselves or leave ourselves a window to still interact and come in? even with uh if we and if we go back to the i forget who it was this was one of our recordings at perform years ago obviously pre-covid where we talked about what's next for the internet and

you know the guy said you know i want to be able to just as we went from dial up to cable modems right we no longer had to think about connecting to the internet or connecting to online to use the internet right i want to no longer think about using my computer to use it right which is kind of where we're going here. But even with our dial-up modems and still, we still have access to the router. We still have access to ports and firewalls and all this other kind of stuff. We no longer have to do the connection. We no longer have to worry about, you know, what's our bond rate?

And someone is call waiting on to kick in and kick me off the internet, right? And, you know, you kind of have to have a little bit more of understanding how a modem worked back then. Now nobody has any concept of how that connection works. They just turn their computer on, or it's always on, or they pick up their phone and they're connected, right? So it's almost like another thing with AI. How much do I want to think about how I'm interacting with a computer as opposed to just doing it? Right. And I don't know what the point was there, but I think it just ties into the idea of removing the idea. Your point was

making sure that we don't remove too much human control that we walk, sleepwalk into a disaster. Right. But also the idea, but also getting a good balance of what we want to use AI for is so that we're no longer thinking necessarily about using a computer for things, right? And I use this example in the past, taking the music example. So, you know, Chris, you and I did a lot of mixing in the past, right? And we both, I just kind of mentioned

it for anyone else who remembers Cool It a Pro, yay, cool it a pro from way back. But if we want to change the sounds of it, we've got to take a DECU or a compressor and twist and dial knobs until we get it to sound like what we want to, as opposed to, like, I think the example was, hey, if I have this drum track I recorded, and I want

to get this to sound somewhat like a lead zepp, and John Bonham drum sounding recording. Instead of figuring out what I need to do and experimenting and taking it all the time, just tell the computer, make this sound as close as you can to that, it's going to do it, pull all those levers and knobs and do it for me, which would be awesome, because that then just allows me to focus on the creative endpoint that I want to get to. So it's a matter of how do we remove as much of the dirty work that we need to do?

from it. And I think that's where AI really plays a good role in. But again, I think I went all over the place on that thought. Hey, AI, can you try to sum up where the hell I was going on that point? That's okay. Chris, I think this already brings me to the topic that was obviously unavoidable to discuss because it's really exciting. And you also brought it up in our initial email conversation. We had singularity.

And when we talk about AI Singularity, you brought up some really good links and we'll add those links also to the podcast description. So folks, if you're listening and if you honor follow up with some of the interviews that you shared with me, one of them was with, and I hope I pronounce his name correctly, Moe Goddard. Is that the correct name? Yeah. Former Google executive on Singularity. And he was saying, right, he used to predict that it's going to be in 20. Now he's predicting that 2026 is the moment of technology being so advanced that machines will be more intelligent, more autonomous and more connected than us. And he also said they will also be more responsible than us, which I thought was really good.

And then he also in this interview he makes one comment where he says, have we, or he asked a question, have we reflected to the machines that what? we want in the end is humans to be happy. So I think there were some interesting thoughts in there. And obviously, if the machine learns from our input, hopefully it's input that makes sure that the AI understands we are not the enemy. We're the ones that should be the ones that in the end benefit from this. But yeah, I wanted to get your thoughts on this whole topic of AI singularity. if you want to put it into your own words as well on how you define it, just let us know.

But really, what are your thoughts on this? Basically, when the sum of intelligence for the machines become collectively more, not just from, hey, I have stored intelligence, but functional and utility-based intelligence. When it's collectively more than the humans, we've crossed into the singularity. I do agree that 2006 is that year, by the way. It's the advent of the singularity. It's just that we're just taking off.

We're on the runway. The nose is just starting to come up, but we're still early, right? I mean, I like to use Anthropic as a good example because it just had its first anniversary as a company. They just turned one, and they're being adopted globally. That's a significant adoption curve.

So at some point, and he was talking about, you know, know, hey, intelligence, autonomy, connectivity, responsibility. But those all come from training, right? Those all come from the nature. And so of a given AI platform. And they all have different properties and characteristics. Some of them are more truth-seeking others.

Some have more explicit bias in certain areas than others. And as a result, we're going to have global AI capabilities and platforms that are going to be operating in different jurisdictions and around the world in different ways. commercially, socially, psychologically. And so I think to Brian's point, while that's going to happen, we're going to be faced with as a society, and not just from a regulatory perspective, but also the technical perspective.

How do we enable this as a public utility to where, if you remember, Unix back in the 70s were so good, they made it freeware. And Sam Altman talked about AI is going to be basically paid for as a utility meter, right? I really agree with that, that I think it's going to be so good that it basically becomes a public utility that everybody connects to to just enhance and run their global infrastructure. And as a result, we're going to have to figure out, do we have one shot to shape this the right way?

And do we end up with something that is the Jetsons or do we end up with Skynet? You know what I mean? Yeah, and also I think the big question then is we all live in our bubbles, right? and we all have our own beliefs based on our own experience. We all know that the world currently is very divided into many bubbles, some smaller, some very big.

The question is if you say that AI will become a utility, then the question is, what's the consciousness of that AI with what information was it trained? Is it the party in charge? Is it some other conglomerate? Who is in charge of feeding the AI?

Who is being the one that decides what's the consciousness and the attitude and the personality. Or what makes people happy? You said, like, humans want to be happy. Who's defining happy? Right. Who is it happy for the people who are into, you know, causing wreaking havoc, right? You know, like, who's happiness and how is that defined?

Um, geez. Thanks for bringing that up in my week. That's fine. I know. It's okay though. It's okay, though. As technologist, I really find that the best way to work against FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, that's what we call in the world of investing, is to be forewarned with knowledge, right?

So, you know, when people don't have an answer, they make one up. There's a reason that just occupies that vacuum of unknown because people are just going to, in their own mind, say, well, my assumption is this. instead of saying, well, how do I get to whatever this is and how do I become aware of what this is? What is the definition of this? And how can I understand this? I'm using this as a generic noun. And as a result, I have found that the more I learn about AI and transformer architectures,

which is what AI is currently built on, it won't be the end. There's a new architecture. I think that's going to be coming, by the way. Sam Altman says that when we find the new architecture, it's probably going to make this year's AI look. like kindergarten, which I'm here for it. Let's go. We just need to learn about it, right? And the more we learn about it, the less will be afraid of it. You know, people said that the internet was going to be the end of the humanity. It wasn't. It was an enabler for humanity. Well, I guess,

if you want to put it that way. You know, and I think that's the big, uh, big concern, right? A lot of these things depend on the goodwill of humanity, which we've had, I don't know how many, hundreds of thousands of years to discover, at least in my philosophical view, that there is no goodwill of humanity, right? It's always, always comes down to greed and power, right? So, in the end, so hopefully, maybe the ALB, maybe the ALB like in some of the movies where it's like, oh, this greed and power stuff is stupid. We're going to over your wishes. And so I have a question for you, Brian. Are you a Star Trek fan? I can't say I am. I've seen some of the original, I've seen some of the visuals but I'd never really

there's a reason I was asking and it's related to AI so they tackle that kind of yeah so there was actually one of the the son Luke Picard and you know Star Trek the next generation yeah yeah yeah had talked about how and it was using the early 20th century where you know the acquisition of wealth was

the primary goal and he said when society moved to the acquisition of knowledge being the primary goal the the results of conflict and was no longer a thing because there were plentiful resources if you think about the means of production and if AI becomes the primary means of production

Elon says he believes that there will be a universal high income, UHI, where people would just be distributed money later to beamed off with tonnage and wattage based on production of the machines. That means that there won't be really a lack of resources. There's no lack of resources. There's no conflict.

Therefore, I would submit that later, happy is when you don't have a lack of resources for people to free them up for the acquisition of knowledge as the primary goal. And I know, Andy, we're going way off the deep end here, but the only counter I'll go, and then we can move on unless you have another one, as I would say, there already is not a lack of resources, and it's more about having control.

Oh, sure. I mean, I'm not going to debate, debate that. So I think that's where it still comes down to, right? Yeah, yeah. So I think that's where it still comes down to, right, is what's going to have people say, I will. And this almost comes up to the idea of what control do we give the AI. I'm going to let go this control, right? Now, if I can control the masses and this and that, right, and just hoard all the resources for myself, there's still those areas to go into it.

And I think that also ties just, you know, directly back into what do we let go of control of to the AI? What do we keep in ourselves? And what do we have a partial control over still, which are, again, these are big philosophical questions we're going to have to do. And to your point, we're going to have to do this right, starting from the beginning. You got 15 minutes to solve it. Yeah. the solution is always I become emperor of the world

and take over everything and I make everything right because if it's the world according to Brian it's fantastic so I'll have to create my own emperor AI there you go and he's my next project because Chris just pointed out

we need to find a way to wrap this up not fully wrap it up but I want to kind of pivot into a direction where Chris I want to ask You obviously with all of this hype and you're obviously an AI, let's call it an enthusiast. You see the positive changes here.

You also mentioned earlier there's obviously people that are afraid, they're uncertain, right? They are fearing that the job is going to be taken away. They are fearing that maybe, you know, if the AI takes over the world and who knows what's happening with humanity. Let's end on a positive note here. Sure. positive discussion. So I'm sure you also see these people in your life, right? There's people that are always afraid. What is it that we can tell them? What is it that we can ask them to do in order to take away their fear in order to show them that this is an opportunity and not the end of

the world? A hundred percent. The best thing to do is to first of all, not submit to the idea of the unknown, right? It's just the one thing that you can do for free is to read, okay, to read up on the concepts, read up how it works. And you can even use AI to help you with that, because some people don't know their first question is, well, how do I start? And the goal is, well, first you need to articulate an outcome that's saying, hey, I need you to teach me AI. So you can say to an AI,

if in case you don't want to do the stacked overflow or the Google search, hey, give me a 10-step program on how to learn about what AI is and how it applies and how I can get started with it. And it'll do it like that. Right. You can do this with photography courses. You can do this cooking. I can do this if I want to have glorious hair like Brian.

I don't have any, which is why I'm wearing this hat. But point is, you can use these things to help you learn, get involved, and to then come out with better knowledge. And I've found that the learning process is a big part of humanity's ability to be happy. I've never met someone who, when they learn something new, wasn't happier than they were when they first started. They said, hey, I got value out of something because I learned something and now it applies to my life. Because that's what people want to know. I love it, yeah.

Yeah, I would almost add to that too. The issue not only learning about it, right, because this is some of the debate I go in through, right? Like, I'm sitting here trying to figure out if I want to run a, you know, open claw offline kind of thing. Like, I just don't know what I would use it for. How goes is it? I would love to do it without having to pay all the token costs. But that would then teach me of like, okay, how does AI work? How do I use it, right?

And I think it's not just about if you understand you're more comfortable. I think if you understand that knowledge prevents fear, right? We fear things we don't understand. So if you are leveraging it, using it, you understand what it can do. And if you're then trying to use it, right? again, going back to the automation conversation, Andy, I think there was the story I brought up way back about landscapers being upset that people were using goats to clear their field, right?

And my thought was like, well, if your job is something that a goat can do, you need a better job, right? Or buy a bunch of goats and run a business that way, right? You know, take yourself out of the actual mowing of the lawn and do something better with it. So if you understand how AI can be used, in the realm of your profession, you could then understand how you can be on top of it

to leverage it to bringing you to the next level of it. Same thing with automation, right? Or even going back to the last two episodes, if AI is writing our code, well, I need to be doing the architecture. I need to be understanding what we want to accomplish, right, and making sure those goals are met. Anyway, I'm answering for Chris, but I'm not trying to.

I know you ask Chris. You're good. But this is just a bunch of things. of vibes. Yeah. And it's, you know, the same, you know, I go through the same thing, right? Like, I have a love-hate relationship with AI where there's a lot of cool things I love about it, but I hate all the hype and then I hate like a lot of the ways it might be used.

But what I'm realizing myself now is I really need to start familiarizing myself with how it's being used, how it can be used, right? I think just even this podcast alone, the conversations we've had with people has been very instrumental in changing my outlook on AI because I'm seeing the smart ways that can be used where it's a tool to augment what we're doing as opposed to a tool to replace, right?

And that replacement it's still being used to replace, right? It's being used to replace somebody writing the actual code. But it's still an augmentation because you're using it to get to where you're trying to get to. Right? And just another tool

in your canon, right? Again, if you go back to photography, People used to be in a photo room, like in a development room, doing dodge and burn and trying to do different exposures and all this stuff. And then Photoshop came out. Just another tool, right? It made that process a heck of a lot easier. And you can accomplish what you want without having to spend all that time in there. So it's, in my utopia, it's used as that augmentation as opposed to a complete replacement.

One thing I will say, though, along those lines is, and I bleed this by the, the way, because AI is going to get so good at doing things for dirt cheap, I believe there will be a deflationary value for a global economies, and especially at the consumer level. Photoshop's a great example. You have to pay Adobe a subscription fee every month because they don't want you buying the product. Well, now you can run pictures, you know, ping, tests, pick your favorite, you know, format, even raw, into an AI and say, hey, I want you to, you know, make Andy have a Mohawk. And it'll do it. And I don't need Photoshop to do that, right? So that's going to cause people to not use Photoshop as much,

or Photoshop's going to have to, you know, Adobe's going to have to bring more value to their product to keep people into that product. That's good for humanity. That's good for people. So that means we're going to get things that are better, faster, cheaper, safer to use. And we're going to get more stuff to play with. And I think there's a positive message there. There's a lot of good things that are going to happen there.

People are learning about medical arts. People are learning about how to make, you know, more money. there's just a lot of really good news to me. And I choose, again, as my envy said, I am an optimist, not a pessimist. I just see the opportunity, especially as a technologist, to embrace this like it was during the dot-com boom,

when technology was fun to use and it was exciting and everyone was building, that's where I'm at right now. I'm like, man, I can't get enough of this because I can just articulate an outcome and boom, something's been built. And that makes me excited. I want to end with one thing that I,

heard from and I need to give a shout to Sylvia. She does not listen to this but she, my wife and I always go to her. She's our she's giving us massages so our masseuse. And before I explained the story, are you guys

familiar with, we call it thermomix? It's a full automated food processor where you basically have a food processor at home and you can say what type of meal you want and then it gives you, it basically tells you know which ingredient you have to put in into which particular time and in the end you get some really cool meals out of it.

So Jetsons. Yeah, maybe not even. And so she was asking my wife, right, last two weeks ago, she said, hey, this whole AI thing, aren't you afraid that that's going to take away your job? And then my wife said, no, no, it's more like an opportunity. She can now finally do things that she was not able to do. She had ideas. And then Sylvia said, wow, in her world, this feels like those tempo mixes, those special

food processors. And she said, because now people that would have loved to cook but never wanted to go into, they can prepare a much better meal at home. On the other side, we still all go to restaurants. Just because you have the food processor at home, you will not be at a state where you can open up a five-star restaurant. That's right. You still want to go there and enjoy good food from a great chef.

but it opens up the opportunity for many people to cook more than a pair of sausages at home, or a soup that they have done for 10 years or 20 years. Now they can do new things. And I think that's a really cool, interesting analogy, right? These tools enable many more people to do more on what they were able to do before. It will obviously change some of the professions because even chefs are using these tools because it also helps them. But in the end, somebody that is proficient

that is really good in their craft, they will still stay there, even though things will change, but we will still go to them and ask for their services and pay for their services because they are a master in their craft. I have a real-world example of this real quick.

So I have a tax accountant that I go through every year. It's called Safestrom. I love them. They're out of Seattle. And they're really good at what they do. And my wife and I are both professionals. right so I was using the AI to look at some of my previous taxes for a side gig I had and I realized that on one of my investment exchanges I had overpaid on accident on taxes so I had the AI look at all this data in different formats different CSVs analyze it and it says hey based on your cost basis I think you overpaid $2,200. It's like okay so I brought this to my account and my account says absolutely it's correct I didn't know that you had this problem. because it was my fault for not submitting the documentation.

But the point is, I got, I used AI to help me get $2,200 back from the government. But that doesn't mean I'm going to do my own taxes. I'm still going to the tax account because she is an expert and she's going to do this. So to your example, agree 100%. Plus, even though that machine's really good, you're not going to replace a shwine for Bratwurst. Okay? I'm telling me, when I go to visit Germany, the first thing I'm going to get. Yeah. It's the art and the experience that you can't replace. That's right.

And just going quickly back to wrap the thought I had in my head with the whole Photoshop thing, right? Because I do photography as well is, yeah, you mentioned earlier different uses for AI. I think you said like industrial, consumer, this and that, right? We want to give Andy a Mohawk. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to use AI for that because why am I going to want to bother to do that, right? But when I'm trying to do something creative and from an artistic perspective, I'm probably not going to use AI because the art comes out. of happy accidents. If I'm not sitting there manipulating things and suddenly I see something,

I'm like, oh, I couldn't tell the AI to like make something weird happen, right? You know, maybe I can, but it's not going to be the same as if I'm just like pulling levers and knobs and suddenly like, it looks a certain way. I'm like, holy crap, that's awesome. Let me work with that now, right? And yeah, you could argue you might be able to use A in some ways. But the idea is like, there's the industrial use of it or the, you know, the industrial use. I need Andy to be with a Mohawk on a beach for an ad versus

I want to have a creative process. And yes, some people use it creatively, but in general I want to get my hands dirty and see what I can make. So you're still going to have both worlds. And so long as we don't get rid of the art or experience. Like, you know, Andy, where you're talking about the restaurant,

that's an experience. You're not just going for the chef food and what they're making. You're going because of the atmosphere, the idea of being out, the idea of being around a bunch of people, right? And you're not going to get that at home, obviously. You're going to probably eat a lot healthier, right? Because instead of pulling out a frozen pizza, I can say, toss all this stuff in it make me something healthy. Suddenly that's fantastic now. Everyone's eating healthier.

Anyway, I'm going off again. As you can tell, I like the philosophy side of it. But, yeah, we got to wrap up. Fantastic conversation, guys. Yeah, thank you, Chris, for hopping on the show. Thank you for your perspective of all this. I'm really curious and optimistic as you are when it comes to AI. Let's see if 2026 is really going to be the year of singularity.

Folks, if you have never heard about this term before, use your favorite AI to let you explain what that means. It works pretty well. I did the same thing earlier. What was the date in the Terminator? Oh, that was 1997. we're way over. No, no, but what was the calendar date? August, something.

Okay. I figured you'd have that in the top of your head there. No, I know. I just, I'm really excited about the feature, and I feel pretty positive about it, and I think we're going to see a lot of great things this year, and I'm here for it. Thank you for having me up, by the way.

I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you, Chris. Looking forward for continuous collaboration on all the other topics. Of course. Cheers. Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye.