hi everybody this is the last time I spoke with Pascal there were a lot of questions that I had that I wanted to go deeper into and many of you contacted me letting me know that there were questions that you would like me to go deeper into as well if I ever had a chance to follow up with them well guess what we're gonna follow up with them right now in a conversation that's going to start in a few moments and this time around instead of focusing more on the Creative Impact of artificial intelligence and how all of us who create content will be impacted I'm going to shift the focus a bit to address some of the the questions that we didn't get to before and these all

revolve around Pascal's extremely deep skills as someone who can take an idea and a vision and turn them into products that people love we're going to talk about all the various things that go into it all the go to market activities that we typically have to follow it's gonna be a really fun chat so sit back and let's get started all right Pascal great to catch up with you for round two you know the first one was such a so much fun that there's so much more that I want to ask and people have told me they would like me to ask you so I figured let's just get you back on the call and do another round and trip around this whole fun conversations

it is good to be back thanks for having me uh all right all right so you know

one of the things in the previous movie chat we spent a lot of time talking about AI assistance and you know that whole world that and how it's going to change how creative people build and you know create things but there's another angle to you because there's only one side of what you do though there are other parts of you that are equally you know fascinating and that is your journey as an entrepreneur you know you're someone who's worked at companies but then you've started your own company and you know and done all these things I've always held this you know assumption you know it could be completely faulty here I always felt that designers make really good CEOs or make really good early stage employees

compared to the traditional disciplines you might think about like product management or developers or so on and so I kind of want to pick your brain on that you know you having been through all these things what do you see as like you know the thing that you know first of all am I correcting my assumption and second what do you think that makes designers more likely to be better at running companies pretty products that people might enjoy wanting to use

oh wow that is a good question I'm not confident if designers are all necessarily the best ones to run companies but I do think that the perspective they bring is is pretty pretty different to say like your classic engineer type or a business type um because I think the designer I think a great designer um is a little more like an artist and I think artists are really good at articulating the vision not just by talking about it but making artifacts that communicate what the what the thing is um or who it's for and uh I think when a a good artist or designer which is really also someone that is a communicator is able to put stuff into a form or out of facts

that do communicate the vision then they can kind of get people behind them and on board right and with just a little bit of work even without doing all the technical work underneath they can create a picture of the thing or concept uh the thing then people can see that okay there's a real idea in their head they're not talking about vague things there's a way to thread the needle on uh you know creating the product of the world that the thing the thing lives in and I think like potted design is also I use design and art like pretty interchangeably at least just in the way that I operate like I'm not really a peer designer like design is just like one thing that I do under maybe a larger

umbrella but um yeah I mean I think it just it's there's a real out to communication and and and and rallying people around that particular vision and part of that happens in like um you know if I was to borrow a word from the book of Disney like imagineering right it's like imagination and kind of engineering at the same time and like pulling things out from the idea space into reality and it's not always practical sometimes it's just enough to give people like a sense of the flavor uh of the thing and they can put their hands on the the electricity of the division I think

gotcha so I think the the storytelling ability that designers have a more natural inclination for gives them an edge at least early on in some of these things the other thing I was curious about is you know maybe I would maybe it's the wrong people I hang out with you know a tough crowd of developers basically but I always felt that developers typically you know or even me as a product manager typically focus on like you know here's a cool problem let's see what we can do here whereas I feel like designers take a more holistic view and say okay you know a major part of communicating and you know communicating to other human beings it's like what's the human ankle to this like you know would someone really find this

interesting or is it something that you're just doing because it just happens to be you know cool technology in all these areas where it's gonna do something interesting here Photoshop brush here I can't wait to build a company around it but I've definitely seen cases where like here's an API that someone created I have no idea what it does let's just do something random with it you know and I'm like can I have exactly the level of success based on the thought process you put into all of this

yeah you know honestly over the years I've found that um the gap between when designers and Engineers if they really are two different types some are because some people are only designed some people only engineer has sort of smushed together like culturally when you do have a good chunk of people who are inside the more insulated bubbles they work at a traditional software company or maybe they live in a tech heavy City such as San Francisco where I lived for a few years um it's not only Engineers that are guilty of it designers too who spend a lot of time inside software companies and I say software companies because there are software companies that the end user as software people and so you get this like funny thing where it's

like we make software for people who make software who make people look for people who make software for software for software for software for software and you start to lose track of well what type of person is is using the thing it's very easy to be inside the bubble and then forget that outside it there's like normies who like have never heard of the word API before um you know they don't know where like a Docker container is they've never operated a terminal and maybe the word AI is like just something that um they've heard in science fiction before um it's I I used to believe like designers had a bit more of a an edge or a swing but after doing it for as long

as I have and just seeing that the two edges sort of diffuse into each other I think they're both kind of in the same the same bucket and it really depends on which area of industry you're in some people are just very inside the like uh how would you kill it well the bubble and then there are some companies that uh you know a little more designed to serve the pop culture and they're less concerned about like wow this would be a cool button to throw in here this API seems like it would be fun to try to come up with the idea for you know it's like um when you're in that in that um that bubble method of thinking there's a lot of trying to create a

problem for the thing like invent a budget problems to justify the thing existing whereas when you're working with real Flesh and Blood like messy people you can just ask them like what's what problem are you dealing with and they'll tell you and it's I think the diff between those type of things is pretty pretty broad so I don't know if that answers the question it does yeah

you know what do you think is the ideal makeup of a company in an early stage for let's say it's a creative you know Endeavor you're building something that you're passionate about and you know you want to scale it up what makes the ideal makeup

man well certainly as few people as possible and certainly as many like multi-disciplinary people as possible I think um people who can you know hop between the different tracks of work is great because they can at least empathize and consider like what their other collaborators are going to need to be able to do even if it's designed with a bit of engineering like like I'm standing then they're existing in the real world and then like Engineers who understand like what's important to a designer and won't be annoyed if they're you know tapped on the shoulder to implement a detail or add us to understand a little bit of both of those things but I think all of that like kind of goes out the door if at the top there

isn't good Vision right I think that the the the leader the CEO of the company needs to really be able to express like where everyone is is heading and ideally that's the only thing that they have to do like in the projects that I work on like eventually I get to a point where I try to fire myself out of the project as quick as possible by hiring people that are way better doing the the stuff that I do so I can go off and you know think about more of the the future whack but early on like I try to do as much of it as possible and in in in recent months like really rolled the sleeves up on on engineering myself I think if you can understand the

full stack then then you know how to um you know hire in people who can do the work effectively

yeah no and one of the things I always liked about all of your various projects and you know companies start or even a part of is that you're extremely good at generating hype for the products that you ultimately build even in its very early stages I'm like yeah I can't wait to try this out whereas I look at other products will be other people like yeah you know it's great I have no interest in it it's not because the products themselves are not good or not comparable it's just that your way of getting the message out has been very unique so can you talk more about that like what is the secrets that one needs to have to generate interest for an early stage product before it even is

ready for prime time

I think a good chunk of it is is meme engineering and funnily enough there's this this uh this fella in the southwest scene who knocked two of the park in a row recently Nikita via I don't know if you've seen his his work around he he made an app called gas and then the one before that was I forget I think it's Nikita right yeah Nikita beer yeah he sold the company I think it was called TBH he sold that to Facebook correct had got locked up in a non-compete he wasn't allowed to like work on another product within the space and then as soon as that four years elapsed you just made the app again and sold it to Discord but at the heart of

that I mean he was very hardcore in growth like I don't know if the products were really designed to have longevity um which is a bit different the way that I try to approach things but there was a lot of engineering on it like I'd say more of the app was about engineering than it like being I think maybe on the inside genius as a as a product itself um and in that it's like yeah it's like meme engineering how do you create an idea that will replicate what's gonna like have the largest sort of network effects can you create something that sort of pops off as an atom bomb to me I like products as like an autistic medium almost in the same way that like

a musician likes to release singles like music and you got to think about how to how to Market it and I'm a big fan of the art of the stunt like what can you do to bind it into pop culture it was an app that I was I was working on a few companies ago where um I'm I sort of put a bunch of like cult or religious themes around it but like light-hearted ones yeah and um the the mascot of the company was like this uh All-Seeing Eye I remember that yeah yeah and it was the idea was like it's your personal God who like creates all these beautiful realms for you to hang out in with your friends and um the feeling was so the idea was if I'm

if I'm forming a you know a real cult uh I gotta have celebrities to endorse it just like real Cults do and so I managed to trick Lindsay Lohan into um recording a prayer video uh to this God and then we uh put it we put it online as is like sort of an ad but like not really we didn't really like mention anything about what the ad was it was just weird enough right whether it was attached to an app and not just in Standalone as like an interesting strange thing to get people talking that then people were like what the frick is this and uh they went out of their way to go find like who was who was behind this we actually spun up a a

shell company and um pretended it was a church so people would like assume that there was like some greater like Beautiful Mind story behind it but really it was just get people to come into the into the app but by the time they're in it they're already primed to play Within the the meme space you know they were coming in they were like oh great oh God I'm here to like download the app like how do I get uh how do I get blessed you know they would they don't they'd almost like uh succumb to or agreed to play the game and I think when you can make it like a meme or a game that other people can get in on they're like more down to spread it as

well because that's a fun place space for them to bring their friends into without them having a great thing from the beginning so I try to make as many things like that where like you could imagine the story of someone else showing it or the story of you showing it to a friend would be just a fun like uplifting thing and that in in a way can just be sort of like a little cultural uh atom bomb type effect to chain reaction

yeah so did you guys leave the load onto the Cameo app or did you have some other back channel that you're able to get her

endorsement oh that I exploited Cameo very early on before they like really stopped you from you know using it for corporate types of activities um and very quickly they uh they clamped down on it but she didn't know that she was recording a um like a an ad for uh um a fake cult I told her that she was um helping us with a video for a friend's stinky little dog named Charlie and I was able to um splice little bits out of the the video and put it into a continuous enough seeming take that people were like what the heck yeah she was just going to come back into the scene after taking a bunch of time off um so there was like there's a timing

thing with some of those memes too right it's like well who's the perfect celebrity oh what's the perfect like topic to carry the thing at the moment um yeah it is it is random you know and creative so it all worked out and we saw another first time I think using celebrities as

well because I remember using the Kizi app I remember seeing Reggie a lot like you know frequently which was very appropriate you know I think keithie was a drum music beats kind of an app and then having a musician who is very talented and likely a YouTuber or something like that made a lot of sense

yeah Reggie was incredible to help us with with distribution and he said he's an old old friend of like us and the company we uh described him as our company shaman and uh you know as soon as we had the app together um there was a funny sequence of events that happened where we're starting to get some lift on the thing it was a strange app to be working on amongst the the current landscape the apps at the time which was social type apps like Facebook and Tumblr and Flickr and all those like Web 2.0 kind of networks where we're in Vogue and we were just making a thing for making music it was pretty pure very simple but um it's like one South by Southwest

uh ATT and I just had seen this thing they were like holy crap like this is this is fresh Apple was like starting to feature Us in in the um in the Apple Stores the app was installing every app around the uh sorry every apples right around the country and so we were starting to get this cool lift and then 18t asked us would you come to like an installation at South by Southwest we have like 100k or 200k or whatever like some pretty crazy amount of money to like do a physical installation and so in about a week we worked with another hardware company in New York um scrambling together and we built a giant version of Kizi and um there was this funny threading the needle moment

where we're like well how are we gonna like how are we gonna attract people to come to this thing at T really wanted um someone to uh demonstrate how to use Casey and Reggie had already been playing around at the app a little bit and so you know they kind of knew that he was within our Circle a little bit we're having some chats back and forth creative brainstorms and on that same trip in Austin we did two things one was I directed a live-action commercial featuring Reggie to promote the app because he's perfect right he can make any sound come out of his body and then um and then we um had him do a live performance where he stomped around on the Giant keezy and he had a microphone

that would beam the audio under his face and he was just like the perfect spirit and perfect like distribution for this this idea um and it almost felt like you know we take bits of feedback from him about like what is what is working or what needs a little polish so it would make it great for you and because some of Reggie's tastes tend to make its way into the app including some samples and stuff from him some of his autistic Spirit also kind of made its way through it and so that helped push push it Forward right it was just like supernaturally aligned it didn't feel like you know Michael Phelps doing a soy milk uh commercial that one always weirds me out I don't know if they still

sell at the grocery stores but for a while they had um Michael Phelps soy milk and all I could think in the back of my head was oh God they have milked Michael Phelps strange brand of Landon but you know

Reggie with music just made sense yeah I know Reggie and you know like I still remember that for you know because it just the Stars aligned so well on that one great product great marketing and the right person to be right up there talking about it

yeah that was truly a special one to do and I I I definitely keep that in the back of that I mean definitely fortunate to have some connects to some some Heavy Hitters not everyone has access to you know excellent Talent like that but um you know I think there's creative ways around it there's ways to kind of hack the the I I mean you know I I promise not to get too deep into AI again this time around but so you know things now where you can pretty much have any movie characters say whatever you want them to say and the facial movements and the mouth movements and so on is on point with the words that are coming out of their mouth you know of

course also sounds like them as well

yeah I mean that starts to get in some dicey territory too because you know you go after someone's like this we're about to enter a pretty strange era as far as access to White Pig goes if anyone can just yeah you might have seen those right where like I think someone tries to recreate make Tom Cruise do like normal kind of activities by using superimposing his face and body on like on himself basically and it almost looks believable like you cannot really tell the difference between like his real Tom Cruise or fake Tom Cruise or Tropic Thunder Tom Cruise rolling down

yeah they they um it was a very popular Tick Tock account I think which was um and then more famously there was a I believe there was a recent Anthony Bourdain documentary where they um they trained a voice model on on his voice and then used AI Anthony Pointe to narrate the documentary

wow that is trippy yeah and I you know last night I heard a story I can't say who the actor is but um there was a famous voice actor who had passed away recently was involved in the let's say Disney family and one of my friends um has who's a fantastic voice actor has been um assisting in training and articulating of an AI model to like extend the legacy of this uh this character and his and his work so you know times are changing as far as the simulation of these characters and personalities get to almost being Eternal yeah man so yeah not to go deep into the territory one more time but getting back to apps and so on one of my favorite apps that you know you had worked on was

the note-taking app you know the one that allows you to take notes Vision you know had like a I'm forgetting the name of it at this point but it's basically the same list thing list exactly like that was part of my favorite and I used it way way way longer than you know then I felt like you're probably your metrics even estimated people to use it wasn't until like Cloud syncing was one of those things I couldn't live without I was like okay I need to do something different but you know the iconography the colors is facing you know all these things goes back to my earlier point about like you know having a designer being a core part of this from an early on stage because you know there are a

billion note-taking apps and then every day and Brilliant note-taking ads come back but for me thing list was like the one I always thought was a gold standard and like my favorite app that I used because I take notes um all the time

I almost forgot about thing list that is a that is a vintage one at this point and uh that was fun to work on you know sometimes taking the weirdo designer animated brain and applying it to slightly more vanilla problems um can unlock some new approaches to to making a thing right like I I think at the time like there were a bunch of people like doing to-do list apps but we wanted to do something with the people bit more flavor and um yeah it was nice to make a pretty polished thing I mean it it I think it was like one of the like the few properties we actually like sold and for not that not that much money I think it still existed I think there's another

company that kind of like took over thing list and they maintained it a little bit I don't know if they even did Cloud sync or anything um but yeah it you know I spent a lot of time these days inside game engines and um still doing animation kind of heavy stuff and 3D things but um and those are those can be like really challenging spaces to be in because you just the simulation space you have to hold in your mind is a lot you just kind of put in a different mode right and um but it's all at the end of the day it's all computers right it's all code it's all the same kind of stuff underneath but it's just a very different way to

articulate it and it is fun honestly to like come back to the slightly more quote-unquote vanilla type problems and be like well what if we push it through this lens of the higher order like thinking can you can you make like some of these my typically mundane experiences um like have a personality or flavor and I think those things having personality and flavor humanize them and ends up making them more of a Humane experience instead of us having to become more computer-like and turn ourselves into robots to be able to interact with computers I think when software becomes more like a being which has a personality it's a lot more natural to relate to

yeah no that's that's so true you know I think there was a book called English called Society of mind that I think was by I think Marvin Minsky like detail exactly on this is that you know the other day you know we've been trying to make humans behave more like computers and like how we think and program and speak their language what are we the other way around you know what it was the other way around where you know we spoke a Common Language and we trained all the various systems to understand it a Common Language being so that humans are more relatively you know friendly about it

yeah I mean I think even today code is um it's kind of like learning magic spells even if you know how to engineer to the normal person it's it's still such a difficult interface and mental play now to put yourself in yeah you're always told to like you know you want to solve problems and domain you're trying to operate in you know which means a visual task is best done visually you know which is why you sell so many direct manipulation and all these things and tools to make it not like you know I'm drawing a rectangle I'm going to draw a rectangle using a tool that is optimized for drawing rectangles whereas coding is still very much a case where if you're drawing a rectangle you're writing text

and not even like you know logical texts it's like bizarre SVG syntax or or maybe even like direct imperative commands on like canvas right like literally moving coordinates from one point to another and I think there's a lot to be done here even ignoring like low code no code tools that try to abstract away details but all these abstractions come with limit you know whereas you can't do the things you might want to do because you're blocked by the tools ability to represent a visual concept into whatever backend language to be ultimately represented in yeah man I mean there's so much to have to wrap your head around I think to be able to move the medium of software around in an effective way it's like a I feel like every day is

that you know mind expansion meme like the Galaxy brand exactly exactly exactly

so getting back to one more point you know I'm gonna put a spot here so here are two situations I'm curious to get your take on what would be the more successful product at the end of it mediocre product great distribution that is product a product B great product mediocre distribution what do you think is a greater chance of success

oh well I think to really answer that question it comes down to what is the measure of success if we're talking about making the chat achieve the first one of mediocre product greater distribution let's show up I mean there's so much so many things in the world if you just forget software products just on Earth that cracked the distribution piece um that's why the world is full of a lot of crap too yeah and um and then a lot of like the they're really excellent things just if that never cracked distribution you could consider them a commercial failure but maybe artistic success one of the key examples I I push a lot of things to the Disney lens lately because I've just been doing a really deep dive on like

the life of them and he's very Upstream of a lot of stuff that I do Fantasia was um one of his like big pure autistic Endeavors and um what was the name of the Leupold stick was the name of the musical collaborator I believe and he wanted together you know what really wanted to do an uncompromised like autistic film forgetting what would be uh he wasn't leaning into what's going to hit it the biggest in the box office right it was like what's going to be the purest expression of the idea um Fantasia now everyone knows about it and it did eventually make Disney money but when the thing came out I mean there's interviews of him talking about it commercial failure artistic success right and I guess it

comes down to what is what is important at the time you know if we really are measuring Disney as an artist um wildly successful with Fantasia because I think great artists eventually have to work out how to reinet themselves after a while it's very easy to get stuck in your patterns and then you kind of lose it you lose your unique perspective because the rest of the world almost kind of catches up and so Fantasia was one of those reinvention moments for him where he had to really turn a lot of his his Thinking Inside Out to get that that thumb out and it certainly inspired a lot of future work that happened uh at the studio but did it make the studio like a good

amount of money no it like lost a lot of money like and so it didn't have the right distribution um and it also just it it was too ahead of its time there's a timing thing on things too I think yes there's a right time for ideas to land and um yeah I think it just really comes down to to what's important I think that he wouldn't have like done I since he wouldn't have like done Fantasia another way you know that's like one of those notches in the belt you want to like you want to keep okay the the the the stuff you learn getting to work on a project like that uncompromised is invaluable even though it costs millions of dollars

yeah and I think that's something they always hear about a lot of creatives who are creating shows for Netflix specifically saying like yeah Netflix gives them more freedom to do what they want to do which may or may not work out I don't know how it works out now given that you know they're being more constrained in like you know funding coins I'm at least like a few years ago it was typically the case where if you have an idea that is unproven but you're passionate about it there's a platform that will be willing to support it and all my almost Netflix right have you seen uh midnight gospel have you heard it I have not let's see if I heard of it

you know I'm I'm a visual person so I might have seen the actual you know um artwork on it I've seen the trailer I've seen the cover art for it yes I've not seen it though so the fella behind it is a is a man of the name Pendleton wood and his most famous uh creation uh it's adventure time which I'm sure you've had that right oh yeah absolutely yeah and it did very well for continua because like I think one of the most popular properties at the time and it did quite a number of seasons um and I don't know the full back story of how the Netflix deal happened but just like my I'd say like my analysis as an artist and looking at how this thing got

produced it was clear that they were sort of like well Pendleton you freaking crushed it on um on Adventure Time come to Netflix and do whatever the hell you want and you watch the thing and it is so freaking Bizarro and weird like it's just it it features this kid who puts his head in this like weird um like on his like space vagina looking thing like it's it's it represents some like reproductive organ it puts his head in it and it's this like futuristic via simulator and it's very psychedelic and he beams into the bodies of these characters and they go on this stupid lucid fluid trippy Adventure every time he puts his head inside the machine and um the amount of tea towel you can just

tell that they were just having fun with it and not worrying about well we need to be economic oh this shot like doesn't make sense here this would be expensive now it's just a sense of wow they just let him play and create whatever we want I mean I'm sure it's probably like have x million dollars and just go to town and just tone it in whenever the thing's complete I would guess that it was probably something like that if you have this feeling of well this is not a like a a true commercial product while Netflix you know is Distributing it I don't think he was trying to make something that would um punch in the same class as uh Adventure Time that but anyway I highly recommend checking

out uh midnight gospel because you watch it and you're like okay there's no way if this was put in front of a contemporary like modern audience just on one of the main channels or Cartoon Network people would get it they'd be like this is from another planet but I do think that midnight gospel in maybe 10 years or 20 years when I think the world itself becomes more psychedelic with psychedelia making its right into the population like like psychedelic mushrooms and all the other things that are becoming legalized I think like you'll it'll probably be a bit more of a cultural Awakening and then they'll be ready to receive an idea like that and I'll just be like that it'd almost be like a classic to be

like oh yeah of course these ideas we think about already but you know artists are often out ahead of of the rest of the pack but it's very sensitive types of people and so they often get ideas beamed into their head before everyone else and I think another part of the job is like working out one two they get to choose when to release it amongst the the the the rest of the folks who are both artists and and non-autists you know

yeah no I mean I think my deployment earlier about timing is such a core part of you know it's a it impacts anything that we typically do but even an artist specifically because you know that's a I forget you know I read a lot of articles in books and so it's hard for me to keep track of what I read and when there's a great article it's reading a short while ago we talked about if you took like an automotive design from today you know Cutting Edge and all of these things and he took it back like I said 20 30 years it had been like this is garbage which is absolutely awful we're gonna do whatever we think the future what 2022 might look like and look very different

even though if you look at it today we're like wait that looks like something from a Jetson it's really terrible and there's something that came out of it which is really like sometimes ideas are so far ahead that even if it is good the timing of when it's introduced has to play a big role because a great idea introduced way too early could not only sabotage that idea from that moment it couldn't potentially sour that idea from ever becoming a reality and then an idea that came out of it was clippy you know the old Microsoft Office oh yeah where you know it gave you text-based assistance on contextually on what you were doing at the time execution there's a lot to be desired but that pretty much stopped any

kind of discussion on space for so long until the people who era probably remember it anymore like you know you and I are probably the only people right now on this planet who are talking about it and remember it you know at this very moment whereas for many other things it's still part of the Zeitgeist and so that always struck with me you know when I have an interesting idea and I'm like okay people are like this idea now is it because my presentation of the idea was bad or the idea is just too far ahead of its time

yeah I think it can often read his culture shock to the people who are not quite ready for it yet you know um if you imagine like a weird futuristic flying car coming in just being dropped in right now it's just like too much for some people to wrap their heads around right because that means it's challenging their assumptions their base assumptions on so many other things and I think some people or most people can only tolerate so many of their core beliefs or principles challenge at a given time right

yeah I I do the Cyber truck as an example of this you know just first introduced you know some people were like this is hideous absolutely awful some people are like the greatest thing ever and most of the people probably played the Halo video games where it remind them of the war Target like oh there's like a warthog I gotta have it right now but then two years later now I was like yeah that totally makes sense and then we see like other competing card companies doing equally blocky kind of looking things they're just like yeah it's just part of the norm and no one remembers at that time how much backlash and so on that came out of this whole thing but also part of me is like

doesn't really matter you know the product is compelling and the vision of it I don't think it's actually out something and it's actually outside of the hands of people have used it but their Vision was so compelling that it was able to overcome so much of the negativity and the headwinds at that point

yeah I mean I think that's just underlying like mechanic that is still built into our like monkey brains which is for better it was because it's probably a defense mechanism the fear of new things right and then you can see the alien it's like something from an outer tribe it's like gonna challenge everything you want to throw stones at it or smash it into a million pieces yeah and like it definitely didn't hurt I definitely hasn't heard that you know Elon also happens to be like doing SpaceX and so she's like wait you know so your mind is like having two ends here it's like wait he he's it has a vision and the team around it to take Rockets up and land the rocket back down

again and yet he gives us this there's something wrong with me right you know I'm the one who's not able to see this because why would someone like that you know lead us in the wrong path the wrong design so there's a cult of personality angle that plays a a large role in this as well whereas it was one thing it's like some random person came with a cyber truck versus here's the person behind SpaceX and Tesla in general and you know other endeavors I think the flamethrower you know basically doing this so I think those are all like goes back to the early series of like building hype and all the various factors that kind of go into it yeah I mean I think it definitely is a

Visionary as like I mean it is crazy to to to look at obviously the ethics he's made sending to space setting up infrastructure and then being a huge troll on uh on Twitter and then you have to somehow hold all of that in your head and make a like binary evaluation of Rocket Man good or Rocket Man bad it's just way more complex than that yeah we've got like a very complex uh president who uh has a Godly amount of uh resources twiddling his finger and you know our our simulations and we had stuff to happen but yeah man it's it's been a real roller coaster to watch

yeah yeah so you know one thing you know we're getting close to like the end of our time here then when I you know check ask one question what does success mean for you you know you've done a lot of really interesting things in my 20 years that I've known you and they've all been very very different in some cases you know that's a common theme of that you know you have an idea that you want to get out to the world but beyond that you know what motivates you what are your plan what are you 10 years from now what do you what does success for you look like

I think that's two things one is I wouldn't hope I can just continue continue doing what I get to do every day a lot of it is play and a lot of it's the really have the privilege of being an artist ideally I'm just doing as much of that as possible and and no other distractions but the second is it'd be great to really build something that that lasts and I don't know exactly what the form of that is um some of it might be like like the feeling of Legacy you know if the same reason people have kids and whatnot and they want to continue on their lineage but um I just think in a world of of technology and software we've just normalized working on things that are

incredibly ephemeral and um the idea of making something or creating something that lasts longer than a few years to me is such an exotic or out there idea if we just consider what culture is today the attention spans are so short um but working on something that could really span a lifetime or a decent chunk of a lifetime um it's really really appealing to me because you you get people to have a different relationship to the thing it's less about the quick little Hits and The Dumping spikes and more like this is a thing that I hold with me or carry in my my life or an experience so an idea it'd be cool to create a thing that is that that meaningful sometime but

um not in a rush to do it I think it'll happen naturally but yeah that would that would be it some build something that lasts and um continue getting it just create out all the time

yeah no that's a that's a great answer there

thanks man