Kent Gustavson: Welcome back to Man vs. Slop. It's exciting this week because we get to, I guess, dive into the mud with someone else. This week, it'll be Patrick Ward. So this is... Who's a... Who's an old friend of ours.

Kent Gustavson: Exciting to talk with him. He's a founder of a company called NanoGlobals, and he's one of those guys who knows a little bit about everything. So this will be a good fit.

Patrick Ward: Thanks for having me Kent.

Kent Gustavson: So I'm Kent Gustavson.

Aleck McCathie: I'm Aleck McCathie.

Kent Gustavson: And let's go. Okay, so this week Aleck, do you want to get us started with don't know, the headlines? You keep up with this stuff. You have you have like a list on your wall of all the AI happenings.

Aleck McCathie: There's nothing that seems too crazy this week like this different than any other week. You know, there's all these different testing things that have gone awry and all these different examples of models that are doing nefarious things and and trying to hide the fact that they're doing the nefarious things as well, which is always spooky. The one thing that I read this week that felt a little bit different than the tone of previous weeks, which for me is mostly all the doomery stuff, I guess.

Aleck McCathie: But, this week, they're talking about how, like, type of land that data centers are wiping out. And, I mean, I think everyone's probably heard about how Google did that crazy thing in Finland by wiping out, like, almost half a million trees without really even having permission. And apparently, there's like these pretty ancient and special chestnut trees in West Virginia that like survived blight. And now this like special little grove of trees is gonna potentially get cut down for a data center too. So I thought that was kind of like like a different side of the nefarious stuff happening.

Kent Gustavson: I feel like I feel like we should quote the Lorax. I mean, the, you know, the the... You got the the Once-ler and and this, you know, entrepreneur who goes and... Yeah. He... What... He has the Truffula trees. Right?

Kent Gustavson: And then he he chops down the Truffula trees so that he that he can make Thneeds, which are things that everybody needs or something like that. And then at the end, there are no more trees, and so all the all the all the business people, like, drive away, and then the Once-ler is just there in his shack. You know? And he... And then you got your, you know, awesome ending of the story where he has one more seed of a truffula tree, and he drops it into the boy's hand.

Kent Gustavson: But before that, The of course, the the weird little thing, disappears and then leaves a note that says, unless. I love I love that book.

Patrick Ward: So,

Kent Gustavson: Patrick, are you a fan of, The Lorax?

Patrick Ward: Oh, very much so. I read a lot of Dr. Seuss growing up. Crazy what you're saying there Aleck, I had heard the similar like environmental destruction and the, obvious answer, again maybe there is some environmental thing that I'm not thinking here of but it's my homeland Australia it has a huge amount of basically desert that you know we'd still have to do the various environmental surveys. By most accounts it seems like prime area for a data center, you know, there's a level of like environmental stability there.

Patrick Ward: You wouldn't be cutting down thousands year old forests. That at least was some that I'd heard from the Australian government of they're trying to build Australia is like this modern, which good luck to them, there are many governments that have tried and failed. But that seems like a prime use case. You've got this data center needs.

Patrick Ward: The other one I'd heard of which I'm guessing is probably what Elon is a fan of is data centers in space which that was one of my college courses was on space and international affairs and that gets really messy really quickly because we've spent the last fifty odd years since we put man on the moon putting satellites in orbit. And now what's really risky about that is there's just a lot of space junk, like, up there. And so even if, you know, you can make it enable from a perspective of putting a data center in space, like, what's the risk of... Does your data center go offline because some other rogue piece of space junk hits it?

Patrick Ward: And then, you know, we sort of... When we were doing the course, we gamed out all sorts of theories of, like, what happens if one corporation's space junk hits another? What happens if it's representative of a country? Does that start an inevitable war?

Kent Gustavson: When was this? Like, I thought that it... Was this, like, last year? That's incredible. It must have been a cutting edge program.

Patrick Ward: Oh, no. This program... Oh, jeez. I did this program ten years ago with a

Aleck McCathie: as well.

Patrick Ward: Yeah. It was it was the the the lecturer. This was at George Washington. The lecturer was a super smart guy from NASA, and he was already predicting then because he, like, knew behind the scenes that space is one of those areas that, you know, government will invest in when it's, you know, good times and the economy is great, very quick to cut back on.

Patrick Ward: And so he predicted the whole rise of not just SpaceX, but sorts of, like, private military contractors and other companies that would get into it to order... In order to fill the gap. And, yeah, he said that, like, this this was a... It was an inevitable, you know, put aside whatever your feelings are about, you know, billionaires putting, you know, rockets in space. It was just a a natural evolution of trying to conquer a next frontier. Because, obviously, it's like international affairs is always obsessed with, like, the demand for resources, the the competition between both, you know, large empires and and smaller countries.

Patrick Ward: And so it has to go somewhere else. And we've kind of, with the exception of the oceans, explored most of the known world. So naturally, they had to look up.

Kent Gustavson: And you can't put a data center at the bottom of the ocean because it would be a little tricky building it. Right?

Patrick Ward: You would... It'd be tricky building it and also the, both the, like, water pressure would be extremely massive. So, you know, five to ten years of effort building only for, you know, one piece to bust. I mean, you look at, like, just ordinary pedestrian or automotive tunnels that we have. It's it's it's as hard thing out of those, let alone if it was, a data center.

Patrick Ward: The other side of it is also like the scary thing about the oceans is we know, I believe we know more about space than we know about oceans. Now, know, often smarter than me could quantify exactly how we know that. But, like, that is that is what's more frightening is that we we don't actually stray much into the oceans because we're very feeble creatures and therefore, you know, don't like to go to the bottom of them.

Kent Gustavson: So so is it possible that there's still intelligent life in the oceans?

Patrick Ward: I think there's... I mean, even the intelligent life we already know of, like octopuses and SWARM and and those sorts of things. So I think it's it's very probable that there's other forms of life that are, like, several layers below what we've even encountered and could just, you know, remain there in somewhat perpetuity, obviously, given the warming of the oceans and and the change of that climate, like, that potentially is new ramifications there. So Mhmm. Whether those, you know, life forms up or, you know, adapt as would often be the case, time will tell.

Kent Gustavson: You are you are just truly a generalist. You know a little bit about everything.

Patrick Ward: I try.

Aleck McCathie: Just looking it up here as we're talking, and apparently, underwater data centers are a thing. There's article from Scientific American saying that they might be planning to build some in The US around Alaska and The Gulf Of Maine. So I don't know if that

Kent Gustavson: means Probably not but Probably not too deep. Yeah. It's, like, probably like Yeah.

Aleck McCathie: Yeah. Yeah.

Patrick Ward: Because because that's the drop off. Right? Is that, like, any... Anything close to land is not actually too deep. And then, obviously, as you get out to the deeper oceans, then you get to the usual, you know, famous points like Point Nemo and Mariana's Trench and things of that nature.

Patrick Ward: You'd also probably want it close just from a logistical perspective of if something was going wrong, you know, you you don't wanna have to take several days to get out to it and then go down. You would want to be able to go ahead.

Kent Gustavson: For example for example, if a group of rogue agents lived in the Deep Sea Trench, Marianas Trench, and no human could get there to shut down the agents, it might be the end of humankind, right?

Aleck McCathie: Yeah. For real. Yeah.

Patrick Ward: Yeah. Well, have very less sci fi, less provocative thinking on that. I think humans will sooner annihilate each other versus AI agents. This goes back to having been through so many tech hype cycles.

Patrick Ward: I'm still looking at most of what we have today as just the evolution of machine learning and I clearly missed the memo at some point We just decided, oh, machine learning is now gonna be called AI, and we're going to do that for branding purposes, and we're going to make various valuations, you know, skyrocket. But in my mind, it's no different than when everything wanted to call itself SaaS or everything wanted to call itself automation. You know, I've seen companies, I even seen some of my old companies, which were, for example, software developers suddenly call themselves AI powered development.

Patrick Ward: It's like, okay, so like having been inside those companies, this is more a marketing push rather than anything else. And so when you hear the things like, oh, it's going to take over humanity. I'd be less concerned about the AI agents and more worried about the humans running the companies that are telling us that. And it almost seems like trying to absolve themselves certain behaviors they might themselves commit.

Patrick Ward: If they could just say, oh, it's because of an agent versus what should be done, which is, Hey, if you're developing this technology and you think it might go rogue, then spend a portion of your revenue or operating model on putting guardrails, putting fixes, and maybe you should be personally liable if it does go rogue. You know, we we think of, like, for example, when we had the the big rise in, robo taxis and that sort of thing when they started getting rolled out onto the roads, when they hit someone, the companies were liable for that.

Patrick Ward: Like, it's your technology and therefore, you know, if it commits, you know, crime or harm, then you are liable for that. By using this vernacular of all the, like, AI agents are so smart. We can't even contain them. Again, you can can tell that there are some probably very smart lawyers behind the scenes.

Kent Gustavson: They have a soul, their spirituality, there's the... But one of the latest things is is Claude saying they're gonna roll out something that says if you're being abusive to the agent, you know, you'll you'll be reported. So it's like they... They're becoming humans in a way. So you're saying that's related to how it's

Patrick Ward: So so funny you bring up the the b... Yeah. Because I read a piece on the being mean to thought. And look, this is no different than social media platforms trying to crack down on now whether that abuse is being committed by human or a bot, like, it's it's still the same thing. And the interesting flip on the head, from from one entrepreneur that I read regularly who, you know, has a very smart pulse on this is that, when you flip moderation in that way, basically taking the burden again away from yourself as a company and you're putting it on the individual.

Patrick Ward: Oh, well, the the individual person who did the abuse is the one. And granted, we can all take some level of personal responsibility, but there is a responsibility on the platform, platform of the technology that provided and facilitated the mechanism in which to do it. And so he reads that that announcement from Anthropic within that very same lens. They're they're... Granted, if they don't want people to be mean to, their platforms for, for whatever reason, because they're trying implement moderation back on the individual.

Patrick Ward: Go for it. And if you want to ban people for it, go for it. But that still shouldn't absolve you of your responsibilities. It just all... This is why history repeats itself.

Patrick Ward: Like it all just rings similar to previous waves and previous other, you know, tech founders. And this is where I'm always, maybe I sound cynical but maybe this is just where you know, always being a study of history. You can see it through the same lens of maybe, maybe that Dario has figured out monetize this opportunity. Like lets make no mistake AI is an incredibly powerful technology but many of the companies that have been part of the first wave are very unlikely to survive.

Patrick Ward: It's the exact same as with the internet. Many of the very early names in the internet died off. Another example is the smartphone. Apple didn't invent the first smartphone but they mastered it and perfected it, and that's why they captured most of the economic gains.

Patrick Ward: So I'm sure Dario being a very smart man is worried that he's ironically been fast and too early that might not be able to cash in forever. Now who knows how long that'll last? You know? Maybe if he can continue to get enough debt financing that runway, and he'll probably, you know, siphon off the money to be enough for, you know, his generational wealth.

Patrick Ward: Fantastic. Good for him. But in terms of the overall arc of Anthropic, OpenAI, a number of these companies, that's unlikely to be where the value where the value of AI being captured is likely to... Is more for for, quote, unquote, boring companies. So today across the consumer space, the health care space, the education space, these sorts of areas.

Patrick Ward: When AI gets applied to those and changes those business models for the better, that's when you would likely see the most widespread economic value as opposed to hype cycle, which is obviously where we we are today.

Aleck McCathie: Yeah. We talk a lot about... Or I rant a lot about accountability and, like, liability and stuff, I guess, probably on most episodes. But it's interesting just hearing the perspective of everything that we talk about from that, like, purely sort of, like, financial sort of, like, startup sort of perspective and how it's really... Doesn't seem as, like, spooky or dangerous, I guess, when you talk about it that way. It's just a bunch of people trying to make their buck.

Patrick Ward: Oh, absolutely. It's Apollo's Apollo's Economist came out yesterday, I think it was, and literally said of the entire Fortune five hundred or S and P five... I think it must have been the S and P five hundred. Seven stocks have gained because of AI and four ninety three have had zero difference. And it doesn't take a genius to guess which of the seven.

Patrick Ward: It's all the ones involved with both build out or the circular financing, it's basically the classic max seven. And what's interesting about that is that I feel he is both right and wrong. So he's right in the sense that right today that the other four ninety three have had like economic return from AI. But that doesn't mean that like AI is not powerful.

Patrick Ward: What it means is wherein you know, I go back to what one of the first waves of of technology. Go back to when we went from horse and buggy to car. And so naturally when you ask everyone at the time when they have horses, what do I want? I want a faster horse.

Patrick Ward: Can't really conceptualize it for a car. And so we haven't done that same work yet for our organisations. We keep applying AI to faster, a little cheaper, a little within the same paradigms that we've always operated where the true unlock, and again, this is not very, appealing to both CEOs and financiers who are trying to get, you know, as you say, Aleck, the quick buck, longer arc of transformation, and that takes time. I look at the previous round of transformation that I was closely a part of cloud.

Patrick Ward: Right? We heard like cloud was a huge transformation in the early two thousands and everyone needed to get onto it. And then I'm looking into organizations in 2026 that still haven't fully gone to the cloud. Partially gone, but still have some on prem and maybe they've got a hybrid cloud model and they haven't fully unlocked it.

Patrick Ward: And that's just something that has been talked about so much that you would think it's like an old wave of technology. No. It's still a very new wave. And so I would say, again, we are only in the first innings of AI.

Patrick Ward: We're looking at some, you know, being very small, have made themselves AI first and and able to generate huge value for that. But you got a lot of companies that, you know, they've got legacy processes. They've got data living in 100 different silos. It's not all connected.

Patrick Ward: That... Reimagining those models will take years, and even take decades. And when that happens, then you start thinking of a true unlock. And that's, you know, it's it's not surprising that it takes time. It's very difficult.

Patrick Ward: You know, even even self described futurists have a really hard time predicting the future. And that's where what I'm personally hoping for is we get back to an idea of applying the technology to produce better technology, better tools, better companies that do better for all people. You know? Let's not worry about, like, the existential threats of things like AI agents.

Patrick Ward: Let's worry more about, hey. What does this mean for does this mean for the idea of how people generate enough income in order to support themselves and support their lives? You know, those are problems we haven't solved yet. You can even look if we take it outside of The US to a global Still got a billion people living on less than $2 a day.

Patrick Ward: Now we haven't solved problem. And that becomes the question. Are we trying to use a piece of technology in order to weaponize against each other? One tendency.

Patrick Ward: Or are we truly thinking, hey. This technology is so game changing. We potentially have an ability to create that concept of human flourishing across the entire species. Like, that would be a wonderful thing, but it takes focused effort.

Patrick Ward: It's the right motivation, and we we need to be careful here of not falling into the fatalistic trap of thinking that the past is going to replicate the future. Because everything that seems like is a a harebrained scheme and into the future would very well become the default just, you know, in in five years' time. And we've seen this in, you know, our own lives. Again, I go back to the smartphone example.

Patrick Ward: You know, when did we think that we would be glued Almost eight. I live in that bridge generation of millennials who remembers the time prior to a cell phone, but also remembers a time when it's, like, completely omnipresent. And so those are the types of technological shifts that we need to remember that it's not AI is not here to simply make the existing world and the existing paradigms slightly cheaper or slightly faster. That's a inefficient use of it.

Kent Gustavson: Interesting. If all the systems are getting faster and bigger and better and whatever, but we're still looking at a switch to the agrarian way of life, which is supposed to change everything and you probably had business bros saying, Yeah man, you gotta plant corn! Whatever the early crops were, probably not corn. But, it feels like we we humans cycle like that, I guess until we don't.

Kent Gustavson: But, that's refreshing in some ways. So I I wanna go back to space junk because I I did see in the news there were a couple things that flew out of space and hit people or didn't hit people. Thank goodness. But apparently, that is the new warning.

Kent Gustavson: Look up. If there's a a a a flaming ball coming out of the heavens, dot run, I guess. So it's it's sort of like... I guess that's always been part of human culture also, except it's not meteorites anymore. Now it's, you know, big hunks of, you know, SpaceX latest satellite or something.

Kent Gustavson: Oh, and the second piece of that is that you're talking about, satellites kinda coming near each other. So then we've got, you know, what Ronald Reagan and and whatever we're we're talking about back in the day of, like, wars happening in space. And now you've got Russia's, you know, satellite coming dangerously close to another satellite. So it's like, okay.

Kent Gustavson: Now now we're acting like junior high school in space. So we've got space junk and we've got, like, space junior high going on. And we call space space, which is even worse than AI because it's like everything outside of Earth is space, which I find also very funny because apparently there are a lot of different things out there.

Patrick Ward: Oh, absolutely. And not only different things, but different atmospheres, different orbital bodies, you know, you, you look at the expanse of space, think for a while, why did we call it that? We called it that likely because, Hey, this was beyond our scope. You know, we, we were obsessed with it for, you know, go back to ancient philosophers in Greece were obsessed with space from the perspective of could we get there?

Patrick Ward: Like, that's always the misnomer. Everyone always likes to pretend, oh, like most of human history, people thought, you know, everything revolved around us. You know, maybe we were flat earth, maybe something like that. And then someone around sort of the time of Copernicus and Galileo, oh, like, no, actually, you know, we rotate around the sun.

Patrick Ward: That's actually complete nonsense known for many thousands of years that we are on a planet that is round and therefore there is something above us. But for the longest time, that we had no way to access it. We had, you know, theories of how we could get there, but it wasn't until, you know, 1969 that we put man on the moon. It's like, oh, okay.

Patrick Ward: We can not only physically get up into space, but we can escape our own atmosphere because that's the big thing, right, just from a purely physics perspective is that Earth is trying to drag every single one of our rockets that we're sending up into space back to Earth. So even to escape our own atmosphere was was a herculean undertaking. But because of that, we still have left, you know, it... It's no wonder that of all the areas of science fiction, space has been the one that has has captured the imagination more than any because you can kind of use it as a sleight.

Patrick Ward: And then when you start thinking about the scale in which it happens, when you realize that the milky way is actually relatively small when it comes to galaxies, even when you go to our nearest galaxy to us at Andromeda, that's significant orders of magnitude bigger than us. And then you think of how many more there are, you know, it it it gets very quick. Think of your... At your own insignificance very quickly. But to your point, Kent, about closer to home aspect about this of, like, where we're putting satellites into space, that's where it does get very scary, and that's where it gets very human because you think of how many of our systems are reliant on, the work of satellites and GPS.

Patrick Ward: And then you think of all the military applications. You know, the... There's the the satellites we know about, and then there's the other satellites that do definitely exist there but are only known to various nation state militaries. And so that can imagine being a far more important battlefield for future wars than you can imagine, you know, boots on the ground or even just having large numbers of resources in terms of large navies, aircraft carriers, and other, like, traditional weaponry.

Patrick Ward: And you can already see this, unfortunately, happening. You look at drone technology that often is using... There's that word again, like, autonomous AI powered technology built into those drones that allows smaller nations to act additional, you know, military powers. And that becomes... Again, there's sort of a a bifurcation of the very catastrophic way, which is, okay. Does that mean just, like, every human on Earth could potentially develop a drone drone to attack other actors.

Patrick Ward: Okay. That gets to be a very dystopian, very, pessimistic, very suspicious society. And then you shift to another way of like, well, does that force us all table more often have constructive dialogue with one another. What I find very interesting when you think of these concepts of war is that often it relies on a misunderstanding.

Patrick Ward: And that ironically, back to where the satellites have supported us, is they have proliferated the Internet across the... You know, there are huge swaths of the the global south that have been to to the Internet for the very first time. And so we have never lived in an age where we've been able understand what other people are going through at any one time. Now, granted there is still obfuscation. There's still misinformation.

Patrick Ward: But what I find really fascinating is that average person today, even in just, you know, a small rural area of America is a far greater appreciation, all different types of cultures and people from different backgrounds. And the conclusion that often comes from that is we're all the same. Just want to ride a good life for ourselves and our families. We're all just trying to, you know, get by, earn a crust, do a good hard days, you know, those sorts of, you know, very inherent, very human things.

Kent Gustavson: Did you say earn earn a crust?

Patrick Ward: Yeah. Earn a crust. That's probably an Australian expression.

Kent Gustavson: I kinda love that.

Patrick Ward: It's Yeah.

Kent Gustavson: Like, you just have a little... Get a little bit of bread, earn a crust.

Patrick Ward: Just a little bit of bread because bread, you know, is, I mean you said it back to agrarian societies, It's the thing that really set our course from going to nomadic tribes where we had to go through different areas, we had to essentially just sort of live off the land and we'd have to make sure we didn't too much of a resource so that it had time to grow and move on to another area. Soon as we could grow ourselves from agrarian principles that's when you start getting folks settling down, that's when you start getting folks starting to build more complex societies because the primary motive isn't just simply by next meal.

Patrick Ward: But now I can think bigger picture of like, okay, well, if I have a grain store of six months, months, eighteen months. You know, food is still, like, you know, let's be real. For the entirety of human history, the the pursuit of food has been the single biggest concern to us just from a purely... You only take three days of no water and you die. Three... I think it's two to three weeks of food and you die.

Patrick Ward: So, like, that is a very pressing biological concern to us. But if you've now got at least six months of runway, then you've got time to start about bigger issues like how do I organize my society? How do I divide up this labor? How do I specialize? And all those things that then set us onto the chart where we came to today.

Kent Gustavson: So, you said something earlier, $2 a day, and that made me think of 2,000,000,000,000 valuation plus or minus of Anthropic or SpaceX or all these, you know, maybe they're overvalued or this and that, whatever. But I just thought about the... And I did I did one of those things. I used my AI here just on regular Google to check out what's the difference between a trillion and one. Right?

Kent Gustavson: So you you take and it's something like what is it? It was, say, a thousand trucks or a 100 trucks. Doesn't matter. One grain of of rice versus a 100 trucks full of rice or some, you know, some huge scale or a thousand trucks.

Kent Gustavson: There's such different scales of operation for one human being to sit at the helm of a family that has a bowl of rice or to sit at the helm of a corporation that has a, I don't know, trillion bowls of rice. And that that for me is also kind of a weird, human... Maybe AI has has allowed it for us to to just scale up the difference more, but it's still that same old haves and have nots, except on the other side of town, it's not just a mansion. Right?

Kent Gustavson: It's it's like some... I don't know how big a mansion would be that's a trillion times the size of a hut. But talk to that because it seems like that seems to be an issue you're interested in too.

Patrick Ward: Yeah. It's a it's it's a massive problem when you get into the scale. And let's be honest, even a billion is quite significantly bigger than when you're talking. You you often hear of this idea of the billionaire class versus others and then you end up with, well people go, well what about regular millionaires?

Patrick Ward: It's like, a millionaire versus a billionaire is already, it sounds, again that's the problem, it sounds similar but because of the exponential nature of the numbers, it just becomes that much more of a delta. Like, you have more in common with a millionaire than a millionaire has in common with a billionaire. That's just how the the the scale works. And then you add on top of that now a trillion, which is, you know, we thought we'd never see that in our lifetime, but already, you know, within the last several years, we've seen several company... Existing companies valued at 1,000,000,000,000, and now we've got both with Anthropic and with SpaceX being valued 1,000,000,000,000 on their IPOs.

Patrick Ward: The challenge there becomes, again, you go back to our models, like our existing models of how to operate both and how we think about them ourselves need to evolve. So you think of perfect example is that a lot of these AI research laboratories or or how you wanna construct them have recognized that. Like, so Dario realizes I can't have a, you know, sick hierarchy with one, you know, CEO on the top and and a bunch underneath. He still operates that way to the outside market because the outside market still needs a construct in which to understand what his company is doing.

Patrick Ward: But if you look at it in terms of different researchers and what they do, they're essentially all able to act as semi autonomous individuals where, you know, they have their resources and their salaries and they're able to go off and figure out more experiments as to what these these AI agents and tools and platforms are going to be able to do. What I would argue is that if we could collectively get sat, and this is where we can borrow an example from the blockchain world.

Patrick Ward: Now granted, there have been many situations in that wave of technology, many of which were self inflicted, unfortunately. Having said that, their concept of decentralized organizations is actually a really powerful model where you don't necessarily have a series of individuals working for a particular paycheck and that paycheck is determined by a boss and a boss's boss and and and that quintessential hierarchy, it gets more open source collaboration where we all collectively decide forward.

Patrick Ward: You've contributed x percentage to that effort, and therefore, you will receive y percent reward. That model, funnily enough, looks a lot like cooperative models, which we're very familiar with in the charitable space, but it hasn't quite proliferated in the quintessential command and control mechanism of corporate. And, again, that command and control somewhere, historical militaries. And it makes sense for old school militaries sure that everyone was obedient to a singular goal.

Patrick Ward: So you had, you know, a general on top and you had his lieutenants and you had the divisions skating below that. That makes total sense for that model where information is a premium and the cost of misinformation can be very severe. But in a day where we are, we're not lacking in information. We're lacking in discernment on that information, but we're not lacking individually in the information.

Patrick Ward: And so you could imagine that that type of decentralized model where, okay, these are the agreements we've all come to as a collective. We've decided this is what we need to do. Okay. How are we going to divide up the the tasks or the the outcomes that we need to accomplish collectively together in a way that is fair to all individuals?

Patrick Ward: That is still very much sitting in the world of blockchain. It's very much sitting in that consource world. I could imagine that could eventually come in. That's gonna take a severely long time because not only does it rely on companies reorganizing, it also means that those companies have to... Why Because it's where the motive always comes from.

Patrick Ward: Right? Companies will often organize themselves in a particular way, and I saw this, you know, firsthand in in startup world. Many times we we tell this myth. We tell this myth that, oh, startups are small, scrappy underdogs, and eventually they become these giants and titans, and they realize they need to slowly decide to evolve themselves to be more mature.

Patrick Ward: You know, we we talk about startups growing up. That is a a massive fallacy. What usually happens is companies when they acquire a certain level of capital suddenly have, quote, unquote, grown ups in the room who say, hey. You need to organize yourself this way because if you don't, you're not going to get the next round of fund IPO or whatever that next financial event is.

Patrick Ward: And that financial event is literally what early investors need in order to make sure that they get paid out appropriately. And so you can view it more as set of goals rather than this overall arc. You know, companies love to tell this large story, and that works very well to get the IPO. But most companies are thinking, okay.

Patrick Ward: Pre seed now. I need to get to series a. Now I've got my series a. My first investor at series a wants to get me to series b so they can get paid out.

Patrick Ward: Series b investor wants me to get to series c, etcetera, etcetera. And so that's a better way of thinking about why companies organize themselves in the way they do even if it might be counterintuitive.

Aleck McCathie: I love that. Just like a closing sort of thought. I I know that your book Source and your company are sort of all about people and and hiring. What could somebody who's listening, like, think about... Like, you... We've talked about how corporations are are maybe not thinking straight or clear about how we can use AI or how we haven't even maybe seen it bloom and come to fruition the way that maybe previous sort of waves of technology have.

Aleck McCathie: Like, what can people do today or what's, like, sort of your thoughts on, like, where we're heading when... Through that lens, I guess, of, like, people and hiring?

Patrick Ward: So I think biggest economic opportunity is available to every individual today based on the technology, not only of what it might be in the future, but what it already exists today. And the reason I believe this is because companies have missed the memo. And because everyone has got into this state... And, you know, I'm not being glib about the fact that most humans are feeling very scared right now. There's a lot of fear because there's a lot of change, and this happens anytime there's any sort of societal shift.

Patrick Ward: You know, it it it... Regardless, you can put all the metrics out there that say everything's fine. People feel this in their bones on a fundamental level. You can look at, the Michigan does sentiment analysis for the... Since 1952 and this last month. Now that's noteworthy because that's not during '11.

Patrick Ward: It's not during the gulf wars. It's not during the oil crisis. It's not during several, recessions. It's not even during 2008.

Patrick Ward: So that's really palpable. It's like, people are feeling more despondent than ever. Said that, see this in the companies as well. The companies are still thinking, oh, I'm not sure about the future.

Patrick Ward: I'm not sure about whether my revenue model is going to survive. So I'm just going to cut my costs where I can and make sure that that protects, you know, my portion of capital and and and my, you know, future, existence. What has that meant, Average consumer. And we use this term, I forget exactly who said it, but the idea of that we have grown up in a time where more and more products objectively less good than when we had them.

Patrick Ward: You know? I'll use a perfect example here of, like, furniture. Right? We used to have furniture that would be handed down in generations because this was carved with such precision, such immaculate craftsmanship, and then suddenly barely get a dresser to last a year these days.

Patrick Ward: And that is palpable. That is frustration. That is pain. Any good economist would tell you where you see pain, you see an economic opportunity, because what do humans pay for?

Patrick Ward: Humans, we love to tell ourselves the story that we know I'm all about growth. I'm I'm trying to, you know, achieve great things and big successes. No. The biggest thing that humans pay for is to relieve themself of pain, whatever that pain is.

Patrick Ward: And the more palpable that pain is, the more economic opportunity that affords. So suddenly, you're in an environment where companies around you are not serving that need. Your fellow humans are feeling pain as a result of that. And now you have a tool in the form of AI that could allow you to target very, very specifically needs of your fellow humans.

Patrick Ward: Now it's gonna take a lot of work. It's gonna take a lot of thought. But, again, this is where there is an objective gap right now between what people would like to see from their products and services and what they're getting today. And the people who crack that are going to be very, very economically successful.

Patrick Ward: And so that is the way that I encourage people to think about this. Again, how do you get to a solution or a business model or an organizational structure that is different than what you've seen in the past? You rethink it from those first principles. Those first principles, what is one pain of people I could solve?

Patrick Ward: Pay for that. How can I gather them together into that all have similar characteristics so then I could scale it? Can I scale it across? You know, we used to think in terms of, can I scale it across my local area or even my country?

Patrick Ward: But I now scale it across the world. That's a really distinct possibility. And so that's the way I think people should be thinking about. By all means, everything we've talked about today, there is a lot of areas of AI that is scary and frightening with certain people at the helm of this, but I've always viewed that it's not constructive to sit in that.

Patrick Ward: It's always it's always better and more constructive to think about the little c. What do I personally control? What I personally control is an ability to relieve and the stress of huge amounts of my fellow humans. And if I do that successfully, not only will I have done a net good for humanity, but also have enriched myself in the process.

Kent Gustavson: Love that. First, for some reason, users or you or anybody can think about why this came into my head, but the, I don't know if you ever saw the show Northern Exposure back in the nineties, but I I was obsessed with it for a long time. And there's a... The the radio announcer, Chris, in in that show would always do weird things. He'd kinda have sabbaticals, and just build stuff or do things.

Kent Gustavson: And there's one scene that completely changed my world as somebody who studied music and everything else. He he flung a piano with a trebuchet, just just for the for the artistic sake of it because, Maggie's piano was was charred, I think, and it was it was old and useless. And so the entire town gathered around as he did this thing and flung this piano out into space. And I... I'm getting goosebumps as I talk about it because for some reason, it meant something to me.

Kent Gustavson: It's completely ridiculous. And I think it has something to do with the space junk and the humanness and the deep seas and all the stuff you were saying. There's there's gotta be some connection there, I

Patrick Ward: guess. Absolutely.

Kent Gustavson: So thanks for hanging out with us today, and, I guess we'll pull the plug. Podcaststhatmatter.org.