Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…Revolution. Hey, thank you for having me. I'm excited for this conversation. I think it's very timely in the sense that obviously the world is waking up to the power of Claude code. And now we've got Claude co-work mode for desktop as well. And so everybody's kind of like, oh my God, you know, this is changing my work in this way, that way. I'm, you know, I'm creating whole simulations of things that I previously just thought about. And I've got, you know, memory palaces that are now like not just in my mind, but are actually, you know, in durable mode on computers. And you've been a pioneer of that over the last couple of years. I've certainly been an AI obsessive for those same timeframe, but have not gone nearly as deep into the personal AI infrastructure world as you and other pioneers have. So I'm really looking forward to just picking your brain as I start to play catch up a little bit on this dimension. And definitely think that there's going to be a lot to learn on that end and some other fronts as well. Maybe for starters, though, you've got a background in cybersecurity. You've worked at several big companies along the way. Now you're independent and doing a handful of different things. Why don't you just kind of tell us a little bit of what your portfolio looks like today and how we should kind of think of the different activities that you're known for? Yeah, yeah. So my background is definitely cybersecurity. That's what I did for, and I'm still doing. But that's what I did for my whole career starting in 99. And that took me all the way through. I started getting into AI at Apple. I joined a machine learning team there. It was doing a bunch of stuff with machine learning and security there. So I got exposed to AI, I want to say probably around 2016 or so. And then I took the job at Apple in 2018 and got more exposure there and thinking about it for a long time. But it wasn't until I went independent in about six months before ChatGPT, actually, so great timing. And then ChatGPT came out in late 22. And obviously, I hard-pivoted, not getting away from security, but just seeing security as embedded inside of AI. I see AI as like a container for magnifying everything else that you're doing. My main focus now, though, is basically trying to help humans and companies, mostly humans, to just be able to adapt to what's coming. That's the main thing. So I do a whole bunch of open source stuff. You mentioned the Pi project. That's probably the biggest one. I've got another project, open source project called Substrate. And all of it is just trying to just move humanity forward. I feel like the place that we've been at all this time has not been a good place. And it's only after it starts getting disrupted, people are like, oh, AI is going to disrupt our jobs or whatever. But right before this happened, everyone hated those jobs. You know what I mean? It's like everyone knew that this was a bad way to live. One of my favorite metrics is how much you dread Monday. And one of my favorite metrics for what a good life looks like is do you look forward to Monday? And I think going by that metric, we haven't really been happy with corporate jobs for a very long time. What I'm trying to do is figure out what does it look like to have a better version of the human future and obviously using AI to like sort of power…

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