The Innovation Civilization Podcast
00:21:05 · George Sivulka, Waheed Nabeel
[00:21:05] S1: I... I'm not a proponent of UBI. No. I think that's I think that's a weak argument. And and if everyone becomes a chef or a plumber, everyone becomes an artist or whatever the economy looks like, I think that it's all about capturing value, and value is actually less concrete than people would like to imagine. It's way more perceived than actual. [00:21:25] S0: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense really. Just staying on the macro a little bit, basically. So one of your investors, Peter Thiel, who wrote a book, basically, and one question he basically asks everybody, and I don't know if you've ever had a conversation with him on this, but what important truth do very few people agree with you on? So have you thought about that?
00:21:46 · George Sivulka
[00:21:46] S1: I've probably thought too much about that. Okay. Yeah. I think there's a number of different truths that I can go into. I think a lot of them would be self serving around a lot of the things that I just shared versus what society might think about AI. But let me think about one that could be interesting even in a different vein. I really like ones around... I think that there's a lot of esoteric or controversial or even conspiracy theories that have more validity to them. And one of the things that I genuinely believe, and this is... It's not as spicy as I could probably get, but I would say that folks like climate change deniers or flat earthers or the conspiracy theorists that that think all kinds of crazy things about the US government actually are better scientists than the folks that are just walking around and blindly believing everything. And science and being a believer in science is way less about just taking the dogma that a government or an educational or scientific institution has told you is right and far more about questioning everything. And so I'd say that even the people that you might think are less scientific than you are... They're often practicing the scientific method in a very big way. And I'm all for people inquiring into different truths or trying to turn what society thinks on its head as better science and, honestly, as better investigative humans for uncovering the truth, even if it seems silly.
00:23:09 · Waheed Nabeel, George Sivulka
[00:23:09] S0: Yeah. Yeah. That's a very interesting take. Never thought of it that way in terms of them being better scientists. But I do agree that with the decentralization of knowledge, basically, that people can pursue knowledge, dissemination, creation, verification in a very decentralized open source way than ever before, especially with the Internet and technology. See, I do agree that, like, you don't have, like, science and knowledge in an ivory tower in some specific institutions and some specific universities, And I've been a beneficiary of that all for that. Yeah. [00:23:44] S1: Likewise. And the next time you meet a flat earther Yeah. Obviously, they're wrong. But you can actually hear their experiments, and you could hear their line of questioning. Then And next time you meet a climate change denier, obviously, they're wrong. But actually think about how they're, like, trying to find proof, and they're trying to turn things on their head. And they are thinking rationally just with the wrong data points. It's better to think rationally than to just blindly accept truth.
00:23:44 · George Sivulka, Waheed Nabeel
[00:23:44] S1: Likewise. And the next time you meet a flat earther Yeah. Obviously, they're wrong. But you can actually hear their experiments, and you could hear their line of questioning. Then And next time you meet a climate change denier, obviously, they're wrong. But actually think about how they're, like, trying to find proof, and they're trying to turn things on their head. And they are thinking rationally just with the wrong data points. It's better to think rationally than to just blindly accept truth. [00:24:09] S0: No. That makes sense, really. One of the other interesting things, basically, that I want to get your take on is we're entering into an age of not only decentralized learning and decentralized meta learning, but also like ubiquitous software where just creating software is just so much easier compared to before. Like you use some tools like Lovable or Replit or whatever, and everybody can create something. Obviously, you know, I'm not talking about super great B2B SaaS kind of software. I'm just talking about normal stuff. But maybe even we'll get there. What do you think the world looks like when software is just so ubiquitous basically, and it's just so easy to build? What is that? I guess there is different elements to it, but start with B2B SaaS. There's this notion that B2B SaaS is dead. Do you agree with that or take or... Yeah. What's your thinking?
00:24:09 · Waheed Nabeel, George Sivulka
[00:24:09] S0: No. That makes sense, really. One of the other interesting things, basically, that I want to get your take on is we're entering into an age of not only decentralized learning and decentralized meta learning, but also like ubiquitous software where just creating software is just so much easier compared to before. Like you use some tools like Lovable or Replit or whatever, and everybody can create something. Obviously, you know, I'm not talking about super great B2B SaaS kind of software. I'm just talking about normal stuff. But maybe even we'll get there. What do you think the world looks like when software is just so ubiquitous basically, and it's just so easy to build? What is that? I guess there is different elements to it, but start with B2B SaaS. There's this notion that B2B SaaS is dead. Do you agree with that or take or... Yeah. What's your thinking? [00:25:02] S1: Yeah. Absolutely not. I think it's ridiculous. And I think if everyone was an amazing developer Yeah. That doesn't mean that everyone would have great taste. A really good analogy to this would be, at the same time, you can look at the music industry, where over the last few decades, the cost of producing music, ability for anyone to do it has been largely driven to zero while... Like, widely democratized. And at the same time, you still have the same number of songs in the top 100. It just means that there's more of an opportunity for anyone to go and capture that, but there's only gonna be a 100 songs in the top 100. [00:25:37] S0: Laws, basically. Yeah.
00:25:37 · Waheed Nabeel, George Sivulka
[00:25:37] S0: Laws, basically. Yeah. [00:25:38] S1: Big power laws. There's a limited amount of consumption. And as art proliferates or as amount of software in the world proliferates, it doesn't mean that everyone's gonna be a billionaire. It just means that the competition will be better and the songs would hopefully be better. And there's all kinds of research on why probably you and I and most of the audience thinks that the songs today or the music today are terrible, and just because everyone thinks that the songs of their teenage years are the best songs. And Yeah. That there's a whole psychological reasoning behind that. But it it actually just means that, hey. We have more optionality, and more optionality allows us to capture a greater amount of the potential value from a given set of top at a given period of time. Yeah. [00:26:17] S0: So would you say creating moats, though, as a founder is much more tougher in this economy? And in that space where everybody... Like, software making is ubiquitous, what's the moat here? What do you keep? Is it, like, just taste, like you said? Or [00:26:32] S1: Yeah. I think that there's definitely gonna be a moat on taste. There's gonna be a moat on good ideas. I don't think technology was ever a moat. Technology is not the hard part of building a business. So a lot of, like, business founders that go out and try to find their tech cofounders, oh, tech is such a hard part. So no. That is not the case. Humans are the hard part, and I think that will continue to be the case.