Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:37:37 · Cristóbal Valenzuela, Alexa von Tobel
[00:37:37] S0: May... Maybe because it's fresh on my mind and it's very close to me. It's... I'm thinking about, again, my, my, my, my sisters and my brother of like them becoming users of, Runway and our product. And I think the, the biggest, kind of subtext there is there's billions, I don't know, like there's billions of people out there that are waiting and have this latent set of, expressions and ideas and things they want to tell the world that they haven't been able to. And where I get the most excited is like you, we started opening the floods to many people to start communicating things they just weren't able to communicate before because they didn't have the tools to. And I think it's the beginning of an kind of explosion of sorts in terms of that creative world. And that excites me, excites me a lot. I think there's many more people out there that are waiting for these things to just be around the corner so they can tell stories and share their perspective of the world in ways they couldn't do before. [00:38:39] S1: So with any new medium, and obviously with everything around Anthropic and Mythos, there's been, like, a lot of talk about responsibility. As somebody who is really on the forefront of an entire medium shift, Just how do you think about what to be most thoughtful and cautious about as you think about the responsibility of this wave of innovation? Thoughts there.
00:39:04 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:39:04] S0: Well, I think thinking about model development and technology in such a way that doesn't feel isolated by one culture or one industry, I think when you think about AI as one of these rare general purpose technologies that has to be looked from different like vantage points. And if you only think about it from like a tech perspective, you're missing out on so many other domains of humans society and And I think what's missing the most these days is kind of like popping that like bubble a little bit and being like, well, this is not, it's kind of the joke people do with or make with when, when people design too many things in California or like, I don't know, think about like the weather app, you know, so most perfect in California. So all the weather apps are always just like shiny and like sunny and everything is like thought to be using like this perfect weather. If you go to any other part of the world, like the weather is like crazy and unpredictable. And so the apps sometimes are not thought for like people outside of California because a lot of the people who design these apps are in California, but the weather doesn't operate in the way California operates. But we somehow have all kind of thought and have to be fit into like the way California thinks. And I think with AI, we actually have to break that mold a lot more and have way more different perspectives of the world because the technology and the impact will be more massive than than any other app we've built before.
00:40:25 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:40:25] S1: That's a great example, by the way, which is that if California is making a weather app, it's mainly sunny all the time. As someone who's sitting in New York with you right now, goddamn cold outside today, and it's almost May. [00:40:38] S0: But I think the iPhone app was never meant for cold and climate, so it never warns you or tells you like seeing if it's gonna rain, it's hard. And it's like, is it gonna rain or is it probably raining? Like, can you just tell me? Yes. That's right. People probably in California is like, why do you care about raining? It's like never raining. It's like... [00:40:55] S1: Yeah. Like send me a text last night that's like, please bring your winter coat today because we're having a shift. Are you worried about, like, massive job loss in the next decade, Cristobal? Like, how do you think about that as a... I I mean, it's so clear from this conversation that you are an incredibly thoughtful, and you're almost like historian of technology in the way that you think about what you're developing. How do you think about just some of the stuff that's terrifying people right now?
00:41:31 · Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:41:31] S0: Well, I I do think jobs are gonna change, and some will go away. I mean, that's... That would be... Like, I'm responsible to say that that won't be the case. Like, of course. Like, technology is automating a lot of jobs that we thought will never get automated. But again, I'm an optimist and I think we might have happened and go through some similar experiences before where this is not a serious endgame. Technology is never going to be about everything or all of it. And we figure out new things. We figure out new jobs. We just, hardest thing for me to, to understand or like sometimes realize is we collectively lack imagination to project and understand a world and things we have never experienced before. And try to do this exercise. If you think about, again, we're talking about painting and the history of photography. If you put yourself in the beginning of the nineteen hundreds and you think about the world back then and what was the technology state of the world and where things were. And if I tell you there's in a hundred and fifty years, they're gonna be a class of people that are gonna be making a lot of money by recording videos of themselves in like dancing in this like vertical, like brick like device. You'll be like, you'll be like, what are you? What are you like? It's just, you're, you're crazy. Right? It's insane. And then here we are, and that's like a form of, and that works. And actually like, we've got to do like, that's a job and like people, people make a lot of money out of it. And, but like, couldn't have not predicted that back then. It's impossible. Like it, I'm, I'm pretty sure no one a hundred years ago thought we would ever reach that point. And, and of course you can play that same game in every point in time. And so right now we're standing in the Benavir 1900s, trying to think about the jobs we'll have in one hundred and fifty years. And my answer is like, that's just, it's a kind of like a meaningless like exercise because like, we just don't know. We'll effectively figure out what those jobs are as we see them. And the only thing is that it's going to take us way less than one hundred and fifty years to get to that point. But sometimes we just need to experiment more, try things more, and be more open minded, and we'll find our way.
00:43:42 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:43:42] S1: So in short, you're basically saying, we will figure it out. Yes, many jobs will disappear. Many more jobs, things that we can't even imagine, like dancing in front of a video, influencers in the wild, will be a new form factor that... And and actually, stressing over it is probably, in your opinion, kind of a misuse of energy because we will figure it out. We always do. [00:44:10] S0: We always do. Yes. [00:44:12] S1: I love that. You're clearly an optimist. Cristobal, I wanna ask a few quick questions to end here today. Sure. Just fire around. And I'm really excited to ask some of these because you're clearly somebody who thinks a lot about the evolution of these technologies. But my my question would be, what is a book that you've read in your life that's really shaped you that you would just say it would be a misuse for people in the world not to read? [00:44:38] S0: Oh, wow. Fiction or nonfiction? [00:44:40] S1: Anything. You tell us. Anything. You can pick you can [00:44:44] S0: pick two [00:44:44] S1: if you're struggling.
00:44:44 · Alexa von Tobel, Cristóbal Valenzuela
[00:44:44] S1: if you're struggling. [00:44:46] S0: No. I'm gonna go with a with a rare one. Maybe it's not the the book people might have thought of, but, I really like poetry, and there's, an Chilean poet that I like a lot. It's called Nicanor Parra. He... The reason I like him is because a lot of his poems... And there's there's a different set of books and probably, like, if you can search for some of them, there's, like, a collection of of them. And I think the whole idea for him has always been like, question the premise of what poetry should feel like and be like. And so when you read it, it's strange. It's weird. You feel you're reading something new. And this is like sixty, seventy years ago. So he's like, he, he was like thinking about just the structure of what makes society very differently. And I like that. I like that idea of like, take this established institutions and the thing that the way things have were supposed to work, and you kind of like ask the most difficult and perhaps, like pointing question, which is why? Like, why? Why do you have to do that? And when people like give all these convoluted answers as to why, it's like, well, it doesn't matter. It's just like if if you just wanna do differently, do it differently. And I think for us, at least for me, that's a lot of how we look at the world. So always questions the why and always question like the institutions. And I took a lot of inspiration from reading his books early on. [00:46:10] S1: I love it. What is a mantra that kind of runs in your head, a saying, a phrase that you kind of swear by?