When life gives you LLMs...

So Zeno Rocha is back on the show. Welcome, Zeno.

Yeah.

Hey, Adam. Hey, Jerod. Super-happy to be here. I told the team that I was going to chat with you two today, they were like “Oh my gosh, the Changelog folks! It’s our favorite podcast!”

That’s our favorite thing to hear.

It’s been a bit, man. How you been?

Yeah, it’s been wild.

How long has it been? A year?

A year, a year and a half…

Yeah, I think so.

That’s too long, man. What a shame.

Yeah.

The last time though, I want to say – okay, so this is Friends… We’re not interviewing Zeno, we’re just digging into some details…

Just a chat.

But the last time we wanted to go deep. We went to “Getting to Resend.” That was the last time on the show.

That’s right. Getting to Resend.

We went through all the history. Getting to Resend. So if you want to know that journey for Zeno, check that podcast out. Sadly, that was before we were video-first, on YouTube and stuff, so you won’t see his face… But today you will.

That is a shame, because look at that face…

Look at that face…

[laughs] My gosh…

You’ve gotta have that face in there, Zeno. You’ve gotta have it. I’ve been seeing your face a lot on LinkedIn lately. Are you like a LinkedIn guy now? Or are you just on all the platforms?

You know what’s crazy? I’m definitely not on LinkedIn. What I do is I’m on X, I’m on Twitter. That’s my home. And then I just repost stuff on LinkedIn. But somehow the algorithm is – I’ve been hearing that a lot, like “Oh, I see you all the time on LinkedIn.” It’s not my fault. I’m just reposting stuff.

“It’s not my fault.” Well, you should be happy about it. It’s a good thing. I swear every time I log in, I see a new post from you, and then I realize “No, this was three weeks ago.” Because LinkedIn doesn’t care at all about recency, which is strange to me.

They do not.

But they care about Zeno. There’s like a special trigger in there. “Is this a Zeno post? Because we’re going to put it back at the top of your feed.”

[laughs]

Yeah, I wonder if it’s because you use a mixture of mixed media. I’ve seen videos of you all in there, I’ve seen obviously your marketing images you attach to announcements and stuff, which I think is just super-well done. Are you the originating designer of Resend? I feel like you are.

Man, I would never in a million years introduce myself as a designer, because I’m an engineer that loves design. I feel like that’s the best way of putting it.

Oh, gosh…

My sister’s a designer.

Imposter syndrome…

Yeah, I think so…

Dude, you designed the Dracula theme, and the website, right?

True. But still…

You’re a designer, Zeno.

Dude…

Man… No, designers… They’re so much –

You have more design skills in your right pinky than I have in my entire body.

No way… No way.

[laughs]

Well, I’ve been following Resend since the beginning, and I feel like the design started – obviously, you’re the original co-founder or founder, so I think I’ve always seen you as the designer for your things, and then I just assumed that you established the foundation, let’s just say, of the design process for Resend. So it looks a lot like your stuff, in my opinion.

Yeah. Well, we had a lot of folks helping us, so I can definitely not take the credit… But I feel like what we really were trying to do is like “Man, there’s so many competitors out there. We’re not the first email API in the world… So how can we differentiate?” And branding was the thing that we were like “We’ve got to double down on branding.” Otherwise… Yeah. Like, people need to go to the website and they need to see those cover posts and be like “Oh, okay. That’s something that SendGrid wouldn’t do, Mailgun wouldn’t do”, and so on.

[07:58] Right. So the Resend design is really solid. I like it a lot. It’s definitely of an era or an ilk. Like, it’s very much in the Linear, kind of the – is it [unintelligible 00:08:10.08] I don’t know, whatever that toolkit is; I don’t know the initials.

Yeah…

Which produces really polished, really kind of high-quality, black, dark mode mostly, designs… Which have been very popular the last five years. And I don’t keep up with design trends, but I’m starting to. I mean, I keep up with them as far as I eventually notice them. But I’m not like at the frontend of that. But I wonder, a company starting today, if you were starting Resend today, would it look like this? Because you always tend to be at the very front edge, I think, of trends. Or would it look more “What’s new and going on in design world that’s going to be trending maybe next year”?

Yeah… I feel like when you’re getting started, you should try to lean on the trendy movement, because you want to position yourself as this modern player in the market. So following the trend is actually a good thing. As you evolve, just like Linear - you go to the Linear website now, it’s way less fancy than it used to be. Because now you can afford to build more timeless design, once you establish yourself, once you establish the brand… Which probably is a step that we might take a year or two from now, something like that. But you need to show that you’re different. So for us, it was like “Yeah, let’s go dark mode first, dark mode only.” And that’s just a different move. Let’s go with like a WebGL on the Hero, because we need to show right away that we’re different.

So those were decisions that we made that were very intentional… And the covers on social too, because it’s like - okay, we know that developers appreciate when this other developers ships a lot. So that’s something that when we see other companies doing or other developers doing it, we’re like “Wow, this is so great. They’re always moving, always shipping.” So we wanted to get that feeling of always shipping… So every day we’ve got a post. There are days that I hate and I don’t want to post. But I feel like it’s my duty as a founder. It’s my duty to be investing on my personal brand, along with the company brand. And those two need to evolve in different ways, but they need to exist both.

Is there anybody breaking that rule? Because I definitely feel like that’s true… And yet, I imagine there’s probably founders out there who never post, and just do their thing, and are still killing it for some reason… But it’s so hard to get attention nowadays, how would you do it, and so you have to post… I don’t know, is there anybody who just - and this is not necessarily for you, Zeno, but even Adam… Is there a startup or a scale-up that just kills it and doesn’t have constant marketing and social media stuff going on? Or is it pretty much part of the game now?

I think it’s part of the game, personally.

Yeah.

It’s been my biggest fear for a decade now, that eventually everybody will have to become some version of a media company… I mean, I was even looking at this – as you know, Jerod, I’ve recently gotten back into golf. My brother visited, and we toured some golf courses, and it’s a connection point for us… I’m trying to improve my game, and I’m just learning that “Wow, TaylorMade, and Ping, and Titleist”, and these major brands, they are basically media companies.

[11:48] Now, if you go on YouTube and look at this stuff, you obviously see the PGA Tour stuff, but you see the brand-specific things. Even like this thing called TrackMan - it’s a hardware/software product that’s used to track your swing, and ball, and speed, and stuff like that… They are a hardware/software manufacturer for the golf industry, and you go to their YouTube, they’ve got really good content. And the reason why they have really good content is because they’re focused on creating media that pulls people in. And I kind of feel like – it’s funny you ask this question, because literally last night I was thinking to myself, there are infinite channels in this world to subscribe to. As I said, just got back into golf, and I’m just discovering this plethora of content.

Yeah. It’s a whole new world.

It’s just there waiting for you, you know?

Totally.

Tap into the channel.

Man, that’s so true. I’m glad you brought that up, because I’m thinking about that a lot recently. I even chatted with Garry Tan from YC last Friday, because I was like “Man, this is so top of mind for me”, and I feel like when he joined YC – he was a solo character on his initialized fund before he joined YC, so he had his YouTube channel, he was doing his thing. But then when he joined YC, he could have just doubled down on the [unintelligible 00:13:14.29] type of content, because that’s a proven content strategy for the past 20 years. But no, they just revamped their whole YouTube thing, and now you can definitely tell YC is a media company. And you’ll see they have multiple shows, with multiple characters. Each character plays a different type of role. [unintelligible 00:13:37.26] So yeah, for me it’s extremely inspiring. And that’s a playbook that HubSpot did, Ahref, other companies maybe outside of dev tools… But I can totally see dev tools going down that path, too.

Yeah. It has to be media, though. Content for - not a sales content. Content to show off who you are, to tell your story, to tell your customer story, to tell the bottleneck, the breakage story, the “It’s broken” story kind of thing. Not this “Let’s buy our thing, here’s how it works” only story. I feel like that’s where maybe folks will hear us talk about this and go and explore and examine themselves, and come back and say “Oh, we should do this. Let’s just sell our stuff on YouTube.” I think that’s not the way to do it. I think you need to talk about your world and your ecosystem, but not “Here’s how you buy our thing.” There may be a channel for that, but I feel like that’s a specific layer of the funnel that you address, and that’s more like sales content, literally. Can it live in YouTube? Sure. But I wouldn’t overly saturate that channel with two different types of content, because now you’ve got this “Let’s capture some people, let’s get some attention”, kind of distribution or become more exposed to certain folks in the world… And then you have “Hey, I want to buy your thing. Help me buy your thing.” That’s a whole different content slice, but do they belong on the same channel? I don’t know about that.

Yeah. And it’s definitely not about YouTube. What we’re talking here is about storytelling. And where do you do that doesn’t matter. You see all these indie hackers going down that path, building in public, which is amazing. They should do that. They’re inspired by [unintelligible 00:15:30.12] and it’s amazing. I guess where people typically fail is they just show the good side of things. So they are always promoting like “Oh, this is great. This is great. This is amazing.” And if you’re never vulnerable, then there’s no way I can connect with you on a human level. It’s just sales.

Right.

[15:54] That’s the challenge though, is like how – not that I’m not honest with the world, but how much of the filter do I want to remove from… Not so much the perfectness or casting this perfect vision of who I am or what I do or what this business does, or somebody else’s business does… Like, it’s scary to remove that filter, to sort of only post the good stuff and not show the bad stuff. It’s a little scary to do the bad stuff, or the challenges. Not so much like “Oh, we’re stuck”, or sucking, or whatever, but more like “Here’s a whoa”, not just “Here’s a high moment.”

Yeah. There’s a paradox… I forgot the name now, but there’s a Wikipedia page on this, where you can transform a bad experience into something that’s actually good. And that’s the paradox. Like, you go for something super-bad, like an incident, but because you do the postmortem, because you’re transparent about the issues that it caused, because you show “Hey, here are the next steps”, then that actually creates more trust. So something that was bad, a downtime, becomes a good thing, because of the transparency, because of the accountability and ownership and all that. But when you’re in the middle of the fire, it’s hard to want to be vulnerable. And there’s a line between “Okay, I can only go so far. If I cross this line, then…” Yeah, it’s super-tricky, super-difficult.

I think that Wikipedia page is called “When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.”

[laughs]

Is that right?

That’s the page.

Oh, my gosh… Did you see that – I don’t watch the show. I think it’s from Millions, or Billions… I don’t know what this show is. I don’t even know the actor.

It’s gotta be Billions, because millions is not impressive anymore.

But they said that. He’s like “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” He’s like “No. When life gives you lemons…” And then he goes on.

[17:53]

“First you roll out a multimedia campaign to convince people lemons are incredibly scarce… Which only works if you stockpile lemons, control the supply. Then a media blitz. Lemons are the only way to say I love you. The must have accessory for engagements or anniversaries. Roses are out. Lemons are in. Billboards that say “She won’t have sex with you unless you’ve got lemons. You cut the beers in on it, limited edition lemon bracelets, yellow diamonds called lemon drops… You get Apple to call their new operating system OS Lemon. Little accent over the O. You charge 40% more for organic lemons, 50% more for conflict-free lemons. You pack the Capitol with lemon lobbyists. You get a Kardashian to suck a lemon wedge in a leaked sex tape… Timothee Chalamet wears lemon shoes at Cannes. You get a hashtag campaign. Something that isn’t cool, or tight, or awesome… No, it’s lemon. Did you see that movie? Did you go to that concert? It was effin’ lemon. Billie Eilish. OMG. Hashtag. Lemon. You get Dr. Oz to recommend four lemons a day and a lemon suppository supplement to get rid of toxins, because there is nothing scarier than toxins. Then you patent the seeds. You write a line of genetic code that makes lemons look just a little more like tits. And you get a gene patent for the tit-lemon DNA sequence. You cross-pollinate… You get those seeds circulating in the wild… And then you sue the farmers for copyright infringement when that genetic code shows up on their land. Sit back, rake in the millions, and then, when you’re done, and you’ve sold your lempire for a few billion dollars, then and only then you make some f***ing lemonade.”

But yeah. Life, lemons, lemonade… Sure.

Yeah. So you’re selling lemonade. So Zeno, what are some failures you posted?

Oh, boy…

[19:56] …that you’re willing to talk about. You’ve got an incident, you’ve got a fail, bad decision, bad hire… Don’t name names. What have you got? Something vulnerable.

Man, so many of those. I think the incidents is a good one, because I think we went through some pretty bad stuff. Like, there was one last year – so it’s been more than a year since we had those two incidents, but the timing of them were terrible. So there was one incident where it happened right before our launch week, and then this other incident that happened, after we were announcing something else… And it’s so weird, because I remember when the incident was happening – so one of them was related to data being leaked. So that’s like the worst possible type of incident, because it’s not just a downtime. It’s like, you’re actually –

Right.

And it was so hard to navigate those moments, and I felt like “Okay, this is it. There’s no way we’re going to recover from this. There’s absolutely no way.” But then you’re like “Okay, this is what I’m doing… And yeah what am I going to do? Am I going to hide? Or just like go with it and trying to make the most out of it and learn it?”

So the weird thing about the bad stuff is that when you look back, in retrospect, everything is different. Today, I’m extremely grateful for those things to happen in the very early days of Resend, because it changed the way I see security, how often I run pen tests, and so many other things. Like how often we run stuff on the CI, so we detect stuff before it goes to production. And I could say so many things about this, but… Yeah, I feel like when bad stuff happens, you always have to try to see the good side. Otherwise - yeah, you don’t recover from it.

I heard it said - maybe it was Adam that said this, and maybe an Adam original, maybe not… But it’s only a failure if you don’t learn anything. Like, if you don’t learn, you did fail.

Yeah, that’s an Adam original.

Is it an Adam original?

I don’t know. It sounds good, though. I like it. Go on, [unintelligible 00:22:08.00] Say it again. Say it again fresh.

It’s only a failure if you don’t learn something.

Yeah, that’s an Adam original.

If you learn from your failure, then it’s not a failure anymore. You’ve actually turned it into lemonade, really.

Yeah.

And - I mean, the fact that you can be thankful for what was potentially a catastrophic incident shows that you actually learned, and adjusted, and are now more resilient than you would have been had you not had that situation. So that’s all good.

Now, if it actually kills you, then it’s not good. Right? Whatever doesn’t kill us…

Makes you stronger, right?

Makes us stronger. [laughter] But if it kills us, then it’s not – now you’re not thankful anymore.

Now you’re dead.

Yeah.

So many catchphrases… Remember Twitter back in 2010? Like, the blue whale. All the time –

Oh yeah, the fail whale.

Yeah, it was so unstable. Today, we don’t even think about it anymore. Like, it just works.

That’s true.

But yeah, I think about that a lot.

But there was something about the fail whale that it became like Twitter culture, and also produced this - not FOMO, but like fear because we’re all missing out… Basically, you’re hitting refresh waiting for the fail whale to go away, because you want the site to come back up. And so it almost made you want to use it more, even in a weird way, because you’re like “Oh, it’s down”, you know? So that was kind of a weird deal, where it kind of produced more demand, which probably was really bad for the engineers that were trying to get it back up again. Like, “Stop hitting Refresh, guys.”

Yeah, for sure.

As far as the addiction factor, I think it probably helped us all get addicted to it back in the early days… Because sometimes you don’t realize the addiction until something gets pulled away from you, you know…

Oh, yeah. That’s so true.

Break: [24:07]

Who here is addicted to their phone?

Probably… Don’t want to admit it. [laughter]

I’m happy to – I mean, I’m not happy to admit it, but I’m happy to admit that at least I’m aware… Because if I don’t have this black mirror near me, I’m like “Can I do life?” And I think it’s just because it’s become this tool that I use in so many ways.

It’s just so useful.

Right, it’s a necessary thing to navigate my daily life, but it’s also my boredom antidote, so to speak. And so there’s a fine line between utility tool, and the other thing… Which is not a good thing.

Right. And that’s why it’s such a mixed bag, is because it’s both. I mean, some things are tools, other things are entertainment, but your phone is like a thousand and one things. And so yeah, I’ve left it at home and had to stop and think “Am I turning around the car, or am I just going?”

“How do I get there…?”

And I can live without the entertainment part, but then you’re like “Yeah, but… What if somebody has to get a hold –” I mean, it’s always that, right?

Yeah.

“What if somebody has to get a hold of me?” It’s like, they probably don’t. And they’ll find a way.

And that’s the one time they will, though.

I know, but you know that people lived hundreds of centuries without these things, and life continued…

Yes.

Like, even in the ’90s, when we were kids… Pagers, maybe…

Coolest.

If you were well to be, you had a pager…

The coolest, man.

Yeah, pagers are awesome, because they had plausible deniability built right in, you know? Because you can page somebody, but that doesn’t mean they have a phone to actually call you back. And so they always had a reason to be like “Sorry, I couldn’t find a phone”, and you just can’t argue against that. But life went on. Life was fine. Maybe it was even better.

Where did you buy your pager, Jerod? Do you know? Do you recall?

I wasn’t cool enough. I didn’t have a pager. So…

You didn’t have a pager?!

I had a friend who had a pager, which was even better, because I’d say “Page Cody. If you wanna get a hold me, page Cody.” Now he’s like my personal assistant.

Page Cody Jerod. J-E-R-O-D. [laughter]

I was right on the cusp of like flip phones and pagers. So pagers were just going out, and my first personal device was like a little Motorola flip phone, at probably the age of 15 or 16. What about you, Zeno?

Yeah, I got the flip phones, too. I can totally relate to that feeling of almost like addiction, borderline addiction. I remember last year Twitter was blocked in Brazil. There was like a whole thing between Elon Musk and the government and then they blocked all the internet providers. So then I traveled there, I arrive at the airport, and I have like a few hours in between flights… And I noticed this thing – like, whenever I was going to do a task, I was like doing something, and then if I had to wait for like three seconds for the thing to finish, then I would go to the browser and be like “Okay, Command+T, tw, Enter.” And that was just like a movement I would do. So I would always go to Twitter in between tasks. But because the website was blocked, then I would always get like this page of “No, it’s offline. It’s offline.” To the moment where like I was doing that for like 30 minutes, I’m like “Okay, I just need to get into a VPN, because I have to go there.” Like, it’s so addicting. It’s crazy.

[29:51] Yeah… I definitely have the pull to refresh thing ingrained deep down in there, where I’ll do it without thinking about it sometimes… Because I don’t let my mail just come in. I have to go check it, because I don’t want to just be pushed. But at the same time, I check it all the time. So it’s pretty stupid. But I opened the mail app and I pulled up refresh, and I’ll do that just habitually without even thinking about it. And that’s when you know something’s tightly ingrained.

Email, man. Email is necessary, as you can probably assume.

But is it, though? [laughter] Do they have to get a hold of me right then, in between bites?

I’m kind of with you on that. I think it was David Heinemeier Hansson one time that talked about this around the Hey launch, or somewhere along their storyline, discussing this idea… I think – I’m not too familiar. They have like an inbox, where it’s like not an inbox, it’s an Mbox…

What’s that mean?

I think it’s actually IM, I don’t know. I don’t know their terminology. I’m not going to try and sell the product, but…

[laughs] Okay.

Oh yeah, I remember that.

…the idea was essentially that just because you email me, does that mean I owe you my time as a response? I feel like there’s this – you know, just because you can find my email on the internet, or maybe even book time on my cal, because we have links out there… I’m like “Does that [unintelligible 00:31:16.17]

Yeah, people do that sometimes, and I’m like “Who is this person?”

It’s like “No, I’m sorry. That’s not how this works. You have to be invited. You can’t just get on my calendar.” I think it’s the same thing with email. Just because you emailed me, does that mean I owe you my time to respond to you? And it’s a little pretentious to think that way, I think, but I think we have to be protectors of our - I would say probably our most important asset to manage is time. You can’t get it back. This moment we’re sharing now is gone forever. This is time you cannot rewind and do differently. And so you dedicate that time to something you think is important… Does that mean I have to dedicate it to respond to you, because you emailed me? I’d say no. No.

And it’s so hard to say no, right?

Yeah. And I do not reply to every email, but I read almost all of them, you know…

And that upsets me, too.

So that’s an even different question. Do I owe you the time to read your email?

Exactly…!

[laughs]

Exactly. Gosh.

Especially the sixth time that you sent it. “Just following up…”

Oh, yeah…

Oh, my gosh…

So Adam and I get a lot of the same emails, because we share editors [at] changehog.com.

Oh gosh, you just said it.

And so many of them are pitches, and so many of them are so bad…

So bad.

And so many of them follow up, without response. Like, we have not said a word, but they’ll send four, five, six emails. Professional courtesies, they call it. And so every once in a while, one of us will reply with an all caps unsubscribe. But one person, who neither one of us engaged with at all, finally emailed back for like the fifth time, with no response, and accused us of ghosting them. I was like “You can’t ghost somebody you’ve never talked to.” What are you talking about ghosting you? We’ve just ignored your emails. That’s the first for me… It’s like, being accused of mistreatment from somebody I’ve never met, and has only stolen like 30 seconds of my time five times.

I don’t know, we’re talking about it now, though… Can I read it verbatim? I have it pulled up.

Well, I’m turning it into lemonade. You see, I’ve created content out of this.

Yeah, you are.

Ha-ha, I win.

Can I read this email verbatim, just for context?

Sure.

Please.

It says “Adam and Jerod, this will be my last email I send to you.” It’s like, come on…

[laughs] Finally, some good news.

“Either you ghosted me, or you don’t want so and so on your podcast. If anything changes, let me know.”

Yeah.

I mean, I applaud their effort. I really do. I mean, they’re getting creative at least.

Yeah.

But… We never ghosted you, because we never talked.

That’s right. [laughs]

You’ve only stolen our time here on this podcast and in our emails five or so times, and we’ve never engaged with you.

Oh, gosh…

[34:14] And just because we create podcast and invite people on our shows doesn’t mean we owe you a response.

That’s right.

And then we have a phone number on our website, Zeno, and they call us. I got a phone call last week, Jerod –

Well, that’s your fault. You put our phone number on our website.

It’s been useful a few times…

Who’s fault is this…?

Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

This is my fault. This is my fault.

Alright. So we can’t complain too much when people call that phone number, you know?

No, but then they call and they’re like “Hey, I’ve emailed a few times about getting so-and-so on your podcast… Are you guys accepting guests?”

You’ve gotta respect that…

And I’m like “Well, if you’ve emailed us and we haven’t responded, it’s unlikely that [unintelligible 00:34:50.28] your email or we’re interested.” So it’s just like, don’t call. Come on.

No, I’ve definitely cold-emailed people. I’m sure, Zeno, you have as well, in our lives… And sent them an email and asked them for something, or to come on our show, and tell them why it would be a good idea, and why we would appreciate it, and have gotten no response back… And maybe a couple of times, maybe like six months later, when they come back across my radar and I’ll be like “You know what? They never replied. I’ll try one more time.” Maybe I’ll try it another time, especially if I really want them to come on the show… Guido Van Rossum… I mean, come on, man… [laughter]

And many others…

Yeah. But I couldn’t – and I appreciate the hustle, but I do not appreciate somebody who’s going to send the same person five unanswered emails. What’s your limit, Zeno? How many emails would you send somebody if you don’t get a response?

Me? As a receiver, my technique is like I just block the domain. So if people are sending me these –

Okay. [unintelligible 00:35:54.19]

…extremely automated code emails, zero context, they’re offering me a position as a software engineer or something… I’m like “What the hell? I’m not interested. That’s not me. I don’t know how you really put me on this list.” And you can tell when the follow ups are automated. Because one thing is what you were doing, that’s like, okay, as a human, I really want you on the show, and then you come in, you’re explaining why, and all that… Versus - like, you know you’re in a sequence. It’s just so clear. And people have these hooks that get your attention, like “Oh, you’re ghosting me.” And then you’re like “No, I don’t want to ghost you.” So then you reply, because now they trigger something in your psyche that then makes you want to reply. Or the subject line that they use to get your attention.

I’ve seen all sorts of crazy things. People sending emails with typos on purpose, and then they send a follow up email saying “Oh, I fixed that.” But then they get your attention.

That’s actually hilarious, because – so I just had Kendall Miller on the show a couple weeks ago…

That’s true.

And he was giving some top tips about how to get people’s attention, and one of them was that. He’s like “You can just spell their name wrong on purpose”, which shows them that you’re a real person. That was his reason why he does it, is to just get past that immediate… Because we all have that Bayesian filter where it’s like “This is just spam”, you know. But a typo is kind of proof that you handtyped it. And personally I wouldn’t do that, I’m with you on it… But it’s certainly a technique that people do. And Kendall seems like he’s okay getting that one out there, if it’s effective. So we all have our little borders of where we think is over the line, and is kosher.

Let me go on record to and say – well, I want to say, even though I’m personally and we all are collectively, I would say loosely just like griping about this, as someone who’s an encourager, keep going. Don’t stop. Do that stuff. You may upset me, I may go on a podcast and not name you, but literally verbatim read your email out loud…

And shame you…

[laughs]

I might ghost you…

That’s right.

[38:25] …but still do it, man. Push whatever buttons you’ve got to; by any means necessary, push through those boundaries and find your way.

Right. But we get a pushback. We get to come on a show and say “This is not cool.” And that’s just part of life. That’s just how it works.

There’s definitely something beautiful about a protocol that you can reach anyone in the world, if you know [unintelligible 00:38:45.19]

A hundred percent.

That’s just something beautiful. Right? And then you can try your shot. Like “Oh, let me see if I can get a hold of Jeff Bezos.” I don’t know… I’m sure he has an email, and there’s an executive assistant that triages that… But yeah, you hear stories of like Tim Cook answering stuff… Like, you can always just try your luck.

That is so true, and it’s such an equalizing technology, where it’s like as long as you can get the email address and craft the email in the proper way… Like, if you can find the magic combination of characters to put into this little box, and send it, you can get the attention of anybody in the world.

That’s true. I mean, theoretically. But yeah, that’s –

Yeah, theoretically. I mean, it happens, and it also doesn’t happen. Sometimes they ghost you. [laughter]

Sometimes.

Oh, that’s hilarious. But yeah – I mean, email is probably to this day top five coolest things in technology. The way it works…

Yes, a hundred percent.

Of course, it has its problems, and I’m sure you know all of them very well as an email sending provider… A lot of the technical problems. Of course, spam is an issue… I mean, there’s so many issues. But it’s not siloed, it’s federated in old school ways… It works, and - yeah, you can reach anybody in the world just by having their address.

And theoretically, nobody owns it. Maybe, Zeno, you could speak to the deliverability aspect… Because I think there’s some layer of ownership or centralization. It’s like there’s a cabal, so to speak, that gatekeeps the protocol, to some degree.

Google and Microsoft, basically…

You know, like, I imagine deliverability is probably the biggest thing, and like somebody controls deliverability of email.

And if you don’t send from a certain IP address or a range of IP addresses, you have less likely the ability to actually utilize the protocol. You may send it to the ether, but it won’t actually arrive, because the system says no, essentially.

Yeah. Which - is that fair, Zeno? Is it basically Gmail and Outlook, or Yahoo? I mean, there’s probably just a few centralized providers who have so many people’s emails hosted that if they lock you out for whatever reason - they think that you’re a bad actor - then you’re kind of locked out, and you can’t hit a third of email addresses in the world. I mean, Gmail is so massive. I’m not sure how big Microsoft’s email hosting is, but I’m sure it’s just massive. And I’m sure there’s other big players like that. But those are the two that come to mind.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Gmail definitely dominates… And then you have Yahoo, who is super-popular in Japan, for example, still. And then Outlook still, and Hotmail, those ones from Microsoft…

Hotmail, yeah…

[41:55] What is cool about them, and not cool too, is they have to keep improving their game, otherwise their products get obsolete. And especially now with AI, you can generate so many different emails, and they’re highly personalized… And it gets even more tricky. But I think the beauty is – or the challenge for them is “Okay, how do we evolve?” And in the beginning, you’re totally right, Adam, there was a lot of emphasis on the IP level. So then you would have like an IP, and if the reputation of that IP is good, then just let all those emails go through. And then email providers came up and they were like “Okay, now I have this big IP pool, and I just shove people there”, and then the good actors balance the bad actors. So then these inbox providers, they’re like “Oh, okay, so now we have to go up a different abstraction layer and look at the domain more than just the IP.”

And they have different techniques. They look at how fast you send emails, and that’s something that dictates “Are we going to throttle the emails or not?” They look at the engagement early on for like emails that are coming to the inbox, and based on that, they dictate the inbox placement. “Are we going to keep it on the primary box, the promotional tab, the spam folder?” And those things are constantly evolving. But the thing I don’t like is like – I wish they would evolve as fast as the web, for example. Because I feel like the web was super-slow, maybe in like the 2000s, and then 2010 HTML5 comes in, and CSS 3, and ECMAScript 6, and it’s like “Oh, wow there’s so much movement.” And now we don’t care so much about how this website looks on Opera versus Firefox versus i6. It’s just like the same website. Very little things like that are different in Safari than Chrome…

Right.

But with email, it’s still – man, it’s so hard.

Tell me about it. I’m facing an uphill battle right now, because Gmail just decided that they’re going to start ignoring our styles in our newsletter, with zero changes from me. Like, it’s the exact same thing, it worked fine last week… I can send the same email I sent two weeks ago, and if I go in my archive, the two weeks ago one looks like it looks like in every other email client… And if I resend the same exact content today, it looks different. Specifically, they’re ignoring our fonts, and our link colors… The actual form of email is still there, but it just looks kind of whack. And there’s no announcements, there’s no nothing. It’s just like, you know, they just changed the way they handle rendering, and now I have to go chasing down whatever it is different in order to get my rules to work. And that just makes me mad. I mean, I can’t ignore it. It’s Gmail.

And at least with browsers, there’s an engine behind, and that engine is open source. So you’re like “Okay, Gecko for Firefox, and Blink for Chrome”, and then there’s an actual change log publicly available… But for those email engines - no, there’s nothing that’s like “Oh, here’s what we change in terms of rendering.” No. You cannot find it.

Well, I’ll pause for a second just to reflect on the idea that Jerod just said resend, and then you just said change log…

I just think that’s kind of cool how both brand names show up in natural conversation.

Wow, that’s true.

It’s just beautiful, you know?

That’s good naming by us, by all of us.

I do like that a lot. And I had to go sign in, Jerod, to Gmail, and look at it… Because you’re right, it looks fine, it’s not the worst ever…

You can read it.

[45:55] …but it’s not respecting the styles. It’s respecting the overall framework of how the email looks, and stuff, but it’s… It’s all gone. What’s up with that…? Not cool.

They’re using their own fonts. It’s like they care more. And Microsoft has done this a while… Specifically, if you log into - whatever it is; Live365… Or if you use the Microsoft Office in the cloud thing, and read the email there, it’s also ugly, because they want it to look like their UI inside their web app. And so all the links are blue, because that’s what Microsoft wants. Now, if you read that same email, still hosted by Microsoft, but inside of Outlook.app… Or .exe… Sorry, I haven’t been on Windows in a while. I forgot what their extension was. Outlook.exe. It’ll look fine. It’ll look just like it does everywhere else. But in the web app specifically, they override things. And Google, I think, just started doing that, is my guess, because Gmail just this last couple of weeks now, it’s like Roboto Sans, or Google Sans… I don’t know. They’re using their own fonts. I’m surprised this is news to you, Zeno. Has anybody else told you this?

Oh, he knows this… [laughs]

No, man.

He knows this… You don’t know this?

You haven’t heard this?

You know this…

[laughs] I hear that all the time. And then Superhuman does their thing as well… And the Gmail mobile app will invert the colors to be – like, if you’re using dark mode on your phone, then there’s absolutely no control, but they will invert everything. And then you just hope that they will invert right with their inversion algorithm, too. So it’s just crazy how you just have to – it still feels super-archaic, even though email is around for 20-plus years. 30-plus years.

And I’ve been talking with my research assistants, ChatGPT, I’ve asked Grok… I think those are the only two that I asked this particular question… What I can do about this. Is there anything that they know? And they both have pushed me towards Litmus, which is a commercial product. Are you aware of that one, Zeno? Litmus? They do take the guesswork out of email marketing. And so what I want is a way I can send my preview email into all of the weirdest places it might be rendered, and see how it looks, and then somehow open a DevTools kind of thing… And I think Litmus offers you something like this. But you know, I’m just a guy with a newsletter. I’m not like an enterprise. Where Litmus is like “Come get all our suite of tools for $150 a month”, or whatever it is. And it just doesn’t feel like the product for me. And so that brings me up to thoughts. A, as a Resend guy, what is there in this world? Are you guys trying to solve this problem? And then B, I think this leads us into our AI SEO, because both Grok and ChatGPT pushed me towards Litmus. That’s great for Litmus, right? Potential new customer, because they were the thing that showed up, that these things knew about. So let’s start with the email side. What’s out there for people to be able to send a preview email into like all the weird places it might render and look at it?

Yeah. So yeah, Litmus is definitely the most popular one. And it’s almost like a browser stack kind of product. They run VMs that take screenshots, and then you see how it renders… So that saves you time. You don’t need another Windows machine to check how things look on Outlook, so that’s great. But it’s still like “Okay, now I see that it’s different. What do I do?” So there are other tools like Can I Email, which is the alternative to Can I Use, where it shows –

Oh, nice.

…like “Okay, here’s how this – like, is Flexbox supported or not?” And then they will tell you.

Oh, I see. So it’s just like Can I Use, but for email.

Yeah. Exactly.

That’s cool.

[50:02] It’s like SVG. You still cannot use SVG on emails. So then the tool will tell you, “No, you cannot do that.” So that helps. And then if you try to – like, we try to put things like that in the product. Like, okay, let’s add a linter, a compatibility checker powered by Can I Email on React Email. So we try to shove as much tooling on the email template creation process, so then when you go live, you don’t see as much inconsistencies… But there’s always a little thing here and there.

That’s cool. I’ll link that one up. Of course, if you know Can I Use, replace use with email, and you’ll hit the website. So I’ll definitely bookmark that. I don’t think it helps me with my particular problem, because I’m not using anything weird, and it’s just like… What I might need to do is I’m putting my styles not inline on the elements, but in the head. And I think that perhaps if I inline them – I mean, that’s inlined. It’s not a separate style sheet that you’re [unintelligible 00:51:04.17]

File

…like a separate resource. But it is in the head, and maybe I need to get them even closer, and inline everything and just bloat out all my elements and see if that fixes it. That’s probably my next step, is to do that. But then let’s take up this other thing, which you’ve put some work into and have been sharing some of your findings on… Is, you know, Litmus is probably very happy that when I said “I’ve got this problem”, that these LLMs are sending me to Litmus. Because I didn’t know about their product prior. And there was one other one. I think it was – yeah, I forgot what it was. It wasn’t as memorable of a product name. So they lose. But when people ask for the best developer podcast, I would love for the Changelog to be the answer, right? [laughs] I mean, let’s just get down to brass tacks.

For sure.

So how do we do that? Help us do that. How do we get our stuff at the top of AI’s SEO?

Yeah, I think everyone is trying to answer that question right now.

Yeah.

Man, for me, what really clicked – so I’ve been ignoring AI for the past two years. Not like from a company perspective… As an individual, I use AI a ton. I love it. I’m optimistic about it. I think it’s great. But on a company level, it’s like “Man, we just need to find product-market fit. Nothing else matters. Let’s just ship stuff that’s going to help users.” But then in January this year, I just started seeing some stuff that I couldn’t ignore. So what do we do now is every time someone signs up for Resend, we send a welcome email. And that welcome email comes from me. It’s very personal, so then when they reply, it comes to me, and then I reply as well. And then this one day I’m just like waiting… I start to get into running, and then I’m waiting for this Nike store to open… So I’m just sitting there, it’s like 30 minutes until the store opens, and I’m just replying to those emails. And then one person is like “Oh, I came from Lovable.” I’m like “Oh, that’s cool”, to reply that. Next person is like “Oh, Claude recommended you.” Reply… ChatGPT recommended you. v0 recommended you, Bolt… I just started seeing those things… And it was six or seven emails in a row. So I was like “Whoa, there’s just something here.” I don’t know what changed… Is there a new version of the LLL? I don’t know. But something clicked. And I was like “Okay, I cannot ignore this anymore from a company perspective. I just have to keep pulling that thread.”

[53:54] And then I started finding like, okay, who is thinking about this problem? Who is digging into that? And it’s a huge rabbit hole… And then what are the techniques to – what you were saying, “I just want more of that.” I want Changelog to be the default solution here. The default answer.

That’s right.

And man, there’s so many interesting things… For example, from an SEO perspective, we care a lot about Google. And we care about Google Search Console as the tool to see how we’re doing in terms of SEO. It turns out, if you want to be the first one in ChatGPT, you’ve got to care about Bing. Because Bing is what’s powering ChatGPT, because of the Microsoft partnership.

Really?

So that’s how the whole indexing of the web came from Bing as the data source for ChatGPT. So then - okay, now that’s different. How do I rank number one on Bing, versus Google? Which is something you would never really pay attention to. And then you have to start thinking about “How do I structure my content on my website?” Because people are asking questions to LLMs. So if they’re asking questions, then it’s a Q&A type of format. So then what we started doing was let’s just have more FAQs on every single page we have, and let’s turn our knowledge base to be more of a question and answer to feed the LLM. And then yeah, I’ve just started playing with llms.txt, which is like this protocol for you to just strip all the HTML and just have the content ready for LLMs to consume. So we did that as well. And man, just started going down that path. Using tools like Profound…

So there’s tryprofound.com, a tool that shows you all the traffic. This one is fascinating, by the way. So the way this works is they hook into your server, and then whenever the server gets a hit, they will look at the origin of the request, and then break it down between like “Okay, where is this request coming from?” And the reason why that works is because when you ask ChatGPT what is Resend’s pricing - for example, if you do that now, ChatGPT wasn’t trained in that data. So there’s no way that they know that. That’s different than if you ask ChatGPT, “Write me a poem.” They can do that using the trained data. But if you ask pricing for any product, they need to look at the web. So because they are able to search the web nowadays, you get a citation. And then when you get a citation, it’s basically them crawling your website, getting the information. So then you get that request. You see “Okay, ChatGPT went to my pricing page.” And then you can start looking at the breakdown between every model. Like, “Okay, Claude users, they actually go to this page. And ChatGPT users go here.” And it’s just fascinating. It’s a completely new way of looking into SEO, that’s for sure.

That is cool. So are you using this Profound platform with Resend?

Yeah, we are. Yup.

Is it worth it?

Man, right now, you’ve got to try everything, right?

Yeah.

What I love about Profound - it gives me the information… I think they still have a long way to go in terms of “How do I take the beautiful graph and turn it into action points?” So then as a team, I can be like “Okay, let’s change this content. Let’s do this. Let’s do that.” Now you get the data. So you still have to parse the data yourself, I guess.

[58:04] While we were discussing these things, I couldn’t help myself but go to Claude and ChatGPT 4.0 and say “What are the best software developer podcasts?” And we’ll start with Claude, because that’s the one that made me smile. The very first one - The Changelog.

Wooh!

Nice…!

Nothing else. I’m just kidding, there’s some others.

Number two, Resend. Wait…

That’s right. There was 10 listed, but we were first. I couldn’t believe it. I was like “Do you know who I am?”

I was gonna say, you logged in…? Is it in sycophant mode? That’s the thing this week. ChatGPT is too sycophant-y.

And then ChatGPT had Software Engineering Daily first, and then us second.

Okay…

Which is just as good as first, in my opinion.

Yeah, second’s just as good as first.

Yeah. [laughter] If you have the same prompt in like Cursor or Windsurf, those models, they cannot do web search. So then you will get different answers than the ones like when you use the web. So you can rank differently depending on where you’re asking stuff. And yeah, it’s just – it’s crazy, man.

I’ve been really curious about how this will all play out, because I think we’ve talked about this several times, Jerod… I think you said recently on these podcasts you produce that you don’t really google much anymore. You pretty much go right to the LLM to ask a question, for the most part.

For the most part.

When you’re asking questions, not finding things.

Yeah. I mean I will google if I know I can just get – like, sometimes you’re searching for something and you know it’s the first hit on Google as long as you just type it in. And so that will be faster than going and asking. And it will save the world some energy. I heard recently that every ChatGPT question is 10x the cost of a Google search. We’re just talking about not the training, but the inference cost, of energy. And I’m thinking that makes sense. It’s basically a database lookup versus an inference call. And so if I can do a database lookup, I’ll do it. But anything serious, or that I don’t know the answer to, or I can’t find it quickly, then yeah, I’ll pretty much ask an LLM first. And I have noticed that they’ve started to push me towards – I mean, push me is okay. That’s an implied. Like, I’m adding that, a little bit of – although I hear they just added today shopping results…

Yup. That’s right.

And people are complaining that they’re getting like really heavily pushed towards products, on questions that don’t have to do with that. I haven’t used it much today, so I can’t say. But that’s kind of a topic that’s hitting the social web right now. And so maybe it’s really going to push you towards products here, now that they’ve added some shopping stuff into ChatGPT specifically. But I have noticed that like whereas in the past it would try to answer my question, but it was always very generic, now it’s like “Here are some potential things you could buy”, you know. Like, I was trying to get my DJI Spark’s batteries to work again… I’m not sure if you guys know about this, because I sure as heck didn’t… But the DJI Spark, which is their small drone, has these batteries, rechargeable batteries, that if you don’t use them for a while - and I haven’t used my drone for maybe two years. I don’t know, it’s been sitting in the drawer, until we just got it out… If you don’t use these batteries for a long time, they go into like hibernation mode, and they won’t charge.

Really? Well, that’s good, I guess…

[01:01:42.22] It’s supposed to save the battery life, but really, all it does is make me think as a guy who doesn’t want to go open it up and do surgery on it, like “My drone is worthless, unless I buy new batteries. I can’t get it to charge.” So of course I’m talking to ChatGPT about this, and it takes me down this long road of figuring out “Here’s different things you can try.” At the end it’s like “You’re going to have to buy this little, I don’t know, gizmo, and a cable. And I can give you links to ones you can go buy on Alibaba”, or somewhere. And whereas it did not use to do that, but like “Here’s an actual product you should go buy.” Which is very helpful if I’m going to go do that. But anyways, I started just ranting after you asked me a simple question, Adam… And the answer was yes, I asked an LLM.

Well, I don’t even know what I was going to say, but I think more of this was like –

It’s because this was like five minutes ago. [laughs] I’m sorry.

That’s okay. No, that’s okay. That’s totally fine. This is definitely a conversation. I think when it comes to the way I find out what I’m curious about, let’s just say, there’s two places I go. An LLM… Lately it’s been Claude first, then ChatGPT. And then obviously YouTube. Those are the two places I tend to go…

Sure.

…because I highly research. I just bought some new clubs. I’m going to admit it, they were more than I wanted to spend, because that’s just how it works… But I researched them.

Because he researched it.

I researched them. And then I just wonder if the research isn’t just confirmation bias.

Sure.

Sometimes it is.

For sure, yeah.

But how do you research the things you want to buy or consume or enjoy in the world? And I really feel like the place I go to learn… I’m more conversationally asking questions to this thing, versus just throwing in keywords into Google and hoping I get a web page that may help me out. I feel like the internet is dramatically changing as we speak insofar as how we find information, and I wonder how that will impact publishing of information. Because if you don’t go to the website anymore to get the info and the LLM just consumes it… In a case like Resend you don’t really care, because you’re just trying to get them to become a customer, and enjoy your product. But in the case of something else, you may really want them to come to your website, because that’s the value to your brand. It’s a captured consumer, whether they’re a curious person, an advocate, a customer, you name it. I just wonder how this is going to change things.

Yeah. I was just thinking how much of a buying decision is just confirmation bias. I bought a new barbecue this weekend, and I remember watching a lot of YouTube videos just so I had more excuses to buy that one barbecue that I wanted to buy.

[laughs]

Lik, “Oh, now that I know the specs, now that I know this one thing or another, now I can justify to my engineer brain that I’m allowed to spend that much money on a barbecue.”

Totally. Well, especially the way that – so I’ve been mostly a ChatGPT user. I’ve tried LLaMA, I’ve tried all these other things, but I keep coming back to that one. And I have found recently - that’s why I brought up the sycophant mode, which they’re working on… But I’ve found recently that it’s been way too affirmational to my ideas, and to my plans. And I’m like, I don’t really want that. I don’t want you to just tell me that I’m right all the time… Because talk about confirmation bias. Like, “Yes, you should buy this thing that you want to buy.” I’d rather just have the truth and not a yes man… And so that made me start to think “Wow, these people who run these companies have so much power right now.” Because all it takes is a little tweak to that algorithm, and all of a sudden I got a sycophant, and I’m detached from reality because I’ve got a yes man, that wasn’t a yes man yesterday, but today it is. Or that wasn’t pushing certain grocery products yesterday, but today it is. And so that’s just very concerning.

[01:05:59.02] That’s why I’ve been using Grok today, because I want to just use them both… Because Grok - a different company, obviously, and different purpose… The idea being truth should be the ultimate goal. I mean, that’s of course the idealistic spin that Elon Musk puts on it. But I feel like if I can use both those two, then maybe I’ll get the truth out of one of them, or something. I don’t know.

I keep coming back to “How is this different than traditional SEO?” And when Google came out, I guess it was the same concern, right? And then when – oh, before I could just go to the web, and now Google is like putting more results in front of me, and it’s influencing what I see. And then social media comes up and we were like “Oh yeah, now there’s this algorithm controlling what I consume.” Yeah, it’s always scary, right?

[unintelligible 01:06:56.26]

Yeah.

Maybe we just leave the phones at home, you know? Maybe that’s the answer sometimes, is just let it… Go out there and touch grass, as the kids say. Okay, well, at least that is good information. I’m glad you’ve done that research on how to position yourself. I didn’t know about that profound platform. I didn’t know that Bing was the backing for that. And I’m sure that this is an ever evolving landscape, and one that every internet phasing business is going to want to engage with. Right? And just like SEO, even though it became such a snake oil business, it was such an important business, because everybody needed to rank well on Google to exist. And I think that whether we like it or not, that’s going to be the case over the next 5, 10 years. Like, if you are not getting surfaced by one of these tools, you are not going to exist… Which is sad.

That’s so true. And if you are number one right now you guys are, then you want more of that. You definitely want to be number one in every LLM.

Stay there. Yeah.

I bet there’s – I mean, I guess Profound might do this, but you need like a “Here’s how you rank in all these different ones.” Is that one of the screens they give you on that Profound thing?

Yeah, they show you - not exactly where you rank, but like how each LLM is consuming your data.

Consuming you, but not necessarily pushing you out there.

Because they don’t have access to the prompts. None of us have. We don’t know what people are asking necessarily.

Well, they could ask them – what I would like to have is “Here’s my prompt. What are the best developer podcasts? What are my best email sending platforms, or whatever? Who should I use for sending my email?” And then just something monitors “Here’s where you are in Claude, here’s where you are on this, this, this, this, this.” And they could do that by just having an account and just asking it the question or something without needing the prompts necessarily. But…

Yeah, they could sort of like host a prompt for you that sort of triggers like a cron job almost.

That’s all it is. I mean, it’s basically an API key and a cron job across a set of providers. This is probably an open source tool already…

Yeah, there’s a YC company –

Somebody out there is screaming into the podcast…

There’s a YC company?

Yeah.

Yeah, there’s always someone screaming into the podcast…

ProductRank.ai.

“You guys are idiots…!”

That’s the one.

ProductRank.ai. See, Zeno has all the links…

Come on, Zeno…

This guy’s like an LLM with good training data. There you go, AI Product Rankings. “Understand how the top AI models promote products and brands with citations.” Show notes…

[01:09:53.08] Well, the point I think you’re bringing up though, Jerod, I think is important, which is this bias. This new technology ushered onto the world. I mean, humanity’s changed because of this. At least the ones that are in first world countries using this. I don’t know how to describe access and availability to the world in this idea I’m sharing, but just that if you’ve got access to these models and you’re using this stuff, there’s a lot of things you can do that isn’t just generate the best email, or find the best podcast, or email platforms to send with, but a lot more stuff that… I mean, I go back to golf, man. I literally made a club inventory list with lofts and field notes for myself, because I’m a new golfer, or back to being a new golfer again… And I’m reminding myself, “When do I use my wedge? When do I use my gap? How should I stand with my 7 wood?” kind of thing. Different things like that. So I’m like making my club inventory… And this thing is like – rather than me type it all up and make the spreadsheet and create the table and all this tedious stuff, it’s doing it for me and with me. And it’s a very much, I would say, to some degree, collaborative, in the fact that I know what I want, I’m asking you to produce it… But it’s not just generate an email kind of thing. But it knows a lot of this stuff. And if there’s if there’s bias injected into this new magic box we all have access to… Like from yesterday; yesterday, it wasn’t promoting this, and today it is… I’m just – I don’t want it to ruin what they are like search has been ruined, I would say, over the years. Search is not – it’s reliable in the fact that, like you said before, Jerod, if you know kind of what you’re looking for, you can find it pretty easily… But you’ve got seven sponsored before you even get to the real content. The real content is there because it was gamed in some way, shape or form… They’ve done things with backlinks, and all this trickery to get there… Maybe they’ve earned because they are the brand. Who knows? And then you get the sidebar, and… It’s just become just icky, and I don’t want this newfound thing that humanity has to be ickified like that.

I think we should assume that’s what’s going to happen.

Aww…

The same way that Google didn’t have ads, and then it introduced ads, ChatGPT doesn’t have ads today, but Anthropic is playing with ads for their results. It’s like a private beta program, or something. So I think you will have to pay to be among like the first ones to be – but hopefully they show as an ad. But then something else will come, and once it starts to be so bad, then a new disruption will come up.

Yeah. Don’t you think this is where open models could win, though? I mean, there there was not an open alternative to Google search. I mean, that was comparable. But the current technology, at least, with transformer models, there’s ample opportunity and slight leads by the proprietary models for the open models to be used by somebody, to come along and productize a model and create an actual product that you want to use, not just a model you can call… That could be that disconnected, quote-unquote unbiased… It’s not gonna be perfect, but not like *bleep* which is what we’re all afraid of. Right? That’s what we’re afraid of, is this going the way that everything else has gone over time. I think that that’s a possibility because there’s open models. There was not an open Google. There just wasn’t. That could compete. There was an attempt to create an alternative product, like DuckDuckGo… Great attempt. But maybe this time around we’ll have options. And maybe those options will actually keep the proprietors more honest, less crappy, because they’ll have more competition, and people just won’t put up with it… But I mean, Google’s been a search monopoly for a very long time. We haven’t had options.

[01:14:21.12] No, we haven’t. You know, you may me really sad when you said that, because I started thinking “Okay, the next thing coming out is ad-supported Claude.” And that just just makes me super-sad. It’s like, well, now you’re going to have a tier that - sure, maybe it may be affordable, but I’m just so tired of these things coming out with like “Here’s the ad supported version of it.” Do you want to spend the double money to get the non-ad-supported version of it? Maybe…

It might actually backfire with this kind of product, because it is so personal and real… Whereas Google search is a list of results. And it’s like - yes, you can pay money to just be listed before these other results, but we all know that that’s what’s going on… But the way you treat Claude, or ChatGPT, or Grok, or whatever it is you’re using, you treat it like your little research assistant. I don’t know why it’s so little to us, but it’s like “Hey, little guy…” And you treat it like a friend. And when you come to a friend for something and they’re shoving sponsored stuff as answers - like, that’s… That’s so unappealing and so unattractive as a friend. Like, I wouldn’t do that. If you came to me and I was like “You should use Resend, because I’m an affiliate…” I mean, maybe I’ll tell you, “Hey, I’m an affiliate. Use Resend and I’ll get 10 bucks and I’ll give you five”, or whatever. Friends do that kind of stuff. But if everything I told you as far as advice in life was just a sponsored piece of advice, I wouldn’t be your friend anymore. You’d be so turned off by that, wouldn’t you?

And maybe what changed is the memory portion of it. I see my wife using it, and it’s just so interesting, because she builds these little coaches for her. So she was like “Oh, I want to improve my health. Can you tell me health tips every day?” And then she already fed the memory with the fact that she’s married, and that she has a daughter, and the model knows their name, so they would tell “Okay, maybe you should go with Zeno and Victoria to a brunch, and just drink more water than normal.” And the voice and tone - it cheers her up. I’m like “That’s crazy. That’s beautiful”, because it has memory now. And maybe that’s the moat. People keep talking about “Oh, what’s the moat for LLMs?” Maybe that’s what’s going to be, the fact that now they have memory. The one that has the best memory, the one that knows “Okay, Jerod, I just want the truth. Don’t try to be nice. No fluff.” Okay, I know that’s how I’m going to communicate with him, and I would just follow that.

Yes. I did try putting – there are prompts you can put in that have been able to disable sycophant mode, by the way. But go ahead, Adam.

I was gonna say, I agree with you, Jerod, on this front, because you want the LLM to be for you. And I guess you could say your friend, in a way, or friendly.

Yeah. Helpful.

Yeah. For me, not against me.

Yeah, exactly.

And I would say if you’re advertising to me, if you’ve got some sort of alternative motive that you’re suggesting things for… Like, help me find the version of truth I’m trying to seek, whether it’s health tips, or business advice, or what’s the best podcast, or email platform to consider… I want whatever the consensus of the world, I suppose, deems as truthful and honorable, versus not fabricated or made up, or for some sort of “I get paid behind the scenes” motive kind of thing.

[01:18:05.14] For sale. Right.

I want the real. And I would I would probably immediately stop using whatever doesn’t respect that, and then I would use the one that does, obviously. And I’d pay more. I’d probably pay more for that. I hate to even say that, because I feel like everything is rented, man. They’ve said it before. “You will own nothing and be happy.” Everything is rented. Everything is a service and a rent. Tired of it. I’m over it.

You didn’t rent those golf clubs, did you?

I bought them…

[laughs]

But did you buy a license to use those for a certain amount of time?

Yeah, I didn’t. I mean, honestly though, I think golf clubs are one of those things, they’re too personal, that you really couldn’t rent them. Not if you’re a serious golfer. You wouldn’t rent clubs.

No.

You’d certainly rent the golf cart to go on the course, because who the heck’s going to take their golf clubs and their cart to the courts? That just doesn’t make any sense.

Wait, wait, wait… Do you drive the cart to the course, or you’ve got like a trailer? You pull the cart on the trailer?

Exactly. Who would do that? No one would do that.

“This is my cart.”

Yeah. “Can I bring my own cart?” “Hey, if you want to. You sound like you’re really committed.”

The only time you rent clubs is when you’re in like Maui, or something, and you didn’t bring your clubs with you… Because traveling with clubs is a pain in the butt.

It is. Now, I will say that a serious golfer will take their clubs with them.

100%. But they’re still a pain in the butt.

I’ve rented a mountain bike before when I was in Sedona, and I have my own mountain bike. I didn’t send mine there. I’m like, it’s impractical to send my mountain bike to Sedona, so I can ride it in Sedona.

Well, the same thing with golf clubs.

I’ll rent the exact same one that’s owned by a bike shop there… And I did. I rented my literal same bike, same [unintelligible 01:19:59.09] most of the same specs… But it was pretty much on par for - to use a pun, pretty much on par for what I actually own. So it was like renting my bike…

Close enough.

…but in Sedona. Which is kind of cool.

Mm-hmm.

Oh, man… Oh, boy… Why do we always end up dystopian when we talk about AI? We always kind of end up a little depressed about where it might be going…

I think it’s kind of overwhelming, because we just don’t know… And we have such a history of things going from like great to worse, that… I mean, the internet’s gone, I think, from great to worse in many small and big ways… And I think Cory Doctorow has done a good job of documenting a lot of that. And so we can’t help but be a little bit skeptical, or cynical, or whatever the term is, dystopian with where we think it’s going to go… I mean, in the small, though – I’m not pessimistic in the small. But when I think about the bigger pictures and the implications, it starts to overwhelm. And a lot of it is just because we don’t know, and so what you don’t know is scary. That’s my take. Zeno, why do you think we always – although Zeno’s not always here, so he doesn’t realize that we always tend to do this. We always get to here.

Yeah, it’s true.

Here we are, at the end of the show, we’re all a little bit contemplative and concerned.

Yeah, why is it important to think about the end result of a technology? Maybe it isn’t. Like, right now it works great. Right now I can come in and ask, “Based on what you know about me, give me your sincere opinion on my flaws”, and then it will give something. Maybe it’s great, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s just fluff… Right now there are no ads. Let’s just enjoy it while that’s the case, you know?

Let’s just enjoy it [unintelligible 01:21:54.07]

[laughs]

Well, it’s still called today. We will enjoy today… I would say that life is better with these tools than it is without these tools.

Yeah… For sure.

[01:22:08.00] And that’s why we all have our phone addictions, because our phone has actually provided so much value to us on a recurring basis that we’ve become addicted to it. I mean, you can take your phone and nothing else and travel the world. Okay, that would be a big stretch, because there’s parts of the world that it probably wouldn’t work, but… You have to plan for that. But you can travel America, [unintelligible 01:22:28.08]

And a charger…

Yeah, you need to charge.

Take a charger.

That’s about it, though. No, actually, most hotels will have a charger for you, or whatever. I’m just saying… Okay - maps, communications, emergencies, transactions, local touristy questions… What could you not get? What else would you need? Obviously, you need to eat… That’s about it.

It’s all in there.

So it’s a pretty valuable thing. That’s amazing.

Yeah, provided you’re connected. Provided you’re connected, you have access.

I would rather have that than a book with the map, and carry that with me…

Right? Well, it’s kind of like that iPad commercial gone bad, where they were smashing all the stuff… They’re smashing the creative stuff, and all the creatives got mad about it. I wasn’t mad about it, but apparently – maybe I’m not creative enough. But it was a good idea in concept, because it has replaced… I think there was a better one, where it’s like sitting on a desk, and the phone replaces all the different things you used to have on your desk. And they really have done that. They can be so many different things… That - yeah, you don’t want to have a giant map, and your shotgun person sitting next to you in the driver’s seat, you know… They’ve got the map open real wide, and they’re trying to find where you are, but then they’re holding it upside down… You know, it used to be rough.

It used to be rough.

Then you leave your wallet on a – you’re filling up gas, and you leave your wallet sitting there, and you drive away to the gas station… Not speaking from personal experience or anything.

You know, this weekend we had this thing called Founder’s Weekend, Founder’s Day, here in Dripping Springs where I live at…

Oh, nice.

And it’s this big old festival, basically… You know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday…. It’s like, everybody’s there. The whole town’s there. It’s a small town, everybody’s there.

That’s cool.

And I thought I lost my phone. I freaked out. I was like – I didn’t cry and fall down and whatever, but I was like…

“I curled up into a ball…”

…knew where I left it, I knew I set it down, and I was just praying when I got back it was there still yet. But the whole time I’m like “Oh my gosh, what would I do?” Sure, I could get a new one… But I don’t have the thing, and it’s got all my information… I was just like, “This cannot happen. I’ve never literally lost my phone like this ever in my life. Today can’t be the day. No, no, no.” You know? So… I don’t know what I would do if I lost my phone. I would be pretty sad, and I’d have to wait for this new one to come in, which would probably be days… So here’s me, days without a phone… Could you imagine that? Like, nah… Let’s not do that.

Yeah, I can do hours, but I wouldn’t want to do days. Too valuable.

Yeah. Same.

Then you’re jealous. You’re like “Look at them. They’ve got their phone over there…”

“They’ve got their phone…”

“She’s got their phone, he’s got his phone… Where’s my phone? Where’s my phone?” I don’t know…

Well, Zeno, your goal is to make Resend so valuable that people talk about it like we talk about our phones. Like, “Where’s my Resend? Come on… That guy’s using Resend, she’s using Resend… Where’s my Resend?!” If you do that, you’ll be a very rich man.

Oh, man…

On his way, I would say. On his way. What’s left? What’s left unsaid? What else can we friends about?

You guys want to talk about that new car?

What car is that?

The new Slate Auto…?

Oh, I didn’t see that.

Alright… Slate.auto.

I’m on it.

[01:25:56.16] This truck can be anything. Even an SUV. This is a brand new company, I think they’re about three years old… Just came out of stealth. Based in Michigan, I believe, but their factory is going to be in Indiana. So it’s all US-based. Mostly American-made… A Slate is a radically simple electric pickup truck that can change into whatever you need it to be. So the idea here is, as an EV, it does not have great – it’s not really called gas mileage anymore. It’s still mileage, though.

Range.

Yeah, it doesn’t have great range. Thank you. I’m not up to date on my EV lingo…

Mileage might be good, too. Mileage.

Yeah, it doesn’t have great range. I think it’s like 150 to 200, but you can buy a bigger battery. But the idea here is, it’s cheap. It’s less than $20,000 for a truck. Now, this is a small truck…

Wow!

…it’s a two-seater…

No way…

Yeah, less than $20,000.

That’s crazy.

After EV credits. So probably like in the range of $25,000 to start…

Okay…

And it’s bare bones on purpose. It’s completely bare bones. There’s nothing to it.

Wow.

There’s no dash with a computer screen… It’s not even painted. It’s like carbon fiber. So it’s built to be wrapped, not painted, because that’s kind of the cool thing nowadays, too. It’s like, get your car wrapped… And they call it Slate, because it’s a blank slate. Get it? You’re supposed to customize the heck out of it. So it’s like modular, you can buy different parts… You can turn it into an SUV by buying the SUV add-on. You can add battery…

That’s crazy.

You can add like roof racks… You can do that in regular cars. But you name it. Like, the dash, you can do stuff… And then you can wrap it. And you can even… It’s so easy to wrap - they’re saying; this is all just marketing fluff. It doesn’t exist yet. The truck exists, but not anywhere that you can buy it. You can only reserve it. But it’s so easy to wrap that you can actually do it yourself in an afternoon. Like, you don’t have to actually have a professional, is what they’re saying, is the plan. And then like everything is self-maintained. So if you break off your rear view mirror, they’re just gonna ship you a new rear view mirror and a little tutorial on how to like put the other one in. So it’s kind of a cool new take, I think, on reinventing the personal vehicle… And I’m into the idea. I’m not sure if I’m into the product, because time will tell… I think it doesn’t ship until like end of 2026. But that’s the Slate. What do you guys think?

I almost bought one just now. [laughter] This is cool.

Well, you’ve got a big truck. This is a little truck.

Well, no, I know that. So I think there is – it’s very popular… Not in the US. I wanna say like Japan, maybe even China, India, places like that, that they have this tiny little truck… And I think they only make them there, and there’s been a few imported to the US. You can even like buy it on the internet for like 10 grand. It just arrives, and you just unbox this truck. It reminds me of that, this little simplistic thing… I think this is a revolutionary idea. Like, this is the way it should be. Give me a bare bones vehicle, that just drives, that’s modular. That I can maintain. That doesn’t cost Tesla prices.

And that you can spend more if you wanna spend more, and upgrade it, and put all kinds of stuff on it… But if you go through the little customizer… I mean, it’s pretty cool. Like, you can pick these different wraps, pick your color… They’ll show you some different examples of people who have – not real people have customized it, but what real people might do to really make it your own. And I feel like my phone is like a no case, standard, bog standard iPhone… And I’m a weirdo, because so many people have like cases, and designs, and… They wanna trick out their phone, because we all have one. You want yours to be yours. I’m just a boring loser, so I just leave it… But I feel like with these slate trucks, potentially, it could be very popular with people that wanna customize, and not spend an arm and a leg doing it. I mean, you customize a Tesla and you’re just like “Well, I spent 50K on a Tesla, and now I’ve gotta get it wrapped for another 5K, or whatever?” Like, this is so much cheaper.

[01:30:14.13] Yeah, I think that this will be very popular with younger folks, for sure. Especially the way young folks, that I know of at least, like to stand out, or be different, or go counter-cultural, so to speak… It kind of reminds me of like the Model T. I mean, I wasn’t alive in those days, but it reminds me of like when the Ford truck first came out, the Model T; it’s like, you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black. It’s like, you can have any of these you want as long as it’s simple when we give it to you, and then you can do whatever you want to at that point.

Right. Here’s how simple it is. And this might be like a bridge too far for some people… You actually have to wind the window down, like with the old winding thing…

Wow, really?

Yeah.

Yeah, that might be a deal breaker for me… [laughter] That’s too simple.

Here’s how simple it is. No seatbelts. No, just kidding. I think it should have seatbelts. But… What are you thinking, Zeno? Are you going to buy one of these? Would you get one?

I’ve been an optimistic this whole podcast, and I’m going to be the skeptical one now.

Okay.

I remember seeing the modular phones. Remember those?

Right. Right.

It’s just so tricky to build like super-highly niched modular products. I love the idea…

Yeah.

…but I feel like people want – they like the idea of personalization more than they actually personalize things themselves. So maybe – it’s great that it has an option.

I think that’s true. I think that’s true. I would be with you if it wasn’t so cheap.

It’s super-cheap.

To get an EV truck for under 20K… That’s bringing the price into a lot of people’s wheelhouses who would otherwise not be able to afford it. So I feel like that’s probably why I’m more bullish… But yeah, I agree, I think – customization people want. But completely modular - it ends up having like a Lego feel to it, or something. When things kind of snap together, you’re like “Can I even trust this?” So yeah, I can understand your skepticism.

It has different charging options, too. Like, you can plug it into a normal plug, a normal 120-volt plug.

Yeah.

It takes a little longer, I think. It charges longer.

I appreciate a company that comes out and just like really does think about everything differently. Like, let’s throw out every assumption. Here’s an assumption - you have to paint your car. Like, no, you don’t. Here’s some carbon fiber… Maybe you want to wrap it, maybe not.

It’s crazy.

Yeah. So that’s cool. The company’s kind of interesting… I think there’s two women at the top, founders, and there’s some backing by – it hasn’t been confirmed, but Jeff Bezos allegedly is an early investor. And so it’s kind of a Tesla competitor in that way, in every way that Bezos wants to compete with Musk… And so there’s some of that going on, but… They’re very young. Three years… Who knows if they can even ship this thing? But yeah, I think it’s a cool, different take on trucks. And like you said, Zeno - win, lose or draw, I think it’s cool that it exists and that they’re trying it.

I think it needs to exist, honestly. What was that – there’s like a Kia Soul, or something like that… This ugly little box thing. It’s so popular with young folks that are buying their first vehicle. This is going to be like that. I think there’s no way they can not succeed. I’ll say this now…

[01:33:58.05] So you’re the most bullish of all of us.

Oh, yeah. I think the world needs the simplest choice to get a vehicle.

Would you invest?

Yeah, I’d invest.

Okay.

I’d invest right this second.

Right this second.

Would you buy one?

Would you buy one?

I’ve got Apple Pay right here. No, I really do. I think that this is – I agree with you, Jerod. I applaud new companies – not just like this specifically, but ones that throw out all the rules, and say “Is that true? Do you really need to paint your car? Do you really need power windows?” I think that’s a yes. That’s a yes for me.

I know… Who wants to [unintelligible 01:34:37.14]

I want some power windows.

Yeah, that’s a bridge too far.

But maybe that actually – I mean the ’80s is a big thing.

There’s no stereo.

There’s no stereo?

Nope.

Oh, gosh…

Add-on. [laughter]

I love how the optimism is like dropping little by little…

I’m still optimistic… I did see that, actually, when I was watching – I was looking at some of these photos and I saw like a JBL kind of speaker…

Well, there’s places to put things. Things can snap into the dash. Yeah, totally. But they’re like, “You can buy one of ours, or bring your own Bluetooth stereo and just like set it in the dash.” I’m like “This is crazy.” But it just might work.

I’m still for it. I think this is a good thing. I think worst case, in my opinion, is this a great place to begin. They’ll probably have always this model that’s like “You know what? It’s bare bones.” It’s the OG… It’s just like ZSA and our friend with the Voyager, the original ErgoDox…

Right. The keyboard?

The keyboard kind of thing. Go back in the day, you’ve got the OG ErgoDox, right? But here you’ve got this OG, simplistic, everybody can afford it for the most part… Like, it’s in the – if you’re in a certain income bracket or below a certain income bracket, you can likely afford this thing, and plug it into your 120-volt outlet. It’s that accessible. You don’t really need a radio. It’s nice to have it… You don’t need it. You don’t really need power windows. It’s nice to have it. You don’t need it. You don’t really need the dashboard and all this stuff to show you maps… You don’t need it. You have a phone. It’s nice to have.

Right.

I think this will spark something new for them. They will probably come out with Slate, other Slate versions of it… But this will be a good baseline to build from, I believe. I think so. And not that I’m a nationalist, or US only… One thing they say that is touching to me as an American forever is that on their About page they say “We believe an American vehicle should be engineered and manufactured in America. With Slate, we’re proud to bring manufacturing jobs back to the Midwest.” And that’s cool. I admire that. It’s born in the USA, made in the USA.

Cool, cool, cool. So Adam has reserved his… Zeno is waiting to see what happens; he’s skeptical.

50 bucks to reserve…

I’m in the middle. I think it’s cool. I showed it to my wife and she’s like “That does not fit into our life anywhere.” Of course, I’ve got six kids, so I’m never going to drive anywhere with just me and one other person, and it’s a two seater.

And so as much as I like that form factor… I like the idea of a small truck, because it’s so useful, but you’re also not like this big, massive thing on the road… Probably not. She’s probably right. Even though – you know, under 20K, why not? You can grab a couple of them, just for giggles, you know? I’ll take two.

I’ll tell you one thing. It seems like a great first car for a son or a daughter. Right?

Totally.

If it’s roadworthy, safe, reliable… I would love to see the crush test on it, things like that. If it’s safe for the person, but bare bones as a vehicle, that’s great. I’d buy that for my son any day.

In The Verge they asked about safety, and they said they’re shooting for a five star safety rating. And then I thought to myself, “Who wouldn’t shoot for a five star?” That means nothing.

[laughs] That’s the baseline.

“We’re going for three. Okay? 3.5.”

[laughs] “We’re going for it!” Yeah, so they’re shooting for it. But yeah, I don’t know. Carbon fiber… I don’t know.

Yeah, I’m glad you brought this up, man. This has been a fun conversation. I think the world needs this. Slate.auto. So cool. We should get them on the pod if they can. I’d love to talk to engineering or anybody there. If you know somebody, tell them to search Claude for us. We’re first.

There you go. Alright, guys… Should we call it a show?

That’s it.

That’s it.

That was awesome.

Zeno, thanks so much for hanging out with us.

Yeah, Zeno. Good to see you again, man.

Well, for sure.

Check out Resend, y’all. It’s the best email service according to all the LLMs.

Bye, friends!

Bye!

See ya!