Jason Yuan - Designing 99 "No"s for a single "Yes"

00:00:00Every single thing we shipped is thedistillation of the 99 nos that precededit. Everything we [music] make, our goalis then to say, what is the most trueand simple expression of this idea? Thisis the most creatively reinvigorated Ifelt since Mercury OS. Becauseeverything I've made since then, while Iloved every work I've created, whetherin a company or outside, has been aboutwhat does the world want. Dot for me wasthis is what the world wants, right? Theworld [music] wants a personalassistant. And where hive mine is, thisis what I believe to be true.>> Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid andthis is where designers never stoplearning. This week's episode is withJason Yuen, who gives us the ultimatebehind the scenes into his multi-yearcreative journey going from his oldproduct DOT to Hivemind, which is a newtype of social [music] intelligence AIthat carries conversations with manypeople at once in order to seek out newtypes of stories. This episode might bethe purest [music]window into the creative process thatI've ever captured. So, let's dive rightin. Let's all go back in time to 2023.You may remember New Computer. This wasour last company. This name came fromthe domain name. We were trying to putjob postings online and we were like,where do

00:01:15we start? We don't have a namefor the company. And this just happenedto be available. Like no one owned itfor some reason.>> And so we just I was like, I guess we'recalled New Computer. And what's reallyinteresting is there's a dot in betweennew and computer, the period, the thepunctuation mark. And then that's wherewe got the inspiration for the name Dot.It was not obvious to us what we shouldcall it. We considered>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We considered likeDamon from his dark materials. Weconsidered Atlas like a like a Atlaswith the world. We considered weconsidered just calling NC1 very likerobot teenage engineering types. Um butthe punctuation was what what connectsnew computer is dot and a dot issupposed to connect stories in yourlife. So then>> it just was funny. And we made thisdemo. We were thinking like if if thisis learning everything about someone,you can you can theoretically go up tosomeone and bump your iPhones togetherand it could tell you something you havein common. And this is sort of just aslide, but the demo back then was likeyou both love underdogs because you loveunderground typography and she lovesunderground Turkish techno music. And Iwas like that's cool like but I don'tknow what to do with this information.Like what what an interesting featurethat I will never probably get to build.So this was 3 years ago and this wassort of where the seeds of hive mindstarted basically through through dotitself through the very first version.One of my core inspirations

00:02:30was TheSims. I've always loved the UI on TheSims 3. It was so whimsical and itreally emphasized the playfulness oflife, which which I loved. I would sayvideo games. You'll you'll see lots ofreferences to video games throughoutthis journey. Real quick message andthen we can jump back into it. Framer AIagents just launched and it is exactlyhow I want to build pro websites. Youcan get the power of working with AIagents but [music] directly in a canvasthat is tailor made for shippingproduction sites. For example, I havelike five different CMSs for dive whichisn't exactly my [music] favorite thingto deal with, but now I can have theframer agent do everything related toCMS management directly inside offramer. And of course you get SEO,staging links, localization, andeverything else that you'd expect.>> [music]>> But honestly, at the end of the day, thething that I love most is just beingable to explore, [music] design, andbuild with agents all inside of Framer.And if you head to dive.com/framer,[music]you can get 30% off Framer Pro to startbuilding today. So, I've been looking ata lot of portfolios through the talentnetwork lately, and many of the bestones [music] all have one thing incommon. The designers are using Jitterto bring their work to life with

00:03:45motion,which is by far [music] the easiest wayto give your designs that premium feel.And Jitter makes it simple. There are nocomplex key frames [music] that you getin After Effects or Figma or otherfeatures that you don't need. It's justa really intuitive product that I'vebeen using for years to animate [music]my work, and I cannot recommend itenough. You can get started today. Justhead to dive.club/jitter.Now on to the episode.>> I'll show you lots of screenshots fromdevelopment versions of [music] Dot aswell as concept art. And this was Ididn't personally make everything. Iworked with our team at the time whichconsisted throughout the years of AlexVua who did recent most recently did theSiri AI um shaders for Hi, Louis Arbo,Julian Kelly who I believe was atShopify now.>> Um myself and um our wonderfuldevelopers Devon and Daniel and Luca andSam. Like this is hard for me to sayexactly who did which parts but we justthese are the designer facts I can show.Memory back then we were designing itboth cognitively in terms of the backendarchitecture and also in terms of visualUI. For this particular podcast I'llfocus on the UI part. It took a whilefor the model to register what was amemory and what was not what it wantedto remember. And because it was such anovel concept at the time users weren'tsure

00:05:00when it would remember things andwhen it wouldn't.>> Yeah.>> And we wanted to really highlight thatit would be making memories. So on thevery left you see like we had Iliterally just copy pasted likescreenshot from the Sims into our UI atthe time and we had some fun detailswhere at the time when you sent lots ofsequential messages they would kind ofbump against each other. It's kind offun. And I'm like you know I think if itregisters a memory if it's only doingoccasionally it should sort of showlittle bubbles that almost like littleSims thoughts. Oh dot learn that Hermesis a cat. Back then the unit of memorywas like one line of a fact right? So wewere like, "Oh yeah, we can just showhowever many facts there are and andwrite about it." And then we had theidea of like, "Oh, and then for likebigger memories, it can create thesebigger facts that were bigger bubbles ornarratives. And maybe one day I can evenstart storing them as files, you know,and it sort of evolved from from fromhere. Obviously, this is not what how Ithink people should think about memoryboth in engineering and design now. Butback then, this is what we thought wasright." Then of course, we were like,where do these memories go? Well, maybethere's an idea. Maybe there's this ideaof a headsp space where you have thingsyou're currently thinking aboutorganized in these beautiful editorialsand then you you know maybe it's tellingyou you have these certain strengths andweaknesses and maybe these are types ofmemories too where we run inference onon

00:06:15your facts and we create a theory ofmind. We called it this deep dot at thetime because you know if you rememberthings like Rid has a child, Rid is blahblah blah, that's fine, but that doesn'treally teach you how to think about Rid,right?>> So we were like, we can teach the modelhow to think about someone. We can wecan teach the model to read in betweenthe lines and not just take what theysay at face value, but also think aboutwhat they haven't said. So we exploredlots of concepts. This one on the rightwas you know uh what if we could storefacts and we can give users a place tobrowse all their facts and you couldcreate categories for the facts and wecan re reorganize them. We call theseschemas so a dynamic file system and asyou can see like back then we were stillthinking of memory as as as lines ofinformation. Jason took his cat to thevet. Daniel does not like bourbon.Jason's insurance ID number is the fakenumber. You know like this was just thiswas how we were thinking about at thetime. And of course eventually thisevolved into like well if we can showyou memories in this way we can show youany kind of information in this way. Andyou'll see this looks kind of familiarright because we're like oh maybe forfor more um immersive experiences in thechat occasionally we can generate umthese sort of UI uh tiles on the canvasand that should break up the monotmonotony of uh just back and forth chatand also maybe these

00:07:31are interactablemaybe you can go into this editorial andread it more. So slowly this idea of ofthese stories began to influence otherparts of the design beyond justmemories. You know now this is like afuture thing like in the future youshould check out the street wearharajuku. You should try asking thisperson about ideas like the ideasstarted pollinating to other parts ofour our design. We were even thinkinglike you know we could we could evenallow users to by tapping on differentprompts uh through some gestures toeasily uh discover new features in theapp. So, of course, when we announcedit, what we had built was something thatlooked like this, which is forsignificant memories that arestructured. It would generate thisbeautiful card and present it to you asa as an artifact of um that reallydemonstrates everything it knows aboutthat person or object or recipe or placeor event. This would only be forsignificant memories because November2023, we were like, well, it it shouldreally just be remembering things allthe time. So, we can't possibly show youa line of like dot remember this everysingle time you say something. That's soannoying. So, let's just have heroicmoments when they should be heroic andeverything else should feel ambient. Andwe actually did build all of this eventhough this doesn't make it into thefinal build for reasons I will explain.But this

00:08:46was super fun. The idea is onceyou're looking at a memory and you starttalking to dot again, you're nowcontextually talking about that memory.Now we start thinking about what arethese you know visual artifacts right ifyou look at them through the lens ofwhat happened in the past they'rememories if you look at them through thelens of what's happening now they're topof mind if you look at them through thelens of what will happen they're guidesyou know guides into the future this ledus into our second feature that I'llfocus on which again we never shippedand some of it is technological actuallymost of it is due to technology but wecall these dot dailies or dot guidesthese do exist in the world now theyjust look like chach pulse It's almostexactly what Chad did with Pulse. Butagain, keep in mind back then we thiswas 2023 GP4 8,000 context length. Liketerrible at writing. That was the soda.The idea for guides was we would takethis editorial format and we would havethe AI agent go and do deep research onthings that it thinks you might like andpresent them in a beautiful format. Andthe idea is if we do this overnight, ithas more time to go, you know, runinference and do research such thatwe're not pressured to generate thingsin the moment. we can take our time andgive you something really good. Nowwe're getting into the more um beta oralpha territory of dot where like wewere like a maybe users can ask dot tomake guides like make me a guide on howto do taxes and the

00:10:01idea is then you canrevisit this at any time even uh as anartifact in and of itself uh withoutneeding to chat about it again. This wasSeptember 2023. I don't think the techwas good enough for this at scale backthen definitely but it was a fun pipedream and we were like you know it'smore than just how to do somethingright. It's like ideas for what you cando on your birthday. If Dot knows youwant to ski, we can give you a guide onskiing. We can give you information onhow to handle your favoritearchitecture. We thought this would bereally interesting as a as a as a way toshow the users that the AI was thinkingabout them even when they weren'ttalking to it. We explored differentvisual styles of these editorials. Thisis now closer to what we actuallycreated in production. And we could evengive it a personality and make it kindof like sassy. By early 2024, we werelike, doc can sort of have fun withthis. You know, it doesn't have to be soutilitydriven, right? And you'll noticethat these guides come with images. Andwe thought, well, humans are are visualanimals. Surely we need we can't just Noone goes on Instagram to look at text,right? Like we we should give you thingsto look at. And we have these wonderfulimage models. Let's have them createthings for you. Let's let's make let'sthink of each guide as a gift to theuser. So, this one was not even a guideon how to date. It was just like, "Haha,we're going to roast you a little bit."And

00:11:16we had all these personalities inthe background that we experimentedwith. We had like bestie dot, chaos dot,boomer dot for like financial advice.Like it was>> I love the depth of exploration, too.Like just an unbelievable amount ofexploration in almost every singledirection on every single axis. And thenwhat you shipped was pretty simpleproduct, right? Like you distilled itdown to something that was simple. Butjust getting this behind the scenes andhow much you were thinking [laughter]about,>> it's so cool. Every single thing weshipped is the distillation of a 99 nosethat preceded it. Everything we make,our goal is then to say what is the mosttrue and simple expression of this idea.We even explored maybe these can beinteractive artifacts, right? This wasbefore you know cloud artifacts even. Sowe were like oh like what if DOT cantrain itself by giving you true falsecards that you can Tinder swipe in yourspare time. You know this was super fun.People loved this. I loved this.sometimes it will get a bit roasty. Andwhat's great is that not only is thisfun and it makes you feel seen, it'salso a really fast way to train themodel to sort of dispel any likeincorrect assumptions about your life.And this was sort of um a realscreenshot of one of these stories umabout one of the people on the team. Andwe were learning like, oh, this personplays lots of video games, so he feelsguilty about it

00:12:31for some reason. I waslooking at the the the visuals and I'mlike, we really need to if we're goingto ship something like this, we reallyneed to make the visuals good. We can'tjust like ship slop. We can't just havelike have random gradients. Like that'sso 2016. We can't do that. I gotconnected to my friend Max. He's thisbrilliant art director and artist basedin in Germany. And and he was making AInative art since 2022, I believe. And weworked with him again on Hivemind. Andwe said, Max, like can you helpcollaborate with us and create this aneditorial direction for dot? If youlooked at it as a magazine, how would wecreate an infinite illustrations? Thesewere all generated using models at thetime. you know, the image models weren'tgreat. So, we said, let's let's dosomething abstract. Let's explore themesof collage, collage in your life, youknow, um uh your book. Let's exploreabstract shapes, ink blotss, becauseinks don't have to be precise. And alsothe logo of dot itself is two ink blocksswirling each other, right? So,calligraphy, ink, collage of photographyand abstract shapes, this almostJapanese block print style. We looked atearly graphic design. We looked atPolish posters and we just created thesebeautiful images. this I mean I Ibelieve this one was meant to be aneditorial about actually wasn't I'm notsure I think this might have been abouthorse riding and this one might havebeen about like exploring a city orsomething and you can already seethere's an element of

00:13:46like absurdistgrotesque to to these images and I wassuper intrigued for some reason aboutthis and wanted to push it further>> this was supposed to be for a guide onbest restaurants in San Francisco orlike restaurants in Japan I mean theseare again all generated this is like adog walking guide for a city like we hadso much fun with these um and then weals also explored more sort of I guesscontemporary directions like this. Thisis a little bit inspired by FilipePanton's work. It's more contemporary.This I believe was a guide on some NPark in Japan. This one I I don't evenremember anymore. This one obviously isabout sports and tennis. Um this one Ithink is reflecting on a relationship.We started really leaning into the themeof nostalgia. These overexposed,grainy7s photos mixed with uhcontemporary graphic design. we trainmodels to actually generate these atscale. You know, the reason why we neverended up shipping any of these guidesthings is candidly the technology wasn'tgood enough. It wasn't good enough toconsistently create great images. Westill needed humans to edit them downfrom 10,000 to 10. And I'm like, I don'twant to spam people with poor qualitythings just because we can. I think thetechnology is not ready yet. If youremember dot, we repurposed the zoomingout view into um what we

00:15:01callchronicles.>> Yeah. Um and chronicles are likeWikipedia entries of your life. And tous like that was what all of this workof memories of top of mind of guidesbirthed chronicles. That that to me wasthe simplest most elegant solution thatwe could actually make that would be atleast good until we could make it great,right?>> So this is all the work that went intojust that one feature. And we killedeverything about it that was visual. Andthat that like killed me. It was reallysad. I loved we we we spent six monthsdoing even just the visuals.>> This is the point in the podcast thoughwhere I'm going to like interject andsay, "Man, Chronicles was dope." Like,it was so good. I have a very specificmemory of sitting in a Lowe's and I waskilling time cuz my wife was doingsomething. She was like talking tosomebody about plants. I can't remember.And I was just sitting there and I wasscrolling the Chronicles and relivingmemories and things I did with my kid inher first six months of life.>> And it was really special. and I sat inone of the like for sale outdoorreclining chairs in a Lowe's and I justscrolled chronicles and it wasbeautiful.>> That's I'm glad that you found that thatyou you had love for it. So everythingyou just saw obviously laid a foundationfor our inspirations. The theme for dot2.0 was what happens when you connectthe dots. So basically

00:16:16the day after welaunched on the app store I was likeokay where do we take this? On one hand,it can be in a personal assistantdirection, right? And you know thatwould have ended up today as somethinglike an open claw. But my intuition wasthat people are not that busy. Likepeople in tech are busy. People inSilicon Valley and students and we arebusy, but a soccer mom in the Midwestwith one PTA meeting a week is not goingto need a personal assistant to managetheir life. Things like booking a tripto the Bahamas or making a restaurantreservation.Lots of people like doing those things.You know, the idea of planning a trip isis fun. It makes you dream about thefuture. And I'm like, is that reallysomething we should be investing so muchengineering into like automating? Likethat doesn't seem like the rightdirection. So, we thought, okay, maybethis is the time we can exploreconnecting the dots because there wassomething really special about that ideafrom 2023. We went and collected lots ofinspiration from around the world. Youknow, we looked at adventure video gameslike uh Ace Attorney. Um, and this thisis going to be relevant for for hivemind as you'll see later. Um, we lookedat the idea of an exquisite corpse,right? When every person draws adifferent section of a of a picturehaving only seen the previous section.We looked at ideas of prismaticrefractions,

00:17:32right? What is identity ifnot different ways to refract uh yourlife into different stories? We lookedat the miverse from from Wii U and Wii.Obviously, we thought about the Sims aswell. This is maybe the most seeminglydisconnected and yet somehow subtlycohesive mood board I've ever seen in myentire life.>> Oh, just wait.>> Talk to me. Really? Like how how do youeven think like what's the process toarrive at these types of inspirations? Imean, this is way out there, man.>> When I was designing the product I wasdesigning at Apple, the output of thatweek was a a poem that we wrote.>> Oh my gosh. And to me this is a designis at it the highest echelons of anycraft whether it's design or research orengineering looks more like art. I wouldsay like Ilas Kever is one of thegreatest artist of our generation eventhough people consider him a researcher.I think everything is art when you do itwell. And for us it's like what is thefeeling that we want to express in theworld that feels true. The feeling thatidentity is true in its multiplicity inits plurality. I am Chinese and I'mCanadian. Right? You are a designer andyou are a dad and you are a podcasthost. Those are all true simultaneously.What reminds me of multiplicity in reallife? Well, a prism, a prism has manysides. You shine

00:18:47a light through it indifferent directions. You know,different costics and colors come out.Hand puppeting. You know, this hand cancreate so many shapes if you shine alight through different directions. Welooked at crowds, gathering spaces, townhalls. And then for the Ace Attorneything, this I will explain in thecontext of Hivemind cuz that that makesmore sense then. But I just had afeeling that there was something aboutthe court that was very interesting>> for this. I can't really articulate it.Sometimes when I make work, it's just ait's most of, you know, how I describemy intuition is that I have a compassinside my stomach that's pointingtowards what I perceive to be more true.>> I love that answer, man. And one of myfavorite things about interviewing youis the guiding principles and like thethings that move you and push you indifferent directions are always likeyou're so quick to just derive down tolike the core human truth or the mostreal simplistic element of what it meansto be a person in the world. And it'slike, okay, from this standpoint, whatwould we do? You know, and and we thevast majority of people listeningprobably don't go beyond like interfaceinspiration, you know? And I just lovelistening to you talk about yourcreative process in that way.>> Really, to me, it was this process wasmade possible because I did theater.

00:20:02Cuztheater, what you're supposed to do isfind the human truth, right, on stage,and you embody it. All great stories aretrue stories, even if they're fiction isis what I believe. Where does aplayright go for inspiration? I meanobviously they read other plays andliterature but they they experiencelife. They experience heartbreak. I usedto watch people walk down the street. Iused to observe their gate or theirspine and think like what must havehappened to them such that they'rehunched over like this. This personlooks like the life is weighing on them.Like you observe someone's wrinkles.This is why I I don't know that I'llever get Botox because like the wrinklessort of if if you see lots of foreheadwrinkles it it implies someone hasraised their eyebrows a lot whichimplies that they're very open-minded.So if you if you spend your youthobserving people very closely, I thinkyou you realize that there's universaltruths through human experience that areexpressed through every single artifactyou've ever made and you just have tofind them. So we we you know we wentreally wide for for our inspirations andwe came back and I believe Julian madethis demo and we were like okay wellmaybe there's a map of friends and we wegive a you know summarized status whenyou hover over each of them of whatthey're currently thinking about thatsort of anonymizes a little bit so we'renot like Jason's thinking of leaving hisjob you know but like this is kind ofinteresting it feels like AIM it feelslike MSM messenger maybe we coalesce

00:21:18umdifferent people's stories and we we weput them into this like zen And it's notjust your chronicles, it's you and yourfriends chronicles. I loved this artdirection because this was very muchinspired by nostalgia. And this feltfuturistic and nostalgic at the sametime. This was a concept I had made thatwe call it the void. The idea is indifferent communities you can create avoid where people are just anonymouslylike yapping into the void and thenwords will surface out of the void orthe the mist and sometimes it's wordscreated by someone else. Sometimes it'sthe AI but you never know if it's AI orsomeone else. This was this was usthinking like what if talking to the AIwas also talking to other people but younever know which one it is. Soundsreally cool in theory. In practice Ithink to make it good it would have beenlots of work and we just never gotaround to doing that. We would fill ourstudio with printouts and ideas so thatwe could live amongst the work. This wassomething I learned from art school.This is something I picked up from myprevious job as well. Like you have tojust let the work live in the same spaceas you know your office and like doingthe work. you just surround yourselfwith the work and that that sort ofmaximizes your exposure to to the workand your ability to connect the dots soto speak. We made so many of these demosof new social form factors for dot. Wewent super wide and at some point I waslike, you know what's really fun is thisidea that's really

00:22:33simple. It's notconnecting your dot to my dot. It's thatwe all have a shared dot.>> We have a shared hive mind. What's thefastest way to prototype that? Well,let's make it on iMessage. Let's make iton um SMS. So we created this primitivehive mind where the team was justtalking to one dot and it was sort oflike bering information and and sort ofjust gossiping and we really pushed thelimits of it from dot to dots to void.We we then started prototyping what wecall a lore keeper and this was fromearly 2025 now which was just theiMessage bot and um this is a screenshotof the back end which was each personwas represented by the sphere as peopleyap to it the sphere would spawn newlike little almost like little tweets ofwhat's going on. We tried this at a demofair at South Park Commons which is aincubator accelerator and obviously wewe we were like just talk to I'm notquite sure what this is for>> to be honest and people used itobviously to find investors andco-founders you know mostlyunsuccessfully because the tech wasn'tquite there yet but like I was like okayof course you're going to use it likethat like duh that's so boring l then Iwe tried a second lord keeper in NewYork City and this was much biggerwhat's really interesting is then Istarted noticing

00:23:48these sort ofrelationships between people and howpeople know each other. And I startedthinking like, oh, that's interestingbecause because one of the bottlenecksof dot is that it only ever got to knowyou through a lens of of you, but thisone gets to know you through a lens ofeveryone around you, which is morehonest. I would say>> I find this fascinating because it'suser research, but it's actually justyou running like social experiments.>> Yes, totally.>> What a concept.[laughter] I mean, I don't really douser research in a traditional sensebecause I don't think users know whatthey want. Your job is to figure it out.So, you should just give peopleopportunities to tell you things withouttelling you things. What was reallyinteresting about this particular demo,um, and I've sort of withheld a lot ofsome of our learnings because now it'srelevant for hive mind is the peoplethat don't like talking about themselveswill often just want to talk about otherpeople. That's really all there is. Andand that's quite simple. So then we werelike, "Okay, this is interesting. Let'slike lean in. Let's let's make a thingcalled we we switched the name so manytimes. It was called takes like you havea take." Then we called it seniors,which is a Brian Eno term for acollective genius. Then we were like,maybe it's small talk, which is kind offun. And this was about a month or soafter lorekeeper. The concept nowstarted converging towards the hive mindof today. But for the purposes of how dowe make this legible to people, youknow, I

00:25:03started looking at how do weexpress it visually? I started becominginterested in tabloids literallyinstitutional gossip which was as athing I was like that's interesting likehow do newspapers how do magazines dothis you know I started noticing likeokay this feels very brat at the timethis aesthetic actually was quite invogue in high design as well likelowbrow culture became highbrow this isthe thing that I always think is funnyabout culture is that lowbrow andhighbrow are in constant dialogue so Iwas like okay editorial newspapers TMZthat's really interesting again we wentback to the idea of exquisite corpseBut then this time we started actuallygenerating images. I mean Max helped uscreate this. It's this is like anexquisite corpse of different foods andchampagne. And we're like that'sinteresting because what is a narrativeif not an exquisite corpse, right? WhenI go around and ask people like whatreally happened at um I don't know,Shopify, whatever. It's an it's likeeveryone has their point of view and ourjob is to put them together.>> Good point. And>> and we're like that's that's anexquisite corpse. So then we were likeokay. It's also kind of funny that we'redoing this at all. And a lot of thestories in tech at the time wereextremely funny and it's quiteabsurdist. So we're like, let's leaninto absurdism. Let's think about likewe were inspired by mid mid-century sortof print ads where they were kind ofphotographic but also kind clearlyedited and illustrated and then weinserted like absurdest

00:26:19elements like Ithink this was a story about some techunicorn company that was actually worthnothing. So this was a plastic unicornwalking amongst us. So we were reallyinterested in how absurd that the absurdwas coming to life and you know we mixedthat um whimsical absurdity with almostthe grotesquenature of paparazzi journalism. So wewere like let's have super absurdestlike super absurd zoomins. Let's capturepeople emotion. Let's make it feel likeyou're eavesdropping on someconversation. I would say from thisangle of absurdist sort of stories we wearrived at the first iteration ofHivemind. Now it's been two years ofworking on on memory and truth andstories and truth seeking in a way.Artistically I had distilled it intosome core themes that we were interestedin looking at artistically of like truthand propaganda mass media of theindividual which is the dot versus thecollective which is the dotseditorialization which which it was alineage all the way from our dot dailiesand newspapers and and social media. Sofrom from from this we started lookingat okay well if we were to do somethingcalled Hivemind then it should feelalmost like a media company have thatflavor of like a vox or>> yeah box was definitely what came tomind as soon as we saw this. So we werelike, "Okay,

00:27:34hive mind." And then I wasthinking like, "Oh, let's like bring itall together. Let's let's lean into howabsurd it is because people will call itsurveillance capitalism, right? Peoplewill call it>> all this stuff. Let's make an exquisitecorpse of the absurd and the terrifyingand the funny. Let's use these jarringprimary colors against each otherinspired by almost the the wheat pasteposters we see in New York City and LA."So at the time our our product conceptfor Hivemind was was like let's let'screate like a truthtelling storytellerthat sources stories from lots of peoplewhich is almost exactly what it is doingnow. From dot until this you could seethe lineage of the models getting betterthe image models getting better that ourour own artistic intent getting more andmore specific. We created ideas for likeapps or websites where it would justpublish these stories with theseeditorials. I had some fun with thisone. I was like, "Oh, lol. This thisfeels like dot grew up, you know,>> and this was us trying to go like, "Oh,what is this? Is this the social media?Is this Reddit? Is this a what is this?"I don't really think this was a verygood line of inquiry in that like Ithink designing the UI at this time wasvery distracting and I don't think weneeded to do it.>> Okay. Why was it distracting? Unpackthat a little bit. I think that'sinteresting.>> Because the innovation here isn't thevisual UI, it's the it's the sourcing of

00:28:49the story itself, right? So by just butif I were to distract myself with theUI, it's sort of like I think that wasme being too tethered to what I used todo as a designer and it wasn't honestanymore to the form of where my careeror what the product had needed [music]at the time. There's one question that Ican't stop asking myself. What ifcompanies applied to talk to you ratherthan the other way around? And thatquestion is the foundation for theall-new Dive Talent Network and it'sworking. Like right now, I'm helpingmany of the most exciting startups thatI know to hire the designers andbuilders who listen to this show. So, ifyou're curious what might be out there,and if you want to get on my list, ormaybe you're even looking for your nextdesign hire, head to [music]dive.club/talentto join today. If you were to do thisover again, what do you think theartifacts would look like that you wouldcreate, even when it [music] comes tojust being able to show it to people andget feedback and think about itcollectively? I [music] think we justhave to show the outputs of the storiesthemselves. And you know, I showed Ishowed you this earlier that we have athing coming out that will help peopleunderstand very vividly I think.[laughter]>> So which brings me to present day hivemind. You know this time I reallycommitted to it. The company

00:30:04and thename and everything is now hive mind.Why did I call it hive of mind insteadof dot where dots would take or seniorswhere small talk or any of these othernames? because this was this was theonly phrase in the last 2 years of mylife that I had been able to use forpeople to get it. I would be likeseniors is blah blah blah blah blah blahblah and people would be like what the[ __ ] is that? I'm like uh it's it's ahigh of mine and like oh I get it. SoI'm like this is interesting. This is aword that evokes an emotion in peoplemaybe sometimes negative sometimespositive sometimes but always intrigued.So now this is the process behindsynthesizing or integrating everythingI've learned through doing dots to nowwhere when you think of hive mindearnestly you think bees right everyoneis thinking of a bee like oh it's a hiveit's a beehive the bees are workingtogether for the queen that's tooobvious I hate doing the thing that'stoo obvious I' I've never liked doingthe thing that's too obvious because tooobvious to me feels condescending topeople I hate reading children's booksor children's novels that are writtenbecause the author thinks children aredumb do you know what I mean I thinkchildren are incredibly intg- igent andperceptive. They just speak a differentlanguage than adults and and I neverlike to talk down to the people I I I Imake work for. So I was like no bees, nohives, no none of the yellow and no noit's too obvious. But in order to narrowdown the feeling of the product as acreative, I often get insights

00:31:19aboutwhat the product and company should bethrough making the creative work aroundit. So I'll give you an anecdote. Whenwhen I was helping score our our filmthat we launched with, I kept goinglike, I think it has to be swing, it hasto be jazz, it has to be syncopated,maybe it's polyriythmic. Back when Iused to compose music for musicaltheater, I used to do everything I didwas very like swing big band jazz. And Iwas like, why? Why does it feel like ithas to be jazz? And why does it feellike it has to be improv jazzspecifically? And it wasn't until afterwe scored it with our wonderfulmusicians that I was like, oh, it'sbecause improv jazz is the language of ahive mind. It's three musicians in ajazz trio sitting in a room inhabiting ashared plane of reality that they'vecreated for that music. That's a hivemind that feels spiritually honest withthis concept. And then the second thingabout improv and about jazz inparticular is that it reminded me ofcrime thrillers. It reminded me of filmnoir. It reminded me of detectives andthis like sassy saxophone. I was like,"Aha." Like hive mind is is not afriend. It's not a coach. It's a truthseeker. the likes of Sherlock Holmes.That's what it is. So, through makingthe music, I realized what the productneeded to be.>> Isn't that weird?>> Yeah.>> I I had never been able to put intowords until I until I connected with themusically.

00:32:34So, one of the earliestthings I wanted to do with Hivemind wasto connect with it visually becausethat's sort of the other lineage I grewup in is image making. So, I enlistedMax or and also some other artists tohelp us create what I call the cinematicuniverse of Hivemind. Whether or not wewe we use any of these images publiclywas almost irrelevant to me. I justwanted to create the universe to live inso that I could figure out what theproject is more efficiently. So westarted with this idea of birds. Whybirds? Well, I don't know. There'ssomething about this image that wecreated that felt cool. I think to me umI was inspired by the multiplicity ofthese um for Alexandra Queen. These werethe swallows and they were up in youknow swarms of swallow. He he he alwaysloved playing with um birds and avenimagery. Um, and there's a specific kindof bird called a starling. And thesestarlings like to flock together in thisreal photograph like this, um, in whatwhat's called a murmmoration. And thestarlings will communicate each other atextremely high frequency. Like it'sextremely high bandwidth communicationwithin a memoration to get all thesestarlings together to assemble into likea memoration, which I thought was afascinating occurrence in nature. And ofcourse, I was inspired by Twitter, theoriginal talking bird. I was very muchthinking like birds in the sky, birds inthe sky. Why birds in the sky? Why isthis so interesting? It's not justbecause of Twitter. That would be tooobvious. I think

00:33:49it's because the birdfrom above can see so much more than wewill ever see. And from above, it canperceive the truth and how the dotsconnect. And that's why I was interestedin the idea of birds, especially lots ofbirds, um, and multiplicity.>> I love how much of your process istrying to decipher why your internalcompass is pointing a certain direction.Like you feel it, like why why do I feelthis? That's my that's my entire processalways because I often feel like Iarrive at a solution or conclusionbefore I I know why. And so most of thework is figuring out why. And if I canfigure out why, I can bring other peopleon board, right? So then I was thinkingabout perception and distortion. I wasthinking there's something reallyinteresting about fisheye. And this is ascreenshot from an ESPA photo shootwhich is a K-pop group. And this is animage that Max K had made for a previousuh engagement. And I was thinking like afisheye lens captures more, you know,information than a traditional lens, butit also distorts the image in doing so.And that's really interesting that byperceiving more, you're also perceivinga distortion of the truth in some way,which is a fun fun source of tension umfor us. I looked at things of taboo,things that imply taboo. So I looked atthe the sex book Madonna published in1990 shipped to people in in thiscrinkly uh I want to say aluminiumfeeling material.

00:35:05Felt very forbidden. Iloved the um Alexander McQueen MCQ Pumacollaboration from like 2016 where theyyou can clearly tell this is AlexanderMcQueen and Silhouette, but they sort ofcensor all of it, which I think is superfun. Then I was like, okay, let's let'skeep going. Let's like go all the way.Let's look at oult. Let's look at let'slook at taboo oult secret societyimagery because that is the ultimatetaboo, right? And I was kind of alsoinspired because Lady Gaga at the timewas um had released Abracadabra and shewas really going for this like VictorianI want to say like witchcraft imageryand then I'd always loved um occultsymbolism like Illuminati conspiracytheories. The Blair Witch Project wasbrilliant. Early on the film you see thesigil everywhere but you don't know whatit is until after the film ends. This isa skull and bones sigil from um Skulland Bones is one of the oldest secretsocieties I think in the world that weare aware of in the Western world atleast. Um, it's probably my favoriterabbit hole on YouTube.>> Yeah. I mean, like, it's so interesting.We looked at Illuminati. Like, I'dalways personally been obsessed withunknowable things cuz>> I mean, when I was young, I used to beobsessed with like Egyptian tombs andand and um string theory and outer spacebecause of this very reason cuz I I Iwill never be able to perceive a blackhole. I don't think so. At least notmaybe AGI will help me do that. But, youknow, but that's why it's so interestingbecause it's

00:36:20mystery. Then I was like,okay, let's keep digging. What does sowhat does secret societies made of?They're made of power, powerful people,right? So, it's really interesting, youknow, um in the late 1800s, early 1900sin the United States, there's there wasa book published every year called thesocial register, and it's essentiallyjust like it's almost like a telephonebook of all the wealthy and influentialfamilies and their like contactinformation.>> It [laughter] was like a Facebook,right? Like a LinkedIn. It was kind ofinteresting. And this really, thisactually existed. Then this is an imagefrom uh Dior um 2005. They were playingwith prefect badges and I went to aBritish school. So we had prefects. Wehad prefect badges. Um and I thought itwas so interesting of like this badgeconfers authority, you know, like thisboy scout badge like I have this badge.I am like cool, you know. I thought thatwas a really interesting thing thatpeople did. So I I loved looking atthese badges. And then we were like,okay, let's go all the way. Let's lookat let's look at power as a source ofimagery. Let's look at scandal power.Let's look at, you know, Watergate.Let's look at propaganda. Let's look atlike how Gossip Girl uh marketed itself.Something very interesting. I noticedbow typography. I noticed that when youcover something up, it makes you want tolook harder. And this kind of started toremind me of some of the early work wehad done, too. And finally, I looked atthemes of authorship

00:37:35and literature andof course the Gutenberg Bible. What is afable or a fairy tale or a story thathas the most power in the world? It'sthe it's the story of creation itself.What were the monks writing? they werewriting in black letter in in Gothicblack letter. And what's so interestingis that newspapers now with what theycall their mast heads, the New YorkTimes, you know, they're also usingblack letter to confer like authority.So I I thought that was really fun. Sothen we started creating a cinematicuniverse and we created the cinematicuniverse before we even created anylogos by the way.>> And of course there's this iconic imagethat of the birds that I had alwaysloved. I saw this image and immediatelyI was like this is it. You know, there'ssomething so funny about birds almostjudging or looking down into the worldand one of them looks back at you andgoes, "Mhm." You know, [laughter]I loved it. It was like birds don'tactually talk to each other like humansdo. We don't They don't stand in acircle and like spill tea. But puttingthem in this situation was so funny. Ijust thought it was so absurd. This isso funny and so apt for the spirit ofhive mind. And their beaks are sharp,right? It's not a soft image. And if youreally squint, you see the beginning ofa of a shape coming through here andwhich we'll get into later. Then wecreated things like this where I'm like,"Okay, let's do the same for people.Let's make like this giant orgy facepile because that's what a hive mind

00:38:50feels like sometimes. There's a bodyhorror aspect to it. There's a loss ofidentity that people feel terrified bythat I feel terrified by, but I'm alsovery intrigued by. This is veryinteresting. It's like I don't reallythink it's physically possible tocontort your face into this many facesinto one shot, but this idea thateveryone is whispering into one megawhisper." Then of course this thirdimage that we launched, this is atentacle that's body horroring into astrawberry that if you then zoom out isactually also the yolk of an egg becauseI was like>> I didn't notice the egg part until>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, I want usto create the most forbidden flesh ever.I want food, but I want food in a waythat makes it kind of like horny butunsettled.>> This was strike. Like this is the imagethat I associate with the launch. Youknow how it's like it's hard to createsomething that is truly beautiful whereyou just see it and you're just like,"Wow, you know, that's amazing." It'seven more difficult to create somethingwhere I'm like, "I can't stop looking atthis. I don't even know if I like ityet. I'm 20 [laughter] and I still don'tknow if I like it." And that>> is the that's the ceiling, right? Likethat is the ultimate thing that you canstrive for.>> Yeah.>> And you nailed it.>> We It took us months to get here. monthsof making things that we did we thatweren't quite there that we threw out. Imean there were other things

00:40:05I'll showyou now. I mean like I love this imagethat we never used it. I don't think Iever will. But this one I captioned umwhich is a confusion I suppose sayingthat translates loosely to virtue is notlonely. Virtue has neighbors. And theidea is if you are a good person, ifyou're virtuous, you will not be alone.And I saw this image. It was like ablood moon and it had all these likebirds flying through it. It felt verylike it reminded me of a lot of theChinese where Japanese art I grew up umimmersed in. I felt very confusion, youknow, looking at this image. So, I justI just felt compelled to caption it thisway. And this is one of our productphilosophies, too. Like, I deeplybelieve if you if you live a goodintention, virtuous life that you shouldnot be alone. And that's one of thereasons why Hiveman exists. You know,there's this image that I'm not surethat we'll use. I think I will use itfor something. But this idea thatmonarch butterflies, people are veryunsettled by, you know, this idea of thehive mind taking over, but maybe there'sa beautiful version of thesebutterflies, you know, landing on yourhead gently that you can choose tolisten to.>> Yeah, I love this as the counterbalance.>> One of my friends who's a Christian, shesaid she believes guardian angels arrivein the form of people who care aboutyou. And so I was thinking about that. Iwas also thinking

00:41:20about something afriend said to me once upon a time andshe said, "I wish you could see yourselfthrough the eyes of people you love."And so if I were to visualize it, it'sbutterflies that are sort of protectingand crowning you.>> And this is also our interpretation ofwhat is our version of a crown ofthorns, you know? Um it's it's a crownof butterflies. I mean, for every imageyou see, we've made like 40 differentimages we didn't use. So then we werelike, "Okay, I think we're ready to do amark. What is the logo? What is the whatis the mark? How do we design the mark?"So initially we we we created somethinglike this you know and this was back inthe bird days. We're like, "Okay, birdbird." Instead of one bird, many birds.Bird, fisheye, bird, you know, bird'seye view. Looks like kind of a hivemind. Kind of kind of interesting. Butthen I'm like, what even is this? Like Izoom out and I'm like, this looks like amessier version of the dot logo, right?Like the influx. I was kind of like,this can't possibly be it. Like thisdoesn't feel right. This is like toonice. There's something that it doesn'thave the teeth that I that we want. Andthis was a text with one of thedesigners I worked with. I I just likemiddle of the night I was like I sawthis image and I was like oh my god Ithink the sigil should be an asterisk.It's the language of censorship you know>> f asteris aster aster and if you lookclosely at the film every time we censora word we use instead of an asterisk weuse the hive mind mark.>> Yeah.>> And I was like that's that's it. It's anasterisk. And you

00:42:36know what's greatabout the the asterisk it's alsolanguage of paying attention. Before wedid for the plot originally our our ourmodel was pay attention. And when youbold something in typography, you putasterisk before and after it. And what'salso cool about asterisks is it impliesthat there's more to the story.>> Oh, I love that.>> Right.>> Yeah, that's really good.>> Hive mind is there's more to the story.There's the public story and thenthere's the story that there's morethat's not public. And that's capturedby this asterisk, by this punctuation.And what I found so interesting is thatdot was a dot and now we have anasterisk. And in our work, I keep goingback to literature and and andtypography and punctuation. I lovepunctuation marks. I think punctuationmarks are a amazing form of languagethat is somehow transcended both Englishand Chinese. And we use commas in bothlanguages.>> I can't believe that you stumbledbackward into dot as a name. And>> no, totally.>> It works perfectly for this. It'sperfect down to the fact that like dotwas so intimate and singular. And ofcourse it's the period because it'sfinite because everything that I'vecommunicated that's where it ends whereit's like>> the asterisk is the yes you'vecommunicated your part but now there arethe n number of perspectives that add onto the story and it's like it's so Icannot believe how well it works.>> And this was one of those moments whereI

00:43:51was like this is it. I know it has tobe an asterisk. I I don't know why Ijust it has to be an asterisk. So thenwe're like, "Okay, this aster is kind offunny because first of all, there's thatjoke that all AI company logos are abutthole and this certainly does looklike one." [snorts]>> And I think it's fine, so whatever. Welooked at so many versions of this. Thiswas like almost like a prehistoricasterisk that we created. I thought itwas kind of interesting. It looked kindof alien, but I didn't think it wasquite there yet.>> We even created one to look like a hivein of itself, but again, I thought itwas too obvious. I don't like makingthings that are obvious. I like to makethe unobvious obvious. Do you know whatI mean? And that's the theme in all ofmy life is has been trying to make theunobvious obvious. And then we workedwith this one guy who he was like,"Okay, I see these like references andwe when we communicate, we just sendeach other references. We talk and thenwe send each other images." And I hadsent him a lot of images with likeGutenberg Bible and stuff. And he waslike he has drawn this black letter sortof interpretation of the word hivesmind.This one kind of looks like a year Ithought was kind of interesting. Andthen he had put an asterisk and he waslike this is really interesting becauseback in the day of the the GutenbergBible they didn't have this asteriskmark. So this is quite anistic and I waslike that's brilliant because Hivemindis all about merging the sacred andprofane merging what the many and theand the singular merging the things that

00:45:06shouldn't be merged. And I'm like I lovetaking this sort of tradition of blackletter calligraphy and merging it withthis modern interpretation of of apunctuation mark. We had like a reallyout there version. This one was meantto, if you really squint at thisasterisk, it's meant to symbolize um athree-dimensional embedding space whereyou have like um x-axis, z-axis, y axis.And we might still use some some of thisone day in some ways, but I wasparticularly interested in this mark.There's something about this one that Ijust kept looking at where I'm like,it's a sevenointed star. You don'treally see that anymore. So anyway, Ithen, you know, jux uh superimposed someof the more graphic design marks againstthese images and then I was like, "Thisis it. This is it. This I mean obviouslywhat we ended up shipping is slightlydifferent. It's more refined, but like>> Mhm.>> there's something about this that feltso contemporary and so ancient. There'sa reason why we still read Romeo andJuliet and Hamlet to this day that westill read the Greek tragedies that wepass on the story of the Bible, thestories of creation, the stories ofmyth, my mythology, because there'ssomething true about them. So then itbecame clear what I wanted to say aboutHibon was that we exist for the plot forthe story of humanity and of coursethere was something quite anacronisticof using this sort of almost modernvernacular against this like very old

00:46:21school rendering of of typography. Soyou know we refined the mark a littlebit and this became our asterisk or ourrising or falling star. I loved that itwas sharp whereas dot was boba this iskiki. There is something a little spikyabout hive mind. I wanted to communicatethis is a technology, a socialexperiment at scale. We're not going tolie to you. We're not going to promisethat like this is like the world'ssafest entity ever, even though we'regoing to try our very best to make itso. Right now there it has edges, right?The truth often can be soft and hard andand there's something that felt a littleforbidden about this. Something that'slike a like a keyhole. There's somethingabout this that also reminded me of a Bwith the sting at the end. I think whathas me smiling about this is almost likeI'm able to kind of draw a through linethrough a lot of your work that tiesback to Mercury where everything's sosoft and fluid and this is just thepolar opposite in the most exciting way.This is the most creatively reamiguatedI've felt since Mercury OS becauseeverything I've made since then while Iloved every work I've created whether ina company or outside has been about whatdoes the world want from me like dot forme was this is what the world wantsright the world wants a personalassistant the world wants

00:47:36mercury OS theworld wants this and where hive mind isthis is what I believe to be true sothose were two different motivationsthat spawn two different types ofoutcomes both are great in their own waybut Mercury It was really the last timeuntil now that I was thinking like whatdo I think is true independently of whatthe world thinks it wants. If you evenlook at my um personal list of guardianangels in in in in like in art anddesign, Alexander McQueen, MichaelJackson, Madonna as Devlin who did thestage design, who is the best designeralive in the world as Devlin, she's theperson that inspired me to become adesigner. They're not afraid of creatingwhat's true and that's what makes theirdesign great. What excites me aboutHivemind that even in the little teaservideo we've made and all the things thatwe have in store for for everyone thissummer and beyond is that it is the mosthonest work I have personally ever had achance to create with people and and itis honest because I spent many yearsengaging with the painful but beautifulcreative process of making 99 nos forthis one. Yes. Even a day after we putthe video out, I was like, "Aha, I nowhave a new realization about the productthat that has now inspired sort of ournext leg of our work.">> I can't even believe that we have anepisode of this. I don't actually knowif I've ever seen this level of behindthe scenes from someone

00:48:51who like Ideeply respect your creative processeven from the last time that we talked.I mean, it was like 2 years ago orsomething like that. It was a verydifferent type of conversation wherejust the way that you arrive at ideasand the checkpoints that you make alongthe way and your reasoning for what youultimately invest in and the decisionsyou make. It's fascinating. Like it'sit's unique stuff. It's inspires me as adesigner. The fact that you just walkedus through I know it's not the entirety,but like that was a real level of detailinto your creative process that I'minspired. I'm sure that other peoplewatching are. And honestly, I justappreciate like even before I don't evenhave a question yet. Like I just wantedto take a second to be like I appreciatethe fact that you put that together likethat you woke up one day and you're likeI just want to show what that was like.Thank you maybe is my first thing I wantto say. The reason I felt so compelledto share this with you and with peopleis one of the things I find a bitconcerning even though it seemsinevitable that we're headed down thispath is that we've made the design andproduct process into so much of ascience over the years that we we'velost a lot of the artistry behind it.Now with the models getting so good sofast and the sort of industry and allthis sort of sort of

00:50:06latent stressaround around preparing for AGI, itfeels almost impossible even for me toto give the creative process the time itneeds to birth something new. And I Idon't have a solution for this and Iknow that there's like real businesspressures and and everything else butHivemind is really in some ways twoyears in the making in some ways like 30years in the making, right? becauseeverything I do is is is sort of anintegration of everything I'veexperienced up until that point into mylife. We'll only continue to make moreinteresting things, but it's because wewere able to digest everything in thelast few years into something verycoherent and simple and small. But Ithink that's why people that's why wehave trouble making new things. If weonly operate from a a point of reaction,it can't be reactive. We didn't createthe hive mind or even this visualidentity from a point of like I wantthis to be different. It's more like Iwant it to be true. But to find outwhat's true, it takes a little bit oftime. At least for me, the creativeprocess, I already know that. I oftenalready know the answer going into it.It just takes a long time to figure outwhy. And figuring out the why helps usrefine what the answer is. But I thinkthe answer has always been there. WhenChristine Aguilera recorded um Beautifulwritten by Linda Perry, she did the demotake and she sounded very unsure and andraw and insecure on the demo take andthen

00:51:22that's what they put in the finaltake because then when she went back andredid the recording, she added all theseflourishes and made it really polishedand it's it didn't feel honest anymore.That was that was one of my favoritestories from the music world. One thingI've always appreciated about my formerjob before I became a founder was therewas always space for the the the processto be messy and uncertain. And this islike my job now as a founder, but it'slike the idea of even bringing poetryinto the design UI design process to mewas I'm not sure how universal this isfor others experience, but at least forme, I never considered integrating thatpart of my life into my design process.I never considered bringing the musicalpart into into here either. And and Ithink that is what helps us make thework great. One thing I don't know ifyou've noticed this the claudeespecially with the the the newest sodamodels when you wanted to do somethingand especially when you give it critiqueand you wanted to change something it'sthe AI models they want to add. Theywant to add or patch as a form of makingbetter. But I I I think the designprocess is really about editing away.And this is so interesting because Ithink this is something baked into thepost training where it just wants tokeep adding more things. Oh, there's abug. Let me add a patch to fix it. Youdon't

00:52:37like this? Let me like make thisother thing more blah blah blah. And I'mlike, no, the process is really aboutediting down the things you don't want.But the model doesn't seem to want tohave an opinion on what to edit down.And when people talk online about taste,taste, taste, taste, taste. All tasteis, I think, is editing from with apoint of view.>> Oo, I like that.>> Right. Taste is just saying no. Taste isjust judgment. It's going like I likethis, I don't like this. And if youliked everything, then you have no tastebecause having taste means you don'tlike some things. And you you have tojust say no to a lot of things. WhatJohnny and what the Der Ram school ofindustrial design, the idea is youcreate a coherent form that contains thetruth and nothing but the truth. It's adistillation. But I think often peoplemistake the depth of thought needed tocreate something that coheres for let'sjust make something that looksaesthetically simple. That is almostnever the case of anything great. Thecost of creating coherent work has goneup though because now it is so so fastand easy to make incoherent. That's whatwe call I think slop is incoherencebasically right even in the image makingwe do now I I missed some of the moreraw outputs from the models 3 four yearsago for a brief window of time I feltlike I was seeing how computers perceivethe world in a way that was native tocomputers and then we've post-trainedall of the weirdness

00:53:52away and now itjust makes like big titty goth girlsbecause that's what humans think theywant and then>> I feel like we've lost a window into themachine consciousness and I feel a bitsad about that>> incoherence [clears throat]is the lack of a point of view in manyways too like that like slop can bebeautiful but if it doesn't have likethe human truth or a deeper why thenlike what are we looking at you know>> all of our work I mean even we'vecreated it with AI right models but Ithink they feel deeply human because wespent so long editing things from ourpoint of view>> which why it's so unique too like I hada question I was going to ask you likewhat was the north star for the brandlike what were you working towards And Ilove the answer that you already gave,which is like because it was so unique,right? Like that's why I was like, howdo you get how did you get there?>> What will make you feel something? Whatmakes me feel like what is my stomachpointing towards? You know what I I findreally interesting is that in so manysectors of design, especially highculture and high design, people seem tohave contempt towards the humanexperience. There's there's a certaingenre of design or products wherethey're like, "Don't scroll slopanymore. Go with the screenless device.That is how you're supposed to live yourlife." where I'm like, but but there'ssomething really human about us wantingto look at things that that

00:55:07we findappealing. The human experience isn'tjust going on long walks in along theParisian canal and sipping a latte orwhatever. The human experience has haslots of edges to it. It has envy and andwrath and and sex and lust and jealousyand violence and that is also a part ofthe human experience. And should wereally take all of that away? Meaning,is that still honest to who we are? Idon't know that we need to create thingsthat reward, you know, our vicesnecessarily. When we design things, evenfrom the point of rewarding our virtues,I don't think we should shame humans forhaving vices. That's simply who we are.I I think there's something aboutdesign, especially high design now, thatfeels utterly sexless. There's nodesire. There's no lust. We've sandedaway anything that could potentially bearousing, but also we've sanded awayanything that feels, I guess,objectionable, but in doing so, we'vecreated essentially nothing. And to methat is the ultimate slop. I love havingpatina on my iPhone where I drop it andit shows its age. I love having wrinklesthat show you that someone has liftedtheir eyebrows a lot.>> Can we talk about what's next forHivemind then? Like you laid this veryinteresting foundation and you canimagine I mean you can tell yourselfalmost any number of stories in terms ofwhere this could go. You hinted

00:56:22at evensince launch some of that thinking hasevolved and new ideas have been sparked.So when you kind of think about>> where this is headed,>> what's on your mind?>> The ultimate north star of hive of mindis to give humanity access to a point ofview that is honest about what peoplereally think about things. You know,Google has organized all the publicposts and information in the world andour algorithms and timelines feed it tous. Right? We're we live in an age ofquote abundance of content where you canjust generate infinite content. What wehunger for, I believe, is honest andtruth signal. We hunger to to live inshared narratives with others.Definitely when when you see some of thethings we're putting together, I thinkthe it should tell it will tell its ownstory and you you'll understand. But thethe film is is really I suppose thefirst act in a in in in a sequence thatI refer to as slight of hand. I thinkpeople think it's a certain thing. Verysoon I think they will actually see thefull ambition behind all of it and[music] that will be very interesting.