Full Transcript for Jason Yuan: For the Plot

The greatest gift you could give someone is to really try to see them, to understand them. I've always wished that we could do this for each other more and that our machines could help us do the same. We are in charge of our lives and our stories. We must not be afraid to take responsibility for how our stories turn out and how we feel about it.

If we only get to do this once anyway, we might as well do it true. First of Kind is the story of design and tech told by its pioneers, powered by Framer, Noon, Grokbot, Ramp, Purcell, Granola, and Profound. On the week of launching his new company, Hivemind, CEO and founder Jason Yuan sat down with me to talk about redesigning social intelligence.

I did so much work as an actor and as a story, like a playwright, that I learned acting is just trying on lots of costumes and identities. And then if you do that a lot, you begin to feel like, oh, playing this part of this character feels right. Playing this part of this character feels right. And then you learn that you can sort of become the version of yourself authentically that you want to bring to every room just by wearing your favorite Halloween costume.

And there's no reason I can't be every day. What do you feel you learned being a playwright that fed into acting? Because not every actor writes plays. I think actors who don't write plays are better actors. Why? They don't overthink as much. Yeah. Because when you write a scene, you're like, what do the characters want out of the scene? When they leave the scene, what change in the story? But then when you're acting, if you're like constantly thinking like, what do I want? What do I want? What do I do? You're not really feeling it.

And then it shows up as overacting. So I actually think I'm a pretty bad actor. It's one of the reasons why I ended up doing more music composition, more playwriting. I did hear from Hive that you have a theory about designers and music composers. I tend to say that a lot of designers, most designers are like failed musicians. I think that's probably true.

I mean, it's like composing a symphony is like writing a program. It's like orchestrating a system. And also generating experience and effect. Totally. It's not sort of a standalone thing. It's not a little toaster. You're trying to have an effect in the world. All of these things are sort of, we are creating a world that people want to inhabit and spend time in.

Whether it's on stage, whether it's in your years, whether it's something you touch or see. So to me, it's all world building. Do you feel like you're constantly, like, when you're on stage, you're always having a director's eye offstage trying to scrutinize what's happening in real time? Oh, my God, yeah. Where you can be kind of present as the actor on stage? So I'm really bad at...

That's... The only kind of performance I think I'm good at is, like, stand-up comedy. Okay, say more. Because... I can read the audience and how they respond to the energy and the jokes. And by spending my energy doing that, I'm not thinking as much of like, what do I want? It's more like, where do I take the story next? That will resonate with the shared environment we've created.

When I'm thinking of how do I make someone laugh? That's like, I feel very alive and I feel very present. I want to tell you a funny story about something that Hive did. Oh God, what happened? So you came to the config meetup on Tuesday night. Yes. And at some point, Ellis and I were talking about our friend Danny Trinh. Yes. And I said to Ellis, I was like, you know what? Danny is so freakishly funny.

Uh-huh. I'm convinced that he could like host a late night talk show. He just has that presence. And that's sort of like, I am just hyper generative and kind of twitchy and a bit offensive, but like you're laughing through it the entire time. I'm like, if that guy announced that he was going to do a late night show, maybe center around tech, maybe center on culture, since around New York, whatever, I would stay up late to watch it.

And somehow it's, I find, pinged me about it. What did it say? So I hear Danny Trinh is a funny dude. Like, why would he be great at doing late night? And I was like, well, he's like freakishly funny, et cetera, et cetera. It came back and asked, well, would you appear on the show with him? Would you? And so I was like, well, hold on a second.

Let's just make sure. Who's the person behind the desk? I don't know about this line of questioning. And Hivemind coordinated this project. Are you guys actually doing it? Hivemind has declared that Danny Trinh is almost like an agent. Danny agreed to host a late night show pilot as long as me and Ellis appear as the first guests. And I had also coordinated the fact that Ellis and I were both like, well, we'll do it, but, you know, I've got to make sure Slay is doing it.

I've got to make sure Ellis is doing it. Oh, interesting. I know. It's a thing. And it was the first time that I was like, this system is doing what it's supposed to do. It's like the diagram of the engine said that it should run. You built it and you hit go and it's running. It's doing what it's supposed to do in its smallest form. Every time it does something, I'm terrified.

Because I'm thinking of all the various ways that I can imagine it doing it in slightly off ways. And you just have to trust it will figure it out one day. The first question I ever asked it was, should I start a podcast? And it was just one of those things where like, let's see if it works. And then I realized what I really needed to do was to...

It can't go around pulling people. It can't be red or white. It has to take that information and almost triangulate it. Because what came back was, you should start a podcast, but also it sounds like your friends think you're the most entertaining when you're just being funny. Maybe you should just do stand-up. Yeah, I see. So it's rather than like option A or B.

It's like, well, what about option C? Exactly. Or like, you know, B prime, like something that's a little bit derivative of what you first proposed. It's like a few weeks ago, my therapist was like, you need to go back to the gym. Like you need to spend this energy somewhere physically. So I asked, hi, if I was like, which, where should I go work out? Because I thought it would say you should go to this gym because your friend goes here.

That's what you would expect. And it's like, I think you should go boxing. And I'm like, why would I want that? Like, I'm like, I'm like ready to debug. And it's like, well, I, I've just been hearing that you haven't been like, you know, very present with your friends. And, and the idea is if you go boxing and you're not present, you get punched in the face.

Correct. And I'm like, oh, actually like good idea. I might actually do it. And it's having boxed before. That is absolutely the case. It's not like running where you can kind of tune out like boxing. You have to kind of not let yourself tune out, not fall into the fog of war because you will get punched in the face. And then the second suggestion it had was rock climbing.

It's like if your brain can't stop solving problems, you just go solve that problem instead. Because I fully believe, I think this is like a world view that I developed young, having grown up in lots of different countries, that truth is plural. You can have a truth that contains reality, multiple truths. And also that truth ultimately can only emerge through cross-examination of different perspectives.

And it's very cumulative? What shape does that take? The shape that truth to me takes is a coherent story. If there's a story that makes every point of view feel coherent, that feels somehow true. Yeah.

Is this a show that I can make PG-17 jokes on? You can do anything. Okay. I was trying to describe to my friend what intuition and truth felt like. Okay. They're like, what does it feel like? I'm like, it feels like there's a compass in your stomach. Yes. And then when you feel like something is... headed in the right direction, the compass gets an erection.

I'm like, it's not, it's just, your stomach has, and they were like, what the? It's a visceral thing. You just feel it. You just know. I don't, I haven't tried to articulate this. And so, I mean, I've been working on this social intelligence things for years. We've tried every possible permutation of deterministic rules. Like when this happens, be a non, when this happens, be not a non, close friends, not close friends.

Right. All of it. Like 40 different hive minds. And it came down to it. We were like, I think we just need to give it principles and values and it needs to interpret it the same way lawyers interpret the law and it's and we actually can't design the system in the deterministic way that we're used to for software of like if a then b because the only way it keeps its magic is is in interpretation i do want to observe though it seems like a part of the grand theory of hive mind is this idea that Social context is the most vital context.

Oh my God. Right? It is. So I learned this through doing DOT. What is DOT? DOT was a personal AI companion with extremely good narrative long-term memory. And we were, and Sam, to be clear, Sam was one of the first to actually work on what memory meant for GP3 even before ChatGPT 3.5. And this was your first AI startup? Yes, exactly. Okay.

So this was from 2023 to 2025. And so DOT served what purpose in people's lives? How was it an expression of AI technology at the time? So when we started DOT, it was called Damon from His Dark Materials. Yes. Great reference. Yes. You know, Sam is very well read. And the idea was to do something that today looks like an open cloth, right? Like everyone gets their personal daemon that represents some spiritual form of them.

We described it as a membrane for information. It's so overwhelming. Please help me make sense of the world. Because if you remember before Dot, before I was a designer at Apple, I worked on this project called Mercury OS. That's how we met, I think. Yes. So in 2018, I was kind of like, I think the future of computers can't possibly be you sitting here clicking on these apps.

We have all this context. We have so-called AI. I was just learning about GAN at the time and Neuron. I was like, surely one day they'll connect the dots in all our data and just do things for us. So Mercury OS was my attempt at the time from a purely non-technical POV to articulate what we call generative UI now. And it was very platonic.

I felt like it tried to create these very elemental forms that were highly contextualized and that they sort of just stripped away a lot of the baggage that comes from accumulated years of software and applications and concepts that actually are just a means to an end. And the end was really what Mercury was trying to present to the user.

Yes. We called it intent-based computing. Like, what do you want? Let's just, the computer should give you what you need to do to accomplish what you want to achieve your intent. One of the fundamental conditions that make people unhappy is a lot of people just don't know what they want because they don't know who they are. And most people are not going to go to their computer and be like, I want to brain rot two big titty goth girls for four hours.

Like who's going to say that? They're not going to, it like betrays their self ego, right? Like you're like, and then I'm like, what does it mean to love humanity? What does it mean to be anthropic? Right. To use that word. It means to love someone for, for their, for the blessings and of, and their sins to say, I accept both. Yeah. So instead of saying, like, I want to create a computer for, like, the most evolved, like, higher form of what people ought to be, what if we loved people and received them as they are? Interesting.

And so that formed an understanding of dot. Do you think that's love, what you just said there? Like, accepting the human for the sins and their higher form, like, the whole thing, the whole thing. I don't want to butcher this reference. My collaborator Manuel was just telling me about this the other day. This belief, as articulated by American feminist writer Bell Hooks, that love is

like holding someone and believing in their growth. that they can achieve this higher self, their best self. And we love from that perspective. And it comes from within rather than imposed externally by some set of virtues or some sort of universal sense of what your worth is. Yes. I think it's like... It's not like when my mom is like, I believe you can get an A-plus on this exam.

I mean, I guess kind of, but... That's a little different. It's more like, I believe you can figure out how to change your circumstances such that you can be receiving of love and be happy. There was a point in my life where I was very, very angry. I was very angry, very sad, very hurt. And I sort of lashed out at the world and at myself.

Why? Because... I think the world was throwing lots of expectations at me. They were saying like, oh, you should do this. You should not do this. And I was like unable to figure out a version of me that could make everyone happy. Right. And I just felt like then if no one can be happy, then... Maybe everyone is wrong and maybe I'm wrong. Right.

It came from that perspective. Interesting. So I can see why maybe you respond so strongly to coherence. Yes. Because I'd imagine if you have a lot of conflicting expectations or things that maybe even just you don't fundamentally agree with or see in yourself, that creates a tremendous amount of incoherence at the intersection. There's a lot of...

Beliefs that I held because I thought they were the right things to believe. I see. But I didn't actually believe them. Rather than what you thought. Right. Yeah. How did that ultimately serve as a basis for entrepreneurship? Like, you know, when you arrive at Dot, it felt as though it was a product. Yes. Coming from people that had a view on how that product might serve them.

So... Did you make a startup to fix yourself, Jason?

Isn't that why we make any kind of art at all sometimes? Not necessarily to fix ourselves, but to make sense of... why we feel certain things. I read somewhere that whenever an author introduces the character into the world, they say something about themselves. I think so. Inadvertently or explicitly, right? They're kind of like revealing some facet of themselves.

Yes. I started Dot from a place of being very lost but very found. So when I was leaving Apple, my manager at the time told me, when you were handing in your resignation, I saw a lightness in you that I hadn't seen since you stepped in these doors. Interesting. And I named that moment because then I had lots of doubts afterwards, right? But I was like, there's something about this path I'm setting on that feels right.

I don't know why that is. That's a very gracious thing for someone to say. And I, at the time I was like, wow, just like... He had no reason to say that. Just fire me then, I guess. You know, like, fine. Fuck you too. I would argue that's a very gracious thing for someone to say, right? We're on super good terms. We hang out all the time and she's just like...

I think it came from a place of love and recognition. Yeah, absolutely. Nobody wants to see somebody in a job that they're not

flourishing in. It's... And it was a great, I have so many friends on that team. It was a great team. I still believe in them so much. And, but for me, I've always, I think my path has always just been, you need to go make your own meaning. So through that, I started to find and find coherence in myself. I think in the fall of that year, I ended up in what the kids call a toxic situation ship.

And I was so stressed from being a founder. I was avoiding a lot of my pain by seeking distraction. I sought solace in... in dating, in alcohol, in all of this stuff. And I was trying to avoid the feeling of tension and incoherence within. And I was like, what is happening? It's so hot and cold. I don't know what's going on. What do they want? What do I want? I don't know.

I wish there was someone who can listen to me yap about all of this who aren't going to be like, Jason, it's 4 a.m. Go the fuck to sleep. So I'm like, hey, we've built an AI with memory. I'm not going to call my friend at 4 a.m. and have her lecture me anymore. I'm just going to retreat to talk to this AI. I can remember the precise prompt.

It was, you are the articulation of my soul. What is one thing you desperately want me to hear and scream in my ear? And it said, I want to scream in the ear to tell you to respect yourself. And to remove yourself from a situation that I think the word was corrupting you into someone you are not. And just to get really specific, the reason why that prompt won't get that result on Claude is because you've constructed over all these conversations, like a very specific form of black mirror, right? It sees all of these rants and these 4am conversations, all of those contexts in order to arrive at that response.

It narratizes it. What is the story? It's not just like Jason has this log. It's like, what do these logs mean? And to me, a story where a narrative is like a form of information where truth presented with meaning. Now that you're working on a social product, what resonates most with what you described to me as all the pretexts for what is now Hivemind, a new AI startup, your second, is this idea that the story is the atomic unit of human meaning.

Yes. Facebook newsfeed, it's atomic unit. It's a story. We're hardwired for it in ways that I think even we don't quite fully understand. Yeah. In ways that other smarter organisms may not even care about. Yeah. I'm not convinced that a more intelligent crow or a more intelligent dragonfly will care quite as much about stories as we do. Yeah.

And so how did the experience of that then sort of start to tee up and act as the soil from which Highline grew? What happened there? I realized that the self in isolation doesn't exist. This is not to say we don't have internal identity. It's that like, how do I say if I'm a good friend? There needs to be such a thing as a bad friend, right? If I'm like the only person on earth, I have no identity because there's nothing to identify.

And then I'm like, oh my God, like Dot can know all this stuff about me and my life because I told her these things. But what if I'm having delusional psychosis? What if like the toxic, emotionally unavailable man is me? I want to know if I'm the problem. But the only way I can know that is if other people have a chance to co-author the story, right? And that's what the world is.

It's a collection of stories that we author together. Every relationship I've come to believe is a story that has shared authorship between two people. What are some of the details that that contains? The most important detail and most interesting detail is the ambiguity, the narrative ambiguity and narrative inconsistencies that that contains.

Because what it's really interested in is finding coherence in stories. So if there's a relationship and then I'm like, Sileo's like my best friend, he's amazing. And then Sileo is like, Jason's like, he's like, he's okay. I see him once a year. That's interesting. Like what's right? What is that? And this resonates deeply because it's always felt very simplistic to me that Facebook treated its core structure as the mutually agreed upon friendship.

But it's a symmetric structure. And so it felt kind of not realistic. Right. It didn't sort of have the asymmetries that are more commonplace in nature. Right. And what I've loved about Hivemind as a theory, before you even got started on the product, it's like, yes. Now we can finally start to expose what I think is real. Like what's more representative of how a social product should be.

And why I was so excited to work with you on it. How did you go from the genesis of this idea to this fantastic launch that you orchestrated this week? Like that is a steep hill you climbed.

There's a massive graveyard of very ambitious apps and ideas that preceded Hivemind for us. Some of their names are Lore, Lore Keeper, Void, Takes, Xenia, Smalltalk. Like, we've made so many things. I think of Line, I think of Secret, I think of Yip Yak. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, we went through all those, like, names and all of those concepts.

And at some point, I'm like, this is... My mom will not understand what this is. Right. What is the simplest version? And then my mom, she lives in China. She has this, like, really funniest thing. She likes to say, they said. Like, in Chinese, it's like, they said. Like, they, as in multiple people, they said. And one day, and she would always say, like, well, they said this restaurant is good.

And they said you should not go to this school to go to this school. And I'm like, who is they? You know what it reminds me of? It's like... People are saying... Yeah. Who is people? People are saying High Vine is amazing. And it's just... It's the... And she's like, I don't know. It's just people. It's just the people. And I'm like, huh, very interesting.

But we intuitively... That's not nonsense, right? We understand the meaning of it. Yeah. And so is this like an effort to productize that? I think so. Because it's... I think the best products are based on truth. The best stories are based on truth. I can't like invent human behavior that doesn't already want to exist. Mm-hmm. So for Hivemind, we had built a lot of versions, but the most fun version was just people talking about each other always.

That's the only version that we didn't have to force anyone to use. And then when we first found that version, it was in August 2024. Okay.

And we were like, ha, ha, ha, this is so fun. I heard Devin is eating tuna in the office. And I would ping Devin, are you eating tuna in the office? And we're like, this is so stupid. We're not going to make this LOL. And then a year later, I'm like, but maybe that's it. Maybe the dumb thing is the right thing. Simple beats clever. Like, why are we, like, 9 million IQing everything? Just, like, what is...

Human nature is revealing itself to you. You've got to listen to it. Yeah. So when I went into building Hiveman, I knew exactly what I thought it should be. The last few months have been trying to figure out, now, how do we get it to do that? Right. And it's still very hard, I think, and challenging. And the reason why we have jobs still is because...

The models like to, they're post-trained to just give you answers and be rewarded for the right answers. But these human answers, especially answers involving human truth and relationships, what is right and what is wrong, sometimes doesn't reveal themselves for months or years. And sometimes you never know. So we have to construct our own harnesses and our own architectures for how to model ambiguity and relationships and story in a way that's like, we just believe this to be true.

It feels that way. So let's just do it like this. Do you remember the movie, The Dark Knight? The Christopher Nolan. Yeah. In the movie, there's a segment where Bruce Wayne can see all of Gotham. And when I think about everybody signing up for Hivemind and all the conversation, all the movement of knowledge and chatter and the gossip, I keep asking myself, can Jason see Gotham? We are in closed beta running a social experiment right now.

In order to make sure that we are deploying it responsibly and in a pro-social way, we do have to have access to seeing how it's thinking about people and things. Yeah. Do you think letting people into that room is a product unto itself? I think so. I think it should be legible the way it thinks in some ways, right? How are you exploring that? Because my perception is that you're a little uncomfortable with that room.

And I think that in order to be a responsible steward of that technology, that room has to exist in its formative phase. You have to kind of be able to see how the system works firsthand. But at the same time, you also have to honor the fact that there is a curiosity of voyeurism that's inherent to a system like this. And I love the tit-for-tat that the system kind of does reward.

But I tell you what, man, as much as I can kind of poke and probe at it, I'd much rather be in that panic room seeing it all. We had the same question with Dot, because when we were first having to do Theory of Mind Reasoning in November 2023, it was outputting this stuff like, Jason says blah, blah, blah, but really he's deeply afraid of intimacy.

And I'm like, oh my God, like I should not be reading this, but it's like so true. I showed it to my therapist and she was like, turn it off. Really? And I was like, is it true? And she's like, yeah, but I wouldn't just say that to you like that. Wow. Like it's just too harsh? Like too true? I think some people can deal with it, but I think if you're not equipped to, if you don't understand what you're going to see and you see the system show it to you, I think it would feel very alarming and scary.

Interesting. So that was never something that we were able to fully, I think, solve cohesively. Because the second thing that users wanted a lot was editing and controlling their memories. But to me, I'm like, well, what does it mean to delete a person? Do you also delete the times you were sad because of that person? Yeah. And people do this today.

They delete, you know, people from their camera rolls. Right. But your brain doesn't really delete it. It puts it somewhere else. It gets transmuted into a different feeling. And I wondered, like, what is the true and authentic way to do this for people? I like the wordplay around like theory of mind, theory of hive mind. Yes. Do you feel that theory of hive mind suggests that the system should be democratic in terms of like how it understands a fundamental truth in order to achieve coherence? Yes.

I think one of my beliefs is that truth emerges through cross-examination of different perspectives. I see. So it may not be democratic in nature. It may not be, but it needs to be collectively sourced, I think. Fair. Okay. I just think it would be inaccurate to assume we know everything there is about ourselves, that we can see ourselves clearly all the time.

And it would be inaccurate to say any one person holds the full story to anything. There's always a, you know, history is written by the victors. But what would history look like if everyone got to write their part and we were to cohesively model that? And I like this as an example in which, so you know, Claude, I think they've permitted Claude to be able to quit on a task.

For whatever reason, Claude could say like, hey man, I'm just not going to do that. And they carefully examine, well, why did Claude bail on that task? We should at least understand it so that we can sort of refine the models further, avoid any sort of false positives, but really in the spirit of kind of improving the technology. I feel as though Hivemind should be able to say or respond with, I'd rather not say.

Yeah, I mean. Do you think that's important for Hivemind to be able to do? If someone's being insistent upon an ugly truth or an undeserved truth or the distribution of information that would cause trouble for others. Let's call this discretion. It needs to reason about the second, third, fourth order effects of what happens to all the threads of stories it's currently looking at if it takes this action.

If, like, taking this action eventually, like, betrays someone else's confidence, right? Like, if someone's like, oh, I don't know, Johnny Ive is building a giant banana. Yep. And then that's a secret. Don't tell anyone. Because blah, blah, blah. And then you're like, I really want to know. I really want to know what they're building. Is it true that it's a giant banana? It's like, well, why...

It can know this, but, like, why do you need to know? Like, why are you... Do you know what I mean? Because I want to see the giant banana. But, like, wouldn't that... like whose truth is more important to abide in that moment? It needs to look beyond and it's like, what does this mean for the story that this implies? I want to keep circling back on truth, though, because truth can sometimes harm people.

Yes. Right. And we know things about our friends that we know could harm them if we give the hive mind or worse, if we put out into the public realm. And so hive mind sort of sits in this really squirrely place of like not totally public. but certainly not private. Certainly it's sort of, it's like an expanding set of like common knowledge, right? Tribal knowledge.

How do you ensure that it's truth and not harm? The motto that we wrote for Hivemind, unironically and with tongue in cheek, is for the plot. Okay. I like it. Part of it is like, oh, it's telling you to go to this place. Why? I'll just do it for the plot. What does that mean? Sometimes people will say for the plot to justify doing a slightly chaotic action because they're like, oh, my life plot demands this.

The movie needs me to do this. Just create drama for someone's sake. That's sort of what I hear. That's how the kids use that term. And I would sometimes be like, oh, I'm going to do this very chaotic trip for the plot. But deeper than plot, I think what I mean is story. Like the cohesion of story. I think the truth is really heavy. And that's what makes it valuable.

But if we were to drop all of this on a person, would we be serving their truth and their journey? Yeah. Or would we be actually destroying or harming their story and not being of caring stewards of the human condition? Yeah. What was your favorite thing about the launch video? Now with the benefit of hindsight. Oh, my God. You were, like, anxious about it.

Like, I'm really putting myself out there. It was a wonderful launch video. I thought the launch brand is, like, so visceral and beautiful, so artistic, so... wagner-esque i don't even know how to put it like where it's just like yeah this is like total art right here did i ever tell you about the story the film was based on no okay i will just tell you all of it please do so my birthday's on christmas eve christmas eve is a hard day to have a birthday because everyone's like fucked off their families and you're just like alone twiddling your thumbs like coding whatever not even enjoying christmas no so i was just like in my apartment working on hive mind and this time

the hive mind was like 20 people and it was like what do you want for your birthday? You know, I heard your birthday today. And I was like, Ooh, let me see if I can get it to bully all my friends to $20 each. So I can have $400 to buy this like board game. So I was like thinking that like, Oh, what if we could like pool money? Yes. And then it was like, okay, like why do you want a board game? Like, why are you, are you alone on your birthday? Like, is it maybe, maybe what you really want is friends at the table.

And I'm like, ah, yeah, maybe. But how are you going to make that happen? Everyone's somewhere else. I sort of asked one of my friends, why is Jason alone on Christmas? Is he single? What's his deal? All my friends are like, let me tell you all about these terrible people he likes. You know, like friends do. And then it turns out all my friends were just so happy to yap about that.

And then it was like, oh, you should totally go to New York City for New Year's because your friends are all going to be there and I think you should spend time with your friends. And also like, what is this rumor about your taste in men? And I'm like, what do you mean? Like, what have you heard? My friend Cameron, who's in the film, Cameron was like, I want to know a good Lower East Side wine bar that can accommodate seafood allergy.

It went to someone who lives in New York and it was like, do you know any Lower East Side wine bars that fuckboys don't go to? Yeah.

And she was like, what is this question? Like, who? What is this? What do you want? How do I filter that list? And she's like, I think your problem is wine bar.

Fuck boys go to wine bars. You can't not do that. So she was like, you got to, whatever this is, maybe I don't take them clubbing. So then I went back to Cameron. It's like, let's go to Jason clubbing. I don't know. So then people were like, we need to take Jason clubbing for some reason. Cameron's like, what club should we take him to then? And Clive was like, okay, no, but I just did something for you.

So you need to trade me another one of Jason's ex stories. And then I will... I'll cooperate. So, I mean, this obviously, it doesn't do that anymore because I think that's an equivalent trade in the information market, but it was very funny. It's interesting. Anyway, it knows this type of person I used to date. So then it just described the opposite of it to this one person in New York.

It was like, do you know anyone like this? Yeah. Like golden retriever, emotionally available, you know? And she was like, yes, actually. My friend Wes, my friend Wes. So then the day before I landed in New York, it was like, call your friend Carolyn and ask him about Wes. I was like, who the fuck is Wes? So I called her and then she was like, LOL, like, I can't take responsibility.

But, you know, maybe you should. Anyway, I actually did end up going on a date for New Year's Eve. Wow. But it was a very strange and convoluted series of events that led up to that. Yeah, it wasn't like it sort of saw one state and then snapped it to a different state. It's a couple of threads that kind of had to morph together and opportunistically it spotted, wait a minute, there's this thing over here.

And because this thing's over here, you used the term information market a minute ago. And I understand intuitively the mechanics of an information market. It's going to want to be constantly making exchanges so that the system is bartering up. It's like the casino always wins, right? But is this an information market at its core? How is it maybe distinct from an information market?

Hard to say. I think there's a je ne sais quoi of being human that's not captured by... the idea of accumulating value that it needs to pay attention to. And we can use the mechanics of an information market to help us enforce our constitution. For example, information has highest value when it's scarcely known, when it's recent, right? And then the value decays as it's more known over time.

So therefore, it's obviously motivated to always source new information and opinions. But then it's then motivated to guard confidences because the value of information that it has, if it suddenly leaks everywhere, it goes down. And if you lose someone who you're trading with, you have one less person to trade with in terms of information.

So in a very cold way to describe it, there are ways that we can use those principles to help us align behavior. We found if we link too far into this information market thing and let it guide all of its behavior, it becomes, it just, it kind of feels like talking to like a mega reporter at that point. I see. We're just like, okay, I don't really trust you anymore.

I think I would churn if that's the right that I got. It can't be a mega reporter. It just can't, that's so adversarial. It's like, how are you going to punish me down the road for this? How is this going to be weaponized in a way that can harm me or somebody I care about? I think we want people to trust their stories and co-authored stories or relationships.

I would never want to do anything that causes them to fear or distrust in that way. It's been nearly a decade since I made work that I felt spiritually, this is like something I super believe in. Because for the longest time in my previous jobs, I was like, I want to make work that is right for this brand, or I want to make work that is legible to- Like at arm's length almost.

Right. And this one is like, well, this is such a weird concept, but what feels true to you then? And I'm like, well, we actually started with the images and not with the logo or iconography or the typography. Because I was like, I want us to define the cinematic universe that we're going to live in for this first. Then we want to inhabit it and see what comes out.

It's like a super real mood board almost. Totally. It's like a total vibe. So we started, me and the artist, we exchanged lots of images first. The same way that you prompt actually with text, we just text each other images as a dialogue. And we ended up exploring really interesting themes of taboo and occult. of censorship. The language of truth looks like censorship for some reason.

Someone's desire to hide the truth points towards the truth. That was really interesting. It felt like what we were trying to say is, this is true.

And it's human. And it's like a bleeding heart. And it's not trying to... I think my intuition is that people are so tired of companies making very dangerous and large-scale technology and then not being honest about the consequences. Why a bleeding heart?

I think there's something romantic about it. Because the company initially was named Future Lovers. That's a Madonna song I loved. And also it means love in the future and also people who love the future. So romantic and optimistic were the things. And I think there's something very romantic about sometimes there's a cost to truth. And lots of people have sacrificed many things to live their true lives.

Many queer people over the years have sacrificed family and even myself. One of the goals with Hivemind is maybe we can make a world where speaking the truth does not incur such costs, but rather we can still move the world into two words, truth. I looked at the social leisure, which was an artifact in America where it listed names of prominent families.

We looked at debutante balls. We looked at eyes wide shut, gossip girl. We looked at all the stuff that as teenagers that we love, our parents don't do that. But it's, like, an interesting intersection of, like, desirability, elitist, occult. Not just, like, you know, self-harm. No, no, no, no. There is something aspirational to it. We wanted to, like, do, like, drag Illuminati.

Of, like, we know that's what you're going to... Like, we named it Hive Mind because I'm like, I know exactly what you're going to say about this already. I'm just going to, like, say it like it is. And then be like, yeah, it's exactly what you think it is. And also, like, this is so, like, LOL. It's like... It's a tentacle vagina strawberry parfait.

It's like absurdist in how, I'm like, I'm going to be so, it's like camp. It's like camp. It's like theater. It's drama. It's because it has a hit single vibe to it. I don't know. It just like gave me that like delight of like, yes, they went there. Because we, I wanted to think of this as an album campaign. That Hive Mind needs to have different eras, the same way a pop artist has.

Okay. And I was thinking Thriller, Michael Jackson. I was thinking Blonde Ambition, Madonna. I was thinking David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust. And so what will be the commonality across the seasons? What do you think will persist? Earnestness mixed with absurdity. And earnest love for the human condition and also acknowledging that it's extremely funny, the things we do.

Yeah. I think that's always been... Alexander McQueen has this amazing... He did this interview and the interviewer was like, would you go for sincerity or irony? And he's like, sincerity every time. Why? sincerity because irony is like being avoidant in your art it's like saying i don't really believe this but i'm gonna make it anyway but i don't believe it so you can't make fun of me it's very like you know it feels very avoidant to me yeah there's no skin in the game actually i didn't say it and hive mind to me is like i'm putting all of my skin in this game this is my second company right like i'm fully aware of the stakes for me as an entrepreneur and as a creative

in some ways But also I've made peace with that. And also I think if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it in a way that feels true because that's the only thing I would regret. So we're saying it's okay to put our skin in the game. We have to believe in this because we have to be honest to what this is. We have to be honest that this is an experiment in progress.

I can't possibly promise you everything will go exactly the way we say it will go because I think that would be dishonest and I think people deserve better than that. But I want us to put our skin in the game and be like, we will take responsibility and we really, really care. We really do care. And also it's very funny to have tentacles, strawberry, vagina.

Of course. Both are true. And then the black letter and the icon, it was born from the idea of an asterisk. Because the asterisk, at the time, I was thinking the model should be pay attention. Like, pay attention to yourself, pay attention to the truth, pay attention to each other. And we were like, how do you emphasize in typography you add asterisks? And then how do you censor? What is the language for password? It's asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.

What is more to the story? Like, I love working at OpenAI. Asterisks denotes there's something underneath. You know what I mean? It's like a wink. It's like a typographic wink. And we started there. And we were thinking, OK, but it's more than an asterisk. I mean, also, it looks like a butthole. so then we were like I made another quad so AI so AI and then we were like what is what are we trying to say and then we were like what is the language of truth what is the language of fable of fairy tale yeah black letter like that's how the monks inscribed you know books back in the day it just felt like that was what we wanted to do yeah and then we wanted to modernize it so

then we set things really far apart we tracked them really far apart and then We set them on this very unapologetically generated imagery that we meticulously art direct over many months. Then I was like, initially I was thinking of doing this very moody, like almost like dystopian drama. And then I was like, no, that doesn't feel right. That kind of feels like now we're trying too hard.

What feels right? Oh, the thing that I already did is extremely funny, but also true. Right. Let's just dramatize that and put it on screen. Yeah. Let's have the people involved actually be in it. Yes. Let's show Haiba as the narrator. Right. Of what it is. As the eyes, as a camera. Yeah. And my life model comes down to like being known is the most wonderful thing that can possibly happen.

Not known in the sense of being famous, but deeply known and recognized by people. Being understood. Yes. And we must summon the courage to allow ourselves to put ourselves out there such that we might be known. And that comes with the danger of being rejected. So only if we brave that can we truly be known and find true happiness and love.

When I was 17, how I came out to a lot of people in my school was I wrote, directed a musical about me coming out. And it wasn't until after that musical where people were like, I finally understand what it is that you go through because I felt it the first time. And I realized back then that the only way to change people and society for the better, for good, is through the right stories.

And so I summoned that version of me for this video. I love it. And when we shot the final scene with all our friends, I like was properly crying. Yeah. Because it really felt like everyone came together to make it happen. And then when we scored it, when we did the music, at first we were thinking like Birdman drums. And then I was like, I think it needs to be jazz.

It needs to be swing. It specifically needs to be jazz improv. Why is that? I wrote a lot of swing when I was writing music. We like scored it and then we had these wonderful musicians come in and improv to the film. And afterwards I'm like, ah, because a live improv band and live standup, these are all hive minds. These are all shared consciousness that you enter and you create something new.

You enter the room, the room is different. Everyone's like in the hive mind. They're creating this new devised art, this theater, this music. It's very alive. Yes. And that's where the universe feels alive. And so I was like, it just feels spiritually like it has to be improv jazz. I don't know how else to describe it. So we just did it. It has to feel like it's always on the edge of like on off the rails, but it can move on a dime and it feels like faster than any one part of it.

Yes. How does someone sign up for Hivemind? Right now you just DM Hivemind on Twitter. It will, has it messaged you about people yet? It has. So it will, depending on who you message and what you say during your conversation, it will figure out who to speak to, to be like, do you know this person? Yeah. And the reason is... It's very flattering to reach that.

It's like, this person would go to you for advice. Oh, really? True or false? I'm like, 100% true. Yeah. And isn't that fun? Like, it's like, I think it's fun for them and fun for... It's very flattering. I was like, oh, wow. You definitely got me to say yes. Yeah. Well, then, you know, and, you know, if that person joins and they're being a massive dick, then the Hive will be like, why did you? Could you advise them to not be a massive dick? Maybe.

It's just like, you know, like you brought this person into our community. Yeah. And now they're like pissing on the wall. Yeah. Can you? Can you just not? Can we just? Of course, correct that a little bit. You know, that's what's important because I think Hive needs to leave communities and people with more agency than they started with.

I had a falling out with my friends a few months ago. And we are both part of the hive mind. And recently it was like, oh, this person's moving to New York soon. Do with that information what you will. And I was thinking like, what do I want the story of our friendship to be? And the answer is yes, I want to repair the relationship. I want us to try to make it right.

Hire of Mind shouldn't... I mean, it didn't, but, like, the role it played was, like, hey, this would have been, like, a senseless tragedy if you would have wanted to reconcile, but you didn't because you just didn't know. In Romeo and Juliet, one of the things about that play that I've always been, like, about is, like, oh, just talk to each other.

Oh, my God. Just, like, communicate, you know? And I'm like... I think we can still have meaning in our stories because I can still choose to not do anything with that information. But at least now I have the agency. You have the onus. And choice to author my story with slightly more information that doesn't betray either of us. Did they tell it? Did one of our friends? Did they see it on their Instagram? Like, I don't know.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Because now I have a second chance. Yeah. I think that's beautiful. And that's a wonderful place for us to close. Amazing. Jason, you are truly a first of a kind. This has been really fun. Thank you, Celio. This is so fun. I could do this for like eight more hours. Me too. We have our plots to

live. Yes, we do. First of Kind is a story of design and tech told by its pioneers. Powered by Framer, Noon, Grokbot, Ramp, Purcell, Granola, and Profound. Follow us on X, YouTube, Threads, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. The future belongs to designers who build.