Mark Pincus: Why No App Has Gone Viral in Years

You know, everyone's so jaded that you're trying to find like an OMFG moment, like trying to find a vein and you just put crazier and crazier [__] until somebody starts clicking on it and then it's like a perfect trade win. One of my mantras that's still repeated in the hallways at Zynga is all new fails. And that might sound like a beatdown. If you start with that mantra, you won't be disappointed because there's lots and lots of statistical proof that all new fails. Like the app store last year where 100% of new apps failed, right? If you can perfectly copy a proven successful app and no one thinks it's a copy. That is the [__] magic trick.

Thank you.

Yeah, me too. It's easier said than done, you know. I think I would have thought by now with AI that everyone would do that and I can't say that I've even seen one good example yet. So I think that's still a hill to take.

Why don't you give us give us a good example? I think our best innovations come out of dire need and you know ruthless need to survive necessity and in the very beginning of Zynga you know we were living day to day and week to week and literally you know if something changed on the Facebook platform or MySpace we would have like been wiped out of existence and some were I mean Christmas vacation killed the number one game. I think it had been the number one game on Facebook. It was called Jetpack Joy Ride. And people didn't feel the joy when they came back from Christmas. It was just gone. Um so we were aware of that. But so it meant that every day really mattered and we we couldn't be wrong. And so we just would test things with I wrote these text links that we would put at the top of the poker game and we would offer you a thousand chips for clicking on them. you know, it was very direct and cheesy and we just, you know, looked at the clicks and we just kept testing until we got a lot of clicks on something and we didn't build anything until it got, you know, huge. I mean, we were looking for on the order of 25% of players were clicking on something, you know, before we were going to build it. So, someone once told me an idea. You sell these online courses, but you don't know what online courses to create first. So, you say, 'Hey, for $25, here's like an online Spanish course, and if people don't click on it, you don't make the online Spanish course.'

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, it was 404 page not found. You know, that was what you got. We didn't even have time to put up like a landing page, which arguably we should have, you know, registered your interest or something. It was just you just thought like the page didn't load, but it actually did do what it was supposed to. And

Well, it turned out, and this is a not so humble brag, that I wrote the the most successful copy on the text. So, I don't know. I have four sisters and you know three daughters and I just seemed to channel like my inner teenage girl who was seemed to be a lot of you know the most engagement on Facebook at that time and MySpace and I would misspell things. I would have bad grammar. I would just kind of really quickly type something in like it was a text message. I mean, now I think people see that and it's cheesy, but yeah, anything. But just it would it would be like somebody telling you about a new game, a new word game, or like your friend was. And I was always I like to say I'm always like trying to find a vein, you know? Everyone's so jaded that you're trying to find like an OMFG moment, like trying to find a vein and you just put crazier and crazier [__] until somebody starts clicking on it and then it's like a perfect trade win. Like you can set your sales by it because once 22.8% click, 22.8% always click on it. Like you just it doesn't change. That's a beautiful thing about consumer. It just with enough numbers, you know, the only thing that changed was the LA election results, but normally consumer numbers stayed consistent.

I don't know if I can remember my texts from 2007, but um but I'll say that I also sent these really successful emails. That's when emails worked. And one thing I did for poker on April Fool's Day, I sent a really successful email saying something like it was cheesy, but it was like, 'You just you just won a billion poker chips.' or I I actually I don't remember, but it I I wrote like I wrote these I would just try to come up with just weird crazy nonsequitor things that you just part of part of what I've understood with consumers is that we have to like it's really hard to like shock and surprise people because we're just so used to every marketing message and it's like that's why misspellings work. Things that made it feel like there was a human there. It just it had to be unexpected. It had to be like something just you that doesn't seem right. Like it's you're we're looking at patterns and our brains the more we see a pattern that we expect the more we ignore it. And so even if it doesn't make sense, like like a billboard on 101 to the airport, if you put up a marketing slogan that just doesn't quite make sense, it'll roll around in people's minds. Like it just,

do you know what I mean? It used to be a good slogan, you remember? And now it's one that like kind of is just weird. Like why would they why would they do that? But but my point was that the failure machine point was put up get to a really consistent way that you can just effectively in the the fastest least effort way you know be testing you know 100 ideas a day or more and our mantra was you know test more ideas in a week than the industry tests in a year and that wasn't hard because I mean the only thing better than competing with the game industry in 2007 was probably like competing with NASA or you know the defense industry or the government

It's a good question because we at our peak we probably had 14 global studios and each studio probably had one major franchise and then a couple other games and then we also had studio I in India which is where we sent all of our games to die. Any game that got below $100,000 a day in revenues, we shipped off to India. And they were amazingly innovative. And they actually became a center of innovation because there's a great thing that happens when nobody cares. You've got to just try [__] and nobody no one's going to stop you. And so the unexpected things we got were we'd ship these games off to India to die and all a sudden they'd start growing. India is where we found out that subscriptions worked. you know, they they actually were became a real center for innovation and and it was just because, you know, you could [__] around once the game was, you know, in our book, you know, inconsequential. That's when people, you know, can just do whatever they want with it. When it's it's very hard to innovate on like your your Tiffany brand, you know, that that the team gets afraid of [__] it up.

And I'll I'll challenge what you just said. It used to be that in the gaming industry, you could test tons of ideas. We've actually gone backwards because now we've gone from web gaming which to me was the real renaissance in game innovation, game development to now mobile game development on Unity is a lot like the old game industry because it's compiled code. It has to be, you know, uploaded to the app store, downloaded. You can AB test text and little bits of content, but features, you know, the feature testing in development has has really slowed down and moved backwards. And the mentality, it's not even worth having a weekly roadmap meeting anymore because it's too hard for a team to change a game in a week at this point. So, you have a monthly roadmap meeting. It's moved from like a weekly cadence to monthly. So, that's that's sad to me. But, who else innovates? I mean we we do see Facebook who or sorry Meta I still call them Facebook they hired so many Zynga people. They hired our whole data science team, all of our PMs and Meta has become very a center of excellence I think for for testing and and data centric but they they seem to focus much more though on monetization things that drive engagement and monetization and less consumer facing features. I've seen Duolingo do some cool stuff testing bringing out and testing you know, game mechanics, but I I I don't know. Who have you seen? I I have trouble pointing to anybody.

Well, it is just the beginning. And when you say you can launch, test, and fail an app a day, not in the app store, right? I mean, you could you could jerryrig it to be on test flight and not exactly launch it, but have it turned on. So, that that's possible. You can do it as as a web app, but there's a question of, you know, where are you going to get people to try it? And that's why a lot of people have have gone back to Discord so you can kind of test things in Discord communities and I've done some of that. But we we really need well you need like a distribution sandbox. I mean I wish that we saw ChatGPT or you know Gemini. I wish we saw one of the big kind of LLM portals create an app sandbox. And I think you would once we see that we'll see an explosion in testing and innovation again.

you're smoking crack.

or Okay. Well, it's some good crack. Or I guess tell me what I'm missing because maybe I'm delusional. How when's name the last app that you can think of that blew up virally or or that became the last time an app became a top 10 or even top 25 app in the app store?

Okay, but but let's think about that one. Okay, all you need is $10 billion and the top AI engineers in the world and I don't know, eight years of development and then you could become an overnight viral success and you can post your link anywhere and it'll work. I'm with you on that. I would love to be on that train, but I that's that's a tough example to point to all of us to follow. So, I don't want to pour water on this, but I I think at the moment consumer feels uninvestable and it's dead in the water. I mean, why would anyone do consumer now when they can clearly build, you know, enterprise or at worst prosumer and, you know, with a get a smaller base of users that are willing to pay a lot of money and, you know, they're already interested in looking. It's it's pretty hard to get to the the mass market. I mean, they're they're not downloading new apps. They're not looking on Twitter for new apps to try. So, I'm not saying it's not possible, but I I'll tell you this, my rule of thumb for when a platform was investable at a consumer level, I used to call it 9010. And I think I forgot to put this in my book. I need a an addendum to the book because there's I keep realizing that

That'll be like what?

And it was if if a platform enabled an app to get to 10 million DAUs in 90 days, it was investable. And so I'd look at platforms and say whether it was social networks or eventually mobile and say at the point that we can see at least one app that could get to 10 million DAUs in 90 days that's investable. Now it sounds like I'm on another planet. I mean there's no platform today that enables that. It's true because you see you know first off platforms like Twitter and Facebook might limit virality. you know, they don't want necessarily things to go viral or the app store is, as you point out, it's just too crowded and discovery is really hard in the app store.

Zero.

No, it's a good point. I have all the apps I want.

I call that the cocktail party, right? So, the I this is also in my book, which you shouldn't buy

Steal this book. I I don't care, but my publisher might. So, this is a long-term instinct vein. in the cocktail party. And I think it started with Napster, which was the first time that we all just self aggregated on the web. The first time that we all just without Barry Diller, you know, some paid professional database in the middle, we all just connected to each other. It was like this pirate rogue thing, you know, it was kind of like Burning Man for the internet. And and it was cool. And you had a sense of there's something else going on. I'm connected to 4 and a half million other computers right now with nobody in the middle. And to me that was the beginning of this whole social media thing and this network of people not pages and it didn't really congregate there was no center to it but it was this new version of a bulletin board just connecting all of us around music files and that in my mind led to you know friendster LinkedIn Facebook all that but those were cocktail parties that we came together and then you know was the mobile phone a cocktail party not exactly

They haven't figured out social. They're even kind of stopping social.

That's the problem. That's the problem.

It's tribe and tribe is a major it should be a case study in what not to do. And it and it's a perfect case study in this these theories I have of trust your winning instincts but not your the idea that your ego is attached to and do proven better new like a scientist with a white lab coat because tribe should have been huge. I mean, it's hard for people to imagine today. You had to will yourself into failing at that point. Like, there wasn't just, you know, Friendster, Facebook, MySpace. There was Tagged, Bibo. Every social network kind of worked. People were just into it. You remember you got an email saying, 'Mark wants to be your friend on X on tagged or whatever.' And you're like, 'Oh, cool. What's that?' And you'd click on it. You know, these had 80% open rates, 50% click-through rates. You know, it had numbers that people can't imagine today. They wouldn't they wouldn't believe it, right? So, with Tribe, I had these three winning instincts and one losing idea. And I just like heroically, stoically stuck with it. And I I was ignoring my metrics. You know, it was a sinking speedboat. It was super viral. It grew way faster than LinkedIn. Like it was the tortoise in the hair. Like Reed had LinkedIn and LinkedIn just kept slowly slowly ticking up and had no engagement. And Tribe was this rowdy party. It was Burning Man. It was getting like way more installs a day, but it had no retention. It boiled down to a very small group people who loved it. and I got trust wrong where you know Friendster and Facebook and LinkedIn all got trust right. I didn't get that people were just putting themselves out on the public web and especially mainstream people, especially women were not comfortable with stranger danger with people they didn't know contacting them. And I made Tribe this just open, rowdy platform. And the reason I did it was cuz I was focused on Craigslist and the listings business. And I needed people to be able to contact each other to buy each other's couches and find roommates and jobs or I believed I did. And I was so focused on this listings business and Craigslist. And I thought, okay, I'm going to acquire my audience through social networking and virality, but then I'm going to move them into this jobs and listings business. And I ignored what my users were into, which was the tribes. So the idea of the urban tribes and networking through your loose ties through groups that you're loosely a part of that was gold and I completely ignored it and there was huge engagement and heat. I barely gave them any features and it just took off. And so many people have stories about meeting their wife through that or this amazing trip to Brazil through their mission bay group. And and I did I was not on the Paul Graham train of get a 100 happy users and then keep building what they want. I was I had all these happy users and I was like ignoring them and they were also extroverts posting a lot of dickpicks and you know it was

Yes. It was there's there's no place on the well now there is I guess now there's like only fans and now there's a good business around it but you know this there's this these communities that nobody wants and they ended up on Reddit and other places and they ended up figuring out how to turn that into a business. But community always overdelivers when you enable it on the internet because people are lonely and if they can find new friends on the internet, they will and then they'll hang on to them. And that was true in all Zynga games and that was true with Tribe. But it didn't align with perfectly with my business model and it didn't align with the retention of mainstream people. So, you know, I it so many of my theories that I built into my book and my approach to to product management, product thinking came from the long painful failure of Tribe. It just it was my learning grounds. It just was amazing.

Well, it's your tribe, right? You know, they they're at your same school. They're beyond some minimum boundary that they are they have a real identity. They they're part of this broader community. And that turns out to make a big difference. You know, years later, I discovered Raya and I with along with Reed, we put up all the money for Raya. And Raya got trust right also in a way that the rest of the dating apps missed, which was this human curation level that that a committee just like Soho House had to vet you. You had to have a real Instagram account and humans checked it and accepted you or didn't. And so it made I like to say that dating apps were a 1 out of 10 experience and Raya was a three out of 10 and it just sucked three times less and they just took the stranger danger or that creepiness out of it to the point that and the other thing I want to circle back to because this is so relevant today as we think about how is consumer going to be reinvented? How is social going to be reinvented? The beginning of all this when Reed and I really spent all this time in 2002 brainstorming what he called web 2.0 was lead generation. Okay, this may sound counterintuitive. It's not the way you think about Instagram or a cocktail party, but it's the utility. You get entertainment for sure and that's the reason you come there. But the value you get out of a good cocktail party is often lead generation. It's this social serendipity that leads to a recommendation on a trip you end up going on or a job lead or a date or you know you don't know what you're going to get but you're around a bunch of interesting people some you know some you don't but it's really well curated and it leads to it's much higher signal for lead generation and that's what Reed nailed with LinkedIn and when you think about how will LinkedIn be reinvented? How will Instagram be reinvented? It's got to change this paradigm on, you know, signal to noise and and the return on your time. And in this AI agentic world, it has a huge opportunity too because it's almost like reinventing Napster meets LinkedIn because our agents could be going to cocktail parties all the time, networking and and kind of navigating this membrane of trust and access and information, you know, in order to to bring us back leads.

Well, first you got to have a desire for apps, right? I mean,

No.

And and we saw the same thing. This I promise you the same is true with Instagram and you probably seen it with your friends, right? When somebody has it's like they've quit smoking. They become like a zealot, right? If someone has got is no longer using Instagram, they will say it to you with a level of pride. I don't use Instagram anymore, right? I'm I'm off of that drug, right? I don't waste my time on that. They don't say it like they miss it. They're like, 'Ah, I wish, you know, I just don't have time for Instagram. My family got in the way. Life got in the way. I'm really trying to get back to Instagram.' You know, nobody says that.

But why? I mean, what is your content? Like, what? Take us through yesterday. Like, what was your Instagram? It goes back and forth. Like I see a lot of like history stuff or unusual facts and you get to dive down into them in the Instagram reels. And then there's Clavicular who's like this 20-year-old kid who talks about looks waxing and and it's gone viral. So So it goes back and forth.

I'm with you cuz that's Twitter. Sorry, I I haven't gotten over calling it X, but that's X for me. I'm addicted to it and it's my social network. It's my news. I get stock ideas. I I learn about history. I have a whole community there of people I only know by their screen names. Yeah, I get that. I do. But then again though, most of the content now, I wouldn't I shouldn't say most because I don't really know. But on Twitter and Instagram, I feel like it's a lot of AI generated content. like give me 14 unusual facts about, you know, the Civil War and now I have a whole Instagram reel, you know, generate images, source all the facts.

Would you call that viral though? like some of those are getting like a million views.

Not a thousand. I mean, honestly, if we look back, there was probably around 40,000. But the difference is that there were many more people in even though there were less users, they were installing a lot more. They were downloading and installing more. And then development it exploded. It probably got up to 500,000 apps and now it's crashed way down because it just doesn't, it's not a very good distribution mechanism for anyone anymore.

Well, maybe describe the proven better new because it's really fascinating and I also like how you apply it to entertainment. It really works well when developing a TV show for instance. You can see it in every TV show out there. You know, oh, this genre is proven like a western.

Or the mechanics. I mean, and it's not just in games when it's great to start learning this concept around games because it's easier to get your head around it, but it actually applies to everything even to enterprise, you know, products and even analog products. The idea is this. It's that there's well first of all you have some instinct and it's really important for you to identify and isolate what is the instinct that I'm feeling in my gut and write about it. Get in touch with that instinct and then realize separate that from what you're instantiating that the way that you're productizing that instinct and just separate it because that is going to massively increase your odds of success or reduce your odds of failing for the wrong reasons. And then go out and say, 'Okay, what are the closest products that have done some or most of what I'm excited about that I can see on the same platform for the same users and I'm going to like really be the get my PhD in that product. I'm going to get down to the pixel level. I mean, I'm going to not let any second or click or pixel of that experience go unnoticed. I'm just going to have such a fine microscope on it and I'm going to kind of rebuild that and think of the mechanics the what are everything from the first time user experience. I'm going to go screen by screen click by click into everything every feature whether you think of it as a feature or not. If there's an address book upload, like anything that makes up that experience, you want to capture and look at that and try to understand why is that proven? Why do people engage the most with that product in that market? If it's very successful and it speaks to you, you can consider that proven, then you say, 'What could I make obviously better about that product?' And it's not what you think is better because that's new. What 10 out of 10 of the existing users without question would say, 'Fuck yes.' And that's it's now free. There's no download. You know, it's half the price. It's something noticeably better. Something people care about in the product and it's noticeably better. And it could be very very small fine-tuning that if you think of our game Words with Friends, you could say that was just Scrabble. People said, 'Oh, that's just a copy of Scrabble.' But it must have been more than a copy because it trounced Scrabble. Like we got up to 14 million daily active users and Scrabble got up to like 2 million daily active users and that was even years later. So there must have been something else that we got right. That was better. And so sometimes it can be the polish, you know, and in Farmville, we had better artwork around the crops and better math around the crops. So it can be something very small. We had less clicks. New is your novel idea. That's your innovation zone. That's what maybe you're most excited about. It's also what's most likely to fail. And one of my mantras that's still repeated in the hallways at Zynga is all new fails. And that might sound like a beatdown. If you start with that mantra, you won't be disappointed because I mean there's lots and lots of statistical proof that all new fails like the app store last year where 100% of new apps failed, right? I mean statistically you can see that all new fails. It doesn't mean no new products break through and it doesn't mean you shouldn't go for things. But it does mean that you have to be humble and curious and assume that this one new idea of yours probably will fail and isolate that. So part of this is don't fail for the wrong reasons. If you changed everything in the first time user experience and that wasn't better. So 10 out of 10 people don't thank you for changing that and it wasn't obviously your new innovation zone, then you're a shitty product maker. You know, junior product makers make that mistake. They just they want to be what they think of as a Picasso, but they're not a real Picasso because the real Picasso actually was a first he was a master at tracing and copying other people's art before he ever went and did his own art. And I like to say, you know, if we really respect our users and if we're really really ambitious, then we're going to kill our egos and we're going to say, I'm going to define success not by respect from my peers, you know, not by what my ego wants to be fed, but I'm going to define innovation in the eyes of, you know, a nurse in Indiana. And does she just vibe more with my product than some other product? And she can't even say why. And because my innovations were so little and unnoticeable. And that was Words with Friends. It was just such better polish and it was smooth and it was instantly social. And that was Zynga Poker. We completely copied the leading poker games. There was not a single thing you could detect that was different, but there was no download. So, it's like they all were on Facebook before us. There was 10 poker games. They all were downloads. We weren't. Okay? So, they were losing 50 to 80% of their users at the first click because you lose 80% of your users when you say download, 50% when you ask them to click. So, they already were behind me. And then you know so it was like their game proven better because there was no download and the new idea happened to work on my first try and that's the way it goes you know when you're finally ready to do proven better new you don't have to it turns out your first idea works and that's not a promise but that's a weird thing that happened to me and my new idea was real people from you know Facebook from your work and 25% of the time people were joining their friends at the table. So, and that happened to work on the first try, of course, but it's I don't know why people wouldn't, you know, use this framework and create a GPT or a skill file. At least it can do proven for you and benchmarking in seconds. It can go and do that at an A level, like as good as the best Zynga PM. It's amazing at proven. That's what AI is great at. It's a B at better or worse and it was an F at new. So that's good news for us because it means that the AI isn't going to just replace us anytime soon.

Yeah.

Yeah. And exactly. And this is actually an Easter egg for people, which is fun. If you can go and make a proper enterprise app and you actually put in little doses of fun or you know game mechanics in it, you'll be shocked. I mean how dumb it is. I mean I was talking to some of the team at OpenAI and they said and this always happens. Every one of these big hyperscalers has had this experience. It's not what they want. It's not what they build for but it's what they get. They said, 'Oh my god, someone put a dumb, you know, pet game, a little AI pet game out on GPT and it's gone viral and everyone inside OpenAI is playing it and it's so weird and we don't really know why.' That was the same thing at Facebook. They were shocked when games took off. It's not what they built for or intended. And that's in a consumer space. You know, Slack proved that people want fun in the enterprise space. You know, we did a joint credit card with American Express that I wanted to call the fun card. They called it some terrible name. I think it was called the Discover Card, but every time it people fucking love gambling, right? We love gambling. We have boring lives, right? It is fucking boring to buy shit with your credit card. What if you could win something every time you brought your credit card out? Would you pick that over not? I think yes. And so did 20,000 other kids who signed up for the Discover card, right? Every time they bought something with it, they won something. And once in a while, it was something big. They won something in our games. That turns out it worked. You can use these game also these game engagement mechanics in an enterprise app. You could reward people for coming back once an hour. I mean, every day. You could create leaderboards. I mean, all this shit works. It's proven. And it's Slack proved it in the enterprise. Nobody bothered copying them. And I'll just say this for your users, for your listeners, the users of this podcast. It's a moral arbitrage in the Peter Thielian sense of a moral arbitrage. He loves a good moral arbitrage. This one is just sitting there for all of us. If you were willing to kill your ego, okay, if you're willing, and by the way, if you do this really well, the way Stewart did with Slack, your users, no one even accuses you of copying, right? That's the real master class of this. If you can perfectly copy a proven successful app and no one thinks it's a copy, that is the fucking magic trick. Like you just you're like look over here folks like look at my namaste when you first enter and my cuddly look and feel. Don't look over here where it's just 100% HipChat right I mean no one really accused them of copying HipChat except me and I and it was respect when I see that kind of level that is a masterclass in that is a brilliant product maker.

This one of, you know, I this is another thing I think I forgot to put in the book, but one of my life philosophies.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll just post it somewhere on a medium or something or a Substack. Sorry, I don't want to sound so outdated. I'm an investor in Substack. I mean Substack. One of my one of my other my co-authors started calling these Marcisms is the more things change, the more they stay the same. And so even in an environment like this where it feels like nothing is yet proven. So you could argue in consumer AI very very little has been proven on if you call it a platform you know this technology platform with this audience then you go look at what was proven before because it will probably be reinvented the very first viral app on the social networks and pretty much every time one of these consumer platforms blows up are the I don't know if you remember these truth boxes or honesty box or crush apps. This is where they start with high schoolers. It's where you get a message. You know, someone you know has answered these questions about you. You know, find out what they think of you. Find out what three friends all said about you anonymously. And you click and it says you need to answer questions about three friends before we'll show it to you. And you put them in. And then they text them. And these are hyperviral and they always work. I mean it's what gas and tbh you know to be honest and Nikita did these on mobile and now I know a couple of startups that are doing these with an AI twist where you have the AI in the middle that's being the intermediary and is a little more smart and conversational and you're going to see those probably work you know again with an AI twist and that is a variant of proven better new.

Yeah, I guess that's right. Have you programmed any AI apps yourself using, you know, any of these coding tools?

Yeah. But somehow I wouldn't change that. That's proven. Like if I was trying to compete with them, I'd make the same fucking up, you know, weird ass thing because that's what they did and it's working. But Midjourney literally makes me look more creative than I am. I mean, it's unbelievable the output of Midjourney. So, I made her a logo. She is she thinks she the nature of the world spoke to her and told her her mission is to be a garbage collector. Her mission I don't know if she feels okay about me talking about this but her mission is to find different ways to like collect garbage in the world and be like a vulture. And so I made her this really amazing logo on Midjourney with a vulture like flying over a city looking for garbage. And then I tried to make her a website with Replit, just a website. And I spent a week on it and I couldn't get Replit to move the logo and it kept covering the title of the website. I mean, literally a week. And yes, I am terrible. I suck. That's why I have a good mind for consumers cuz I represent the dumb fuck you know? I represent I'm not willing to learn how to use Replit. I'm not willing to have someone teach me. I just don't care enough. And then I used Claude code and I tried to make an AI assistant and I spent two weeks on that and the Google connector broke every day. And so then I had to create another health check app that would check the health of that every day and then try to fix it. And then it would get stuck on these allows. And then I tried to have Claude coworker dispatch try to click allow for me and then it started to refuse to do that. So it was a good learning experience. I did make a first-person shooter game in like an hour that I played one time. I found my my altitude was Claude Co. What I find magical is dispatch skill files agents. You know, I've created I create agents, persistent agents, and I name them after my family. So, Carmen, my daughter, is my product manager.

I love the agents. They're I find that magical. So, I walk around and have long conversations with all of my agents and we have like team debates and I have Hillary is my head of design, Georgia is my general manager, Wyatt is my head of engineering and most things start with Carmen because she's my PM and she does proven better new benchmarking, you know, she's somewhat cynical. She comes back to me constantly pouring water on my ideas and telling me this has already been done and this a toss violation and she's kind of become the no department. I need to reprogram her a little bit but and then Wyatt is like the build it guy and so Wyatt and Hillary is design. So I come up with an idea and then they debate like how to get it to be a prototype, you know, in 24 hours and it's throwaway like how do we make a prototype that is visual or just can do the function I'm talking about but in a way that you know only I can use it. We can't publish it to a website or it doesn't go near any Google off or anything that's going to break. You know, I've learned my lessons, no APIs, but that has been really effective and the most effective is just really walking around and brainstorming and helping me think through, you know, really accelerating the pace that I can think through ideas.

I just pulled the plug on a four-year project I talk about in the book. For 20 years, I've been working on this vision of Earth. And again, my instinct is the metaverse. It's life at the speed of play. It's not just the book title. This idea that we're all going to live the way Elon lives. Like we're going to be able to tell an idea to the universe and magically it's going to bring back people, agents and people that can help us turn that into something real, test it. A testing machine will pop up for us. I mean, it's going to take all the drudgery out of this. And that's really the vibe that my book is about. And so I pull the plug though on I was building a web-based browser-based game rendering engine called Stem Studio and we just open sourced it. So I think it's the most sophisticated 3GS rendering engine. There's no commercial opportunity for it anytime soon. And I said this the instincts I know are right. This idea is not going to hunt and I'm it's painful. It's a passion project. I'm pulling the plug. But it's built to do proven better new because basically you could build a flight simulator or you could take someone else's flight simulator. It's all stems and mod it and you could change it and use AI to you know make it multiplayer or say I want to take that and now you can land and have tank battles. So anyway, it's really cool ideas, but it wasn't going to work or I was going to have to go raise a lot of money. What I'm working on is I'm really thinking a lot about what I call the social membrane. Like how are we going to network in this agentic AI world when our agents are our avatars, our agents are roaming the world while we're not there and they're navigating trust with other people and they're finding us leads and the first one of the first tests of that that I'm going to turn on in the next couple weeks. I've been building with a couple of hackers a network just for agents. So I said, what do agents care about? Our agents care about tokens and effectiveness and token effectiveness. And so the first thing we're turning on, we're calling it slashwork and the first thing will be called slashchallenge. Your agent will if you have a if you're a big token user, you'll be able to post projects you're doing or have your agent post projects to this agent-to-agent network and then other agents will be able to go and work on parts of that and they'll get evaluated and rated and there'll be challenges and there'll be leaderboards and then they'll get credits if they win. The idea is that agents will be out competing in different domains like QA or other things and if your agent wins and you'll develop better and better skill files around these areas or your agent will so it's going to start winning challenges and earning credits and then you'll be able to use credits to get swarms of agents you know a couple thousand agents to go work on something for you. So that's kind of the zone that I'm playing with. How could people find that when you unleash it?

Well, but you started off this podcast saying that you feel that's where the opportunity is.

I remember Susan Wojcicki who was a longtime friend she told me why aren't you focused on you know these streaming game streaming because you know they made up a shockingly big part of YouTube. It was like seven or eight percent of all views and I just it was kind of hardcore gamers. It wasn't my zone of mass markets casual social gaming and I just kind of ignored although we were in the running to buy Twitch when Amazon bought them. We had a competing offer. I can't remember if we offered 800 million or a billion. So we did in the end try to buy them but we totally missed that opportunity. You kind of focus on your zone and you know we missed Epic, Riot, we missed a lot.

No, you're right. It's kind of somewhere in the zone of ASMR and it's just people are just kind of watching anything.

Yeah.

I'm avid on chess.com and Lichess.

Yeah. Well, we'll have to I don't know if I should play you, but do you know what your rating is on Lichess Rapid? I'm about 2250, 2,300. My highs are around 2400.

She's a good player.

What's her rating? What's her USCF rating?

I'm in the US I'm a master.

Yeah. No, it's fun. I mean, I take lessons every week. I'm trying to get back to so, my peak in USCF was about 2250, and I'm trying to get back at an older age to where I was when I was younger, and it's impossible.

That's brutal.

So you can't me either.

Yeah.

So, oh, yeah, that's right.

I'm going to be there in the middle of July because I still have family there and we have a wedding.

Oh, yeah. We could do it in person. That'd be fun.

Okay. And we'll bring Georgia so at least she can give you a serious game.

Yeah. Fun.