A Motorcycle for the Mind

**Nivi** (0:00)
Hey, this is Nivi. You're listening to the Naval Podcast. For the first time in recorded history, we are not at the same location. I am actually walking around town, and Naval might be doing the same, so there might be some ambient noise, but we are going to try hard to remove that with AI and some good audio engineering.

**Naval** (0:23)
Podcast recording is so stilted, because it's like you have to sit down, and you schedule something, and this giant mic pointing in your face, and it's not casual. It makes it just less authentic, more practiced, more rehearsed. I get that it produces maybe higher quality audio and video, but I feel like it produces lower quality conversation.

**Nivi** (0:42)
And we all know brains run better when they're being locomoted, and you're moving around or just going for walks.

**Naval** (0:49)
Absolutely. My brain is powered by my legs.

**Nivi** (0:52)
I pulled out some tweets from Naval on the topic of AI. We want to talk a little bit about AI and hopefully talk about it in a more timeless manner, but I think some of it's going to be non-timeless content. Before we jump into the tweets, do you want to say anything about what you're doing with your time or what you're doing at Impossible?

**Naval** (1:14)
Not really. We're working on a very difficult project. That's why it's called Impossible, with an amazing team, and it's really exciting building something again. It's very pure, starting over from the bottom, and that's all with day one. I guess I just wasn't satisfied being an investor, and I certainly don't want to be a philosopher, or just a media personality, or a commentator, because I think people who just talk too much and don't do anything, they haven't encountered reality. They haven't gotten feedback. The harsh feedback from free markets or from physics or nature. And so after a while, it ends up becoming just too much armchair philosophy. You probably have noticed my recent tweets have been much more practical and pragmatic, although they're still occasional ethereal or generic ones. But it's more grounded in the reality of working every day. And I just like working with a great team to create something that I want to see exist. So hopefully we'll create something that will come to fruition and people will say, wow, that's great. I want that also, or maybe not. But it's in the doing that you learn.

**Nivi** (2:13)
So I pulled out a tweet from a couple of days ago, February 3rd. Vibe coding is the new product management. Training and tuning models is the new coding.

**Naval** (2:24)
There's been a shift, a market pronouncement in the last year, and especially in the last few months, most pronounced by Claude code, which is a specific model that has a coding engine in it, which is so good that I think now you have Vibe coders, which are people who didn't really code much or hadn't coded in a long time, who are using, essentially, English as a programming language, as an input into this code bot, which can do end-to-end coding, instead of just helping you debug things at the middle. You can describe an application that you want. You can have it lay out a plan. You can have it interview you for the plan. You can give it feedback along the way, and then it will chunk it up, and it will build all the scaffolding. It will download all the libraries, and all the connectors, and all the hooks, and it will start building your app, and building test harnesses, and testing it, and you can keep giving it feedback, and debugging it by voice, saying this doesn't work, that works, change this, change that, and have it build you an entire working application without you having written a single line of code. For a large group of people who either don't code anymore or never did, this is mind-blowing. This is taking them from idea space, and opinion space, and from taste directly into product. So, live coding is a new product management. Instead of trying to manage a product or a bunch of engineers by telling them what to do, you're not telling a computer what to do. And the computer is tireless, the computer is ego-less, and it'll just keep working, it'll take feedback without getting offended. You can spin up multiple instances, it'll work 24-7, and you can have it produce working output. What does that mean? Just like now, anybody can make a video, anyone can make a podcast, anyone can now make an application. So, we should expect to see a tsunami of applications. Not that we don't have one already in the App Store, but it doesn't even begin to compare to what we're going to see. However, when you start drowning in these applications, does that necessarily mean that these are all going to get used? No, I think it's going to break into two kinds of things. First, the best application for a given use case still tends to win the entire category. When you have such a multiplicity of content, whether in videos or audio or music or applications, there's no demand for average. Nobody wants the average thing. People want the best thing that does the job.