On this episode of Okay, Computer, Dan talks with Ida Josefiina, co-founder and CEO of Sane, about utilizing the power of collective wisdom for social platforms (3:00), why she thinks the next phase of the internet will look much more decentralized (9:00), building incentives for users to adopt new types of social platforms (13:00), Sane’s embrace of “thought spaces” to differentiate from the competition (19:00), the importance of creating beauty in digital platforms and spatial interfaces (25:00), and why Ida thinks people aren’t ready for augmented reality (28:00).
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Show transcript:
Dan Nathan: [00:00:38] Welcome to Okay, Computer. I’m Dan Nathan. I am here with Ida Josefiina. She is the founder of Sane, which is a social platform tool for discovering, connecting and sharing ideas online. We’re going to get to all of that. First things first. When you name this, where you trolling the owner of a now very large social platform? [00:00:55][17.2]
Ida Josefiina: [00:00:56] No, I was not. [00:00:57][0.8]
Dan Nathan: [00:00:58] Well, welcome to. Okay, Computer. [00:01:00][1.6]
Ida Josefiina: [00:01:00] Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.[00:01:02][1.6]
Dan Nathan: [00:01:02] All right, listen, you and I met as meet many Okay, Computer guests on Joe Marchese the roof. It was hosted by Heather Hartnett, his partner there for Human Ventures. And you and I had a quick chat and then we followed up with a longer conversation on the phone, and I was just kind of floored. I’m like, Oh my goodness, this would be a great podcast. You are a brilliant person and a great founder here. So we want to talk about Sane we want to talk about how you got there. But I first want to take a step back because your journey towards being an entrepreneur and a founder in the tech space is not kind of the normal one that many of our listeners are familiar with. So how did you kind of get into this? You were born in Finland. [00:01:41][38.4]
Ida Josefiina: [00:01:41] Yes. [00:01:41][0.0]
Dan Nathan: [00:01:42] Right. And you spent some time in Silicon Valley as a young adult. [00:01:44][2.3]
Ida Josefiina: [00:01:45] Yeah. So I’m originally from Finland, like you said, from Lapland, way up north, kind of middle of nowhere type of situation. Grew up half there and half in the San Francisco Bay area. As a kid, my dad’s also started founder. So runs in the family, I guess. [00:01:57][12.2]
Dan Nathan: [00:01:58] Did he did you guys moved to Silicon Valley so he could be involved? [00:02:01][2.9]
Ida Josefiina: [00:02:02] Yeah. So I’ve done this like first through my dad as a kid and now myself. And then when I was 15, we moved back to Lapland, which was kind of awful because I was a spoiled 15 year old California kid stuck in the middle of nowhere, nothing to do, and just super sort of desperate. And I suppose in that existential loneliness, I started thinking a lot about the sort of big picture questions of humanity as I had nothing else to do. And you know why we’re all here? And also, then what could potentially threaten that existence? That’s when I discovered existential risks, and I became like really interested in the future of humanity questions. And since then, I’ve sort of worked in politics and tech. I started working in politics when I was 15 because it felt like the first sort of tangible way in which I could be a part of the conversation if you know how we organize things in the world. And after a few years, I realized that, you know, especially in a country like Finland that is pretty well off with very few people. You’re not exactly, you know, solving for the big future of humanity related questions So pivoted into tech. Someone was like, Why don’t you just go work in tech? Like, in tech you can just build stuff you don’t really have to, you know, ask for permission and you can kind of take a global approach from the get go. So start working in tech when I was 19 and bounced around a lot, geographically speaking, lived in China kind of all over Europe, went back to the San Francisco Bay Area, worked at a data aggregation software company there. And throughout all of that, my sort of interest in X risks future of humanity stuff remained very much intact and kind of shaping my thinking a lot. So working with in data and information, I started thinking a lot about the role of those two elements within all of this and sort of came to the conclusion that while we have all of these individual challenges, whether they’re in climate change or in AI alignment or in nuclear threats or whatever it may be above that, we have sort of this umbrella problem, which is whether we can create enough collective wisdom to actually be able to solve all these individual different challenges. And that’s when I started becoming really obsessed with the whole collective wisdom question. And obviously in 2022, that has a lot to do with our digital information infrastructures and the Internet and all of that. And that’s sort of like the background to why I’m interested. [00:04:11][129.0]
Dan Nathan: [00:04:11] That some sci fi stuff and we’re going to get to all that. But let me tell you, tell me a little bit, how do humans deal with existential risk? Because it’s funny that you said you kind of got exposed initially to this by being in politics, you know, American politics they brush existential stuff. They put it out, you know what I mean? Like they don’t want voters to be focused on it. And because those are long term hard choices, right. That need to be made and everyone is kind of solving for kind of quick fixes when it relates to politics. I’m just curious, like it was that different in the U.S. when you lived here versus being back in Finland? And how do you think about how humans deal with like the threat of these existential risk? [00:04:48][37.1]
Ida Josefiina: [00:04:49] Well, first of all, I don’t think anyone in politics is really talking about existential risks. They had nothing to do with politics. And like my interest in politics stemmed from that. But there is nothing to be done within the political realm to address that. But I think thinking about existential risks for me, I think I might be at a little bit of an odd one out here, but it gives me a lot of purpose that makes me feel like thinking about existence and reflecting on existence and with existential risk. There is also existential hope and you can kind of, you know, look at the risk negative side, or then you could look at the positive sides of things and where humanity could go and what we could do. So I think reflecting on existence in general is just incredibly important and on a personal, spiritual, individual level, but also collectively as a society and while recognizing that we do have risks and we need to solve them also opens a lot of like mental opportunity to think about all the beautiful, incredible things that could be achieved if we were to both individually and collectively sort of recognize our existence. [00:05:50][60.6]
Dan Nathan: [00:05:51] Which, which is interesting. So collective wisdom and again, I’ll just use the U.S. as an example. I mean, we have a group of thoughts of what we deem to be facts as it relates to science. And we have some people that believe in it and we have some people that don’t, you know what I mean? So it’s like, how do you get a collective wisdom in a country as diverse as the U.S. where we just can’t agree on facts? [00:06:11][20.6]
Ida Josefiina: [00:06:12] I think it’s not so much as just thinking about the outcome, the output, but really, you know, encouraging people to explore their ways of thinking and showing what their thinking looks like and kind of coming into the reason for why Sane exists is that I don’t think it’s particularly productive that we exist in a society or a way of working or thinking where we’re really just focused on the output, the real sort of end result of everything. Like I have to have a very fleshed out idea, fleshed out argument before I can put it to the world for criticism rather than, you know, showing the meta layers of information and context of how these ideas came to be. I feel like most of the valuable information and the learnings are in there and not the final result. So I think when it comes to collective wisdom and to thinking about how we can sort of raise the collective intelligence of humanity for the future, it’s not just about increasing the level of information. It’s figuring out how to turn that data into information, information into knowledge, and ultimately knowledge into wisdom, which is mostly in the sort of meta layers. [00:07:12][60.2]
Dan Nathan: [00:07:13] So going back to collective though, so we have China with one and a half billion people, we have 8 billion people on the planet and they have a firewall. Yeah, there’s bits of science and stuff like that that come from China. But I guess my question is how do you how do you do this in this kind of bipolar world that we live in, like one which is free and open to ideas and one that’s not [00:07:32][19.2]
Ida Josefiina: [00:07:33] I’m more I’m much more focused on thinking about how we can sort of like increase the soft ways in which we can ultimately increase the level of collective intelligence or wisdom or whatever you may call it. Obviously, like the China and different areas of the world, having, you know, different regulations and and different general infrastructure for how information gets to be born and who gets to access it and who gets to create it. All of those sort of fundamental questions around information is one thing, but I think that there’s a lot to do in the West, in the United States and Europe, and just shedding light on the ways that we create information and the ways that we share it and sort of giving more diversity of tools and access to people to explore the creation and the sharing and the discovering of ideas and what’s already out there. [00:08:18][45.7]
Dan Nathan: [00:08:18] All right. So do you buy that Elon Musk wanted to overpay for Twitter probably by $25 billion because he loves humanity and he wants it to be the digital Times Square for the world. [00:08:29][10.8]
Ida Josefiina: [00:08:30] Yeah, I don’t know what to say about Elon, but what I can say about that is that I think this fiasco is creating a lot of questions and opportunity and space to explore what’s going to come next. [00:08:44][14.2]
Dan Nathan: [00:08:45] All right. Let’s talk about that opportunity, because it’s really interesting to me. If you think of the dominant social players, at least in the West, they’ve been around for at least ten years. Right. And I think that you and I would probably both agree. And I think that’s probably why you founded Sane and that’s why you’re on the podcast right here, is that you think the next ten years are going to look very different than the last ten years. And this also goes to China in a way, when you think of TikTok, which is, you know, just been around for a few years and it’s literally taken the world by storm from a social standpoint. They have an app again, it has to operate under the Chinese Communist Party rules and they’ve exported it to the world and they’re taking gazillions. That’s a technical term here that we use a lot of data from around the world. And however Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, is using it. They’re using it in some way, shape or form. Yet all of our platforms are denied from being in China. Right? So that’s a really interesting thing. So what’s broken about social, at least in the West right now? [00:09:40][55.2]
Ida Josefiina: [00:09:40] Yeah. So I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s the system is somehow broken or anything is broken. It’s just maybe the time has come for things to be different and people tend to forget that the Internet is so young, it’s just a few decades old. And perhaps we saw this sort of first wave of Internet entrepreneurs creating a very centralized place in which all of us exist in within a small group of companies created by a small group of people. And that’s where all of the information essentially in the world gets exchanged more or less. And I think what I’m betting is that the next second wave of the Internet or the next phase of the Internet, however you might call it, might be a lot more decentralized, where there is a lot more people creating a lot more places on the Internet. And the first phase of the Internet was really about creating as much information as possible in the world, like we just amassed more and more and more and more and more information. And it’s kind of the the data and information part of turning data into information, into knowledge, into wisdom that. I referenced earlier. And the second part now, which I think we’re very much entering and this whole social media fiasco that’s going on right now with all the different players, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is helping us enter the second phase, which is so much more about making sense of all that information. And I really hope that myself and my colleagues working within the space right now are going to create a situation where there’s room for a lot more people to create tools, to create platforms that really help us make sense of this overload of information. So I think the next phase of social media is really going to be about that. It’s going to be about more decentralized spaces that ultimately help us understand what’s going on, allow us to express ourselves better, communicate ideas better, and ultimately show other people who we are. [00:11:24][103.6]
Dan Nathan: [00:11:24] Can you and I’m not trying to stump you here. Can you give us a sense of some decentralized platforms or services that are working really well right now? We just went through this last kind of two year period where Web3 was like the hottest buzzword, right? And we’ve had a lot of guests, really, really smart people who are like, you know, kind of believe in this whole idea of a kind of decentralized webs and creators really owning their content rather than being the ones who are the product for these larger platforms. Do you think that there’s anything that exists right now coming out of, let’s say, this this massive multi-year period where, you know, people really wanted to bet on the space. Think of all the VC dollars that were raised to kind of invest in decentralized platforms or protocols. Are there any that stand out to you that are actually working that give you confidence or does it give you more confidence that none of the shiny things that people are really focused on and throwing money at over the last couple of years, they didn’t work. Maybe it’s too early. [00:12:20][55.7]
Ida Josefiina: [00:12:20] I think it probably was too early. And I’m not necessarily thinking that decentralization equals crypto or web3 it might mean more conceptual decentralization. Thinking about wanting to go away from this small group of platforms into other spaces on the Internet, I think that’s a form of decentralization. It’s not that really shiny web3 or crypto form, but it’s conceptually there. And I don’t think that also users are necessarily ready yet to make that difficult technical leap into going to these spaces where they have to tinker with stuff. [00:12:53][32.9]
Dan Nathan: [00:12:54] What would be the incentives for users to use a different platform? I have teenage daughters and I’ve seen over the last eight years, you know, what’s come and gone from their iPhones. And to be honest with you, there haven’t been that many social apps, you know, I mean, there was the predecessor to TikTok. There was, you know, a couple other things, Vine and, you know, like here and there, there’s been all these things. The platforms usually buy them to integrate them or they get copycatted, you know, that sort of thing. Like right now there’s this BeReal app that you probably use and maybe it’s fun for a fleeting moment, you know what I mean? And you keep your streaks up and that’s a behavior that was basically put upon us, you know what I mean by Facebook and Snap. But again, unless they can monetize that, how will they do it? They’ll monetize it through brands like through advertising, that sort of thing. So it’s the same old mousetrap, right? So I’m just curious how you think about what would the incentives for users to go to a decentralized sort of app or social experience where they’re not the product, right? They’re not the data that’s being sold and they’re not the one that the ads being shown to. Because, again, one of the things, at least in the last ten years, has been pretty clear. There aren’t too many other monetization, you know, avenues, you know, e-commerce, maybe that’s one, payments will be another. And I’m just curious how you think about that. [00:14:06][72.5]
Ida Josefiina: [00:14:07] I would first maybe just separate business models from why users would be leaving certain platforms and looking for others. And I think when I was a kid, I used to go on these different blogging platforms, probably on blogger creating a blog that was just my like personal diary that I wanted to share with the world. And the world was my mom and my sister and probably one friend and no one else besides that. But I would post these pictures and write these little text about what I did in a day, what I was thinking about, what I did that week, and it was completely meaningless, but it was really an important avenue for self-expression. It was a way to organize thoughts and to create this sort of digital presence that was an extension of myself. And I think that is that was incredibly valuable to millions and millions of millions of people back then. And I would argue that equally valuable, if not more now, and something I’ve been thinking a lot about is how we sort of went from this experience economy that a lot of people argue is dying or has died since COVID and wondering like what’s coming, that’s like what’s coming after the experience economy and something that we’ve been talking about it saying a lot is the end of the external experience economy and how what’s coming next is what we’ve been calling the internal experience economy, which is kind of like the more spiritual, intellectual sister of the external experience economy, meaning that rather than going to a restaurant to take a photo of some fancy food and fancy atmosphere and sharing that on Instagram to say like, Hey, look, this is who I am because I go to these cool places and these cool places to find me, we’re taking pictures of books that have nice little sentences that reflect our sort of deeper in ourselves and posting that is that online. So it’s going more towards like wanting to be valued for things that we know versus things that we own and looking for that those avenues and channels of self-expression. And I would argue that because of, you know, this combination of being in these centralized platforms that are also at the same time extremely fragmented, that we go to Twitter for one specific thing, Instagram for another thing, LinkedIn for another thing, and kind of get lost in the combination of them all without any place to actually communicate the very essence of who we are, what we care about, and how we think, what our beliefs are. There is a big gap for wanting to go on to a platform where we could do all of that and we could do all of that without the sort of pressure of, you know, having this kind of like loud, extroverted clout that we’re on for Twitter, etc.. So I would say that that’s one thing that’s a really good reason for having new platforms that allow for this kind of self-expression, allow for the discovering and creating and sharing of ideas with more depth, more context, more nuance. And then another one is the business model side, which is a whole other game. At Sane we’ve been thinking a lot about the business model. And I do think that, for example, looking at how the $8 blue checkmark thing plays out is a really interesting indicator potentially of how people feel about paying. There’s the caveat that Twitter used to be free and now they’re trying to charge for it. So it’s not necessarily the best indicator. But yeah, I think that there will be a lot of sort of discovery and exploration within the space of what the business model of the next iteration of the Internet will look like. And probably it’ll be a combination of various different business models for different platforms that people are on. [00:17:21][193.8]
Dan Nathan: [00:18:04] Current Ad. Masterworks Ad. Taboola Ad. You named your new company Sane. And the Oxford Dictionary says the definition of that is of sound mind. And when I think about social, you know, I really only use Twitter. I use it professionally. I don’t have a LinkedIn account. I don’t have a Facebook account. I use Instagram just to kind of track my kids a little bit. So I’m not active on any of those or Snap. You know, I think what’s happened over the last 15 years is like the human mind has changed. I mean, very clearly. I mean, it’s like a pervasive sickness, this kind of the dopamine, you know, of checking for likes and retweets and whatever the hell else goes on. And so I wonder, you know, give us a little bit about the mission of Sane. Again, we haven’t seen too many new social platforms really compete with the existing incumbents back in the day, if Zuckerberg or Spiegel or anybody, either Sergei and the other guy, they saw something that looked kind of interesting with five engineers and a family. They just buy it, right? You know, I mean, it’s so integrated or they copy it and they kill it, right. So what do you what are you trying to do with Sane? What’s the mission and what do you think is different about your opportunity that maybe some of the prior founders who were creating social platforms in the last ten years? [00:20:57][173.3]
Ida Josefiina: [00:20:57] Yeah, I think the opportunity is really a lot in the timing right now. I think that because of what we just talked about, like the reason for why users would go somewhere else right now, why they would look for alternative opportunities or places to express themselves is because of how weird everything is right now. It’s just such a weird time and I think we’re going to look back on what’s happening in 2022 and, you know, rhetoric, actively realize a bunch of like cool things that we could have built specifically now to sort of address the a lot of the pain points and the trends and the changes in Internet behavior and also the changes and just cultural trends. So I think that that’s that’s really, really, really, really key. What we’re doing and saying is creating an opportunity for people, not just people who, first of all, have the ability to write a substack once a week, have something to write about, and the time that it takes to write a whole newsletter or blog post every single week or even every since two weeks, the bar is so high and it’s again for me, much more for the loud and the extroverted who have that sort of time, capacity, ability, desire to be in that format, to be publishing all the time. So Sane is opening the opportunity for all of the other people who have a lot to share, not necessarily in the form of just longform content and all the time to create what we call thought spaces. So for example, like an anecdote I like to use or say in this instance is, for example, if I wanted to know something about you, I would Google you. I have Googled you. I found all your different podcasts, all the different things you do. You have a twitter account, right? Yeah. Yeah. I went on your Twitter, I scroll through your Twitter. [00:22:35][97.9]
Dan Nathan: [00:22:35] Obviously very memorable. [00:22:36][0.6]
Ida Josefiina: [00:22:38] I scroll through your Twitter, read maybe the first four of your tweets sort of like got absolutely nothing out of understanding what is the sort of central question or theme that you really care about? Like, who are you like? What do you care about? So say saying instead you could just create a knowledge graph. We call them thought spaces. And I thought space would be like, let’s say this is the question that I’m most obsessed with in life in the world. Three years ago, I wrote a blog post that kind of really well summarizes my thinking around this. And this podcast is my absolute favorite podcast because it really touches on the most essential themes of what I’m trying to explore through all my podcasts. And by the way, I grew up in this place and when I was a kid I was reading these books and it might remind me of this image and that is why I am now building this. So you can just create this thought space, this knowledge graph, this map showing the journey of how your ideas were born and essentially who you are, communicating more of your humanity than just the final podcast episode. Because people might people do obviously listen to your podcast, but they don’t have the capacity to go back and retroactively listen to 200 podcast just to understand who you are, what you care about, and how they should really navigate your work. So Sane enables that for not just the top publishers were able to write every week, or the ones who are the most clever on Twitter constantly tweeting in between their work breaks all the time. I am unfortunately not one of those people, and I’ve always felt the pain of not being able to participate, to being able to be maybe more like thoughtful, introverted and combining creation and curation to really show beliefs and what a person’s thinking looks like. So our mission is really that to enable deeper and more meaningful ways of creating and sharing and discovering ideas that exposes those meta layers of information and context. Because like I said in the beginning of the episode, I think that’s where a lot of the gold is. That’s where a lot of the really important nuggets of information. [00:24:40][121.7]
Dan Nathan: [00:24:40] So it doesn’t have to be influencer led. So one of the things I think is interesting, a lot of people that they say I follow on Twitter are not happy with the last month and changed since Elon took it over. They’re not happy that Elon is giving amnesty to prior blocked accounts, including the former president here, you know, who’s kicked off for good. And they’re searching for other places to kind of express themselves and share their ideas. And, you know, this post news has popped up. Have you seen this thing? And there’s been a handful. I guess it’s the former founder of Ways. I think his name is Noam Barton. And so some very influential big Twitter personalities, meaning people have good followings, have been pushing it. And so I signed up. There’s a wait list of a few hundred thousand. It’s interesting. It looks like a knockoff of Twitter. Now, there are some incentives there. They want to actually pay creators. Right. And again, I don’t know if the business model has been fleshed out yet, but I think that’s kind of interesting. But it would take influential people to go there. Note not different than truth social. Truth social Donald Trump’s well, you know, you snicker and I snicker too. It’s a clone of Twitter but with a bunch of people that are no longer welcome on Twitter, right? Like there’s a thing called StockTwits for the stock market. Okay. It’s been around maybe as long as Twitter. It looks like Twitter, you know. I mean, so there’s all these different verticals that have popped up that are just clones. So I guess my question is, is like, do you have to be the same as the thing that’s worked but people are dissatisfied with or do you have to just kind of break the mold and start all over again? Because for all intents and purposes, you know, timelines are timelines, right? Like the news feeds the news feed. I’ve looked at seen in these stock graphs, they’re beautiful. They actually it’s like the opposite of Reddit, you know what I mean? In a way. And I can get a sense and you Googled me, but I went to your same page and I had a really good sense for who you are. Now, the last question on this is that does it look like when you put my name in, does it look like all of the links that come up? You know what I mean? Like, because there’s videos, there’s tweets, there could be a LinkedIn profile, there could be a news story, there could be a whole host of other things. I mean, Google’s done a pretty good job of that, right? [00:26:47][126.5]
Ida Josefiina: [00:26:47] Well, I just want to actually say something that you just mentioned briefly, but about beauty and digital spaces, I think that’s something that is so incredibly neglected, is like there’s so many brilliant designers in the world. Like, why don’t you people hire them? Like, seriously, like we spend so much money and effort into creating physical, beautiful spaces that make us feel inspired. So why the hell are the digital spaces that we’re in? [00:27:10][23.1]
Dan Nathan: [00:27:10] So is that a pillar of what you’re trying to do at Sane? [00:27:14][3.1]
Ida Josefiina: [00:27:15] It is definitely to push the boundary, but beyond just being intellectually stimulating to also feeling beautiful and inspiring, I think that’s so important. And that gap is closed by such a few companies in my opinion. I think like going back to kind of like the meta layers of context and information that I think is so important is when you create a thought space, which is again the knowledge graph and you’re thinking about creating nodes, which are the little objects that can be PDFs or images or advanced text editor based notes that you put in there and how to connect them to one another. You can connect them on Sane manually, and you can drag the nodes and visually organize the place however you want. It’s so interesting to see how it different. People do it differently, so it won’t be the linear link dump that you see everywhere else on the internet because it is an infinite interface that you can navigate. So it’s really interesting when you give autonomy to users to see what they actually do with that autonomy. I thought it would be so much more monotonous than it is. It seems that people are getting really creative with it and you can see that they’re sort of like personalities are really coming through, not just in what they create, but in how they organize the creation that they that they’ve made. So I just find that like extremely interesting and also like a good sort of signal that there could be more than the linear link dump that we’re used to. [00:28:25][70.6]
Dan Nathan: [00:28:26] So, you know, think about when Facebook went public in 2012, they only had the blue page. They bought Instagram like I think a month before their IPO for $1,000,000,000. Okay. And at the time after the IPO, Facebook’s stock tanked because there was an analyst who came out with a report, Wall Street analyst with a report that they had no mobile strategy and that the time, you know, the iPhone was maybe three years old or four or five years old or something like that. But it’s really starting to get mass adoption. And then all of a sudden, people like they’re never going to be able to recreate the experience they have on a web page on a three or four inch screen, which I thought was really interesting. Okay. Now, they obviously did a really good job doing that over the next ten years, but then all of a sudden, you know, it was like record scratch time last November of 2021 when Mark Zuckerberg goes out and he’s in like some, you know, virtual reality world in that press conference or whatever the hell it was like that, that investor thing. And now all of a sudden I think that, you know, when you’re talking about your thought graph and everything like that, I’m thinking to myself, in five years it’s going to be an augmented reality thing. It’s not going to be me staring at my phone or my iPad, my computer. It will be something that kind of from a sci fi movie, it’s just in this space in front of you. Is that is that something that you guys are thinking about? [00:29:41][75.3]
Ida Josefiina: [00:29:41] Yes, I think it’s again, same with the centralization to decentralization and there being like a sweet spot right in the middle. This is another thing like I don’t think that we’re ready yet to go into those augmented reality spaces. I still personally feel extremely claustrophobic when I put on one of these headsets and I’m like, Where the fuck am I what am I doing here? But I think thinking about interfaces we’re interacting with, like I definitely think that we are ready to move away from the linear into something more spatial. But I don’t think that we’re ready to be in that 3D space yet. So it is something that we’re definitely thinking about is that potential leap. But I think that there’s so much just build in the sweet spot. I find it a bit funny sometimes that we’re making this leap from like the centralization to decentralization or from these 2D spaces to 3D spaces without exploring much of the middle. And I think that that’s I feel like we’re, you know, maybe a few inches away from being in the middle. So building for the middle just makes so much sense because people are just about ready to enter those spaces. [00:30:43][61.4]
Dan Nathan: [00:30:43] What are some near-term milestones for saying like, what do you want to get to as far as users or the user experience or, you know, give me a sense of like what we should be looking out for. [00:30:53][10.2]
Ida Josefiina: [00:30:54] Yeah, well, we’re in private beta. It’s closed right now. So what we’re really focused on building is the discovery aspect of saying so what our private beta testers are right now doing on Sane and it’s just building these thoughts, these thought spaces, and people have built really, really cool things. A friend of mine, Maria, for example, she built a thought space that was called A Decade of Thinking. And it’s essentially this like chronological spatial network of what kind of questions and sources and books and ideas she’s been dealing with in the last ten years that have ended up in her becoming a left wing political economist focused in Latin America. So it starts out in 2011 asking questions like, why are some countries rich and other countries are poor? And then she links some PDFs, sends some books and some ideas throughout that ten years that really kind of pushed her thinking from one thing to another. And if you just take 2 minutes to look at that thought space, you can really get an understanding of who Maria is, how she thinks, what her beliefs are. And even from like an educational perspective, if you’re going on to saying later when the discovery and everything is launched and you search for like Latin American studies, she did Latin American studies at Oxford. So if you’re someone that who’s interested in studying Latin American studies and understanding like what kind of things people are thinking about within this realm, and you find her thought space like that is a golden amount of information. That is something that people usually charge for it to curate those kind of spaces. And maybe that’s something that we’d actually like to do in the future is, is to allow people to work as creators on the platform. But what we’re really focused on right now is kind of like nailing down these like initial set of use cases where people are expressing different versions of themselves, whether they’re just for like, you know, who am I answering the question of who am I or thought space or this is what, you know, is like the central theme intellectually that I’m navigating. And this is the kind of stuff that I’ve been thinking about or whether it’s like a random collection of research on, let’s say, transhumanism. Just for you, Dan, to, for example, get to know me. You go on my saint profile and you’re like, okay, it is profile. It is random collection of research on transhumanism. Like she wrote this essay and listen to this podcast and this image. And just quickly, you can kind of see how I think, not just what I think. And soon you’ll be able to use the discovery feed to search for anything, to follow different people, to subscribe to thought spaces, and to navigate that entire lot of information that exists on Sane through a semantic search engine as well. [00:33:15][140.6]
Dan Nathan: [00:33:15] Well it’s been a pleasure to get to know you. It’s a fascinating conversation. And I wish you so much success with this, because I think to the point you made before, I mean, we’re just I guess we’re kind of addicted to these platforms. We don’t really know why we’re there anymore. We’re spending a lot of time there. We don’t always leave there feeling good about the time that we spent there. And I think, you know, for you to go out there and challenge, you know, what exists in these massive incumbents, I think it’s an honorable kind of goal and it sounds pretty cool. The stuff I’ve seen so far looks great. So I can’t wait until you’re out of that secret, double secret beta and then get on there. So thanks for joining us. [00:33:52][36.8]
Ida Josefiina: [00:33:53] Thank you so much for having me Dan. [00:33:54][1.0]
Dan Nathan: [00:33:58] Thanks again to our presenting sponsor Current and our supporters Masterworks and Taboola for bringing you this episode of okay Computer. If you like what you heard, make sure you hit, follow and leave us a review. It helps people find our show and we want to hear from you. Email us at contact at risk reversal scam. Follow and connect with us on Twitter at okay computer pod. We’ll see you next time. [00:33:58][0.0]
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