Transcript

The surprising Future of AI With Fathom’s Founder - Richard White

From The Proven Podcast · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 51 min · 11,653 words · 129 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "The surprising Future of AI With Fathom’s Founder - Richard White", an episode of The Proven Podcast published October 15, 2025 (51 min, about 11,653 words). It mentions 45 people, works and ideas, including Fathom, Fathom AI, Application layer, Boardroom, PowerPoint.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Fathom, Fathom AI, Proven Podcast
  2. – 10:00: Fathom, Sonnet 35, Warcraft 2
  3. – 20:00: Application layer, Car washes, Fathom, Foundational model
  4. – 25:00: Boardroom, AI regulation, Application layer, Marshall Brain
  5. – 30:00: Emergency medicine, Self-driving cars, Terminator, Urban land
  6. – 35:00: Fathom, Magic Pattern, PowerPoint, Silicon Valley
  7. – 40:00: Fathom
  8. – 45:00: Fathom, PowerPoint
  9. – 50:00: City council, Fathom, Fathom AI

Notable quotes from "The surprising Future of AI With Fathom’s Founder - Richard White"

  • Successful in AI and they're rushing around. He did it five years ago. He's the CEO and founder of Fathom. He's also a really great guy until he starts telling you the…
    about Fathom · at
  • Industry is starting to realize, the EOL cycles on these LMS is now measured in months. So Anthropic puts out Sonnet 35.
    about Sonnet 35 · at
  • The big, the big platforms that are, again, going from zero, like a Jasper, going to zero to 100 million and right back down. But the real beauty of this stuff is like it can…
    about Jasper · at
  • And I actually think that's where a lot of the gold is. I actually think a lot of the gold is at the application layer.
    about Application layer · at
  • Seeing people who are entire divisions are getting eradicated. People with master's degrees from Ivy League schools are, trying to get jobs at McDonald's right now and they're…
    about Ivy League · at
  • Know, I was a big proponent of like I was telling everyone listen about UBI 10 years ago and I was worried about truck drivers back then, right? I was like truck driver number…
    about Truck drivers · at
  • Us as, founders. This is what keeps us up at night as well. I mean I think you know the I think the boardroom conversations are more about like pace of AI change and kind of…
    about Boardroom · at
  • Operate will also have to change. And the simplest example I can give this is we gave very specific PowerPoint presentations that looked in very specific way and a very s specific class level for that. That took a ton of time.
    about PowerPoint · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Marshall Brain — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Yeah there's a really good short book called Mana MNA by this guy Marshall Brain.

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

  • Fathom — Company · 11 mentions · first at
  • Proven Podcast — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where it doesn't matter what you think, only what you can prove. Richard proved it in a time where everyone's trying to be successful in AI and they're rushing.
  • Jasper — Company · 1 mention · first at
  • Car washes — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Of like great I've got the best new software that solves this one burning problem for car washes, right? Like yes.
  • Ivy League — Company · 1 mention · first at
  • HowStuffWorks.com — Company · 1 mention
  • Salesforce — Company · 1 mention
  • Slack — Company · 1 mention
  • xAI — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

  • Fathom AI — Product · 2 mentions · first at
    Sure. I'm the founder and CEO over here at Fathom AI. we are the number one AI notetaker on G2 and HubSpot. No one likes taking notes on their meetings. And so we have basically an AI that will join your meeting, record.
  • PowerPoint — Product · 2 mentions · first at
  • Sonnet 35 — Product · 1 mention · first at
  • Warcraft 2 — Product · 1 mention · first at
    It's it's it's one of those things and I'm going to date myself here but the original Warcraft 2 cuz I'm that old before you Okay, so I can see by the smile you played it…
  • Terminator — Product · 1 mention · first at
    Cuz people do have this dystopian fear that all of a sudden it's going to be Terminator, right? You're going to have the day it cuts over and then the robots are going to take…
  • Self-driving cars — Product · 1 mention · first at
    Be a lot of good done there. I think, for all the disruption that we're going to see with self-driving cars, that's also a place we're gonna point to, right? the number one…
  • Magic Pattern — Product · 1 mention · first at
    We're we're all using you know we're using chat GPT we're using things like magic pattern is another one I love where it's like easy way to kind of just like you can basically…
  • Gamma — Product · 1 mention
  • GPT-5 — Product · 1 mention
  • Yelp — Product · 1 mention

Concepts & topics

  • Application layer — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
  • Boardroom — Concept · 2 mentions · first at
  • Lean Startup — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    I remember 101 15 years ago, everyone was kind of doing like the, the was it the lean startup stuff where they're oh, they're selling stuff before they really even built it. And you know that got taken to an extreme, but now you.
  • Foundational model — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Company doing 100 million revenue, I don't think they're going to be a foundational model. I don't think they're going to be something like Fathom. I think they're going to be…
  • Truck drivers — Concept · 1 mention · first at
  • Therapists — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Middle level management, it's all knowledge work, therapists. Yeah.
  • Trade school — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    You know I think what we're seeing when you look at what's happening you know college enrollment is down trade school enrollment is up and I think like you know the people that…
  • AI regulation — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Like and so I think the other thing people are talking about is also candidly like AI regulation. the other thing I say is like you know I think a lot of folks in techland voted for Trump and one of the.
  • Western-style democracy — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    This belief right or wrong that if China gets to AGI first if you believe in western style democracy bad things happen then right and so I think that's another there's like you…
  • Emergency medicine — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Scans the early detection like our health care system my father was in emergency medicine for 30 years he will be the first one to tell you we are really reactionary in…
  • Urban land — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Point to, right? the number one cause of death of people, the number one use of like urban land, like you think about housing affordability, think about what happen when you…
  • City council — Concept · 1 mention · first at
    Fact, I met with another entrepreneur yesterday who was told me is running for city council and I think he expected me to be disappointed and like be kind of confused by that.
  • Attorney General of the United States — Concept · 1 mention
  • Dunbar's number — Concept · 1 mention
  • Gen AI (Generative AI) — Concept · 1 mention
  • IPO (Initial Public Offering) — Concept · 1 mention
  • Jenga — Concept · 1 mention
  • LLM (Large Language Model) — Concept · 1 mention
  • Moore's Law — Concept · 1 mention
  • SaaS (Software as a Service) — Concept · 1 mention

Places & events

  • Raleigh, North Carolina — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Awesome website. the guy's actually from my hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. He wrote this like 25page book and it was kind of a tale of two cities. one city actually set in the US that was like dystopian AI future.
  • Silicon Valley — Place · 1 mention · first at
    I mean I you know I think that I think everyone thinks that in Silicon Valley we have a whole different set of tools than everyone else. We actually don't. I think there's you know what I'm done.
  • China — Place · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where it doesn't matter what you think, only what you can prove. Richard proved it in a time where everyone's trying to be successful in AI and they're rushing around. He did it five years ago. He's the CEO and founder of Fathom. He's also a really great guy until he starts telling you the unforgiving truth of what's actually going to happen with AI in the next 24 months. It's terrifying. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. The show starts now. Hey everybody, welcome back. I am excited to have you on the show, Richard. Thank you so much for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me.

So for the four or five people who don't know who you are. Can you explain what you've done, what your success has been?

Sure. Uh I'm the founder and CEO over here at Fathom AI. Uh we are the number one AI notetaker on G2 and HubSpot. No one likes taking notes on their meetings. And so we have uh basically an AI that will join your meeting, record it, transcribe it, summarize it, write the notes, write the action items, fill in your CRM, you know, Slack it to you, email it to you, you name it. so that you can just focus on your conversations and not doing a bunch of kind of data entry work.

So I think most people are familiar with your product. I think the stuff we're going to talk about now is stuff that people aren't familiar with about the reality of AI. A lot of people think AI means artificial intelligence. It also means always incorrect. Uh there's also a side of this that you believe about what it what it means for you as well and some of the harsh realities of what AI does. Can you kind of share what some of those harsh realities are? Yeah, I mean I think one of the things you know I've been doing software for 20 years and

AI has completely upended how we think about building software. Um made it much more of like an R&D process now whereas before it was more of like a manufacturing process.

It's also made the failure r much higher, right? Like you know we it takes a long time to sometimes ship an AI feature because it will fail three times before you get something to work. Um and so that exists for both when we're building features for our product. It also exists like when we're trying to buy AI products to basically, you know, you move our business forward. We actually have a goal at Fathom of getting to 100 million revenue while staying below 150 employees. And so we have this big emphasis on efficiency and automation. And it's been interesting because we had this, you know, I just gave this talk where I expected to give a talk about how, you know, we've transformed everything with AI and we actually have like a 60% failure rate uh on AI initiative. So, I think there's a lot of really interesting gotchas when you're trying to build or deploy AI solutions.

So, what you're trying to tell me is that AI isn't the holy grail. All of a sudden, I'm not going to start floating and curing cancer cuz I was bored on the toilet one day. That's not how things actually work. Damn you, man. You've ruined it all for us forever.

She's so sorry. So, as we go into these and you're talking about failure, what do you mean by failures? I mean, a 60% that's that I mean, I wouldn't get on a plane that had a 60% failure. I know we get married because that's a 62% failure ratio, but okay, we'll get on a plane that has a 62% failure. What do you mean there's a 62% failure ratio in AI?

I mean, so actually there's this MIT study just came out that said like the average company right now is like actually a 95% failure rate on like AI initiatives. What I mean for us is basically like it produced the outcome we wanted. And I think that's actually the hardest part is like

in AI land it's easy to get it to produce something. It's easy to get the AI to spit out something,

right? Hard part is getting it to spit out the right thing. and what is the right thing. So, for example, in our business, like, you know, I could you could build an AI that gives you an accurate summary of a meeting that's six pages long, but accurate may not be enough. Like, that's too verbose. I don't want a six page, you know, it's a 10-minute meeting. I want six pages. So, there's like this whole new nuance of like quality that I think is hard for us to adjust. We're not used to judging it, right? We're used to software as binary. It works or it doesn't. I click the button, the thing moves on the screen, right? And now we're in this world where like I click the button and it spits out some words. I'm like, are those the right words or not? Right? It makes a judgment call. Is that the right judgment call or not? And so I think one of the things that's really changing everything is we

have to rethink how we evaluate tools because we have to actually get in there and it's almost like evaluating a hire, right? It's more like a vir because you're you're basically buying thinking, not features now. And so it's kind of upended how we think about purchasing products. Right. So, I can't even get chat GPT not to put dashes in the damn responses that it gives me, which I I can't tell you how many cursing that I've done at that thing. You're talking something significantly higher. How do we get it to produce content that we actually want or or go from that 10page, you know, dissertation that's so verbose into what we want? How do we do that on at the home level for the your everyday consumer? And then also, you know, as the CEO as a as a very successful company because every single meeting I'm in, your damn software is there before anyone else joins. Thanks for that. Um I'm a little little angry about you with

that one. How do we do that in both the personal level and the professional level?

Yeah, I mean it's actually that same study said that like the success rate for things like CHF GPT is like actually 40%. Which is still not great but way higher than 5%. Right. And I actually think I think AI is actually easier for individuals to use because individuals are basically taking ownership of that output, right? Like it's like, oh, it's written this email for me. And yeah, I hate that always puts the M dashes in there, too, but I can at least remove them. Where it becomes problematic is when we're using these things at scale and no one's basically been properly equipped to QA the thing. Uh, right.

You know, we have a whole team at Fathom that all they do all day is play what I call kind of like a, you know, AI version of Jenga where we think about this as like all day we are experimenting with like, you know, basically models and use cases, right? And does this model good at this use case? Can can this model find action items from a transcript? And I call it Jenga because like if you push on a block and it, you know, gives any resistance, you give up. You find another block that moves smoothly, right? Because there's a weird kind of like

problem you've got now where you got so many models with differing kind of performance parameters, cost parameters, and so many different you want to do. So it's like this really big problem. You almost need a full-time team if you're building stuff.

Either you're building it or you're evaluating it to like, you know, evaluate multiple vendors in parallel and try, okay, we're going to hire three vendors. We're going to put each of them on a 90-day pilot, which by the way, we make every vendor give us a 90-day pilot for AI and going to have a whole team that QA it. And when we don't do that, it almost never works. So when when new GPTs or new models come out, there are so many times where I personally I've spent so much time training my old model and trying to teach it and say, "Hey, do this, do that, and I have very specific calls to for it to do that." when a new one comes out, do you guys over at Fathom have the same puckery motion that we have in our side? We're like, "Oh god, everything's about to blow up again." Is that is that something you guys are facing as well?

Yeah, on two dimensions. Well, I mean, one, we get excited because usually the, you know, new models unlock something for us, right? For example, GPT5 for the lackluster kind of reaction it got from the market did actually solve a significant problem for us. Hallucination rates are way down and that actually ends up a whole new class of problems that we were trying to solve before but couldn't. But it causes also other problems in that none of these models are forward compatible. Right? You get something working on GPT4, it's not necess.

And even more problematically, I think this is something that everyone in the industry is starting to realize, the EOL cycles on these LMS is now measured in months. So Anthropic puts out Sonnet 35. They put out 6 months later Sonnet 37. Son 37's more powerful, but now there's a limited number of GPU compute in the world, right? And so they're shifting all of their compute to this new model. So now you end up on what we call the LLM treadmill where if you don't upgrade your models,

all of a sudden you find out you're getting all these errors because there's no compute to service them. And so now you're spending as much time upgrading your models as you are basically building new stuff from scratch. So the maintenance load on these on on these tools and processes is way higher than anything you've ever seen in software al it's it's it's one of those things and I'm going to date myself here but the original Warcraft 2 cuz I'm that old before you Okay, so I can see by the smile you played it before I would go and I would attack the orcs or I would attack the knights or whatever it was. I would save my my military formation.

Okay, if this doesn't go well, I'm going to go attack. If they all die, I can just go back again. I wish that existed inside chat GPT where or any GPT that we're going we're like okay want you to try and try and do this quit giving me dashes or I want you to word it this way and then for some reason AI becomes always incorrect and it just goes off on a tangent. I'm like excuse me sir can you just go back 30 seconds that would be nice and then it sounds like what you're saying is hey I did this great game can I pick it up and drop it in over here as well and it seems like both of those things are absent in the market even at the highest levels which is where you are. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think a lot of advice I give to companies is like if you can try to solve a problem with in building something in house, but know that that in-house solution has like six to nine months of shelf life and know you're

going to throw it away and probably buy a vendor at some point, right? Uh but by building in house, you have a better sense of like cool, we at least know we got it to do the one small critical thing we needed to do, right? A lot of vendors throw a lot of things at you, right? We have 10 different features and two out of 10 of them work sort of thing. But yeah, this is it's kind of like this whole new again this whole new paradigm. It's very much an R&D lab. It's very much a

not an assembly line, right? It's like it's not as predictable as what we had before this in SAS. I

I I wish this was something new in a sense of tech because I remember cuz I'm old enough to remember when you know we had the dot boom and everything was going on with the internet like oh this is going to be amazing and then you know pest.com is going to be amazing and this is going to be everything just blew up all the time. So not just on the personal level but professional level companies you thought would be Fortune 500 companies are going to be there forever would be gone 2 3 weeks after. Are you seeing that with the established companies are sitting there going, "Oh we've got, you know, there's a the light at the end of the tunnel is not a light, it's a train, we got to adjust because what worked today just won't even exist." And how short is that time frame?

I I mean, I think the exciting thing as an entrepreneur right now is that a lot of the big companies are really struggling to release good AI features because it breaks their paradigm of how to do software, right? They're used against this assembly line where it's like how do we build software? We say we want to build this feature. We spec it out. We build it for 3 months and then oh, you know, we click the button and it moves, you know, 10 pixels to the left, we're done, right?

And it requires a whole new way of doing QA that most these companies are good at doing, which is why I think if you look at most of the big new AI features from a lot of these companies, they're really mediocre, right? Like because they just don't know, they don't have the muscle in the company, which is what is quality, right? They don't know how to judge basically like subjective quality and they're still looking at from their kind of like objective like did it do the thing? Did it spit out words? Yes, great. Pass QA ship it sort of thing. So I actually think this is a challenge if you're buying software because a lot of times the bigger incumbents actually have inferior products to the new startups. New startups have their own problems, right, of like you know instability, whatnot. But if you're an entrepreneur, I actually think it's a fantastic time because it's like the incumbents are completely out of their

depth in how to build software in this new era. Uh and so I think exciting actually as much as it is also terrifying.

Yeah. I I think that the best example I've heard of this is imagine you're on a train that's going as fast as possible and you're on one car of the train and you're fixing as much as you can, but all of a sudden it's going to unlock and that car is going to be gone. So you better jump or good luck. I wish you nothing but the best because that's just the reality that we're going to be in. So, as someone who's kind of tip of the spear, who has been become very successful with what you're doing and has created a company that as much as I do hate your thing, showing up to all the meetings, is something that everyone uses. Um, where do where do you see AI?

Because everyone's like, "Oh my god, it's the greatest thing since fire." And there's other people who are like, "Oh my god, it is fire. It's going to burn down my house." There seems to be people who are very polar opposite. Either you're completely madly in love with AI, or oh my god, it's the devil incarnated. And they have this paradigm shift. Where do you see it going since you are again you're you you're in there you're with the CEOs you know what's going on better than even someone the regular person would be how does this look in five years

yeah I mean one thing I will say is this is to me the greatest technological shift of my lifetime bigger than certainly bigger than mobile bigger than social you know I'd honestly even say bigger than internet itself right like there is real there right like for all the failure rates and stuff like that they're also the denominator is huge right everyone's trying because this is the closest thing I've seen to match Um, one of the challenges is like, yeah, what is, you know, I have board meetings and we're kind of talking about like what, you know, what's our 5year plan, what's our 10ear plan, I don't know, if you get to AGI in 5 years, does anything really matter? Can you really plan beyond AGI type things?

um smarter people than I I think the the real question it's kind of an open question right now in the market is you know my kind of core friend group the same folks that I kind of leaned on 5 years ago before Gen AI got good to make me feel confident building a business betting on Gen AI getting really good uh it's kind of like we started this company in 2020 2020 we launched we put AI in the name of the product and all my investors are like what are you doing everyone hates AI it's easy to forget it was only four years where AI was being marketed in 2015, 2016, 2017 and it was terrible, right? It was not high. It was, you know, it was it was basically fraudulent kind of stuff. Um, but now we're at this point where everyone's like, "Oh my god, AGI is going to happen in two years." And, you know, there's some people still believe that we're going to keep accelerating. I think that that group of people that I'm kind of

surrounded with thinks it's about 50/50 between like we're going to reach a plateau of what you can do with the current tech and we're going to find kind of mors style the next, you know, step up. It's clear that we're getting diminishing returns from the current generation of transport based AI like GPG5. I think everyone kind of sees all the latest models are now more optimized for efficiency. They're not like wildly smarter than the previous model, but they're cheaper to run, which is important. Companies running, you know, for their margins and all that sort of stuff. Um,

I've kind of taken the approach we have to kind of assume that things are going to kind of slow down because we assume they're going to continue accelerate. almost impossible plan for anyways. So, um, and we're kind of, again, I think GB5 was a one of those was a good data point of like, okay, like it seems they were plotting towards a plateau and we're waiting for whatever the next thing is after transformer models alone. Um, but it is the most volatile market I could ever imagine, right? like you know we've we've been on by this company's been on objectively a rocket ship by the last 10 year standards and we're now just doing pretty good by modern standards where you see companies go from zero to 100 million a billion in revenue in two years right it's

and then you go back down to zero two years later right like look at the stuff like that so is insanely volatile market full of tons of opportunity but how longived those opportunities are I think is to be seen

yeah I think to your point of what does does this mean to the human race? Um, I will give a little bit of push back. I don't I don't think it's better than internet. I don't think it's better than industrial revolution. I don't think I think it's better than the only thing better than this is fire. That's as far as the human race is concerned. This is this is fine as far as what it could do. Now, fire was good and bad. It could burn down your entire village. Yes. But it also makes good food. We could, you know, do these things. As far as what I'm concerned, what I've seen with it, AI is as good as fire. Now, what that means going forward M good luck. I I wish you nothing but the best cuz it's it's going to be pretty pretty interesting. You mentioned there's companies that go from zero to a billion dollar valuation and then two weeks later gone. Do you think we're going to see in our lifetime the first

hund00 million company run with just a single employee? Do you think that's going to happen?

Yeah, I mean I think you Sam Alman talks about the first billion dollar company with a single person, right? I think that's highly possible and then you can extrapolate all the concerns you have about like societal upheaval and wealth inequality and from that pretty pretty pretty easily right but yeah no I think that's perfectly reasonable to expect

yeah I think when it and this is something that people don't understand this is no longer a luxury we don't get to sit back and say hey I wonder if this is going to happen I wonder if this is going to affect me this is going to create wealth distribution issues on the equivalent of basically India when you look at how people are distributed especially here in the United States you're going to see that. So, if for those of you who are playing at home who might not understand everything that Richard is talking about and what he's doing, um you do not have the luxury to sit on the sidelines. So, either you're going to be panhandling or you're going to embrace AI because this is just this is what it is. This is electricity. So, if someone's walking into that and they're like, "Oh my god, this is terrifying." You know, you're you're telling me that, "Hey, I need to embrace it, but then you're telling me the

company's going to disappear in 5 months." When you're an entrepreneur, you're like, "Oh god, I have to go into this. I know I have to go into this, but I could get punched in the face or I most likely will. So, how do you advise entrepreneurs? How do you advise business owners and hey, these are some proven tactics that work. Let's let's do these. Just do these for now. Make sure that if you do get knocked on your butt, you can get back up somewhat gently and, you know, go from there. What are the things you advise?

I mean, honestly, I think it's never there's never been a better time to start something that's really narrowly focused, right? You you hear a lot about the big, you know, the big platforms that are, you know, again, going from zero, like a Jasper, going to zero to 100 million and right back down. But the real beauty of this stuff is like it can get you can really tailor the stuff to specific use cases, specific problems. And you can build faster and cheaper and better than you ever have before, right? It's completely you can you don't have to have a CS degree like I have and a team of six engineers anymore to build something useful. you can just be a pretty good, you know, hobbyist, prompt engineer, plus some magic patterns and some some prototyping tools and you can build something of value, right? And so, you know, I remember 101 15 years ago, everyone was kind of doing like the, you

know, the uh was it the lean startup stuff where they're like, oh, you know, they're selling stuff before they really even built it. And you know that got taken to an extreme, but now you literally can really narrow down and find a very specific niche and you can build a really good like and I know this is kind of a majority of a lot of markets but like lifestyle business out of like great I've got the best new software that solves this one burning problem for car washes, right? Like

yes. And I actually think that's where a lot of the gold is. I actually think a lot of the gold is at the application layer. A lot of the investment and noise and all the stuff is all kind of at the like foundational layer. It's all about who's building the big infrastructure stuff,

but that's a that's a you know billionaire's game. You need a lot of money up front to do that. I think there's a lot of money to be made at the application layer sitting on top of these tools. And if you can get good at bringing them and that's where I think I think that person that's going to be the, you know, the the single person company doing 100 million revenue, I don't think they're going to be a foundational model. I don't think they're going to be something like Fathom. I think they're going to be something that sits above something like Batham, right? Or above these foundation foundational models, right? Just finds a really good niche that just happens to catch like wildfire.

So I I think that's for the entrepreneurs. I think for the employees, there needs to be this conversation of what's happening because you're seeing in their orgs, you're seeing people who are entire divisions are getting eradicated. People with master's degrees from Ivy League schools are, you know, trying to get jobs at McDonald's right now and they're terrified. And as as I rightfully think they should be this, welcome to this new world. You know, when we were me, when I was younger, being an entrepreneur was not sexy. They did not like that idea.

Being in comic books, not sexy. Being a dork, not sexy. And then all of a sudden, now like it's our time. It's our time has come. Same thing with entrepreneurs. The employees that I know are terrified. They are they are fundamentally they're like, "Hey," and they go back to their old model, which is, "I'm going to get another degree." I'm like, "That's that's not going to help you. That that's over. Those times are gone." So what do you say to those you know mid-level medium man you know mid-level managers kind of just you know senior directors VPs what do you say to those guys who have said like I've built and I have you know busted my butt to fit into this model of this process of this American dream and as George Carlin said really well he goes it's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it if you no longer believe this model and you you are no longer built for this and the thing you

were built for does not exist anymore how do you adapt Yeah, I mean that is the question like that will be the question of the next 5 to 10 years, right? I remember, you know, I was a big proponent of like I was telling everyone listen about UBI 10 years ago and I was worried about truck drivers back then, right? I was like truck driver number one profession in like 30 or 40 states, right? And

it's going to, you know, it's going to go away soon. And it's kind of funny, it's really hard to predict these things. I think everyone would be assured that that was the first thing, the first kind of like industry get years ago. Here we are 2025 and actually it's no it's artists, it's copywriters, it's pretty soon going to be lawyers, middle level management, it's all knowledge work,

therapists. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so um so you know what would I say? You know, honestly it's like it's there are no I would tell you like your fear is wellounded first of all, right? Like and unfortunately like I'd love to sit here and tell you that you've got nothing to worry about. I think you do, right? uh you know I think what we're seeing when you look at what's happening uh you know uh college enrollment is down trade school enrollment is up and I think like you know the people that are kind of solving this first principles the folks coming out of high school are looking at that saying gosh you know there never been a better time to be in the trades now am I going to tell some VP to like hey you know you should go back to college and become a you know a plumber you know I think that's a tough sell too I think there's like a middle ground where if you really become a student of

this stuff. I still think there's a lot of opportunities in the next couple years again at the application layer where you could be the person that helps companies get from a 5% success rate that we're seeing to a 25% success rate and there will be a lot of opportunities there. Um I think it really depends a lot where you are in your career. I mean I you know I've been building software for 20 years and I've always thought that like you know I can always fall back. I know how to organize people to build great software. I'm not sure that'll even be a skill set in five years. Right.

That's correct. um you know I I very much point like if I don't have kind of a exit or retirement plan over the next 5 10 years we need to be thinking about what we can what value can provide beyond that but I do think very tangibly I think trades will be coming back in a big way I think you know there's a lot of opportunity for people to learn how to become experts of you can be an expert in replacing your own job with AI that gives you a job over the next couple years

so you know we talked about entrepreneurs we've talked about employees we talked about where we think this is going and how this is the new fire. What are some of the conversations that none of us are here having, let me ask, none of us other than you are having in these boardrooms with these people who are, you know, very much a tip of the spear. What are the things that you guys haven't made us public yet? If you can, this is, hey, this is what we're talking about and these are the things that keep up us at night because we know what keeps the entrepreneurs up at night. We know what keeps the employees up at night. You're us as, you know, founders. This is what keeps us up at night as well. I mean I think you know the I think the boardroom conversations are more about like pace of AI change and kind of like you know how quickly will you used to be you build a software company and usually had

at least 10 years before someone really disrupted you and then now you know and it started now it's like 5 years pretty soon be two years where it's like there's so much technological change it just undoes you know if you valuations for SAS businesses you look at them today versus 5 years ago dramatic

oh my god yeah right um so I think there's a boardroom I think there's a lot of conversation with that again about like AGI and like what would that mean? Could that just you know render a lot of businesses irrelevant? Um I think the conversation we should be having is the one we've kind of been tiptoeing around which is like how do we as a society handle this? Um yeah

there's a really good short book called Mana MNA uh by this guy Marshall Brain. Do you remember how stuffuffs.com? Uh awesome website. Uh the guy's actually from my hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. He wrote this like

25page book and it was kind of a tale of two cities. Uh one city actually set in the US that was like dystopian AI future where like the robots are in the ears of the humans telling them exactly what you know walk 10 steps this way turn over the burger that sort of thing. And another city where it's like oh no a lot of the gains from AI are more shared amongst society. It's like it's a little hyperbolic, right? But I think a really interesting thought experiment of like this is coming and which, you know, I don't know that we'll get as dystopian as one example or as utopian as the other, but I don't think we're I think we're everyone's busy fighting trying to put the genie back in the bottle. The genie is not going back in the bottle.

We need to talk about what's where do we want to like put guard rails and push the genie in one way or another, right? like and so

um I think the other thing people are talking about is also candidly like AI regulation. Um, the other thing I say is like

you know I think a lot of folks in techland voted for Trump and one of the reasons they voted for Trump is because he wouldn't regulate AI

and a lot of folks see that the basically there's an arms race between us and China around AI and if there's this belief right or wrong that if China gets to AGI first

if you believe in western style democracy bad things happen then right um and so I think that's another there's like you know kind of so many different levels to this upheaval But those are the three I would think about.

So where do you think things are going? Cuz people do have this dystopian fear that all of a sudden it's going to be Terminator, right? You're going to have the day it cuts over and then the robots are going to take us over and turn us into cottage cheese. Where do you think and what's more realistic for that?

I I think all the paths are still open. I you know I don't you know I think it's not the answer I wanted to hear, but okay. Yeah,

I just peed on myself a little bit there. I think all, you know, I think we would be foolish. I think there's a lot of folks in AI land that are concerned about AI safety. Like a lot of the, you know, a lot of the kind of open revolt that they had at OpenAI a year ago was about this fear that like this thing was founded on the premise of AI safety and it seems to gotten off that mission sort of thing. So, a lot of people way smarter than me seem to be very concerned with that. And so I think, you know, don't want to be alarmist, but I think we should all be like alive to the danger. This feels like a the critical moment in in like a in in human civilization, and everyone needs to educate themselves a little bit and, you know, do what they can to make sure we're nudging ourselves in the right direction.

So, for all of you who have just caught the podcast, we've decided that we're all going to die. We're all going to be out of jobs and it's completely over and it's a horrible time to be okay. So let's try to give people a little bit more hope about what what's done. So there's this lot of conversation about what AI can do and what AI has done and not only just the basic stuff with business but what's been done medically like hey we're we've made XYZ discoveries and we've pushed the envelope with that and hey how we've looked at a problem that couldn't have been solved by humans for 100 years it's in 27 seconds. So there are some amazing things with AI. Can you kind of share some of the your favorite ones that you know you've seen that have kind of personally like oh my god I can't believe it just did that or it figured out that

I mean I think you just touched on one the big one just like a lot of the stuff you're seeing happening in healthcare right where like we things that used to be really expensive right like analyzing scans the early detection like our health care system my father was in emergency medicine for 30 years he will be the first one to tell you we are really reactionary in healthcare

um for a number of reasons but first and foremost like it's very expensive to be basically proactive in healthcare because you know someone's got to analyze these scans, they got to look at these blood markers, they got to do all these things. Um both on the like kind of like the preventive maintenance, preventive medicine stuff as well as research. And this is going to drive down the cost of all that stuff dramatically.

Oh yeah. To the point where you know you don't have to be rich to get kind of life extending care well ahead of some acute medical crisis. Um, I think there's a lot of I think that's going to be the thing we're going to look back at and be like, "Wow, we're going to cure, you know, hopefully cure or greatly reduce the harm on a lot of diseases in a very short period of time." Um, but it's going to be kind of the wild west in the meantime because also our medical regulations haven't really caught up with that, right?

How to handle it. But I think that's probably one area you can look at and point to and be like, there's going to be a lot of good done there. I think, you know, for all the disruption that we're going to see with self-driving cars, that's also a place we're gonna point to, right? Like, you know, the number one cause of death of people, the number one use of like urban land, like you think about housing affordability, think about what happen when you don't have to dedicate, you know, 40% of your city to parking. Think about what happens when, you know, people aren't getting in car accidents left, right, and center. So I think there's going to be you know on the other side of this crucible there are a lot of things look forward to in the same way you look at the same thing with like the industrial revolution and stuff like that there were a lot of painful things in that transition a lot of terrible things

happened humanity was better for that transition in the end right um but it will be

I don't think we have to go as far back to the industrial revolution either even with the IT boom when technology kicked in people like oh my god these are going to wipe out jobs yeah they did when tech rolled out when we had the dotcom boom and everything took off the internet. It wiped out walls of jobs, but the job that you have right now did not exist before that. The jobs that I did that the careers I had. So, yes, it will wipe out a ton of

Will also create a ton. So, I think there is that. I think to your medical point, you know, there's a difference between uh our DNA and DNA. There's different with that how we we measure those things. Some things don't change because even if you die of cancer, your DNA is that's your DNA. But the other stuff we can analyze and say, hey, you know what? We say that everyone should take these medicines. However, based off your stuff, your individualized goodies, you should be taking this. I was I was sitting with the CEO of one of the companies that does that. We broke down.

He's like, "Yes, let's run your blood work." And within a day, he's like, "Okay, this is what you need to stop eating right now." I was like, "I'm sorry, what?" He's like, "Yeah, you're I'm like, "Yeah, but that's supposed to be healthy." He's like, "Yeah, for everyone but you. Don't eat that." Uh, he regrettably did not say that I could have ice cream every day. So, I'm still mad at him, but that's for those little I was like, "Well, I can't have ice cream every day. What the hell?" So, there is that. So we get we we understand I think you know for every single level that we're at be it employee entrepreneur founder there is this optimism and there's also a little bit of fear. So as we get through that I think having the tools and the techniques right now like what are the things what are the tools that you're using other than obviously everyone needs to use your software. I get it. Uh

please stop using on my meetings you bastards. Um so everyone needs to use your software. What are some of the tools that you use every day and how do you use them differently than everyone else?

I mean I you know I think that I think everyone thinks that in Silicon Valley we have a whole different set of tools than everyone else. We actually don't. I think there's you know

what I'm done. We're we're all using you know we're using chat GPT we're using things like magic pattern is another one I love where it's like easy way to kind of just like you can basically it's a it's an AI for generating prototypes like you want to user interface something. So like we build a lot of prototype tools. Um, you know, at a at the at the high end, I think the the secret is to actually build good products with AI, you actually end up using multiple models like any in Fathom, whether it's generating meeting summaries or finding action items or, you know, answering questions based on transcripts. There's a pipeline and we're using three or four different models from different providers in that pipeline. Um, we use, you know, some from Gemini, some anthropic, we use some self-hosted ones.

So at the high end when you're actually building really sophisticated stuff and trying to build you know the highest quality AI right and take it to market it's a whole different game but an individual frankly I don't think there's a lot of I don't I I there's actually I think there's so much word of mouth adoption of these tools right it's why tools go from zero to 100 million so fast

because they're so good that there aren't a lot of like secret tools that people are using right it is a lot of flaws at GPT be you know make you know etc etc. Yeah, I I think the other thing that's really important is when you h pick a new tool, you have to understand what you used to do, how you used to operate will also have to change. And the simplest example I can give this is we gave very specific PowerPoint presentations that looked in very specific way and a very s specific class level for that. That took a ton of time.

We used a tool called and again I don't do sponsorships or affiliates. I refuse to do it so this isn't that. which is to cool gamma and my team got a hold of it and they're like I was like okay this looks completely different they're like yeah but we created 300 slides in a week versus a month and a half and I was like okay I guess our slides now look different so having that adapt adaptivity adapt adaptability was vitally important what are some of the ones that you've used that you're like hey okay yes I used to do it like this it doesn't work anymore

that's it's that was actually the example I was going to give right which is like we that oh I want my slides to look like this gamma is great getting slides out. Are they going to be exactly what I had before? No. No.

But you, that's the thing. It's like, you know, it's like using chat GP in Google search. Is it exactly what I got out of search results? No, it's actually better, but you have to be flexible and be like rethink what do I actually need out of this tool.

Um, right. Yeah. Gamma would be the same exact one I do, right? Like I love creating I honestly I spend I do kind of waste more time now and there generating fun AI images from it. I do too at the bear. I'm glad you brought it out because I didn't want to be the first shameful one to say that. I spend way too long in there just messing with the images because it's fun. I'm like,

"Yeah, I'm a I'm a put an image in two words on the slide kind of guy." And our branding uh actually we just rebranded. We put astronauts in it. It's part of the reason we put astronauts in it is because I had so much fun in every deck we've had for the last nine months. I've got astronauts fencing on the moon, astronauts fighting monsters, astronaut doing math with their helmets on. Like it's I love her. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Not to be fun is not to be discounted in the workplace. It's worth doing. Yeah. It It's still got to be fun out there and get that rock and roll. I'm glad that you you stepped up and and said that you too are a dork like me. So I appreciate that you you step into that world for me. So when people are sitting there and they're looking at this, one of the things that they're concerned with is, you know, if I go to Google and I type in, you know, what's the best food in my city? I'm going to get thousands of answers. With Chat GPT, I'm going to get one,

right? People are a little afraid of that. Like, okay, we're now getting it. So, I don't have the option to think on my own. I'm now being told and I have now had the data so synthesized down to this one thing. Is that something you're concerned with as well? Because if I go to the library and there's one book on history, I know I'm missing a lot.

Yeah. I mean, there's a big concern about like, you know, we've already had this kind of bifurcation, I feel like, of what reality or truth is in America for a certain degree, right?

Uh, well, what do you mean? We're not going to get that. But, uh, yeah, I think it is interesting like

for as much as you get things right, there are certain corner cases where it's really, really bad. like you know I think uh my girlfriend the other day was like oh looking up some place that would like I think you know sew something for her right oh I need like a and it gave her three answers and all of them were completely made up like

it's I mean that one's at least easy to spot because you can easily verify like oh that's not a real place u but it is a little scary because we are outsourcing judgment not like why we like it is because we're outsourcing judgment right because who wants to go through a thousand restaurant recommendations right I just want three pick But yeah, we're outsourcing judgment to this AI and that's why I think again I'm grateful at least that there are reasonable competitors and it does seem to be that there isn't as much moat in building foundational models as we thought. Now there's a ton of moat in that like you know from a consumer brand perspective chat GPT has 98% of the market. Um but I would encourage people to like get a second you know whether it's Gemini whether it's clog like you know when you're skeptical ask us get a second source Grock you name it right like I I think all the smart people

generally are diversifying you know they I don't just I don't rely on one to answer the question right for that very reason

I also think if you are kind of trapped in one ecosystem by your own choice because no one traps it to this point and to your point with you know the girlfriend asking place for selling. I'm like, "Yeah, okay. Now, go check Yelp and compare your options, you're going to get." So, having that cross reference is important. It's one of the things that I've coded into mine, which is one of the things I love about uh GPT so much. I'm like, "Okay, if you give me an answer like this, always do this after." Um, and outside of dashes, uh, it seems to resolve it. I think everyone I know will just celebrate so much when the damn dashes and emojis are no longer included. Stop it. No one writes like that. That doesn't sound like a human.

What is wrong with you? So, if if anyone, by the way, on a side note, who's listening to this knows how to get rid of the dashes permanently. Please send me a message. I will pay you for it. It drives me out of my mind. So, that

open. I actually don't even know how to get rid of the M dashes. I think I read something that they they're aware of this and they're like, "We're not sure how this got in there."

It feels like it's the AI's fingerprint sort of thing. I don't know. It really is. Yeah. So, and it's funny because I will sit there and I will tell it over and over and over and over and over and now I'm just like undash this because it's just like I'm not I can't teach it. So, when people are like, "Oh, AI is so intelligent. It can learn." And there no, you can't even get rid of dashes right now. So, just just breathe here, sweetie. So for those of you who are sitting there and okay we've got tools we've got adaptive but those are going through and we talk about what's next for you not in 5 years but what's the immediate next 90 days for again you're you're kind of tip of the spear with what you're doing over at Fathom what is the next 90 days for you having conversation with your staff because you have to lead differently because now we're in an AI age how do you lead differently how do you show up

differently in that environment how do you build 90-day plans because anything beyond that you're yeah you know come on we don't know

I I mean, you know, we've been fortunate in some ways. This kind of has come back to our strength. Even from the beginning of this company, I've always been like, we only build 90-day plans. I actually think that I think in a lot of companies, planning is this like art of selfdeception and like false prediction, right? Where it's like you doing technology even before AI, you really can't know exactly where you're going to be in a year. Um, and so I think it's important to have hypotheses about the future, right? We believe the future will take this and not this, right? Um, you know, but then we kind of react.

We're more reactionary on a local level. Um, you know, I, you know, I mentioned our goal earlier. If we want to get to 100 million revenue and have less than 150 employees,

that's way easier to achieve when you start from 10 employees than you start from 500 employees, right? Uh, and we're also a fully remote business. And so, um, we're kind of pushing the envelope on two dimensions of like how do you use AI to basically streamline communication in 100 person org that's doesn't ever see each other in person more than once a year. Um,

yeah, but I'll tell you that, you know, right now it's still, I think, really exciting times. I mean, we for our business, the thing we've been really excited about is not just writing notes for meetings. That's never been our goal. Our goal is what happens when we get all of your meetings, all of your team meetings, all of your company's meetings into one data repository because it's a really big data set. It's really hard to move, you know, historically never been captured, certainly not structured. But if you get all that into one place, we're finding a place where the modern LLMs can actually do really interesting things. Like we did an example at Prototype the other day where we said, "Hey, you know, yeah, Fathom, tell us what's the history of transcription engines at Fathom?" and it went back through every all hands every engineering meeting for four years and it wrote a six-page article about

everything we've ever done. You think about for knowledge management, right? Yeah. Um like we don't also see where your loopholes are and where your vulnerabilities are. Say, hey, you know, you've listened to four years of my conversation. I don't remember when I had some dinner last night, let alone anything else. So being able to sit there and analyze, okay, where are their holes in our things? What have we missed that was mission critical? That's something that because again, I love picking on Fathom because it shows up and it annoys me all the time. I want permission. I'm like bugger off. But the ability to do that and then query everything down the road, that data set is invaluable,

right? Once you get to a point where it's like, you know, everyone hates meetings, but we love having great conversations, right? And I think

what we're moving towards a world where you can have meetings and just kind of speak things into existence. We could talk about it and we get done with the meeting, it's done.

The S's written, the emails drafted, the power the gamma PowerPoint is already queued up sort of thing, right? Um, and we get to a world where we get this really interesting dissemination of knowledge across the or in like a fun way. One of the things we're experimenting with is like, you know, everyone hates sitting in all these meetings where like I didn't need to hear most of this. How do we start building everyone like a customized podcast that listens to every meeting adjacent to your op like adjacent to your function and gives you kind of like having across the or today? Uh, there's just so many fun things you can do now that you literally couldn't do even six months ago with the LMS we had then. So, I still think, you know, I still wake up every day feeling pretty optimistic. Um, yeah, I look inside my window, I feel less optimistic, but like I feel like we'll get there. You humans humans

always solve things at the absolute last possible minute, but we usually So, yeah, Tersel said it really well. It says, "Americans always do the right thing after they've done everything else."

Exactly. So, that's that's kind of where we are on this, and I'm like, "Oh god, here we go. Here we go." All right, just survive and hold your breath long enough. Go on that one. How are you dealing with because a lot of and this is getting away kind of from the AI. You've created a very successful brand and a very successful company. It's all remote. A lot of founders, a lot of owners of companies have problems with that. Uh bether, you know, how do we keep my team motivated? How do I keep them honest? How do we keep them unified? How do we build this cohesive culture? So, how have you survived and thrived in that environment? I think you know so the one of the reasons why I have this goal around 100 million with less than 150 employees is I've had a lot of very successful friends that go IPO get to really big companies and all of them say gosh when I tell them we're like 80 90 people they're like oh I missed that

that was so much fun and I always ask them when did it stop being fun and they're like well you know the answers vary 100 150 200 but it's all in that range and I hypothesized when talking to them like there's some point at which you switch from a high trust environment to a low trust environment.

And you know, you know, I picked 150 for our goal because that's like the Dunar number, which is like this theoretical limit of how many real friends you can have. And so I kind of think once you get above that number, it's impossible for everyone to be friends in the or inherently going to be a low trust environment. And so I think it's interesting. I see all the same stuff where it's like, ah, I let my employees work from home and like they're not really working that hard and da da da. Oh. Oh, that's because you have a low trust environment. Uh, and I don't exactly know what creates high trust versus low trust. I mean, I think it's a cultural thing, right? I think it's something you like, you know, I think it's a lot about like maybe how we lead and how we communicate and how we motivate folks. But I do know you should just be aware of when you have what environment you have. And you're right,

if you have a low environment with your employees, one, maybe we should get curious about like how did that happen? And two, yeah, might then need to get people back in the office because if you can't trust that they're going to work, you know, put in the work, right? Incentive structures might be evaluated. But I think we've been very fortunate in that like we have an amazing team that loves the work they do that each are given enough autonomy and given trust.

I think high trust environments happen because when we hire people, I I say tell our team tell our execs, you should trust by default.

You didn't want to trust them by default. You shouldn't have hired them. You should by default. You should give it room to run. You should It's kind of like uh it's kind of gamma. You shouldn't be prescriptive about the deck needs to look exactly like this.

Is it 80% what you thought it was, but 100% what it needed to be? Think right. And I and I think that's an important factor. 80% of what you thought it was, 100% of what you needed it to be.

Right. And and I think when when hiring people that one of the best advice I ever heard was, would you trust this person to feed your children? In other words, if you got in an accident and you couldn't provide for your family, would you trust that these people could do it for you? And if you can't say yes to that, then you have failed in the hiring process. So my I guess my next question is as you built this high trust environment, which takes time and it takes personalities and there's very specific things. Help with argue on getting rid of someone who does not fit into that environment.

Our goal is usually 90 days. um like you generally I you usually know by 60 45 60 days and then yeah just out of an abundance of caution like I think you can go as long as 90 days you really can't go any longer than that um but that's our that's our goal right I mean I think uh it's generally pretty clear the nice thing is once you have a high trust organism the organism will reject any organs that don't seem to fit in with that right

um and they themselves like as long as you've got a good way to have listening posts that are not just, you know, like that's that's what gets harder things we get bigger. It's like how do we how do people trust they can tell me, hey, this new executives brought in is not like is not our DNA sort of thing. Um, but the organism knows if you can find a way to observe it.

I'm I'm I'm It's interesting that you do 45 days. Uh I'm much faster on that. Yeah, we you know, we we're very quick. I mean, my grandmother said it really well. when you're dating someone, you will know within three weeks. And if you don't know, you know, and she she's just bulletproof with that. And uh I miss her greatly. She's no longer with us. But when it comes to hiring someone, normally within the first 48 hours, and we don't pull the trigger that quickly, but within the first 48 hours, you've got enough of an icky. You've got enough of a Okay, this I don't know if I want a second date.

This might have not son of a good. So, I love that you have a big heart and you have high empathy. So model tough to you and and your people.

Well, what I'd say actually we used to probably have I would say that number used to be lower, but then everything looked at we said the

anytime we find out it's not a fit in the first week, that is a real indictment of our hiring process

thousand%. And so I think now now we're generally getting to things like okay we think our hiring process is pretty good which means no one should be failing inside of three weeks, four weeks, right? We shouldn't be able to tell shouldn't be anything that like crazy. some but you can't test for everything in in the hiring process, right? That's where I think like, okay, even with the best hiring process,

those issues will show up month in. That's when, oh, they were all on their best behavior in the hiring process. And we got unlucky in our references and stuff like that,

right? Yeah. We we normally give people tests. We're like, "Hey, need you to do this, need you to do that." And we kind of go through that process like, "Hey, do these things." And we still have people actually test on what they need to do. Um, and so that helps us out with what with what we're doing. So, as we go through this and as things are changing as an organization and as for you, as you've had a level of success that you never thought you were going to have, doing something you never thought you were going to do, what's next? What's the next big thing that you're like, "Hey, I really want to accomplish this."

You know, I think one of my superpowers as entrepreneurs is like I have like these built-in blinders sort of thing, right? Where uh I get really I get so passionate about what I'm working on. I actually think like one of my superpowers is just getting passionate about things. I can get I always say like I always like to hire passionate people like because passionate people get passionate about anything. I get passionate about plumbing going back to our like transition your career into you know I think if you told me like hey Rich go be a plumber I would get so excited about fittings and the right and stuff like that. Um and and I think right now it's like there's just so much that like it's the most fun time to build. It's the most volatile to build volatile time to build, but it's also the most fun time to build.

Um, I do on a personal level get really passionate about, you know, what I see happening in public discourse and what I'll hesitate to call politics. I will fact, I met with another entrepreneur yesterday who was told me is running for city council and I think he expected me to be disappointed and like be kind of confused by that.

No, I think that's amazing. I was like that's amazing. I was like politics not enough I think people of high character good judgment go into politics because they judge it to be Eevee negative and it is Eevee negative

but that's not why you do it right you do it after you've gotten so much from the society that you feel like you should give back

and I you know I think there's a lot of stuff that I would love to do in that sphere in the future um because I think I think our country could use some help I think it could use some high judgment people that are not out for themselves a thousand%. And I it's interesting because it's a similar conversation I had over the weekend. We're talking about, hey, we've all been very blessed. We've all been very successful. Maybe it's time to give back and offset and maybe course correct some of the things that are going on that have been going on, not just for this, this administration, but for many, many, many, many administrations. We're going back double digit. You know, it's like, oh my gosh, we got to we have to pivot this and it's time to kind of have these people take over and do something different. So, other than you're running for president in the next 27 minutes, if someone wants to track you down and they

want to learn more about you and they want to connect because I'm just super grateful that you shared this stuff, what's the best way? How do they get a hold of you? How do they get a hold of Fathom? What's the best idea?

Yeah, check out Fathom. Fathom.ai. It's free to use. Please give it a shout. Um, and then you can find me on the only social media that I use, which is LinkedIn. Um, so find me on the the stodgiest of the social media is LinkedIn. Nice there. I'd love to hear.

I gota I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so very much, Charles. This is awesome. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. All right, guys. That wraps up our episode with Richard. I want to thank him for going out and sharing some insights and where things are going and the unforgiving truth of what's next with AI, how it has two very specific paths, and it's in our ability to dictate where that goes. All right, guys. I'll see you in the next one.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "The surprising Future of AI With Fathom’s Founder - Richard White"?

In order: 0:00 Fathom, Fathom AI, Proven Podcast; 5:00 Fathom, Sonnet 35, Warcraft 2; 15:00 Application layer, Car washes, Fathom, Foundational model; 20:00 Boardroom, AI regulation, Application layer, Marshall Brain; 25:00 Emergency medicine, Self-driving cars, Terminator, Urban land; 30:00 Fathom, Magic Pattern, PowerPoint, Silicon Valley; 35:00 Fathom; 40:00 Fathom, PowerPoint; 45:00 City council, Fathom, Fathom AI.

What is mentioned in this The Proven Podcast episode?

45 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Fathom, Fathom AI, Application layer, Boardroom, PowerPoint, Proven Podcast. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "The surprising Future of AI With Fathom’s Founder - Richard White"?

The episode runs 51 min; the transcript is about 11,653 words in 129 timestamped sections.

More from The Proven Podcast

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated November 19, 2025.