#94 - Is GPT-3 the Next Big Thing?

alright what's up everybody it's july the whole world is locked or not locked we don't know if the hell's going on but ian and sam just recorded this episode we talked about a bunch of things we talked about a project that one of the podcast listeners has launched ironic newsletter that's doing six thousand dollars a month very quickly and i think it built the project in about a month we talked about this crazy thing called gp three which is this ai project that came out of open ai that everybody's losing their mind about we talk about b and i this old school business referral network and then we talked a lot about you sam asked me a bunch of questions about life at a big company which we're not sure if it's interesting or not so i think we're gonna put it at the end of the episode we're gonna chop the episode out order we're gonna toss that at the end maybe it's not it not interesting maybe it's interesting it's up to you guys to decide alright i hope you enjoyed this episode as always let's do it boom alright what's going on dude i had like a perfect day yesterday i did everything that i'm supposed to do just great like i it perfect in the in the and that my actions were perfect so i feel good and where you are i i i'm obsessed with weather where you are high of eighty two today currently seventy two you have nice california weather i was just outside and take all my calls by the pool it feels fucking great it's excellent can't complain so it's san francisco san francisco been horrible weather lately it's currently sixty degrees so it's been like sixty in cloudy the past week are do you think you're happier with the sun for sure yeah for short greenery and the sun you know i'm a human i think that works on humans so my wife is from manhattan like her mom and dad live in like the heart of manhattan and she's trying to convince being to move to new york and my down so there's two the here's the pros of cons the cons are new york's pretty like objectively horrible weather like at at least nine months of the year it's just like cold and like kinda wet and gray yep and then taxes suck and then like it's pretty dirt it's fairly dirty right and got it and the pros crowded and the pros are like you're you're like if sometimes if you're in the hustle and bustle it can make you more ambitious and it's can be in firing but also wear you out but so my question is where you've moved out to there's way less people it's more space do you think that the risk of getting fat and soft is worth the being happy with space and weather yes given where i'm at if i was twenty four i'd be like you know this is not the right move in fact when i was twenty three twenty four i was living a sweet life in australia and in australia is like sunny you go to the beach people don't work that hard everyone in the country basically has a truce like y know i won't work hard if you don't work hard and we'll allstate stay you know at the top and i was like i gotta get the fuck out here like i'm definitely gonna become less ambitious less motivated i'm gonna become less of a person because i'm not gonna challenge myself if i stay here i'll be so comfortable but now where i'm at thirty two years old side burns all gray you know got a kid got wife got a dog for now that slow pace and being less in the hustle and bustle and having experienced it i'm good i'm ready for that next chapter now so so this is i feel good about it but that again i'm human it and we just justify whatever the fuck we do anyways so but i i believe it i don't i don't think i'm talking myself into a into a bad decision i think i'm in a good decision here especially now that everything's online dude i i actually believe this silicon valley is on twitter like silicon valley move to twitter some number of years ago and like san francisco you know south bay new york london it doesn't matter twitter is where the heart of the action is actually you can build a world class network on twitter you can to get access to great conversations you can see ideas and get know become a part of them you can raise money through you know through the internet twitter is silicon valley i'm pretty convinced of it yeah i agree i i i've been getting sick of it lately i'm like i don't wanna it's been getting a little what's it called the you can twitter homogeneous yeah so i'm having to like follow different stuff i watched the the doc you or this tv show or the ford versus ferrari thing and they were in like racing cars and i was like this is way cooler than the internet i need to surround myself with these people dude had a moment like that where yesterday i was listening to opened up a club house that app that's like still beta i think yeah i quit using it out of picture it was like you know the notification was like mark andre jason is talking to you know whoever you know bunch of people and so i was mark jason's on i went in and they were talking about like if an asteroid was coming into the earth what would be our mitigation strategy like like you know they'd all looked into it i was like who looks into this you know they look into this like i looked into conspiracy theories and like i look into the the drama behind mtv is the challenge so you know they were like oh yeah i've read about our what we would do and here's what would happen and then i like happened to like kind of swipe and just like miss i i like switched apps into twitter and then at the top of my feed was the guy from pastor dave doing a watermelon watermelon eating challenge against his kid and i was like yeah i watch this and stand and was just like opted into like the mindless entertainment of that and no regrets is that choice that was the right choice for me and so i i i agree similar topic have you seen tv show peak blind i actually started it i watched fifteen seconds of i haven't gotten into i watched yesterday i started it so i love that show and i love boardwalk empire and i re sorry re rewatch piggy blind from the beginning and the the for anyone listening it's fiction historical fiction so it's mostly fake but it's supposed to be based on real stuff but i don't it's like a crime family or mafia or something yeah a little bit yeah so they just like it sees this guy tomas shelby and he has this family of five or six family members and they start out mostly illegal so gambling selling liquor fighting betting just like your traditional nineteen twenty gangster worry with me and your life yes yeah that they get a little bit legit but they're always still kinda doing bad stuff they just drink and smoke and fuck and fight and just all bad just not bad stuff but love vice and i was like this guy's way cooler than like mark zuckerberg like let's just like mark zuckerberg on his surfboard with his white face and hugh jazz yes i'm like dude this guy like this guy's a rock and roll star whereas like marcus like we're wouldn't survive a day at piggy blind right what you know who knows maybe i mean he's pretty gangster but it in a dark way but right it it was just like let's let's let's i'd need figure out who i look up to yeah yeah yeah yeah that's that's a good point you are who you admire and and like you know whatever no judgment they just go through go through your phases and i think both of you and i are in a phase where it's like alright i'll speak for myself i went like pretty deep on the ad admire the people who did great things in tech and startups and kinda modern day business and i know you shifted to like fuck modern day historical business is where it's at historical pioneers and settlers and shit like that generals and then but it's cool to admire different things but not get stuck in the admiration and so so yeah i don't know i don't know it's a good question yourself who i admire right now and then should i should i stay admire or do i need to switch it up well and also i read a lot of personal finance stuff so i need a lot read a lot of subreddit around personal finance stuff and some of it it's like people who have high net worth and how they're doing personal finance and they're like buying a three million dollar home and they're like making all these justification and or buying a fancy car and every once in a while i'm like the only justification for me doing this is because it's fucking cool and what since like we need to remember that that doing something just because it's cool is oftentimes a wonderful reason why you should do anything and it's a life worth living and like i get i'd get too caught up and like well you know if we if i annual analyze this out over fifteen years like it's right like it would be cheaper more yeah and i'm like oh yeah but also like rock and roll like let's just do step just because it's awesome that this is that's like just it just makes me happy there's you know people say like you know what advice would you give to the twenty one year old self and like i asked that question too we have guests on here if you were twenty one again what would you do and it's there's all this like what would you tell the you're younger you but also good question is what would twelve year old you or twenty one year old do you say to you now if it if if if eighteen year old me or twenty one year old me came out of a time machine and got to see thirty two year old me what would he say it'd be like did you got fat what's up with that like yeah this is all cool but like you got fat i lose aren't you getting fit though i'm getting fit but like to eighteen year old be or twenty one who meet this would be fat and he'd be like wow that's lame or it'd be like dude your millionaire here like okay what are we doing with all this money what is the shit we're doing like are we going here we gambling are we are we taking our friends on trips so and it's like oh you're buying equities like alright well like you know so i actually like the other way i want i want in some ways twenty year old i it's like i think forward twenty years and i think backwards twenty years would twenty one year old me be proud of the way i'm with my life and then would fifty one year old may be proud of the way i'm living in my life and these thought experiments help me make these adjustments and get out of the fog of like just the orders the routines that i'm in because as routines are really fucking dangerous i i agree with all of that and the i think it's good questions to ask it's i've find myself asking that stuff all the time of like it's just so easy to get caught to this optimization type of mentality that's and this is what i told we had a meeting today at my company i was like you guys less optimizing more innovating like let's let's remember let's just do cool shit and not like worry as much about the click through rates right well you wanna bring up b n i yeah so okay two two actually wanna start with a different acronym gp three yeah i i've been talking to sam about it and i've gotten access oh nice okay great so give people the simple explanation sam simple explanation man i there's a lot going on let's make it really simple which which is do you do you do you remember smarter child when you're a kid that that that a bought where you could ask it with the weather and you could ask it like is got real and it would come up with like things it's like that on steroids so from my understanding it's a it's an ai tool where you can use a lot of people are using this thing so the guy who was the leader of y comb quit y comb become the ceo of this and it's basically this i think elon musk is considered a founder as well it's basically this engine where you could tell this ai bot to do stuff and they do it for example someone's like create a website where there's the google logo and a search engine and somehow this bot like turns it into a search engine and it just what happens look like google yeah exactly so i don't even know what gp gpu stands for so that's how much i know about this but basically you feed it little inputs of text but you can also feed it actually images they've shown as well but you could most people what they're doing with right now they feed it small snippets of text so for example somebody can feed it a snippet of you can just say you can just ask a question and it'll answer like smarter child then there's a there's a website called learn from anyone i think dot com someone built a little tool which is you pick who you wanna learn from so you can learn be like einstein and you can ask a physics question and it'll answer based on what einstein would say to this and it's like shockingly good and so you can kind of like pick a teacher and then ask a question and then you can get an answer from that teacher based off of whatever that teacher had put out into the public domain that this this this algorithm has ingested all the all this like raw text from the internet and through it has found okay what would this person say and so there's all these crazy use cases like you said like i have a friend sheri who's the guy his tweet viral where he basically was like just described what he wanted a web page to be and had spit out the html code or the javascript code to build that site so he he was like make a to do list where i can add it to do and then i can mark it to do is done and then it actually built an app that was a to do list app just off of that description that was your buddy yeah and he did he did the google one two where he's like put the google logo up top and then add a search bar and that two buttons one says search one says i'm feeling lucky and then return return the answer to whatever question is asked in the search for and he built like a google competitor it's been out of google competitor so but let's talk about like real like do you think that this is actually gonna be legit we all know that ai is pretty transformative trans technology it's gonna be whenever ai you know as ai progresses it'll be the next big tech shift you know the previous tech shifts were from you know non computers to computers computers to the internet from the internet to smartphones and now it's smartphones to ai and that ai is either really narrow like it can only do a specific set of things which is like when you see an ai beat the best go player or chess players or poker players in the world that's very narrow can only do that one thing or if you said okay this ai is gonna identify faces and it's like cool facial recognition that's a narrow ai this seems a lot more general and the more general ai gets the more exciting things are because that means it can do a lot of different stuff that you can't really predict and the the kind of if you wanna get real futuristic and crazy general a ai or ag as they call it is considered the last invention the last human invention that ever be needed because once you have ag then ag invent everything else what like i think i'm a little bit of a normal like a pretty normal basic ass person when i think well this is just like the end of everything i ever believe in right believe in meaning what like i don't know what's man made versus created by a robot there are what is the point of a human being like we exist to do work i i think like we exist like do stuff and if this thing is doing everything then what are we supposed to do we're gonna consume it and we're gonna become entertainer and podcast and artists and we're good in the if you take a long view when this gets really really good we're all just gonna be playing video games and make an art okay well this thing can definitely do that already like but do you think it's actually good even mean is that a good outcome no do you think that this technology is good at them yeah or is it still pretty basic in it's it's not good enough but it is shockingly good like you when you're like it's like when you see your niece after like three months and they had a gross spurt and you're like whoa like you're now you're up to wait last time you were came out to my my hip and now you're like i i level with me somehow or whatever like now you're up to my shoulder like that's crazy you're still not a full grown adult but like damn i didn't realize you grew this much that's what happened with this project is there was a damn i didn't realize it was this good where like holy shit these conversations seem very human like somebody put in like the first half of their blog post about how to run a board meeting and then it spit out the second half and finish the blog post about how to run a start up board meeting i was like wait how does it know that does it know when i would write my blog post it was like kind of indistinguishable the first half and the second half and the first half was written by a real vc in the second half was written by the robot who was just basically guessing what the next word should be which is like kind of insane i almost want this to fail like i'm like nervous that's not gonna happen yeah that's the best inventions they always say like the best technology seems like magic and when you see real magic or you see magic you're like a little bit scared like when you see david blaine do some crazy shit you're like whoa hold on hold on what's what's going on here how did the card end up in my box it's like that doesn't make any sense that's kinda how this feels it's a little bit scary so but that's my question do you do you think that what what what your buddy did do you think that it's actually good or do you think it's like do you think that it's still like a a a car in nineteen thirty it's still like a car in nineteen thirty don't know what those cars like but basically in a sandbox if you can control the inputs so you can kinda play around with it you can demonstrate you can create really cool demos really cool even prototypes we're not at products yet but we'll get there like this gp gp three is improving on gp two so it's like fuck how good is four gonna be in five like it's like know the original iphone really wasn't that great either and then now it's like if i can how much movies on my phone and you know like it's amazing and like things get amazing pretty quick and so i think this gonna get amazing pretty quick i yeah i'm i'm a little and awe so i i've got a or i've applied to get access and i've talked to sam about it and he was like yeah our the person who gives access is is on vacation for like two or three days but they'll get back to you like alright well i guess i'm waiting on her to reply i wanna use it for writing articles on the house was gonna say you guys should write the news through a robot one day you know basically like one day we could just see what that's what we're yeah so i'm waiting to get access for that now we'll see i wanted to run our transcripts for our podcast through it i basically just wanted to be like hey it's sean and sam i'm talking what what would we say if we talked about x and i bet it could recreate our you know stupid conversations well can't you ask your buddy to set that up yeah i can't i i got so i'm gonna bring him on so next week i wanna do a segment where i'm gonna bring on the guy who built that thing as well as either fe who's kind of my trusted tech like you know a sounding board because he's also realistic he doesn't get caught up in the hype and then there's also this vc founders fund who wants to come on and talk about it and who the young guy dylan yeah i don't know them yeah it's kind of a patrol on twitter good i like that well i'm curious to learn more i just feel like i'm not smart enough or educated enough to actually know what's legit and what's not and i wanna know like with your buddy was it as simple as you literally just type in the google doc and you tell this thing what to do and it does it or does it require more is there more stuck to it yeah we'll we'll we'll ask him so yeah we're n but we know enough to know that hey this is true this is interesting it's is worth understanding more yeah but it's like there's there's been so many things like that we're mean there's a lot of i'm like my god this was amazing this is everything and then you dig a lot of fall starts yeah yeah so alright what's b and i okay b honest so let's go to the exact opposite end of the spectrum the most fucking dumb down old school thing that i discovered that i didn't know about so b and i is a business referral network i don't even know what b and actually stands for either is a company b i a company go to b i dot com so these guys i think are making about fifty million a year and what they do is let's say you start a local chapter so this kinda like the vista model that both of us are interested in like so so this is a little bit different though so what happens is they have ten thousand chapters and they have two two hundred seventy thousand members so you can do the math on kinda how much they're making in their membership fees but the way it works is in a local chapter there'll be like one let's say financial adviser one plumber one you know whatever the other occupations are that people have a whole bunch of kind of self employed people and it's a referral network so it's like cool i'm in this chapter i meet you guys you're my homie now so now whenever i know a guy who needs a lawyer i'm gonna refer the lawyer in my circle to any of my customers i'm a financial adviser and whenever you're hey lawyer whenever your guys need a financial adviser you refer them to me and so it's a referral network for for basically trades people to swap customers and super simple idea obviously drives a lot of value in that if you know every business wants more customers and if this is a trusted way to do it great and it also has the kind of benefits of like you meet other people who are kind of in similar buckets and you're like oh cool like we're kind of brothers in arms except for you do law and i do financial advising and then this guy's a mechanic and then that guy's whatever pretty cool been around for a while hadn't heard of it since nineteen eighty five yeah i'm looking all up now is this a the guy who is the chairman of it he just his photo he looks like a slick he us so we're looking on a photo he's got his hands he's on stage he's he does the thing we put a keynote note speaking thing of his which is always a tell that this guy's insecure and then but yeah i mean we're gonna be he could be a great guy i mean wearing a suit tie hair slick back so that's why sam saying what he's saying we paint the picture so people understand why you were just saying it yeah and i'm not actually saying this nobody knows we don't know this guy i don't know but so is this a scam i this is so weird to me the first the top searches is b and i a pyramid scheme that's what the top searches is like right if you type in b and i yes i believe that and you do think it's a pyramid scheme no i i believe that people would be curious about that because it's organized like a ml mma in a way you become a local chapter owner than you recruit members in your local network and then all of you paid dues to the mother and like that's you know whether it's affiliate or actual like you know ml like that's similar model and so i understand why people would be skeptical but i found this really interesting there's something business i had never heard of i'm looking at now it says they have over two hundred and seventy thousand members in two thousand nineteen members generated sixteen billion dollars in revenue through referral business i just never would have thought that this many people would buy into this yeah you know what i mean how bit yeah i'm a little fl acid i'm looking at everything i can i'm fl acid how'd do you find this i was talking to somebody like i run these mastermind groups right and i talking to the guys and i was kinda like yeah i run three of these groups now and they're like oh it's great you know you have somebody many people signing up i want we you wanna open up more and i was like yeah but i don't if i wanna do this anymore and i kinda tired of these like this is kind of a lot of work and then i was like you know there's these interesting like either i wanna scale it up and make this a big deal or i wanna wind it down and not do it at all like i don't wanna be in this like little bucket where i'm like doing a few and it's kind of a time suck but it's not making a shit ton of money and so he one of the guys in that and my when got ben he told me about this and i was like oh interesting never heard of this and then they were all they were actually all aware of it which i never really because they're all small business centers so they had been contacted or you know offered to join this thing yeah what i've learned about though so i i've been investigating this those these like groups they're they they do scale it is hard work yeah it is very hard work yeah this is your business it's not like a like it's like everything if this is your business your business gonna be pretty hard work and this is actually a pretty decent business i think it's good think it is a good well designed business there are many worst businesses than than this one or the vista y p model also and so but you'd have to make it your business which i don't personally wanna do do you wanna talk about one more thing yeah sure wait did we talk about the erotic newsletter i don't remember great did we bring this up already we did not know okay it said a listener of the podcast launched an erotic newsletter two months ago that is currently making six k a month and uses porn hub as an acquisition channel i don't know anything about this but let me tell you guys some background here which is i've done tests by creating like audible for erotic novels and in the process i learned a few things one women are absolutely willing to buy this stuff two erotic and like romance novels is like the is i i believe it's the largest category on kindle and it's the most engaged category and i'm a man so i think of this differently but like women like this is pretty much like porn to women like this or this audio like for a lot of women it was they just loved like these audio books and written text that describe sex and all these types of i don't even know how to discuss it like because it's so foreign to me but like there's all these subreddit where it's like where they just like write erotic stories and then there's like watt pad and all these websites they get hundreds of millions of monthly unique visitors and all they do is write erotic stories it's just right yeah it's totally new to me and and so interesting and brady you do you know more about this can you tell us me more about what he did so so the the guy's lat is it cool member of the of the group he's done other projects so he he's the one who launched that church tipping app as well alter he seems to be a hustle what's his story yeah that was basically it he had launched the church app i think it launched but i'm not sure if he's still working on it he's got another business which i think is growing that's his main thing and that's like you can book right yeah that seems to be doing well it's an influencer booker thing and then he did just did this as like a side thing he has someone running it he basically set it up in a few weeks and he's using what is it and customer what is it you sign up and what do you get to look an erotic story like every week or however have you read any of them brave you i have not no that is the truth let's it do your research you i don't yeah do you know the name of it what's the name of it i talked about this kid having the call you want hinge club i hope i gotta go to now hinge yeah like hinge like a dating app yes hinge club it's for it's erotic for black women specifically alright beautiful at hinge club dot com so i can't find the url yeah neither can i we should bring we should bring them on for like a ten minute segment i wanna hear how we did this i also wanna hear about using porn hop as an acquisition channel what that's like i've never done i've never done anything like that it's club dot subs dot com okay club dot subs okay one quick idea and then one one one one story alright quick idea employee onboarding at a company so every company onboard new employees so prop pay pinpoint every company has i've i've hired somebody i need to onboard them every company kinda bake their own little process and there's you know not really like a seamless way to do it it's like oh okay cool you're gonna hey talk to the it guy he's gonna get you hooked up with x y z talk to the hr person they're gonna get you hooked up with you know abc talk to your manager they'll tell you about this oh this other thing you'll learn about it four weeks later because you we forgot to tell you about it oh you should get some swag or like a computer like there's all these different systems right i think rip is trying to do this in one way but i'm curious if there are other angles to rip seems a bit like the utility side of things like the the getting set up sign on payroll with with your it stuff what about like this sort of human side of things so how do you how do you welcome employees how do they learn about your company culture how do they is there like a an easy way to do these like kind of customer sorry like company culture like training ind nation welcome to the cult type of things i think companies really care about culture i think they care about like people learning like what it's like to work here what the origin story is like of the company all these good things and there's a lot of like full core that gets passed down and a lot of like tribal rituals that get done informally can you do that formally is it kind of a question mark you do rip but for the in info for the non utility stuff is that a question do you think that people have or a problem that people have like i think so because like for example at twitch i know that one of the earliest employees like there's only a few og left now or you know eight nine years in or whatever and one of og was putting together like a kind of a little booklet that was like here's the like history of twitch it's like all the cool crazy moments that have happened in the company do like a i i i do that with you you do like a welcome thing right yeah where i say like here's like the history that's hard to scale right because it's like you're using the most valuable people's time which is good they get facetime with the ceo on whatnot i think small companies deal with that that way but as you get bigger and bigger those become less less personal and also harder to do every monday you know because every monday you're hiring me people as your company grows like i don't i i don't how many people you guys hired this monday but like you probably had either you know between zero and one employees hired per week max right and like but at a bit at a bigger company they're hiring tens of employees or even hundreds of employees per week and so how do you get them in so i i i think there's a service there there's like a welcome week and you go through the the boot camp of the of the company and you like you get both the utility stuff and and the fun stuff but they're all pretty lame and and as the world goes remote i wonder like can you simplify this to being a link and it can that be a really well designed page that tells your story the tells this is what we've discussed earlier sean of like the like a high school newspaper paper for your company right but that's like with the recent stuff i'm saying there's just like i like this is more like a drip campaign right it's like everybody needs to go through this sequence of getting this information and you don't wanna be the one re retailing that joke manually every every every i know but if you build this product that we've discussed over and over again which i think you can do it yeah like what you just said is you need a trip campaign for a company that so you need like a media company for it it's one i mean it is quite fascinating i i understand what you're saying i have been i i don't wanna work on this because i think of that is kinda boring but i i understand the need and i i to totally get what you're saying and i i bought i'm bought it so and also a bunch of people i think three different teams have reached out to me since we excited about that idea and are working on prototypes stuff it so i'll show you when we when somebody has one well i i don't even have cool names but i don't know if they have names yet have thing they're like we're working on that thank you said here's the mock ups and i said alright send me a link when you have it when you have a prototype i'm very interested okay one other the last last little thing so are you a basketball fan you don't follow the nba much do you during like the playoffs i'll i'll pay attention a little bit why where you talk about the bubble so the bubble started there's something interesting here so in general sports leagues are trying to come back they're having great difficulties doing so the nba is trying like the most robust attempt at this they're creating like a biological seal a bubble basically they like at disneyland or something it's in disneyland oh or disney world sorry in orlando and basically it's like a summer camp for rich nba athletes and so and they're like complaining that they're like they put them up in like a marriott they're like complaining they're like oh my god there's only one room in the so they're complaining about the room because at the beginning when they come in they have to quarantine for seven days and so it's like seven days not leaving that room and so anybody even if you just stay on the the room i would hate that i can i would i would i would retire the food that gets delivered they're showing the food looks like you know worse than my middle school lunch somehow i don't know why they're serving these guys such horrible food and then they can't have like their side chicks come to the place because it's like a the it's a bubble they can't have new people coming in so like you know these guys who are used to being you know out there you know you know popping bottles of the club they can't do that anymore so all these funny things are coming out but what i thought was interesting hey i'm just interested in ken sports come back you know during covid and i'm a nba fan so i'm into it but the second cool thing that happened was a bunch of the players because the only there's only like two media members in the bubble and so they're reporting on espn but way more interesting is all the stories and vlogs that are coming out direct from the players inside the bubble telling their story so there's one guy this guy named i don't know say i think is t so this is kind of like a rookie on the seventy six he's not that great of player but he's excuse cool he's interesting rookie but he's doing vlogs like casey neistat and so that's pretty neat he started this thing two weeks ago when they answered the bubble which like ten days ago or so he put up his first vlog didn't even does he started his youtube channel he's already over two hundred thousand subscribers casey neistat posted a comment on the first video being like this is awesome well made video and like this guy's this guy was like geek out about casey neistat he's like dude i love new videos yeah i'm trying to emulate and he's like a multi millionaire nba you know athlete and so i think it's cool what's going on and these guys are tell they're showing the food they're showing what they're you know how the covid testing works every morning they're showing these little disney magic bands at the buzz in and if it's green you can go into this area if it's red all you gotta go get tested again and like and i ever reminded me the reason i'm bringing this up is because a lot of people ask me oh how do we get more customers how do i market my business i just want growth could you have any marketing ideas for me and this is like the universal marketing idea and i saw this heat and shot tweeted this out the other day he goes the timeless content marketing idea show your work and i was like this so fucking true and that's what these guys are doing they're just showing their work they're they're going about their life as nba player and they're just showing and that they're editing it into a good vlog but like it just works and this works for your company too if you don't know how to market your company just show how you're building your company and trust me that will bring you attached there's so many different words for this it could be like document don't create there could be show your work there can be t learn and teach it's like a it's the same thing though it's just like yeah do everything out in public right ryan hoover always says work in public and i i used to say that i like show your work a little better because i remember taking math test back in the day and like you could get the wrong answer but if you showed your work you always get partial credit and if you got the right answer without showing your work the teacher would mark it down and it's sort of the same thing in business if you're showing your work along the way even if your business is not successful yet you will get a a big halo effect to people wanna work there i mean you guys do this you guys put out a lot of content you know bar stool does this even more they show behind scenes i like posted a jobless that we had i got like two hundred applicants in twenty four hours you've you've shown your job listing you put out your writer your writer's guide for your writers you've put out like what else you put out if you put up more stuff that you've worked in public a little bit i'm gonna i'm gonna create a newsletter course right so there's like a whole bunch of things that you can do that are and but there's there's more that are just like showing the life of of right you trying to do what you do and it's easy it's it's easy it is it does take time but it's actually quite fun and well what i mean is it's simple right right it's in your control and you don't need to look for some other external genius idea hey here's a simple idea that'll will work for everybody and it works for some better than others so like for example you it work well for you because your customer is also business oriented and a business owner or an aspiring business owner so you showing how you build your business work it it brings you customers your customers are directly interested for others it's more niche like a portion of your audience will care about that and a portion more but the portion cares will like love you and that's really ultimately what you wanna do with marketing is get people to love you yeah most people just really bad at create content but this stuff definitely helps like you just write what you are learning and you posted on hacker news and you do that ten times and probably two of them two of them might work right and we should do that with this podcast we should be like cool how we grew the podcast to million downloads in six months like that's an easy thing i should be putting out there to to work in public to to show our work about how we're building this podcast up that people would be interested that i i haven't done so i gotta take this lesson for myself as well yeah well let's fucking do it great i'm gonna write a book called a hundred great questions and i'm gonna write the best questions that i've that have helped me in my life can either question for yourself or questions you ask others there's hundred great question i'm i'm gonna commit to writing in that book that's a great that's a great one a hundred great questions when you because i feel like you already have like fifteen yeah i have a little note cheat i'm my little like because sometimes i'll hear somebody ask a question i'm like oh great question i'll give you a really simple example this is not this is not a great life question but this is a great question this is like more of a management tip so probably wouldn't make the book but i'm a say it anyways you know when you are talking to somebody and this often happens with the engineers you're talking to an engineering and you're like alright when is this gonna happen by and any leaders always asking their team alright i want this thing to happen you want this thing to happen you say you're doing it when is it gonna happen and like you know the problem is people suck at forecasting and predicting things and also there's this weird like incentive like first like i'm kind of over bearing when i say shit like this i get like really i'm excited but it sounds aggressive and so they're like they don't wanna say too long because they'll they know i'll be like what the fuck like we're planning to do this in six months like this way too long also they don't wanna say too short and then not deliver that because they you know they they don't wanna be seen in somebody who missed it so they don't they kinda sand into like some middle ground so i've always just like been like fuck the people i predicting these this question is useless to ask whenever are we gonna have this by and i was in a meeting the other day and dan who's my manager at my company now he's way more experience to me he's like kind of the the gray haired guy at our company super smart and way better managing people than i ever am so he he asked so the ceo of twitch asked this question when are we gonna have this buy and i could see the person shrinking and trying to like go through this do i do i underestimate overestimate i have no idea what the real estimate it is and that dan came and goes let me ask you a different question at what date would you be surprised that this hasn't happened by and the person like relaxed and they were like well you i'd be shocked if if we didn't have this by a q three or whatever and they were able to like answer a different style like just ask a about a question get a better answer and i was like that's a different way of like about would you be shocked that that it if we're sitting here what what date would we be sitting here would we be surprised that this hasn't happened by our shocked that it hasn't happened by now that becomes the upper bound okay cool now i know that and it's like you know what's the sin and he has another one with sort like what's the sun is you could expect us to start to see results from this like where we would look at it we would be you know we'd would be smiles in this meeting because we'd see some some tangible substantial result and that became the lower pound and i was like dude this motherfucker is a smooth operator like he knew how to get to the and the crux of this answer i always want without like the bullshit of the person's psychology getting in the way so i like that little one this is not gonna be about an idea but something similar that people will like and i'm just gonna interview you a little bit sean so i've never worked at a company really i mean i've worked at my companies and you up and until recently worked mostly at your companies but now you're we're at twitch with two thousand people you also interact i imagine with a lot of amazon people which is supposed to be the best of the best so i have a couple questions first is your company i think was kinda similar to mine which was mostly young people who were inexperienced but smart and kinda of figuring it out very much so yep now you at a company that does it have a lot more experience people yes very much okay so what i wanna ask is does that matter that the people are experienced do you think are not like yeah i don't know if it's experienced but there's a certain level of wisdom that comes over time and also i wouldn't say it's to everybody right i would say everybody is more experience or just like generally smarter better resume better talent than the people that we recruited for the most part because we were recruiting these like kind of underdog jack all trades non specialists who had never done it before but we're hungry and good never were smart and couldn't learn and we were taking bets on people and we were very good the that was good for what we had so now i realized because at some point i was like dude when do these people work because i my calendar became booked every thirty minutes was a meeting and i was so when do i go work because i was used to you know you probably did this with your company less so now i think but i we had a meeting today at our all hands and i go look we're gonna start we gotta yes guys let's innovate instead of optimize and also like cancel all the cancel all meetings and start over there's way too my meetings right so so i used to do that where i'd have a couple meetings a day two three max and then for the most part i was working on something i was looking at the data i was trying to figure out what to do i was work sitting next to my designer and like working on a feature or sitting next to the marketing guy and working on a campaign or engineers figuring out what the fuck going on and i felt like i was in the work and i thought that that was real and now i'm like the schedule is just meeting meeting meeting meeting meeting meeting so what i first got here i did the normal startup guy thing where you judge a big company like yeah these fools you just sit in meetings all day nobody here doing any real work blah blah blah and then there's an element of that's true but what i figured out was okay what do you actually need at this at the top of these companies right well this exec team like the top like let's say twenty people of this company that's like one percent of the workforce and this one percent their job is basically to be this like two things one they have to be the accountable party to everybody so they need to be like good cop or bad cop depending on what's needed for their like chain of command and so if even if you didn't do any work if you're the scary meeting of the day for the next layer of leaders and the next layer of leaders below that you become forcing function that helps that whole org work it's kinda abstract but that's one job that you have the other job that you have is basically to call bullshit and redirect when you think that resources are being wasted and so you sit in meetings all day and you're like a computer you're like i feel like i don't use my hands anymore i my brain is just in a vat and it's says this like that and and basically i'm i i come into the meeting there's a memo i read so i'm ingesting all this information and then i make a decision at the end of it or i approve a decision at the end of it as all i do i approve or i make a decision or sometimes i audit when i'm like wait this doesn't make any sense why is this why does this have all these holes and that's the role of an executive i think in a big company and like we try to say it's about all these other things like it is about recruiting sure it is about strategy sure it is about setting up systems sure but like fundamentally on a day to day basis i'm a brain in a meeting room and then i get fed information and i either approve or i make a decision or i audit a decision that's being made that's all i do so do you like that no and do you think that the people that twitch needs to run their company these high highly paid probably very wise older folks people with great judgment whether you're great judgment because you're experienced great judgment because you're a domain expert or great judgment because you have awesome intuition on some shit like whatever it a it's great judgment person typically easiest way to get there is bunch of experience so do you think that those folks actually make the company better or would do you think it would be better if it was just like a bunch of start be people like you hired yeah i think they make it better but i think they are great with established systems when you need to innovate that brain and a vat doesn't work and so but you know a company of this size that's doing so you know so much revenue so has so much users for most of the company is just to make sure the ship keeps growing naturally and reducing risks like oh you know like i bet i was actually thinking about this other i was sitting in like a two hour meeting that was about a topic that was like there's a whole team called trust and safety i bet at the hustle you don't have a trusted and safety team or like a you know facebook i you know i even know how many resources now how many millions of dollars i mean thousands of people are just working on the like abuse spam porn a fake news and like account takeover fraud like there's just a huge amount of that at any big company because when you get big you become a target and so you have a huge amount of your emphasis is just on that and that's just making sure this the ship doesn't sync it doesn't make the ship faster it actually makes it slower it doesn't make it like go to new destinations it's just making sure this valuable thing doesn't sync due to all the vectors of possible attack and i'm sitting through these meetings and i hate those meetings because i'm not good at that my brain doesn't help there and i get super impatient and but now it's sitting there i recognize recognized like holy shit i didn't even know this was a problem that big companies have i you know if you had said it i would have agreed but i didn't understand i didn't really understand how much time and energy goes into shit like that at what point did twitch become this thing where it no longer required innovate and maybe like innovate like you're saying they no longer innovate innovate i'm sure they would disagree so we and and and they're probably and they could be argued they're like well we do it a it and the the right so that's maybe not the best word but basically huge drastic changes kinda is what you're saying yeah i i think the first three three years three to four years were more of the scrappy innovation hustle throw it at the wall oh there's something broken i don't have time to fix it right now i work i'm i'm gonna keep growing this thing and like yeah workable deal with that later you know i think that i was first three or four years that's fine guess and we'll bring on i i gotta bring him on he's got a shit ton of business ideas too so i'm gonna gonna how will they innovate you know amazon has kinda definitely innovated even after i mean you know amazon had like two thousand employees i think after three years how do you think that they were able to continue to innovate and how do you think twitch will be able to continue doing that so i got put on basically the core like one of the core like innovation or like big like new things at twitch because basically emmett was like okay this guy is like good at that he's a startup guy he's good at the zero to one phase most of our company the people we hire are not the zero one they're the one to end they're about growing an existing thing that's working and making it work better this guy's good at making something that's not working or doesn't even exist today exist or work and so he put me on that and basically what he did was he carved out a team called it a strike team other companies called a tiger team a swat team or whatever and so he carved on a strike team he said what do you mean named my resources he's like boom here's your resources so i have basically a team of thirty something people and and i actually wanted less he was like don't you need i was no less in fact even thirty is way too many i i actually think i need less initially and so we started smaller what's so yeah we started smaller than that but but quickly adds up and so and he was like okay you know you guys are gonna operate over here you don't have to do these traditional processes you're gonna report directly to me and you have a clear mission and you have a blank check and break all the rules actually use your new here do you know rules good go and so that's what he did and we've made like amazing progress today because he was able to carve out a system like that and i think other companies frequently do that now this was in response to like a risk to the company so companies are good at like oh shit there's a risk boom assembled the the swat team facebook always has had this thing called lockdown we'll go into lockdown and nobody leaves till we solve this problem type of thing and so that's as a risk then there's other areas where it's like more opportunistic it's like yeah it'd be nice if like we should be innovating i think that's harder for big companies big companies are pretty good at responding to like existential threats and risks at least more so than just continued innovation driven by their own motivation you know and emmett when emmett started the company he was a college kid and it started as one thing and then after six or eight years or something i mean a while it evolved into a twitch how do you think he has done going from being a college kid who's just like creating some stupid thing in his dorm room to now running a massive i think he's great but i i didn't know him before so i only know i'm only know the guy for a year and in that year you're i'm like this guy is it's great he does all these you know i can see he still has the entrepreneurial edge and they're like in the meetings he'll be like cut the bullshit like we need to go fast and like why are we not going fast and then we'll be like oh excuse excuses me he's like okay cool let's kill all those excuses and let's do it mean he has those moments but there's all the other shit you to do to run a large company that's managing p and l and trying it profitable and is mature and you have to deal with these trusted and safety issues like i know that wasn't his base strengths like his strengths he's super strategic he's super smart he used to be a programmer and now he's not programming he does strategy stuff but he's not the product person anymore and he's got all these people in his company and so i think he first surrounded himself with other people so he hired sarah who was the coo of pandora she's the coo of twitch now and she's a great operational like kind of she could whip an organization into shape then he brought in dan dan was at google he ran youtube's engineering and product and then then he was at next door as the cp and so now he's the chief product officer essentially of twitch and dan those had to also run an organization so we're and it didn't know he brought in people to do it and then he just kinda kept doing the thing he's good at which i think is the right way to be and like you know i said that thing about a brain and a vat like he he literally just sits in a meeting room essentially all day and a different team comes in and then they have a memo his his job is to read the memo and respond in a way that like helps the team be better in some way and this dude like within five minutes the memo is digested he's figured out that like he's found the one inaccuracy of the memo and called that out and he's found the two like important things of the memo and he'll focus the discussion on that he does that better than anyone i think he does it better than anyone because he's bit probably in doing that that one exercise for five years straight and plus his brain already had like very high horsepower so it's pretty impressive i like i i enjoy talking about this because i think that when people who are listening and me included are building companies you forget that you can build your own reality and you can kinda make it what you wanna make it and i enjoy hearing about this because sometimes i'm wondering i'm like which which reality would i enjoy right so i like hearing about other people's reality i also looked at his life now and i was like i would not want that life and i thought that's what i wanted which was is really actually interesting important right when you realize your dream is is it actually a nightmare not a dream and it's not that extreme but like the dream of what if i built a big company like a twitter or youtuber or a twitch and i was ceo and we had this really unique we were the market leader with this cool company culture and all this bullshit when i see what his day day is like i'm like okay i think it'd would be cool to build a thing like twitch but i wouldn't wanna be the ceo of this i don't want this headache this headache is not a fun lifestyle for i think people don't realize is that a it's shockingly boring and b you actually have to just do a lot of negative stuff all the time yeah the the amount of time that he's thinking about what is the future of twitch how do what's a strategy how do we get there how do we build an awesome culture is small on the pie chart compared to dealing with headache of the day headache of the week headache of the month and they're like recurring headache of the year and like those are it's mostly dealing with pain in the asses either people or problems and that's what he gets paid the big bikes to do right but i realized we'll shit that's not what i would want as my lifestyle which is good to know because that's what i was shooting before before so it's good to see it and be like sw i i'm love where your story i love hearing this stuff so i did one smart thing and i recommend anyone does this so i i i think i mentioned this before but i asked emma i said hey he sent me the earliest pitch decks memos meeting notes and he got from the early innings days of twitch just go to your email sort by earliest and just forward me anything with an attachment and he did he sent me a bunch of stuff and so i saw the first slide decks when they're pivoting from justin tv to twitch or his user interview notes when he called a hundred streamers and was like hey how do i get you to switch to twitch you're on this other platform today and how they became the market leader and just seeing the way he and now it's funny because like now everything so structured it's six page memos formatted in a certain way like you have to say you don't say like growth is really strong you have to say we grew from x percent to y percent which is plus or minus this percent month over month which is plus or minus our quarterly goal and that's the format and if you ever say something like you know things are going well or this is a big risk or whatever like you need to back everything up at in this formatted way but back then like is obviously as pleasant would be like a startup right like it's just you know shoot from the hip yeah shoot from there alright so then i went to this guy ethan who become kind of a cool little mentor of mine ethan is like l ten which is like one of the top levels under bezos at amazon at and he's he runs the prime division and so i asked him i said so here's my email to ethan i said aws origins that's the subject line so i said were you involved at the birth of aws such an incredible business i said was this a high profile big bet that they knew oh this could pay off big let's bet big or was this like some una assuming little project with modest aspirations that happened to become a monster i said did this start one of those six page memos is that memo now framed and hung on the hall of fame walls i read some articles but i wanna know from the inside what actually went down and so this is great and so that he was like he's like i was around i wasn't directly involved and so then he answers question by question he goes it started small as far as i know he goes there's three three little services you know simple db s three e two a database storage and compute it started with a small team engineers which is like the amazon two pizza team i don't know if you ever heard that like they want every team to be small fed by two pizzas and he's like you know s three came out first it worked it was you know modest fan fare when it launched but then e two came out was instant hit hockey stick growth no looking back we all realized holy shit this is actually gonna be pretty big we started adding services and then those services we added were just we just looked at what people were doing on top of vc two and oh they're hacking that together let's build a really good service that everyone can use that does exactly that or hey they're using the service in a way that's in breaking it let's quickly protect the service and make sure it can't break in that way seriously like if you think about like a vc portfolio aws was three bets one was a we can get our money back with a little bit of profit acquisition exit like s three was like a small win ec two was like a unicorn ip that went to ipo and one was a small loss which was simple tb but you know how you know how it goes the unicorn pays for all the other losses that you had so it ended up working out how does this match with the with the public law the public story and then he lastly came and and i i came back and i said you know this all kind of his interesting matches up i said how come aws didn't do payments you know it seems like payments is a core infrastructure service stripe did that stripe was basically aws payments and built like a twenty five billion dollar our company what happened you guys launched payments early on why didn't it work and he was like you know our failure and payments was due to us like wanting to narrowly control them rather than our old playbook which was give up margin and and use that to get to mass adoption every every pro payment thing we ever done is flop we overthink it always stripe was a big win but we didn't catch it and and then he was he looking for the memo to send me the original memo to send me and i was like i love being a internet historian and in this i don't know if i blame stuff but i love hearing that another thing is that i was listening to a or i forget whichever guy gave bezos their seed money and apparently he was telling a story when he interviewed him he was like bezos was like yeah man i think think this might be a hundred million dollar business right and i i just love hearing those stories like that yeah and there's there's people who tell these other folk stories like so for example and you gotta know that a lot of this is bullshit so chris ak is pretty famous for this he tells stories he's like he's the greatest entrepreneurs i know from the first conversations it's like they could see in the future they knew he's like i remember i bumped into kevin's sis from instagram in a c working space and he was telling me like you know he was showing me his little app that nobody had even used it was on his phone and he's like yeah like when we get to five million members will do this feature when we get to fifty million we'll roll out this feature and he's like i remember thinking fifty million dude you're smoking crack like nobody even knows what the hell your app is he's like but he knew and so there's like it becomes a story he's telling this on cnbc and then i've heard peter till told the story of like you know i'm on the i was the first investor in facebook and facebook was doing well and then yahoo or whoever i think yahoo offered them a billion dollars to sell and mark came into the the board meeting and was like hey you know this shouldn't take long me five minutes it's just a formality but yeah we've received this offer we're obviously not gonna take it and and then so peter till telling the story to make z seem like this like you know this monster who just kind of always knew it's like this omniscient who person who just knew what the future is was gonna be and was so courageous to just turn it down no brainer and you know us mere mortals would never do that we were would be like so excited to get a billion dollar offer but then you hear the real stories behind these things and apparently and i'm gonna have josh elm come on and confirmed this story but from what i know doug did say no the initial offer and then facebook started doing kind of like had like i have a down year growth was kinda low they took a down round but before they took that doug actually went back and actually agreed to a deal to sell yahoo for i think on a billion dollars or nine hundred million and it was gonna happen and then like a week later or so yahoo came back to trying to renegotiate the deal down to six fifty or seven fifty or something like that up like i fuck this like no we're not taking that deal and they went back to independent but like let's not forget he was gonna take that deal and like same thing with all these other you know famous stories of like oh you know chris soccer talked about uber he's like travis cl clinic would come to my house in tahoe sit in my hot tub and we would talk about we're gonna destroy the taxi industry and all this shit yeah but also travis did think this is a big enough project to be ceo and like recruited a random ceo of twitter to kinda run his pet project until he realizes thing's gonna be big and then he took over so like let's not pretend like these things don't have humble origins and really humble beginnings and you know z was like you know there's interviews of him on a college couch being like why does this have to expand past colleges it's just a cool college thing it doesn't have to be more and like now he's putting satellites on you know above the earth to give people in india internet access so they can use facebook like these things start humble i think that like there are occasions like i i've been reading henry ford's book where it's like there's definitely people like came at edison who are vision and it's like oh everyone in america should have lights that those people exist but then there are also people who are described as vision and it originally started out as like isn't this neat this little widget i made yeah google they wanted to sell for a million dollars they were happy they were happy to take a million dollar offer and they just didn't get so they kept going so i i love hearing those stories okay that's all i got this long episode tell us how this was i think this was might maybe a c minus episode give us give us a grade just throw a letter out us seat on twitter our twitter handles will be in the description just tweet that us a letter grade or go on our facebook group and give us a letter grade i wanna i wanna know what you guys thought of this i guess we'll find out but yeah i hope you enjoyed this episode as always cool see you