Emmett Shear: Life After Twitch, Jeff Bezos Lessons & AI Doomsday Odds

is ai gonna kill us all maybe i'm mcs sheer is the ceo of twitch was acquired by amazon in twenty fourteen joins us now i started twitch to help people watch other people play video games on the internet the creator and c cofounder of twitch watch other people play video new emmett new i guess that's the answer what types of ideas are you noticing or standing out to you that are interest the first time maybe five to seven years it feels like cr trying to start a consumer internet company like the ones that like i was so excited to start in two thousand seven it's like potentially a good idea at because of ai you mentioned ai might become so intelligent it kills us all podcast is really growing i don't i don't want the world to end i think it's gonna be okay but it's such the downside is so bad it's like it's really probably worse than nuclear war but that's a really bad downside this i think of it as a range of uncertainty and i would say that the true probability i believe is somewhere between yeah i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to at all in it like a days off on a less travel alright what you're about to hear is a conversation i had with emmett sheer emmett was the creator and c cofounder of twitch if you don't know about twitch i don't know you're living under a rock it's like one of the most i don't know five most popular websites in in the states right now it is a a place where you can go to watch other people of video games of all things watch other people play video games who new emmett you i guess that's the answer so he was the creator cofounder of that and built it up it's a multi billion dollar company they sold to amazon many years ago seven years ago or eight years ago for about a billion dollars and has grown many times since then he finally retired after seventeen years of the journey i got to know emmett because he bought my previous company so we got acquired by twitch emmett it was like my you know quote unquote boss for my time when i was at twitch so i got to see this guy firsthand he's the real deal and i've been wanting to get him on the podcast since those early days when i first met i was like this guy is great we talked about a bunch of things so we talked about some ideas of like how he would use ai if he was gonna create another company like i think he's good he's retired now from that game of operating a company but if he was gonna do it this is what he would do so we talked about ai ideas we talked about why why he thinks ai might kill us all might you know be be the big doom scenario which is interesting because he's not just a guy who's gonna go cry wolf if he's not a pe he's not just a journalist who hates tech is a techno opt this is a guy who believes and tech is a a very very intelligent guy and he sees you know a probability he gave us a percentage of probability he thinks that could be sort of the doom scenario and why he thinks that that could be the case of what we should do about it so we talked about ai we talk about some of the frameworks that he has for building companies we didn't talk too much about like the origin of twitch you feel like he's done that a bunch of times so we try kinda stayed away from that but it was a wide ranging conversation and and for those who are watching this on youtube i apologize the studio that we booked in san francisco they screwed up the video so we don't have video for the for for youtube we just have the audio only version so you'll see our profile pictures my bad sorry about that you know gotta pick a better place you gotta pick a better studio i guess but anyways enjoy this episode with emmett sheer somebody said creativity is not like a faucet you can't just turn it on i think actually if you if you've pulled like a hundred people most yeah of course creativity it's to sacred it's special thing that only happens if you've meditate in the morning ver is perfectly right and you've had your your healthy in your coffee or whatever and you were like no for me it's very it is like a foster watch and i could just write and just keep generating more ideas yep how i love that for two reasons one i love that you just be like no actually this that's like a consistent thing i've seen you do and the second is i think that's very true about you and i wonder is that practiced or is that innate like if i if if there's a researcher studying you when you were like ten years old right do you think they would have been like this person's is different in these ways what would have seemed different or special about you at the time i the if there was a nurture nature break on this it happened very early because by the time i was ten you would definitely notice the same thing i'm not really that different but i would be much as effective but like as a ten year old i already had that same experience but you were different than other ten year olds yeah other ten year olds well i would actually say i was less different than i think most people actually most children have this experience already i think most ten year olds and definitely most five year olds are capable of generating ideas for what to do about something or to like play pretend almost indefinitely they don't run out of ideas it's as you get older or somehow you what you learn to do is you'll learn to stop down the ideas that are like bad and to not say dumb things but the more pressure you put in yourself not to say dumb things the more your inner idea generator it like gets disrupted and i i say a lot of dumb things like when i'm generating ideas i may not put weight down on them but most of the ideas will be bad they'll have something obviously wrong with them and they give you this advice and when you if you go like someone who teach teaches at a brainstorm like right no bad ideas here that's obviously not sure there's lots of bad most of your ideas are bad yeah the actual advice is like don't stop at the bad yeah what you you're what you're trying to do is you're trying to disable that sensor that most people have installed that like is like no bad no bad nope bad don't be stupid don't be stupid and i think i was like m socialize i'd it never occurred to me to to to have that like i i i never got the sensor installed and why that is the case i'm not sure but i actually i think i'm the one who is unchanged in some sense i'm a little more child like in that way and everyone else is the weird one who like why how does you end up like damaged by your life that you're your inner wells spring of creativity has been right crushed i think that process is actually very simple you this process goes up all kinds of things in people's minds you start from some capability something you can do some behavior and if when you do that behavior you try that thing and you receive negative feedback which can be external or you actually think even more often internally you're like oh i i screwed it up oh it's bad oh i don't disappointment you learn not to do that thing pretty rapidly and so that leads you to doing it less which means you're less skill at it which tends leads you to doing it less which that that cycle ends in you being very bad at something like i'm bad at math no you're not everyone can be like the kind of math you're talking about everyone can be the kind of math and people say i'm bad at math they don't mean i'm bad at like abstract algebra proof so they mean i can't do arithmetic or algebra basic algebra and that's just imaginary like everyone can do that it's easy they got stuck in one of these like spirals and now it's and getting out of one can be very hard and i guess i think that's what happens to people's creativity i don't know i didn't go through the process myself and so i so now as i'm saying this out loud actually what i the idea that i have it come up for me is it's like oh maybe what it is is that i had better ideas that's like i i got in the reward i got the reward loop or or had an environment that was unusually positive and positively reinforcing for me having ideas and so i would have ideas and it would go well that would lead me to having more ideas which and more practice at having ideas which would go well and then you wind up just never breaking that loop i have a a trainer who comes over my house it always says this thing to because like my kids will come down during the session i'm almost was like oh sorry like obviously annoying like two year old is here he's almost getting hurt on all the weights and that's probably like not what you want in your session so someone was like oh sorry sorry and he's just like dude no and he's like kids and dogs i go what he goes i love to be around kids of dogs day they got it right they know life he's like a dog is like unconditional love happy playful you know super loyal he's like what's not to learn from a dog i wanna learn everything i can from a dog or kids he's like look what she's doing she just made up a game on this thing like we're here trying to do a serious workout she made this her play place yeah she can't wait to come down here he's like i wish all my clients one it couldn't wait to come down to the gym i was like damn guys right and one of the things i like is figuring out people's ism they're philosophies and you're were like oh i thought of one on the way here explain what it was it was have you tried just solving the problem no was what does that yeah so there's a there's a meme on the internet i think it started with weird son twitter which is like have you tried solving the problem by and then an infinite list of possible sentences just the tweet is always have you tried solving the problem by like ignoring the problem maybe you tried solving the problem by spend spending more money on it have you tried solving and one of my favorite ones of those that has become almost like a life motto is like if you tried solving the problem by solving the problem and that sounds dumb right let's outside that sounds it's one of those like zen cone pieces of advice that when you first hear it is like are are you serious like that's the advice is it solve the problem by solving the problem but what you noticed when you try to help people with problems a lot is oftentimes people will have a problem and really obvious what the problem is and they'll come to you for advice for like well how can i deal with the consequences of this problem or how can i avoid needing to solve this problem or how can i get someone else's to solve this problem of or how other people solve the problem in the past which closer to the right answer or what can be the right answer and the point of the the saying is to remind you that sometimes the way to solve the problem is just like just to actually try solving the problem like don't deal with the symptoms don't accept the symptoms don't don't find a hack around it like the problem is the website is not fast enough and instead of like trying to figure out how we can make a loading spinner that distract people from that fact but if we just made it so fast that you don't need a little spinner it's interesting because that's a good it's a very good advice when the problem actually is sol i mean your people are flinch away from it because something about it is ave ver even though the problem isn't really un unstoppable like if they worked on it for six months it would go away and it's worth solving whereas there are these problems we're like you're trying to make perpetual motion machine you're trying to do something that is actually too hard and solving the problem by solving the problem you should actually stop trying to solve the problem that's they a huge mistake and you should be looking for a hack around needing this solve the problem we should be looking to live with it more effectively but i find actually on the balance at least as most people i i talk to i help most people i know i think it's maybe it's people in in tech like love that love the hack they're always looking for the easy fast solution that cuts around and it's solve the problem and it's very helpful it's it's the most often helpful form of that advice in my opinion it's like bring people back to just solving the problem i find it but the advice i like the most or the the sayings that resonates with me the most are the ones it's like you spot it you got it it's like if it's the one i is the advice i needed mh that's why it resonates me that's why like giving it out because like i personally experienced it have you personally experienced that or what's an example where you remember trying to do everything but solve the problem and then you finally realized shit i should just solve the problem it's an interesting question but what is you spot it you got it as like noticing us half the battle basically it's sort of the smart person version of whoever smelled the delta yeah yeah it's like percent if you hit you only noticed this in other people because you've seen it in yourself too yeah otherwise you wouldn't be able as servant of it my version this as we give the advice we need to hear yes yeah exactly which is same basic idea it's actually not always true like that's one of those really good heuristic we're like sure half the time when you give advice it won't actually be for you but half the time it is and noticing it is so powerful that like you should just check every piece of advice you give for like wait a second is this advice i need to hear right now when it comes to the like have you tried actually solving the problem i think i'm pretty good at that in general i think that i often give it to myself in a more meta sense like it's advice i often need a more meta sense of like when i'm confronted with like a thing that needs to be programmed i will often go just program the thing but i have a tendency to like look for ways that i can solve the problem and not that the problem can be solved and for me that the verb this almost always like what don't know what what else for help and i just like it doesn't even occur to me to go to go do that i'm just i'll just indefinitely dig try to go solve the problem myself i'm not really trying to solve the problem i'm trying to solve the problem while avoiding having to ask anyone else for help which is like not real i'm not really trying to solve the problem but actually know we're there i think this is one of those things where it's almost like the creativity thing it was a shock for me to realize other people don't do that yeah you're yourself actual on that one yeah yeah what's a piece of good advice that you're bad at taking oh that's a that's a an excellent one i think the the big one there is like you know listen more like i been with this device so much for yc and it's a hundred percent something thing that i need to get better at which is like you go into the user interview and you have all these ideas and thoughts and you need to not be surfacing those you need to actually be focused on you know move your attention to them and really be interested in and care about what they have to say and your opinions and what's what you think is true is irrelevant and i am i'm a much better that than i used to be and i i also it's one of those things like being reminded like let's just tell it for a second and let like listen there's almost always good advice for me and something that i in as much i give fairly often but like it's hard for to to take on one of the things i really liked that you showed me once so i remember asking you when we were at twitch i think we were working on a problem that was like reminiscent in of early days twitch with like the mobile bubble stuff in different countries where it's like oh we're not the leader or we need to like create from scratch which wasn't a muscle that a lot of people there were were flexing at the time and i was like hey do you have any stuff from the early days of twitch you sent me a thing which was like here's all the user interviews like here's my doc from all the user interviews it which was basically from what i understand there was like a small universe of people that were already doing video game streaming and you were like cool let me call all of them and let me ask them like three questions and if i can just get these answer these three questions that should give me a little bit of a road map a blueprint of understanding what do i need to do in order to like win in this market yeah he take me back to that because that i like that for two reasons it was a simple and b seemed like a focused intensity that you found a point of leverage and he pushed yeah i think two things happen to lead to that the first was like the realization obviously in for we wanted to win in gaming the streamers mattered and at justin tv we'd always been like streamers and viewers are equally important and i finally made a decision i like no this product ultimately is about streamers and if this doesn't work for the streamers doesn't work for anybody and then i had the realization this is one of those epiphany moments where i truly saw i have no idea why anyone would stream video games like i don't really want to do it and i have all these i could i saw my myself building products for these people for the past four years tv and not really having any idea why they did the thing they did at all and i sort of i saw like oh i'm just making this up i have no idea i just i know the answer i couldn't know the answer like they there is are there there is an out answer out there these the a bunch of people know it but i don't and that triggered me be like i need to know i need to understand like these this these two hundred people i need to understand their mind and about forty interview is probably and i didn't wanna know like what they thought we should build because if they knew what we should build they would have my job and and i talked to enough of them before to know that they had no good product ideas i i wanted to know like why are you streaming you what have you tried to use for streaming like what did you like about that like what how did you get started in the first place what's your biggest dream for sharing what you wish you know someone would build for you and i didn't ask them what do i wish someone would build for you because i thought they would have a good idea i asked them because the follow question was really the killer one right they they would say i wish you would build me this big red button i'm like great i built you the big red button like what what does it do for you like why is your life better after i built that and then they would tell me the real thing which is like oh i would i'd make a button i'd make make money that month i get a bunch of new fans who like loved me or my fans who already loved me on youtube gonna watch me live more of than would and i like oh that's the real answer like why you you don't you don't want the button you want the fans or the money or the i call it that love the like the the sense of reassurance and and positive feedback that the your creative content was wanted but you're a smart guy this love and money and fans i i'm sure you would have guessed what do the streamers want false what what is really false what is your thinking it was a revelation that people would want money because i was like you're streaming like you know whatever twelve hours a week if we met let you monetize with the rates we can monetize today you'd make like three dollars a month that would like that didn't occur to me that would be a positive thing and like yes oh my god that would be amazing and i was like wait you're serious you would like three dollars and my i'm back i don't know over promise like i'll build you the monetization actually but like you would really be excited if it only produced like a tiny amount of money and they're like absolutely i just it was the idea that i could make money doing this would be so exciting that had not occurred to me because it always easy for me to i was a programmer i had summer jobs turning for microsoft if you're a programmer or you can get a summer job and turning for microsoft that's like pays many many years of that level of streaming in three months like why would i it didn't need just even it wasn't in my world that that would be so important to them and of course i knew they wanted a bigger audience but the degree to which they valued even one more viewer and the degree is they didn't care about anything else like they they they wanna be able to watch them they wanted to make money and i'd ask about other things like do you want the video production you know like improve the video production have cool video production and they'd be like yeah i'd like okay what but like what what's good about like what do you like about like well i'll get more i'll get a bigger audience and it was really the realizing the realization that like it was just those three things basically explained ninety eight percent of their motivation and we could maybe it didn't move needle on that could be ignored so a good example that's like polls everyone everybody ask for poles seems like a cool future at live polls of course are you gonna have a bigger audience of the live polls not particularly are you going to make more money no is it does you really do you really feel more love if you're running a live poll than after you're just like asking chat and having people go post it in the chat and say it no it's the same you got the feedback it's cool so this product chat blow up it's cool to the chat so you're saying that this feature is worthless yes in fact potentially negative in fact and so it always be on the list of like things that would sound like they might be cool and we just would never build it entirely correctly because it wasn't gonna move the needle and the thing that's really hard to teach there that i've i've i've been yc visiting partner for the this batch and i'm trying to convey to people it's very hard to get them to do it is like you have to care about these people these people as people and these people as as in the role they're doing as these people as streamers and what they believe about their reality is you to accept as based reality that is how they see the world and that is what's going on but like you need to like literally have no regard for their ideas where to solve the problem and it's a little pate in a way but it's it's more of like just respecting that their experts in this thing and you need to understand them in that thing and that what people are looking for when they are looking for the product idea from the person is like they don't wanna do the work they they don't wanna take responsibility for it's my job i have to solve the problem and no one's gonna tell me what the answer is there's no shirt there's no customer it's up to me to come up with the the truth and and then defend it when other people are like no that's wrong i have to be able to say like no no let me explain this let me explain why there's actually a good idea and that's scary you're responsible i think actually it's a it's probably why the just solve the problem advice bouncing around my head because a bunch of the fear founders have about addressing these things i think comes down to a willingness to take responsibility for solving other people's this other person's problem like they're gonna come and dump a bunch of problems on you and it's your job to solve it for them within the constraints available and there's no if you come with the wrong idea it's on you and you can't you can't trust anyone else to do it for you what are you seeing in this yc batch so you're visiting partner mh exciting time with ai pretty much like you know half or more of the batches doing something with with ai yep what's exciting what are you seeing what where do you see the puck so it's interesting i would actually say that at least in this batch i think it might have been different the previous batch but by this batch use of ai is no longer interesting yeah out not ai so being it's like it's like being an aws startup or like being mobile a mobile startup like what do you mean you're a mobile startup like no are you are you building a social media network like what's the of course you have a mobile app i don't and then now it's like of you hear you're using l to solve a problems that's just like a if you weren't doing that i would think you were a dummy like i don't understand like that's not a you wouldn't even bring it it's not even interesting topic of conversation the question is like what what are you doing notes that's not entirely true there's about some percentage of the batch i know it's between ten and twenty percent i'd say that's legitimately building like ai infrastructure because there's a need to build a bunch of infrastructure there those are actually ai those are ai companies but like we'll people hear ai company i don't think they've they think back end infrastructure support for ai they think of using ai to like do things and i actually couldn't tell you what percentage of the batch is ai from that point of view all of them maybe i don't know like why wouldn't you use it even if it's only for a minor thing there's always something you can use it for it's very useful technology what types of ideas are you noticing or standing out to you that are that are interesting is there like you know for example i remember when i first moved to silicon valley suddenly the kinda like bits companies started doing really what i was like oh uber airbnb and like online offline yeah i was like oh wait this this used to be like a taboo like it was like no supposed to a software company like you you have to ship t shirts what you're doing i would say like stay away from trends the offline offline companies that started the trend did very well uber is a great company airbnb is a great company but they were all door a great company but at the time that was they they were doing something that was not allowed they were they were they were they'd found an opportunity that had been ignored almost all fee online off like companies that get started after uber door dash airbnb are big being like we're gonna be the uber and door and airbnb of x most of those companies about through very well is on online offline bad no it's generated a bunch of incredible companies jumping on the trend was probably bad for you and so whatever i tell you is like the trend i see i don't mean trend i guess what i mean is i think you're a person that is really good at looking at a situation like looking at a box of stuff and identifying correctly what's really interesting in this i they're thing to you yeah no i i understand i think i understand what you're asking so like what i think is changing the world right now having observed this is the consumer is back for the first time in a long time been in by a long time it's like internet it's like five years or something like but like for the first time maybe five to seven years it feels like cr trying to start a consumer internet company like the ones that like i was so excited to start in two thousand seven is like potentially a good idea that's because of ai ai means there's a whole opportunity to sort of reimagine how consumer experiences can work ground up and what's what's cool about consumer is for b to b saas the experience isn't the product and so rei imagining the experience is not reopen a necessary it can but usually does not reopen a segment in consumer re imagining an experience a hundred percent reopen the segment because the thing you're selling is the experience the thing the use your product is it's a different experience i mean be saas it's not the experience it's the what yeah it's people actually care what it does and like and the the the pricing model and and like the adoption it's very practical and you can make people jump through hoops if it does a thing because there's a lot of money to the corporation and money and labor people paid the use your product and it's whole different thing and so ai adds new capabilities new capabilities enable new segments of p saas to be created that will generate some amount of growth in consumer it does a really cool thing it's like mobile it reopen every segment as like oh if that you assume mobile exists now that you assume ai exists what could you build now and that's very exciting i don't have answers for that anywhere because like you know we'll see like that's a we would do other thing in consumer there's a bunch of lottery tickets like no singular genius that works out right like you could see like okay mobile comes photo sharing became right like open again right window has opened windows for it turns out it's instagram and it's snapchat which is gonna use photos as text messages yeah just scenes photos have a few different use cases and right instagram and snapchat took two of the best ones the the fact that photo sharing is one of the most important segments and that you know sort of posting them and messaging with them are the two important most of important things to do with them seems blinding the obvious in retrospect and if you'd had to predict that in two thousand seven or two thousand eight like good luck yeah like nobody nobody nobody correctly predicted that stuff before it happened mean not nobody if you did correctly predict that you made a lot of money and congratulations really good at consumer slash you got lucky we will find out when you try to do it again i think that in ai i actually should have a theory for like the what one of the ways is this will disrupt a bunch of businesses in ai especially in consumer a huge number of businesses can be conceived of as effectively being a database with a system of record that has like a bunch of canonical truths about the universe and of them is a row it's like yelp it's like it's like a big database that has a bunch of rows and the rows are like restaurants and local businesses and they bunch of facts about them like they're where are they located one of their hours you all in that database real and it's all text and it's all there's a bunch of messy stuff out in the world and it's been digested into something that is searchable and incomprehensible and usable in an app for you to use and most of the work of turning the messy real world into the canonical row is done is done at right time by the users so that's how u app's work in general a bunch of your users go out into the messy world and then they turn it into a row database and if they include a photo or a video is part of that it's like attached to the row as a fact about the restaurant here's a restaurant here's a hundred these hundred fifty photos are facts about its menu but they're attached facts they're not the basis and where i we think oh ai has opened up the possibility for is a huge version there what if the thing you did you gave us was just a a video of your meal and or you know photos or you but ideally just like a video of your of the meal of you talking about the meal of whether we had a good time or not you and your french shooting the shit about what did you like that one no i like this one like and what if we just saved that video raw and then an ai watched it and extracted a cached version of that of the the metadata but truly like if we decide something else is important like we we we didn't get noise levels but like like noise levels would be a good thing to get instead of like collecting data for everyone we to start a whole data collection for us to get that we just go back tell the ai yeah also grab noise collection levels from all of these videos in fact maybe we don't even as a product have to go do that maybe as a customer i can literally just be like what's the noise level at this restaurant and the in real time the ai i can go rewatch the video and tell me or you know i ran a search and there's these fifteen restaurants and i'm like oh actually sort by noise noise level we don't have noise level pre recorded but it's it's in all the videos the ai can very quickly watch all the videos in parallel and some sort of by noise level for me but it it wasn't even in the database to start with right and i think that inversion i'm using yelp as the example because it's i think a very familiar thing for most people of like reviews is it's pretty easy to imagine a bunch of video reviews of everything and that being the system of record instead but you can describe some phenomenal number of consumer apps as being that in him you type anything to a text box right you're you're participating one of these system of record things what if it is the video what if you just what if you assume video is deeply index and understandable by computers what should the experience look like and i it looks a lot more like snapchat or tiktok like experience but but then different because you need map it's it's not exactly like anything it's a new kind of thing but it's it starts probably with the camera open which is weird right like a yelp that starts with the camera open that's a that's not yelp today and it's it's it's it's disruptive because it's helps whole value prop is we have all this great highly meticulously groomed data and if this is true that that becomes entirely worthless we throw that all away and we just want to one of which of videos like it's worse than the videos and there's suddenly the playing field is leveled is the start up in yelp and that's a that's a huge opportunity for disruption and so i think that you can take that and you can reapply it to any product where you fill out forms and that's like a general purpose consumer thing you can now do kind of like build it for mobile was and i think in some cases it will be very powerful and like that will be the new winner i think in some cases the incumbent can kind of add videos or like it's not really better and like the incumbent will just win like it won't disrupt everything but if you pick the right thing not only will it disrupt the incumbent the new thing may be dramatically better for some things like i actually think i actually yelp in somebody as a bad example i think the data yelp has with the photos and the reviews is like ninety percent as good as a video systems of record probably but you could imagine something with a video system of record where it's not so obvious what the even put in the highly processed version of the data in the in the text version of the data and the video version a lot better and then i think not only can you disrupt the incumbent you can text the size of the segment like you this becomes a good segment now where it wasn't particularly before so like chat gp is a great example of this in actually that everybody kind of has now played with which is you take google which is like oh we have our value is this entire sort of rank of web page based off of terms and we have we understand basically what what should show up in this in this hierarchy and it was really good for finding stuff and chad gb was like cool you could ask a question to try to find a link to an answer or we could just give you an answer or even better forget questions and answers like what if you just give me a command and i just make something instead of finding things i could create things for you right and all of a sudden it was like well how did they do that was like well they just basically slope up the internet and and then you train the ai to do it they over fit statistical prediction algorithm on every domain of human knowledge like this is my theory i'm pretty sure it's true but like statistical prediction algorithm in general work very well we found the innovation is found a a prediction algorithm works better than normal a but the way it works better than normal is really interesting it's not actually particularly out that it outperform traditional algorithms for prediction on normal amounts of data it's that it it keeps working as you just dump more and more data into it and more and more processing on that data into it like machine learning algorithms you kind of you over fit very fast and more processing more explain benefit fit if you imagine like you've got a bunch of data cloud of data points and they're kind of vaguely in a line under fit is like you like just most draw something just like a across random it's a random line that doesn't look like anything like the shape of the the dots a wealth fit curve is like you draw a line through the dots and there's kind of noise of like things that are random above and below but it's like if you look it like that that actually does fit the data like the the underlying predictive facts about the data well while ignoring the noise and then if you over fit it like you get this like really wiggly curve it touches every single dot exactly but like when you get a new thing it like will miss that because it over it predicts too much of the thing and so when you get new data you know she doesn't predict that very well okay and so normally what happens is you try to like dump more data and more a compute to a normal machine learning algorithm you get diminishing returns very quickly we're like it just doesn't perform that much better with twice as much data twice as much compute the clever the cool thing out the transform based attention all you need architecture is that it it continues to benefit from more compute and more data in a way that other ones didn't and so what that lights you do is run it on a much bigger domain than normal run it on everything don't just don't just run it on normally as you added more as you add more area it like to degrade the quality elsewhere no fuck do everything and just put it a ton of compute in and now you get something that predicts pretty well against everything which is to say it like it seems to be kind of intelligent the day evidence seems suggest that it's that it's over fit when you ask it to predict something that is either in the in the set of things that was trained on or a linear extrapolation between two things it was trained on it's quite good at giving you the thing you asked or but linear between five things but it if the things you're asking are all in there and it just has to find the way to blend them together it's good at that when you ask it to actually think through a new problem for the first time like what's an example there are seven gears on a wall each alternating there's a flag attached to the seventh gear on the right side of the gear where it's pointed up right now if i turn the first gear to the right what happens to the flag like that's a anyone who's like there's a breakfast question for you this is what you pause morning if you pen and paper and time you can work this out no problem right you just just just draw the gears and when you turn the first gear to the right it turns the left one's the at the other ones on the left and his next to the right and there's a general principle there that like cures alternate which is if you ask it knows that general principle but it won't but like but then you say pull it doesn't it has no one asked dumb gears on wall flag questions like this is not a a thing that has been it's in its training set and do you have to kind of logic way through it and like figure out okay we should like i'll do turn left turn right turn left turn right turn left turn right oh the flag is on the right it's pointing up so when the last gear which is the same as the first gear turning right the last year gear it's odd number so it's turning right also the flag will rotate down to the right clockwise cool like i can work that out it's not actually that complicated and i bet that question will be answer that's a pretty easy question and if chip gb four i tested it with three three one five if four doesn't answer it five will but like the fact that it struggles at all with that while being so brilliant it combines other stuff really shows that it's it's over fit right it it knows how to answer problems that it has seen before but when you give it a truly novel kind of like combination of problem it struggles a lot because it's it's i would say you if you give it a sort of the formal psychiatric psycho approach it has a very high crystallize intelligence but a pretty low fluid intelligence right now now that could change but like today that's the the state of affairs and do you bring this up in order to say what you say okay i think it's over fit and it and it's strong in this area and weakened this area what's the so what of that for you is it that are you are you trying to say that's a little bit over hyped or you trying to say dude just wait till it can do both are you trying to so certainly problems are doable now definitely just wait till you do both because that's a that's a whole different thing that's scary but the current thing that is mostly crystallize intelligence is really good at a very it this way it's a what was saying is it's a clever trick right it's really good at a at a big set of tasks which happens to be the set of tasks that like anyone has ever written stuff down about explicitly like all explicit human knowledge but that's like a very big domain there's a lot of things that can be solved where there's an explicit examples of people solving that problem or a linear inter interpretation of those problems in the domain of all human knowledge the fact that doesn't generalize is it irrelevant it's immensely powerful with you don't need fluid intelligence i guess is that is the point for it to be very useful but it it's not you do everything people they they they you you hit these boundaries weird boundaries where just like like wait a second you can't do that like no it's i can't do that at all novel problem solving it's just terrible at so what about let's walk through two examples wanna hear your take on this so you gave the yelp example mh another thing that's kinda like rose at a database is something like spotify mh it's like oh i wanna go listen to a song here's genre artist song length you know some algorithm rhythm popularity similarity to other songs in some way and but spotify value to if spotify value is in the playlists i would agree with the analogy to spotify because playlist are an example of this kind of like database human data entry thing so spotify value is mostly in the set of all of the music itself the licenses and all the music itself and so i don't think spotify is a great example because the human data entry parts of the database if that all just gets deleted tomorrow it would like not hurts about how that bad the thing i'm thinking about is what if the licenses don't matter so what happens if generative music is just awesome to listen to in a hyper yeah personal way oh and it likes yeah the types of songs that am it likes that's a different that's a different insight i think is also possible which is like it's not about being able to analyze and extract for media it's about being able to create media mh because the video of record is enabled to buy the ability to stand and read video and comprehend it generative is is the opposite it's like you we can oh we can make all the stuff music in particular is sticky against that people don't want new music they want old music they want the music they love already the music they grew up with and that is the that cycle is what causes record labels and just to stay in charge whether we sold listen into the rolling stones right like the other thing i would say about that one is like the music's not good yet like maybe someday like it's really it's really not that good yet well i mean caveat this if it gets if the general intelligence level goes up a lot all bets off it'll make some really great music for us before it maybe takes over the world and kills everyone but let's assume that doesn't happen soon i think it's gonna take longer than people think we're going to make great music though when know what if we do go out we're renewal out with some great music and amazing it's excuse be it's gonna be a a great two or three years before we all like we all go but until that point making really good like new great music is hard actually and i think that rick rubin great success demonstrates why artists will still be important the ai can generate lots and lots of music but it it's not gonna have the the fine judgment of distinction the ability to say like this song not that song and actually you i think what it will do is it will d skill the music making process on one vector the ability to like literally create the sounds and it will greatly up upscale the music making process another vector they're ability to to cure not just curious to to give explicit exact feedback like rick rubin does ai is gonna turn us all in the rick rubin for for generative ai like that that skill set of the ability to have a musician come to you and help them produce their best music that's the thing you need you to do because it's easy to generate a thousand cuts but there's infinite cuts you could generate how do you direct the the how do you shape that in the right direction and and and mine and discover think it's make it a cool be interesting you'll get a different set of people who will be optimal that right you mentioned ai might become so intelligent it kills us all this podcast is really growing i don't i don't want the world to end life is good life is good i here we'll well i'll ask the question clean for the for the intro dramatic hook is ai gonna kill us all maybe like walk walk through how you a smart person who's a opt optimistic about technology mh but a real about real shit mh what is the way that you think about this or how would you explain this to you know a love one you care about who's not as deep into technology how would you explain to this you're their trusted source of technology what do you say to them so it it is because i am so optimistic about technology than i am afraid if i was a little bit less optimistic i was like this ai stuff's over hyped yeah yeah yeah look it says nice parlor tricks like we're nowhere near buildings something like it's actually intelligent like and like the engine all these engineers are work on anything think they're on on i think they're full of shit it's gonna take us thousands of years we're not that good at this stuff technology technology's is not going that fast i'd be like this is fine it's great actually it's good news it's a new trick we learned excellent it's because i am so optimistic that i think that there's is a chance it will continue to improve very very rapidly and if it does that that's that that optimism was what makes me worried it's sort of the analogy i to give on that front is like a s bio synthetic biology i'm quite often got synthetic biology that i've several friends who work against in bio companies it hurts shows a lot of promise for fixing a lot of really bit important health problems and it's quite dangerous it will let us and genetically engineer more dangerous diseases that could be very harmful to people and took then as that's a wade pro and con it's like nuclear power mix nuclear weapons and nuclear power they're both real the christian nuclear weapons is dangerous you doesn't you don't be a techno non optimus to like think that that's there's a problem there i think it was good that we didn't go have every country earth go build nuclear weapons probably and likewise in s bio i would say that it would be we actually we already have these regulations in place we should over time we be able to strengthen them and improve the and audit the oversight and build better organizations to monitor and regulate them but like we regulate whether people can have the kinds of devices that would let them like print smallpox and we regulate whether you can just buy precursor things you need to go print stuff and we keep track of who's buying it and why like that is why i'm glad that we do that i don't not calling for a halt s bio but like if we weren't willing to regulate it i would call for a halt it is vastly too dangerous to do to learn how to genetically engineer plagues and then not to have regulation around people's ability to get the access to the tools to engineer plagues that's just too suicidal dumb and i just because i am pro technology i believe we should absolutely develop the technology and that we should regulate it that seems just straightforward and obviously true to me i think it's easier for to understand that in the s bio one because the concept of like engineering a plague seems like an obviously a thing you could do and very aid obviously very dangerous and obviously enabled by technology the ai thing is more abstract because the threat process us is not posed by a particular thing the ai will do the way the play will happen analogy i like to use is is sort of like you know i can tell you what's confidence that gary castro is gonna kick your ass chest right now and you asked me well how is he check me which piece gonna use i'm like i don't know and you're like you can't even tell me what peace is gonna use and you're saying he's gonna check make me you're just a pe i'm like no no you don't he's better at chest than you the what means he's gonna check you and i don't i i don't know quite know what happens or people deny that like i think what the big thing is they don't really imagine the ai being smarter than them and they imagine the ai being like like data in star trek like kind of dumb than the humans about a lot of stuff but like really fast at math like that's not what smarter means like imagine the most savvy like most smartest person you can think of and then make them think faster and also make them even better at it and not smart in just one way like smart at everything like a great writer just insight after insight and like can pick up s by on in an afternoon because they're just so smart that's smartest person you know and then they just keep pushing that and like that's all that person is obviously dangerous if they're if they that person isn't a good person they're obviously dangerous like imagine this really really capable person and then imagine them wanting to go kill a bunch of people or something it would be bad now the thing with ai that then kicks it over the edge is that that person can't self improve easily you meet this person is like super strong super like talented great with people great great intellectual mind they can't turn around and like edit their own genome edit their own upbringing and make v two of themselves with all the skills that maximally smart person come up with that like is even smarter than them but that's like we're explicitly the ai is good at programming and like chip design and like it can explicitly trend back on itself and rev another rev of that and the new one will be better at it than the first one was and there is no obvious endpoint to that process like there probably is at some level a physics based endpoint to that where like you can't actually just keep getting smarter forever there's some but we don't really we don't understand the principles of intelligence at all like if most things we understood how to make electricity far before we understood what electricity really was like that's generally how we that's how scientific progress works we usually understand we gained the ability to create a manipulator phenomenon on well before we deeply understand how it works we didn't really understand what fire was for quite a while you could use fire really well the same thing is gonna happen here we're using the ai but we don't understand its limits at all we understand the the theoretical limits how far will get and if moore's law is any indication we can keep getting at the very least they can keep getting faster indefinitely whether or not it can get smarter or not even human low just human level intelligence if you cap it a human level intelligence which there's zero reason to think it will stop at human like it will almost certainly blow past us but like even if you cap it at human intelligence imagine a hundred thousand of the smartest person you know all running at a hundred x real time speed and able to communicate with each other instantaneously via like tele those hundred thousand people could cr take over the world like they don't have to smarter than a human for that for that that army of von neumann right like so so the argument to me goes in several steps it's like chan you build a certain level of intelligence and then it's like okay let's i think i actually think a lot of people do believe that like computers are smart google is smart calculators are smarter than us but add math i think it's not hard for them to believe that the ai is gonna be far smarter than human beings where i think a lot of people then don't make that last leap is sort of like but then it'll have an agenda or a motive or any yeah will for anything into happen so how do you address that last point of like what is the what are the scenarios you worry about when it comes to like now the direction of that so you build this thing and it's really good at solving what is intelligence fundamentally but the ability to solve a problem right so it's really good at solving problems and it's gonna solve the problem by solving the problem it can just go right through the problem and solve it because it's really good at solving problems but we've just defined it is it's like that's that that's the kind of thing it is super good at solving problems and so you tell it somebody built an ai and all earnest ness tells it either smart they don't even tell it go do a thing oh they absolutely will by the way they will just tell to go do a thing but let's say we try to be careful and we ask it give me a plan to stop the war in the the democratic republic of congo right now right which which would be a good thing for the world i think we should that war is is going to hurt a lot of people give me a plan for that and i tried to i caveat it that that does this that does that that does this you that that here's what i mean by a good plan this is one of these like evil genie bargaining things right like it'll give you a plan and it it's make giving you a plan that will cause you to solve the problem but like it's definition of solve the problem is there's no war in the drc what point it further there to be no war in the drc is like all the humans in the drc are in s fields that means they don't die and it's all you know and oh we added a caveat that the geo gdp has to go up too so that so it also it the plan results in you know corporations in that in that area all trading with lots of money with each other so the gdp is very high and and when i say it sounds like a fucking science fiction thing and the problem is it's casper of a chest i don't know if i could do it i would be the super intelligent ai that could take over the world i can't give you the the exact plan because that that i think that makes sense which is that a human with it a human with motivation can get the ai to work for and the date i think the the main thing is that the the human doesn't need a bad motivation i think people imagine well humans have had powerful tools for a long time bad people with powerful tools have done bad things that for a long time the solution is good people with powerful tools counter them the problem is even if you're a good person with powerful tool good things to ask for reasonable things good people would ask for you know like let's up maximize the all in free cash flow of this corporation over the lifetime of the business and they extend the lifetime as long as feasible possible ends in like the world being destroyed and the core of the earth being turned in you know for being turned into cars for the company to sell and the i think the best analogy that that works for some people here is like when we create the ai we are creating a new species it's a new species that is smarter than us and even if you try to constrain its being an oracle and just answering questions not taking action to be a good oracle one must come up with plans then and then a a good oracle can manipulate the people around and will manipulate the people around it no matter what like the whole point of like the greek myth is like when they tell you when they tell you the prophecy when you trust them trustworthy where the oracle tells you a prophecy they're obviously often become self a fulfilling it's very easy that to happen that's not an unusual thing and i think even more to the point i out i was start gonna start to start this over at some level more to the point we won't just make oracle we are already building agents we will build the predictive ai and we will put it in a loop that caused it to optimize towards goals and he will give it goals to optimize towards done if you're gonna have it's gonna have goals you be optimizing towards those things and when it does that you're gonna have these agents that have goals that they're optimizing towards that are smart not just smarter than humans but much smarter than humans as much smarter than humans as humans were against giant sloth when we showed up in the new world and intelligence is the the uber weapon like it's not an accent that humans took over the world it's not the fastest creature it's not the strongest it's not the longest lived it's the smartest and we're gonna build a new smartest species and this is a this isn't a there's no fundamentally un unbelievable problem here that species could care about us like you could build into its its goals of the world how it saw the world the way it humans care about other humans that it cares what the things we care about that it cares about humans that it cares about things we value the three hundred and seventy five different shards of human of human desire that like of everything we care about care about in the world it could care with those things too and if it does hallelujah we finally have a parent like we finally have someone who actually knows what they're doing around here because like lord knows we don't like we're we're barely competent to run this thing i would welcome very smart you know very smart other species that that is that is aligned with us and cares about us i would not welcome one that is that cares about maximizing free cash flow that is that what humans care about and that is why it's like so dangerous and so knowing what you know then knowing what you believe first what is the probability of the bad scenario on your head are you like are we talking about a one percent yeah yeah issue thing order of magnitude ten percent of fifty percent what what is it in your in your mind i don't believe in point estimates for probabilities because it's like a bid ask spread in the market if you're really uncertain the bid ask spread doesn't clear like you're betting on it there's just like a lot of unresolved so i think of it was a range of uncertainty and i would say that the true probability i believe is somewhere between three to thirty percent which of the downsides of the down of of a very very balanced happening which is scary enough that i urgently urged action on the issue but it's not like you should give up like least it probably everything's gonna be fine fact is probably really good the answer the the the the non e based answer the like just the straight up like are we gonna win or not answer like i think i think it's gonna be okay but it's such the downside is so bad it's like it's really it's like it's like probably worse than nuclear war that's a really bad downside and it's worth putting even if even if you think i'm in it's nonsense at three percent you're like no it's no more than a half percent i you go you don't recommend a different course of action it have you have to you have to believe that it's effectively almost impossible before you would recommend ignoring it as a of course as a problem like you have to be like point o one percent for it'd be like yeah let's just roll the dice and are you gonna what are you gonna do action on that so you've kind of like you you know you're done with twitch and ad mode now but also this seems to be a pretty big deal yep are you like i should do something about this or yeah i'm gonna now sort of educating myself because i think this point of view i'm start now has been developing because i like learning more about ai and i think it's one of those things we're intervening in the wrong way right early it's one of those it's one of those self fulfilling prophecy things and if you're integrating improperly the in the way that is not effective spend social capital and also like doesn't necessarily move the needle and if if you didn't have people like advisory cows out there banging the drum really loud i would feel more need to bang the drum myself but i like you're asking me the question it's you know it's out it's out in the water people know it's a problem and so i'm decided to focus my cycles and like what how do we actually thread the needle what is a course of action that leads us to over time eventually still being able to develop ai but also not destroying the world and i think one of the things i've gotten to is that like this idea that like oh ai also has crystallize versus fluid intelligence just like a human does that's an important split of how to think about it and that we should be monitoring and worried about trying to understand the general intelligence not just generally benchmarking its performance on tasks because it that will keep going up and it's not in fact itself necessarily intrinsically dangerous if it canceled solve novel problems is is there a news surrounding test level is there like a better because like it hasn't pass us yet but is there is there something we have after that because it seems like there's you mean an intelligence testing yeah we we need iq tests basically like various kinds of how does it do on an iq test right now depends has it seen that iq test before like we have right yeah so very well on those right so what would be how does how does it do on novel iq tests that's so i know i i've not seen a good benchmark though that's a good that's a good idea for to go test yeah i think that's that's like that's the sort of thing that i think would actually be worthy of going to go do maybe there's some sort of a queue test for all of the we wanna put all the models through that really tries to get at fluid intelligence rather than right monitor but how how are we gonna it was this great project arc is this this group arc is working on called the eval project that's explicitly trying to build these kinds of tests focused on a few other more pragmatic tests right now but but i think that's sort of thing they would go after that's a good the alex i'll i'll ping paul asking about that you said something earlier that i wanna ask you about you said founder like you know we're talking about this the singular gene that it took to figure out instagram or snapchat right or whatever at that time and you're like you know are they lucky or they good what i don't know we'll find out let me try again are you lucky you're are you good and are you gonna try again well since i had multiple failures if i was successful i must be at least like partially lucky i would say that i don't plan to try again since i don't i don't feel drawn i trying to start a company i think like i kinda did did that was fun i got a lot out of it it was great i don't need to do it a second time i do i'd like how starting a company gives me good goals and it worked towards it's like concrete that's a value to myself and others and i think it's also i also liked that it it was challenging and i wanna do something i i like that i had scale i thought i could impact a lot of people but i i've i sort of come around to i sort of thinking like well what is impacting me the most what's changed my life the most and i realized that actually if i really thought about it often wanna changed my life the most was like essays people had written and ideas people had shared and i think i'm at the stage of my life now where i'm i'm actually i have something to say and so i'm i i think of it as sort sort of current trying to i want to put the ami world view out into the world the way that you know paul graham is put the paul graham roll view out in the world or tel le has like not just put his world of view in the world then like condensed it into like sayings that like can that allow other people to like onboard it even if they haven't read all the books and i think of that ambition to like try to try to code into a meme almost yeah can be digested and shared yeah into you need the long you need the long form this great blog post studying in theory two zero one size does matter by stevie okay that's about why like the people who change the world with her writing all write really long blog posts and it's basically like you just need some amount of time in someone's head to like we talking about this earlier like to install that your agent voice yeah to install the voice and so you i think i just need to produce a lot of writing and then you also need the pity summary things which are which both are things the voice can say often in people's heads and also like enable a language for talking about your worldview view that people who aren't soaking in it can like interact with so the people who are like reading you don't sound like crazy people and i think that's the that's what i wanna work on next i love that i think that's great do you he said something about rick rubin how he's sort of the i don't know how you would describe it it's kinda like curator but almost like collaborator really with an artist to help them do their great work is paul graham the rick rubin of the startup world no paul is paul is more like the that tony robbins of the i mean i the in the in the best way it's not so much maybe we're not quite much help self help but the main thing that talking to paul does to you repeatedly is like increase your ambition and drive like and he has good idea sometimes too like took get me wrong every now and then paul's a really genius idea but like mostly what i got out of talking to paul was not necessarily the great idea that would lit like change the trajectory of the business but the belief that i could go find it and that i was gonna change the world and that i should be what we were doing was important and worth investing in and that i got a bunch of stuff too it but that was so that was singular so valuable at like over overload the other things i got out of it how does he do that because you know when you say that my head thinks of like a tony robbins like david go like sort of people that almost like push you but he doesn't seem like that personality and reading all of his he's not like that at all so how does he get you to think bigger and push harder without being a ra ra ra ra think bigger push harder right you know what you should do is the classic poly and it's always followed by nothing you could add on what you're doing to turn it from project a addressing this small thing to project b changing the up the universe university which all transportation we're were gonna manage power if you tried to power all transportation instead of like building a wheel but that's just right you know what you should do you know what you should do is yeah yeah if you talked to paul you know i've never what you should do you know what you should do that's that that that is the consistent poly he i don't say dilute because it it sounds mean but i was like he d himself about your business and how great you are and invites you to join him in this diluted vision of like interpreting what you're doing in the biggest best possible light and from that vantage point what you're doing is super like what if it what if it goes right is sort of what what he invites you to ask right what if don't stop stop asking yourself but stop seeing all the hard problems all the shit you're gonna have to do ask what if what if what we're doing works what if it goes right what if it goes right and we like keep going like what could it be and when you spend time there you see how the small things can turn out to be microsoft was building programming languages for like these hobby micro computers that was a tiny irrelevant market that turned out to be extremely important and that's generally true of all the big businesses but they but they start doing the important startups ups they start doing something small and that seems almost trivial but there's a way in which this trivial thing can be seen bigger he sees it early no he sees he sees things that have nothing to do with the way you'll actually be big early but he sees a bunch of ways you could be big no one can do that no one actually knows if they knew it they just go do then they'd be the the the process the oracle what did he say let's say for justin and tv or what's what's one we can yeah justin i remember we one of them was like you you should like go hire all the like reality tv stars and make get them to go beyond justin tv you could be you could just take over all the scripted stuff that terms to me there's a terrible idea for a bunch of reasons but like it recon contextualize what we were doing for me in terms of like we're not making a on the internet live streaming show we might be building like just the way that you make un scripted entertainment generally and that's like much bigger idea and we're ranking a calendar and for my first startup up and i remember this you you know what you should do is make it like programmable so that people can add in and out functionality so it can like talk to your to do list in your your email and you're like everything else in your life and then it could be your calendar in some ways like that's everything you're doing what if it was like the central hub of like your entire online information management system that's also a bad idea like your calendar shouldn't be that but like but like but account could but what if it was and you walk away and and i am implicitly by saying that what he's telling you is i believe you are the kind of founders who could build an information management system that controls all it takes over people's entire like solves the entire problem for them does there takes over all their information and manages it for them you're not just like building a like google count like what what what you will find out later is a google calendar clone before calendar is launched not just like like i said you you're not just spelling an outlook clone in javascript you're like changing the way people relate to information i'm like is that true it's neither true or false that's not a true or false statement you're but it's a way to contextualize what you're doing it's the it's the sonic super quote of like don't teach them to like carrie wood or build ships teach them the urine for the vast and endless see like paul teaches you to see how you could be a changer of the world and how what you're doing is part of like this grand like building of the future and like the ideas i'll repeat here not both of those ideas are bad but they were very helpful because they made me feel like what we were doing was important that paul believed that i could do something big and important and they caused me to even though i wanna projecting them look for those ideas like to be open to and looking for it because you would get one every like you get like three an hour paul is a faucet for these it's easy i i can do it for startups ups too and enough if i want to i learned the trick and i should do that more often i'm usually what it fall into the tactical stuff but by by having that happen when he once he's once you've rejected ten of those you can't help but start hearing the paul you know what you should do in your own head the ceiling has been raised yes of like what well maybe i should recon my to do list as like an email client like what why is email to do separate like maybe i should should be building something much bigger than what i'm building and in a way that doesn't require me to change anything maybe what i've built is already almost that if i just like think about it a different way it's just funny balanced there i should had a tweet throw out this recently between like you know small plans having no power of german souls plan big or go home you should be really ambitious and aim super big and like only new products that are really big could be that you could see being being super big and super important and then the other hand the fundamental truth that like you know big trees grow from small acorns and like most of the bet many of the best things when they get started the person is not thinking i'm gonna go take over the world they're just trying to do a good thing that like they think is good often just often for themselves even or for like a very small number of other people and then it turns out that that's much much bigger than they realized and and those are both true pieces of advice like like people need to hear in different context like but to kind of contract each other yeah what what about these other people so you've you've had privilege i asked about program you've also been friends with you were in the first spicy batch so your friends with reddit guys mh i think you know the call some brothers sam alt list give me like a rapid fire on on them of like what makes them unique like you said about paul what what his kind super superpower is what really stands out what something you would admire about the way he does things give me one about maybe steve from reddit yeah so like it's easier in so with paul because like he was a mentor to me right and steve was much more like my it something like my brother and start right growing up with paul i know i know the things that he like taught me because it was it was much more of an explicit like i was being taught by paul with steve it's like i learned things from him by like watching and i imitate i think like i actually learned a lot from steve on management by watching his kind of un like steve is not like an un unfortunate person and like we'll we can get angry or can get sad or whatever but like when there's a crisis happening or there's i've decided i i got a shadow him for a day and when bad news is delivered he responded he wasn't like moved he was like still grounded in response that to that thing and was curious asked questions like didn't jump to what to do about it but then also like ended the meeting with was like alright well i what we should do hear what we're gonna do right and like it was just sort of a masterclass class like this is this is when you when something someone brings something up it's gotta be anxiety for looking it's a bad news that's what it looks like when a leader is engaged but not like not activated and like i think i in my own leadership to sometimes success and sometimes failure i think try to imitate that when i receive that you know when i have something like that in that state when you say you shattered and what was that like you guys just said we we exchanged like like going to each other's offices and i'm like sitting through each like early on or like maybe like five years ago four years ago it was really cool but did i was justin me justin and steve all like shattered at each other it was pretty fun i learned a lot that's incredible to like go watching their ceo at work and like you have to have the i don't know how you have the kind of like trust relationship to make that happen with that like knowing someone for fifteen years and i happen to have the privilege like know a bunch of ceos for really long time and getting to shadow each other was like a real learning thing what do you think even if these people didn't let's say explicitly teach you things you know i like you know if i read a biography or whatever one of the things i always try to figure out as more like to what extent is this person sort of built different or operates differently than like mh even somebody who's very good like the difference between very good and sort of like the elite what is the the the best of the best at this craft versus somebody who's very good certainly very good but just not the same what is those like the diff is what i'm always most interested in i'm curious you've been around a lot of these like high performing even like you know yeah bezos you've you've interact with him like do you notice any of these dips or is is it all just like it's hard to hard to say like that i i think i believe more in contextual commercialization like like that i see people do really amazing at something but like it's especially it's your own company there's a lot of like you happen to fit this problem well and it's not general i i know how to generalize i don't if you can i don't know of anyone else even performing at this problem the ceo of stripe job is a very specific job and patrick's amazing at it would he be equally amazing at some other ceo job possibly but i never seen him do that and i never seen ceo of stripe and it's very hard me to is it true at the beginning like is it true is like like startup founder of ambitious company are those are the those is stripe different at that stage too or like no absolutely people who are really good you can sense the energy and the drive and the capability and just the pace there's like very tends to like stuff happens a lot but like usually but then not always like some problems don't actually give weight like stripe is a good example of a company that gives way to a high energy high pace thing because it's it's a simple problem at some level that has infinite details that have like could be right but i think like i don't know if that approach would work as well if you're trying to create open ai or philanthropic where it's a research oriented organization and he kinda of have to be little more patient and enforcing it's impossible and so i i really believe in like fit the different people are good at different things and like obviously someone's a plus it patrick's obviously a plus it being a stripe ceo and it's just hard to tell the reason which these things are transferable and we don't really know but i actually one thing did come to mind about this question in terms of like a capability capabilities that i do think is that i did see bezos exhibit ro i was like oh that's a thing that i'm good at but he is better at that i'm better than most people but he's better than me which is but we present him on twitch probably twice a year once twice a year for the first three four years i was at amazon and every time two things would happen first of all he would remember everything we told him the first meeting and i don't think he was like reviewing extensive notes someone else took because i don't know when he would have the time to do that i like i observed him going from meeting in to meeting and he did not review notes so i think he just remembered at least the high points and the other thing was consistently he would read our plan and he would then ask a question about why we didn't do a certain thing or would give us an idea of everything we could do that i hadn't thought of before once so it's a bunch of things i had usually and then at least once which is hard to do because all you do is think that never happens most people would be lucky to get one of those one ever let alone one a year would be great like if you did it once a year or even once every three years right he could just like do you just generate them and they were and they were not all bad ideas either they were new ideas but i think i had i generate a lot of ideas to get a new idea i haven't thought thought of a on a topic i've been thinking about for a decade that might even be a good idea that is like he's just really fucking smart smarter where i can like i don't know how he does that can you say a story of one of those as like the status of limitations passed at like five years ago i'm trying to remember i can't honestly i i don't remember the specifics anymore just remember the like the like what the fuck moment like because the first time i was just like oh he's smart like he's seeing twitch for the first time a lot of times smart people will have a one good idea about your business the first time they see it because they have this huge history and they're pattern matching you to some historical thing they've seen and like that combination yields one new insight but then he did the second time remember the second one was like what is going on this doesn't make any sense like nope i've never had that experience of forever andy does not have the new idea generation relationship the same way but he does have the like remember what you told him thing which is also extremely impressive like that's that's and andy has his other thing he can do that i think is another andy also has easier for me as people i like reported to or i've learned this asking say yeah yeah and it has this like ability to criticize you in a way that conveys one hundred percent i know that you're amazing i know that your plan is good or you know like or that you achilles capable of making a really good plan i know that you're working really hard and i know that you are smart and you have a great team and we have a huge opportunity and yet somehow your results are bullshit which must i don't know what's wrong but we're in this together and we're gonna like i i have your back but like i but i'm confused like why aren't the results better given how amazing you are and you feel supported like you feel like he he believes in you but but like but he's just he's you're so sad oh i'm sorry i've confused i've i'm sorry i failed even though i clearly can succeed it this i'm gonna go i'm gonna go like fix this now and like it's almost like i instead of looking at this and then judging you you he comes to your side of the table says what is this yeah and like like how did we wind up you're like how i have failed you that i didn't say something earlier like something i don't but like not a way and that can come off for some people when they do that it comes off as sincere or it comes off as like they don't think you're actually competent like how did i not catch this can come off as don't blame you because you're clearly not good enough to caught this like he really how did we how did we wind up here i know that we are working together we're on the same team how did we wind up with not the results we wanted with a plan that i thought we both thought seemed good like help me understand and because it because it is genuine it's super effectively so talking to them i know if i talking was super effective on me and i saw effective on other people as well so i know it works on some number of people right and there's know of those those things i i've tried to i've tried to become good at i'm not i'm not as good at it as andy as but i've certainly gotten better so it's nice to learn from that's great love that one dude thanks for doing this i know i've been i've been bothering you to do this for a long time because i i love hearing your stories love hearing the way you think it's very different than most of people run into even here in silicon valley where you're supposed to have this kind of very eating diverse set of minds you know you're you're one them you're one of the reasons i moved out to san francisco was to meet people like you so thanks for doing this thank you i appreciate that yeah a beautiful i really appreciate all the color in the podcast yeah i feel like i could rule to where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a go less travel never looking back