The Exchanges

Q And is it technology that's causing us to feel lonely, or do we go to technology because we feel lonely, and we, we seek out sort of technology as a way to feel connected, or find people like us?

A So when I started my research, I was agnostic about the role that technology and social media played in today's loneliness crisis, but the more I dug into the academic literature, and there's by now, of course, a vast body of this, the more I came to believe that technology was Net a problem here. Up until about a year and a half ago, it was hard to actually establish definitively whether it was just correlation that people who were lonely were spending more time, for example, on social media, um, or was it causative? And there was a landmark study that was carried out by Stanford University about a year and a half ago, a real gold standard of a study where they had 3000, um, participants 1500 in a control group, and the other 1500 were expressly charged to go off, in this case, Facebook. The results were very clear. The group who went off Facebook for two months were significantly less lonely, significantly happier, and interestingly spent significantly more time doing things in person with friends and family, so it wasn't that they just migrated, um, onto, um, other platforms, and, and since then there have been a few other studies which have supported this, saying that, showing that social media Actually makes people feel more lonely, but even our devices play a part here. We've all done it. We've all been in a room with our partner. Or our family. Heads in our phones, not e…

AI assessment note: “whether it was just correlation... or was it causative? And there was a landmark study”

Q Sure. Look, if, if somebody gives you a gift or maybe does you a favor, is there a balance in the sense of obligation that we feel we need to repay? Or is there like almost an interest, a mental interest that we, uh, we ascribe to, uh, returning that favor. So we have to do more.

A No, uh, we are obligated to give back at the same level, but if the only thing we can do is to give back at a higher level, we will, to avoid the burden of feeling like a cheater, like a free rider, like a taker, an ingrate. So, If somebody buys us lunch, so we say, okay, next time it's on me, right? But between that time, if this says, this person says, I'm in a bind, can you drive over to where I am and jump my battery for me, right? We have to say yes, because this person just did us a favor. While we're in that state of obligation, we will go even higher. Although most of the time we can cancel the, uh, the obligation simply by giving what they gave us a nice lunch.

AI assessment note: “we are obligated to give back at the same level, but if the only thing”

Q And that was through the, the painstaking addition of microscopic sort of brushstrokes over years and years and years to create that effect. Is that correct?

A Absolutely. The more layers, sheer, thin layers of, uh, his painting, his brush strokes, uh, because he understands how light diffracts, how it hits our eye, that if it hits the center of our eye, you see more detail. If it's the corner of our eye, you see shadows and colors better. So if you look at the very detail directly at the corner of the lips of the Mona Lisa, they actually aren't turned up. But as you move your head a little bit, and you catch the shadows and the colors better, the lips seem to turn up. So it becomes an interactive smile, all because of the scientific brilliance of Leonardo da Vinci, as well as his passion for perfecting the Mona Lisa.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. The more layers, sheer, thin layers of, uh, his painting”

Q And so they pushed each other to go, to go beyond where they would have gone on their own. I think at one point they both quit the same commission, didn't they? They were both hired as rivals and.

A Right. They were great competitors and the, uh, elders of Florence took, uh, Made use of that by commissioning them to do works on opposite sides of the big hall, the big room in the town hall building, and Leonardo was gonna do a Battle of Angiari painting And, uh, Michelangelo was doing another battle painting, and there they were, almost as if it were, you know, a, uh, shark tank or some, you know, bake-off, and they each become somewhat unnerved. Uh, Leonardo's drawings are just spectacular, with horses having their faces contorted in rage and everything else, Uh, Michelangelo has a lot of nude people bathing. I mean, they're both very intense drawings, but they both quit before they finish. It's almost as if the competition drove them forward, but after a while the competition became too intense. Michelangelo leaves to go to Rome and ends up painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Leonardo ends up going to Milan and among other things, painting the last supper. So they each remain rather productive, but they forego that commission in Florence.

AI assessment note: “they both quit before they finish. It's almost as if the competition drove them forward”

Q I think it's a good time to sort of pause and just give us a thumbnail sketch of your career. I mean, it's very narrative defying in a lot of ways. A lot of people work in hospitality, but not a lot of people have the trajectory that you had at such a young age. Can you walk us through some of your experiences and how we got here today?

A Yeah. Started working when I was 15. Sold clothes in malls. I then started at Hooters at the age of 17 as a hostess. First person in my family to get accepted to college, became a waitress at 18 my senior year, then started college and kept waitressing. But then I also started cooking. The cooks quit one day, and I ended up picking up kitchen shifts. And then another day, the bartender had to go home, and she needed one of the servers to help her take over the shift. And so these things kept happening in the business that resulted in me working different jobs. And before I was 19, And before I even finished my first year in college, I had worked every job in that business. I knew how to run a restaurant without realizing I knew how to run a restaurant. But that was not my ambition. My ambition was to get my degree. I was a electrical engineering and computer sciences major, a psychology of women minor, and my plan was to get those degrees and go to law school. I thought I would be an attorney. And By the time I was 19, what I mentioned before with this story with Bonnie, she came to me and said, you know how to do every job in this building. I trust you. I know you'll represent us well. I'd like to nominate you to be a part of the training team to go launch the first ever Hooters franchise in Australia. No question, no doubt. Yes, I want to go to Australia and help launch a fra…

AI assessment note: “Started working when I was 15. Sold clothes in malls. I then started at Hooters”

Q You mentioned something there about domain expertise, which I think is interesting. GE was for most of your, your time there and the time before you, I think under Jack, it was known for generalist sort of management in place. And a lot of the businesses you'd be running plastics one day and aviation the next day. Well, what are your views on that now and how have they changed?

A What I always say is that I learned so much working for Jack, but the world changed very dramatically between the 19 nineties and the 2000 and beyond. And I think that there is a role for generalists, but it's harder to be successful in the world today, unless you're kind of deep domain, particularly technically, uh, the best CEO I had working for me in GE was the guy that ran the aviation business. He was great at the technology, knew the people, uh, he knew all the initiatives that the company was trying to drive, but he was just a really deep domain technical leader. And that was really what I was trying to groom and what I think is important today. If you look at Bezos, you know, Amazon's a conglomerate, but it's a software company. Google's a conglomerate, but it's an AI company, you know. Yeah. Walmart is huge. It's a retailer. You go, the companies that do well today are extremely deep. And I think to a certain extent, you know, not, look, we had a ton of good people, but we were creating perfect managers for private equity. You know, if you look at the basic GE toolkit that I grew up with, it was almost the perfect match for private equity where You took a company, you had five years to turn it around. You didn't have to make big bets on products and technology. And so I, I think to a certain extent, some of the people, uh, who left GE did best in private equity versus …

AI assessment note: “it's harder to be successful in the world today, unless you're kind of deep domain”

Q I'm going to switch gears and talk a little bit about innovation. And one of the topics of your book is the difference between innovation and invention. Can you expand on that?

A Yes, I, I deliberately talk about innovation rather than invention, because I think we've talked a lot about inventors, about brilliant people who come up with bright ideas that change the world. I want to talk about innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical, reliable, and available, and affordable for ordinary people. And that's a long slog, and it's a lot of hard work, and it's often more important, more difficult, Then the process of coming up with a good idea in the first place. And there are innovations that change the world dramatically, which don't actually depend on any inventions. Things like container shipping, which had an enormous impact on global trade by drastically cutting the cost of shipping goods overseas, which didn't involve any invention of a technology, of a new technology at all. It just involved a sort of change in the way we organize our ships. And a guy called Malcolm McLean gets most of the credit for that in the Trial and error slog of innovation rather than the lonely genius idea of invention was something I was trying to get at. There's quite a nice, uh, funny story that I tell in the book, um, which illustrates the point, which is a beaver and a rabbit looking at the Hoover Dam, and the beaver says to the rabbit, no, I didn't build it, but it is based on an idea of mine. And of course, getting from,…

AI assessment note: “innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical”

Q We all have the same like human impulsiveness and sort of like the same, we just have better tools now or different tools, not even better tools, right? Like different things available.

A In many ways, better tools, because if you think about it, if you look at the statistics, everything that kills kids, everything that harms kids, not just kills kids, it harms kids, is down to record lows. Uh, homicide, record lows. Truancy, record lows. Drug use, record lows. Pregnancy, record lows. Uh, incarceration, record lows. All these things are at record lows. Even suicide has gone up over the past few years. But it's not at a record high. If you look at the 19 seventies and eighties and nineties, actually suicide was higher back then. It's so what they do is when they show you suicide has gone up, this is what they did in the social dilemma movie. They only showed it to you from the graph starting around 2004. But if you take the X axis back, you'll see suicide isn't at an all time high, quite the opposite. It used to be much higher in the past. So if we wanted to build a device to keep kids off the streets, off the roads and safe at home, Maybe this gadget is not such a bad idea. It seems to be having some upside.

AI assessment note: “In many ways, better tools, because if you think about it”

Q How do you think about your day and organizing it to make sure that you're working on the most important things?

A I roughly think of my time in three buckets. I try to spend about a third of my time on people. So that's either hiring or internal HR. I think this is the environment work, creating the environment for people to thrive and do the best work of their lives and their career. Spend about a third of my time, particularly right now on product. So I'm sort of temporarily running our largest product, which is wordpress.com. And so, uh, I'm a lot more in the, And the weeds there in terms of, you know, working with the leaders and engineers and everything to make sure that's an excellent experience. But more normally, I might float a little bit more between the different products across the company. And then finally, that final third, I just try to reserve for whatever is the emergency of the week.

AI assessment note: “I roughly think of my time in three buckets.”

Q Do you think it's possible to have, um, an even divide amongst co-founders, like a fifty-fifty split or 25, 25, 25?

A I don't actually. And so, and the reason is that at the earliest stages, you have to sort of forward look the cap table. In other words, I'm going to raise a seed and I'm going to get 20% dilution to Typically the Series A, another 20 to 30% dilution, and so on and so forth. And so the question is, at the end of the day, when you're at Series C and you now own five or six percent of the company, or let's say seven or eight, is that enough to keep you motivated and knocking your head against the wall 18 hours a day and busting through all of the barriers that are presented to you? And it's a question mark. Having said that, if you own 50 or 60% of the company, then you are all in. And so it's that simple forward-looking five-year-ahead view that we bring to the table.

AI assessment note: “I don't actually. And so, and the reason is”

Q And how do you come up with a valuation? Like, where does that come from? Often, I mean, from an outsider's perspective, it seems like some of the valuations I see tossed around in the newspaper headlines are just, they seem outrageous based on the economics of the business.

A Completely arbitrary. Yeah, no, no, there's some rubrics. So, you know, they're in SaaS based businesses, uh, because they're very data driven, uh, SaaS by software as a service, you know, there are, there are obvious statistics like the cost of acquisition of a customer, the CAC, the lifetime value LTV. There's ratios. There's different dynamics that you can pull from other companies that are successful, and you can apply them to your company, and then you can raise and lower. Generally, it's a price to sales multiple. Um, you can raise and lower your multiple based on the dynamics, right? So if I have very high churn, you're going to get a lower multiple. If I have very high margin, let's say in the high nineties, um, you're going to get a higher multiple. Uh, but at its core, uh, it's a function of a couple of other things that are, Somewhat different. One is the investor syndicate needs to own enough to make it worth their while, right? So a lot of VCs will say, I need to own 20 or 30%. We won't get involved. Otherwise, uh, angel investors may, uh, simply want to put dollars in and get reasonable ownership out. At the same time, the founding team needs to have enough equity to make it worth their while. And I think some VCs have it upside down where they say, well, we're going to own all this business, but then you've lost alignment of your founder. And if you lose your fou…

AI assessment note: “there's some rubrics... Generally, it's a price to sales multiple.”

Q Let's flip that around and, uh, what people don't often see, which you can add uniquely is sort of what's the mind of the attacker. Like if you're looking at acquiring, um, valuable information from a company, walk me through that whole process. Like how do you think about that? How do you go about doing that? What does that look like?

A So initially an attacker is going to profile the target, and that can look like different things. So if, you know, the target has online services, they'll probe those services to see what's there. Are there any email addresses on your website that are really easy to identify? What type of social media presence is there? And that ultimately will lead into typically a social engineering campaign, either in the form of You know, an email that is received that looks really normal, that you want to trust, and hopefully will get you to click on something, or double click on an attachment, or it'll go to your phone, you click on that, and that exploitation occurs. The other approach that we see quite a bit is people don't use multi-factor authentication with just a basic email setup. So brute force, brute forcing passwords works. Somebody gets in, We'll scope out your inbox and see what's there. Who are your customers? What's your routine? And then they will perform perhaps a financial redirection. So in that case, they would get an idea of what your entire portfolio is and email all of your customers and say, hey, here's your new payment instructions. And they will have all the outstanding invoices already, uh, you know, listed and ready to go. So they can immediately say, you know, you owe us X amount. This is where I want you to send this money now. And That is remarkably and surpr…

AI assessment note: “initially an attacker is going to profile the target, and that can look like different things.”

Q What are the core emotions? Like, are there universal emotions? Are there, like, how many emotions are there? Are there millions? Are there four? Are there five?

A You know, some scientists will tell you that there are six, and some will tell you that there are 22 or 24. I mean, I think if you look at the evidence, there's not really good evidence for either of those answers. In fact, there's evidence against both of those answers. I would say, um, there are no core emotions and there is no set of universal emotions. What's universal is affect. Your brain regulates your body, your body. Sends, sends data to your brain and you feel it as affect because that's how you're wired. That's how everybody's wired. You know, affect is like this kind of like general barometer that lets you know how your body budget's doing. And that's true for everybody. As far as we can tell from all the cultures that have ever been studied, that's universal. But more than that, how you make sense of, you know, for example, there's one culture where The prescription for what you're supposed to do when you're afraid is go to sleep.

AI assessment note: “there are no core emotions and there is no set of universal emotions.”

Q because I mean, I know of you, I read your stuff, and then going a little deeper behind the scenes is, is always fun, and I found this really interesting story. You worked as a librarian at the Warner Chapel Music, And you quit. And that is like one of the most interesting stories I have ever seen, um, with somebody quitting. Can you, can you share that with me?

A Sure. Uh, it was my first real job. It was at Warner Brothers in Midtown Manhattan, the music publishing division. Uh, it was an office with about 14 employees, and I was 22 years old, and I had been working there for two years, just the bottom entry-level position running the music library. But I loved the job, and I loved my colleagues, but after two years, I was ready to quit so I could be a full-time musician. Like, I was earning enough on the side as a musician that I could quit. So I found someone to replace me. Um, it was an old friend that I knew would be perfect for the job. I knew that she would do it really well. She had the right temperament. She was in the right stage of her life. I knew that she'd be psyched about it, and Really give it her all like I did. So I offered her the job, and she said yes, and she moved to New York City to do it. Uh, she stayed at my place for a while. I trained her, and I taught her everything, and after a week or two of that, uh, that's when I told my boss that I have to quit now, but here's my replacement. She already knows everything, and she's starting on Monday.

AI assessment note: “that's when I told my boss that I have to quit now, but here's my replacement.”

Q What is fracking? Just to orient everybody listening to this.

A So it is the process, it's called, the full name for it is hydraulic fracturing, and it's not actually new, but it's the combination of two techniques that were around for a long time. One was drilling horizontal wells instead of vertical wells, and then the other was forcing a mixture of chemicals and water and sand into the earth. A fracking entrepreneur described it to me this way, it would be like sealing all the exits in a building and then yelling fire. And seeing what starts coming out of the cracks, right? Creating this enormous pressure such that things that don't otherwise want to come out start, start coming out of the cracks. And that's what fracking is. And it enabled us to extract oil and gas from places where we knew there was oil and gas, but you couldn't get it out drilling a well conventionally, a conventional vertical well. But this technique of fracking allows these wells to actually produce a fair amount of oil and gas. But The problem turns out to be that these wells decline at an incredibly steep rate. So a vertical well, once you found it and it produced oil and gas, it would continue to produce for years. A fracked well declines really sharply after the first year, which means in order to keep production levels up, you have to keep reinvesting. So you're on this capital treadmill, and that's why the industry has not been financially viable, because you …

AI assessment note: “it's the combination of two techniques that were around for a long time.”

Q And then you went on, um, you had sold them. What was the timing around that? Like, uh, I don't quite know what happened, but you went on CNBC and you sort of like said, we need to do more. Uh, and you were, you were, well, you walked me through that.

A Sure. Yeah. Uh, so basically we put the hedge on in maybe the third week in February and And by March 12th, the hedge had gone from being worth nothing to being worth, you know, 2.7 billion dollars. And the markets had dropped, I don't know, 25% or so at that point in time. And we said, you know what, uh, we've got this massive position in the hedge, which maybe has the potential to double if the, you know, credit spreads widen to where they were during the financial crisis. But if they don't, and the government takes the right steps, you know, this hedge could be worth zero and the stock market can go right back up to where it was. So we made a decision to exit the hedge. And so we started selling the hedge and we started aggressively buying stocks On the 12th. I went on CNBC at 12:30 on the 18th, and the reason why I know these details is because, you know, I wanted to respond to some of my detractors. We'd invested two billion fifty million between March 12th and March 18th at 1230 in the stock market buying, you know, additions, adding to our portfolio, buying, repurchasing Starbucks. We had sold half the hedge for a 1,000,000,300, a little more than half the hedge for a billion three hundred million, and Uh, so we were three billion, you know, three hundred and fifty million more long stocks, if you will, than we were on March 11th. And bear in mind, this was a firm with t…

AI assessment note: “I went on CNBC at 12:30 on the 18th”

Q Would you say that it's, are the founders charismatic, or is there a myth of charisma that leads to this sort of people following you? You're seeing thousands of them a year, effectively. Like, what A percentage of them are using charisma versus idea. Like, how are you getting people compelled to follow you into this pursuit?

A Yeah, I think charisma helps, but I think it's more about the power of the vision. So, you know, Steve Jobs, super charismatic, obviously, but Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, I wouldn't say are, you know, a standard deviation, more charismatic than most people. But I think that both of them believe they were working on something important, and that they were doing kick ass exceptional work, and they attracted people who believe their vision and wanted to work hard on a great project with them. And so I think that that's really the defining characteristic is they have a vision that compels a set of like-minded people, and they all feel like they're in on a secret together, and they believe that they're gonna convert everybody else to their point of view until one day everybody has their point.

AI assessment note: “charisma helps, but I think it's more about the power of the vision.”

Q How did you come up with the mental models?

A I wish I could say it was by being smart, but it was, it was as much as by being dumb. So like, if you look at what Charlie Munger talks about is great investors, they, they read a lot. They're genuinely curious and they try not to repeat avoidable mistakes. And so, so I went back in time And I looked at all the companies that we had passed on that we should have invested in, Airbnb, Pinterest, um, who else, PagerDuty, Anaplan. I did a forensic analysis of it. I found the initial intro email and who the source of that intro was. I looked at all the notes we took. I looked at the pitch deck at the time we saw it. And I even looked at the notes between us and the pass email I sent. And then I studied what happened in that round. What price did it get done at? What were all the future rounds? Who said yes? Why? And then I, when I get a chance, I actually interview the founder a few years later. And the reason this is so important, Shane, is that startups are so random that you can literally forget how it happened. So, for example, we invested in Lyft when it was Zimride back in 2010, and it would be very easy for us to believe we knew more than we knew at the time we made that investment. Same with Twitter, same with Twitch, same with Okta. And so in the ones that we did say yes, and it was a big win, we try to not breathe our own fumes too much. And we similarly try to go back in…

AI assessment note: “I went back in time And I looked at all the companies that we had passed on”

Q Can you expand on that and explore that with us for a little bit?

A Why don't you ask me a question about, uh, my new podcast, for example, right? That would be, I actually would like you to talk with me about my new podcast, but I won't say that, right? Why don't you bring me flowers? Why didn't you say good morning? Why didn't you thank me when I did? Why, you know, What is actually, what am I saying? I'm saying, I wished you had thanked me. I wished you had noticed that I bought you this new suit. I wished you had, you know, shown me your appreciation for, I wished. But if I say I wished, I have to put myself out there. It means I want something, and I can be refused. I can be rejected. I can be not heard. And that, in a relationship that is not secure, I will defend against that. I don't want to show you that side of me. So instead of saying what I want, I'll say what you didn't do. That's the criticism. What you didn't do and what's wrong with you is safer in some bizarre way than to tell you what is special about me and what I would have wanted.

AI assessment note: “instead of saying what I want, I'll say what you didn't do.”

Q And then that was because you, you were running into trouble, right? You had to sell them.

A The firm, the firm ran into trouble because there was, um, People in the trading department exceeded limits on certain type of security, and it ended up that interest rates went the wrong way, and, you know, we lost doubly on the trade, and the impact of that on a mark-to-market basis would have gotten close to wiping out the entire firm's equity, and the way financial firms work is that if you have no equity, and people have lent you money to support Your balance sheet, and they realize there's nothing underneath them, then they panic and call their loans, and everyone calls them at the same time, more or less, then the firm collapses. And so that's what we were facing. So, so it's important that you either bring in additional capital very quickly before anybody knows you have that kind of severe problem, or you have to end up, you know, selling the firm on, on sort of almost a fire sale basis, so, so that The acquiring institution, which is larger, basically provides the same function as putting equity in. They're guaranteeing the rest of your balance sheet. So that was the position we found ourselves in, and, and I sold the firm to, um, American Express.

AI assessment note: “The firm, the firm ran into trouble because there was”

Q And so can you sort of, like, walk me through all of those techniques?

A Yeah, sure, of course, yeah. So direct labeling is just telling people, you know, what something is, or what a situation is. This is particularly useful when people are newbies, when they're young, or when they're just trying to make sense of things for the first time. They don't have necessarily a pre-existing experience. View. So in a classic study, kids were assigned to different conditions and encouraged to not litter in the classroom. And in one condition, they were given a persuasive appeal. They were told it's really important that you don't litter. That seemed to increase or throwing away of trash and not littering in the short term, but not in the long term. Another condition, kids were told that they were not litterers, that they were the clean class, the school principal, the teacher, the The janitor all told kids that they were the clean class and that they didn't litter. So here you have young kids being labeled, their, their group identity is being labeled, and then kids behaved in accordance with that label. They littered less even weeks later. Now that's not how, um, you know, most interventions, especially with older populations or with people who are more sophisticated, don't just give people a label. They instead give people information Upon which they can draw a new inference. They give people the new basis for interpreting something in the world. For exampl…

AI assessment note: “So direct labeling is just telling people, you know, what something is”

Q Is there anything else that comes to mind?

A Farming out things individually, um, giving worldwide rights to, uh, to publishers now is crazy because the, the world market is getting more and more lucrative. So I'll do deals just in North America, basically, and that lets me do separate, like wool is with Random House in the UK and here in Australia and New Zealand and basically worldwide English. And, um, the book is different. The, it's localized for the For the, for Queens English, basically, instead of American English, and they know their market better, and putting them in charge of it, instead of having someone in America shop that out to subsidiaries, it's not only makes for a better product, it makes for, um, better business sense. So I've done, like, amazing deals in Brazil, um, you know, 60,000 dollar advances, which I would have been gaga for in the, um, in North America with my first books, and here I'm getting it from a country that is exploding with, um, interested new readers, and I had no idea that was a market, and we've done, we've now done deals in over 40 countries, and doing them individually has maximized the decisions we made. For instance, in, um, In Taiwan, we went with a very small publisher. It's a one man operation. Literally like one guy runs the whole business and does the translation, everything. He's a, he's a dynamo. Yeah. He's amazing. Only does like two books a year. And he, he was offeri…

AI assessment note: “Farming out things individually, um, giving worldwide rights to, uh, to publishers now is crazy”

Q What sort of feedback would you get after you, you did an interview or a show from him that would, you would go back and would make you better?

A There, there, I mean, there's a, there's a lot. Let me think about some of the ones that were really important. I mean, he was the ones, he was the one that started getting me thinking about, um, uh, sentence structure and, and whether or not the brain could follow it. Um, so he had all these yellow and then red flags. Most of them were yellow, and they were the things just to kind of watch out for, as opposed to don't Do these things. Um, so he would be always looking for the word that, T-H-A-T. He would be looking for, um, too many commas. But, you know, he, a couple things that I remember from him. One is that in his office in the CBC, he used to have this big sign that said, we are here today to make a radio, an audio signal, excuse me, And the purpose of that is to constantly remind you that it's all about sound. It's all about sound. Um, and he would say things like, you know, use colors. Colors are really powerful to the ear. Don't tell us she was wearing a heavy jacket. Say she was wearing a heaven, a heavy fuchsia jackdown jacket, right, with, with green and purple and pink. Those are really loud when you hear them. He would say, don't tell us that, um, this guy's busy. Why do you think he was busy? Why did you get the impression that he was busy? Was his phone ringing constantly? Was his desk piled high with papers? Explain what you saw and let us decide if he was bus…

AI assessment note: “he was the one that started getting me thinking about, um, uh, sentence structure”

Q You also wrote a book called The Complacent Class, um, which kind of highlights that there's a lot of changes going on, which get a lot of attention, but our reaction to those changes, um, is sort of neglected. Can you expand on what these changes are and how our, you know, seemingly well-intentioned decisions today, um, may not have the desired effects?

A Well, the key idea behind the complacent class is that Americans have become quite risk averse. Uh, they move around the country at much lower rates. They're much more paranoid about how they raise their children. They medicate themselves at higher rates. Our economy has less churn. It's less dynamic by many different measures. Rates of productivity growth have been down outside of the tech sector. So a lot of these decisions to settle in and be safe and comfortable, they're individually rational. Like, it's, it's good to be safe, right? Stress is, is, is a bad thing. But when our society collectively makes this decision, there are ways in which we're all worse off because we live in a much less dynamic country. Our rate of economic growth is slower. It's harder to afford the federal budget. Uh, we end up with a screwy politics. Those are the basic themes of the complacent class.

AI assessment note: “these decisions to settle in and be safe and comfortable, they're individually rational”

Q and traffic problem. Is that something that solves itself? Because we know in the, you know, the next 20 years, there's a high probability of self-driving cars coming on the scene, and we can assume reasonably that that will alleviate some of the traffic problem, maybe not fix the roads, but Is that problem worth solving now, or what would you have people, how would you think about that differently?

A Well, I would have government price the roads during rush hour, or in some places such as Manhattan, maybe price them almost all the time. One encouraging sign is outside of Washington, Route 66 into Virginia. They're now charging tolls, and at rush hour the toll can be as high as 30 or 40 dollars. It sounds terrible, but without the toll you couldn't really use the road at all. It was just a big parking lot. So London has applied a congestion charge going into the central city. It has worked. Singapore has congestion charges for its roads. They have worked. In this country, we need to do the same thing. Self-driving cars could make the problem worse, you know, because you'll send out your car or your vehicle on all kinds of errands. Oh, go to Whole Foods and pick me up some smoked salmon. I'm hungry. And there may be fewer people on the road, but the people that are there could be in much slower traffic. And it's so hard to get new roads built. There's environmental review. There's homeowners groups. Uh, it's very, very difficult in a lot of parts of the United States.

AI assessment note: “Well, I would have government price the roads during rush hour”

Q What are your rules for reading? I mean, do you read cover to cover? Do you, how do you, after you pick up a book, what's your process like?

A Classics I read cover to cover. Uh, almost by definition of a classic. Uh, most books I don't finish. Very good books I finish. Maybe one book in 10 I'll finish. But I don't mean that as any slight to the books. You've always got to think, Well, you know, chapter seven in this book, is it better than starting a new book altogether? So much of my reading now is shaped by my reading for my own podcast series to interview guests. So I just interviewed Matt Levine of Bloomberg, and he writes on law and finance, but when he was an undergraduate, he was a classics major. So I reread quite a bit of Horace, you know, the Roman essayist and poet, to try to get into the mind of Matt Levine. So that, more than anything now, drives my reading. Reading To understand other people I'm interviewing.

AI assessment note: “Classics I read cover to cover... Most books I don't finish.”

Q trend? Is it a personality trait? Is it something, um, a crusade? Is it, we've all, I mean, I've worked in organizations where there are some people who are, I would say, relentless, uh, and they come from a good place, not malicious intent, but they're, They're constantly challenging the status quo and making sure that other people can't be, uh, blind to information. Um, what causes that to happen?

A Well, it's really interesting, and it's a very, very hard question to answer because, uh, you know, there's a lot of mythology around such people who are customarily described as whistleblowers, although that's quite a complicated term. Um, so there's a mythology that says they're mostly women, and the research doesn't bear that out. There's mythology that says they're people of faith, the research doesn't bear that out. The only thing I could find, and I've interviewed hundreds of such people, um, they tend to be a little nerdy, and I emphasize a little, because, um, you know, not spectacularly, but they are definitely people who like detail. And as a consequence of liking detail, they may be slightly better than average pattern recognizers. So they'll start to see things that will prompt questions.

AI assessment note: “they tend to be a little nerdy... people who like detail.”

Q Let's dive into givers and takers a little bit, because I think there was actually three types of people, right? Givers, takers, matchers. Can you, can you walk me through the differences just so everybody starts on the same playing field here?

A Yeah. I think about these as, as styles of interaction and, you know, they're kind of grounded in the motives that we bring to the table every time we talk to another person. So givers are people who are constantly asking, what can I do for you? Um, they're excited to add value and help other people. And, you know, sometimes that means knowledge sharing or mentoring or, you know, just showing up early or staying late to support other people. The opposite of a giver is the taker, and that's somebody who's, you know, constantly trying to figure out, what can you do for me? Come out ahead in every interaction, and takers are really great at volunteering for the projects that are interesting, visible, and important, and then dumping the grunt work on everybody else. But of course, they love to walk away with the lion's share of credit for every collective achievement, which is why I know we all adore working with takers. Maybe not. And then, you know, most, what I found was most people are, they kind of hover in the middle of this spectrum as, as matters. I found that over half of people identify this as their primary interaction style at work where they say, look, I don't want to be too selfish. I don't want to be too generous. So, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to trade favors evenly. If you do something for me, I'll do something for you. It's almost like they're, they're acco…

AI assessment note: “givers are people who are constantly asking, what can I do for you?”

Q What's the history of Athens, the city itself?

A Well, we have to go back to the fourth, uh, millennium, about 3400, uh, BC, when the, we have the first inhabitants, uh, who settled on the Acropolis and in the surrounding plain, and from, since that time, the city has a continuous habitation, so you say that the city has a history of six thousand years, and several meters of archaeological remains beneath The modern city. Um, you had a period, well, until the 10th century BC, we cannot say that, well, you can say that we have the city-state of Athens. Just note, in ancient Greece, ah, you have, we have hundreds of independent city-states. Ah, Athens, Sparta, Corinth, just to name the three of the most, ah, important. Um, but we believe that the city-states were formed during the 10th century. B.C. So, up since that time, since the 10th century on, you have the formation of the ancient city, started, started spreading out around the, the Acropolis, and the heyday of, of Athens was the fifth century B.C., when was the, had the strongest navy, they controlled all the, the Aegean, they had multiple sources of revenue from the harbor of Piraeus, they had silver mines, Manufacturing activities, and in this period when the Athena democracy was developed, you had philosophy, art, so the, but when we say the fifth century B.C., that's a period between four 80 to four 30 B.C., about that period, when Athens is at its strongest and the …

AI assessment note: “we have to go back to the fourth, uh, millennium, about 3400, uh, BC”

Q And did Greece go back to city-states?

A Greece, we still had the city-states, but most of Greece was under the control of the, of the Macedonians. So you had Macedonian garrisons in, in the cities, Ah, important fortresses were under Macedonian control. Ah, the kingdom of the Ptolemies, who were ruling Egypt, ah, who, who wanted to fight against, to undermine the Macedonians, were supporting the Greeks when they wanted to have, to start a rebellion against the, the Macedonian garrisons. Ah, it happened a couple of, ah, of times, but with With meager successes, just for a few years. Uh, and that's, uh, that's why when the Romans finally arrived, and they defeated for the first time the kingdom of Macedonia, they declared the independence of the Greeks. It was very fashionable of declaring the independence of the Greeks, but always independence, man. Ok, you can take care of your own affairs. But we call the, the shots in important issues of diplomacy and, uh, independent to an extent. Yeah. You, you, you have a municipal independence.

AI assessment note: “we still had the city-states, but most of Greece was under the control”