The Exchanges

Q business model or cultural in the sense of the people working for a company? Versus the actual business model, as you were saying that it strikes me as like the Google model is really good for incremental innovation, whereas the Apple model, at least on the local level is really good for possibly going from zero to one or step changes, or maybe I'm thinking about that wrong. Am I?

A Um, no, I, I think you're right. I mean, they, they managed, they went from bankruptcy, uh, to not, uh, and then they obviously went from, you know, success to success between, uh, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, um, Uh, and obviously, you know, this large question mark looming over all of their heads now. Um, and so they have, they have been the mythical Phoenix rising from the ashes multiple times reinventing themselves. Google, um, has business lines that are incredibly important that are not the core product, but they did buy them. So, you know, I actually believe it's kind of a tangent, but I actually believe YouTube is more important to Google than web search if, if they're thinking about it properly, but that's an acquired asset. Now they nurtured it properly, but it's an acquired asset. Um, Facebook is, is kind of similar. Well, obviously it's, it's popular knowledge now that Instagram is kind of more important than the core product, but again, it's an acquired asset. And so, um, you know, I think that, uh, I think that it remains, it remains to be seen, you know, how, how it'll play out between these guys. But, um, I do think the approach of having confidence to not really look at the data and go into a little corner and just, you know, restart from scratch is I think a very strong moat Apple has. Uh, in addition, a kind of another interesting cultural propert…

AI assessment note: “Um, no, I, I think you're right. I mean, they, they managed”

Q control of your life. It seems like people are sort of like tuning out Uh, more and more, and they're just thinking, oh, they're lucky, right? I can't be lucky. And you're, you're talking about something that's really fascinating to me, which is like, what are the things I can do? Like, I don't control luck, but how do I make it a little bit less about luck every day?

A I think that's right. Um, I mean, you want to, uh, set up a world where kind of, you kind of want a mixture, right? You want to be able to continually kind of improve where, where you are, uh, in a, in a fairly linear fashion. Um, and, and, and, and in many ways, these are the goals that I think companies should be seeking. Um, that is to say continuous improvement. And this is where, you know, tracking metrics, figuring out what other people think, you know, what, what, whatever your rubric is, that that's important. And then you also constantly want to have this background thread, 20% of your time, 10% of your time, whatever, where you're trying to be incredibly opportunistic and, like, seeking opportunity and in many ways being lucky are kind of the same thing. And what I mean by that is, Um, the, the, the trick to basically becoming more lucky, and there was a cool study about this a while ago, is, um, uh, you, you can actually increase your odds of luck in the world. You know, you, you don't even really need pioneer. You just have to do this interesting, hard, psychologically hard task of, number one, kind of walking around the planet with a metal detector. So you have to constantly be listening for opportunity, um, even if it feels psychologically uncomfortable to pursue that opportunity. And then second, and this is the trick I think most people Including myself could, c…

AI assessment note: “constantly be listening for opportunity... You have to learn to act on it when it fires.”

Q I want to come back to leadership. You mentioned, um, the importance of leadership and in one of the talks that you gave, I think it was called how to win. You talk about how do we become a better leader? What is your answer to that question?

A Yeah. Becoming a better leader. Um, and, and I'm saying this as someone who is still learning. Um, you know, I'm still like level N out of X or X is a much larger number. I guess the things I've observed in myself, a couple of things. First, uh, probably the most important thing is the ability to distance your thought patterns and your emotions from your actions, and I find it fascinating that across the world, Western or Eastern, there's different concepts to this. Some people call it mindfulness. Some people call it, you know, being observant. Some people call it having a better sense of purpose. Whatever it is, it's the same thing over and over, and, you know, put your Um, pick your religion and then pick what you want to subscribe to, but it's the idea that you can kind of play the game of life in kind of third person as opposed to first. Um, that is incredibly important. For the very simple reason that you're going to have good days and bad days and you're going to be sitting at some point in a one-on-one with someone and it's going to be a bad day and they're going to deliver you some bad news and you're going to have to react appropriately. You're going to have to press the right buttons, um, uh, in terms of the actions you can take, uh, that, uh, that cause the right reaction. Um, and I think you gotta be, you've gotta be able to observe yourself in the third person to …

AI assessment note: “the ability to distance your thought patterns and your emotions from your actions”

Q I like that a lot. One, one question that's related to sort of like how we feed our brain is how do we go about changing how we think?

A So when I've observed what's causing me to change how I think it's, it's been, um, Occasionally. So, so that, you know, one common answer here is that it's, you know, um, read different books and try to view things from the other side. I, my mental metaphor for that is like reading a book in terms of changing how you think is you, you got these two rocks, two flints or tinders or whatever, and there may be a spark, but it won't really catch flame. Um, it's hard. Like a book's a good starting position, but it won't catch flame. What's the largest thing that's caused me to change my opinion or, or, or thoughts on things at a very deep level is really the environment. And in particular, the people I am surrounded by, um, the people you are surrounded by will rewrite your brain, whether you'd like to or not. And I certainly have noticed myself both in political affiliation, um, as well as like answers to things like nature, nurture, it's the micro influencers. And I mean, micro in the sense that these people are not globally known, but they matter a lot to me. Um, or I think highly of them, and there's something Cool slash scary, where when a micro-influencer or someone you respect says something to you, um, I think you are, no matter how disagreeable or analytical you are, you are, you eat it a little bit faster than you would anyone else. Um, you, you know, and the same thing is …

AI assessment note: “What's the largest thing that's caused me to change my opinion... is really the environment”

Q Have you had any problems doing that? I mean, when somebody thinks just totally one 80 from you, what do you do internally in that situation?

A Well, okay. So there's the, um, there's the kind of, uh, what would this be? The Keegan, um, self-transforming mindset, um, action of, Well, you're actually willing to, you know, instantly reform or have their views, you know, kind of chew on them, process them, and then spit them right back out. Um, and I would say, you know, it'd be ideal to work toward that. I'm, I'm certainly not there. I, I try to find, um, Interest, intrigue, uh, in the other side. I think that that is a better exercise for my brain. And so sometimes all I can end up doing, this is a little bit of a cop-out. I end up telling myself, let's try to, again, envision this person as an emergent property and figure out how did you develop that opinion? Like, again, what, what happened to you that led to you spitting that out today? And that at least can let me empathize with them or understand where they're coming from a little bit. It won't necessarily mean I adopt it properly, but it's at least a half step that's interesting is to It's like somehow get interested in how they ended up with their opinion. You know, I basically, I, I don't think there are All actors are locally rational, even terrible ones like Adolf Hitler. So it made sense to them what they were doing at the time, and it's an easy thing to just call them evil, but I think the more interesting and important thing, if you really want to suppress …

AI assessment note: “I end up telling myself, let's try to, again, envision this person as an emergent property”

Q things in order to try to achieve their goals, whatever their goals are. One of the things that strikes me that possibly separates successful people and unsuccessful people in these endeavors is obviously luck. But one of the things that we've talked about today is flow. Do you think that that's accurate? And what else do you think separates successful people? In these environments of, you know, rife gladiatorial competitiveness.

A Um, yeah, my belief is, okay, what separates success is, sadly, there's a component in that, that I do think is, uh, kind of luck by, uh, you know, birth. Um, Uh, you know, I, I, I will never be seven feet tall. It's kind of dictated by my genes. I can certainly modulate, and I can certainly stunt my growth by, you know, uh, not eating properly as a baby and as a child. Um, but there's, there's kind of a band, and I think that that is also true for one's ability to, you know, reason through complicated problems. Um, but I actually think that that band, that kind of intellect component here Is vastly overrated. Um, and, and I say that it's, it's not even rated that highly, but I still think it's overrated because I think that the real thing that separates, you know, successful people from not, in my opinion, is they get stuck in what is a really tight, great feedback loop where they're getting positive affirmations for doing the right thing. And so they continue to do it. And that positive affirmation is kind of a reward from people they admire. Maybe it's money. There's a lot of different alternatives here. But they, they kind of get stuck in that and then it just continues to iterate it over and over and over. You can kind of imagine if you're an engineer, there's kind of source code and you just get tight, you get stuck in a tight loop that's positive. And I think it's true f…

AI assessment note: “the real thing that separates, you know, successful people from not... is they get stuck in”

Q versus just showing you maybe what you want to see, or maybe creating civil unrest, or what if it's machine learning and we don't actually quite know what's going on behind the scenes because there's 46,000 variables that are weighted differently than we can comprehend in our mind. Walk me through, like, how do you think about where the responsibility for that lies and like how you think about that?

A Yeah. I, I think about it a little bit in a weird way, which is So as, if you start a company, um, again, you're, you're kind of starting a game, and you got, you start with zero points, and you try to get as many points as possible. That's just how the game works, and the points are dollars, and so a lot of people view this as wrong or evil, but I actually think that my view on it is it's created everything around us. It's created the podcast app that you're, you know, that, that you're using or listening to. It's created the table in the room that you're in, the light, whatever, so it's a wonderful way to get people to do things. Um, the problem is it has, A short-term outlook. I mean, this is, I basically think, I think you can trace almost Every major problem that we have in the world today to the fact that capitalism has a very short term outlook. So it maximizes for what is good today, not what is great 10 years from now. And so the Hershey's company gets rewarded for selling you a chocolate bar that makes you feel good in the moment, but may give you diabetes long term, you know, shorten your life and incur a massive cost, a massive societal cost. Um, and in many ways, you know, this is obviously the chatter with Facebook today is they're optimizing for engagement and optimizing for ads. Um, and again, you click on something cause you were curious about it. So, like, tha…

AI assessment note: “capitalism has a very short term outlook. So it maximizes for what is good today”

Q So we have third person, not first. We have acting out of insecurity. What else would you add to that?

A Um, I think another really important Um, thing is, especially people when, when kind of being thrust into positions of leadership very quickly for the first time, tend to drastically overwork themselves. Um, and I think this is coming out of either some internal psychological narrative they have, so the chip on the shoulder thing, again, I always wonder what her name is, or comes out of, um, this, this kind of machoist mindset that, um, the way to get as many points on the leaderboard is to, um, just Input, basically. Just be at the office all the time. Work really hard. A hundred hour work weeks. And, um, in many ways, this isn't wrong. Like, that, that is true. That is somewhat inspiring that you're in the office on the weekend, and I will pull, and I will punch a little bit above my weight, because gosh, you're doing it. I might as well, too. Um, it gets wrong when you start taking it to the point where you start making foolish decisions. Very specifically, I, it gets wrong when you start not sleeping well. I, I, Like, I think the fact that we don't talk about sleep all goddamn time, uh, is, is going to be one of the largest changes of, say, 4050 years from now, and more and more science comes out. Um, you know, just kind of like I view Pioneer as kind of working on the meta problem to curing cancer or global warming or, uh, you know, say, civil unrest in the world. I kind o…

AI assessment note: “tend to drastically overwork themselves”

Q you read? How do you read it? Uh, is it books online, long form, short form podcasts? I mean, you listen to the knowledge project. I'm sure you listen to other podcasts. How do you consume information? And like, if your brain is a pattern sort of recognition machine, how do you prime it with intelligent preparation in advance of encountering those patterns? That was really like one long-winded question.

A No, no, no. It's a, it's a, it's a great question. And I think it's, it's, it's interesting to ask the hypothetical, um, is optimizing your food diet more important than kind of optimizing your mind diet? Um, uh, and, and I wonder if the answer's now, I wonder if the main needle mover is like optimizing your brain. Um, cause I actually find If I want to get myself to do something that is hard, uh, I'll actually read books about it. And, and the brainwashing effect of books is actually quite strong. Um, you know, many people talk about the length of books and the fact that the content is repetitive and books should be shorter. That way people would read more, but I actually think the potency of it is that it's long and the narrative is repeated over and over and over and over again. I'll give you a very small anecdote. I, um, used to be, still am addicted to running long distances, multiple marathons a year, that type of thing. And as a result developed, um, you know, the, uh, the body that all long distance runners have, which is incredibly weak. And so at some point I got frustrated with that and I wanted to get into weightlifting. And the question became not like, how do I weightlift, but how do I really get interested in weightlifting? And it turned out the solution was, um, I guess one, surrounding myself by, um, Uh, an environment, you know, where, where for other friends …

AI assessment note: “If I want to get myself to do something that is hard, I'll actually read books”

Q Which model, if you had to go all in on one, would you, would you go all in on in terms of longevity or the most likely to survive changing environments?

A Right. That's a great question. I think the challenge is I'd pick the, the, the, the model that was best suited to the map you're trying to traverse. You know, it's kind of like you're starting, you're starting a shooter game and you're wondering, do you go for like the mech or do you go for the sniper or do you go for the assault? Like, these are all suitable things. You just want to get a sense of what's the map that we're trying to traverse through. Um, uh, but, but there's this one interesting flaw that Google's trying to fix in its alphabet model. We'll see. I, I, I'm, I'm happy they're running the experiment for, you know, the, the, the case study 10 years from now, which is, does this kind of continual improvement, you know, let's slowly increment the numbers, does that mindset get you stuck in a local maxima where you're unable to reinvent yourself? Because you have this kind of innovator's dilemma and challenge where usually in order to reinvent yourself, um, you need to both cannibalize existing business models, uh, and certainly redirect resources in a way that doesn't immediately make sense. Uh, and you know, so, so the core Google unit, I think, will not be able to reinvent kind of the next ad model because of traditional innovators dilemma, but the broader question is, will Alphabet be able to do it? Or, and so the positive take is that Google's really figured out…

AI assessment note: “I'd pick the, the, the, the model that was best suited to the map”

Q like so much of what we consume today, either online or through the education system seems to be the antithesis of sort of like the safe to explore the positive rewards for exploration and positive in this case, not the dopamine response of sort of like reading this clickbait article, but like Having an actual positive impact on your life. Can you talk to me a little bit about this?

A One thing, uh, I think would be interesting to you and your listeners is, you know, so when you ask the question, um, how, how did it all start with me? I think we as humans are, are quite terrible at reverse engineering the neural net in our head. Um, much like it's actually quite hard within modern machine learning techniques for you to figure out that that individual thing you fed the neural net led to that specific result you want. It's kind of composite and, and it's a soup. Um, and I kind of feel like when you ask me, where did my curiosity start? Boy, I don't really know that I could accurately answer that question. I could hypothesize. Um, but I actually think I'd be better answering that question when looking at other people. And it does seem to be the sense of, to your point, getting some type of positive affirmation that it is okay to do a thing. Fundamentally, like, you know, our brain is constantly making predictions based on what will happen if you take certain steps, uh, and so, you know, you will feel great if you eat the chocolate bar, um, you will feel maybe great if you go work out, you'll feel great if you talk to this person, you'll feel bad, you know, if you put your hand into the fire, and so we're constantly predicting the environment, and curiosity is a lot, a lot of curiosity, um, is about Cultivating a situation where you positively predict the outcom…

AI assessment note: “the world where we're in today is there's a shortage of positive feedback”

Q How, how did that help you, um, design better products? How did that relationship with her and that sort of knowledge of psychology that you guys chatted about help you?

A Um, yeah, that's a good question. Um, I mean, my sister was always, uh, running experiments on me. I remember, I think when I was like five years old, six years old, she would repeatedly ask me to draw maps, um, uh, from where we were to how we would get home, because I think there's a lot of spatial development that happens at that age that she was curious about. Um, and so being subjected to, uh, basically being a guinea pig, um, of, of someone, uh, certainly enlightened my mind To how my mind was changing as a child quite a bit. Um, uh, and if, if you think we have no agency as humans and, you know, there's just like some mumbo jumbo in there, in our DNA plus environment and, and, and, uh, and we kind of are on autopilot. It's kind of interesting that I ended up building, um, component and software that has an incredible, uh, I hope fairly deep sense of, uh, human psychology as well. I mean, pioneers, I think literally equal parts kind of software and psychology in terms of, you know, the different psychometric profiles we use to select people and, Um, how we motivate people. So there's a lot of human psychology there. So it's kind of interesting that, um, from our same, maybe it's all genetics, right? We kind of ended up doing the same thing as adults, although mine has a software flavor to it and hers has a research flavor to it. Right. Um, that, you know, the, the, the th…

AI assessment note: “I ended up building, um, component and software that has an incredible... sense of, uh, human psychology”

Q Talk to me a little bit about pioneer. What do you guys do? Uh, where did the idea come from?

A Yeah. I mean, it goes back to reverse engineering ideas. It's always a tricky one. Um, I think, I think it was so, so my, my backstory is, is kind of weird, not weird in the context of Silicon Valley, but, but weird in the global context, I'm originally from Jerusalem, Israel, uh, where I was born and raised. As an Orthodox Jew, leading a very different life from the one I'm leading now, and I had no idea that, you know, flash forward a couple years, I would have started a company, a company would have gotten acquired by Apple, and be, you know, running, um, you know, uh, a massive organization, uh, working on machine learning at the age of, like, 23, at the time, the world's largest company. Um, and all of this kind of got started, uh, and you know, this is a pattern. This whole feedback loop got started because I almost accidentally, uh, applied to this thing called Y Combinator, which funds early stage companies, and I didn't really even realize what I was doing at the time. I was sitting in an Israeli, um, military prep camp, and I remember hitting submit from, like, my old Nokia phone at the time, waiting for the GSM network to, to accept my bytes, um, And that would change my life. Uh, and I, I had no idea at the time, but that, that would, you know, seriously change my life. I thought it was going to be an Orthodox Jew married with seven or eight kids at this point, livi…

AI assessment note: “reverse engineering ideas. It's always a tricky one. Um, I think... my backstory”

Q Well, what sort of feedback loops do you keep track of personally? Like what's your, your personal sort of like metrics that you, you look at, or what sort of guardrails do you put in place to get quick feedback so you can adapt yourself?

A So I think a lot of people, uh, are interested in kind of individual things, say I would do, uh, very specific stories, like what time do you wake up? Uh, you know, what do you eat? Uh, you know, what's your workout regimen? And I think, um, I think that that is actually the wrong message to send, because I could tell you what time I wake up, um, but the more interesting thing to me, uh, is, uh, the fact that I am obsessed about optimizing this thing for an outcome, uh, and that is, I think, the takeaway, um, that I think more people should be in the business of. Self-experimentation is actually more important than the results, because, um, the time that I wake up is pretty individualized to me, I think a lot of, I happened to today, I wake up very early. I think a lot of people do much better if they wake up much later. In fact, you know, if you would have caught me five, six years ago, I was, I was definitely, um, uh, uh, in the camp of, of waking up as late as possible and staying up as late as possible. And I built all these rationalizations why I was that way. And my grandfather told me he was that way. And so I suddenly built up this whole, you know, obviously false theory about it.

AI assessment note: “I think that that is actually the wrong message to send”