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[0:00:24] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Limited availability in California. Driver is responsible for emergency and towing charges not covered by the policy. Coverage subject to policy terms and conditions. This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all.
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[0:02:15] First Contact with Lori Siegel is a production of Dot Dot Dot Media and iHeart Radio. One thing where I do think Silicon Valley gets a little bit dishonest is saying like, OK, we're going to build these incredibly powerful systems. They're going to do all these wonderful things for us on this incredible exponential curve of technology. And then right when we want it to stop, it's going to stop. Tech years are like dog years. A lot happens in a short time.
[0:02:53] I want to take you back 10 years ago. This one is personal for me. One of the first people I met when I started covering technology around 2010 was Sam Altman. We were both in our early 20s. It was before tech exploded and left us with some pretty complicated questions about the future. Back then, everyone was hustling. We were coming out of the recession. The App Store had launched and a new creative class was emerging.
[0:03:20] It wasn't cool to go work on Wall Street anymore. You could just have an idea and code it into the hands of millions. I met Sam at a conference called South by Southwest. He had a startup at the time called Looped. It was a location social networking app for your phone. That felt so long ago if you know his trajectory. Sam, for me, represents so much of what I find fascinating about tech. Success and failure. Big ideas. Blind ambition.
[0:03:50] Sam became a fixture in the Bay Area. He ran Y Combinator, which is one of the most valuable incubators in Silicon Valley. His next act is called OpenAI. It's an initiative he started with Elon Musk. Sam personifies what it was like to come of age in Silicon Valley. His first company, Looped, was ahead of its time. Technically, it failed and sold in 2012. But Sam went on to become one of the most prominent voices in the Bay Area.
[0:04:19] It's like his failure was a springboard for success. But he's also someone driven by an inability to stay in the lines. He isn't afraid to stand up and say things that might get him into trouble. He has a history of taking a stand under bright lights and a podium. You'll hear that. That was always the spirit of Silicon Valley. But that spirit has been compromised, and there were some glaring omissions in the exponential curve that drove us to this moment in tech.
[0:04:48] I'm Lori Siegel, and this is First Contact. Okay. Okay. Let's start. So the show is called First Contact. And what I love to do, given my history of covering technology, especially when I have people that I've known for many years, is go back and talk about our first contact. Do you remember our first contact? It's South by Southwest in 2008, 9, 7. I want to say it must have been 2009 or 2010. Okay.
[0:05:21] You, Sam Altman, who are now kind of royalty of Silicon Valley, you know, president of Y Combinator and now running OpenAI, you had founded Loop. Yeah. And I remember our first contact. I don't even know if you realize this, but I was just starting at CNN and I was just interested in technology. And I was a production assistant pretending to be a producer who had convinced someone.
[0:05:49] To let me bring my best friend to South by Southwest with a camera and put... But didn't you like buy your own plane ticket or something? Yeah, and I like slept in like a bed with my friend. Like we literally like... And I was hustling. I remember being very impressed by this. I mean, I can't believe I told you. Did I tell you that? You did. I'm super upset by that. Yeah, but it was like this certain moment where I would have done...
[0:06:10] Anything. Fast forward, I became our senior technology correspondent for CNN. I was on camera for a decade, but I wasn't even on camera then. I would have done anything, including pay my way to South by Southwest and put people like you on camera because it was such an extraordinary moment. There was this extraordinary moment. There was a legitimate new platform that kicked off a ton of startups. At the same time, startups were easier to start by less experienced people than ever before. So you had the intersection.
[0:06:37] Of the iPhone kicking off this new platform of mobile, of which we still really haven't had a new platform of that level of significance since. And then a sort of technological and cultural moment where you have things like AWS, where all of a sudden people could easily start startups and a cultural moment where they wanted to, you know, kind of coming out of the financial crisis. And it was this magic period that I'm super thankful to have like witnessed and been in and been a part of.
[0:07:07] Where it was sort of the world changed very fast and it mostly got changed by people deciding they were going to start companies. Yeah. And I think what was really interesting to me is, you know, fast forward, I think it was maybe that same year you were my first on camera interview. It was in Bryant Park and we were talking about Looped and it was like the iPad had come out. I mean, by the way, I feel like a hundred years old even saying these words. It ages me.
[0:07:33] Because I think you have to go back to the history in order to go to the future. And I think this is such like a crazy moment. And I remember being so nervous. 13 years ago, no iPhone. It's like crazy. It's like easily in living memory, there were no smartphones that mattered. Yeah. And now it's like very difficult to imagine life without that. And that's the power of technology, right? But it's an incredible real-time example, yes. Yeah. And so for you, it's always very special just because you very much represented.
[0:08:02] For me, a first entrance into technology, a first entrance into being on camera, which helped shape my career. So not to be whatever. No, that's really sweet. It was really interesting to me. And it's been fascinating to watch you because now that was a decade ago. I would show you the video, but I'm appalled by the fact. I just kept wearing this black blazer over and over and over again, which I'm just appalled by. That's a good reason not to get out all the videos. Yeah, totally.
[0:08:30] Fast forward, you went on, so Looped was the first company funded by Y Combinator. You became the president of Y Combinator, which is like the most prominent incubator in Silicon Valley, responsible for Reddit, Dropbox, Airbnb. I mean, the history kind of tells itself. But I remember...
[0:08:46] This moment with you, you also became like this startup Yoda. Like you have this blog that like everyone like asked for your advice and you're like became this massively influential startup person just like at the center of all that. Everyone wanted you to fund their startups. Everyone wanted your advice. You know, that kind of happened in the time I knew you. And then I couldn't really go to coffee shops with you anymore. You became like startup famous or something. Yeah, extremely famous, but in an extremely narrow world.
[0:09:11] Right, but super interesting. Well, startups really became this cultural moment for a brief period of time. And I think now it's shifted. It became the thing that the most ambitious young people wanted to do. Whether or not they had studied technology, it was like, this is where it's happening. This is how I can sort of most quickly have a big impact on the world. And Y Combinator was, as you said, sort of at the center of that. And so I had that reflected, whatever. I want to kind of go back.
[0:09:37] Well, I think a lot has...
[0:10:06] Gone wrong, which everyone talks about, but a lot has gone right as well. And that's kind of, you're not even really supposed to say that anymore. And one of the things that I think is really great about Silicon Valley is people don't have to have a lot of credentials. They can have failed many times in many previous startups. And as long as they're really right once, as long as they eventually do something where they build a product that people really love that somehow is useful to people in an important way, that still drives the world.
[0:10:35] And people can still have sort of great careers that way. And I've never seen anywhere else where that happens. And so looking for people who are determined and visionary and bold and willful. Willful is like I think the most important word that I've learned to describe startup founders if you had to just pick one. Why? Because if you have a way to bend the world towards your will, most of the time you will eventually be successful. You may get knocked down a lot of times like most people do.
[0:11:04] I certainly had one quite difficult and long failure of a startup. But if you just keep going and if you just figure out how to make things happen and don't give up and have this sort of strong vision of what you want to do in the world and how you want to see the world be, you can eventually accomplish great things. Where do you think that comes from for you? So I was looking back and every person I've ever interviewed, it's like...
[0:11:30] Someone went through something, right? Anyone successful who I know has like gone through some kind of like, you didn't fit when you were younger. What do you think it was? Yeah, I mean, the question is always like, are people like that? Is it genetic or is it from childhood trauma? Probably the answer is both. I had all things considered a, like I can't point to like, oh, like I was always doing this to like get my father's approval or whatever. Like I had a wonderful childhood.
[0:11:59] I don't have a single moment I can point to where this traumatic thing happened to me. That's why I work super hard. Maybe it did, and I just don't see it. But there's something about you. I was reading. I think it's extraordinary that you grew up in Missouri. I think it's extraordinary. There was something I was reading that in high school, I think there's something I go back to that I read.
[0:12:23] That you did that I think was very defining of who you are as a person and what kind of divides the people who kind of stand by and someone who actually says something in an extraordinary way. Can you tell us that story? So there had been one sort of semi-openly gay guy in my high school before me. And he had, I think, had an okay time but was happy to leave. We were in a...
[0:12:50] Relatively conservative by current standards, but for St. Louis at the time, pretty open-minded school. And somehow someone had invited a mother of a gay guy to come give a talk for some national coming out day or something. And some students really objected to that. I think mostly on a religious basis, but also just like gay people are bad basis.
[0:13:19] And so kind of like made a lot of noise about how they weren't going to go to assembly that day and was discussing the schools doing this and all of that. And I was at the time the only sort of like gay person I knew of at my high school or totally openly. I think it then changed real quickly after that. And so we had this thing that you could do where you could sort of anyone who wanted could give like a five minute speech to the whole school any morning when we were all together for assembly.
[0:13:49] I went home and I wrote the speech that I wanted to give about like, this is a different time. Sure, like you can like think gay people are like bad news. But if we can't talk about these issues without every time someone feels like they don't like something, they're going to like organize a protest and talk about how we have this like awful, unsafe environment of decay or whatever. I mean, the language was just egregious.
[0:14:16] That that was like not the kind of environment we should hold ourselves to. And now it's like the kind of speech that anyone could sort of give at probably any high school anywhere in the U.S., even in pretty rough parts of it, and would be okay. But at the time it felt like a very scary thing to do. And I remember sort of like being up all night. I don't think I, I mean, yeah, like fitfully dozed a couple of hours the night before. But I was so nervous about it. I don't really like get nervous for stuff. And I was so nervous to do this.
[0:14:45] Because I was like mostly out, like most people knew about it, but it was not the kind of school where you would really stand up and like talk about being gay and that was okay. And I almost didn't go through with it. I almost like changed the speech to like not put my own personal story in there. I remember like very clearly sitting in the hallway outside of assembly with this pen changing like the section where I told my own story back and forth like three times because I just couldn't do it. And then I don't even know why.
[0:15:13] But I finally was like, you know what? I'll just tell everybody I'm gay, whatever. What's going to happen to me? And then it was sort of this moment where you kind of just go on autopilot. But I remember, I was like 17. This is like half my lifetime ago. So it's amazing how clearly I still remember this. But I remember sort of like walking out to the podium and there's sort of these bright lights. And thankfully you can't really see individual faces out there. And I...
[0:15:41] I hadn't really told the administrators what I was going to talk about. They probably had a guess. They were clearly nervous. I remember the head of school was like, so you're going to give a sound off today, huh? And I was like, yeah, I am. And he's basically like, please don't make a meltdown for me. I was very close to him. And I gave this speech, and I don't say this out of self-deprecating anything, but I'm not a good public speaker. I have a lot of other talents. That's not one of them.
[0:16:10] But I felt so passionate about this one that it went much better than it would normally go if I stood up and gave a speech. It surprised me how well it went. And then the audience, my classmates and people in the younger grades, got a long standing ovation out of it. And sort of all day at school that day, people telling me how much it meant to them and that they really thought I was right. I had some younger students come up to me in tears that had been just...
[0:16:39] I mean, one had been like almost suicidal from the thing earlier about sort of this, the protest. And then after that, I think a bunch of people came out and it was sort of a different environment. So it was this really great moment. I'm happy I did it, but it was so terrifying to do at the time. How did you feel? When it was done, I felt relief. I was like, whether that was a good or a bad thing, I was so nervous and now it's over. And I did the thing that I think is right. And now whatever happens, happens.
[0:17:08] Do you remember the first lines of it at all? I don't. I don't. I remember that the last lines were just about either you have a tolerant, open community or you don't and you don't get to pick and choose which topics you're tolerant on. Again, I still feel like, you know what? If people have a problem with gay people, that's fine. They can go somewhere else. This thing that Condoleezza Rice
[0:17:38] said that her mother told her once has really stuck with me, which is like, if people don't want to sit next to you because you're black, that's fine as long as they're the ones that get up and move. And so, you know, still like if people have a problem, I'm sure people do with me for being gay, like whatever, they can go do their thing, but you don't get to create an intolerant community. And I still feel really strongly about that. Do you feel like here in Silicon Valley, it's pretty tolerant?
[0:18:07] Yeah, I mean, I'm sure there are these like subtle ways in which it's still not. I've seen some of them, but I don't like, I don't believe that you should live your life obsessing over all of the things that have gone wrong or sort of ways you've been slighted. I think you just sort of move forward in whatever way you can. And I think that's just a better way to live. But yes, there are definitely ways in which it's, I think, still not as good as we'd like. Yeah. I mean, this like,
[0:18:37] This same impulse has gotten me in several internet wars where I say the thing that I believe and Twitter doesn't like it. But I do believe you have to, at some point, either stand up for what you believe in and have the courage of your convictions or you just let the world get worse. And that goes from matters of justice, which is one that I thought about here, to things like saying,
[0:19:07] I believe that AI is going to transform human society and you're not supposed to say that out loud. And if you talk too much about the future, you're kind of in the community of AI researchers viewed between a little bit askance and like is actively quite evil. And I may be wrong, but what I actually believe is we're going to create this technology that is more transformative than any technology humans have ever created. And almost no one is paying attention or talking about it. And you can either do...
[0:19:34] What most people do, which is say, okay, the societal norm is I'm supposed to just put my head down and not talk about it. Or say, I really believe, I may be wrong, but I really genuinely believe that this is going to change the world in unrecognizable ways. It's going to make what we looked, we talked about happening earlier with the iPhone look like a warmup. And we got to talk about that. Yeah. So, I mean, when we met, it was the iPhone had changed everything. So now you having spent, how many years did you spend at Y Combinator?
[0:20:02] I ran it for like six, but I was there helping out for basically since the beginning. So you said even before when we came in here, you've seen something like 3,500 startups, right? Come through and completely transform society. So you left Y Combinator and you went to start OpenAI. So can you explain a little bit about what that is? Well, actually, they overlapped. So while I was at YC, one of the areas that I was most interested in, that I still am, it's still the category of startups that I...
[0:20:31] have the most passion for is how can we have more of these sort of moonshot startups that work on a difficult piece of technology that has massive societal implications if it works. Nuclear fusion, any of the other climate change efforts, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, space colonization, these huge things. And we either helped fund or helped start a number of them while I was at YC. One of them was OpenAI.
[0:21:00] I wish I could tell the version of the story which is an OpenAI was always the one that I knew was going to work phenomenally well. That's not true. It was, you know, like many others that we tried failed. Some worked. This one really worked. What is true is this was the one I was most passionate about. When I was 18, I wrote down a list of the problems that I most wanted to work on. It was like a college assignment and the first one was build artificial intelligence.
[0:21:26] The passion had long been there, but I had no idea it would work out as well as it has been since. And then as it kept going, it operated for a long time without any CEO. And as I realized this is going to have implications to our society and collective humanity that I still can't fully grasp but are going to be unimaginably huge, that was what I wanted to spend my time working on, and that still is. And over time, a fairly gradual transition where I did...
[0:21:55] A little bit of that and then both kind of 50-50 and then sort of just moved over. But the goal of OpenAI is to build general artificial intelligence, a computer that can think like a human in every way and use that for the maximal benefit of humanity.
[0:22:14] It's interesting. It just seems to me that you're still, to a degree, the guy in the gym with the bright lights on you, just saying something and putting yourself out there in some way, hoping, and not necessarily caring, but hoping that people are going to just understand or feel less alone or something. There's like some person in you that's still out there putting yourself out there in some capacity, saying this is how it should be, or this is who we are, to a degree. Yeah, and now the stakes feel really high.
[0:22:43] Okay, we've got to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. More with my guest after the break. Progressive's accident response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident. Because the only thing worse than someone you love being in an accident is not being able to help them. Progressive is here to help when you can't. So get peace of mind knowing your loved ones are protected with Progressive's accident response. Learn more at Progressive.com.
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[0:25:06] So what do you think the next thing is that we need to be thinking about that we're not? And I also want to get into this moment where I think both of us feel this, where when we started, there was this optimism. Everyone is like super excited about tech. You're talking to the girl that paid her own way to South by Southwest and would have done anything to put these people on camera. And now it's like the pendulum has come all the way to the other side. Yeah, I mean, I know it's true. Intellectually, I know it's true because I remember it. I was there when everyone was optimistic.
[0:25:35] Like what? I would say the worst was services that were willing to optimize for engagement at the cost of huge side effects.
[0:26:03] Companies like Facebook and the business model. In my head, what I was thinking of is like Twitter seems to feed on outrage. Right. And you could probably do a lot of things to change Twitter that would... Again, I think the people working in all of these companies are actually good people and you're not really supposed to say it either. I fundamentally believe that. And I assume all of these services are going to change. I think we're facing a moment where we just got through this explosion of growth and transformation of society.
[0:26:30] And we need new rules and new antibodies and new norms and new regulation. And it will catch up and we'll get there. But I think along the way, people were definitely like, well, I can do this thing and it'll make us grow. And if I don't do it, we'll lose to some competitor. And that is a bug with capitalism. That's true. But I think we're at this moment where the world is pretty great by a lot of metrics. If you just look at the fall of extreme poverty or...
[0:27:00] We should all be celebrating. And if you look at what's available, there's a lot that we should be really happy about. And we're not. And I think technology has a lot of blame there. But it's not just the actions of the companies. It's that, as we said, in the last 13 years, the world has fundamentally transformed. And society hasn't caught up. And this happens when technological revolutions happen.
[0:27:29] This is just the one that we get to live through.
[0:27:59] Can't yell fire in a crowded theater and social media is a new kind of theater. But I'd like the government to set those rules and the fact that we're now in this world where there's calls for the companies to do it themselves terrifies me. Anyway, as hard as all these issues are, I think what we've just been through is a small warm-up for what we're now on the brink of. And we didn't even get it right on the warm-up.
[0:28:20] What is that? That's not comforting, right? No. Especially for someone who has an insane instinct as to companies that are going to be correct. That warning doesn't leave me with the warm and fuzzy. Well, it shouldn't. Again, I don't think it does a service for someone like me to say, oh, there's no more technological change on the horizon. We have this big transition. That's it. I think kind of what happens now is there's one news story about someone editing.
[0:28:48] The germline of babies in China and everyone really stresses out for two days and then they forget about it. Or you see an example of powerful AI technology being used for something that's sort of an example of what's to come and then they forget about it. And this is somehow or other, we are on the brink of being the first species ever to design our own descendants. Maybe we do it by something like Elon Musk's Neuralink.
[0:29:17] Maybe we do it by editing the genome with CRISPR. Maybe we do it by creating artificial digital intelligence. But this is not a small thing. Most things that people really get stressed about are sort of in yesterday's newspaper, not in the history books. And this is one that's going to be in the history books. And I agree with you. These are the things that are coming down the pipeline. This is the long-term view. The thing I worry about, having covered this for the last decade, it's like,
[0:29:46] So let's go with Elon Musk for an example. And you're close with Elon. You know him. When we're thinking about Neuralink, right? Like, and you're thinking about these things are coming down the pipeline. You're going to have a chip implanted in your brain that's going to make us smarter. This is going to be amazing. Like, are we thinking already about the unintended consequences? Will your thoughts be hacked? Will we create a superhuman species?
[0:30:07] I don't think people are talking about that stuff as the technology is being built. Are they?
[0:30:36] I think this is a huge deal. And I think one thing that's happened is there is this relationship now between tech and the media, which I would describe as... Increasingly contentious? I was going to just say not that fun to be on the tech side of. And one way to respond to that is people just say, well, I'm not going to keep talking to the media. And this means the conversation drops out of the sort of public view. I think it's...
[0:31:06] And that's frustrating, to be honest.
[0:31:30] And yet we keep doing it. Speaking of the media, I read this nice paragraph that I was going to quote to you about how you and Elon met at the Rosewood Hotel. Is that? Oh, kind of the first dinner of OpenAI getting started. The first dinner of OpenAI set the scene. It's like the Rosewood Hotel for folks who don't know is like this very fancy hotel where it has nice views and plentiful drinks and people in high heels and lots of like VCs.
[0:31:54] We just picked it because I think Elon was staying there that night. And it was like you guys talking about like Armageddon. This was the article. Like Armageddon could happen when it comes to the future of artificial intelligence. And like we have to do something. So like take us to the table with Elon in the Rosewood Hotel. We're on Sand Hill Road. Yeah. I mean, this is like one of many. Like none of these. People love the narrative that like.
[0:32:20] There was this one conversation and then this company. Okay, well, that one's in the public. So give us one that's not out there. I mean, I think the conversations that people that sort of don't, they don't have quite as good of a narrative, but they're the ones that matter are the 30 small conversations that happen in groups of two or three sort of, you know, late at night where people are just like, of all the things we could do in the world, should we do this? And what does this even mean?
[0:32:49] Should it be a company like A or like B? What is the research direction we would go after? What do we even think it's going to take to build artificial intelligence successfully? What are our theories around that? And then you, at some point, say, okay, it is really important to do this. This is going to have a transformational effect on society. And in fact, that was back in, we started in 2016, now it's the beginning of 2020. Even what's capable four years later breaks my mental model of how fast progress can be.
[0:33:19] So we got that part right, but then the details of how we were going to make all this progress, we got largely wrong. So we've had to adapt and do new things along the way. And the way that this really happens and the way that I think it matters is some people meet each other or know each other and start talking and say, should we do this or should we not? And at some point you make a decision and say, we're going to go ahead. And then you sort of jump off the cliff and you try to build the airplane on the way down. And whether we're successful or not.
[0:33:48] Remains to be seen, but the progress we've made has been faster than I thought it would be. And what is the dream with OpenAI? The medium-term dream is that we figure out how to build intelligent systems. Systems that can learn, systems that can think, and that can be useful to humans and vastly increase everyone's standard of living. And I think it is astonishing that we now have
[0:34:18] Computers that can learn. Like we don't talk about this much because we've sort of all gotten used to it. But the one thing that I think really makes humans special and really makes sort of life special is this ability to learn and to think. And once you get one algorithm that can do that and that it can do more and more of that as you scale it up and make it better, then the world is really going to change a lot.
[0:34:48] All of these ways where we have computers that can think and really do things that we need them to do. One thing where I do think Silicon Valley gets a little bit dishonest is saying like, okay, we're going to build these incredibly powerful systems. They're going to do all these wonderful things for us on this incredible exponential curve of technology. And then right when we want it to stop, it's going to stop. Right. That seems unlikely. Not the way the world usually goes. But you're not supposed to talk about what happens when it keeps going.
[0:35:18] And I think we have a responsibility to talk about what happens when it keeps going. And I think we have some big societal decisions to make about what happens when it gets smarter than we are. When do you think that'll happen? In our lifetimes. So what does the future look like? I mean, I know that you guys kind of, people were like, oh, they're fear-mongering when they talk about OpenAI and this and that. And I thought it was interesting something you said.
[0:35:41] You were speaking to someone about if people had talked about Facebook like this, they would have been criticized and brought up all this stuff like what if Facebook did all this back in the day. And that's kind of what you're trying to do with artificial intelligence of trying to go and anticipate some of these things. What do you think worst case scenario looks like? Well, what I would say on the fear mongering point is I think you can never make all the people happy all the time. And so what you better do is just the thing that you...
[0:36:10] You think it's morally right, and you might be wrong, but you make your best sort of intention. And I think that history, on this one, now I feel more confident that history is going to be on our side, which is talking about how to make sure we get to the good future. Not saying like the future is going to be awful, killer robots, whatever. We don't actually say that. But saying that we have to do work to get to the good future. Right. And that we have to think about this ahead of time. I think history is going to prove us right. And I think the people who are like, you know, it's all always great. Don't worry about it. Look the other way.
[0:36:40] I think that's what kind of got some of the current social platforms into trouble. And had they thought a little bit more ahead of time, we may have avoided some of these mistakes. Yeah, I mean like long term, long, long, long term. I think if we do a good job and if the world goes the way we want, you kind of have this transition from purely biological humans to some sort of hybrid merged humans and artificial and digital intelligence.
[0:37:08] Not everyone's going to choose to do that. And I think there will be some sort of world for people who don't want. What does all that mean? You just described like, so what is that? So what does that look like? The opt out part or the rest? All of it. Like just explain it a little. I mean, here's like one version of the world. I couldn't imagine, which is that a lot of people, actually not a lot. Let's say like a small percentage of people, a lot in absolute numbers, but not by percentage. Say, you know, I want to.
[0:37:34] I'm going to go all in on the future. I'm going to plug my brain in via Neuralink or whatever. Seems very scary to me, honestly, but I think a lot of people would choose that and maybe I would at that point too. And I'm going to merge with a copy of this AI and we're going to, we, like whatever this new thing is, this sort of hybrid, we're going to go off exploring space and sort of just be to a human, unimaginably smart and powerful and capable in a way that a human today.
[0:38:03] with all of the capabilities of an iPhone would seem like a magician to a human from just a few hundred years ago. I think that exponential difference, we should expect to see even more powerfully on this exponential curve of technology. And I think what that means in terms of power and capabilities are difficult for you and I to sit here and clearly imagine, but it's pretty unbounded.
[0:38:31] And then I think there will be some people who say like, you know what, I'm opting out of that whole thing. I want to live out my life as a regular human. And there will be some way to do that where you live in some, maybe the whole world is just like an AI-free zone. I don't know. And AI goes off and takes the rest of the universe. How about, I've been particularly interested, this line is going to sound weird when I say it. I've been particularly interested in death.
[0:38:54] How do you think death is going to change in this idea of, you know, I've done a lot on like bots. I mean, this is very basic, but like bots where we recreate a digital version of ourselves. But I know that it's been an obsession here in Silicon Valley. You know, the idea of replacing your blood with the blood of young people. That's one thing. But even beyond that, like what do you think death means in like 20 or 30 years? I think it's a really interesting question. If you had a perfect copy of your brain.
[0:39:21] If you got the Neuralink implant and downloaded every thought process, every memory, every emotion, say if you could make a perfect copy of Laurie in a computer that was going to live forever in that computer. Let's say you can make some tweaks. So there's now this tweaked version. And you know that your body is going to die, but that copy of Laurie, which has all your memories, all your thoughts, it acts exactly like you because it is this sort of in the extreme molecule by molecule copy simulated in software.
[0:39:51] Do you count that as you living forever? Do you care? I mean, I do think that's me living on in some way. I mean, you know, I think it's so weird not to bring like the human stuff. Like my mom was sick recently and I was thinking like, I don't know, there's something so visceral about it. Maybe having like the connection with technology of like looking at our text messages, looking at everything. Like we have so much life data too that we're leaving out there, right? Like, I don't know. I think I have a different opinion here than...
[0:40:18] Most, and I'm sorry, I'm going to go full Silicon Valley tech bro for a minute. Hit me with it. I'm prepped. Hit me with it. One of the most valuable perspective shifts that has come out of what has now been sort of a long-term and pretty intensive meditation practice for me. That's the cringe. I'm sorry. Okay. Hold on. Wait. Are our listeners still with us? Okay. Go ahead. I'm just kidding. Go ahead. Has really been this arrival towards this certainty.
[0:40:46] I don't feel a separate self anymore. I view me as this system that takes input, runs it around in my brain, and produces output. But when I really deeply look at that, I cannot find an egoic me anywhere in there. It's like, you know, I'm part of my environment. There's this model of the world in my head. Photons come in, action comes out. But there is no me. There's this body, this mind, these thoughts, but there's no sort of like...
[0:41:16] Separate me outside of reality at the controls. And if there is no you, there's no other. And then kind of all of the versions in the different philosophical traditions of the world of non-dualism end up being true in this weirdly basic way. And if that's your operating model of how you think about the world, which is there's a body, there's a mind, but there's no entity at the controls of that. There is no self.
[0:41:44] Then I think you think differently about what it means to die or not, or like if the thing in the computer is you or not. Right. And so all of these, I think, deep and old philosophical questions are newly relevant in a world where we actually can connect our brains to computers. How would you feel about it? It'd be something. But like, as I said, if you don't feel like there's a you in the first place, it's like, okay, there's like another copy of this agent.
[0:42:14] Okay, we've got to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. More with my guest after the break. Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronic store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage.
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[0:44:12] Fees may apply to Chase business complete checking accounts. The $500 offer is available for new business checking accounts with qualifying activities through January 21st, 2027. Eligibility and qualification requirements must be met. Additional restrictions may apply. Please speak with a business banker for more information. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. I ask every founder that I interview this question just because I think it's an important question. What do you think is the single most important?
[0:44:56] Ethical question we need to ask ourselves when it comes to the future of us tech and humans. Well, I think it's this question about in a world where we're going to have computers that can think like humans, what is the society we want to design? I think there's a lot of short-term important questions. This empathy one we talked about, I think, is a big one. I think the absolute catastrophic failure of San Francisco to empathize with people who need help, for example, is a big one. I'm ashamed.
[0:45:25] Deepest sense of the word about how San Francisco has dealt with homelessness, mental health, and drug crises. But I think longer term, measured on the geologic timescales, this question of what do we want the role of humans to be in the world, and how do we make sure the world is good for humans in the broadest sense, I think that is the biggest ethical question of our lifetime.
[0:45:55] What do you think? Bigger than even the inequality questions and everything else that feels huge today. I mean, what do you think, having spent this last decade? I mean, what do you think the next?
[0:46:04] As Silicon Valley, what happens next? Let's look at the current mess. We talk about the town square being overrun. We talk about the days of technology being loved and all the great press around the founders. All of this has changed. We have people truly questioning Facebook, truly questioning Twitter, truly questioning the business model of Silicon Valley. Where do you think we land? On the whole, this industry cares more about...
[0:46:33] Doing the right thing for the world and making things better than say like the finance industry. But I think it is also true that there's plenty of people here who are between somewhat and entirely motivated by making a bunch of money and don't think about the consequences of doing so. I want to go back a little bit to this idea that you are kind of like this startup whisper. I think that a lot of the things you help people with are not just startup.
[0:46:58] Successful founders have almost too much self-belief. And I think you gave the example of Elon Musk showing you around SpaceX and being like, I'm gonna...
[0:47:19] Yeah, that was a long time ago and I remember it like step by step. It was such a visceral example of someone who has almost too much self-belief. Explain that to me. Almost, almost. It's very hard to do a startup. It's hard in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn't done it. In fact, I'd say the thing that is almost universal from talking to founders who have started companies that have been successful is this has taken over my life.
[0:47:49] All of my life force has gone into this to a degree that I had no framework for. You hear that again and again and again. And there are so many times where it's tempting to give up, where you just feel like there's nothing left to go wrong. But if one more thing does, I'm just going to collapse on the floor and that's it. I can't do this any longer. And you have so many people telling you that you're going to fail, in addition to so much direct evidence that you are in fact failing.
[0:48:18] That the self-belief that it takes to get through that and say against all these odds, against all this evidence that this isn't working, against all these smart people telling me that it's not working, I am going to keep going. That takes an unusual kind of person. In fact, the personality traits that make one good at that are not good probably in sort of other careers and maybe not even in the rest of someone's life. But there is something about it.
[0:48:48] Where if you're really trying to do something new in the world, you've got to be able to keep going in the face of incredible doubt. And you give the example. I mean, give us some specifics. So one was Elon Musk showing you around SpaceX, right? Yeah. So I forget what year this was, but let's say it's like around 2012. So it was well before they've been as successful as they've been now. And it was like...
[0:49:17] A Friday afternoon in Hawthorne, California, at the end of a long work week for me, I'm sure a very, very long one for him. And we were meeting, I don't even remember what to talk about, but we met in like sort of a little conference room for a little while. And then he was like, do you want a tour of the factory? And I was like, sure. And I assume he had like some tour guide. And then he spent like three hours himself like showing me around. Would have thought he was busy, but he did.
[0:49:46] And, you know, there are these like little like vignettes that stick out in memory that were sort of funny. Like whenever he would walk up to some area with sort of like me in tow, the people there were just like scatter. And any detailed question about like, oh, what is like this piece of the turbo pump on the engine do? He would have like a 30 minute answer for. And so it's impressive, like the level of just technical detail of how the whole thing fit together. And it was also sort of impressive to hear him talk about why.
[0:50:13] He viewed it as such a moral imperative to get humans off of Earth, living in other places. And it was very clear how genuine his motivation on making humans multi-planetary relatively soon is critical if we want humanity to be robust and survive. But yeah, the thing that stuck out, sort of thinking about it much later, was not the technical depth, not the...
[0:50:42] The intensity of how much the mission mattered to him, but the certainty that he could do it. And, you know, when you talk about sort of like, well, this part seems really hard, and man, like, you know, establishing life on Mars, like, think about all the prep work you have to do to make it human habitable, and get, like, just take all the stuff that we have on Earth that we've built up with billions of people over thousands of years to make human society function, and just, like, get in all that machinery.
[0:51:12] Figuring out new governments, new countries, everything you have to do to establish society on Mars. Almost everyone would just say like, that's too much work. That's not actually possible. And he was like, we have to do it and so we're going to, no matter what it takes. We'll figure it out. And that spirit of like, we'll figure it out. I will make it happen. That's this extremely powerful thing. Do people ever come to you since you're kind of the startup Yoda and ask you about like, I'm assuming, because to be a good founder,
[0:51:42] You do have to really have a lot of self-belief. You have to be obsessed with something. You have to live and breathe something. You have to be a little insane. Those are at least the traits of people I've interviewed that are successful. You have to be really resilient. I can imagine that's really difficult for personal life. I can imagine that's difficult for mental health. Totally. And so with those highs and with that intensity must come this whole other aspect of...
[0:52:06] What it is to be that kind of human to be able to be capable of this. And I think that there is a cost in some capacity. So I wonder if you hear that and what advice you give. Absolutely. So I should mention that I don't advise startup founders much anymore just because running a company is not a part-time job. It really keeps you exceptionally busy. And so I don't do this as much. But when I was doing it, I would say half my conversations with founders,
[0:52:36] Even if they weren't explicitly asking about this sort of stuff, which they rarely do, that was the real question. I learned over time that when a founder comes asking for sort of vague, nonspecific help, what it's really about is I'm having a hard time with myself or I'm in one of these many moments of despair that come to all founders. Or, not uncommonly, my company is going fine while my personal life is collapsing around me.
[0:53:06] What should I do? And I do think that one thing that's gotten a lot better is founders take mental health much more seriously. Founders prioritize getting sleep. But on the other hand, it's easy to get sleep when things aren't stressed. And then when you're just facing incredible stress and anxiety at work, it's hard for anyone to sleep. Or you have founders say, my company is going great, but I just realized that I have...
[0:53:35] I've been working 80 or 90 hours a week for the last seven years and I've neglected all of my friends and they don't call me anymore. And what do I do about that? And I think one of the things that people don't like to talk about in Silicon Valley and probably in other industries too, is that to really succeed at sort of the highest levels, that requires a prioritization decision that means you've sacrificed a lot of other things.
[0:54:03] And I sort of think that most people can have, if you're sort of like in a privileged enough place to be able to do this, most people can have whatever one thing they most want. You can prioritize work and work 80 hours a week and have a family successful career. You can prioritize your friends and family and have a sort of super rich social life or many other things as well. It's very hard to have it all. And I think it's a disservice when people pretend that you can, when people pretend that you can run a very large and complex.
[0:54:31] And that there's no personal life trade-offs that come with that. What's the thing that you want most? At this point, the two things that I really care about are working as hard as I can to make this transition as we move to this technologically enhanced species go well. And then spending time with the people that I really love, which honestly, that's become a smaller and smaller list. I think like many people, my 20s were about...
[0:55:01] Success and hashtag crushing it and having tons of friends and going to parties. And now there's a small, narrow kind of work that is really important to me and a small set of people that are really important to me. And other than those two things, I don't have a ton of room in my life for other stuff. And I've gotten okay at just saying no.
[0:55:25] It's a hard thing though. I mean, I guess you've had to get really good at that probably because of the influx of people who want things from you. But I think that's much harder. Well, I don't know if it's hard for most people. It was terribly hard for me and I was horrible at it. And then I realized that I am letting my life get filled up by what other people want me to do. Or these things that I've been working on. I could have kept being a startup investor forever and it's very addictive because it's not very hard work. You make a ton of money and there's a lot of glory. And that was...
[0:55:54] If I think I could have easily gotten pulled onto that path forever, or I could have gotten pulled onto a path of just saying, yeah, it's really fun to have a bunch of relatively shallow relationships with tons of interesting people, and it's easy to get pulled into that. But I do feel like it's been this effort for me to prioritize, to really think about how I want to spend my time and really try to prioritize that. And the hard part is, as I said earlier, you can have maybe one or two things that you really want.
[0:56:23] If you're willing to let all the other things go. And letting the other things go has been hard. I remember when there was a New Yorker profile that came out on you. And you still, I mean, that reaction, right? I reread it before I interviewed you. I know there's a lot we could dig into. The bunker, you have like a bunker. There's so many things we could get into.
[0:56:44] I had a section in my notes called It's the End of the World as We Know It. In the spirit of the shortness of life, is there anything else you'd like to talk about? No, no, no. We don't have to talk about it fully. What I wanted to talk about was with this idea that I heard you say something about that profile that I thought was interesting, which was you re-read it and it was okay, but you didn't feel like it captured you. Yeah. And so now that we're sitting here and you are sitting with someone who's known you for 10 years, how would you describe...
[0:57:13] What didn't it capture? What didn't it capture? Yeah, like what? So I read it twice. Once right when it came out and it was like quite annoying. And then I read it once later and I thought it was sort of more fair, but still it didn't feel like looking in a mirror. When you look in the mirror, what do you see, Sam? Something more human than what emerged from the scaffolding of that piece. I like the guy that wrote it.
[0:57:43] And I think if he didn't have the space constraints, he probably would have put more in there that I think more fully captured the picture. And it's always sort of you want to write in any characterization of anything, you want to highlight the things that sort of most differentiate someone from like the average human. And so in that sense, you want to like point out the things about me that are sort of most different from the composite average person. I mean, I did learn that you have a bunker. Sure. So there's like all these weird things you can point out about me.
[0:58:12] But I don't think those are the ones that define me. So what are the ones that define you? I mean, they're the boring things, right? They're the same thing. The things that I think make most people who they are are the people that they love, how they spend their time, what they're like to interact with, how you treat a friend in a crisis, how you treat a family member in a crisis, how you sort of bring joy and happiness to the people around you, what you believe in, what you work on.
[0:58:42] How you spend your time, how you feel. And most of that for me is just like anybody else. And then you can point to these weird edge cases. Looking back, what do you think is your most memorable investment? Because I think you've had such interesting specific experiences. I don't know if folks listening who aren't as inside baseball understand that you've invested in probably many of the, maybe are the reason they're using some of the products they're using on their phone. But what would you say is,
[0:59:11] What are the most memorable investments you made? I think I could point to like all of these specific cases where I invested in this company and it went really well or sort of more painfully I had the opportunity to invest in this company and passed and it went on to do really well. This is going to sound like a dodge of an answer, but for me the most memorable thing is how well the strategy of investing in startups in an early stage overall has worked. It still amazes me that...
[0:59:40] I or anyone else who does this reasonably well can sit down with two or three founders and an idea and say in aggregate, you know, you get it wrong in many specific cases, but in aggregate, if you do it enough, say with enough accuracy that these are special founders, they're going to be successful and decide that after a 10 minute or a 60 minute meeting and be right where on aggregate you can sort of.
[1:00:08] Now, this may not be as true now as it used to be. In fact, I suspect it's not because valuations have come up so much. But the thing that amazes me that is most memorable to me is not any specific investment, but it's that the entire strategy works. But when you say you can sit with someone and like...
[1:00:28] Five, ten minutes or something. And I think you said five at another thing, but you're not allowed to do it in five because it's not socially acceptable. Sometimes you do change your mind in the second five, but not very often. Okay. But what would it be? What would it be that you'd be looking at? What is it? Evidence of willfulness. In whatever circumstances in life a person has been faced, have they outperformed what should have been possible at every stage? Have people found a...
[1:00:57] A way relative to where they are to bend the world to their will. Vision and courage. Raw intelligence. The ability to be an effective evangelist. One of the biggest jobs of being a company founder is to continually convince many different kinds of people that you meet that they should help you. So you have to be able to convince people to come join your company, for them to keep working there while they get...
[1:01:26] Incredible opportunities, people to invest in your company, customers to buy your product while it's still in development, many other things like that. And so one of the most important skills of a founder is to be really convincing that this startup is good. The best way to do that, of course, is to really believe deep in your heart that it's good. And that comes through fast or not. All of this kind of like goes back to the location days, right? And I interviewed all of you guys back then.
[1:01:56] What do you think is the biggest difference between the Sam that I interviewed in 2010 and the Sam that I'm sitting in front of in 2020? It's funny. I feel like very much the same person, but playing a very different game. I was at that time running a sort of forgettable startup that I really cared about.
[1:02:27] didn't turn out to matter that much to now then having this intermediate period where I sort of ran this thing that I think had a huge impact on the world in a lot of different ways, Y Combinator, that just touched. It is and was certainly even more maybe this kind of voluntary flag bearer of the startup movement at the time when the startup movement was not what it was now, but still kind of the insurgency.
[1:02:56] And that was a formative experience and a lot of fun to now working on this thing that I, again, I may be wrong, but I believe will be the most important work I ever do. There's that quote that I love that your 20s are always an apprenticeship for the work you do in your 30s, but you never know what that's going to be. And so I felt like in my 20s, I was learning and practicing for the work I'm doing now. And I hope I can do a really good job.
[1:03:25] Because now I think it actually matters. So it was nice to have a practice one. It's a good warm-up, right? Yeah. Well, and if you relate that to the tech stuff that you were talking about, like this whole last decade was a warm-up to these real massive issues that we're now facing that are fundamental and human and impact us at such a human level. Yeah. I feel very grateful to have gotten to watch that warm-up.
[1:03:53] I wish it had gone differently, but just watching what happens when people are not as conscientious as they should be up front, not because they're bad people, but because the incentive system is what it is, and also because technology can get so powerful so fast that if you don't make yourself stop and think about what's going to happen, not next year, but in 10 years as this compounds, it's just really easy to do the wrong thing.
[1:04:21] And I just want to push you on this because you sit at a really important table. Do you think that the people in your community are going to, quote, do the right thing?
[1:04:50] Predicting what the rest of the world wants and would think. But the only way to do this and have it be just and good is to include a very broad representation of the world in making these decisions about how we want to coexist with this technology, what human rights look like, what the role of humanity looks like, what the new socioeconomic contract with your government looks like. These are questions that
[1:05:17] Everyone deserves to weigh in on and that we should make a collective decision on not sort of the will of the people who write the software. If the last decade was tech's warm-up and we didn't really get it right, what does the main event look like? Will Silicon Valley do better? Is the reflection there, the incentive structure? Honestly, I spend a lot of time out there and I'm not 100% sure. But I think Sam is right. The stakes now are even higher.
[1:05:50] I've watched a lot of founders like Sam grow up in Silicon Valley. I think the next phase requires more people at the podium, under bright lights, standing for something. And opening up the doors to people and new voices who don't think in terms of code, but who specialize in humanity. I'm Lori Siegel, and this is First Contact. For more about the guests you hear on First Contact, sign up for our newsletter. Go to firstcontactpodcast.com to subscribe.
[1:06:20] Follow me. I'm at Laurie Siegel on Twitter and Instagram. And the show is at First Contact Podcast. If you like the show, I want to hear from you. Leave us a review on the Apple Podcast app or wherever you listen. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. First Contact is a production of Dot Dot Dot Media. Executive produced by Laurie Siegel and Derek Dodge. Original theme music by Xander Singh. Visit us at firstcontactpodcast.com.
[1:06:49] First Contact with Lori Siegel is a production of Dot Dot Dot Media and iHeart Radio. So, everyone on board? You can't see it, but everyone in this room is nodding. They all agree the launch plan's perfect, but Julie has an idea how it can be even better. So she asks Copilot Cowork to help her overnight. Hey, Copilot, gather the past three months of retail sales reports, surface key insights, oh, and build a deck outlining a partner strategy by tomorrow morning. Morning, team.
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