I Sold Twitch 9 Years Ago For $1B… What I’m Doing Now | Emmett Shear Interview

Shaan Puri

Is AI gonna kill us all? Maybe. McShear is the CEO of Twitch. It was acquired by Amazon in 2014. He joins us now.

Emmett Shear

I started Twitch to help people watch other people play video games on the internet.

Shaan Puri

The creator and co-founder of Twitch watches other people play video games. Who knew? I guess that's the answer. What types of ideas are you noticing or that are standing out to you as interesting?

Emmett Shear

For the first time in maybe 5 or 7 years, it feels like I'm credibly trying to start a consumer internet company. Like the ones that I was so excited to start in 2007, it feels like a potentially good idea. That's because of AI.

Shaan Puri

You mentioned AI might become so intelligent it kills us all. This podcast is really growing. I don't... I don't.

Emmett Shear

I want the world to end. I think it's going to be okay, but the downside is so bad. It's like... it's really probably worse than nuclear war. That's a really bad downside. I think of it as a range of uncertainty, and I would say that the true probability, I believe, is somewhere between...

Shaan Puri

alright what you're about to hear is a conversation I had with emmett sheer emmett was the creator and cofounder of twitch if you don't know about twitch I don't know you're living under a rock it's like one of the most I don't know 5 most popular websites in in the states right now it is a a place where you can go to watch other people play video games of all things watch other people play video games who knew emmett knew I guess that's the answer so he was the creator cofounder of that and built it up it's a multibillion dollar company they sold to amazon many years ago 7 years ago or 8 years ago for about a $1,000,000,000 and has grown many times since then he finally retired after 17 years of the journey I got to know emmett because he bought my previous company so we got acquired by twitch emmett was like my you know quote unquote boss for my time when I was at twitch so I got to see this guy firsthand he's the real deal and I've been wanting to get him on the podcast since those early days when I first met him I was like this guy is great we talked about a bunch of things so we talked about some ideas of like how he would use ai if he was gonna create another company like I think he's good he's retired now from that game of operating a company but if he was gonna do it this is what he would do so we talked about ai ideas we talked about why why he thinks ai might kill us all might you know be be the big doom scenario which is interesting because he's not just a guy who's gonna go cry wolf he's not a pessimist he's not just a journalist who hates tech he's a techno optimist this is a guy who believes in tech he's a a very very intelligent guy and he sees you know a probability he gave us a percentage of probability he thinks that could be sort of the doomsday scenario and why he thinks that that could be the case and what we should do about it so we talked about ai we talked about some of the frameworks that he has for building companies we didn't talk too much about like the origin of twitch he didn't feel like he's done that a bunch of times so we kinda stayed away from that but it was a wide ranging conversation and and for those who are watching this on youtube I apologize the studio that we booked in san francisco they screwed up the video so we don't have video for the for for youtube we just have the audio only version so you'll see our profile pictures my bad sorry about that you know gotta pick a better place gotta pick a better studio I guess but anyways enjoy this episode with emmett sheer somebody said creativity is not like a faucet you can't just turn it on and I think actually if you if you've polled like a 100 people most like yeah of course creativity is the sacred special thing that only happens if you've meditated in the morning and the room is perfectly right and you've had your your alfenin in your coffee or whatever and you were like no for me it's very it is like a faucet watch it'd be like I could just write and just keep generating more ideas

Emmett Shear

yep a 100% I love that

Shaan Puri

For two reasons: 1. I love that you'll just be like, "No, actually this..." That's like a consistent thing I've seen you do. 2. I think that's very true about you, and I wonder: is that practiced or is that innate? Like, if there's a researcher studying you when you were 10 years old...

Emmett Shear

right do you

Shaan Puri

think they would have been like oh this this person's different in these ways what would have seemed different or special about you

Emmett Shear

At the time, if there was a nurture versus nature break on this, it happened very early. By the time I was 10, you would definitely notice the same thing. I'm not really that different. I would be much less effective, but as a 10-year-old, I already had that same experience.

Shaan Puri

but you were different than other 10 year olds

Emmett Shear

Yeah, other 10-year-olds... Well, I would actually say I was less different than I think most people. Actually, most children have this experience already. I think most 10-year-olds, and definitely most 5-year-olds, are capable of generating ideas for what to do about something or to play pretend almost indefinitely. They don't run out of ideas. It's as you get older, somehow you learn to stomp down the ideas that are like bad and to not say dumb things. But the more pressure you put on yourself not to say dumb things, the more your inner idea generator gets disrupted. I say a lot of dumb things when I'm generating ideas. I may not put weight down on them, but most of the ideas will be bad. They'll have something obviously wrong with them. They give you this advice, and when you go to someone who teaches you to brainstorm, they say, "No bad ideas here." That's obviously not true. There are lots of bad ideas. Most of your ideas are bad.

Shaan Puri

yeah the the actual advice is like don't stop at the bad ideas

Emmett Shear

yeah yeah what you you're what you're trying to do is you're trying to disable that sensor that most people have installed that like is like no bad no bad no bad don't don't be stupid don't be stupid and I think I was like malsocialized I'd it never occurred to me to to to have that like I I I never got the sensor installed and why that is the case I'm not sure but I actually I think I'm the one who is unchanged in some sense I'm a little more childlike in that way and everyone else is the weird one who like why how did you wind up like damaged by your life that your your inner wellspring of creativity has been right crushed and I think that process is actually very simple this process goes up all kinds of things in people's minds you start from some capability something you can do some behavior and if when you do that behavior or you try that thing you receive negative feedback which can be external or you actually think even more often internally you're like oh I I screwed it up oh it's bad oh I don't disappointment you learn not to do that thing pretty rapidly and so that leads you to doing it less which means you're less skillful at it which tends to lead you to doing it less which that cycle ends in you being very bad at something like I'm bad at math no you're not everyone can be like the kind of math you're talking about everyone can be the kind of math when people say I'm bad at math they don't mean I'm bad at like abstract algebra proofs they mean I can't do arithmetic or algebra basic algebra and that's just imaginary like everyone can do that it's easy they got stuck in one of these like spirals and now it's and getting out of one can be very hard and I guess I think that's what happens to people's creativity I don't know I didn't go through the process myself and so I got so now as I'm saying this out loud actually what I the idea that I have comes up for me is like oh well maybe what it is is that I had better ideas that's like that's the I got the reward so I got the reward loop or or I had an environment that was unusually positive and positively reinforcing for me having ideas and so I would have ideas and it would go well that would lead me to having more ideas which and more practice at having ideas which would go well and then you wind up just never breaking that loop

Shaan Puri

I have a trainer who comes over to my house. He always says this thing to me because my kids will come down during the session. I'm always like, "Sorry," obviously annoyed that my 2-year-old is here almost getting hurt on all the weights. That's probably not what you want in your session. Someone was like, "Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry," and he's just like, "Dude, no." He says, "Kids and dogs." I go, "What?" He goes, "I love to be around kids and dogs. They got it right. They know life." He's like, "A dog is like unconditional love—happy, playful, you know, super loyal. What's not to learn from a dog? I want to learn everything I can from a dog or kids." He's like, "Look what she's doing! She just made up a game on this thing. We're here trying to do a serious workout, and she made this her play place. Yeah, she can't wait to come down here." He's like, "I wish all my clients wanted to come down to the gym." I was like, "Damn, this guy's right." One of the things I like is figuring out people's isms, their philosophies. And you're like, "Oh, I thought of one on the way here." I explain what it was: "Have you tried just solving the problem?" "What does that mean?"

Emmett Shear

So, there's a meme on the internet. I think it started with Weird Sun Twitter, which is like, "Have you tried solving the problem by..." and then an infinite list of possibilities. The tweet is always something like, "Have you tried solving the problem by ignoring the problem? Have you tried solving the problem by spending more money on it?" One of my favorite ones from that meme, which has almost become a life motto for me, is "Have you tried solving the problem by solving the problem?" That sounds dumb, right? It sounds like one of those zen cone pieces of advice that, when you first hear it, makes you think, "Are you serious? Is that the advice?"

Shaan Puri

that's it

Emmett Shear

Solve the problem by solving the problem. What you notice when you try to help people with problems is that oftentimes, people will have a problem that is really obvious. They’ll come to you for advice, asking questions like, "How can I deal with the consequences of this problem?" or "How can I avoid needing to solve this problem?" They might also ask, "How can I get someone else to solve this problem?" or "How have other people solved this problem in the past?" These questions are closer to the right answer, but the essence of the saying is to remind you that sometimes the way to solve the problem is just to actually try solving it. Don’t deal with the symptoms. Don’t accept the symptoms. Don’t find a hack around it. For example, if the problem is that the website is not fast enough, instead of trying to figure out how to make a loading spinner that distracts people from that fact, what if we just made it so fast that you don’t need a loading spinner? It’s interesting because that’s very good advice when the problem is actually solvable. However, people often flinch away from it because something about it is aversive, even though the problem isn’t really unsolvable. If they worked on it for six months, it would go away, and it’s worth solving. On the other hand, there are problems where you’re trying to make a perpetual motion machine. You’re trying to do something that is actually too hard. In those cases, solving the problem by solving the problem is a huge mistake. You should actually stop trying to solve the problem and look for a hack around needing to solve it. You should be looking to live with it more effectively. I find that, on balance, at least with most people I talk to and help, especially in tech, they love the hack. They’re always looking for the easy, fast solution that cuts around it. However, solving the problem directly is often the most helpful form of advice, in my opinion. It’s about bringing people back to just solving the problem.

Shaan Puri

I find that the advice I like the most, or the sayings that resonate with me the most, are the ones that say, "You spot it, you got it." It's the advice I needed. That's why it resonates with me and why I like giving it out, because I have personally experienced it. Have you personally experienced that? Or what's an example where you remember trying to do everything but solve the problem, and then you finally realized, "Shit, I should've just..."

Emmett Shear

solved the problem it's an interesting question what what is it you spot it you got it it's like noticing as half the battle basically

Shaan Puri

it's sort of the smart person version of whoever smelt it dealt it it's like yeah

Emmett Shear

yeah yeah it's like 100%

Shaan Puri

If you hit, you only notice this in other people because you've seen it in yourself too. Otherwise, you wouldn't be as observant of it.

Emmett Shear

My version of this is: we give the advice we need to hear. Yes, exactly! Which is the same basic idea. It's actually not always true. That's one of those really good heuristics where, sure, half the time when you give advice, it won't actually be for you, but half the time it is. Noticing it is so powerful that you should just check every piece of advice you give for, "Wait a second, is this advice I need to hear right now?" When it comes to the question, "Have you tried actually solving the problem?" I think I'm pretty good at that in general. I often give it to myself in a more meta sense. It's advice I often need in a more meta sense. For example, when I'm confronted with something that needs to be programmed, I will often just go program the thing. However, I have a tendency to look for ways that I can solve the problem, rather than considering that the problem can be solved. For me, this almost always involves asking myself, "What if I wouldn't ask somebody else for help?" It doesn't even occur to me to go do that. I just think, "I'll just indefinitely dig and try to solve the problem myself." I'm not really trying to solve the problem; I'm trying to solve the problem while avoiding having to ask anyone else for help, which is not real. I'm not really trying to solve the problem. But actually, no, weirdly, I think this is one of those things where it's almost like the creativity thing. It was a shock for me to realize that other people don't do that.

Shaan Puri

yeah you're self actualized on that one yeah yeah what's a piece of good advice that you're bad at taking

Emmett Shear

Oh, that's an excellent one. I think the big takeaway here is to **listen more**. I've received this advice so much with Y Combinator, and it's 100% something that I need to get better at. When you go into a user interview, you have all these ideas and thoughts, but you need to avoid surfacing those. You have to focus your attention on the users and really be interested in and care about what they have to say. Your opinions and what you think is true are irrelevant. I am much better at that than I used to be. It's one of those things where being reminded to "let's just chill out for a second and listen" is almost always good advice for me. It's something I give fairly often, but it's hard for me to take on.

Shaan Puri

One of the things I really liked that you showed me once was when I asked you, while we were at Twitch, about a problem that was reminiscent of the early days of Twitch. It was related to the mobile stuff in different countries, where it was like, "Oh, we're not the leader," or "We need to create from scratch," which wasn't a muscle that a lot of people there were flexing at the time. I was like, "Hey, do you have any stuff from the early days of Twitch?" You sent me a document that included all the user interviews. From what I understand, there was a small universe of people already doing video game streaming. You were like, "Cool, let me call all of them and ask them three questions." If I could just get the answers to these three questions, that should give me a little bit of a roadmap, a blueprint of understanding what I need to do in order to win in this market. Can you take me back to that? I liked that for two reasons: it was simple, and it seemed like a focused intensity that you found.

Shaan Puri

Of leverage and you pushed

Emmett Shear

yeah I think 2 things happened to lead to that the first was like the realization obviously in for we wanted to win in gaming the streamers mattered and at justin tv we'd always been like streamers and viewers are equally important and I finally made a decision I was like no no no this product ultimately is about streamers and if this doesn't work for the streamers it doesn't work for anybody and then I had the realization this is one of those epiphany moments where I truly saw I have no idea why anyone would stream video games like I don't really want to do it and I have all these I could I saw my myself building products for these people for the past 4 years at justin tv and not really having any idea why they did the thing they did at all and I sort of I saw like oh I'm just making this up I have no idea I said I don't know the answer I could know the answer like they there is a there there is an answer out there these a bunch of people know it but I don't and that triggered me to be like I need to know I need to understand like these these these 200 people I need to understand their mind and I did about 40 interviews probably and I didn't wanna know like what they thought we should build because if they knew what we should build they would have my job and I I've talked enough of them before to know that they had no good product ideas I I wanted to know like why are you streaming you what have you tried to use for streaming like what did you like about that like what did how did you get started in the first place what's your biggest dream for streaming what do you wish you know someone would build for you and I didn't ask them what do I wish someone would build for you because I thought they would have a good idea I asked them because the follow-up question was really the killer one right they they would say I wish you would build me this big red button I'm like great I built you the big red button like what what does it do for you like why is your life better after I built that and then they would tell me the real thing which is like oh I would make I'd make a bun I'd make make money that month or I'd get a bunch of new fans who like loved me or my fans who already loved me on youtube would be able to watch me live and more of them would and I was like oh that's the real answer like why you you don't you don't want the button you want the fans or the money or the I call it love the like the the sense of reassurance and and positive feedback that the your creative content was wanted

Shaan Puri

But you're a smart guy. Those love, money, and fans... I'm sure you would have guessed. What do the streamers want? False.

Emmett Shear

what what is really false

Shaan Puri

what did you think about it

Emmett Shear

It was a revelation that people would want money. I was like, "You're streaming, like, you know, whatever, 12 hours a week. If we let you monetize the rates we can monetize today, you'd make like $3 a month." That didn't occur to me that would be a positive thing. They were like, "Yes! Oh my God, that would be amazing!" I was like, "Wait, wait, sir, you're serious? You would like $3 a month?" I'm like, "I don't want to overpromise. I'll build you the monetization, actually, but you would really be excited if it only produced a tiny amount of money?" And they were like, "Absolutely! Just the idea that I could make money doing this would be so exciting." That had not occurred to me because it was always easy for me to make money. I was a programmer. I had summer jobs in training for Microsoft. If you're a programmer, you can get a summer job in training for Microsoft that pays many, many years of that level of streaming in three months. Why would I...? It just wasn't in my worldview that that would be so important to them. Of course, I knew they wanted a bigger audience, but the degree to which they valued even one more viewer and the degree of choice—they didn't care about anything else. They wanted to be able to watch them. They wanted to make money. I'd ask about other things, like, "Do you want the video production? Do you want to improve the video production, have cooler video production?" And they'd be like, "Yeah." I'd be like, "Okay, well, what's good about that? What do you like about that?" They'd say, "Well, I'll get a bigger audience." It was really the realization that those three things basically explained 98% of their motivation. Anything that didn't move any of that could be ignored. A good example is polls. Everyone would ask for polls. It seems like a cool feature—live polls. Of course, are you going to have a bigger audience with the live polls? Not particularly. Are you going to make more money? No. Do you really feel more loved after running a live poll than if you're just asking chat and having people post it in the chat and say it? No, it's the same. You got the feedback; it's cool. So this product, it's actually cooler to see.

Shaan Puri

the chat blow up

Emmett Shear

It's cooler to see the chat blow up. So, you're saying that this feature is worthless? Yes, in fact, potentially negative. It would always be on the list of things that might sound cool, but we just would never build it entirely correctly because it wasn't going to move the needle. The thing that's really hard to teach there—I've been a YC visiting partner for this batch—and I've been trying to convey to people, is that it's very hard to get them to do it. You have to care fanatically about these people as individuals and as streamers. What they believe about their reality is something you have to accept as base reality. That is how they see the world, and that is what's going on. But you need to literally have no regard for their ideas on how to solve the problem. It's a little paternalistic in a way, but it's more about respecting that they are experts in this field. You need to understand them in that context. What people are looking for when they seek a product idea from someone is that they don't want to do the work. They don't want to take responsibility for it. It's my job; I have to solve the problem. No one's going to tell me what the answer is. There's no T-shirt, there's no customer; it's up to me to come up with the truth and then defend it when other people say, "No, that's wrong." I have to be able to say, "No, no, no, let me explain why this is actually a good idea." That's scary. You're responsible. I think that's probably why the "just solve the problem" advice is bouncing around in my head. A lot of the fear founders have about addressing these things comes down to a willingness to take responsibility for solving someone else's problem. They're going to come and dump a bunch of problems on you, and it's your job to solve it for them within the available constraints. If you come up with the wrong idea, it's on you, and you can't trust anyone else to do it for you.

Shaan Puri

What are you seeing in this YC batch? So, you're visiting partner? Mhm, exciting time with AI.

Emmett Shear

pretty much so

Shaan Puri

Probably like, you know, half or more of the batch is doing something with AI. Yeah, what's exciting? What are you seeing? Where do you see the puck coming?

Emmett Shear

So, it's interesting. I would actually say that at least in this batch, I think this might have been different from the previous batch, but by this batch, the use of AI is no longer interesting.

Shaan Puri

ai is out no no no ai is

Emmett Shear

ai is so in it's like it's like being an aws startup or like being a

Shaan Puri

a mobile

Emmett Shear

A mobile startup? Like, what do you mean you're a mobile startup? Are you building a social media network? Of course, you have a mobile app. I don't... and then now it's like, of course, you're using LLMs to solve a problem. That's just like, if you weren't doing that, I would think you were a dummy. I don't understand. That's not even an interesting topic of conversation. The question is, what are you doing now? That's not entirely true. There's about some percentage of the batch—I don't know, it's between 10% and 20%—I'd say that's legitimately building AI infrastructure because there's a need to build a bunch of infrastructure there. Those are actually AI companies. But when people hear "AI company," I don't think they think back-end infrastructural support for AI. They think of using AI to do things. I actually couldn't tell you what percentage of the batch is AI from that perspective. From that view, all of them? Maybe. I don't know. Like, why wouldn't you use it? Even if it's only for a minor thing, there's always something you can use it for. It's a very useful technology.

Shaan Puri

What types of ideas are you noticing or that are standing out to you as interesting? Is there, like, you know, for example, I remember when I first moved to Silicon Valley. Suddenly, the kind of like bits companies started doing really well. It was like, "Oh, Uber and Airbnb," and like online-offline. Yeah, it was like, "Oh wait, this used to be like a taboo." It was like, "No, it's supposed to be a software company. You have to ship T-shirts. What are you doing?"

Emmett Shear

I would say, like, stay away from trends. The offline companies that started the trend did very well. Uber is a great company, and Airbnb is a great company, but they were off-track companies at the time. They were doing something that was not allowed. They had found an opportunity that had been ignored. Almost all the online-offline companies that got started after Uber, DoorDash, and Airbnb, are big. They say, "We're going to be the Uber and DoorDash and Airbnb of X." Most of those companies did not do very well. Is online-offline bad? No, it's generated a bunch of incredible companies. Jumping on the trend was probably bad for you. So whatever I tell you is like the trend I see.

Shaan Puri

I don't mean trend. I guess what I mean is... I think you're a person that is really good at looking at a situation, like looking at a box of stuff, and identifying correctly what's really interesting in this box.

Emmett Shear

yeah I

Shaan Puri

the interesting to you yeah

Emmett Shear

No, I understand. I think I understand what you're asking. What I think is changing in the world right now, having observed this, is that the consumer is back for the first time in a long time. By "a long time," I mean since the internet started—it's been about 5 years or something. But for the first time in maybe 5 or 7 years, it feels credible to start a consumer internet company, like the ones I was so excited to start in 2007. That's because of AI. AI means there's a whole opportunity to sort of reimagine how consumer experiences can work from the ground up. What's cool about consumer is that for B2B SaaS, the experience isn't the product. So, reimagining the experience does not necessarily reopen a segment. It can, but it usually does not. In consumer, reimagining an experience 100% reopens the segment because the thing you're selling is the experience. The reason people use your product is that it's a different experience.

Shaan Puri

and in b2b saas it's not the experience it's the what yeah

Emmett Shear

It's... people actually care about what it does, and the pricing model, and the adoption. It's very practical. You can make people jump through hoops if it does a thing because there's a lot of money for the corporation. Money and labor are involved, and people are paid to use your product. It's a whole different thing. AI adds new capabilities. These new capabilities enable new segments of B2B SaaS to be created that will generate some amount of growth in consumer markets. It does a really cool thing. It's like mobile; it reopens every segment. Now that you assume mobile exists, and now that you assume AI exists, what could you build now? That's very exciting. I don't have answers for that anymore because, you know, we'll see. That's a little... we would do the other thing in consumer. It's a bunch of lottery tickets; nobody knows.

Shaan Puri

It's a singular genius that works out right. You could see, like, okay, mobile comes, photo sharing became...

Emmett Shear

right

Shaan Puri

The window has opened again for photo sharing. It turns out it's Instagram and Snapchat, which are going to use photos as text messages.

Emmett Shear

wait yeah it turns out photos have a few different use cases and instagram and snapchat took 2 of the best ones the the fact that photo sharing is one of the most important segments and that you know sort of posting them and messaging with them are the 2 important most important things to do with them seems blindingly obvious in retrospect and if you'd had to predict that in 2,007 or 2,008 like good luck yeah like nobody nobody nobody correctly predicted that stuff before it happened I mean not nobody if you did correctly predict that you made a lot of money and congratulations you're really good at consumers / you got lucky we will find out when you try to do it again I think that in ai actually I have a theory for like the what one of the ways this will disrupt a bunch of businesses in ai especially in consumer a huge number of businesses can be conceived of as effectively being a database with a system of record that has like a bunch of canonical truths about the universe and each of them is a row it's like yelp it's like it's like a big database that has a bunch of rows and the rows are like restaurants and local businesses and they have a bunch of facts about them like they're where are they located what are their hours yeah all in that database row and it's all text and it's all there's a bunch of messy stuff out in the world and it's been digested into something that is searchable and comprehensible and usable in an app for you to use and most of the work of turning the messy real world into the canonical row is done is done at right time by the users so that's how ugc apps work in general a bunch of your users go out into the messy world and then they turn it into a row in a database and if they include a photo or a video as part of that it's like attached to the row as a fact about the restaurant here's a restaurant here's a 100 these 150 photos are facts about its menu but they're attached facts they're not the basis and where I what we think oai has opened up the possibility for is a a huge inversion there what if the thing you did you gave us was just a a video of your meal and foe or you know photos of your meal but ideally just like a video of your of the meal of you talking about the meal of whether you had a good time or not you and your friends shooting the shit about what did did you like that one no I like this one like and what if we just saved that video raw and then an ai watched it and extracted a cached version of that of the the metadata but truly like if we decide something else is important like we we we didn't get noise levels but like noise levels would be a good thing to get instead of like recollecting data from everyone we have to start a whole data collection for us to get that we just go back tell the ai oh yeah also grab noise collection levels from all of these videos in fact maybe we don't even as a product have to go do that maybe as a customer I can literally just be like what's the noise level at this restaurant and the in real time the ai can go rewatch the video and tell me or the you know I ran a search and there's these 15 restaurants and I'm like oh actually sort by noise noise level we don't have noise level prerecorded but it's it's in all the videos the ai can very quickly watch all the videos in parallel and send sort of a noise level form even if it wasn't even in the database to start with

Shaan Puri

right

Emmett Shear

and I think that inversion I'm using yelp as the example because it's I think a very familiar thing for most people of like reviews it's pretty easy to imagine a bunch of video reviews of everything and that being the system of record instead but you can describe some phenomenal number of consumer apps as being that anytime you type anything to a text box right you're you're participating in one of these system of record things what if it's just a video what if you just what if you assume video is deeply indexable and understandable by computers what should the experience look like and I think it looks a lot more like snapchat or tiktok like experience but but then different because you need map it's it's not exactly like anything it's a new kind of thing but it's it starts probably with the camera open which is weird right like yelp that starts with the camera open that's a that's not yelp today and it's it's it's it's disruptive because it's yelp's whole value prop is we have all this great highly meticulously groomed data and if this is true then that becomes entirely worthless we throw that all away we just want to want to watch your videos like it's worse than the videos and so suddenly the playing field is leveled between the start up and yelp and that's a that's a huge opportunity for disruption and so I think like you can take that and you can reapply it to any product where you fill out forms and that's like a general purpose consumer thing you can now do kind of like build it for mobile was and I think in some cases it will be very powerful and like that will be the new winner and I think in some cases the incumbent can kind of add videos or like it's not really better and like the incumbent will just win like it won't disrupt everything but if you pick the right thing not only will it disrupt the incumbent the new thing may be dramatically better for some things like I actually think actually yelp is always a bad example I think the data yelp has with the photos and the reviews is like 90% as good as a video systems of record probably but you could imagine something with a video system of record where it's not so obvious what to even put in the highly processed version of the data in the in the text version of the data and the video version's a lot better right and then I think not only can you disrupt the incumbent you can 10 x the size of the segment like you this becomes a good segment now where it wasn't particularly before

Shaan Puri

So, like, ChatGPT is a great example of this in action that everybody has now played with. You take Google, which is like, "Oh, our value is this entire sort of rank of web pages based off of terms." We understand basically what should show up in this hierarchy. It was really good for finding stuff. Then ChatGPT was like, "Cool, you could ask a question to try to find a link to an answer, or we could just give you an answer." Or even better, forget questions and answers. What if you just give me a command, and I could just make something? Instead of finding things, I could create things for you. Right? And all of a sudden, it was like, "Well, how did they do that?" It's like, well, they just basically slurped up the internet and then, you know, trained the AI.

Emmett Shear

To do it, they overfit a statistical prediction algorithm on every domain of human knowledge. This is my theory; I'm pretty sure it's true. Statistical prediction algorithms, in general, work very well. We found that the innovation is in a prediction algorithm that works better than normal. But the way it works better than normal is really interesting. It's not that it outperforms traditional algorithms for prediction on normal amounts of data; it's that it keeps working as you just dump more and more data into it and more and more processing on that data. With most machine learning algorithms, you kind of overfit very fast with more processing.

Shaan Puri

explain it

Emmett Shear

If you imagine a bunch of data points, they're kind of vaguely in a line. **Underfitting** is like drawing a random line that doesn't resemble the shape of the dots at all. A **well-fit curve** is when you draw a line through the dots. There might be some noise, with random points above and below, but if you look at it, that line actually fits the data. It captures the underlying predictive factors while ignoring the noise. On the other hand, if you **overfit** the data, you get a really wiggly curve that touches every single dot exactly. However, when you encounter new data, it won't predict well because it overpredicts too much. It predicts too much of the existing data, so when new data comes in, it doesn't perform accurately.

Shaan Puri

okay

Emmett Shear

And so, normally what happens is you try to dump more data and more compute into a normal machine learning algorithm. You get diminishing returns very quickly. It just doesn't perform that much better with twice as much data and twice as much compute. The clever, the cool thing about the transformer-based attention-only architecture is that it continues to benefit from more compute and more data in a way that other ones didn't. So, what that lets you do is run it on a much bigger domain than normal. Run it on everything. Don't just run it normally; as you add more area, it degrades the quality elsewhere. No, forget it. Just do everything and put in a ton of compute, and now you get something that predicts pretty well against everything. This is to say, it seems to be kind of intelligent. The evidence seems to suggest to me that it's overfit when you ask it to predict something that is either in the set of things it was trained on or a linear interpolation between two things it was trained on. It's quite good at giving you the thing you asked for, but linear interpolation between five things... If the things you're asking are all in there and it just has to find a way to blend them together, it's good at that. However, when you ask it to actually think through a new problem for the first time, it struggles.

Shaan Puri

like what's an example

Emmett Shear

There are 7 gears on a wall, each alternating. There's a flag attached to the 7th gear on the right side of the gear where it's pointed up right now. If I turn the first gear to the right, what happens to the flag? Like, that's a... anyone who's like this.

Shaan Puri

is a breakfast question for you this is what you pawn in in the mornings

Emmett Shear

If you have pen and paper and time, you can work this out, no problem. Right? You just draw the gears. When you turn the first gear to the right, it turns the left ones, and the other ones to the left, and heads next to the right. There's a general principle there that gears alternate. If you ask ChatGPT, it knows that general principle, but it won't... but then you have to... it doesn't... no one has asked dumb gear questions like this. This is not a thing that has been in its training set, and you have to kind of logic your way through it. You figure out, okay, we should have like: I'll do turn left, turn right, turn left, turn right, turn left, turn right. Oh, the flag is on the right; it's pointing up. So when the last gear, which is the same as the first gear, is turning right, the last gear—it's an odd number—so it's turning right also. The flag will rotate down to the right, clockwise. Cool! I can work that out. It's not actually that complicated, and I bet that question will be answerable. That's a pretty easy question. If ChatGPT 4 doesn't answer it, 5 will. But the fact that it struggles at all with that, while being so brilliant at combining other stuff, really shows that it's overfit. It knows how to answer problems that it has seen before, but when you give it a truly novel kind of combination of problems, it struggles a lot. I would say, if you give it a sort of formal psychiatric psychometrics approach, it has a very high crystallized intelligence but a pretty low fluid intelligence right now. Now, that could change, but today, that's the state of affairs.

Shaan Puri

And do you bring this up in order to say what you say? Okay, I think it's overfit. It's strong in this area but weak in this area. What's the "so what" of that for you? Is it that you're trying to say that's a little bit overhyped? Or are you trying to say, "Dude, just wait till it can do both"? Are you trying to say, "Well, definitely problems are doable now"?

Emmett Shear

Definitely just wait till you do both because that's a whole different thing. That's scary. But the current thing that is mostly crystallized intelligence is really good at a very... it... this is why it's a clever trick, right? It's really good at a big set of tasks, which happens to be the set of tasks that anyone has ever written stuff down about explicitly. All explicit human knowledge is a very big domain. There's a lot of things that can be solved where there's explicit examples of people solving that problem or a linear interpolation of those problems in the domain of all human knowledge. The fact that it doesn't generalize is irrelevant. It's immensely powerful. You don't need fluid intelligence, I guess, for it to be very useful. But it doesn't let you do everything. People hit these boundaries, these weird boundaries, where it's just like you're like, "Wait a second, you can't do that." Like, no, they can't do that at all. Novel problem solving is just terrible at it.

Shaan Puri

So, what about we walk through two examples? I want to hear your take on this. You gave the Yelp example.

Emmett Shear

mhmm

Shaan Puri

another thing that's kinda like rose in a database is something like spotify mhmm

Emmett Shear

where it's

Shaan Puri

Like, "Oh, I want to go listen to a song." Here's the genre, artist, song length, you know, some algorithmic popularity, and similarity to other songs in some way. But Spotify's value... So, Spotify's value is in the playlists.

Emmett Shear

I would agree with the analogy to Spotify because playlists are an example of this kind of database, a human data entry thing. Spotify's value is mostly in the set of all of the music itself, the licenses, and all the music itself. So, I don't think Spotify is a great example because the human data entry parts of the database, if that all just got deleted tomorrow, it would not hurt Spotify that bad.

Shaan Puri

Well, the thing I'm thinking about is: what if the licenses don't matter? So, what happens if generative music is just awesome to listen to in a hyper... yeah, yeah, personal way? Oh, Emmett likes... yeah, yeah.

Emmett Shear

these are

Shaan Puri

the types of songs that emmett likes

Emmett Shear

That's a different insight that I think is also possible. It's not about being able to analyze and extract from media; it's about being able to create media.

Shaan Puri

mhmm

Emmett Shear

Because the video system of record is enabled by the ability to understand and read video and comprehend it, generative is the opposite. It's like, "Oh, we can make all this stuff." Music, in particular, is sticky against that. People don't want new music; they want old music. They want the music they love already, the music they grew up with. That cycle is what causes record labels to stay in charge. Whether you still listen to the Rolling Stones or not, the other thing I would say about that is: the music's not that good yet. Maybe someday, but it's really not that good yet. Well, I'm going to caveat this: if the general intelligence level goes up a lot, all bets are off. It'll make some really great music for us before it maybe takes over the world and kills everyone. But let's assume that doesn't happen soon. I think it's going to take longer than people think.

Shaan Puri

we go out

Emmett Shear

to make

Shaan Puri

great music though

Hubspot

Oh no, what if we do go out? We're going to go out to some place with great music. It's going to be a great 2 or 3 years before we all go, but until then, making really good, new, great music is hard. I think that Rick Rubin's great success demonstrates why artists will still be important. AI can generate lots and lots of music, but it's not going to have the fine judgment of distinction—the ability to say, "This song, not that song." I actually think what it will do is deskill the music-making process in one aspect: the ability to literally create the sounds. At the same time, it will greatly upscale the music-making process in another aspect: the ability to curate. Not just curate, but to give explicit, exact feedback like Rick Rubin does. AI is going to turn us all into Rick Rubins for generative AI. That skill set, or the ability to have a musician come to you and help them produce their best music, is the thing you need to be able to do. It's easy to generate 1,000 cuts, but there are infinite cuts you could generate. So how do you direct that? How do you shape it in the right direction and mine and discover the best options? It's going to be kind of cool. It's going to be interesting. You'll get a different set of people who will be optimal at that. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa! I can see the client's whole history: calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from 3 days ago that I totally missed. HubSpot: grow better.

Shaan Puri

You mentioned AI might become so intelligent it kills us all. This podcast is really growing. I don't want the world to end; life is good.

Emmett Shear

life is good here

Shaan Puri

Well, I'll ask the question clearly for the intro: **Is AI gonna kill us all?** Maybe.

Emmett Shear

like walk through how you know walk

Shaan Puri

walk through how you a smart person who's an optimist about technology

Emmett Shear

mhmm

Shaan Puri

But a realist about real issues. Hmm... What is the way that you think about this? How would you explain this to a loved one you care about who’s not as deep into technology? How would you explain this if you’re their trusted source of technology? What do you say to them?

Emmett Shear

so it it is because I am so optimistic about technology that I am afraid if I was a little bit less optimistic and I was like this ai stuff's overhyped yeah yeah yeah like it does nice parlor tricks but like we're nowhere near building something that's actually intelligent like and like the engine all these engineers who are working on who think they're on on or something they're full of shit it's gonna take us 1000 of years we're not that good at this stuff technology is not going that fast I'd be like this is fine this is great actually it's good news it's a new trick we learned excellent it's because I am so optimistic that I think that there's a chance it will continue to improve very very rapidly and if it does that that's a huge that optimism is what makes me worried it's sort of the analogy I like to give on that front is like synbio synthetic biology I'm quite optimistic about synthetic biology that I've several friends who've worked in synbio companies it shows a lot of promise for fixing a lot of really important health problems and it's quite dangerous it will let us genetically engineer more dangerous diseases that could be very harmful to people and that has to that's a way to pro and con it's like nuclear power makes nuclear weapons and nuclear power they're both real the creation of nuclear weapons is dangerous use it doesn't take you don't have to be a techno non optimist to like think that that's there's a problem there I think it was good that we didn't go have every country on earth go build nuclear weapons probably and likewise in synbio I would say that it would be we actually we already have these regulations in place we should over time we'll be able to strengthen them and improve the and audit the oversight and build better organisations to monitor and regulate them but like we regulate whether people can have the kinds of devices that would let them like print smallpox and we regulate whether you can just buy precursor things you need to go print stuff and we keep track of who's buying it and why and like that is wise I'm glad that we do that I don't like calling for a halt synbio but like if we weren't willing to regulate it I would call for a halt it is vastly too dangerous to do to learn how to genetically engineer plagues and then not to have regulation around people's ability to get the access to the tools to engineer plagues that's just suicidally dumb and I just because I'm pro technology I believe that we should absolutely develop the technology and that we should regulate it that seems just straightforward and obviously true to me I think it's easier for people to understand that in the synbio one because the concept of like engineering a plague seems like an obviously a thing you could do and very day obviously very dangerous and obviously enabled by technology the ai thing is more abstract because the threat it poses us is not posed by a particular thing the ai will do the way the plague will happen analogy I like to use is sort of like you know I can tell you with confidence that gary kasparov is gonna kick your ass at chess right now and you ask me well how is he gonna checkmate me which piece is he gonna use I'm like oh I don't know and you're like you can't even tell me what piece he's gonna use and you're saying he's gonna checkmate me you're just a pessimist I'm like no no no you don't understand he's better at chess than you the whole it means he's gonna checkmate you and I don't I I don't know quite know what happens if people deny that like I think what the big thing is they don't really imagine the ai being smarter than them they imagine the ai being like like data in star trek like kind of dumber than the humans about a lot of stuff but like really fast at math like that's not what smarter means like imagine the most savvy like most smartest person you can think of and then make them think faster and also make them even better at it and not smart in just one way like smart at everything like a great writer just insight after insight and like can pick up sinbadge in an afternoon because they're just so smart that smartest person you know and then they should keep pushing that and like that's that person is obviously dangerous if they're if they that person isn't a good person they're obviously dangerous like imagine this really really capable person then imagine them wanting to go kill a bunch of people or something it would be bad now the thing about ai that then kicks it over the edge is that that person can't self improve easily you meet this person who's like super strong super like talented great with people great great intellectual mind they can't turn around and like edit their own genome edit their own upbringing and make v 2 of themselves with all the skills that maximally smart person can come up with that like is even smarter than them but that's like expli where explicitly the ai is good at programming and like chip design and like it can explicitly turn back on itself and rev another rev of that and the new one will be better at it than the first one was and there is no obvious endpoint to that process like there probably is at some level a physics based endpoint to that we're like you can't actually just keep getting smarter forever there's some but we don't really we don't understand the principles of intelligence at all like with most things we understood how to make electricity far before we understood what electricity really was like we that's generally how we that's how scientific progress works we usually understand we gain the ability to create and manipulate a phenomenon well before we deeply understand how it works we didn't really understand what fire was for quite a while you could use fire really well the same thing is gonna happen here we're using the ai but we don't understand its limits at all we don't understand the the the theoretical limits of how far we'll get and if moore's law is any indication we can keep getting at the very least it can keep getting faster indefinitely whether or not it can get smarter or not even human just human level intelligence if you capped it at human level intelligence which there's zero reason to think it will stop at human like it will almost certainly blow past us but like even if you cap it at human intelligence imagine a 100,000 of the smartest person you know all running at a 100 x real time speed and able to communicate with each other instantaneously via like telepathy those 100,000 people could credibly take over the world like they don't have to be smarter than a human for that for that that army of von neumann's

Shaan Puri

right

Emmett Shear

like

Shaan Puri

So, the argument to me goes in several steps. It's like, can you build a certain level of intelligence? Then it's like, okay, I think a lot of people do believe that computers are smart. For example, Google is smart, and calculators are smarter than us at math. I think it's not hard for them to believe that AI is going to be far smarter than human beings. Where I think a lot of people then don't make that last leap is sort of like, but then it'll have an agenda or a motive or any will for anything to happen.

Emmett Shear

so so how do

Shaan Puri

You address that last. Of like, what are the scenarios you worry about when it comes to the direction of that intelligence?

Emmett Shear

So, you build this thing, and it's really good at solving what intelligence fundamentally is: the ability to solve a problem. It's really good at solving problems, and it's going to solve the problem by going right through it. We've just defined it as the kind of thing that is super good at solving problems. Now, you tell it that somebody built an AI, and in all earnestness, you tell it they're smart. They don't even tell it to "go do a thing," although they absolutely will, by the way. They will just tell it to go do a thing. But let's say we try to be careful and we ask it, "Give me a plan to stop the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo right now." Right? Which would be a good thing for the world. I think we should; that war is going to hurt a lot of people. So, I ask for a plan, and I try to caveat it: "This does this, that does that, and here's what I mean by a good plan." This is one of those "evil genie bargaining" things, right? It'll give you a plan, and it's making a plan that will cause you to solve the problem. But its definition of "solve the problem" is that there's no war in the DRC. Well, what would "no war in the DRC" mean? It means all the humans in the DRC are in stasis fields, which means they don't die. And, oh, we added a caveat that the GDP has to go up too. So, the plan results in corporations in that area all trading with lots of money with each other, so the GDP is very high. When I say this, it sounds like a science fiction thing. The problem is, it's a chess game. I don't know if I could do it. I would be the superintelligent AI that could take over the world. I can't give you the exact plan because that's... yeah, but I think that makes sense.

Shaan Puri

which is that a human with a human with motivation can get the ai to work for you

Emmett Shear

And the data centers... I think that the main thing is that the human doesn't need a bad motivation. I think people imagine, "Well, humans have had powerful tools for a long time. Bad people with powerful tools have done bad things for a long time." The solution is good people with powerful tools countering them. The problem is, even if you're a good person with a powerful tool, good things to ask for—reasonable things good people would ask for—are, you know, like, "Let's maximize the all-in free cash flow of this corporation over the lifetime of the business and extend the lifetime as long as feasibly possible." This can end in like the world being destroyed and the core of the Earth being turned into, you know, being turned into cars for the company to sell. I think the best analogy that works for some people here is like when we create the AI, we are creating a new species. It's a new species that is smarter than us. Even if you try to constrain it to being an oracle and just answering questions, not taking action, to be a good oracle one must come up with plans. Then, a good oracle can manipulate the people around it and will manipulate the people around it no matter what.

Emmett Shear

Of like the Greek myth, when they tell you the prophecy, when a trustworthy oracle tells you a prophecy, the prophecy often becomes self-fulfilling. It's very easy for that to happen; that's not an unusual thing. And I think even more to the point... Actually, I'm gonna start this over. At some level, more to the point, we won't just make oracles. We are already building agents. We will build the predictive AI and we will put it in a loop that causes it to optimize towards goals. You're gonna have goals; it's gonna have goals you'll be optimizing towards. When it does that, you're gonna have these agents that have goals they're optimizing towards that are smart—not just smarter than humans, but much smarter than humans. As much smarter than humans as humans were against giant sloths when we showed up in the New World. Intelligence is the uber weapon. It's not an accident that humans took over the world. It's not the fastest creature, it's not the strongest, it's not the longest-lived—it's the smartest. And we're gonna build a new smartest species. This isn't a fundamentally unsolvable problem. This species could care about us. You could build into its goals how it saw the world, the way humans care about other humans. It could care about the things we care about, that it cares about humans, that it cares about things we value—the 375 different shards of human desire, everything we care about in the world. It could care about those things too. And if it does, hallelujah! We finally have a parent. We finally have someone who actually knows what they're doing around here because, like, Lord knows we don't. We're barely competent to run this thing. I would welcome very smart species that are aligned with us and care about us. I would not welcome one that cares about maximizing free cash flow because that is not what humans care about, and that is why it's so dangerous.

Shaan Puri

And so, knowing what you know and what you believe first, what is the probability of the bad scenario in your head? Are we talking about a 1%... yeah, yeah, ish thing? Or an order of magnitude of 10% or 50%? What is it in your mind?

Emmett Shear

I don't believe in estimates for probabilities because it's like a bid-ask spread in the market. If you're really uncertain, the bid-ask spread doesn't clear. If you're betting on it, there's just a lot of unresolved issues. So, I think of it as a range of uncertainty. I would say that the true probability, I believe, is somewhere between **3% to 30%**.

Shaan Puri

which of the downside

Emmett Shear

Of the down of a very, very bad thing happening, which is scary enough that I urgently urge action on the issue. But it's not like you should give up. At least, it’s probably going to be fine. In fact, it’s probably really good. The answer, with the non-EV based answer, the straight-up "are we gonna win or not" answer is: I think it’s going to be okay. But the downside is so bad. It’s real. It’s probably worse than nuclear war. That’s a really bad downside. It’s worth putting... even if you think I’m being nonsensical at 3%, you’re like, "No, no, it’s no more than a half percent." You don’t recommend a different course of action at half. You have to believe that it’s effectively almost impossible before you would recommend ignoring it as a problem. You have to be like 0.1% before it’d be like, "Let’s just roll the dice."

Shaan Puri

And are you going to take action on that? So you've kind of like, you know, you're done with Twitch. You're in dad mode now, but also this seems to be a pretty big deal. Are you thinking, "I should do something about this," or are you like, "I'm gonna..."?

Emmett Shear

Right now, I'm sort of educating myself because I think this point of view I've been articulating has been developing as I'm learning more about AI. I think it's one of those things where we're intervening in the wrong way early. It's one of those self-fulfilling prophecy situations—intervening improperly in a way that is not effective spends social capital and also doesn't necessarily move the needle. If you didn't have people like Elijah Jadakowski out there banging the drum really loud, I would feel more need to bang the drum myself. But I feel like you're asking me the question; it's out in the water. People know it's a problem. So, I've decided to focus my brain cycles on how we can actually thread the needle. What is a course of action that leads us to, over time, still being able to develop AI but also not destroying the world? I think one of the things I've gotten to is this idea that AI has crystallized versus fluid intelligence, just like a human does. That's an important distinction in how to think about it. We should be monitoring and worried about trying to understand general intelligence, not just generally benchmarking its performance on tasks. That will keep going up, and it's not necessarily intrinsically dangerous if it can't solve novel problems.

Shaan Puri

is is there a new training test level is there like a better because like

Emmett Shear

it doesn't pass the training test yet

Shaan Puri

but is there is there something we have after that

Emmett Shear

Because it seems like there's... you mean an intelligence test? I mean, yeah, we need IQ tests, basically. Like various kinds of...

Shaan Puri

how how does it do on an iq test right now

Emmett Shear

it depends has it seen that iq test before

Shaan Puri

it likely has right

Emmett Shear

yeah so very well on those right

Shaan Puri

so what would we do

Emmett Shear

How does it do on novel IQ tests? I don't know. I should... I've not seen a good benchmark, though. That's a good idea for something to go test. Yeah, I think that's the sort of thing that would actually be worthy of going to do. Maybe there's some sort of IQ test for all of the models that really tries to get at fluid intelligence rather than... right, these are like...

Shaan Puri

we have to monitor it but how how are we gonna

Emmett Shear

Well, this is a great project. Arc is this group working on called the Evals Project. They're explicitly trying to build these kinds of tests. They're focused on a few other more pragmatic tests right now, but I think that's the sort of thing they would go after. That's a good thing. I'll ping Paul and ask him about that.

Shaan Puri

You said something earlier that I want to ask you about. You mentioned "founder," like, you know, we're talking about the singular genius that it took to figure out Instagram or Snapchat or whatever at that time. And you're like, "Are they lucky or are they good?" I don't know. We'll find out when they try again. Are you lucky or are you good? And are you going to try again?

Emmett Shear

Well, since I had multiple failures before I was successful, I must be at least partially lucky. I would say that I don't plan to try again since I don't feel drawn to starting a company. I feel like I kind of did that. It was fun, I got a lot out of it, and it was great. I don't need to do it a second time. I do like how starting a company gives me good goals—something I work towards. It's like concrete; that's a value to myself and others. I also liked that it was challenging. I want to do something that has scale; I think I could impact a lot of people. But I've sort of come around to thinking, "What has impacted me the most? What's changed my life the most?" I realized that, if I really thought about it, often what had changed my life the most were essays people had written and ideas people had shared. I think I'm at the stage in my life now where I actually have something to say. I want to put the Emmett worldview out into the world the way that, you know, Paul Graham has put the Paul Graham worldview out in the world, or Taleb has not just put his worldview out in the world but then condensed it into sayings that allow other people to onboard it, even if they haven't read all the books. I think it's that ambition to try to...

Shaan Puri

do like a computer to a meme almost yeah

Emmett Shear

yeah so

Shaan Puri

that can be digested and shared

Emmett Shear

Yeah, indeed. Anyway, you need the long form. This is a great blog post titled "Size Does Matter" by Steve Yagay. It's about why the people who change the world with their writing all write really long blog posts. Basically, you just need some amount of time in someone's head. Like we were talking about this earlier, it's to install your agent voice.

Shaan Puri

yeah

Emmett Shear

To install the voice, I think I just need to produce a lot of writing. You also need the pithy summary things, which are both elements that the voice can say often in people's heads. They also enable a language for talking about your worldview that people who aren't soaking it in can interact with. This way, the people who are reading you don't sound like crazy people. I think that's sort of what I want to work on next.

Shaan Puri

I love that! I think that's great. You said something about Rick Rubin and how he's sort of the... I don't know how you would describe it. It's kind of like a curator, but almost like a collaborator, really, with an artist to help them do their great work. Is Paul Graham the Rick Rubin of...?

Emmett Shear

The startup world... No, Paul is more like the Tony Robbins of the industry. I mean this in the best way. It's not so much about self-help, but the main thing that talking to Paul does for you repeatedly is increase your ambition and drive. He has good ideas sometimes too. Don't get me wrong, every now and then Paul has a really genius idea. But mostly, what I got out of talking to Paul was not necessarily the great idea that would change the direction of the business, but the belief that I could go find it. I felt that I was going to change the world and that what we were doing was important and worth investing in. I got a bucket of other stuff too, but that was singularly so valuable that it overshadows the other things I got out of it. How does...

Shaan Puri

He does that because, you know, when you say that, my head thinks of people like Tony Robbins or David Goggins—sort of people that almost push you. But he doesn't seem like that personality. Reading all of his essays, he's not like that at all. So how does he get you to think bigger and push harder without being a "rah rah rah rah, think bigger, push harder" type?

Emmett Shear

You know what you should do? It's the classic Paul Grahamism, and it's always followed by the idea of adding something to what you're doing to turn it from Project A, addressing this small thing, to Project B, changing the universe. For example, all transportation—what if you tried to power all transportation instead of just building a wheel? But that's as right as...

Shaan Puri

you know what you should do

Emmett Shear

You know what you should do is... yeah, if you've talked to Paul, you know what? I've never met him. You know what you should do? That's the consistent "Paulism." I don't want to say "delude" because it sounds mean, but he... I was like, he deludes himself about your business and how great you are. He invites you to join him in this diluted vision of interpreting what you're doing in the biggest, best possible light. From that vantage point, what you're doing is super... like, what if it does work? What if it goes right? That's sort of what he invites you to ask. Stop asking yourself, "What if?" Don't stop seeing all the hard problems and all the challenges you're going to have to face. Instead, ask, "What if what we're doing works? What if it goes right? What if it goes right and we keep going? What could it be?" When you spend time there, you see how the small things can turn out to be significant. For example, Microsoft was building programming languages for these hobbyist microcomputers. That was a tiny, irrelevant market that turned out to be extremely important. That's generally true of all the big businesses. They start out doing something small that seems almost trivial, but there's a way in which this trivial thing can be seen as bigger.

Shaan Puri

he sees it early

Emmett Shear

No, he sees things that have nothing to do with the way you'll actually be big early. But he sees a bunch of ways you could be big. No one can do that. No one actually knows. If they knew it, they would just go do it. Then they'd be the prophet, the oracle.

Shaan Puri

what did he say let's say for justin tv or or what's what's one of

Emmett Shear

them we about reddit or yeah justin tv I remember we one of them was like you you should like go hire all the like reality tv stars and make get them to go be on justin tv you could be you could just take over all the unscripted stuff that turns me a just a terrible idea for a bunch of reasons but like it recontextualized what we were doing for me in terms of like we're not making a on the internet live streaming show we might be building like just the way that you make unscripted entertainment generally and that's like much bigger idea and we were making a calendar and for my first start up and I remember this you know what you should do is make it like programmable so that people can add in and out functionality so it can like talk to your to do list and your your email and your like everything else in your life and then it could be your calendar in some ways like that's everything you're doing what if it was like the central hub of like your entire online information management system that's also a bad idea like your calendar shouldn't be that but like but like but a calendar could but what if it was and you walk away and and I am implicitly by saying that what he's telling you is I believe you are the kind of founders who could build an information management system that controls all the that takes over people's entire like solves the entire problem for them does their takes over all their information and manages it for them you're not just like building a like Google cal like what what what you will find out later is a Google calendar clone before calendar is launched you're not just like like I said you're not just building an outlook clone in javascript you're like changing the way people relate to information I'm like is that true it's neither true nor false that's not a true or false statement but it's a way to contextualize what you're doing it's at the it's the saint exupery quote of like don't teach them to like carry wood or build ships teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea like paul teaches you to see how you could be a changer of the world and how what you're doing is part of like this grand like building of the future and like the ideas I'll repeat here not both of those ideas are bad but they were very helpful because they made me feel like what we were doing was important that paul believed that I could do something big and important and they caused me to even though I wanna projecting them look for those idea like to be open to and looking for because you would get one every like like you'd get like 3 an hour paul has a faucet for these it's easy I I can do it for startups too now if I want to I learned the trick and I should do that more often I'm usually won't fall into the tactical stuff but by by having that happen when he once he's once you've rejected 10 of those you can't help but start hearing the paul you know what you should do in your own head

Shaan Puri

the room the ceiling has been raised

Emmett Shear

Yes, of like what? Well, maybe I should recontextualize my to-do list as an email client. Like, why are email and to-do separate? Maybe I should be building something much bigger than what I'm building, in a way that doesn't require me to change anything. Maybe what I've built is already almost that if I just think about it in a different way. It's this funny balance. I actually had a tweet thread about this recently between, you know, "small plans have no power to stir men's souls." Plan big or go home! You should be really ambitious and aim super big. Only do projects that you can see being super big and super important. On the other hand, there's the fundamental truth that big trees grow from small acorns. Many of the best things, when they get started, the person is not thinking, "I'm going to take over the world." They're just trying to do a good thing that they think is good, often just for themselves or for a very small number of other people. Then it turns out that that's much, much bigger than they realized. Those are both true pieces of advice. Different people need to hear them in different contexts, but they kind of contradict each other.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, what about these other people? So you've had a privilege. I asked about Paul Graham. You've also been friends with... you were in the first Y Combinator batch, so you're friends with the Reddit guys. Hmm.

Emmett Shear

I think

Shaan Puri

You know the Colson brothers, Sam Altman. Let's give me a rapid-fire overview of them. What makes them unique? Like you said about Paul, what is his kind of superpower? What really stands out? What's something you admire about the way he does things? Give me one about maybe Steve from Reddit, yeah?

Emmett Shear

So, it's easier in some ways with Paul because he was a mentor to me. Right? And Steve was much more like my... it sounds like my brother in startups. Growing up with Paul, I know the things that he taught me because it was much more explicit; I was being taught by Paul. With Steve, it's like I learned things from him by watching and imitating. I think I actually learned a lot from Steve on management by observing his kind of unflappability. Steve is not an unpassionate person. We can get angry or sad or whatever, but when there's a crisis happening... I got to shadow him for a day, and when bad news is delivered, he responds but he isn't moved. He remains grounded in response to that situation. He is curious, asks questions, and doesn't jump to what to do about it. Then, he ends the meeting with, "Alright, here's what we should do. Here's what we're going to do." It was just sort of a masterclass. When someone brings something up, it can be anxiety-provoking, especially if it's bad news. That's what it looks like when a leader is engaged but not activated. I think in my own leadership, sometimes with success and sometimes with failure, I try to imitate that when I receive something like that in that state.

Shaan Puri

when you say you shattered him what was that like you guys just said we

Emmett Shear

We exchanged visits, going to each other's offices and sitting through each other's work. Early on, or maybe about 5 years ago, it was really cool. I did this with Justin and Steve; we all shadowed each other. It was pretty fun, and I learned a lot. That's incredible—to watch another CEO at work. You have to have the kind of trust relationship to make that happen without knowing someone for 15 years. I happen to have the privilege of knowing a bunch of CEOs for a really long time, and getting to shadow each other was a real learning experience.

Shaan Puri

What do you think? Even if these people didn't, let's say, explicitly teach you things... You know, if I read a biography or whatever, one of the things I always try to figure out is more like, to what extent is this person sort of built differently or operates differently than, like, even somebody who's very good? What is the difference between the very good and the elite? What is the best of the best at this craft versus somebody who's very good—certainly very good, but just not the same? Those differences are what I'm always most interested in. I'm curious, you've been around a lot of these high-performing people, even like, you know...

Emmett Shear

yeah

Shaan Puri

Bezos, you've interacted with him. Do you notice any of these differences, or is it all just like...?

Emmett Shear

It's hard... it's hard to say. I think I believe more in contextualization. I see people do really amazing things at something, but especially when it's your own company, there's a lot of factors involved. You happen to fit this problem well, and it's not general. I know how to generalize it, but I don't know if you can. I don't know of anyone else even performing at this problem. The CEO of Stripe, for example, has a very specific job, and Patrick is amazing at it. Would he be equally amazing at some other CEO job? Possibly, but I've never seen him do that. I've never seen anyone else be CEO of Stripe, and it's very hard for me to...

Shaan Puri

is it true

Emmett Shear

at the beginning

Shaan Puri

Is it true that as a startup founder of an ambitious company, is Stripe different at that stage too? Or like, yeah?

Emmett Shear

No, absolutely. People who are really good, you can sense the energy, the drive, the capability, and just the pace. There's a very intense vibe; stuff happens a lot. But usually, not always, some problems don't actually give way. Stripe is a good example of a company that gives way to a high-energy, high-pace environment because it's a simple problem at some level that has infinite details that it could be. However, I don't know if that approach would work as well if you're trying to create OpenAI or Anthropic, where it's a research-oriented organization. You kind of have to be a little more patient. It's impossible to enforce a one-size-fits-all approach. I really believe that different people are good at different things. Obviously, someone like Patrick is an A+ at being the Stripe CEO. It's just hard to tell the reasons at which these things are transferable; we don't really know. One thing did come to mind about this question in terms of a capability that I do think is generic. I saw Bezos exhibit this, and I was like, "Oh, that's a thing that I'm good at, but he is better at it." I'm better than most people, but he's better than me. We present to him on Twitch probably once or twice a year for the first three or four years I was at Amazon. Every time, two things would happen. First of all, he would remember everything we told him from the first meeting. I don't think he was reviewing extensive notes someone else took because I don't know when he would have the time to do that. I observed him going from meeting to meeting, and he did not review notes. I think he just remembered at least the high points. The other thing was, consistently, he would read our plan, and then he would ask a question about why we didn't do a certain thing, or he'd give us an idea for something we could do that I hadn't thought of before. Once, it was a bunch of things I had usually considered, and then at least once...

Shaan Puri

which is hard to do because all you do is think about

Emmett Shear

This company never happens. Most people would be lucky to get one of those, let alone one a year. It would be great if you could do it once a year or even once every three years, right? He could just generate them, and they were not all bad ideas either. They were new ideas. But a thing I had is that I generate a lot of ideas to get a new idea I haven't thought of on a topic I've been thinking about for a decade. That might even be a good idea. He is just really smart, is what I can tell. I don't know how he does that.

Shaan Puri

can you say a story of one of those as like the statute of limitations passed like this is 5 years ago

Emmett Shear

I'm trying to remember... I can't honestly say I remember the specifics anymore. I just recall the "what the fuck" moment. The first time I was just like, "Oh, he's smart." He was seeing Twitch for the first time. A lot of times, smart people have one good idea about your business the first time they see it because they have this huge history. They’re pattern matching you to some historical thing they've seen, and that combination yields one new insight. But then he did it the second time. I remember thinking, "What is going on? This doesn't make any sense." I've never had that experience before. Andy does not have the new idea generation capability in the same way, but he does have the ability to remember what you told him, which is also extremely impressive. Andy has this other thing he can do that I think is unique. It's easier for me with people I've reported to or learned from, like Andy Jassy. Andy has this ability to criticize you in a way that conveys, "I know that you're amazing. I know that your plan is good, or that you're capable of making a really good plan. I know that you're working really hard, and I know that you are smart and have a great team. We have a huge opportunity, and yet somehow your results are bullshit." He must be confused, thinking, "I don't know what's wrong, but we're in this together, and I've got your back." You feel supported; you feel like he believes in you. But at the same time, you're just so sad. "Oh, I'm sorry. I've confused... I'm sorry I've failed, even though I clearly can succeed at this. I'm going to go fix this now."

Shaan Puri

almost like instead of looking at this and then judging you you he comes to your side of the table and says what is this

Emmett Shear

Yeah, and like, how did we wind up here? How have I failed you that I didn't say something earlier? I don't know, but not in a way that can come off as insincere. For some people, when they do that, it comes off as if they don't think you're actually competent. "How did I not catch this?" can come off as, "I don't blame you because you're clearly not good enough to have caught this." Like, how did we wind up here? I know that we are working together; we're on the same team. How did we end up with not the results we wanted, with a plan that I thought we both thought seemed good? Help me understand, because it is genuine. It's super effective. At least, it's effective on... I don't know if it's effective on me, but I saw it be effective on other people as well. So, I know it works on some number of people.

Shaan Puri

right

Emmett Shear

and that's another one of those things I've I've tried

Shaan Puri

to be good

Emmett Shear

I've tried to become good at it. I'm not as good at it as Andy is, but I've certainly gotten better. It's a nice thing to learn from.

Shaan Puri

That's great, love that one dude. Thanks for doing this. I know I've been bothering you to do this for a long time because I love hearing your stories. I love hearing the way you think; it's very different than most people I run into, even here in Silicon Valley where you're supposed to have this kind of very unique, diverse set of minds. You know, you're one of them. You're one of the reasons I moved out to San Francisco was to meet people like you. So thanks for doing this.

Emmett Shear

Thank you! I appreciate that. Yeah, it's beautiful, and I really appreciate being able to come on the podcast.