All right, the return of Sam Allman.
It's nice to be back, right?
You know, YC is going to be huge next batch.
Interviewed like more than a thousand companies.
Open eyes going really well.
I'm ready for this year to be winding down, but it's been a good one.
So I want to do something a little bit different for this episode and just break apart a lot of your essays.
I have a rough outline with a few general topics that you seem to have written about a few times.
And I figure we can kind of just go into each one.
So it seems like there are several categories from observing your thoughts and then choosing what to work on
and then creating actual value once you've chosen a thing.
And then pass that kind of purpose in general, like purpose in your work.
The first one, the first quote that I liked was from your essay, the days are long, but the decades are short.
And that quote was minimize your cognitive load from distracting things that don't really matter.
It's hard to overstate how important this is and how bad most people are at it.
I think it's very easy to spend a decade being incredibly busy and incredibly stressed every day and feeling like you're working incredibly hard and creating a ton of movement but not moving forward.
And I think this is like a big trap and it's so easy to get caught up in things that are urgent but unimportant.
Or it is so easy to get caught up in the trifles of office politics and playing status and power games that don't matter, but feel so fun and so important.
Or just random other bullshit that piles up in life.
I've at least found for myself, I have like a fixed budget of cognitive output per day and I can spend that on whatever.
But if I let it go on unimportant stuff, then I never have time to get to the really important stuff and it's so easy to get heads down and focused and sort of miss like, what am I actually accomplishing?
The number of people who have said to me like, man, I thought for 10 years I was doing incredible work because I felt like I was creating a huge amount of output.
But in retrospect, it was in the wrong direction.
You do need to focus and do stuff, but I think it's really good to focus for some period of time and then step back and think, like, am I doing the right thing?
You also don't want to make the mistake that the stereotypical Silicon Valley 22-year-old or 21-year-old college dropout says of, I'm going to solve all the world's problems in three months, and if I haven't done it in three months, I failed, so I'm going to give up and do the next thing, and then they jump onto some other project.
That's bad too, so balancing this is hard.
I think like making, checking in to make sure you're working on things that matter and working on an appropriate time scale, time horizon is really important.
Cause I kind of wanted to address broadly how do you even frame that?
You have a certain amount of like detachment that you need.
And so when you, how do you step back when you need to?
I am pretty good about in my downtime, I naturally just think about do I feel like I am being maximally useful and working on the right things or should YC be doing something totally different than we are today?
Should we be willing to throw everything out and rethink about it or is it going well?
But I think people find different ways to do that.
Like one specific thing I do, which has sort of become this annual ritual I really like, is December 31st every year.
I take a break from vacation and I like sit and I write down what went well the last year, what didn't, I look at like how I did on my to-do list for the year and I write them out for the next year.
And because I know I'm going to do that every year, I stress about it less the other 364 days.
But I think like the fundamental pattern that has always worked for me is take time, explore a lot of things, try a lot of things, try to have like a beginner's mind about what will work and what won't work.
But trust your intuitions, pursue a lot of things as cheaply and quickly as possible, and then be very honest with yourself about what's working well and what's not.
And then the hard part is cut all the stuff that's not working and focus down and down until you're eventually focused on the one thing that's really working or the two things that are really working.
In terms of choosing, I mean, the sort of transitions into choosing what to work on and how to create value, but in terms of establishing those metrics for, you know, so say you say you have like, you know, YC, open AI, and then the rest of your life.
Do you create similar metrics for each one or does each one?
It's like I am skeptical of these like systems where you try to have like everything on the same rubric.
I mean, the best thing I can say is I follow my interests.
I try to pursue a lot of projects that seem interesting.
I realize that most of them will fail and I don't care.
And then the ones that, as long as the ones that work really work.
So like opening up, it really works.
I've done plenty of other things in the last five years that have not worked at all.
We should explore that because I think it's something that's not talked about and it's to the detriment of everyone.
So for example, like last year, year before you were doing a lot of political stuff.
Yeah, I still think that is going to work.
Let me try to frame it in an area where a lot of things went wrong at once.
But in a way that was really good.
So I sold my startup when I was 26, something like that.
And I worked the acquiring company for a little while, maybe 25, I don't remember.
And then I took a year off.
And in that year, uh, which is hard to do, it's really hard to do in Silicon Valley because like in a place where social status is determined by your job and what you're working on, like when you show up at a party and someone says, Oh, what are you working on?
And you're like, uh, I'm kind of just taking the year off.
Like you can sort of see in real time their eyes, like look for someone else in the room to talk to you.
It doesn't feel that good.
It's an incredibly privileged thing to be able to do this, but if you are in the position between jobs where you can take a year off, I highly recommend it.
I think it was one of the two or three best career things that I ever did.
In that year, I read many dozens of textbooks.
I learned about fields that I had been interested in.
I didn't have any idea that they were all going to come together in the way they did, but I learned a lot about nuclear engineering.
I was starting to work, so I learned a lot about AI.
I learned about synthetic biology.
I learned about investing.
That was the year that I started being like, well, I had made maybe four angel investments before this, but I was like, all right, I'm going to get serious about this and try it and see if I like it.
feel for a much more of a feel for like What the rest of the world is like I met people that were working on all sorts of different things who were nice enough to talk to me I got Badly needed time to reconnect with my friends and family.
I just got caught up on life
And I just sort of like helped people that seemed, I had unlimited time, right?
So if I met someone interesting and it seemed good and needed help, I would just help them.
And they would teach me stuff or they would like offer me the chance to invest in their startup later.
And I left myself unscheduled so I'd like the drop of the hat I could like fly to another country for a conference.
And I started doing all this random stuff.
Out of all of it, almost all of it didn't work out.
But the seeds were planted for things that worked in deep ways later.
Okay, so you both sound like it was positive, and it was great, and you had a great time.
But when you say it didn't work out, how does that... Oh, I mean, like the individual projects.
Like I invested in a bunch of companies that failed.
I got really excited about a few companies I wanted to start that turned out to be bad ideas for different reasons.
But that's like fine because that's the thing when you're in explore mode, you try a lot of projects and you accept that most won't work.
So yeah, I know a few people that have gone through this and it seems like they don't always.
So maybe they say, all right, I'm going to go on vacation and that lasts a couple months and then they come back and start meeting with people.
Or maybe they just immediately jump into something, start researching whatever is trendy, which I think is like a separate problem where you're just following everyone else.
Usually you the crowd is right sometimes and Okay, fine, but then how do you become decisive?
Because you say yeah, so this is the trick relatively short the trick is How do you figure out what to commit to and when yeah, and this is where I think
It takes brutal honesty with yourself about which projects are actually working and which you would like to convince yourself are working.
And I've been guilty of this mistake many times and I will be many times in the future.
This is a very hard thing to train yourself to do to really step back and dispassionately look and say like, am I desperately trying against myself?
This is working or is this actually working?
But I think it is a muscle that is buildable.
Like clearly people get good at that.
Um, it's just hard because it means admitting failure in something like every time I make a major investment in a company, um, I am convinced it's going to work.
You don't go in expecting to lose your money or at least, you know, like I am prepared to pay for the expected value that I think it's going to work.
And once you've anchored that, it's like hard to go back and be like, man, I was so wrong, which obviously happens all the time.
The best thing about investing in a lot of companies is you learn to be, it's very humbling.
You learn to be majorly wrong very frequently.
And you learn that that's okay as long as the magnitude of the successes pays for all of the failures.
I haven't thought about this before but say you sold your company and had some money and weren't thinking about being an angel investor.
Do you think it's actually a good idea to angel invest a little bit before you start something else even if you're not pulled in that direction?
The things that I think have taught me a lot about like
business are poker and angel investing.
So I recommend both of those.
By the way, as a quick plug for poker, so I played a lot in college fairly seriously.
And it's not for everybody, but
I strongly recommend it as just a way to kind of like learn about the world in business and psychology and risk and everything else.
Did you play like competitively?
I went to school on the peninsula and so I would go down there a lot.
Did that fund your startup?
It did not for my startup, but it funded my living expenses as a college student.
Yeah, I'm always surprised by it.
I mean, there aren't infinite people who can do this, but there are enough people that actually make so much.
But I would have done it for free.
Did you ever get into the online stuff, like 10 hands at once?
That was not as fun, and then it kind of stopped.
So you wrote the productivity post fairly recently.
I thought that was really fun.
Your three main tips were sleep, exercise, and nutrition.
For like physical productivity.
I think that's like a small fraction of the whole thing, but yes.
But I think that's core, right?
Because if you don't have a foundation, you're off.
Look, it is possible that I am incredibly genetically unlucky and I just like these people who claim they only need to sleep four hours a night, it's true.
Like I try to sleep eight hours or close to it as much as I can.
And I get it most nights.
And, um, if you're trying to like win on really big creative ideas, um, much better off like cut something, have less of them, whatever.
But like for me, skimping on sleep, which I have tried at other points in my life is a terrible trade.
I've tried to optimize what I kind of think of as like my best time, you know, like, I try not to sell my best time for anything other than the projects I want to work on.
I think, um, everyone, it takes people a while, but everyone figures out what that is.
Um, like for me, it's early mornings or like the first three hours after I wake up and like, man, do I put a huge premium on anything, get it in the way of that.
How many hours do you think you have good hours every day?
It's always in flux, but I mean, like, if you take a armadaffin or something, you get 20.
Yeah, but I don't know if that's necessarily the best version of Sam Altman.
I mean, I can definitely like sit down and be like super productive for eight hours in a row.
I mean, go to the bathroom or whatever, but no break.
Which I think is more than most people can do, but I mean, I think I can get four before I need to go work out or something, but it's definitely not like 16.
And I think like the people who say 16, I feel like I get much more done than they do.
So I just don't believe it.
Maybe, yeah, until we evolve and someone can get 16 done.
So in your broad writing on choosing what to work on, I love the hamming lecture.
I watched it a long time ago.
And he's so much more prescriptive than most people are today, which I really enjoy the tone of.
Do you remember that story of the lunch room?
People don't talk like that anymore.
Not everyone, not many or not many.
Um, it's been very interesting trying to sort of help create a research institution here.
Um, and I do think we've done one of the more interesting research labs of the last couple of decades.
Um, the world isn't set up to support this anymore.
And I, and it's a very interesting question about why, um, but I think if you take one, one thing I've learned from open eyes, if you sit down and say like,
Our research goal is to create AGI.
That's very far off and very hard.
You work on anything you want that is going to help us get there.
And how do you manage the psychology of multiple teams working on things that are all pointing toward AGI, but in different directions?
You know, like maybe it's robotics, maybe it's gaming.
And then all of a sudden someone gets a result.
Does that shift an entire team?
Um, yeah, I think it's really like, I think it's actually a very similar algorithm to what we were talking about for how to figure out what to do with your life.
Like try lots of things, let people follow their intuitions.
And then when somebody starts working, put a lot more resources behind it.
That's worked for us really well.
Um, one other thing from, uh, the days are long, but decades are short.
I liked your risk explanation.
Um, so specifically you say things in life are rarely as risky as they seem.
Most people are too risk averse.
And so most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths.
Yeah, I mean, the risk is you look like the real what risk actually looks like is that you look back at the end of your career and you're like, fuck, I wasted it.
And people aren't programmed to think about risk that way.
Like we're very good at thinking about
short-term catastrophic risk, and we're very bad about thinking about long-term chronic risk.
We worry about nuclear plant meltdowns, but not about inhaling coal smoke or whatever.
There's like a very small handful of people that I would say, like I have taken interest in their careers because I think they're going to like do amazing things in the world.
And I try to spend a lot of time with for no reason other than I want to help them.
And consistently, like this is the thing I find myself pushing them on, which is you're thinking about, you're thinking too small and you're thinking about risk the wrong way.
Or you need a perspective shift.
Man, perspective shift, that's something I want to write about that at some point.
I think as you get older, getting a shift in perspective just gets harder and harder and harder.
And it's an unbelievably valuable thing to get.
I think this is why people end up taking like lots of psychedelic drugs.
I don't know if that's the best approach.
But keeping this sort of mental flexibility to look at things from fresh perspectives and new angles, man, is that important to hold on to.
It doesn't happen very often.
It's like losing someone close to you, losing, losing things or the psychedelic path has become very popular.
And yeah, just on reading the research, I've been like, and, you know, limited experience.
You're like, Oh, so it's both abstracting you from your daily habits and then giving you the motivation to pursue things that you were kind of on the fence with.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think you need drugs for any of that.
I think you just need to commit to do it and give yourself like a space and a format and people to do it with.
The other like thing that I found for all of this stuff that really matters is surrounding yourself with people who will
make you more ambitious, sort of make you more inquisitive, shift your perspective more is really important.
And basically all people, almost like 98% of people in the world will try to pull you back and say it seems a little bit too crazy, a little bit too out there, a little bit too ambitious.
Yeah, almost everyone wants you to be average.
because it fits their framework.
Yeah, it's just it's more comfortable.
Has any book you've ever read on risk helped you understand risk or is it just through experience?
Playing poker is one good way to do it and reading poker books was good.
Like reading biographies of people who have done like really amazing things I think is helpful.
Like I love reading about sort of like the great, the big iron science and engineering projects of history.
Um, like, but I don't think I'd ever, it's hard to imagine I would ever get tired of like reading books about the Apollo program.
So now that like the, the next kind of theme in a lot of your writings about creating value and say someone's chosen whatever they might want to work in your productivity essay, you say, my system has three kill, three key pillars.
Make sure to get the important shit done.
Don't waste time on stupid shit and make lots of lists.
I feel like you should have had shit in the last one.
You never get to get away from the things you've written.
Anyway, actually, I think it's good.
Well, I do fundamentally – I may be able to phrase it differently, but I do believe – I think people overcomplicate it.
I think this all productivity point thing where you have these systems and these multivariable charts and three-dimensional, whatever.
Like those people never seem to be the people who like really move the world forward.
And I think any system as long as it keeps you disciplined and getting done what you say you're going to get done.
is fine and I think like the simple ones really work.
The one thing I would say is if you're going to try to like multitask a lot, written lists are very helpful.
But beyond that, I think like whatever you find that works for you is good and I think like focus and prioritization are the keys here.
I think for the most part you know what to do and you know when you're screwing around and not doing it.
One thing that I have found helps people is if they have like a lot of CEOs form these small groups of like accountability buddies.
It happens very naturally during YC because you have your batch mates and you have like group office hours and then you lose it and people feel their productivity sag and so they reform the groups by themselves and that seems to work.
Yeah, there was this guy, Nick Crocker, who wrote this post, Elephants, I don't know if you ever know this post.
But yeah, it was him and three of his friends, basically weekly emails and then quarterly check-ins.
It's very simple and easy to follow, would recommend it.
So the other thing you talk about in creating value, you talk about these like big projects.
And there's this other essay you wrote called What Happened to Innovation.
And I think it's this fear that many people have like, oh man, all the cool shit already happened.
When in reality, it is obviously happening, but you're questioning like how can we incentivize more of this one thing works like if we do actually build a guide opening that is more important than all the innovation, some total and humanity so far.
So clearly not as all the innovation happened.
It's an interesting question of why people feel that way.
Um, one is it's cool to like seem sort of world weary.
Um, one is people like to complain.
it is true that most of the innovation recently has been in software like and the internet.
Now, I do think the internet is like a triumph of humanity and like that's where the frontier is.
That's where the best people want to go work.
And so I think it is a fair criticism to say like most recent big iron innovation has been on the internet.
Um, and that is a criticism, but it's also a praise.
And like, you know, I think there's usually like a small handful of frontiers where the most talented people go because that's where you're making the most progress.
And sure, it's not physics right now, but that's okay.
And I think it's like, if you just look at the rate of change in humanity in the last decade, it's crazy.
Like the internet will not solve all problems, but I think it'd be a mistake to say we're not making progress.
And what about funding mechanisms?
Have you changed your, I mean, I think that post was pre open AI.
I will have a lot more to share here.
Hopefully in the first quarter of 2019, one of my big projects this year has been how you fund the stuff.
And I think we're close to an answer on projects without, without the same appeal as AGI.
Well, if it's not going to create a lot of value for the world at some point, I still don't have an answer.
But things that will create value for the world, but on a long timeframe and in uncertain ways, I think we'll have some new structures to share.
There was a point that Hamming brought about in his lecture that he said, he who works with a door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
So this figuring out the balance of how much random flux you accept in your life for how much waste of time is hard.
The at some point and it takes a long time to get here, you know, you get to like hire a couple of people who screen stuff for you.
But I didn't have that luxury for a long time.
And there's basically two things to do.
One is you take a lot of random meetings and you accept that 90% of the time you will waste your time and be fresh with yourself for wasting your time for that one meeting that makes it all worth it net.
Um, but the trade off of that is you have to work so much because you got to do that in addition to your regular work.
Yeah, do you allocate a percentage for that?
Um, I used to again, I've got sort of good screen systems, but I used to be like, I used to spend, I don't know, like 10, 15 hours per week and like random stuff.
And most of the time it was just painful and sometimes it's so valuable.
Um, I think if you cut it off entirely, it's disastrous.
Like if you don't have any like flow of like,
people outside your network with new ideas or just a lot of talent that is under, appreciated.
That's like a key point to that lecture.
Where it's like Nobel Prize winners only work on important problems and it removes them from that.
So you can't cut it off totally, but if you're not willing to work really hard, I think you do have to just cut it down a lot.
I remember it was a funny moment at the hackathon, like last year when you were there, uh, there was some team who was like, we're going to do this and then we're going to do that.
And then we're going to work on rockets or like help work on the rockets.
And you said something that I thought was so great where you're like, if you want to work on rockets, go work on rockets.
I don't believe in the deferred life plan.
A common criticism of people in Silicon Valley who I think have great futures in their past are people who say some version of the following sentence.
My life's work is to build rockets, so what I'm going to do is spend, I'm going to make $100 million in the next three, maybe they say four, in the next four years trading cryptocurrency with my crypto hedge fund because I don't want to think about the money problem anymore and then I'm going to build rockets.
And they never do either.
I believe if these people would just pick one thing or the other, you know, I'm obsessed with money, so I'm going to go make $100 million, however long that takes, but with a long enough time horizon that it's reasonable.
Or I'm just going to build rockets right now.
I believe they would succeed it either.
But the problem, one of the many problems with the deferred life plan is everyone can kind of tell that that's what you're on.
And you're not that serious about, you're not that committed to either.
I mean, it must work sometimes, but I've seen it fail a lot, lot, lot.
And I understand the temptation of it and I understand the degree to which people feel, well,
They're never like, I'm going to make $1 million and then work on rockets and just raise the capital.
They're people that tend to be obsessed with making a lot of money.
And I understand the temptation to figure out basic financial security, of course.
But I think one of the things that's amazing about Silicon Valley
Is you actually can raise money.
As an unknown 22 year old to go make a rocket company.
It's happened several times at yc and so that's what you want to do like just get on with it.
The company will pay you a salary like you'll be fine if you can raise money at all you'll be fine if you can't raise money like think about something else but it is.
I mean, I could go on such a long rant that I will just bore people and piss people off.
But I would say the deferred life plan empirically usually does not work.
And if what you want to work on is like an ambitious company and you are in Silicon Valley and you are competent,
you very likely can figure out a way to just work on that problem.
Maybe it means you have to go be an employee at SpaceX instead of being Elon Musk, but at least you're doing what you want.
And it's also like, listen, dude, if what you really want is a hundred million dollars and you just make sure that exactly just like call a spade a spade and make money and but be willing to like agree that that takes you except that that takes a long time.
And you can't just sort of say, I'm going to compress this into three or four years.
And that's when you don't have guarantee it doesn't work.
You don't have to hide behind wanting to make rockets.
Yeah, I think many people actually do want to make their rockets, but they also you have to like pick one kind of you have to like You can't say I'm gonna do this thing for the short period of time and then do what I really want to do or you'll never motivate people to like Join you and want you to win and work with you.
People can sense authenticity.
People can sense people's motivation.
People can sense if you're doing something because, like,
if you're doing something for the right reasons.
And I think like to succeed in anything, it's important that people are rooting for you.
It's important that people want you to win investors to press your team, whatever.
Um, and I think that's one of another one of the many problems with the, with the deferred life plan.
People have seemingly like any intelligence level and almost like any EQ level have amazing bullshit detectors.
And again, like doing anything worthwhile takes a long time and it takes a lot of like emotional trauma, like a lot of people telling you you're an idiot or wrong or whatever.
If you're not willing to sign up for that, you're not going to succeed.
And people can also kind of sense when you're like, not willing to sign up for that.
Like if you're doing the crypto fund just to make money or not, because you're a diehard believer in crypto, people can kind of tell.
But even if it comes, yeah, it's not even that.
It's just like riding this wave.
Even making money, because if you're doing the crypto fund to make money, that is kind of aligned.
But if you're not really into the crypto part of it, then you don't know what you're talking about.
Yeah, just like something about it is...
No, I've had it with like side projects where I'm like, you know, maintaining code for months and months.
And then I realized, like, I don't know how much I care about this.
But then it's hard, like, it's hard to pull out at that point.
Because it's going to go nowhere.
Um, so one of the last things that I wanted to talk about is, is purpose in work and careers in general.
And I think it's kind of related to AGI.
So you wrote an essay, the merge while back and you said our self-worth is so based on our intelligence that we believe it must be singular and not slightly higher than all the other animals on a continuum.
Perhaps the AI will feel the same way and note that the differences between us and Bonobos are barely worth discussing.
So, this is a common topic, right?
Where do you think that's going in the AGI era, if it happens?
Look, I think people find purpose and meaning in many different ways.
And it is the only thing I care about is that people find it somewhere.
If it's in raising a family, if it's in, you know, running a eSports team, I think that's like as valid as trying to build AGI.
The thing I hate is just people who are apathetic and proud of it.
But yeah, I think that the definition of there are, I think, what seem to be some human universals about ways that we get meaning in life, like human relationships for almost everybody are at the top of that list.
Feeling like we're creating value for others, feeling like other people think highly of us and respect us.
There are many ways to do those things.
And I think one thing that will happen with the sort of arrival of
Like, I got lucky, I got born reasonably smart, will be less and less of a benefit.
60,000 years ago, like running around, intelligence wasn't that much of a benefit, like physical strength endurance, much more important.
60,000 years from now, human biological intelligence, I don't think will be that much of a benefit again.
And it's just, it happens to be at a moment in society where it is really valuable.
Yeah, actually I find it in particular it's out here, like intelligence is so highly rated that people seem oddly disconnected from their bodies.
So it's been cool seeing you like doing the whole workout plan now.
How much do you weigh now?
I think I gained 18 pounds of muscle mass this year.
Yeah, and vegetarian too.
So you're heavy lifting, right?
Much better than doing like heavy cardio.
Well, the thing about like, I've shifted over to lifting this year and I've found that.
So first of all, you get way stronger, way faster.
Like heavy cardio does almost nothing.
It just makes you eat a lot more.
I was good at bike riding, but like now I actually see physical progress, which is crazy.
I mean, the sad thing about it is like,
So I gained all this weight, which makes it harder to run, and I haven't been running this year.
So I don't even know if I could run a mile without stopping at this point.
So in some sense, I'm in terrible shape.
But in other sense, I'm really strong.
But they're so different.
Yeah, they're diametrically opposed.
There are people online that are like, oh, well, if you get your squad up to 500, you can bike anything.
And it's like, you don't understand power to weight.
So, are you going to set a goal for your fitness?
I already hit my lifting goals for this year, but I'll keep going through the end of the year anyway.
I think the last thing is like, what are you reading right now?
The last thing I read, it's really short.
It's called The Way to Love by Anthony DeMello.
It'll take you like an hour to read.
It was recommended to me by Naval and it is a series of meditations on life and it is a super fast read and I just finished it.