You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
There's a lot of innovative technology going on in this world, and we have a couple of headlines. Semaphore reported the US and China likely agreeing to set up a formalized channel for talks on artificial intelligence.
Yeah, we also learned that YouTube is going to soon require video makers to disclose whether they've uploaded manipulated or synthetic content that looks realistic just think generative AI. So they got to disclose that.
John mentioned Nvidia up for a tenth consecutive session, longest streak of advances since record setting dash back in December twenty sixteen, and Video, the world's most valuable chip maker, announcing updates to its AI processors. So we want to talk AI. We want to talk innovation, kind of talk the next big thing.
Yeah, we got a great guest to do that. Andrew McAfee as principal Research scientist at mit IS. He's out there of a new book, The Geek Way, The Radical mindset that drives Extraordinary results. He's also the visiting a visiting Fellow, the Visiting fellow, the only one Tech and Society at Google, where he's working with Google and research related to the societal impacts of genitive AI. Andrew joins us on Zoom this afternoon slash evening from Lisbon, Portugal. Andrew, how are you.
I'm well, Thanks for having me.
Hey, well, thanks so much for joining us. The book is called The Geek Way. What is the Geek Way?
The geek Way is an upgrade to the company. It's a better set of philosophies and practices for running this thing we call a company. And I decided to write the book because I kept on seeing in industry after industry the disruptors were beating the incumbents at their own game. And I thought that was a really important phenomenon and I wanted to understand it, and it turned into this book.
Hey, listen, we use the word geek like you're such a geek. Oh, I'm being so geeky, you know, like we kind of toss it around. But what exactly do you mean?
I know, you've got four norms to.
Talk about the geek Way. I mean, is that how you define it?
No? And this is a really important question because when I was a kid geek was an insult, and it was usually meant somebody who was way too into computers. So I was guilty of that. And the thing that makes me happy is that the definition has broadened out and I don't think it's an insult anymore. A geek is somebody with two characteristics. They get obsessed with a really hard problem. They're tenacious, they can't let it go. And if their solutions are unconventional or outside the mainstream,
they don't care. So my shorthand phrase for a geek these days is any kind of obsessive maverick. And the geeks that I wrote the book about are the geeks that got obsessed with this really hard problem of how do you run and keep succeeding with a company in today's really uncertain, turbulent environment.
So elon musk A geek.
Geek, big geek, not perfect, not by any stretch, but adheres deeply to a couple of these norms that I talk about in the geek way.
Well, let's get to those norms. There's four of them.
Speed, ownership, science, and openness. Speed. You're talking about not doing necessarily something fast, but you do something, create it in a meaningful way, and then you get useful feedback on it. I feel like it's every time I get like, hey, an iOS update or something i I'm helping with that speeds.
That's exactly right. And of all the norms, Elon and his companies epitomize speed the most. For me, Tesla is willing to blow up rockets. Now, no people are on those rockets, and they don't have any loss of life yet, but they will iterate and get feedback and learn from reality and learn from physics and blow things up. And
their results really speak for themselves. And if you look at Tesla and it's market value and its ability to build affordable electric cars profitably, they are clearly disrupting the entire incumbent automotive industry and taking it into a different chapter.
What about Tim Cook? Is Tim Cook a geek?
Tim Cook is a geek. Apple is a very secretive company, and in some ways that are a little hard to penetrate. But one thing that I learned about Apple, in addition to being very fond of this iteration of approach, they also followed the norm, the great geek norm of science. And what I mean by that is not do a bunch of fancy statistical ab tests or anything, but settle
your arguments based on evidence. And there's a wonderful story about that portrait mode on the iPhone and the fact that the background is blurry and you can control the blur when you're setting up the photo. There is a debated Apple and they're rolling out that feature about whether we should have the ability to control the blur in advance or only see the effects after we take the picture. Someone in a big meeting did a demo of the feature where you can preview the blur, and that's settled
the argument. That's what science is. It's an evidence based argument. The geeks love to argue and they love evidence, right.
I love that one.
You write about a lot in the book, which is really interesting. The other thing I like is openness, which you know you've got to be able to share, be open to Well, wait a minute, maybe we should do something a little bit differently, or and maybe we have to change. It's so easy to be defensive with, you know, with anything you do.
Tackle us a little bit more about this.
Yeah, and maybe I'm wrong, and maybe we need to pivot, and maybe this thing that I've invested a ton in and this thing that I'm hanging my reputation on is not the right answering we need to change. So for me, openness is just about exactly the opposite of defensiveness, of clinging to what you have and never letting it go. And that defensiveness is very clearly tied to an attitude inside a company of winning all the time, of just winning,
winning the argument, winning the day, winning whatever. I don't think it's a coincidence that Jack Welch's autobiography was called winning and walking away from that. And it's not that the Geeks love losing. These are incredibly tough competitors, but they realize that if you're going to win over the long haul, you have to take risks. You have to fail. Sometimes you have to not punish people when they are failing.
And I think it's amazing that Jeff Bezos, in one of his shareholder letters a few years ago, said, look, if we are not incubating multi billion dollars inside Amazon right now, we are not innovating at the right scale. We are not taking enough risks. Now it looks like a Lexta was one of those multi billion dollar failures. But the culture at Amazon is one that that not only tolerates that, but in any cases celebrates it.
One of those maybe that I don't know if we can consider it a failure at this point, but one of those that wasn't a failure was AWS. And the guy who you know was charged and tasked with building that out is none other than Andy Jassey, who's now the CEO of Amazon. Okay, so Andrew, tell us about some folks who maybe aren't geeks that you've come across in your research, who are high profile and we've heard of.
I mean, you can look at the unbelievable ly short lifespan of Quibi, which was this short vio streaming quick launched.
We all watched it from from our homes during the pandemic. But go ahead, no, we didn't. That's why.
That's why it is.
We didn't watch you tube and hit top, but not Quibi very much. But think about that. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who's the founder of it, is an actual Hollywood vision area, a huge string of tape measure home runs in that industry. He drafted a recruited Meg Whitman to be the CEO of Quibi. They raised coming on two billion dollars to execute Katzenberg's vision of short form entertainment. Now, they didn't do geeky things. They didn't listen to a lot of evidence,
they weren't very open to changes in direction. They didn't build a beta of their product. They just realized this full vision and released it out there into the world. And it lasted as a live streaming platform less than two hundred days before they announced the shutdown of it. It was just this really old fashioned approach where you're just going to blindly follow the vision of the leader,
com hell or high Water. And I contrast that with Netflix, which is funded by this complete outsider to the entertainment industry and is now disrupting that industry even as we speak.
Fascinating.
Is there so thought in terms of AI? We're all like agg it feels like over artificial intelligence.
Yeah, my John Tucker's looking at me. Yeah, guy, thank you.
But how do you think about it?
Especially?
Is there a geek to follow when it comes to AI that you think is going to be on it.
Well, I think first of all, that this period that we're living through of unreal science fiction progress with AI, and in particular this latest chapter of generative AI, these are some of the most powerful tools we humans have ever invented to help us accomplish our goals. We're living through an astonishing ceriad of innovation. Now, what kinds of companies are going to be successful at harnessing that technology. I think they're geek companies. This technology is so new
it's deeply weird. The future is very uncertain. I think maybe the only way, but certainly the best way that you're going to get smart about it and learn how to use AI and generative AI is by following this geeky approach of taking a little risk, trying something, getting feedback, iterating, moving into the future. That way, I'll be astonished if AI helps the people still following the industrial era playbook come back against the geeks. I do not predict.
I'm so dying to ask you about metaverse, but we've run out of time. You're gonna have to come back. This was fascinating. Andrew McAfee, Principal Research signists at MIT. His book is called The Geek Way, The radical mindset that drives extraordinary, extraordinary results, extraordinary works, extraordinary too, really fascinating right in terms of how you look at things.
The Geek Way