Someone is going to build a great tool to write in a new way, and that will expand the realm of human possibility. How do you use ChatGPT every day? I really do use it as a general purpose tool. Every few months I find new ways to use it. Have you read the paper driven by compression progress? Compression is like the secret to intelligence, and we're going to go figure out how to compress as much knowledge as possible. That's what we're going to make AI.
If you were to write a book, what would it be about? Almost all business books are terrible, right? There's like three good ideas and 300 pages. What a reader wants is three good ideas in one page. You wanted to be a novelist that astounded me. But only for the romantic life of it, smoking in a cafe in Paris, and yeah, you can still do that. I could. Probably not the path my life is going to go on, but I could.
You ever wonder how Sam Alman takes notes, thinks about annual planning, thinks about sabbaticals, what he's going to actually work on, how he chose to focus on AGI? You ever wonder when he learned from Paul Graham? With those are the things that we talk about in this episode, and we get answers.
Now you'll see this conversation is in two parts. So the first part we recorded in early 2024, the second part in late 2024, and then this interview is just those two things combined and brought together. And before we get into it, one more thing. I'm about to run my final last ever write a passage cohort. This is the last one ever.
This is the graduation tour. This is the last dance. If you want to get to writing, if you get inspired by this episode, and you want to join us, go to writeapassage.com. I would love to have you on the program. All right. Let's get into the conversation with Sam Alman. All right, Sam. I want to begin with how is knowledge of LLM's changed? How you think about writing and communication?
I mean, I think we are going to all, no, I think many of us are going to write in a different way. And the future, I don't mean like people are just going to use LLM's to write stuff for them, because one of the strangest things that I think happens is when people put a few bullet points into an LLM, have a generated nice email, send it to Sam.
And then they summarize it on the other end, because we just can't agree that we just want the bullet points back and forth, and there's still the societal nicety. But someone is going to build, probably somebody already has built a first version of this, like a great tool to write in a new way, where you have this thing that is not expanding your bullet points, but is helping you discover new things in the idea space.
And that's awesome. Like that's what computers do it their best, right? Is they help, they are a tool that help you do things you otherwise couldn't do. I've always thought it was strange how we've had this tools for thought, idea for decades, and yet the vast majority of the way people write is they open up Microsoft Word, and they have no aid from a computer. Really, it's just like a typewriter.
Yeah, I mean, it turns out that like writing is pretty good. I don't we can sure make it better, but I understand why that's where we are. Tell me if this is faceless or accurate or we're on the spectrum, it is, but I find it interesting that there's a juxtaposition between words being more important on the input and then moving away from words with the output. So, Dali, I think words are going to be a huge part of how we communicate with computers, how we program computers.
And natural language is kind of the interface to computers that people want. I think I think that's been, you know, sci-fi predict that for a long time. But I think a big part of the revolution of chat GPT was you could just talk to a computer in plain English and get it to do all these things. It won't be the only way we want to interact with computers, of course, and you'll have multimodal input as well as output, but we are very finely evolved to use language.
There's also something special about text. Yeah, for sure. Searchable, malleable. There is a reason that this has been such a part of like, to imagine humanity and human culture without language. It's like, oh, it seems imposter. I can't do it. And even text itself, the, there's a rigored text. There's a rigored to thinking in text, for sure. Yeah, I get it. Because you can point to specific words and sentences that you disagree with rather than just the overall vibe.
So if we're having a conversation, I can't remember the exact word that you said. But if there's a transcription, I can say, I was this that I really like this that I think we can make some minor changes to. How should chat GPT be changing how we teach our kids how to write? I don't think we know yet what the writing of the future, the process is going to look like I would bet it's just like a safe baseline that it's not going to change all that much.
I think we will have new tools that let people write in different ways and hopefully get more sort of idea refinement and generation out of the process. But, you know, this thing that people say of like, no one's ever going to learn to write anymore because now it's just like that. That's not why people really write in the first place like the kind of writing that you can just the kind of thing you would do by having chat GPT go write your ear kind of, you know, essay for English class.
That's not real. That's not what this is about anyway. And if chat GPT can help people do do a writing like activity and get higher quality thinking out of it, that's wonderful. Tell me about that literally if we believe that part of the value a big part of the value of writing is to clarify your own thinking and we can have new tools that help you do that better than before. That'll be a big one.
What I think of chat GPT is raising the returns to is the initial seed the big bang moment of an idea. And this is a way that I like using chat GPT is I know that I have a distinct idea of chat GPT disagree with me. And then once I have that idea if I can clarify in some sort of way, then chat GPT can help me find examples and stories things that amplify and help to grow the initial seed that I've planted.
Totally. I think I've, you know, I try to like watch people like very different walks of life use chat GPT and it's always eliminating. So I watched two students use it to kind of like help with their homework do their homework to be honest recently. And one of them basically just like put in their thing and wrote their whole essay and I was like appalled because I kind of knew that that was a theoretical thing that people were doing.
You know, significant volume or whatever, but you hear about it. But like to like watch someone just like do that and then get an essay that was, you know, bad, but like passable out of it was intro like that was like a real like what have we done moment. I was like this rolling away that you know, I just hadn't I'd never seen someone do it before.
And then I watch someone else use it in a very different more interactive way to try to do something more like what you're talking about, which is like I have this idea I can't quite articulate it. I'm kind of stuck. Let me get on block and let me generate a bunch more ideas. And the thing that came out of that was far better than I think anybody would have done on their own.
And I was like reflecting a lot on that. And the first question was like a bad question like if you can just put something in and get a super interesting or that I thought not like I a super passable response. I think we're just like asking people to do the wrong thing. Whereas if it's something that like. Gets them to want to think about a question differently and use the tool to help them get somewhere they wouldn't have gotten on their own. That's really interesting.
How do you use chat GPT every day? I used to only use it for a few things. And both chat GPT has gotten better and I figured I'd use it more. And so the cool thing now is I really do use it as a general purpose tool. And I hope that a few years from now on you asked I'll say I use it for most things that I do. Like every few months I find new ways to use it new ways to incorporate. It's it's obviously still.
Terribly integrated into most people's workflows, but that's just going to get better and better. When you're talking to friends, you're like you should use chat GPT for this. What are the themes that you're telling them to do? I mean, the thing that I hear about from my friends that they love it for the most is like computer programming help in somewhere or other. And the number of people who say that's like transform my life. I mean like. It's very gratifying here. It's all fun. Like.
There are other things where people say it's like change the way my kids learn or teachers say change the way teachers that's great to. And then there's like incredible examples with healthcare, the way people use this for creative work. But the programming one is like near and dear to my heart many of my friends or programmers. So I hear about that a lot. Email. Yeah, you do a lot of writing by email and you've. I do a lot of like very short email. I do a lot of like seven or two emails.
And how is chat GPT help do with that? It's super good to summarize in all emails that like most long emails. Honestly, I just stop. I don't even read. But if I have to read one, it's super good at like chat GPT's ability to effectively summarize long pieces of content. I like a really long thread or whatever very impressive. Yeah, it was just I got a tour of the library here. Yeah, that's cool space.
Nice job. I like that space a lot. It's beautiful. Thank you. And the I saw the in Cherto on the wall, but it seemed to lab. And he says that basically the definition of a good book is one that can't be summarized. And maybe there's an equivalent for GPT. There's a really interesting. Thing there, which is that it's some sense. It took me like years to really understand this, but I'll you would always say that what these models are really about is compression.
And we're going to go figure out how to compress as much knowledge as possible. And that's what we're going to make AI. Compression is like the secret to intelligence. And. That was like I had to meditate on that for a long time. I'm sure I still don't fully understand it. But there's something deep there.
I was talking to your assistant. She said that you think very clearly or like a man a few words, but when you say something, it's it's really you're clearing what you want and you really crystallized your message. I guess the part of that that resonates is I do try to like get at the essence of problem. I definitely don't like when other people communicate. Clearly. That was really interesting in your conversation with Joe Hudson, how you spoke about the way that you've.
Released anxiety from your life. How has that change in your internal state shown up in your thinking? I don't remember who said this, but someone. This is a friend who is like a famous quote with someone said like most people can't even let themselves think the interesting thoughts much less say the interesting ideas. And I think there is something about the world that has gone horribly wrong there. And I'm sure having like background anxiety running this process makes it harder to think.
New thoughts and a focus for sure if you're like a bundle of anxiety and you have like an intermonologue spending you an all sorts of different directions that's hard to really sit down and focus. But if you're like constantly self critical if you're constantly saying well, what other people think about this if I even you know. I think a lot of people have. I've heard people say things like well.
That might be an interesting idea, but I would like feel embarrassed or foolish to even like tell people that I was thinking about it. If you can't even let yourself like go pretty far down the path of an exploring idea before you worry about one of the people are going to think about it. That that seems bad. This idea that you have around people spend so much time trying to think about how to be more productive, but you're like hold on hold on hold on.
Let's talk about how to really think about what we're going to work on in the first place. How does writing help you do that? So first of all, I strongly agree that if you have a choice between spending some effort thinking about what's work on versus how to like be a little bit more productive in this new method or that new method. With a very, you should a very high bar for doing anything but thinking about what to work on. I think that's just sort of a higher.
I think that's the impact thing most of the time. Of course, it doesn't work all the time. It's a point you actually have to go execute, but I often see people who I think are really talented work super hard are super productive. Just not spend much time or surprisingly often not really spend any time at all in a meaningful way thinking about what they're going to work on. And I think that's like the high order bit.
That's that's part one in terms of writing this way to do that. I think of writing is sort of like externalized thinking. I still if I have like a very hard problem or if I feel a little bit confused about something have not found anything better to like sit down and make myself write it out. Write out like what I'm you know how I'm thinking about it. What I think somebody should be try to like figure out how to explain it to myself or to somebody else.
So I think it's just like it is a super powerful thinking tool. I write for my right things down for myself or for the most and for like private groups the second most public at this point very rarely. What are the different parameters of clear communication. There's sort of the slogan earing. There is a good tagline. There's also the depth of the idea. Yeah, actually I think clear communication is very much less important and very much downstream of actually clear thinking.
So if you know what you're going to do. If you've and if you've like figured out how to like reduce that to the essence of why it's a good idea and what the plan is going to be. What the priorities are going to be then communicating clearly about that is not so hard. But getting clear about the actual ideas is really hard. And so I think unclear communication is a symptom of unfocused thinking for the most part. Napoleon.
He has a line about the importance of clear directives clear communication because when you're on the battlefield you need to be able to articulate things simply and have alignment for the team lots of similarities with what you're saying. I mean, I think that's just the point. I think that is I understand that I haven't studied a lot of military history, but that's like a pretty common refrain like that seems to have been born out by history.
But I also think that's like born out in business that clarity speed quality of execution all linked. Of all the things you've written, what are you most proud of? This is not false modesty truly none of it. Writing is not my gift and I'm okay with that. Writing is super valuable to me as a tool for thinking for communicating with internally with the org, but there's nothing. I hope I will do things that like stand the test of time and matter to the world.
It's not going to be my writing, but that doesn't mean I don't get a lot of value out of it. To give you a little bit more credit, maybe the purple pros isn't your gift, but a piece like how to be successful really influence me. Thank you. I appreciate that. To make every next thing that you do, be a footnote to what you've done before. That's a profound idea. Yeah, I mean, I think I hope that like I will contribute some ideas to the world that matter.
Again, I hope all of those matter much less than opening I does, but that's nice for you to say so. I genuinely appreciate it. We'll go get you to start writing the personal blog. I wanted to like practice writing. I had this like sense I had watch program right and he's an amazing writer. I never had any aspirations that I was going to be anything like that, but I had seen how powerful it was for helping start a founders and for getting to invest in good startup founders.
I wanted to try to get good at it. I'm not a naturally gifted writer, but I believe like you know with practice, anybody, people can get good at a lot of things. I wanted to like kind of continue doing the thing that seemed to work so well for why see getting good founders. But honestly, it wasn't it's not my calling them life. I don't really do it anymore. You wanted to be a novelist that astounded me.
I did, but only for the like romantic life of it, not that I thought I was ever going to be a good writer. It just seemed like this like very good person to sit, you know, smoking in a cafe in Paris. Yeah, you can still do that. I could. Probably not the path my life is going to go. So I turn out I'm like not a very good writer. And I'm not going to be a blogger and that's okay, but I am still very happy at the experiment because I learned that I can like.
Right for myself to clear from my own thinking and that has been super powerful. Even the ability to like write a message to like explain to a team what a plan is and why we're going to do it. I think doing that in writing versus doing that in a meeting is often very powerful. Have you done that recently?
It's like if we're starting a new project or if we're putting together some sort of like plan that we're going to execute on forcing myself to write it down rather than just like sitting in a meeting and let us to ball around. It's been very good to have a format of sorts. No, no. I mean, I try to like keep it under I don't think long is good. Yeah, so I try to keep it short but beyond that. No, no, we're all constraints.
Tell me about your just communication lessons that you've learned from Peter Tiel. He is so distinct in the way that he communicates and you've spent a lot of time with him, especially early in your career. He's an amazing communicator. And one thing that he does super well is he comes up with these like very evocative, very short statements that really sticking your brain.
And I don't know how to do that. I don't really know anybody else who does that like he does, but it's a he has like very interesting things to say and very interesting ways to say them. And most people you're lucky to get one or the other. He is like a very rare combination of both. It's super impressive. What do you think contributes to that? He thinks about the world in this sort of like deeply unconstrained way.
Yeah, I mean the first thing anybody would say about him. He is a truly brilliant original thinker. And that's just rare. There's a boundlessness about your thinking that really stands out. Like I feel like you have that same sort of a lack of constraint. I think he's he's more of a like here is this totally. Here is a totally different view on something that no one else has ever expressed and now sounds like obviously. At least interesting and often obviously correct.
And I think my view of the world is often more like. Can we just do more like we have this like vector? Can we push on a harder? Is that like the David George sense of like everything is possible? That's not limited by the constraints of physics. Yeah. And also that there's not enough. People don't. To tie it back to Peter. I remember sometime someone asked like a long time ago. So an estimate was your biggest investor mistake ever.
And everybody expected him to say something like well I invested in this company. But also money blew up and he said the biggest mistake. I don't know if it was B or C but it was bigger to take ever. Let's say it was not investing in a series B a Facebook. And that is the kind of mistake I try not to make. So I'm like a big believer and find what is working. And like go aggressively after it.
Ideas are such a power law and it's about finding that core thing and just doubling, tripling down on that. Yeah, I think that the really good ideas are rare. And when you find one you should quadruple down on it. And should be the only thing you push on. You know, you should. I'll actually I feel these things in writing and business, whatever. I really, really believe in this principle. And I mean, I think this is why I like all business almost all business books are terrible right.
There's like three good ideas and 300 pages. And what a reader wants is three good ideas on one page. Yeah. Did Paul Graham teach you anything specifically about writing? Yeah, mostly just by reading his essays. I think like many other people, my introduction to the startup world and excitement about it came from reading PG's essays. He's like an unbelievable writer and that was a topic of like great interest to me and many other people.
I think a whole generation of us like copied PG in all of these ways. And so although he was never like let me teach you a class on how to write. I and others clearly took a lot of inspiration because I think he just does it in a style that resonates so much. Clarity, precision, density. Like if you go read average business book versus PG essay, it's like they're both business writing. But other than that, they're like different species. There's no posturing. He says interesting stuff.
He said it clearly. He doesn't waste your time. Nothing feels fake. Pitching coming up with the story. How does writing factor into that? Again, I think of like writing as a tool to think more clearly or to get to the essence of something. And then hopefully when you're in a pitch meeting for your startup or whatever, you've already figured out to get that down to the clear essence of it. And if you can.
It's really dramatically different to be on the other side of a pitch, if the person has like gotten their thinking clear ahead of time or not. It's also a bonus if they're clear communicator and and I can like think of a few examples of people who I think are exceptionally clear. Fingers and horrible communicators, but it's rare like I had to sit here earlier as you were talking about that thing.
And so if someone can get their thinking clear before a pitch, then they can get across to you what they're trying to do. And there are a lot of people who can just without writing, but I often find that writing is is really is really helpful. And I often find that there are these ideas that I think I'm super clear on. And then I try to make myself write it down right down like a one-page summary. And I was like, oh, I didn't really understand that in the first place.
Do you do a lot of Google docs exchanges with friends? I used to. Like all of life. It's just been in this like we are through the looking glass past year and a half or whatever it's been, but not even that much. Since chat GBT launched all of like the normal hobbies of life pretty much have gotten attenuated. And we're doing that. I'm thinking about doing this thing or thinking about this idea just because it's interesting. What's the next step or tell me where I'm wrong?
And you can do like a lot of that over dinner parties and make a lot of progress. You can like host trends for a weekend and talk about something a lot and make a lot of progress. And it's something about the process of trying to crystallize it onto a sheet of paper that has to be like internally consistent. That doesn't let you like hide from the weak points. The constraint I like to give people is it needs to be short enough that you can send it to me in a screen shot.
Like a mobile phone screen shot? Not for everything, but I like that. I personally think that's like maybe too constrained for some important ideas, even though I directionally super agree with you like short as short as critical. How much of your own writing the inspiration is born from conversation? A lot. But it kind of like comes in as this jumble of ideas and then writing is helpful because it I think of like conversation is this very generative process.
And then you've got to like grind it down to the essence and that is best done like sitting in front of a big monitor with no one else around. The image of tangled headphones came into my mind. Interesting. For me, the image is much more like grinding down rocks than then untangling something. Because it's more like a process of like removing then untangling and when you have all these like slightly different ideas banging against each other, you kind of end up with the right core.
If you were to write a book, what would it be about? I mean a lot of times people say like hate say I think seems really important. Can you recommend me a book to read? And I kind of think about it and say no not really. So I think I would try to like write the book for the people that I ask what they should read about AI. And I think I would start with like here is the historical context of other technological revolutions. Why this one will be similar? Why it'll be different?
Here's how the technology actually works. Here's what is possible. Right now, here's this is going to impact your life this year. Here's the range of things that might be possible in five years and how it might impact your life then. And then if we really kind of let ourselves dream out a hundred years. Here's like what this means for all of us. And if I was your editor and I was like Sam, what is the biggest thing that people are missing right now? What would your answer be?
Well, that's why I'm not going to write the book. I haven't had time to like think about that. And I don't think I will need time soon. Where the all lower case thing come from? I mean, I was like I lived online as a kid. And that was just I don't know why I stopped using the shift key. I do it if I'm still if I'm writing something that feels like a school paper. I just I actually wrote something that I may do as a blog post, but it's like super long. It's like 20 pages.
It's way too long and I may just not have time to edit it down, but it was so interesting to write. But like for something like that, I still, you know, capitalize it perfectly. So it's like still in there somewhere. I like that. I may not have time to edit it down. There's something about that that it's really the editing that takes work. Yeah, for sure. I heard a nice line from David Oglevy. He said I'm a terrible writer, but I'm a great editor. That's a real skill.
That's very tough to do, especially on your own stuff. Do you get help with editing? Like is that is that something that happens like in Google docs here or how do you think about it? The things that are like written just for like an internal document, those don't really get edited. I mean, I was like I kind of write at once. Maybe I read it once. I have extra time and I just send it out. But for like internal coordination, why I think writing is super valuable.
That's not like getting edited for publication. Internal coordination, why do you use those words? Oh, if there's like a bunch of teams that have to agree on what we're doing. I think having a written document, we are like a document, heavy culture in that sense. I think that's a good thing. Is that document, heavy culture, something that you got from Matt Machari? No, that predated him. Predated him. Did we see that? No, actually that's interesting.
I think it's probably something about like the academic culture of researchers that started to hear. In what ways did people's thinking reveal themselves through the writing of YC apps? The biggest thing that you that I took away most of the time is how rare clarity of expression in a YC application is. And it's rare even though we say like this is really important and it seems obvious that that's what you should try to do.
But I found on the whole that people who did not express themselves clearly in a YC application did not run the company in a clear way, did not explain to the team what they were doing, did not explain to investors to customers, everything else that they were doing in a clear way. And that is a very hard way to have a chance at success for a company. So much of your job as a founder or anyone leading any kind of company is like evangelist and chief.
And it's hard to be an effective evangelist without clear communication. When you were a Y Combinator, you had a big initiative of open sourcing knowledge around a course and you wrote a book called the startup, the startup playbook, I was I wrote like a pamphlet. Well, it's okay. You wrote a 50 page book, but tell me about why you did that and the process of writing the book.
I think getting the knowledge out about how to do startups is just like a clear net win for the world. It's not the most important part of what YC does like the one on one mentoring support the network that's all more important, but putting the knowledge out there is, I think, a good and easy thing to do. And what is something that you learned while running YC that you feel like really influences the way that you run open AI.
A big part of YC was just like encouraging founders to be more ambitious and to kind of go after what they believe in. I think there's a lot of that in the company too. What is something that you're excited to do with your writing with GPT that you can't do now? The thing that I have been thinking about is how can I use Tatchy BT to just like make writing feel higher volume and lower stakes.
Like how I still like if I have to go right like a 10 page thing that still feels like a huge thing to have to go do. And there's like a lot of activation I have to like right wait time and like the right mood and then I have like hours of on and around to focus. And if if if using chat GPT and I'm figuring this out yet, but I've been thinking about it can somehow mean like it's the kind of thing I do when I'm like in an Uber for 15 minutes.
Because it just makes the activation energy that low that would be very cool. How can GPT amplify different personalities you know one of the things I like to use it for is hey rewrite this in the style of Amor tolls or Tyler Cowan how can GPT continue to do that. Well future future versions of GPT will be very capable of that what the fair thing to Tyler Cowan is in that case we're trying to figure out. So it's like not an obvious question. But for sure, what everybody agrees on is there.
There can be many personalities that are not based on real people. And that's a cool thing to have. And the fact that. You can have what's called them like personas you can have like chat GPT we mix things in different personas. I think that'll be helpful in the creative process. They think that I hope for. More than anything else out of chat GPT and future versions is that it will be a tool that. Let's us do things we just couldn't do before think of ideas we just couldn't have before.
Be more creative than we could be before. And this is kind of the arc of technology. But I think this is a going to be a particularly great example of it. Creativity not limited by skills but by the ability to think of the idea in the first. Not even that like if these tools like can help you think of the idea but you have got to have you got to be a great curator like I don't know exactly what it's going to be like.
But I do know people are going to get very good at using the tool like they do with any tool. And that will expand the realm of human possibility. Hey, I want to tell you about a new site that I built called writing examples. We take writers like Steinbeck or well sign failed and breakdown what makes their writing so good. That sounds like it's kind of your thing will go to writing examples dot com and if you go there, you enter email. I'll send you my three favorite additions right away.
All right, back to the episode. One of the things that I really admire about you is how deliberate you are about thinking about what to work on. And I'm curious how you thought about your choice to work on a GI and what that process of envisioning that one thing that you're going to focus on was all about. Your process is the right word for it right like it all of these things sort of start as these like almost jokes. So not quite a joke but like a sort of like somewhat ridiculous idea.
At the now working on a GI seems like the obvious only decision for me at least. But at the time it seemed like a pipe drain. But I think ideas in general are very fragile. Good ideas. The best ideas are extremely fragile. And there is an unbelievable amount of value in figuring out a setup a method. For not killing very fragile but potentially very great ideas. This comes down to like how you think about it what your process to make a decision is.
It comes down to like who you surround yourself with. I think a particular kind of toxicity to avoid are the people who are like so smart they understand why every great idea is bad. But I think in the very early days, the main thing is not to accidentally kill good ideas. So tell me about fragility and how writing factors into this.
The thing that is most important to me personally about writing is like externalized thinking and organization, magnification, whatever you want to call it of vague ideas. I find it astonishing how much writing just for yourself.
Sometimes for a small group of other people you're exploring an idea with but mostly writing just for yourself helps clarify what you actually think helps like sharpen stuff in a way that for me and I think for a lot of other people is somehow impossible to do just like thinking carefully on the long hike. But in your head, yeah, it's harder to hide really messy thinking when you have to actually write it down and look at like stare at it.
So tell me more about the process as you thought about your plan in the early days of open AI in terms of focusing on this. What was the sort of final output of that process where you said let's do it. I do remember intermediate stages where it was like talk to like a bunch of people have all these ideas right out like, okay, here's what we're going to do.
Here's our plan. You would write some of those down and it would be like very obvious to you immediately like, okay, this actually makes you feel it. You feel it or you think it through and when you stare at it, it's one thing to have a couple of beers with some friends and say, we're going to be like, you know, and it's another to say like, okay, here's like here's like a full cohesive plan for what it's going to look like and that makes some of the bullshit fall away.
So many of those we write out as we were thinking through the different things we could do and how we would be an organization. You know, we're all going to go join some university research lab like that helped get rid of some of the silliness. And again, now it all seems so obvious that this feels weird to even say because like, of course, it's what we're going to do.
But at the time, it was deeply not obvious or a lot of other people would have been doing it. That would be sort of my like evidence point for it. And then eventually if you write something down that looks like credible enough, you send it around to other people. They had the same experience. They might rewrite it. They might edit it. But they also kind of say like, all right, when I have to like stare at this and block and white, it's a little different.
I'm a big believer in getting like input from lots and lots of people, especially on like hard questions of what to go do in the broadest sense. And now as you do annual planning, then you think in one, maybe three or time frames, is that process the same different? It don't do this with like as much rigorous as I should. It hasn't been annual, but maybe like every two years, I've written a document for Open Eye called literally our plan.
Nice. And the first one was like 25 pages. And that was like lots of hours of talking to people getting feedback, but it was like a sharpening process the whole thing. There was then one later that was like 15. There was then one that was like four. I believe we could do like a half page version now. And I think that's like a good, that's a, that's a great side of progress. Yeah. How much writing you doing day to day now?
Every weekend, I mean, every weekend, I'll like write something and usually share it with like 10 people internally or something. Just like here's the thing I'm thinking about that we should do. Yeah. I have been working on something I actually plan to publish, which is rare for me now about just sort of. What the world looks like if we get AI driven abundance and like why that's important. But it's like it's a long way to go.
As you think about how AI is going to change writing, you know, what are comparatively what skills are going to be more valuable versus less valuable. In a world where like AI can do lots of things for you having great ideas knowing what you want the idea to do and AI can do anything is really important. Taste creation, like expert level, you know, like whatever it is that PG does. Yeah. That's going to be super valuable. I love using Chatchy BT to help me write something.
Especially like as I've been trying to write this thing, if I get like stock, it's a sort of like superthusaurus. If I just can't figure out how to phrase something or I'm like struggling with something that like just can't get something to flow. But it's definitely not like going to replace coming up with the ideas anytime soon. It's an incredible tool for writers, like incredible tool for writers, but definitely not a writer.
Like a sparring partner, like a collaborator, like someone you can like give like a sub-task to. Yeah. That's a lot of how I use it is a lot of times I have a word that I'm struggling with and I'll say give me 10 words that would work in the sentence. And then I'll take the sentence, quote it, and then it'll give me the output. It's really good at that. Yeah. How do you think that we should be training writers differently in a Chatchy BT world?
I heard this story once. I don't know if it's true or not, but it was like some creative writing teacher. They would have these students come and you know, the first day or whatever she'd like given us, I'm not which is right. The first paragraph of your novel and people would come in with all of the standard like freshman and college mistakes, like you know way too many like stretched metaphors way too much like flowery language.
And then she'd go through this like exercise of I think a standard one first, which is cut one metaphor from every page. But one unnecessary word from every sentence cut this cut that cut that you take this like 10 page thing down and you cut it down to one page and it would like it would not be so torturesly overwritten. And then the class would read them and they would say like, okay, what happened here? What's the. And the answer was there was like no story at all.
There was that the instinct was try to like write this like beautifully whatever kind of satisfying to write thing, but it's no fun to read like the readers want a story. Yeah, and the thing from this like teacher is that we might teach people to write beautifully, but there's there's no interesting story.
On the other hand, you have these like sort of massly massly mass market successful, I don't even know what like I'll pick on like the twilight books or something quite interesting story horrible right in sure. And the question is like can we make it easier to get both. And can we teach people how to use these tools? Do you have a sense for how good chat GPT storytelling is like if I turn on voice mode and read it to a kid, how much better is that versus mom?
I think the story time is not yet very good, but I would expect it to get better. We're still at a place where the models are just generally improving so much. I mean, there's areas that we could push on that be better for storytelling, but if the model just gets a lot smarter and also if we train it to be better story time.
How do you do that? You show it a bunch of examples of what makes a good story makes a bad story, which I don't think is like magic. I think we really understand that well, not we just haven't tried to do that. When you're sitting down to write and you're thinking about creating a focused state, what is it that you're doing in your process to really create that?
I used to think like, oh, I got to get in the perfect place and I got to set a time that I'm going to go to this coffee shop and put on my noise cancel and headphones and I'm going to be in writing. And now I will take any 11 minutes. I'm interrupted that I can get sitting in the back of a car lane and bed, like whatever it is. I mean, if I do have like, if I had like a perfect thing, it would be like Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and nothing scheduled.
And that is great. Like if I got to sit down and like, I have to write like a long thing, I will try to set that up. But most of it happens in like short chunks in the back of a car. You know what I use a lot is I use the voice feature. I take it and I ask it to just clean it up and I find chat you be to be so helpful with that because I'm much more generative with my mouth than I am with my fingertips.
Interesting for me. It's the opposite. Really? Yeah. I'm convinced there's ideas I would never have sitting and talking with people that I just need to sit and type for. This is like obviously a very common observation, but but figuring out like the right amount of being with people talking, you know, getting exposed to like a lot of ideas and then having some time alone to think to write to just sort of like do some deep work.
Whatever that is, I think obviously this is a super important pattern to a lot of people definitely to me. My sort of like roughly rough rhythm is I'm like, you know, in the office kind of nonstop all week. I have no time to think it's just like kind of crazy packed. And then on the weekends, I have like long quiet blocks and I'm not really around people. And that cycle is very important to me.
And is that fractal like do you sometimes take a few weeks off or anything like that? I used to. I think that's like really good. Like when I've taken like long chunks of time off, I would do like a month of like nonstop hanging out with people and then like a month of, you know, being in the woods on the beach, whatever. That doesn't really happen anymore. Yeah. Do you take notes during the week that you reflect on or just on your hand? No, I'm a huge nut.
Oh, tell me about that. There's all these like fancy notebooks in the world. Yeah, you don't want those. You definitely want a spiral notebook because one thing that's important is you can rip pages out frequently. And you also wanted to lie like flat and open on the table. And if you like open pages, you want them to like, you know, like be able to lay like this, whatever.
You definitely want to be able to like rip pages out. I'm a big believer of like, I take a bunch of notes and then I like clearly like rip them out so I can look at multi pages at the same time. And I can like crumple them up and throw them on the floor. And I'm done like when our house cleaner comes in on like a, you know, whatever. There's just these pile of crumple papers that I'm like type my notes and whatever on the floor.
You definitely want like a kind of paper that is like good to write on, which is a feel thing. But most papers terrible to write on. You want a hard front and back to the note pad. So and you also want to be in the confidant pocket. I was about to say that. I think the uniball micro. 0.5 pen is the best pen overall. But the Mugi 0.36 or 0.37 in dark blue ink is a very nice pen for other reasons. So those are the two I would use. But I think this kind of notebook and one of those two
is the right answer. And how many notes you're writing per day and that thing. I go through one of these like every three two or three weeks. Oh wow. So you're taking a lot of well. This you can see how much I've ripped out like this used to have like 100 pages. So that's how you think about it. So you're going to basically take the notebook and then you rip out the pages. You don't have completed notebooks. I don't have completed notebooks. Wow.
What inspired this? Where does this come from? Lots of trial and error. Many kinds of notebooks, many pens, many different systems. This one's really good. Another thing I've been thinking about when it comes to the influence of AGI on creative mediums is just the competence with the written word is going up so much. And here's what I mean. There's now, you know, with Sora, you can create videos using text as the input. You can do that with music. You can do that with images.
And that's a big change in terms of the influence on of writing on our world. Again, for me, like writing is a tool for thinking most importantly. And I don't think that's going anywhere. And so I think it's like, it's really important that people still learn to write for this reason in the same way that even if there's going to be like less traditional coding jobs, coding is a great way to learn to think too.
So it's still learning to code. So when you say it's important that people learn to write, what does that mean? What it means to me is that I've like figured out this tool to think more clearly. Now if there's a better way to think more clearly, I'd great. I would switch to that. Definitely not found that yet.
A final question that we can close with is there's just a lot of people out there who are saying that AI is going to kill writing and they're angry about it about it. And what do you make of that? I don't see any evidence whatsoever that AI seems to be killing writing. I mean, there's like a lot of bad AI writing like plastered over the internet.
And there's like a lot of like bad student assignments that have probably been written by AI. I don't think anyone's serious. I don't think the program is sitting around being like, AI is going to kill my writing here. I think it would have to be like full super intelligence before I was like, OK, this is going to replace human writing full stop. And we have much bigger. She's to worry about that points. Even if that happened.
Let's say we have a system that can write better than a human. Do you think that the most popular novel of 2027 has a human name on it or not? Like a human writer on the note. I think yes. I think it does too. When I finish a great book, the first thing I go do is like, I want to know about the writer on another life story.
And I don't think I ever have that feeling to like AI writing. There is there is something about you read an incredible book and you kind of you could connect to a person even though you don't literally know them. If you like you do it, you feel like you have this important shared human experience. And that is like some significant percentage of the enjoyment of a great book to me. And I think it would keep doing that. All right. Thank you very much. This was fun. This was fun.