My Conversation with Naval on Building Judgement

Hello and welcome. It's been five years since the Almanac of Naval first came out. And to honor that, Naval and I wanted to do a special edition for you. We spent the day together and recorded over four hours of our conversation. Now we're sharing that here with you, updating and expanding the key ideas in the book. Like everything else in the Almanac of Naval, this version is being made available for free in addition to the audiobook available on your favorite platform.

This book has grown as a word-of-mouth phenomenon, being gifted and recommended, ultimately reaching millions of people all over the world in 40 languages. I hope you will help these good ideas continue to spread. Uh thank you for joining us. Let's dive in. I have this theory that as humans we're always searching for something perfect and permanent because that's the opposite of the life that we have, which is an imperfect and impermanent life.

And we can search for it in spirituality, the quest for God. We can search for it in science, which is the quest for the grand, unified, perfect theory of everything. there is analogues in art and beauty in the Sistine Chapel trying to encapsulate something perfect for a long, long period of time. And so I feel like I personally want to focus on that and there's a there's a struggle because you also want to look at new things.

Yeah, the world is always moving and advancing, especially the domain of things and objects and learning and technology and science, you want to look at the most recent things. You don't want to learn the science from thirty years ago. You want to learn the science the best we know today and the same about technology. And that has practical value knowing about PAI or self driving cars or robotics or what have you.

So it's always good to know about what's moving quickly and is on the forefront of knowledge. But at the same time, you also want to study the timeless and that's human nature. Human nature doesn't change. So there you wanna rely upon the old and people. You know, you want to read Schopenhauer and you want to read, you know, the Tao De Ching and so on because or the Bible, because people don't change.

And so with my tweets, I kind of struggle with uh or even with writing as podcasting, thinking, time that I spend, what I struggle with is I wanna spend a lot of time on the time list because that knowledge carries through the rest of my life. Mm-hmm. But I also want to spend time on the Tang Li, which is the most modern stuff.

Now, there I have to look for the modern stuff that's actually useful. It's actually the modern stuff about things. Like I wanna know about AI, I wanna know about self driving cars, I wanna know about robotics, I wanna know about space travel and space exploration. I want to know about drones, but I don't want to know what, you know, Kim Kardashian's doing today. Like that's useless knowledge. In fact, I don't even need to know.

uh any lessons in human nature from her and her interactions with other people because those lessons have been written down better by Schopenhauer or Kant or someone like that in the past, right? Plato. So When it comes to philosophy and human nature, that's timeless material. It's worth learning. Uh it's somewhat cliche.

in the sense that uh we can get into what cliche is, but it's somewhat cliche. Uh but at the same time it's very important to absorb because these are the deepest guiding principles. You know, philosophy is kind of the study of how to live a good life. I think Aristotle called that Euda main the ocean like that. Probably saying the word wrong. But uh

That's worth studying, but at the same time it's worth studying the ultra modern, most recent stuff when it comes to the world of science and technology and things. At least for our book, our work, for our writing. I don't like putting timely things in there. And the trap is timely things that have

nothing to do with knowledge of how things work, but rather knowledge of people or just gossip or news. I think a lot of people have said this Taleb most recently that, you know, to see how worthless the news is, just read yesterday's newspaper, right? What's the half life of the information that you're consuming? How long will it be relevant uh in the future is predominantly based on how long has it been relevant to the back.

Yeah, and this ties into a little bit with Deutsch's work, which is he'll say a good explanation. One of the ways you know it's a good explanation that is reached. and reach across space and time. So it applies to lots of things that you didn't expect. uh it explains things which you would think were out of its domain or or it was originally that theory was postulated to explain a local thing, but it almost always ends up explaining a global thing.

Um so for example, like in the axial tilt theory of the earth, you know, you might have come up with that to explain why there are seasons. Uh, but then the seasons flip when you go to the southern hemisphere. And you can't change that. You can't take the part of the theory that explains the seasons in the hemisphere in uh in the northern hemisphere and then throw it out when you get the southern hemisphere. That that theory has deep reach or wide reach.

So the best theories are deep and wide. And, you know, a another another completely different angle on the same thing is Jed McKenna. He has this uh I don't know if you ever read Jed McKenna, but he's kinda this crazy anonymous enlightened dude. Right. And he writes these really funny books starting with spiritual enlightenment as a damnedest thing.

And I highly recommend them for people who are not mystical, not spiritual at all, but yet they know something is off, something is missing, something is wrong. It's like uh, you know, um I think it was Morpheus the way he describes the matrix. He goes, It's a splinter in your mind, right? Do you feel like Neo, it's like a splinter in your mind? Yeah, it's so if if you feel like there's a splinter in your mind, uh Jed McKenna is a good starting point.

And he has this uh proof quote unquote of the existence of truth or God or what what have you. Mm-hmm. Um and uh it's actually It's a rework of a very old proof by a monk named Anselm. Uh I don't know if he realizes that, but it's a rework of an existing proof. Anyway, it's not really a proof. It's not a mathematical proof, but it does rely on this idea that, hey, do you believe that truth exists? And if you believe that truth exists,

then, you know, that's a different universe than one where you believe that there is no truth. Right. And if you believe that if truth exists, then do you believe that truth can be non existent in a certain place or a certain time or it can be temporal? And the answer is no. And so if you kind of follow that chain of reasoning, you realize that truth would have to have the widest and deepest reach. Again, it would have to be this all encompassing theory.

So whether in science, whether in spirituality, whether in technology, I think we're all just looking for something perfect and permanent. And as humans, we're always gonna be dissatisfied. The human mind will always be dissatisfied until it finds that. And that's kind of the the drive for achievement.

And th the more accomplished somebody becomes, the more they get to level up and go for something even broader, even deeper, even further. So, you know, Deutsch, for example, isn't just content with being a mere physicist, he's also studying what he calls the four deepest theories computation, theory of evolution by natural selection and epistemology, because he's trying to explain everything in kind of a grand unified theory. And you know, every philosophy at its core.

has to have some appeal to universality, right? To like explaining everything. It's just it's just kind of human nature. Even the whole current AGI craze. It's about like, oh, we're gonna invent God, it's gonna explain everything. This is the last technology. I don't know what it is about humans, but it keeps driving us towards that. Everybody wants a theory of everything. Absolutely.

Yeah, Marxism is kinda that. You know, it's kinda like we're all equal, we're all the same, you know, we're all consciousness, we're all just one. We're obviously Marxism has lots of problems. I'm not gonna sit here and critique Marxism all day long, although I would be happy to. But it is also that there's that universalist intent in there.

So in a deep way, this quest for the answer to everything keeps seeping back into every endeavor of our lives. And whether you realize it or not, it's always like lurking underneath. You said that your sort of earning power is higher than it's ever been and been on a steady

increase over time. I'm curious to sort of break down the components of that. Like how has that changed? What have the inflection points been, even as you've sort of gotten more retired, I guess you would say, like less deliberate? Yeah, to be fair, right now I'm like minimally retired. I'm working hard, I got a new company. Right. Um, in a way I'm probably

I I I'm probably putting in as much work as I ever have. Um, but you know, the vast majority of it goes into my new company, which I really care about, still in stealth mode. Um, but you know, some of it goes into making a few investments here or there, helping out some people that I know in the ecosystem plus my old companies. But in terms of earning power, um

Some of that comes from stored capital, so I can fund my own projects. Some of that comes from reputation, so people will kind of trust me and, you know, fund me and so on. But a lot of it just comes through knowledge. of knowing what to go after, how to structure a new company.

how to get it going, how to recruit good people, recognizing early on, like, oh, don't bother recruiting that person, even though they're good because they're too high ego, they won't fit in, or don't sell too hard because it'll just come unstuck later.

or go after these kinds of people. You know, you need more technical builders at the beginning and less of the marketers and so on,'cause otherwise they're just going to create too many requirements too early, et cetera, et cetera. So it's just a lot of practical know-how which has been folded into principles. You know, th there's kind of a they're learning curves to everything. I think it was

It was either Schopenhauer or Seneca. It was one of the two. I think this is Seneca, where he basically said uh yeah, it's in one of his letters to Lucilius, uh he said something on the lines of that uh the right way to learn is is from the specific to the general and not from the general to the specific. And what that means is I

you do things in reality, you encounter reality, you test it, you learn from it, and then you generalize. And then that lets you know when that maxim or that aphorism or that principle or that value system, when it applies and when it does not.

Because one of the problems with picking up other people's v values and aphorisms, you don't know when they apply when they don't. So when people say on Twitter, Well, you contradicted yourself. It's like, Well using that word in a different way, it doesn't apply in this case. It's not, you know, even though I don't use a lot of adjectives.

Uh what I mean is in most cases, in the way that I'm thinking about it, this applies, and in other cases the way I'm thinking about it, this other thing applies. And I'm just giving myself a heuristic, which is not to be blindly followed. And these people are looking for math proofs. Yeah. Yeah, you have the you came in with the frame of the specific when you created the general.

That's right. I created the general to help me uh navigate future specifics, but each situation is specific. It you know, so it has it may have multiple general things applied to it that compete in one of them overrides or multiple of them overrides. That's how you go from the specific to the general.

But the opposite is when you go to academia. You know, you study too many things in school, you learn all these grand theories and then out in the field you're spouting theories but you don't know which one applies where and when, or you've just learned the wrong theory for the current thing. And that's when you kind of end up as what Nassim Taleb says an IYI and intellectual yet idiot. Uh and it's basically someone who's over educated and under practiced.

So is the recipe for building judgment then the combination of like these heuristics, these maxims, these ideas and the experience to plug in that sort of lice them Experience first, you gotta do first. You know, another television is if you wanna be a philosopher king, first be a king, right? Yeah.

uh first become a king. That's the harder one. And that's the one that'll make you the process of becoming a king will turn you into a philosopher automatically. The process of becoming a philosopher will take you further from being a king. And you won't be a very useful philosopher either. By the way, no hard and fast rules. There are people who didn't do a lot practically speaking that were incredible philosophers, but they're very, very, very rare.

But yeah, I mean, you wanna be in the arena. Like uh you know, for example, Elon, I know you're working a book about him. And he has general principles, but those principles come from doing things. He knows the value, for example, of speed, right? Elon is famous for how fast he does things and then he gets to cycle time of things down.

And that is a core principle for him. And he has a lot of detailed implementations on what that means practically about okay, engineers get to set their own requirements. You know, you always unblock everything, you don't hide behind email. He has all kinds of, I'm sure, many, many heuristics in his head that derive from that big principle. Mm-hmm. But if I just sat around academia and somebody told me, Yes, speed is everything, go with speed.

I'd just be kinda idiotic about it. I'd just be running around hyperventilating all the time. I wouldn't know about to apply it. So again, life is lived in the arena. You have to do the things to learn the things. It's a mistake to just learn and not do. Uh when I was a kid I was a big fan of reading.

And I used to read a lot. I mean, I read hundreds, maybe thousands of books. I've lost count. And most books I like I picked the books and I'll read them and I'll be like, Oh shit, I read this book ten years ago. I just forgot about it.

And I'm like two thirds of the way through the book'cause the forum'cause I have a terrible memory for things that are that don't really stick with me, things that are incredibly useful. And I used to be proud of that fact. And now I realize actually most of my reading was worthless.

You know, it was all academic book knowledge. A lot of it was just fiction. Uh, and these days I read less, but I read very deliberately. I read because I'm really interested in something and I'm trying to learn something. Or I'm trying to figure something out and I'll read small amounts and then I'll think a lot. So I'll use that reading as more of a way to spark my own thinking rather than just kind of taking in things from other people and then regurgitating them back later.

Um, like a lot of Teleb doesn't stick with me. Like, for example, this anti-fragile thing doesn't really stick with me because I can't find that many. actual examples in my life where I can apply true anti fragility. Because true anti fragility is not just resilience, it's that you actually get stronger through ad adversity. And yes, I can see some cases of that, like, you know, horme hermetic effects when you're, you know, weightlifting.

But there are a lot of cases where I don't find a practical application of anti fragility. But I get why Taleb does it. Like his entire investing strategy is anti fragile. You know, he the the system collapses, he makes more. Or it's just volatility in the system. He makes more. But I don't find as many examples, so the concept of anti fertility doesn't stick with me. And even though I know that that's the book that most people think has had the biggest impact on them and he values it the most.

Uh it doesn't work for me. Uh so I don't read that book. But I'm always rereading skin of the game, uh, because that one has a lot of nuggets that I can apply that that that I can say, Oh, that's the generalization. uh something that I had noticed in my specific life. So the minority rule is a good example. I keep seeing the minority rule show up everywhere.

Um, so you you do you do need the practical applications in your life. You you have to do. So even to the extent today that I want to become smarter and wiser, that means I have to work. Yeah, I was gonna say you're continuously injecting experience and principles.

Correct. Yeah. You start with experience. You start with specific knowledge. Then that specific knowledge turns into more generalized knowledge. Then you can take that and turn it into values, which are you know, do or you tie it into your existing values.

it improves their judgment. And I think ultimately in this age of infinite leverage, judgment is the most important thing. Like if you knew Um where to navigate, you know, people will pay you for that. The captain of a ship is chosen based on his ability to get the team together and tell them where we're going, inspire them to go there. Um so but where to go is the most important part. if you have two candidates for CEO of Apple, right, the most valuable company in the world currently.

Maybe it's NVIDIA, but whatever. You have two candidates for the CEO of the company and one is right 80% of the time and one is right 85% of the time and the company's worth trillions of dollars. Who are you going to put in charge?

You pay that guy right eighty five percent of the time a lot more. Like you pay him billions of dollars more per year because he's steering a tr multi-trillion dollar ship and the direction matters more than any other single thing. And then finally I would say that Judgment. Judgment is really important. Judgment comes through experience and reflection. So you you experience things, you have honest reflection about those things, and you build your judgment.

And then at some point your judgment becomes so good that you cannot even explain it or articulate it anymore. So there's a point early on where you don't know what to do and you have to rationally think through what to do and you take feedback. eventually you get so good at making the decisions

that you don't go to other people. Yes, you can get a little bit of feedback to inform your judgment, but you're you know that you're in the best position to make up your mind. So you exercise the judgment and you can articulate to other people, why did I do that?

But there comes a point where your judgment is so good that you can't even articulate it. And that's when it's called taste, right? When you're just like I that it doesn't feel right to me, right? This is just the way we should do it. This is the way I want to do it, right? But at that point it's taste.

And people who have gotten to that point, like the Rick Rubens of the world, where they have really good taste when the Steve Jobs is of the world, I think those are the people who are the most creative and create the greatest works of art and business because they have really good taste. Like I think I would guess that Musk, for example, on SpaceX, he has taste. And there are a few key engineers around him who have taste. Um in if you look at the uh leading AI labs,

And you kind of see the tweet threads from some of the researchers there when they care to talk about how they're choosing which experiments to run and which ones not to run. It boils down to taste. They have taste about like, I'm gonna throw thousands of GPUs at this for hundreds of hours and spend lots of money and probably wind up in nothing. But my intuition, my taste tells me, my developed intuition, which is my taste, uh tells me uh whether to try it on or not.

Yeah, you you had a tweet, it takes time to develop your gut, but once it's developed, don't listen to anything else. Exactly. Yeah. And this is just another way of saying taste. It's your gut feel and it can be around people. Um, you know, older people have very good judgment about other people because the one thing that we are always all gaining experiences in human interaction. No matter what we're doing, we're interacting with other people.

So we're building up experience about who to work with and who to trust and who not to trust and who not to work with. Um, and that ends up your gut feel. And so as you get older, you gotta trust your gut feel.

Is your investing now primarily feel like taste? Yes. Yeah, almost entirely. I hate articulating it. And and a lot of times, uh you know, I I'll I'll pass on things now. It's not just taste on the company. It's an understanding of my own tastes in the sense of what I like and what I don't. So there's a lot of companies now that I don't invest in where I will I will I will pass up on the investment because

I don't want to take a walk with the founder. I didn't learn anything. Or uh I am just genuinely not interested in the category. I'm not curious about it. I'm not gonna stay up late reading about or thinking about it. So it's gonna feel like a chore. Or it could just be like, you know, I've got one short life on this earth. Do I wanna be associated with this way of making money? Probably not. There are other ways to make money. So obviously that's a post-wealth problem or post-wealth taste.

So it's not just taste about the business. It's also an understanding of what it is that I value, how I want to spend my time, what I want my legacy to look like, what am I going to be proud of, what am I going to learn from? And again, this is back to an effort to being lazy. And lazy means not working and not working means uh not doing things you don't want to do. If you want to do it, it's not work. So an ideal life would be where

Everything I am doing and everything that I am associated, everyone that I'm associated with is something that I would do anyway, you know, almost for free. And being with people that I really enjoy being around and learning from them. So for me that's People who are very capable, they do things. Uh, they're very low ego, so you have to deal with all the nonsense that comes with that. They're very intelligent and uh so you're always learning from them.

Is it actually ideal to be paid purely for your judgment? That that's a thing you've talked about, but as we're like talking through this, it's like the the it's very hard to extricate your labor from your judgment, at least t a at some ratio, right?

Yeah, that's right. You know, this is why another tweet I had they they do contradict each other if you're if you want to talk math where it's like, you know, what you do and who you do it with is more important than how hard you work, right? W uh sorry, it's start uh work as hard as you can, but you know, what you do and who you do with are more important than how hard you work. But you still have to work as hard as you can.

So it shouldn't feel like work. You know, this goes back to like it should feel like play to you but look like work to others. That's really what you want to be doing. And that's idealized. You're not gonna be able to do that, you know, the full time. you know, it's obviously not just hard work. Like how many companies is Elon running, right? The corner the guy running the corner grocery store puts more hours in the grocery store than Elon puts into any one of his companies.

So it's not just purely about hard work. That said, you don't get to be someone with great judgment and great connections and great capabilities without working hard. And you will not build up your knowledge fast enough.

When you're working super hard, when you're really intensely into something, that's when you actually make the biggest breakthroughs. So I remember back in college I had this computer science project where we had to write a compiler. And a compiler is a difficult thing to write. You know, a compiler takes a high level programming language and breaks it down to lower and lower level programming languages until it finally goes into a set of instructions that the computer can understand.

And writing compilers up there in C S. It's like, you know, uh other things on that level might be like writing an operating system, right? A simple operating system. So it's no joke. And I just remember when I would go in the computer lab, it would take me hours and hours and hours just to load the problem into my head, to go through my own code from the previous few days.

to kind of come back to speed like, okay, this is what I meant over here and this is the part where I'm stuck on and this part over here is janky and this is a patch and this thing works over here and it's beautiful. And but it would just literally take me hours just to get back into it if I'd been out of it for a little while. And so then I found that the most productive sessions that I had

uh in front of that computer, writing that compiler, were twenty four to thirty six hour sessions where I wouldn't sleep. So I would just be up for thirty six hours drinking Coca Cola's and just kinda coding or just thinking and walking and coding and thinking and walking.

And then when I finally fell asleep, the problem would fall out of my head. And then it would take me a few days to recover. And then I would have to reload the whole problem back into my head. Now that that's an exaggerated kind of example. But I think in general, a lot of times a lot of breakthroughs

happen when you're deeply into a problem. It just takes hard work and time. Like even with my co-founder of my new company, who is just an amazing guy. He's brilliant, just one of the smartest human beings I've ever met, super low ego, very pleasant. Um and very hard working. If he's awake, he's working. He's probably working right now while I'm goofing off recording this video.

You know, I've even noticed with him, like we talk every day, we have deep conversations, we catch up a lot, and it'll be an hour into the conversation when I'm already ready to hang up and give up and we've already covered all the topics that we're just circling and shooting the shit.

that the big breakthrough will come, the big insight will come. We're like, ah, but also this, oh yes, and now it all connects together. It just takes time for your brain to percolate through a problem. And so the more time you devote to a given problem, uh, you know, the more likely you're to have a breakthrough. It's like if you're trying to solve a really hard problem, one technique that I have is I want to load it into my background subconscious.

I want my intuition working on it. So I can have that shower breakthrough 48 hours later. And you can't put that on a schedule. You can't time that. So what you have to do is you have to so intensely focus on the problem that your whole mind absorbs it and even your subconscious figures that okay, this is important. You're dreaming about it. And then on some unknown timescale, you'll have some insight or some creativity.

But you're not gonna have that unless you did the hard work of working through all of it manually with your foreground, with your neocortex early on. So I do think hard work is important. You can't give it up. But um if it feels like work, if you're forcing yourself to go through the motions, then you're gonna lose because somebody

who doesn't feel like it's work is competing with you. And for them it's entertaining or fun or at least fulfilling. So then good judgment comes from a combination of like spending so much time on the explicit knowledge that it becomes sort of implicit. That's right. Yeah. You spend time on the explicit and then it becomes implicit and then there's a phase where it's still it's implicit but you can still articulate it.

And, you know, this is an analogy. This is not strictly correct, but I would say there's a point where you have to reason through it every time using logic and that's basic decision making.

And there's a part where your subconscious can kind of enter into it. And then I would say like now you've judgment and developing taste. And then I think there's a point where your whole body reacts to it. Right. Because there is wisdom in the body. There's knowledge in the body. And at that point it's just taste. And then you're done with that thing. I mean, y you're not done, obviously. It's always gonna improve, but now you're you're Top of the craft.

D John Cleese, the guy from MyPython, had a great quote about this that stuck with me, which is um you you simply have to let your mind rest against the problem in a friendly, persistent way. That's right. That that's actually really well put. Yeah, he's right. Your mind has to be involved and you have to focus on it, but it has to rest against the problem because that you're pushing on it, but in in a way you're not gonna give up. And yeah, you know, was it in a friendly Friendly persistence.

Friendly and persistent, yeah you can't give up. And friendly so you don't give up. Exactly. He's right. Yeah. I think yeah, him and uh Ogilvy have like these really interesting ways of sort of activating their subconscious around um around problem solving. Yeah, everyone who I think is deeply creative both works really, really hard.

Um, but yet knows that it has to be enjoyable. Otherwise you'll never get there. Um, there was a line by a painter, I think Pablo de Soros Sorosota or something like that. Um, I don't remember the name, but the the line was good. And he said, you know, for ten years uh I've painted seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius. Does AI have judgment?

Uh no, I don't think so. I wouldn't count on AI to like exercise judgment. What AI has is AI has incredible information retrieval capability.

So it can cross correlate all human knowledge and if humans have figured out before, it can give you the conventional correct answer, which is going to be correct in most cases for pr solved problems. So, you know, if you're trying to figure out like you know, what is the law on a specific point, it can like read all the legal texts and tell you what the current interpretation of the law is according to all the conventional wisdom.

But if you're looking to do something creative or something brand new that no one has yet figured out, or you're dealing with a highly complex problem with a very specific situation, um you don't have the AI make that judgment call for you. So I don't think of the AI necessarily as having judgment, but I think of it as like the ul ultimate leverage information retrieval tool. Um also humans have

values, they have points of view, they have binding principles, they have things that undergird the foundation of what they believe to be true and what they believe to not be true. And this is idiosyncratic to the person, it's adapted to the environment they're in. The AI is taking a one size fits all approach.

according to what's either in textbooks or conventional literature or what the data labelers labelers who are labeling the data into the AI thought of it. I think AI just looks like magic to people'cause it just it's it's very hard to wrap into your mind uh, you know, what these incredibly huge data sets operating in all these highly mathematical dimensions are capable of. I mean, the the amount of information they can retrieve and cross correlate is just astounding. It's like

If you ran a Google search every time and you read all top thousand results very carefully and then you cross-correlated them and you were able to stitch them together. I mean you would make a few mistakes along the way, just like the AI does. But you know, that level of research. Combined with, I do think it has some tremendous calculation abilities because it can write programs and it figures out um sub algorithms.

you know, below the level of human creativity, but above a mere calculator. So I think the AIs are incredible shortcuts, but they're shortcuts to giving you answers to solve problems. where you don't need a perfect answer. So uh one quick I heard was, you know, AI is great when wrong answers are okay. Like you're not gonna die'cause the answer is wrong. You're not gonna lose a lot of money'cause the answer is wrong. Um but for anything creative or requiring judgment at the edge.

Which is what you get really get paid for. You get paid for creativity. So the AI lifts the boat for everybody. If you have an AI, everybody's an AI. You get the AI answer, everybody gets the AI answer. There's no there's no alpha, there's no edge anymore. So in that sense, the uh uh the AI raises raises the uh the tide.

Uh and right now you're gonna get an edge because most people aren't using AI or aren't using it for, you know, um a lot uh or they don't know how to use it well enough for bleeding edge problems. So again, like any piece of technology, um, if you're early adopter, if you leverage it well, you're gonna do extremely well. So this was my quip on Twitter that

Um, it's not that AI is going to replace software engineers, that AI is going to let software engineers replace everybody else. And I stand by that. Because software engineers not because they're writing software, because Software engineers are always using the latest tools, they're just structured, logical systems thinkers who are trying to build a system to solve a specific problem. And now thanks to AI, they can solve more and more problems.

Um, they can make cars drive themselves. They can make they can make robots walk around. They can make expert systems or AI systems that will make certain levels of decisions without humans having to be in the loop. Um, and that just gives software engineers the amazing leverage. So all the people saying that programming is dead, go learn art or the trades, they're they're idiots. They're just completely wrong. And software engineers are getting richer and more powerful than ever.

And the most recent proof of that just popped up with Mark Zuckerberg paying a hundred million dollar packages to recruit individual machine learning engineers.

Because the most leveraged engineers are the ones who are building these AI systems and then the ones below them are the ones who are using these AI systems. And then even below them is everybody's affected by these engineers using these AI systems. Yeah. You had talked before about like the the robot revolution is already here. It's just packed into data centers. And that was ten years ago.

That's right. Yeah. The robot revolution has been here for a long time. There's trillions of robots on the planet, uh, but they're just packed into data centers. They don't need legs and arms. They're just computing. Now there's AI and AI agents and I imagine, you know, the leverage that somebody who's fluent with those tools can get is Orders of magnitude.

massive. I mean now you can program them speaking natural languages. Now they can uh access natural language databases. Um now you can program them just by pouring in huge amounts of data. not even having to program them. They program themselves. Then they program for you. Uh, but it still helps to be a structured thinker. Like my most useful classes when I was doing computer science and physics were actually things on Yeah, like I love my courses on computer hardware, on computer networking.

on statistics, on a lot of the deeper physics. And not because I got to use those directly, but because it just helped me with concepts. It just helped me think in certain ways. So even if you aren't writing networking code, knowing how the computer is doing networking underneath is incredibly useful because then you know it's possible.

Uh Steve Jobs and his team, their genius that allowed them to assemble things like the iPhone was because they understood at a very deep level what was possible, what was technologically possible, what was in the bleeding edge, what was barely possible, what was almost impossible.

um and what was actually impossible. So they knew the lines between those different things and they knew it in terms of the material science, they knew it in terms of manufacturing, they knew it in supply chains and deliverability, they knew it in costing, they knew it in computer programming, they knew it in hardware, they knew it in electrical engineering, they knew it in battery requirements, then in space requirements, then you in bandwidth requirements.

They had people who understood all these different pieces and could make the trade offs to assemble this perfect jewel like little smartphone that all of a sudden was a true personal computer in your pocket. And that's what made the iPhone great. I would argue the greatest product.

of the modern age is still the iPhone. I mean I'm I mean all what they mentioned doing AI, but if you just look at like the one device that every human craves and would not give up right now, at least this moment in time in twenty twenty five If you if if you went to people and said you can have one of anything you want, uh, but if you don't take that thing, you can't have it at all. They would all take the iPhone.

Um, so and the last product before that that I think inspired that same level of desire was probably the MacBook. And before that it was a Macintosh. So kudos to Apple. But they were the best product builders on the planet because they understood all the hard trade offs deep down at the detailed technical levels. Even if you'd given Jobs and his team an AI to do all the vibe coding, you know, and all the vibe design.

they could not have built that good of a product without knowing deep down what is the abstraction that the AI was hiding. Where was it making mistakes? What did it not understand? Uh and how do all the pieces fit together? Because they were truly creating something new.

Uh and if you're creating something new, you still need to understand everything down to the deep, deep detail levels. It's just the AI, at least as currently structured in twenty twenty five, these modern AIs, they will take the drudgery out of it for you. If it's been done before,

then, you know, with a small hallucination rate, they can probably do it for you today. And they're getting better and better. So eventually all the stuff that's been done before, you can have them do. But that's okay. You can't get paid in any meaningful way for things that have already been done before, nor should you want to be. It's incredibly boring.

One of the things that, you know, a good entrepreneur will tell you is they hate it when they're doing the same thing day in, day out. That shows that there's a failure of automation, a failure of imagination. Uh so good entrepreneurs automate thing. And that's why, by the way, there's no entrepreneur I've met.

who says, oh, AI is a bad thing. To an entrepreneur, it's a tool, it's an opportunity. Entrepreneurs are not scared of AI's replacing them. Yeah. Right? No entrepreneur is going to be replaced by an AI. They might be replaced by another entrepreneur who uses AI better. Uh and they need to get good with AI, just like they need to get good with any tool. Uh uh entrepreneurs are not afraid of AI replacing them any more than they were afraid of uh MacBooks replacing them or AirPods replacing them.

uh or self driving cars replacing them. It's just an another opportunity. Um, so I I mean I I I my my vision and belief and hope is that every human being wants to be creative. Every human being wants to control their own destiny, every human being wants to make new things, every human being wants to be engaged and challenged. Um And, you know, maybe it's too late for some people'cause they've given up, right, cynically. But I think it's certainly every child does.

You know, every child starts out super creative. Every child starts out just wanting to alter their reality around them and to do new and delightful things. No child wants drudgery. No child has given up hope uh on day one. So I I do think that newer generations will take advantage of these things.

Yeah, I think you know, it's tempting for some people to see entrepreneur as a fixed class of people rather than something that everyone could aspire to be. And you said before, I you know, there are seven billion people on the planet, I hope one day there are seven billion companies. And I feel like a lot of the tools and structure were moving in that direction.