#294 – Tony Fadell: iPhone, iPod, and Nest

Tony Fadell is an engineer and designer, co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, Nest Thermostat, and author of the new book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Mailgun: https://lexfridman.com/mailgun – Scale: https://scale.com/lex – NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour – SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex and use code LEX – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings EPISODE LINKS: Tony’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tfadell Tony’s Website: https://tonyfadell.com Build (book): https://amzn.to/3xSReee Story (book): https://amzn.to/3Olzqhv PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:16) – Memories (14:13) – Apple II (22:51) – First business (26:55) – iPod (50:56) – Ideas (55:09) – Marketing (1:05:26) – PR and Comms (1:15:06) – Design (1:20:03) – Experts (1:26:04) – Steve Jobs (2:09:43) – Jony Ive (2:16:55) – Nest (2:27:13) – Advice for young people (2:31:30) – Startup (2:36:25) – Money (2:41:33) – Work-Life Balance (2:44:11) – Darkest moment (2:49:48) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Tony Fadell, engineer and designer, co-creator of the iPod, the iPhone, and the Nest thermostat. And he's the author of the new book, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. More than almost any human ever, he knows what it takes to create technology ideas, designs, products, and companies that revolutionize life for huge numbers of people in the world. So it truly is an honor and pleasure to sit down with Tony for a time and look back at one heck of an amazing life.

• 0:38Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Mailgun for email campaigns, Scale for machine learning, NetSuite for efficiency, SimpliSafe for security, and Aidslee for sweet, sweet naps. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, on to the full lotteries. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will do. This show is brought to you by Mailgun by Cinch, an email delivery service. It has API for transactional and marketing. It also has a bunch of fascinating features, like send time optimization,

• 1:22Lex Fridman?

  so automatically optimally figuring out what is the best time to send these particular kinds of emails. I've used Mailgun for many, many years to programmatically send emails. I guess that would be called transactional. So based on people that sign up for different stuff, I would send them emails when I was teaching courses. At MIT, I would manage the email sending through the API I mail gun, because you can use, I think, I think I've used both JavaScript and Python to do all kinds of emailing, and it just takes care of all the hard work for you. Of course, you can also use it for marketing emails. You can automate a lot of that. You can both write it and send it, all that kind of stuff. The list of features is huge, but the most important thing, honestly,

• 2:07Lex Fridman?

  is that it's just reliable. So go to lexfridman.com/mailgun to learn more.

• 2:14Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Scale, a machine learning assisted data labeling platform. Scale Rapid works with any use case or task, including image, video, text, annotation, and classification 3D data, and it supports 20-plus languages. I've said time and time again that the success of a machine learning system in the real world has a lot more to do with the data, meaning the annotations on the data, the data selection itself, and then the quality of the annotation. That's way more important than the machine learning model architecture. Whatever the neural network magic that you're doing is not nearly as important as the quality of the data.

• 2:58Lex Fridman?

  Now, there's a lot of caveats and nuances and all that kind of stuff, but for real-world application, at least 90% of the value, the bang for the buck, comes from the annotations, the quality of the data, the data selection and the data annotation. And that's what Scale is good at. Go to scale.com/lex today and you can get your first batch of data labeled up to 50 bucks for free. This show is also brought to you by NetSuite. NetSuite allows you to manage financials, HR, inventory, e-commerce, and many more business-related details all in one place. Somebody wrote me an email saying that NetSuite is awesome, but it's funny that I'm doing an ad read for NetSuite

• 3:42Lex Fridman?

  since this is more for companies versus individuals. Yeah, they're awesome. I just do ad reads for stuff I'm aware of and that I think is awesome. I have way more advertisers willing to advertise on this show since like two years ago than I can ever do ad reads for. So I'm very picky. And there's all kinds of different reasons why I love certain companies. You know, Magic Spoon is still a sponsor. Obviously, sort of Mailgun and ExpressVPN are things I've used for many, many years. And NetSuite, I just, time and time again, come across them as a company that can be relied on to take care of the messy stuff and do it well,

• 4:27Lex Fridman?

  the messy stuff for running a business. So right now, they're doing special financing. It's back. Head to netsuite.com/lex to get their one-of-a-kind financing program.

• 4:39Lex Fridman?

  This show is also brought to you by Simply Safe, a home security company designed to be simple and effective. It takes 30 minutes to set up. You can customize the system for your needs. It is one of the systems I have set up in my place. I take security exceptionally seriously. It's the sort of consumer facing security system I use. It's the one I've always used. Very easy to set up. You can add all kinds of sensors, all kinds of cameras, window breaking, motion sensors, all kinds of stuff. I forget how many, but they're all awesome. There's like no crappy sensors or products that Simply Safe has. All of it's super easy to install. All of it on their website is super clear. I recommend it highly.

• 5:24Lex Fridman?

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• 5:41Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its Pod Pro mattress. It controls temperature with a nap. It's packed with sensors. It can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. I am a huge believer in the power of the nap. Sometimes I'll drink a cup of coffee, take a 20 minute nap, and I wake up feeling better than I do after a full night's sleep. It's incredible. I don't know how it works. It's magic. And in terms of the effectiveness on my mind, a power nap is a power nap. The surface to me doesn't matter because I often sleep on the floor. Doesn't matter. But if I also wanted to feel good, which I do,

• 6:24Lex Fridman?

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• 6:50Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Treatment Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Tony Fadell.

• 7:16Lex Fridman?

  When did you first fall in love with computers, or let's say, computer engineering and design?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  I first fell in love with computers and programming was in a summer school class in fifth grade in Gross Point Farms, Michigan. It was a simple, basic programming class, but the basic programming class was not like you might think it was. It was bubble cards. So literally, it was, you know, the cards, the stack of cards, and you would use a number two pencil and you would put in your program line by line, and you'd have to make sure it was perfectly stacked and no errors and what have you. And you'd take that set of cards and you'd put it on this reader and it was, and it would go off to an IBM microcomputer

• 8:05Speaker 01

  somewhere in the back, then the cloud. And then you would sit on a Texas Instruments paper terminal. And it would just, literally, I was just, I could write things and it would, I could program this machine to do stuff. And it was, you know, it was nowhere near sexy. There was no graphics, right? Oregon Trail was all in text, right? The cards were so cumbersome that if you got one thing wrong or out of order, it, or disaster, or you dropped one card, it would all fall apart. So just doing that, you know, printf, or what was it? I can't even remember what it was. It was, you know, what the, what the basic commands were, but-

• 8:47Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so when you say basic, you mean basic programming-

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Programming language.

• 8:50Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Basic program-

• 8:51Lex Fridman?

  So you're, you're writing basic programming language on paper?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  On paper.

• 8:57Lex Fridman?

  And you're calling it programming, though? It's called programming?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're programming this computer in, you know, in a remote location and it came back. So it was truly cloud computing in a way. It was really terminal based computing.

• 9:09Lex Fridman?

  And the input and the program are separate? So the input to the program or they go together? Like, um, or is there no input to the program? It just runs and it gives you output?

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, it goes in and it says, it says ready and then you can say run.

• 9:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  And then it would run, but to program it, you didn't type it because it was a printer terminal. You would make the stack of cards and that would get it into the, the computer's memory.

• 9:34Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so where was the magic?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  The magic was that you could create, you had a language and you could create what you wanted to create. Right? You could create a world or, or what have you and have this interaction. And you could compute things, you could, you know, do numbers, you could, I was playing Oregon Trail. Right? So you were less like-

• 9:53Lex Fridman?

  So you can play video games?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Wow, video?

• 9:57Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  You could play text games and then imagine them in your brain, right?

• 10:03Lex Fridman?

  Oregon Trail, there's this meme I saw recently. If you want to feel bad about yourself as a programmer. Realize that one person wrote Railroad Tycoon. I think that's the name of the game. It's this cool little builder game. One person wrote it in assembly.

• 10:24Lex Fridman?

  So for like from scratch and for people who don't know, it kind of looks like a SimCity type game. It's a city builder, but obviously centered on railroads. And there's a nice graphics, a three dimensional, all that kind of stuff. All the things, all the rich colorful things you would imagine for, for a three dimensional video game. All written in assembly, meaning the lowest level code next to binary.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:47Lex Fridman?

  Which is fascinating and that's the, you had to notice the magic at that low level at that time. You didn't have all the graphics, you didn't have all the like APIs and all the sample codes, no stack overflow, no internet, none of that.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  You just had, you had to know registers, you had to know the op codes. And you had to imagine the world in your brain of the memory structures and everything. There's no visualization, you visualized it all yourself, right? And so that was magic, but then the next part of the magic of where I got hooked even further. Was like, I'm doing these little things. And then Electronic Arts came out for the Apple II, so I got an Apple II. And Electronic Arts came out and I was programming and doing basic and making my own games. But then there were two games that really blew my mind. One was Pinball Construction Set.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  And the other one was Music Construction Set. And these were both places where I could create pinball games and I could create musical scores because I love music and I could then play them, right? And so when you had that, you were like, oh, there's something very different. So I could create myself, but then there was others that create tools so you could create at a visual level. And then you would read the backstories because electronics arts back in the day, it was one programmer who would program those things, you know, each of those things. And you could read their backstories. It was literally like, like a musician or someone else, like you could read Rick Rubin's, like, here's the thing. They tell you all that stuff. And there was one guy who wrote Music Construction Set. He wrote it all in assembly and he was 16 years old.

• 12:22Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  And I was probably 12 or 13 at the time. And I went, oh my, if he was able to do this and had it published, right? And this amazing tool was created. I'm like, what could I do? And so then it just kept building off of that. But really it was those seminal things. First the introduction and then the, you know, the power through programming and turning these things into what you wanted to turn it into. And you didn't have to be 40, 50 years old and have, you know, PhDs. And then I was like, okay, this is really cool.

• 12:57Lex Fridman?

  I wish we did that with programmers where we treated them like artists. We would know the backstory these days today. Or we'd, not just programmers, engineers.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Engineers, designers.

• 13:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, like all the things about a product that I think we love are the little details. And there's probably a human being behind each of those details that had their little inkling of genius that they put in. And I wish we knew those stories. That's always sad to me when I, because I obviously I love engineering and I interact with companies and they, you know, autonomous vehicle is something I'm really interested about. And I see that companies generally, and we'll probably talk about this, but they, they seem to want to hide their engineers, like engineers hold the secrets. Like the great secret, we did not speak of the great secret. But then the result of that is you don't, you don't get to hear their stories, the,

• 13:51Lex Fridman?

  the passion that is there behind the engineers, like, and also the genius, the little. There's a difference between the stuff that's patented, like the kernel of the idea.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:02Lex Fridman?

  And, and the beautiful sort of side effects of the idea. And I wish companies revealed the beautiful side effects a little bit more. But, uh, so sorry for the distraction. So what, uh, you mentioned Apple II. What was the first computer you fell in love with? Like the, the product, the thing before you that was a personal computer?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  It was the Apple II. So the Apple II was something I was just lusting over. You know, it was, I think it was at the time, it was the, um, you know, the person of the year. Maybe it was that year. I don't remember what, but.

• 14:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, Apple II was the person, the person of the year?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, for Prime Magazine back in, I don't remember when, but it was around that same time. I was so young, but I had, there was the Apple II and I didn't know what it was, but I knew about tools because my grandfather taught me all about tools and, uh, creating things, right? And I saw this thing and, and I had the, you know, that, that IBM experience, that terminal experience. And I'm like, oh, I could have that at home, right? And so I need to have that at home. And the only thing that was really talked about in, in our circles was the Apple II. And I was just like, that's it. So I went, jumped up and down. It was very expensive. I have to have this. My parents like, what? You know, it was twenty, twenty five hundred dollars back then.

• 15:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Well, in the nineteen eighty one, it was like crazy, right? So I was like, I'm going to make as much money as I can this summer. And my grandfather said, because he, he helped me learn all about tools and build things together. I will match whatever you make so you can get this computer. So I worked very, very hard as a caddy, golf caddy, caddying actually for the, you know, the, the families in, you know, at the country clubs in the, in the town, um, where we lived and, uh, did whatever I could. And that end of that summer was got my Apple II. And I, you couldn't tear it away from me. It was my, my friend. It was everything.

• 15:51Lex Fridman?

  From a product perspective, what do you remember that was brilliant? The design choices, the ideas behind it? Or is it just that it exists? Or the very idea of a personal computer is the brilliant design choice?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was that I could actually have this kind of tool in my house and I could use it. Anytime I wanted, I could program it anyways. There was no, you know, there was no internet connection. There was no, it was all just you. You either loaded software that you got from someone, right? Or you created it yourself. And then there was a whole other thing which was started happening, which we were doing. And this was kind of like MP3s and stuff. We were sharing software, right? So you built this community of sharing software. You would go and pirate, that was what it called, pirate all this software. You never use it all, but it was just that fun thing of like, I'm going to get all this other stuff and then tear it apart and do disassembly on it and see behind the scenes. So you really had a sense this was your world and you owned it, right?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  And you could like literally go into every register. We didn't have all those security layers like we do now. Like you could really touch bits and you could poke bits and you could make this light turn on. And, you know, and the geek in Simon just lit up. Now you, there's, it's so abstract. You know, people don't even understand, like usually, you know, some programs don't even understand memory. They just think it's unlimited, right?

• 17:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and security, it's like now there's all this security that you should have, but it's like the adults all showed up to the, to the party and now you can't have all the fun.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  It's like, no, no. You know, this was the thing where if you, if the power went out, you lost your whole program. You might've worked a whole day on it and if you didn't press save at every other line and you were save, save, save, and it would like, the disk drive or the tape drive. Like it, every single step was contemplated. Because if you didn't, you lost maybe a ton of work.

• 17:43Lex Fridman?

  So a lot of the magic was in the software. The fact that you could have software, the fact that you could share software, the, in the community around the software. It wasn't necessarily the hardware.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Well, that was the first step. The second step around the hardware was I got things like the mocking board, which the mocking board paired with the music instruction set, you could now generate all kinds of tones and notes. And it was a synthesizer in the Apple II. So you would plug in this card and you go, oh my God, look at this. And it would, you know, you could start generating cool sounds. You're like, it like was a Moog, you know, like a Moog in a way, early Moog.

• 18:18Lex Fridman?

  What year are we talking about?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  This is eighty-two, I think. Eighty-one, eighty-two?

• 18:24Lex Fridman?

  And I bet you can make all the kind of synthetic sounds that are very cool in the eighties.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, eight-bit, you know, chip tunes, right? Chip tune, ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. And then, and then, you know, when you wanted to add a joystick, you had to pull a chip out and you had to like plug in a dip socket to put in a joystick. And, and then I was like, oh, and then I had to get more memory. How do we do that? And I wanted to speed up product. So, so then that turned into a company, actually, from that. But it was in a hardware software when it at that. But it was all about, you know, modifying this thing in every way. First was software. And then you started gaining confidence and then I got a little bit more money and stuff. And then you could get into the hardware and, you know, wire things. And then the Apple II came with all the schematics. Right? So in the back, in the early Apple II's, you could open up and all the schematics were there.

• 19:13Lex Fridman?

  So you purchased the Apple II and the schematics come with it?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it came with it.

• 19:18Lex Fridman?

  That's an interesting choice. That's an interesting choice from, from a company perspective.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Right, it was like a real maker kind of thing.

• 19:26Lex Fridman?

  Right. Ah, I wonder what they... So that was intentional?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely intentional.

• 19:32Lex Fridman?

  This is the, this is for the cutting-edge folks, too? Or especially for the cutting-edge?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  It was only the cutting-edge. It was geeks for geeks.

• 19:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  So we were like, oh, how did they make it? And then we got to learn through that. Apple I did the same thing, right? It just, Apple II became more packaged up and had, you know, a little bit better software, right? Came with BASIC and then, you know, so, so it was really, it was, it was what we might think of as a Raspberry Pi today or something like that. But not with so much software. It was literally, and all the chips were out there, so you could inspect the buses and the, right? Because everything was just broken out.

• 20:06Lex Fridman?

  So I guess that's the idea behind stable, big projects in open source, like on GitHub? That you have the schematics there. And it's it's kind of a product, but I wonder why more companies don't do that kind of thing. Like, we're going to release this to a small set of people, self-selected, perhaps, that are kind of the makers, the cutting-edge folks, the builders, the at-home engineers. Like, in some way, what Tesla is doing with the beta for the full self-driving is kind of like that. It's like selecting a group of people. But that has to do more

• 20:49Lex Fridman?

  with you, how safe of a driver you are versus how much of a tinkerer you are, because you don't get to tinker. I wonder, is that a crazy idea to do for really cutting-edge technologies? Especially, you're interested in, like, hardware stuff. Is that crazy? Why don't more companies do that kind of thing, you think?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  I think, back then, it was about a community and serving that community of builders. Now, this is about people who want to get the experience and want it really simple and easy. And they're like, and so there's the audience, or they believe the audience is small, who would value those other things that we're just talking about. But if we look at things like Raspberry Pi and all of these other little boards, right, there's a whole world more than I've seen. Like, it's amazing what you can do now with these little kits and the software that's created. And so there's a whole nother, I think, another batch of makers and builders that are coming up through the ranks. And if we look at YouTube channels and stuff, right, they take these little boards, they hack them, then they

• 21:52Speaker 01

  print out, you know, parts on their 3D printer, assemble them, and they create robots and what have you. So I think it's happening. It's just not as, you know, it's just not as, I guess, raw as it used to be. But it's there, and it's really expanding around the world. And that's really nice to see, because, you know, it's a whole new generation who can, who are empowered.

• 22:16Lex Fridman?

  I think there's a semi-dormant genius amongst millions. So Raspberry Pi is revealing that a little bit. It's probably, I wouldn't be surprised if it's several million Raspberry Pis that have been sold.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  I think more than that.

• 22:30Lex Fridman?

  And it's kind of this quiet storm.

• 22:34Lex Fridman?

  Of genius brewing of engineers who don't get to hear because they're not organized. I mean, we get to hear through inklings here and there. Like you said, YouTube, there's little communities that are local and so on. But if they were organized.

• 22:48Lex Fridman?

  If a leader would emerge, no. Okay, so when did you first start to dream about building your own things? Designing your own products, designing your own systems and software and hardware?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Well, in high school, there was a company that a friend of mine founded and I was the second employee. It was called Quality Computers. And it was a mail mail order, mail order, because there's no e-commerce then. There's no internet again. You either mailed in your little coupon and you said, this is what I wanted to order. Or you wrote in to get a catalog and delivered to you, you know? Turnaround time and this stuff was like, from the time you wanted, the time you bought it was maybe eight to 12 weeks. That was just the normal way of getting things. So Quality Computers was a mail order for Apple too. And it was software and and all kinds of accessories.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  So hardware accessories, so hardware plug in cards, joysticks, all this stuff. And what we noticed was there were accelerator cards or memory cards. And to be able to use those cards, you had to actually go and change the software you used to access this new memory. So you literally had to go and you took the program that you had, let's say it was Apple Works, which was like an early Microsoft Office or something like that. And you had to literally change the code and you would install all these patches to then take advantage of the hardware. So what we started creating was software on top of it to do the automatic installation of all of these patches.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  So we made it much easier to take new hardware and then and and the existing software you have and expand it into this new world. So it was creating tools and that really great customer support. And we we started getting a lot of orders because we had the software make it easier to install, to give them the superpower. And at the same time, you know, they they would be able to change their software and have a new world that wasn't existing from the companies that were creating the initial products. And so it was more of that. And then that happened with hard drives. So I wrote a hard drive optimizer for the Apple II to like read because you could get really fragmented. So I wrote that piece of software and we sold that through the company along with the hard drives that we sold from third parties.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  So that all happened in 12th grade freshman year of college.

• 25:18Lex Fridman?

  You wrote a hard drive optimizer in 12th grade.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, between 12th and freshman year.

• 25:25Lex Fridman?

  What programming language do you remember? Is it assembly?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  There were certain inner loops were assembly and other loops, actually, there were really early Pascal, no C, C compilers.

• 25:38Lex Fridman?

  What was the motivation behind these? Is it to make people's lives easier? Is it to create a thing, experience that is simpler and simpler and simpler, thereby more accessible to larger number of people like what? Or did you just like like the tinker?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  No, no, no, it was two things really because one, we wanted to sell more hardware and software, right? So it was like, oh, make it easier for the user. And then the other thing was because I was also manning the customer support line. People would call and I'd go, this doesn't work. And I'm like, oh, I gotta go fix the hardware and software, right? Or I gotta fix the software to make the hardware and the installation process better. So my whole world was out of box experience from when I was in high school. Because I had to man the customer support line, pack the boxes and write some of the code while we were doing it. While Joe, Joe Gleason, who was the founder of College of Computers, he was off doing the mark, the ads, placing the ads for the mail order, making sure we were running the credit cards, right?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  It was two of us and then it turned into a third, and then we hired another person from high school to like pack boxes. So I could stay on the customer support line or doing the software, right? And it was all in his parents' basement.

• 26:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Right?

• 26:46Lex Fridman?

  As you were scaling exponentially.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Scaling, right. Exactly. Bootstrapping.

• 26:51Lex Fridman?

  So we'll jump around a little bit, but what were the, you said you love music. What were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod? If we jump forward.

• 27:01Lex Fridman?

  And how far back do those ideas stretch? You know, if you look at the history of technology. There's, I mean, not just the product, but the idea is truly revolutionary. Maybe it's time has come, but just if you look at the arc of history, sort of music is so fundamental to who we are as a humanity.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:29Lex Fridman?

  To be able to put that in your pocket, make it truly portable is fascinating. In a way, that's truly portable, so it's digital. As opposed to sort of like a Walkman or something like that. So what were the ideas that gave birth to the iPod?

• 27:48Speaker 01

  You know, I was in love with music since I was a kid. Just loved music from, I think, second grade when I got my first albums and stuff like that.

• 27:56Lex Fridman?

  What kind of music are we talking about?

• 27:58Speaker 01

  So this was Led Zeppelin. This was The Stones, Hendrix, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Styx, Ted Nugent, you know, just the real, you know, the real American and British rock and roll, right?

• 28:17Lex Fridman?

  There's a bunch of people listening right now, who Ted, who's that?

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Who's that?

• 28:21Lex Fridman?

  Led Zeppelin, what is that?

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  It drove my parents crazy.

• 28:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just blast it loud.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Loud, just, and this was second, third grade, fourth grade. I just, I fell in love. And then we moved back to Detroit and I love listening to the radio station because there was all kinds of crazy music because you'd have an amalgam of rock and then funk and R and B. And I loved to listen at night, so I had a clock radio. But if I had the clock radio on, everyone, parents go, go to sleep, stop that, turn that stuff off. So I hacked the clock radio and put a headphone jack in it. Right, so I say, oh, they're like, okay. And then, and then I could listen to it all night and no one could hear me, right? And I could just sit there and, you know.

• 29:10Lex Fridman?

  Just huddling around the radio.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Groove out.

• 29:13Lex Fridman?

  Just listening to Zeppelin. Stairway to Heaven. What would you say is the greatest rock, classic rock song of all time?

• 29:21Speaker 01

  Greatest classic rock song of all time?

• 29:24Lex Fridman?

  What pops into mind? Well, no, you know what? I mean, this has to be objectively not the one.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Dude, this is so hard.

• 29:29Lex Fridman?

  This is a serious journalistic interview. You're not going to back down from these kinds of questions.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 29:36Lex Fridman?

  No, I don't know.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  It's a challenge.

• 29:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's hard, it's hard to pick. But I, to me, Stairway to Heaven is a safe fall. It's like, it's so often considered to be one of the greatest songs of all time that you almost don't want to pick it.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 29:51Lex Fridman?

  But you return to it time and time again, and it's like, yeah, this is, this is something pretty special. This is a rock opera of sorts.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Well, the rock opera that really blew me away and still continues to blow me away is all of Dark Side of the Moon. Like that. I love Zeppelin, I can't say which one's better. But Dark Side of the Moon for me was, it was a, you know, audio experience, right? The whole thing from soup to nuts, plus all the synthesizers, all of those things.

• 30:19Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Back to the iPod. So that's, from the early age, you loved music.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Loved it. Absolutely loved it and, you know, always was just around it and always, I just, it was always playing, you know? I played it so loud that I actually hurt the earring in my right ear. And I still suffer from that today. And then.

• 30:41Lex Fridman?

  No regrets.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  No regrets whatsoever. Going to concerts and downtown Detroit and all that crazy stuff. So, moving forward. So, in college, I was a DJ. So I would DJ and hang out and play all the tunes I love and whatever for the, for the crowd. And then I continued to do that in Silicon Valley when, when I moved right after school. And so I was belugging all of these CDs around with me. A thousand CDs to, right? And, and at the same time, and so those were heavy. And at the same time, I was doing the Philips Nino and Velo. Those are Windows CE-based mobile computing products.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  The Nino was the first device to actually put Audible books on tape. So we, I worked with Audible. We met in a conference and they were like, we don't want to do hardware. We just want to do content. I was like, well, we have this device. Let's get it together. And we got Audible on that. And this was in ninety six or seven. First Audible books. And it, you know, it's, oh, my God, that's audio. Well, what if we put music on it? Right? And so I, and the memory was very small at the time. Right? There was almost, there was almost no flash. It was all DRAM. When you did Audible, you stored it in DRAM.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Right?

• 32:01Lex Fridman?

  Which is okay, probably, because how much books do you need? Is the idea. By the way, brilliant. I mean, just putting books. I know it's probably not the sexiest of things, but putting books on a mobile device is a brilliant step. I don't know. Sometimes can't measure how much human progress occurred because of an invention. Like there's the sexy big products, but you never know. Like maybe like Wikipedia is one of those things that doesn't get enough. I think credit for the transformational effects it has. It's not seen as the sexiest of products, but maybe it is.

• 32:41Lex Fridman?

  When you look at human history, Wikipedia arguably is one of the big things that, that basically unlocked human knowledge.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Human knowledge and human editing and human, you know, just the human, human nature of building something together.

• 32:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So it's fascinating. Sometimes you can't measure those things, maybe until many, many decades later. Anyway, sorry. So that was, that was the Nino. That was, that was there. And then there was Audible. The books, why not put?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Music. And I'm carrying around the music for the DJ gigs. And you're like, wait a second, uh, two and two together, right? Like, let's get rid of this. And so, and then MP3 show up.

• 33:21Lex Fridman?

  The the actual like

• 33:22Speaker 01

  The format, the format, MP3 showed up around ninety seven, ninety eight.

• 33:27Lex Fridman?

  So MP3 is is compressed, so you can have, like, the storage is reduced significantly.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Right, so you could go from a, you know, a large, full, full lossless, lossless, you know, digital track into something that can be stored in four to eight megabytes, something like that for the audio. Now, you know, that's a reduced quality, but you could get it down there and you're like, oh, okay. And now, if we have enough flash or DRAM, we can put ten, fifteen, what have you, all in that same memory. And it starts to replicate a CD and then ultimately, if you put it on a hard drive, you could start to put, you know, thousands of songs.

• 34:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's that's also another brilliant invention. But like, people don't realize, I think, I think people would be surprised how big in terms of storage, raw audio is. And the fact that you can compress it, like, I don't know what the compression is, but it's like ten X, it's very significant compression and still it sounds almost lossless.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Much to the chagrin of Neil Young, who, who does not like that.

• 34:32Lex Fridman?

  But even even Neil Young, even the stuff he talks about is still tiny files relative to the raw. So he wants us to increase it just a little bit more, a little bit more. But it's still, that's an invention. That's a thing that unlocks your ability to carry around a device that can, you know, and listen to music, because without that, there's no way you can carry on a gigantic hard drive.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And so, so then that, so it was MP3s, the Nino and my, you know, my, my hatred of carrying around all this heavy stuff, that then spawned, you know, fuse and then ultimately, you know, became a lot of that, the ideas and things of that nature were, and and my passions were born into then the iPod. You know, it was too, Apple needed something and I wanted to fix something and it all kind of, you know, came together at this right, right place, right time, plus the right technology came at this. It was just like the stars aligned.

• 35:30Lex Fridman?

  So how did it come to life? The details of the stars aligning, but the actual design.

• 35:37Lex Fridman?

  The actual engineering of getting a device to be small, the, uh, the storage of the, you know, the interface, how it looks.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 35:47Lex Fridman?

  The storage, the details of the software, all that kind of stuff. What, what are some interesting memories from that design process? What are some wisdoms you, you can?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 36:00Lex Fridman?

  Part from that process.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, how long do you want to go? Cause I have, I can go deep, uh, so, uh.

• 36:08Lex Fridman?

  Let's go at least 20 hours, go.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:11Lex Fridman?

  This is one of the lengthy documentaries.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  We're gonna turn it into episodic, uh, binge, binge listening.

• 36:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, Game of Thrones.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  So let's just start with, uh, you know, after I was asked to be a consultant to put this thing together. So I had already had knowledge of, you know, the, the space and the technology and all that stuff. But I had to very quickly, and, and a lot of the suppliers, because of what I was doing at Fuse, trying to create that thing. So at, at, as a contractor, I was like, okay, what is the first thing they need to do? So, so after I showed a, you know, uh, um, different architectures and what three different products could be to Steve about options for storage options, battery options, form factor options. There was three options and as I was, was I told, uh, given very good advice,

• 37:00Speaker 01

  give to the, the two options you really do not like, but they're options and give the best option last. Cause Steve will shut, you know, shoot all those down and give the, the, the best option last. And then you could talk about that. And so that was the one, um, that had a 1.8 inch hard drive and a small screen, uh, like the screen, you, you, you know it, uh, in the, on the original iPod, classic iPod. And, uh, and then I had enough of the idea of the three or three or four different,

• 37:32Speaker 01

  CPUs and processor suppliers and kind of systems that were out there that I had gone and found and, and put together. Um, power supplies, you know, uh, disk drive interfaces, firewire interface, all that stuff. So I put together all of those, those schematics or, you know, block diagrams. They weren't schematics yet, cause it was just me. And coming up with a bill of materials, coming up with what it could look like, what would be the input output? How we could, uh, make a better headphone jack? That was also on there. Screen suppliers, tearing apart calculators. So got all calculators and all kinds of electronics to get the the right size. Different sizes of small LCDs. So I got all kinds of different battery types.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  I got different types of, you know, and different battery sizes, double As, triple As, working through all the different. And there was lithium ion, nickel metal hydride. So I took all the battery types. I took all of the memory types, processing types, LCD types and and connectivity and all that stuff, not wireless, but wired. And laid out these things as Lego blocks. So literally had all of these things as just. And so I it made them so I could like, you know, put them together and figure out what the compact fact form factor would be.

• 38:51Lex Fridman?

  Oh, like, how do we shove them together? What's the smallest possible box you can get? So the the questions without the storage, so the hard drive, batteries, double A, triple A.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:03Lex Fridman?

  Screens, so screen size. And then for that, you're tearing apart calculators.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Calculators, digital cameras, whatever, and getting little things, right? So so you can make it physical, right? If you can make the intangible tangible like. And so I can say, look, we can make this. And I could I had brought this whole bag of goods and it's like, right? And like, here's this, here's this. This is why double As won't work and because it makes it too fat and everything. So just educate everybody through, here's the parts that we can use.

• 39:30Lex Fridman?

  You should not cheat a paper. It's physical. You're playing in the physical space.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Oh, I would go back and forth. So truth be told, because there weren't a good enough graphical tools on on a on the Mac, I was using a PC with Visio and some 3D tools. And I was doing 3D design at the same time. I was taking all these physical parts and going, OK, what feels right? Because you have to go from, you know, the details and then the rough. And you go back and forth and you iterate, right? And so it was just a lot of fun. And then I ultimately ended up with a styrofoam model and printouts that came from Visio that I glued together and put my grandfather's fishing weights in because I also modeled the weights, right? So I said, oh, this is this many ounces, this this many ounces and grams.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  And then I went and got all that and made the weighted these styrofoam models. To then match that. So when you picked it up, it felt more or less form factor right. And it also you felt the how much, you know, was it going to be dense enough? Is it going to feel solid and rigid in your hand? Right?

• 40:32Lex Fridman?

  Why does it need to feel rigid?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Cause it has to feel substantial. It has to feel like I have like a like a bar of gold in my hand. Right? You know, maybe you know this, when you open and close a car door, you know that thunk and you go bam and you go that feels solid, that feels real. And then you get this tinny car that's like ding and you're like, does this feel safe? Does this feel like a value? And so you, when you have a device like that and you, you want to make sure that there's not too much air in it, that you distributed the density of the masses in the right way. So it feels like it's right thing. So you have to model battery life, costs, you know, mass, sizes of different things. And then you have to also think about what the UI is going to look like. Right?

• 41:17Speaker 01

  So you have all of these constraints you're working, variables you're working with. And you have to kind of, you know, you can't get the perfect of everything. What's the best, you know, local maximum of all of these components that come together to provide an experience?

• 41:31Lex Fridman?

  Local maximum, it's always trade offs. What about buttons?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Buttons, oh, there was also the buttons too, right?

• 41:36Lex Fridman?

  Oh, by the way, a lot of these battles fought inside your mind or is it with other people? Is it, is it with Steve? Is it lower? Like what?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  This was all independent. This was me before being able to present to Steve because I had to feel really confident. That if I was going to put this in front of him, that it could be made. Right? So I had to convince myself and go work through all the details through the like the very, very rough mechanical design, electrical design, software things, because I didn't want to present something that was going to be fictional. Right? My credibility would be like trashed. Right?

• 42:08Lex Fridman?

  So you mentioned convince yourself. You're painting this beautiful picture of a driven engineer, designer,

• 42:19Lex Fridman?

  futurist. How much doubt were you plagued by through that? Like this, this is even doable because it's not obvious that this is even doable. Like to do this at scale, to do this kind of thing, to make it sexy, to.

• 42:36Lex Fridman?

  Shovel the screen, the batteries, the storage, to make the interface, the hardware and the software interface work, all of that. I mean, I don't know, I would be overwhelmed by the doubt of that because so many things have to work, plus the supply chain.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Like, at that point, I wasn't getting into any of those details or anything. You know, there's, there's the basic stuff that you have to put together. And then you have to, you know, through my learnings at General Magic and my learnings at Philips and delivering, you know, multiple, you know, large scale programs and manufacturing, you kind of get a rule of thumb and you know what to focus on at the beginning and what not to worry about over time. Like, when I was early in my career, I worried about everything on the engineering details, so much so that, you know, I would be a nervous wreck. Sooner or later, you learn how to filter out and figure out what to prioritize. And so 10 years later, you know, I was able to much, do a much better job of filtering out the things of like, we'll get to that in, you know, in weeks to come. But right now, we got to like solve, you know, the, the very important things, which is,

• 43:35Speaker 01

  is, could this actually be something real and that you could deliver, you know, enough battery life, right? Enough of an interface, of the right cost, right? And the right, right, right price point.

• 43:47Lex Fridman?

  So you already, you were sitting on, on a track record of successes and failures in your own mind, where you had sort of already a confidence, a calm, a calmness. But still, was there a doubt that you can get this done?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Always, always.

• 44:03Lex Fridman?

  How hard is it to achieve a sort of a confidence to a level where you could present it to Steve and actually believe that this is doable?

• 44:12Lex Fridman?

  Like, what, what, do you remember when?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, that moment?

• 44:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  I think it was after I triple checked, I couldn't, I couldn't bring anyone in, right? I couldn't let anyone in on this. So it was just me.

• 44:24Lex Fridman?

  Are they gonna trample on it? That kind of thing? Why?

• 44:26Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, because I couldn't bring any, what I mean, bring anyone in on this, one, it was a highly confidential program inside of Apple. There was like four people who knew about it, right? And so I couldn't bring anyone from Apple because I was a contractor. I couldn't bring anyone else from the outside world. I'm working for Apple and I'm under this crazy NDA, right? And this contract. So it was just, it was, so I'm, I'm, I'm doing this. Oh, and at the same time, I'm also buying every competitive product, MP3 player and tearing them all apart.

• 44:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Right? Tore them all apart and looking at them and, and trying to learn from those as well. So it was all of this stuff in six weeks. So I didn't sleep.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Right?

• 45:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  But I was like, because I was trying to make this from, I was envisioning this since the Nino. Right? And I was like, oh, my God. Right? But there was another doubt that I had, and it wasn't just, could you make the product? But could Apple actually have the balls to make it? Because Apple was not the same company

• 45:27Speaker 01

  that you know it today in 2001.

• 45:30Lex Fridman?

  Really? It was cautious, conservative, careful?

• 45:33Speaker 01

  It was barely break even. It was worth four or five billion dollar company.

• 45:37Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so the guts required there is not necessarily in the innovation. It's like, this is going to cost a lot of money. We're going to potentially lose all of it because it'll be a flop.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Well, there's not just that, but there was only the Mac.

• 45:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  And the Mac wasn't doing very well.

• 45:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  There was less, it was about a 1% only in the US market share for the Mac. Right? The company was in debt. Bill Gates had to give him a loan.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Right? Michael Dell, at the time, was saying, shut down the company and give the money back to the shareholders. So this is not the company that, you know, that people go, oh, my God, the iPhone came out. It's a very different level of confidence and financial situation that the company was in versus the iPod.

• 46:24Lex Fridman?

  So given that, what was the conversation when you finally presented to Steve?

• 46:30Lex Fridman?

  What was that conversation like?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  The conversation was, well, we went through it, the presentation and all that stuff happened. And he was just like, and you know, he never, he would flip through it real quick, throw the presentation aside and said, okay, let's talk about this. Right? And so we went through it all. And one was a big conversation about Sony. And Sony was the number one in all audio categories, home, portable, whatever, in the world. Okay? I had been already gone through 10 years of failure. And I was like, wait a second, how are we going to compete with Sony?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  And I was always worried that Sony was gonna come out with whatever it was that they were gonna come out with, their MP3 player, and that was it, game over, right? And so I was like, Steve, and this is why it took me four weeks to finally sign on to join Apple after he green-lighted the iPod program in that meeting, was because I had built other things in the past at Philips, the Nino and Velo, but they didn't know how to sell it or market it. They didn't know how to retail it, right? So I was like, we could build this. And I was like, Steve, I'm pretty sure I can build this. I've done this before. But how are we gonna sell it? You have all your marketing dollars on the Mac. And he looked at me and he goes, you build this with, you know, a team, our team and

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Apple, and this isn't me, right? And I dedicate that we will make sure that at least two quarters of all marketing dollars will only go to this product and nothing else.

• 48:07Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Right? That was, Mac was the lifeblood of all revenue of the company.

• 48:12Lex Fridman?

  So Steve saw something special here.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. And he said, I'm going to commit all the marketing dollars. If you can deliver the experience that we're all talking about, if we can do that, and that was Jeff Robin as well, because iPod would have never happened without iTunes. You know, people don't understand, that was a bundle. You couldn't do one without the other and vice versa. So Jeff and I were, you know, if Jeff and you can present and bring that, bring that experience to life, I will put all the marketing dollars behind it.

• 48:41Lex Fridman?

  When did the marriage of iPod and iTunes sort of, what was that birth of ideas that made up iTunes?

• 48:51Speaker 01

  iTunes existed before the iPod, okay? And so Jeff Robin had his company, oh man, I can't remember the name of it, but it was bought. He was making a MP3 player app for the Mac.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Steve saw it because there was MP3 player apps like Winamp and other things that were on the PC, RealPlayer. And Steve saw that going on and saw that Jeff and his small team had this, this, I can't remember, sound something. Anyways, he bought that and that became the basis of iTunes and then Jeff ran all of iTunes. And so what happened specifically there was they were starting to hook up to all these third-party MP3 players. Because there's a lot of Korean, the MP man, like Walkman, but MB man, all these. And they were trying to hook them up. And they were like, these are horrible experiences. And through that, and they said iTunes was something that was going to help grow the Mac base. Because we were trying to get more people on the Mac. So this program would be a great

• 49:49Speaker 01

  new thing you could add to the Mac. And there was also internet connectivity at the time for the iMac. And so they did that. And then they're trying to do these, these hookups. They weren't going well. And that's when they said, we need to build our own. Or Steve said, we need to build our own, since these are such horrible experiences. People don't want to just burn CDs from iTunes. We need to get that music on the go. But in an Apple fashion, that's when I was called to come in to do that, the iPod thing. After the six weeks, then he already envisioned, I'm sure he had it envisioned, because they were trying to do this thing. Okay, now that's it. iTunes, what, you know, it wasn't called iPod yet. You know, what would become the iPod? That is going to be the thing that

• 50:33Speaker 01

  then propels Apple into this new thing. Because you're bringing all these music lovers in that are going to need their, their next generation, or Sony Walkman version 2.0.

• 50:45Lex Fridman?

  So when you look at, again, apologies to linger on iPod, but it's one of the great inventions in tech history. What wisdom do you draw from that whole process about spotting an idea? This is something you talk about in your book, Build.

• 51:07Lex Fridman?

  How do you know that an idea is brilliant? At which stage? When did you know it was a good idea?

• 51:16Lex Fridman?

  And maybe is there like some phase shifts? First, you're complete doubt, then maybe hmm. And then maybe it becomes more than a hmm and becomes like a little more confidence, that kind of stuff. And also wisdom about who to talk to.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:34Lex Fridman?

  So they don't trample the idea in their early stages, that kind of stuff. And you thoughts about this?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  We could go on again. How long do you want to go?

• 51:42Lex Fridman?

  This is a Netflix series, I told you. Multi-season.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  So a lot of lessons learned over those years of failure and success. But the first thing it starts with, there's a whole chapter called Great Ideas Chase You. And so it kind of goes into in build and you can go and it goes through kind of chapter and verse about all of those. How Nest became into being. But let's talk about it specifically for iPod, right? So for me, I always had pain, the pain of carrying these CDs everywhere, right? And I had the joy of music, right? If you could say all of a sudden, I could get the music I love all the time in a portable package and I can have all the music I love all the time. I was solving a pain, which was, for me, it was thousands of CDs.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Other people might be 10 or 15 CDs, right? And then I can have the joy of all this music uninterrupted. That was, that was taking the pain, making a painkiller for it. And then at the end was a superpower, an emotional superpower that said, oh my, this is something different. So when you can actually focus on a pain, not of, not, and get a painkiller for it, not a vitamin. So the difference between a painkiller and a vitamin is very clear. One, you need, I gotta get rid of this pain. A vitamin, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, maybe somebody needs it, maybe not. It's all marketing story, right? So you start with the pain, give them a painkiller. And hopefully, if you can do it in the right way, you give them a superpower, an emotional superpower.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  That is always, and that's the way to, to, to know that you're hitting on something that's really powerful.

• 53:22Lex Fridman?

  The pain and the joy.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 53:25Lex Fridman?

  Are you always aware of the pain?

• 53:29Lex Fridman?

  So it seems like a lot of great products. It's like we do a lot of painful things and we just kind of assume that's the way it's supposed to be. Like we mentioned autonomous vehicles, we all assume we're supposed to be driving.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:44Lex Fridman?

  Like, and it doesn't, you don't think of it as a pain.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Right. Well, you've, you've habituated it away.

• 53:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  You've habituated it away. For me, you know, when I go to other places, like living in Bali or living in Paris or whatever, and I'm not driving, I'm walking or using a scooter or what have you, different thing. And you go, oh my God, when you left that environment, because everyone else is driving all the time, you're like, that's what you do. And you find out there's other ways of living and there's freedom. When you get rid of that, you're like, oh my God, I didn't know that this was so much better. So there's, there's something in the book that's called out and I deemed it the virus of doubt. And what the virus of doubt is, is when there's pain and it's been habituated away, you use the right marketing messages to, to bring people back to that initial experience

• 54:37Speaker 01

  they had, or the initial experiences they had of that pain. Do you remember when the first time you did blah and it felt like this? Right? And then you reawaken that habituated pain. And people, and it becomes visceral and then they're like, oh, yes, I hate that. And then you go, now I have the painkiller and the joy for you.

• 55:04Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  That's when it all comes together and it goes.

• 55:09Lex Fridman?

  Let me, on this, on the pain and the joy that's brilliantly put. You mentioned selling and marketing, right? Marketing dollars. I have a love hate relationship with marketing.

• 55:25Lex Fridman?

  Like with a lot of things that require artistic genius. To me, the best marketing, I suppose, is the product itself and then word of mouth. So like, create a thing that people love.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. That's fundamental.

• 55:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but so any other marketing requires genius to be any extra thing. Because every, to me, I don't. Yeah, maybe you can, by way of question. I'm just speaking off the top of my head as a consumer. What is great marketing? What does it take to, to, to reveal the, the pain and the joy of a thing?

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Okay. It all starts at the beginning. And let me give you, I'm going to give you a couple of different ways of looking at it. Okay. And again, we're going to, might go a little long here. So just stay tuned in.

• 56:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  So the first thing is.

• 56:21Lex Fridman?

  Start at the beginning.

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Let's start at the beginning. In the early part of my career, you know, like General Magic and Philips and what have you. And especially when I was, you know, a teenager, when I was like doing, making my own chips and stuff like that. I really worried about just putting cool things together. I'm like that, when I put those two cool things together as an engineer, you go, that's cool. And then I would talk to the other friends who might be geeks too, and they go, yeah, that's cool. Because we knew the bits. So we put them together and that's a new way of doing it. And you're like, wow. That's all what? It's not why. Why are you doing this?

• 57:04Speaker 01

  We know what we're doing, but we don't know why we're doing it because we're not articulating it for ourselves. Because it's just something we're like putting it together and like, yeah, that's cool because, because we think we're solving some problem we have, but we're not really articulating it. So what normally happens, and this happens because we invest in so many companies around the world. You have these brilliant engineers, designers, scientists, researchers. They put together these, these whats.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  And then they develop it, develop it, develop it. And then at the end, they call in marketing and say, now tell a story about this. And let's get it out to the world. Okay. What happens then is marketing is like, well, why do, why do people need this? Tell us why people need it. And so they create a story around this product. But the product was born out of whats, not whys. And so they start telling, marketing starts telling a story. And it turns out to be a fictional story, usually. They say, oh, this is going to do these things. The product comes and is delivered and it falls flat on its face. Because the marketing doesn't match the product. Because they weren't both created at the beginning together. Right?

• 58:16Speaker 01

  There are whats when you create a product, but there's a lot more whys. And the whys help inform the whats. And the whys also inform the marketing.

• 58:25Lex Fridman?

  So at the, that's what you mean deeply at, we should start at the beginning. So the designer should be also the marketer. The engineer should be the marketer.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Exactly. Stop impressing the geek next to you. What is the superpower you're bringing or the pain you're killing for the, your, your, the end customer? Right? Now let's get, let's contrast that. Think about a movie. A movie starts with a treatment. It has an audience. This has the audience, here's the characters, here's the storyline, the plot, here's the, here's the, here's the arc of the story. Right? It pulls that all out. Then there's a script that's written. And that script is then produced. And then you add all the flourishes and what have you, music and graphics and what have you. Right? And then it comes out and then there's the marketing of the movie. And that story was created at the beginning.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  What you need to do, if you're going to do a great product, is create that treatment for your product. And I call that the press release. Do the press release.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Like the treatment, who's the audience? What, what features do you have? What pains are you solving for people? To have the virus of doubt there to remind them what pains they have and why you're solving them. The price, all of those things. And you use that as the bar, the measuring stick for what you do during development. Because what happens that along the route, you know this. Oh, we're not going to be able to get that feature done on time. Throw that one overboard. We gotta hit the, we have to hit the date. Oh, we're not sure this product's right yet. Add another feature. Add another feature creep, right? If you don't have that story you know you're going to tell at the beginning, you don't have that bar, right? And then at the end, you don't know when you're done. If you don't have that story.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  So you can actually look at that press release. You might, you know, you, you change it over time, that draft. But then when you're done, you know, the whats and the whys. You have all the things, the audience and everything. And then you can give that to marketing and say, well, and marketing's been along the way. Let's be clear. But then everybody's in sync. And that's when you can tell a cohesive, nonfictional story about, and the product delivers on that story or hopefully over delivers on that story.

• 1:00:40Lex Fridman?

  So in the drafting, from the beginning to the end of the press release, what does a successful team look like? Who's part of the draft? Is it engineers, designers? What, what's the purpose of a marketing department? In a company, small, let's say, small company, but more than two people.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:01Lex Fridman?

  So from where does the why come from? Should it always come from the designer? Or should there be a marketing person that, yeah, steps in and asks the question? So I'll just keep asking random questions.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  I know, these are great questions. Okay. So, because you're just like, I'm like, I can't wait to tell you the answer.

• 1:01:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  So it's in the book as well. But you have to separate out the various functions of marketing. When, that's what I thought. I was like, marketing's marketing, you know, when I was, and, and it's really not. There's so many disciplines, just like in engineering, mechanical, electrical, software, and even software. It's, you know, are you cloud services, firmware, applications? Marketing has that much diversity as well. Okay? And you have to honor that. And so there is marketing communications like PR, press, press. There is social marketing. There is a marketing creative, right? There's marketing activation.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  But there's another thing that also comes out and people confuse it with marketing, which is called product marketing or product management. And product management or product marketing is the voice of the customer. They're the person who sits there and listens to what's going on in the competition in the marketplace, understanding the needs and those pains of the customer. And they're representing them in every single meeting. So things don't get off track, right? So that, and they're creating the messages, not the marketing. What happens is there's messages that product marketing creates. Like, those are the deep messages, like, we need to save 20% of energy, let's say, right?

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  And then marketing turns that into something that's with creative and everything, and brings that message across. Maybe it doesn't say that, but it comes maybe visually or some other way. So product management does that and, and, and holds that press release along the route and making sure that we're tracking. And then also, marketing is tracking with that press release to make sure they're not telling a fictional story, right? Because they could also add extra adjectives or something, and then the product can't deliver that. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Keeps everybody in check.

• 1:03:18Lex Fridman?

  They have to be grounded to the press release, to the raw.

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Right, to the customer needs, right? Because they're always representing the customer. So you have to have a product manager. Typically, that's the founder. Right in the beginning. And then over time, you hire a product management team to then really, you know, watch over this the whole way. And they are talking to customer support. They're talking to engineering. They're talking to design. They're talking to sales and marketing and they are always in the mix. And it's the hardest thing to hire for.

• 1:03:51Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah. So it's they have this very important job of developing and maintaining the why.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:03:58Lex Fridman?

  Why is it the hardest to hire for?

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Because you have to understand you first, nobody reports to you.

• 1:04:05Lex Fridman?

  You're alone.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  So you're alone and you have to build great ties with all of these different, these different functions.

• 1:04:11Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  You have to understand what they do, have be empathetic with what they do. And you have to get have to project the customer's empathy or empathy for the customer to them. And tell them why and why this customer needs this, why this doesn't work. And so that they learn more, they're not just doing, but they learn about the customer's point of view and sit in their in and stand in their shoes to be able to then make better decisions on the engineering details or the operational details, customer support details. So they understand that even if they're not the customer that it's intended for, they start to live through and through their eyes and see through their eyes of that customer. So they make better decisions.

• 1:04:53Lex Fridman?

  And there's probably fascinating, beautiful tensions between that and sort of the, the, the engineers, oh, that's cool. Sort of the, you know, developing the what?

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:05:07Lex Fridman?

  And which makes it an extra hard job, I'm sure.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:05:11Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask a sort of a little bit of a personal question? And the one subfield of marketing you mentioned comms and PR.

• 1:05:20Lex Fridman?

  How do I ask that?

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  I can hear your struggle in your sigh.

• 1:05:26Lex Fridman?

  Why? Or do the comms and PR folks sometimes

• 1:05:35Lex Fridman?

  kill the heart and soul of the magic that makes a company? Or is that, is that wrong to say?

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Give me an example.

• 1:05:45Lex Fridman?

  I will say the spirit of the example, which is, it feels like often the jobs of communications is to provide caution. It almost, it almost works together with legal to say.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  A shield.

• 1:06:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we probably should not say this. We're probably, let's be careful, let's be careful. Now, that makes sense, except in this modern world, authenticity

• 1:06:17Lex Fridman?

  is extremely valuable. And revealing the beauty that is in the engineering, the beauty of the, the ideas, the chaos of the ideas, I think requires throwing caution to the wind to some degree.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:06:34Lex Fridman?

  And I just find that,

• 1:06:38Lex Fridman?

  boy, I mean, it's a really, so to push back on myself, I think it's an extremely difficult job because people will hold you responsible if you're doing communications when you take risks.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:51Lex Fridman?

  And especially when they fail. So like the, it's a difficult job. So I understand why people become cautious. But to me, communications is about taking big risks and throwing caution to the wind at its best. Because your job is to communicate

• 1:07:09Lex Fridman?

  in the long term, communicate the genius, the, the joy.

• 1:07:15Lex Fridman?

  The genius of the product.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:18Lex Fridman?

  And that sometimes is a tension with caution. Sorry, so I, because I've gotten the chance to meet a lot of very interesting people and interesting engineering teams and so on, I look at what they're doing and I look at what's being communicated. And it's just, there's a mismatch because the communication is a lot more boring. It's like, there's something very, like, just straight up boring about the way they're communicating because of caution.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Okay. You have just teed me up for another diatribe, okay? I'm gonna get on my, I'm gonna get on my podium here.

• 1:07:56Lex Fridman?

  Yes, please.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  It all comes out of the leader. If the leader doesn't know how to storytell, or the leader doesn't know how to do bold storytelling, then you get even more conservatism from the PR and communications folks. Because they're always, so if you have a, not a bold leader, they, they're always going to be a filter, right? They're always gonna try to smooth things out and take off the rough edges and try, so they're gonna be even more, if you have a conservative messaging leader, you're gonna have even a more conservative communications department. Why? Because they wanna keep their jobs.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Okay? It's really simple.

• 1:08:38Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  They gotta keep their jobs. If they say one wrong thing, it could be the end of it. So if you have very conservative leader, they're going to be even more conservative. If you have a bold leader, they will be, oh, they'll always take a little more conservative bend, but you're still gonna have bold communications.

• 1:08:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's brilliant.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Okay? So it starts with the leader. Now, that said, when you, you, you think about the messages and the joy and revealing things, right?

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Many of these leaders don't tell great stories. So what we do at Future Shape, our investment firm, is we take those scientists and the great minds and everything. And what do we surround them with? Marketing and communication people and storytellers to give them the confidence to tell a much broader story about the impacts of what they're creating and how big the global change can be with those technologies. Because usually, they don't, those leaders who created those technologies, they don't really know how to communicate really well. And they don't feel very comfortable in how they speak.

• 1:09:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so it's interesting because stories, and I'm a huge fan of stories.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Have you ever read the book Story?

• 1:09:58Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  By Robert McKee?

• 1:09:59Lex Fridman?

  Uh-uh.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  You should read this. And this is what I read when I was 26. Story by Robert McKee. And it's a book all about the ways to do script writing, the prototypical types of scripts, drama, comedy, and how it's been shown over millennia, how these stories are done. It's a fascinating thing. And it gives you an insight to, and it's written for, you know, obviously Hollywood and movies and things like that. But it's incredibly useful for what we do as designers and engineers and technology leaders.

• 1:10:36Lex Fridman?

  There's some aspect in this modern day where, you know, this podcast and so on, that what I love is the humans behind the story too. So some part of the story is the human beings. So humor, drama, heartbreak, hope.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Emotions.

• 1:10:56Lex Fridman?

  Emotions. That's not just about painting a beautiful story that's flawless. It's a...

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Vulnerability.

• 1:11:05Lex Fridman?

  Yep. It's, you know, being a dreamer, like overpromising, and then failing, so changing your mind, realizing, sort of just the whole of it. And then also being like, depending, of course, where your personality is, embracing the full richness and the complexity of the personality of the leader or the different people involved. I mean, that's all part of it. Like, you can't just present this... Beautiful, always pleasantville view of a product. There has to be this humanity that's part of it. The full roller coaster of the humanity, which I think has been very difficult for companies to embrace. I'm not sure why.

• 1:11:50Lex Fridman?

  I mean, maybe it's just an old school way of doing things that people think, you know, that we present a facade. And, you know, we generate the story and we tell the story as opposed to sort of.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Well, we learn, especially in the technical world, we present the story as it's faster. It's smaller, it's longer battery life. It's it's bits and numbers and, you know, and metrics. That that resonates, sure, with other geeks. What resonates with the, you know, the planet? It's all emotions, right? And if you can bring a great emotional story, but with a great rational story at the same time, why you should do this? And it's like, oh, my God, you bring that superpower, that joy, then it all hangs.

• 1:12:39Lex Fridman?

  And there's personal drama too, like the human.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:44Lex Fridman?

  The here's the pain I had, remember that thing? And like, I mean, just, I mean, just, you know, you're. You're obviously this extremely well-known human being that's behind a lot of these great inventions of the technology world, but you're also just a human being. You have a clearly like a distinct personality that comes through the like your eyes light up. Just the way you communicate is you. Some people are more stoic, some people are like Elon is, you know, all over the place, the chaos. Steve Jobs, you know, there's a very, I mean, it's hard to put into words.

• 1:13:26Lex Fridman?

  I can be poetic and so on, but there's a very distinct comes on stage. You know, that personality right there, that's not just the product. That's something else too.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:13:36Lex Fridman?

  And like you have to reveal that a little bit and allow people to reveal that a little bit. And just let them be themselves.

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  Well, look. Why, why do I think your podcast is so amazing? Because you are yourself. You talk about yourself, you bring your emotions into it, and you don't modulate it. You, you're you, right? You're, it comes through, it's, it's true. It feels right. You are you, that you, you, you dress the way you want to dress. You say, this is me, and this is all of me. And you, and you become vulnerable, right?

• 1:14:10Lex Fridman?

  It's much easier to do a podcast like that than run a very large company.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:14:14Lex Fridman?

  Where a lot of people will feel the pain if you make, if you say something stupid.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:19Lex Fridman?

  If you, so, um, there's a, it's much more easy to be afraid.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:24Lex Fridman?

  And be careful. So, but nevertheless, the same applies. Um, authenticity and risk-taking is, is, is the only way, unfortunately, uh, to be successful in the long term. Uh, let me, just because we're jumping all over the place. Uh, I, just linger on the iPod.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:14:43Lex Fridman?

  One of the great designs, um, broadly speaking in the word design of all time. What, what does it take to design a great product? If you look, we could jump around, we could look at Nest, we can look at iPod, we can look at iPhone, and many of the, the great things, uh, you design. But just looking at that one transformational thing, what can you say about what it takes to do a great design? Or maybe what makes a great design?

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  Well, we talked about, you know, a painkiller, and we talked about the, we talked about that, you know, joy that comes from it. But then there's the behind the scenes, there's the team. There's everyone who brings it to life, brings that story to life.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  If you have a great story and you know the why, then you can communicate it to those people who are working on it. And then they bring their own thing into it, right? It becomes emotional for them, too. It's not just a job, it's a mission. And so many of the details that are born out of these early prototypes, these things that you still haven't given full form to, there may be 80% done, or maybe even 60% done, but you can see enough in there. Then you take those great ideas and you give the whys to the team. And so that they feel it, they can understand it, then they bring their best and their ideas

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  to the table, and then you can select from those. And you can then start to, you know, it could be just a pixel change. It could be a slight change on how you do the audio for the feedback, or maybe a curve on the mechanics, or something like that of how it feels. Because everybody brings themselves trying to, you know, feel this thing. They're not just doing something that someone told them to do. If you can instill that mission and that why into that team, it doesn't have to be big, you get, I feel, a 10x. Everyone comes together in a special way and, and the magic is created. You put the love into it, the customer feels the love on the other side.

• 1:17:01Lex Fridman?

  So the, making the team, like taking them in onto the vision, onto the why, now they feel the, all the little details, we think of the original iPod and all the many generations after, all those little details are in them is the emotion of the engineers and the designers that...

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  It's their baby.

• 1:17:29Lex Fridman?

  Working nights, struggling, this isn't right. Like you said, changing little pixels here and there, changing, changing the shape of things, changing the feel of things, like the materials, the, I don't know, just everything on the soft and the hard, the packaging.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Then the words on the packaging.

• 1:17:50Lex Fridman?

  Just everything.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  The words on the website.

• 1:17:52Lex Fridman?

  And always jumping from the very specific detail problem to the big picture, how the thing feels, the overall.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Always jumping back and forth. What does it look like to the customer? How are we going to implement it in the most, you know, efficient way? Cause you know, a lot of the stuff you don't know is some of that stuff is hacked in, maybe hacked in at the end. It might, it may not be the most beautiful architecture that a geek would look at and go, oh my God, that's so beautiful. Cause we can look at and visualize this incredible software stack or hardware stack. Some of it could just be hacked in. You make it better over time, but it was that brilliant thing and we gotta get that in because that's the way you do it now and we'll make it more efficient later.

• 1:18:33Lex Fridman?

  Maybe this is a good moment to draw a distinction between design and engineering and does such a distinction even exist?

• 1:18:42Lex Fridman?

  Are these distinct disciplines or no?

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  I don't think they're distinct. I think they're different types of design. I think there's, you know, there's always this, you know, this idea of this, oh, on the mount designer. And it all comes down and it all flows down like some magic. It's not, there are electrical designers, there's AI designers, there is data scientist designers. Everybody has design and there's a chapter in the book all about that, actually. That it's not just, you go to the mount and it comes down and you're enlightened. It's each person brings their, their form of design and their craft. Cause what, if they're really good, they're artists in their own right. They're not just engineers. They're not just designers. They're artists. They're empathetic. They really want to bring their best.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  A lot of the best engineers I have are not the technical or that I've worked with are not the technical, gotta get it exactly right. They're the artists. They came from music or they came from other things and they, they see that, right? When you work with very rigid engineers, this is the way, the only way, la la la. Those are not the engineers I want to work with.

• 1:19:50Lex Fridman?

  They're all like a bit artist at heart.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Right. They, they, they understand the practical, practicalness. They, they don't have to have the rigidity of this is the way it's done. Like, mm-mm. Where if you're building something new, all new and revolutionary, none of us are experts at it.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  And if you come with that expert mindset, just tell me, and I could give you a story. I should probably give you that story. About that, if you come with the expert and I'm the expert, when you're doing something no one's ever done before, I don't want you on the team. Because we all are learning about something that has never been in existence before. And we have to bring that level of vulnerability and openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things throughout the team.

• 1:20:38Lex Fridman?

  So you want people that are able to have like beginner's mind or whatever, like, don't, don't come in as an expert. What's the story?

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:20:46Lex Fridman?

  You know, lots, okay.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  No, I can tell.

• 1:20:48Lex Fridman?

  All right.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  So, so, you know, you asked, what were these risks, you know, like on the early iPod? And there's, there was, there was a few big risks, like one, and this, this doesn't go in the story, but like, putting rotating media in your pocket and it could drop at any time. What happens there? And like, you can damage, because the heads and the hard drive media are so close. It smacks, it's dead, right? So that was one big one, like, is holy shit, right? So that was something we, and we had to design special tests and everything and special software on that. But then there was another one, which was at the early days, the way the first generations of iPods, I had to hack the, I had to hack the IDE interface to the hard drives.

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  So I was like, okay, what we're going to use is we're going to use this chip for hard drive. Hard drive, to make a hard drive, you had to have a chip that did firewire to a hard drive. Okay. And then that would become a portable hard drive. Well, then we had a, we had the MP3 player and the user interface and everything. So there was times when it was just this hard drive and there was times when it was a MP3 player. And I had to hot switch between what the hard drive thinks it was talking to.

• 1:22:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Right? So designed this thing, tore it apart, did all this stuff. And I was like, You know, maybe I'm gonna screw up IDE and there's something, there's some holes I'm gonna see. So I go, who's the expert at Apple who understands IDE and everything? So this person comes over, the mass storage specialist comes over and I put on the whiteboard and said, here's how we're gonna do this thing and here's the commands and da da and this is how it hot switches and everything. He's like, that's never gonna work.

• 1:22:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:30Speaker 01

  And I was like, what? He goes, never gonna work. I said, well, let me go over here and show you this right here. I have it prototyped and it's been working for days. I just wanted to see if you're gonna have it find any holes in the thing.

• 1:22:40Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Didn't even, and he just stormed out of the room and never, never even.

• 1:22:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:22:45Lex Fridman?

  That's hilarious. I've had a lot of experience like this with experts. Like, for example, this ridiculous room.

• 1:22:53Lex Fridman?

  I had, I had a person and there's many people like this that I showed them, here's the situation, you know.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  For acoustics or something?

• 1:23:02Lex Fridman?

  Acoustics, yeah. They're like, no, no, no, no, this is horrible. This, this, this is not, this is not gonna work. The reflection, the curtains are not gonna stop.

• 1:23:15Lex Fridman?

  There's a bunch of terminology they're telling me. It's a similar kind of situation as the IDE, which I was like, no, I, listen. I just need to see is there major issues and they're like a low hanging fruit that are fixable and major holes I should be aware of. Not like, let's.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  A hundred thousand dollars to upgrade.

• 1:23:34Lex Fridman?

  To upgrade for what exact purpose?

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  The what, not why?

• 1:23:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. The why, the focusing on the, on the story, on the content, on the, the why, the why, the why. And that, that actually I've experienced that unfortunately in the artistic realms too, which is like photography and videography, cinematography. It's interesting, I talk to photographers that are quote unquote experts. And it's always about, so much of the focus is on the equipment. The equipment behind the sensors and the lighting. And it's like, all right, all right. But.

• 1:24:17Lex Fridman?

  What about, what about the feeling of the story you create visually?

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  The difference between a movie that's really well told and it doesn't have all the effects and everything versus maybe some of the superhero movies we see all the time, which is good luck if there's a story, but man, there's a lot of action and CGI.

• 1:24:39Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's, that's right. And that, and there's also value to the, to those, right? CGI superhero.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Can tell a better story, but you have to have a good story to begin with.

• 1:24:50Lex Fridman?

  Sure, exactly. But it's, if you're focused on the story, I guess you need to start with a story. You need to start the story. And if you bring in experts, they can often be detrimental, I guess, to the why. They're, they're too good at doing the what.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  Well, you can bring in experts for why. There's lots of experts for why. Too many times we get experts for what?

• 1:25:15Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  And then they only focus on the what. And so you, so they come with the specs and feeds and the, the numbers and all the other stuff. But what you're really asking for is I need somebody about the why and understanding what we're trying to get done here and fitting the what's into that why, right?

• 1:25:31Lex Fridman?

  That's why I, I do think that I, one of the qualities that I really enjoy for people to work with is like humility for a particular problem when you approach it. Basically, I don't know how to solve this, but we're going to figure it out. As opposed to, oh, I've solved this thing many, many times before. I know exactly what to do. Humility before the chaos, sort of having, having an open mind that this is going to require a totally new way of doing things. It's a really nice quality to see. You know, you're one of the fascinating humans in the history of Silicon Valley. Steve is another one of those. So those two humans came together for a time to work together. What was it like working with Steve Jobs?

• 1:26:17Lex Fridman?

  What aspect of his behavior and personality, let's say, brought out the best in you?

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Pushing you, really pushing you relentless on the details, challenging you for the right reasons. It wasn't bullying, it wasn't demeaning. He would critique the work, not judge the person, at least not in front of them, or inside of, you know, in front of a group or anything like that. I know it was really that attention to detail. And he, when he would make a decision, you know, there are, when you make the first version of anything, something revolutionary, there are a lot of opinion based decisions. And there's only one or two people, three people who hold those opinion based decisions and what they should be.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  And when you have those opinions, and you're trying to work with a team to implement those decisions, you have to really tell the why of those decisions. Just don't go do it, but why it's there. So you can feel part of that decision. You can understand what were the trade offs of the different other answers to that opinion, right? And say, this is the reason why we picked the, what we picked, because it's this for the customer, or this for the overall story, what have you, so that you felt really good. Because a lot of times, most people want a data driven decision. But with V1s, you don't get data. Right?

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Maybe in a B2B, you could a little bit, because you can talk to customers, but you can't do that with a consumer product.

• 1:27:51Lex Fridman?

  V1, version one, B2B, business to business versus what's the alternative?

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Uh, business to consumer, V1.

• 1:27:59Lex Fridman?

  Okay. We're just defining some terms.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Yes, you're absolutely.

• 1:28:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so, and when you say data driven decisions versus what?

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  Opinion based decisions.

• 1:28:09Lex Fridman?

  So like gut, you have to use, you don't have any, um...

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  You can't fall back on any data or any previous history to kind of inform you of what's going on, right? And so if you look at most companies who are paralyzed and cannot make new innovations and new products, it's because they're trying to turn, and this is what I saw at Philips, they're trying to turn opinion based decisions into data driven decisions, so they don't lose their jobs. So if you look at management consulting, management consulting is all about taking those opinion-based decisions, giving them to someone else to turn into data that comes back to them and says, they can blame the management consultants

• 1:28:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  when something goes wrong, as opposed to, it wasn't me.

• 1:28:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  Right? When you need to have to tell that story, you have to understand that, especially V1, you need to be able to articulate those those opinion-based decisions, and you need to own them. And if you fail with some of them, you didn't get it right, you then own them and fix them and move on, right? Version one of the iPod wasn't perfect. Version one of the iPhone wasn't perfect. We got a lot of opinion-based decisions wrong. But as you go through it, because you got more data. Because V2, you had data on those original opinions, and then you were able to then modulate off of that, right? And you still have new opinions, because those are differentiators that you, that we call differentiators, that the things that, you know,

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  move the, move the product forward in its evolution. But at the revolution stage, opinions, opinions, opinions, no data.

• 1:29:51Lex Fridman?

  And so you have this discussion, you and Steve

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  And the whole team.

• 1:29:54Lex Fridman?

  Anastasia and the whole team with opinions. And there, you have to be harsh.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  I, I, I wouldn't say harsh, but you have to be very determined, right? You know, there, there are two real opinion-based decisions that happened on the iPhone. One was the keyboard. Should we have a keyboard keyboard or should we have a virtual keyboard? The BlackBerry was the number one productivity messaging device of its time. It was called a crackberry for a reason, because people loved it, because it had, it was easy to type and, you know, they could get their work done. But when you're saying, we're going to move from that, everyone's talking about that in the market, and you say, we're going to move to a virtual keyboard, and it's not going to work as well as the hardware keyboard, that's an opinion-based decision, right? Because the data is telling you. All the best sales are over here.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  God, that takes guts. It takes guts, but you have to look at it from a different point of view. And this is how I learned to come to understand this because I had been building, you know, virtual keyboards before and I knew, you know, the goodness and the badness in them. Right. But he was like, look, those are productivity devices. We're making it, ours is born out of an entertainment device and productivity. Right. We need to show full screen videos. We are going to have apps, not apps, but our apps, the Apple apps, because there were no App Store yet, are going to take over the whole screen. You want a full screen web browser. You don't want one that's like half of the device is just a keyboard. Maybe you don't need that keyboard in every instance. So we want that part of the screen to change based on the tool you may need at the time. And maybe it's just full view.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Right. So you have to go and understand it's a different type of device just because that's that. And it's successful for that reason, the crackberry for the keyboard. That's not the only thing you're going to do with this device because people only did messaging. And maybe a few phone calls, right? This was going to be so much more. It was going to be an entertainment web browsing device. So you wanted those tools to go away. But it wouldn't be as good as the hardware keyboard. So that's an opinion. Let me give you another opinion based decision that got turned around before it shipped. Steve said, no SIM slot. I don't want any slots. We're going to make it very pure. Johnny was like, of course, no slots. Johnny, and we all looked around and go, that doesn't work. You can't do that. Well, why does Verizon?

• 1:32:18Speaker 01

  And then he would always, and this was the magic of Steve, like when you said, no, that doesn't work. You'd go, well, why does Verizon not have any SIM slots? Right. They showed that you can do a mobile phone with those SIM slots. And you're like, okay, here we go. And so a few days later, we come back with, you know, and, and so product marketing, voice of the customer, engineering, we all come back with all the data showing how many, how many data networks and, and mobile networks required SIM cards versus did not. And what the trends were. And so we showed the data. And that killed the, or excuse me, brought back the SIM slot on the original iPhone. Because we're like, Because he was just like, we're gonna tell AT&T to not use a SIM.

• 1:33:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  Right? We're gonna just tell them to do it differently. Right? But we were like, if we want this thing to go anywhere around the world, you want to put that friction in. People are gonna move from place to place. You know, they have different SIMs because of the prices and all that stuff. We had to show all of that data and then that opinion-based decision got turned into a data-driven decision. And it, and the SIM slot obviously showed up. So those are two very, at the very same time.

• 1:33:26Lex Fridman?

  So interesting, yeah.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  Right? Opinion can hold and so can data overrule opinion when data does exist for a V1.

• 1:33:34Lex Fridman?

  But at the end of the day, you don't know what the right answer is. So doing no SIM card slot may have been the right decision. We won't know because maybe if that was the decision, then like many times throughout Apple's history, you basically changed the tide of how technology is done.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely, you know.

• 1:34:01Lex Fridman?

  You never know.

• 1:34:02Speaker 01

  Apple started Wi-Fi. People don't understand. Wi-Fi came out of there. There was no Wi-Fi in 2001. Apple started Wi-Fi and then everyone else, you know, got on to onboard. If you look at now where we're going, we're going to phones without SIM slots. Because we have eSIMs, right? And now the SIM slot's becoming legacy, legacy as a legacy port. That legacy port will probably be gone by six, maybe 10 years. It'll be gone. I'm pretty sure of that because it's so much easier for carriers. They don't have to have physical things to go out and, right? So right now, it's just the early days. But it will happen and it will go its way. It'll fall away, but it will take time. You just couldn't do it back then.

• 1:34:43Lex Fridman?

  So timing is essential here, but at the end of the day, it's opinions and that's where the genius is. Sometimes the data tells you one thing, but the data at the end of the day does represent the past.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:34:55Lex Fridman?

  And the future may be different than the past.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:59Lex Fridman?

  Sometimes there's wisdom in the, in the past and sometimes it's actually representative of something that should be overcome. And progress looks like leaving that stuff behind, like the headphone jack.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:15Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that, when, when different folks were getting rid of the headphone jack.

• 1:35:21Lex Fridman?

  Boy, that I would love to be a fly in the wall of those discussions.

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  We had that, oh, that was, that was a discussion that happened almost every year. That was an every year, should we get rid of headphone jacks on the iPod? Right? When are wireless headsets gonna happen? What it, right? And it took years to build all the right protocols, the chips, all those things to make the experience that is the iAirPods today. Right? To say, have the confidence, because Bluetooth was good, but it wasn't Apple-like. So Nat, it's like, we gotta make our own chips, we gotta make our own software stacks. Now we have the confidence to remove the headphone jack and actually make you pay $200 more for your iPhone that you were just paying because of the headphone jack. Now we've grown our revenue, we've given a new experience to the user, right?

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  And ta-da, you know, and it's just, it's magic. And now the world's transformed to everyone, you know, moving to that, right? But it took years to understand the problem, develop the technology to, and not just rush it to market, to get a half experience, but to get it right and refine it, then ship it. And only then, after, it was probably four or five years in development, just like the M1 processor. Right? That was a work from 2008, right? Grinding away, grinding away, grinding away, then saying, okay, now we have the confidence, we're doing our own silicon for all the iPhones and iPods iPads and such.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  Now we're gonna turn to the Mac and make sure we have the best processor, right? Not just that we have the best integrated design team. And then saying we're gonna, you know, and then besting everyone, making sure the software's and the hardware's designed at the same time, making sure the kernels, all those things are gonna use the best efficiency. And then popping it out. And then it feels seamless. It's magic. There were no, as far as I could tell, unless you were in real esoteric drivers or something like that, it just worked. It was magic. Like the transit, it was not even a speed bump. It was not even a crack in the road.

• 1:37:30Lex Fridman?

  So perhaps famously, Steve had a bit of a temper.

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:37:35Lex Fridman?

  Steve Jobs, would you say his particular personality in this aspect was constructive or destructive in the process of shaping these opinion-based ideas?

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  So in Build, I write a chapter called Assholes.

• 1:37:59Lex Fridman?

  Yes, and you lay out beautifully the types of assholes and maybe you could speak to the constructive and the destructive types of assholes.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's really two delineations that I that I have found of, you know, real fundamental ones, and that is, again, the why.

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  Why do I feel this person is an asshole? Okay, they might not be. I feel this is a person who's an asshole.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  Are they motivated by their ego? Or are they motivated by their mission? Something they're trying to do that's and doing in service of something else, right? Sometimes those lines can be blurry, but it's usually pretty clear.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  When it's when it's ego motivated, you're it's clear they're just trying to get up in the ranks, push people down, shove people aside. I think we saw a president do that on a stage once.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  You know, I'm me and I'm the, you know, I'm the the guy, right? And I'm going to prove it by pushing everyone away and being nefarious or what have you, either passively aggressive or aggressively aggressive. What they're doing about themselves.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  There's another one, which is someone who's so attentive to detail and unrelenting

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  that they're trying to get the right things for the customer or in service of their mission, and they want to make sure we fulfill those things. Right? And they really care. They don't micromanage all the details, but they micromanage the details where the customer it touches the customer in some way.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  People who work with those types of people who are unrelenting and push you and might make you upset, a lot of times it's a knee jerk reaction to go, they are an asshole.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  Get off my back. You're an a-

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  Right? And you're protecting your ego. Because what's happening is that person is usually pushing you beyond your boundaries. They see something that we can do, or you can do, that you're just either not wanting to do for whatever reason. You're not confident in that. You're like, I don't want to take the extra time and saying, no, we need to get that done and pushing you. Okay? And so

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  when we came to those areas, it wasn't just a one-on-one, it could be Steve against the team going, we need glass instead of plastic on the front face of the iPhone. And we're going to do this. And we're like, God damn, you know? And so we did it. And he pushed us because he didn't know all the details, but he could see in our minds that we're like, yeah, we could probably, yeah, we could probably, but man, it's really putting us in risk. And we laid out the risks for him. And he's like, I'm willing to take those risks. We'll do that. We're like, we might be three months late. He's like, this is so important. We need to stay on time.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  You know, but it would be all the time, push, push, push. It reminds me of like kids growing up, and me is growing up, you know, when your parents push you to make you grow beyond your boundaries, your personal boundaries. And you're like, God damn it, I'm sad.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  You know, but they do it for the right reasons. Now, let's see, it's not bullying. It's not about bullying. It's not about demeaning. It's about either pushing you to another part of the mission that needs to get done, or it's about critiquing your work, but not judging you.

• 1:41:39Lex Fridman?

  Yes. Well, there's a lot to say there. So one,

• 1:41:44Lex Fridman?

  it's fascinating. It really is fascinating. And you laid out a very nice picture, but it's-

• 1:41:51Lex Fridman?

  It does feel like there's sometimes gray areas, which is why it makes all of this very complicated. So one question I have for you in terms of glass on the iPhone.

• 1:42:01Lex Fridman?

  How important is it that like Steve in that case is right? Because I could argue each side. It seems like in one sense, just having a strong vision and opinion is already going to make everybody grow, even if it turns out to be the wrong. As long as you are sort of standing your ground.

• 1:42:27Lex Fridman?

  You know, Napoleon invading Russia or something in the winter.

• 1:42:31Lex Fridman?

  It's just not going to be a good idea. It's not a good idea, but I'm going to hold to that. And then, once you decide, you go all in. And then, from that, even if the whole team knows it's the wrong decision, just sticking by it, powering through. You will learn through the pain of it. Like, everybody will learn. So that's one side. The others, maybe the asshole, the vision-driven asshole,

• 1:42:58Lex Fridman?

  gets to be more and more of an asshole if they have a track record of through that process, having built people up, having made the correct decisions. They can't, they're not allowed to be an asshole.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  They're in rare air and no one can challenge them.

• 1:43:13Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  Right. Steve was never that. That's the great thing. He was, he was never unchallengeable. You could challenge him. Now, let's, now, this, the, the, the plastic to glass story is a perfect example of this. So at the beginning of the project, well before we were going, we had always had these things about, you know, plastic front iPods, these kinds of things, scratches and all that stuff.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  So we said, are we gonna have a glass or a plastic a cover for the display? Because the the display was glass underneath it. We argued back and forth about glass versus plastic. And then we all landed together on plastic.

• 1:44:01Speaker 01

  Okay, the original decision was plastic. And the reasons were, okay, we don't want to make a mistake. Glass can break, you know, people drop them all the time. So we don't want to have a fragile device. Because you're gonna be using even more than a music player, right?

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  And you're gonna be holding your head and putting it in pockets and misses and all that stuff. So we went down the road with plastic. When it was shown, when the product was shown at Macworld in 2007, the first time, that was plastic.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  We had just enough of them in the field at the time. We started to start seeing light scratches on the the plastic.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Reviewers who didn't have the device yet, because it was behind glass. If you if if you remember 2007, the Jesus phone comes up and no one could even touch them. You could just look at it in this beautiful museum quality box, like it came from the future or whatever, the past. It was like, oh, and you just looked and that was all you got. But then people said, well, what screen is what covers on that? You know, reviewers who knew better, you know, and then it's plastic. And they were like, really? And so there was enough of a doubt there. And then when we started to do it, and then Steve changed the frame of reference of the question or of the result of what the customer would think. And he was like, if we designed it with plastic

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  and it's in their pocket all the time and it gets scratched by coins lightly scratched or by keys or something like that. That is a design problem. We need to fix that was our bad.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  If they go off and drop it, or even slightly drop it, and it cracks, it's the customer's fault. And they have much lower, they have less likelihood to complain. Yes, they'll complain, but they're part of that, of that failure.

• 1:46:03Lex Fridman?

  Yes. Oh, that's fascinating.

• 1:46:05Speaker 01

  And then.

• 1:46:06Lex Fridman?

  That's true to that.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  Right? Because then they were part of why it failed. Whereas the design, they didn't do anything wrong. It was just sitting in their pocket and it's, you know, it's scratching. And that's normal use. Abnormal use has been dropped and we're like, oh, now we get it. And so we all moved to that mindset. When you framed the problem and the solution in that way versus the original framing where we all landed on plastic. So, and then he was unrelenting on that, but we all had moved. And we have moved mindset and we understood the why. And we marshaled together. And then by the end of June, and it was crazy.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  The mechanical product design teams sourcing, all of us, the partner Corning, pulled together to make that happen because it was the right reason. Right? So this, you know, you look at these stories and you hear just the top line rumors of the takeaways. But that's not usually how it all happened of like, one leader was, that's not how Steve was. Now, I've seen leaders who are just pounding, you know, and just had no real empathy for the team and understanding the why. And it's just, it is the way I want it, right? I am the supreme leader. That wasn't like that when.

• 1:47:24Lex Fridman?

  He just had a very strong opinion.

• 1:47:26Speaker 01

  Very strong opinion.

• 1:47:27Lex Fridman?

  But it was challengeable.

• 1:47:29Speaker 01

  It was challengeable and if you came with the right thing, you know, it was, you could, you could modulate that. But you had to come with a team. It couldn't just be you and it could come a team and data and to overcome. Cause it was a very strong opinion.

• 1:47:41Lex Fridman?

  And there's personal quirks of character, like you said.

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  Bad days and good days.

• 1:47:46Lex Fridman?

  Bad days and good days. So there's also the three options you said. You, you noticed that the third option is always going to be the one that's picked. Those kinds of.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  Idiosyncrasies.

• 1:47:56Lex Fridman?

  Idiosyncrasies. And that, so that brings up another thing.

• 1:48:03Lex Fridman?

  You said challenge the idea, not the person, you know.

• 1:48:08Lex Fridman?

  I'm somebody who has a, you know, I have a temper. I've, I use colorful language and so on. When I'm on teams I work. In my private life, I'm much calmer and so on. But I get, when I get really passionate with engineering teams.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  I've been called an asshole.

• 1:48:24Lex Fridman?

  And you get, I mean, I am distinctly aware that you cross lines often.

• 1:48:32Lex Fridman?

  There's like levels, right?

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:48:34Lex Fridman?

  They, you know, you could, it has to do with language and how language is heard. So for example, you could say a lot of stuff to me. You could swear, you could say stuff that sounds personal, like, uh, uh, like, I don't know. Lex, sometimes I think you're the dumbest human on the face of the earth or something. I don't know. This sounds very personal, right? But I'm not going to take that personally. I understand what's being said. And then I'm also notice that there's other people that take stuff more personally. This, this has to do with teams and figuring out like, okay, who's going to take certain words personally or not? And you have to know, that's what takes, makes a great coach, a great leader. I'm sure you have to, you have to like factor all that in.

• 1:49:15Lex Fridman?

  But it just, there's something about just being an asshole and, um, being passionate and really driven that sometimes you do cross lines. And that's, I don't know what to do with that because it feels like it comes with the territory. Like you have, it seems like you can't just have a perfectly optimized.

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  No, no, absolutely not. They, we're humans.

• 1:49:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  We're humans. We don't have a program, everyone's programmed the same way to react the same way to given stimulus. Right?

• 1:49:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  So, you know, you said, I don't know if this was a real example, but you said, oh, you're the dumbest human on earth or whatever. I would never say that. Absolutely never. And if someone said that to me, or I saw someone else say that to another person on the team, absolutely not. That is not allowed because that's judging someone. You may be heated and you can get heated and you can say it in your intonation, but to then try to put a label on it and put a label on a person, that is not allowed. So if you let that kind of culture happen and it becomes somewhat.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  You know, sometimes it's in jest. You know, it has to be very much in jest and those two people have to have a really good working relationship.

• 1:50:29Lex Fridman?

  So, so.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  But, but other than that, I'm sorry, it's going to be a lot more. You could say aseptic in that way that you're not going to add that stuff in, but you can do it with all other types of ways without saying that because then people who do react to that kind of language.

• 1:50:45Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  And don't have those shields because they don't might not, might not have that stream confidence level that you do and you can just brush it off. You can, that can be very cancerous in a team because people then mean that. And then they see, oh, that's the right way to be. You gotta snuff that out and you gotta be that, you gotta be that change or that model that you want to show the team.

• 1:51:06Lex Fridman?

  Yes, it's true. Even if it doesn't affect me, it's going to affect a significant enough fraction of brilliant people where that shouldn't be part of the culture.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. And, and, and other people see that happen and then, oh, I guess that's acceptable. Right? Just like politics in the workplace, is that acceptable or not? I call it out exactly when I see it in front of everyone. Right? Because it's just another ego driven thing. You have to set the tone as a leader for what you want your organization to be and how to, it gets reflected in the world and you have to uphold that. And you can't, sure, you can have an excursion outside of that, but you have to go back and say, I'm sorry.

• 1:51:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  You have to go and apologize, heal and said, I was not the person I wanted to be that day. I'm really sorry.

• 1:51:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  This is, and, and even in front of the team. And have that humility and say, we're all human here. And just because I'm the leader doesn't mean I don't make mistakes.

• 1:52:02Lex Fridman?

  So have the self-awareness, apologize.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:52:06Lex Fridman?

  And that, that's, that's also part of the culture.

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:10Lex Fridman?

  How are you different from Steve as a leader and designer? So you, you've spoken about sort of what made you stronger, which is he was able to challenge, he was able to push you to bring out the best.

• 1:52:24Speaker 01

  Well, I come from the technical angle, right? I deep technology, software, hardware, systems thinking, you know, implementation, all that stuff. So I have a different bent. He wanted to be an engineer, started, but really he was much better at all the other things, the storytelling, the interfacing and being the voice of the customer and being that product marketer in a way, right, that we talked about. I grew into being the product marketing, the marketing. He came really out the other way, right? And never got really deep technically. So that's two different mindsets. One's not better or worse, it's just that's how it is. And it takes all kinds to, and all kinds can do great designs.

• 1:53:03Lex Fridman?

  Did it manifest itself differently, just the fact that you came from those different places?

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:53:09Lex Fridman?

  Like what, so like the discussion about glass on iPhones probably had a different flavor to it?

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Sure. When you started getting into the technical details, enough so, you're getting into the third order technical details and he can't argue with that anymore. Then with someone, he's like, okay, you know, at some point, he's like, I can't win this war. Like, and he learned that very early on because he didn't like the way the look of the Macintosh board, the PCB was laid out. He wanted to be beautiful on the outside and on the inside. He's like, why are all these wires running this way? Why doesn't it have all this symmetry? And we have to make it beautiful on the inside and even the traces on the boards have to look a certain way. So the teams made the board they knew that would work and then they made the board that the way Steve wanted it and that didn't work.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  And then Steve instantly figured out, like, at some point, don't micromanage every single detail. There's some things he doesn't know enough about and so he would get rid of that. But that was one of those instances where he pushed really hard and that's his opinion. So they said, okay, we're going to make it a data-driven decision and we're going to make both and we're going to show you the results, right? And then from there, he didn't get into those details. So from that, you could have a great challenge, right? Because then you could get those data and say, we can't do that and let me show you why. Or we can do that. And then Steve would go, you can't do that. And you're like, oh, we can do that, let me show you. Right? So there's certain times when you were like bringing something to reality that he didn't think could exist. Right? So it was that, it was always that creative tension, that interaction that was so successful, right?

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  I think, but there was one other fundamental thing that was different. And that it graded on the team. And that I made sure and I learned from to not do. And, and I over maybe overdo now in the opposite direction, which is when there's a great idea that comes from the team, acknowledge that person and go, that is a great idea. As the leader, you know, the opinion driven, that's a great idea. Let's build on that. Let's see if that can do that. Or it's a great idea, but not for now, put it aside. But call out when people have great ideas because it's infectious. And that means maybe not ideas that come bubble up to the customer level, but inside the organization, people like they get rewarded for their ideas and say, that's a great one.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  Steve was always like, you give an idea and he would go, hmm, okay. I don't know. The next day, 24 hours later, it would come back with slight modifications. I've had this genius idea. Right? And sooner or later, we'd, we'd look around the table and we'd like roll our eyes and go, here we go again.

• 1:55:47Lex Fridman?

  So it demotivates you from generating ideas a little bit?

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, we got used to it, but you know, later on in the team, you know, it was just not, it, it just, it doesn't want to bring the best, right? Cause if you're always like, ah, the reaction is never, that's a genius idea. It was always like, it was either negative or neutral, right? Then it doesn't, it doesn't have that same emotional effect that you want you to bring your best.

• 1:56:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, sometimes it's fun when people get excited about it. Just yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You kind of build on top excitement it could be, but coupled with sort of harshness when the idea is bad and you call out the bad ideas too. So it's the good and the bad.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  Oh, you could say, you don't have, you don't have to say bad idea. You say, maybe not now, let's table that for later, let's discuss it. Or say that that's a decent idea, but did you think about that idea this way? Not just no or yes, but let's talk about why that might not be applicable in this case so that they can learn. So the next time they bring the next idea, they can modulate and understand to start seeing through the opinion based decision makers or the database to bring in and bring better formatted arguments or ideas so that you have better chance of success the next time.

• 1:57:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  Right? You gotta train through those moments. You gotta teach those are teaching moments.

• 1:57:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, teachable moments. I aspire to be that kind of person. I'll, I'll usually say that, that, that idea is shit. That is the like, the like, and then you. That I remember that that this brilliant person just gave that really shitty idea. So I remember to make sure the next time they give a good idea, I really compliment that good idea.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:57:26Lex Fridman?

  But I personally, I mean, it's emotion, but I I call out the really shitty ideas.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  But you should call out the really great ones.

• 1:57:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  If you let the pendulum swing both ways, then everybody goes, he's balanced.

• 1:57:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  If it's always one way.

• 1:57:40Lex Fridman?

  That's right.

• 1:57:40Speaker 01

  Why bring any idea?

• 1:57:42Lex Fridman?

  I'm all about the pendulum.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  Right. You gotta have both, the joy and the pain. Don't just give me pain all the time.

• 1:57:51Lex Fridman?

  The yin and the yang. Uh, so you mentioned the glass and the iPhone. So you wanted to, not just the iPod, not just Nest. You you were one of the key figures in the creation of the iPhone. What's the interesting aspects? What what's the good, the bad and the ugly of the origin story of the iPhone? Um, again, this is a Netflix series that spans multiple seasons.

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  Uh, change my flight, please.

• 1:58:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What what wisdom, what interesting memories you have from the finding? So, uh, the the the pain and the joy that that was foundational to the iPod. Uh, the the all the CDs you had to lug around.

• 1:58:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:58:31Lex Fridman?

  Um, what was the the pain and the joy and the vision of the iPhone in your mind and the mind of the team? Steve's mind and so on?

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  Well, you know, there's multiple pains. You have to also look, there's not just customer pain, but there's business pain. Okay. And it's about the, so Apple now is getting out of that place where it was in 2001. Now people are starting to pay attention. Apple's starting to get in the culture again. It's becoming relevant. Cash is starting to flow. iPod is 60% of that, of the of the revenue, total revenue of Apple, doing an 85% market share. You're starting to get a wind at your back. You got confidence. Like, Apple had been beaten down since probably the first time the Mac was, since the Mac. It was a beaten company ever since the Mac. So we're talking 15 years at that point, right?

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  This is the first time you're seeing, like, and Steve would proudly came in front of us and said, Today, I can tell you all of the employees, we are now out of debt. We paid off our debt. It was a joyous moment for him, right? And then ultimately for our team, because no more debt. Wonderful, right? So now what you have is you have this successful thing changing the face of Apple. And you hear these heavy stomping footsteps of the mobile phone industry. Boom. And it's the feature phones at that time. They're adding cameras. They're adding color displays. They're seeing the success of the iPod and going, that's just music.

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  We have some storage. We can load music on our phones and we can do what the iPod does plus more. Boom, boom. Yeah. Right? And you're like, and how many mil- hundreds of millions of them are being sold at that point? It wasn't billions yet, but it was still, you know, 100 million, 200 million a year. iPod hadn't gotten there. It was for 20, 40, 50 million, something like that. So now you're like, okay, what are we going to do about this, you know, Goliath? Who wants to take our lunch, right? The schoolyard bully. And so, well, there was one, let's partner with them. So iTunes Music Store was there.

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  All of these phones are going to need music. So they can come to the iTunes Music Store and get that music for those phones. Cause it wasn't just about the hardware player at that point. It was about the software that you need on the desktop and the content that you needed to download. So now Apple had multiple legs of the stool, as Steve would always refer to it. So now the mobile phone industry, okay, we're going to work with them. They are going to make a, an iPod shuffle, basically. Inside of a phone can have 99 songs total. And they're going to come to our store and you're going to, I was like, okay, great. It's all going to be well and good. And that became the Motorola Rocker Project. It was Apple and Motorola getting together.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  There's going to be software on the, on this smartphone, or not smartphone, but feature phone to cook to iTunes to get your music. It wasn't even downloadable over a cloud or anything, because that, that wasn't available yet. There wasn't, have duty data networks yet.

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  It was a disaster from the beginning. Two different cultures, two different types of leadership styles. Not necessarily the most competent engineers on, on, on, on the other side. And it turned out to be an absolute horrible disaster. I watched the pains because I luckily I didn't have to be a part of it. I watched the pains on Jeff Robbins face each time we would meet and he would be like, these guys are just, you know, like, really? Do we have to do this, Steve? And he's like, we're contractually obligated. And when it came out on stage and Steve showed it, it was maybe a one minute. You know, Steve loves those extended, you know, like drawn up. It might've been a one minute, two minute kind of thing. And he literally threw that phone out of his hand as fast as he could. Yeah. Right? Because it was horrible.

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  So that, so there was the pain of we're not going to partner. So if we can't partner with these guys, we have to become one of them to actually compete. Yeah. To save the thing that is bringing Apple from, you know, that 15 years of malaise. Right? So then from that, we were made a prototype of an iPod plus phone. A classic with, it was an iPod, but it had a phone inside with all the music and all the other stuff. And you use your headset, wired headset to do the audio. Right? There was another project at the same time because we were doing videos in the iTunes Music Store,

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  iTunes Video Store for music videos and movies. And it would be a full screen iPod. So instead of the, the classic, the way you know it, it would be full screen and it would have a virtual click wheel. It'd have a virtual like single touch touchscreen that you could scroll. Right? Think of maybe an iPhone like you knew it, right? And then there was a third project going on, not in, those two were going on in my team. But the third project going on was the multi touchscreen technology to drive a Mac tablet.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  And so that Mac tablet, that touchscreen technology, there was just way too much you had to change on the software and everything to be able to use a tablet, right? We see this all the time, like people are like, there's not enough tablet apps today that are modified for tablet. They're just phone apps that are grown up, right? So then there would just be Mac touch stuff. So you'd have to have a whole developer community. That probably wasn't the best place to take that technology first. So you take that technology, marry it with the full screen iPod. And the phone stuff we were working, because the iPod phone with a rotary dial was just like a rotary phone. We couldn't make that interface work well for data input. You put those three together and now is where those, those three things

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  that then created the form or the technology and the form inside what would become the iPhone, married with a bunch of low level software from the iPod and manufacturer software and drivers and communication stuff, combined with a very reduced Frankenstein Mac OS. And I mean that in the best, the best way. It means it wasn't Mac OS just changed a little. It was totally, things were hacked out and changed and new code was inserted. And it really was a, a whole set of things from all different places to make that first iPhone OS. And then there was another team working on the apps.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  And then another team working on the design of how it looked overall between all that stuff. So all of those things came together to create what we know as the first generation iPhone.

• 2:05:31Lex Fridman?

  And those are all probably fascinating engineering challenges.

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 2:05:35Lex Fridman?

  And great teams like the creating Frankenstein OS. That's fascinating because you're simplifying, simplifying, but then you're just pulling different stuff from, and you're basically inventing, I mean, they're probably not thinking of it that way, but a new era of computing, a new kind of computer. It really is Frankenstein.

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  Right. And you didn't have to run Mac software. If you look at some of the other smartphones of the time, like Windows and stuff, they were like, we need to make sure it runs Excel and it runs Word or something like that in some reduced thing. This was like, no, no, no, no. This was born out of entertainment. So we didn't have to go and take all the same application, you know, all those other ones was about compatibility. This was about a whole new way of being.

• 2:06:20Lex Fridman?

  What did you think about? The Steve Jobs presentation of the iPhone, the sort of the first iPhone.

• 2:06:30Speaker 01

  Phone, internet communicator and iPod in your pocket.

• 2:06:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they are going to sort of present the, announcing three new products. Kind of thing and then saying that it's all in one. Just, this is a good example, one of the sort of historic presentations of a product.

• 2:06:51Lex Fridman?

  Clearly, there's like some showmanship that works, some reason it works.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:06:55Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't always work, it often doesn't work, but it did, in this case, and often did for Steve. What, like, how did that feel?

• 2:07:05Lex Fridman?

  What part of the actually, the design process was that presentation? You know what I mean? Like from the early, because you said, so consider the why, the press release at the very beginning.

• 2:07:18Speaker 01

  Steve was doing that the entire time. He was working on that story from day one.

• 2:07:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  He was pitching us this, this, this, and then this, and then he would look at our faces, because you wouldn't, most people wouldn't, at least if you were working for him, wouldn't tell him what you really thought of what he was saying, but he would look at your faces. And then he would talk to a few real trusted confidants outside of the, outside of the organization. And see what they thought, right? And they could give him feedback on it and they could really challenge him. But they could, he would also look at their faces and go, hmm. And so when you see that, hmm. Then he would modulate it and change it slightly and change it. So he was working during all of that time on the story and the storytelling. Right? And the whys. While we're working on that and helping us refine it, just like the switch from plastic to glass, right?

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  All the time working on that. So when he comes out on stage, he does something that every marketer is told not to do. Say, these three things are now combined in one. That is like the, that, they say that that is the laziest form of storytelling possible for marketing.

• 2:08:25Speaker 01

  Right?

• 2:08:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:25Speaker 01

  Right? But it was the best one because it was all those pains. It was like, I want my iPod, but I want my communications and I want my internet browsing because I want it on the go so I can look up things because it was information. And when you were on the road, you had a laptop, you had an iPod and you had a phone that, and you had to carry all of these things with you at once. Now, we're going to solve that pain for you and put it all together. So he was just showing you the pain and beating that virus of doubt and going, it's now in this one magical thing. And he could come up and masterfully tell that story because he told it almost every day to all of these people inside very quietly. And then it was just, right?

• 2:09:07Speaker 01

  It was like a, you know, a Tony Award winning play that had been worked on for 10 years.

• 2:09:13Lex Fridman?

  But also the human came through, the timing.

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  It was all that. It was all of that. And of course, he was dramatic at certain points and he would raise his voice and a wry smile or whatever it was. It was all those touches. He was an actor as well as a storyteller.

• 2:09:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  But, but it was the truth, right? The truth came through. It was a nonfiction story. And then he added those personal flourishes on top of it to for dramatic effect.

• 2:09:41Speaker 01

  It's amazing.

• 2:09:43Lex Fridman?

  So there's a designer you mentioned, Johnny Ave. You both are brilliant designers, great human beings. There were some battles fought in your, in the distant past between the two of you. Looking back, what is the positive characteristics of Johnny that made you a better person and designer, having worked with him?

• 2:10:12Speaker 01

  Watching the process that the design team that Johnny led.

• 2:10:18Speaker 01

  I don't know where, because that was over years. I didn't see all of those things. But watching the design process of really, because it was really a team that was about materials, it was about form, it was about colors, it was about these physical characteristics. It, it, when we talked about this earlier was design. What is design? Design's everywhere. Okay. So what they were really focused on was form, how the feel was, how it looked, the aesthetics, the physical aesthetics. And watching, going through that process, I learned so much in that process about how to do colors, how to do materials, how to

• 2:10:59Speaker 01

  think deeply about curves, right, and shadows, and how it would look, not just in your hand, but how it would look in the photograph you were going to take for marketing, right?

• 2:11:13Lex Fridman?

  So how it would look, how you would feel, all of it.

• 2:11:17Speaker 01

  It was, it was all of those physical things around that and watching the process to get there. That was enlightening for me, right? It opened my mind to go, oh, okay. Just like there's a process for all these other things, it wasn't just magic and you say, ha, ha, there it is. It was really a process of refinement, you know, of opening the funnel at the beginning and refining down over time to get to that final, final mile and selecting and doing the selection and certain types you could, certain times there were opinion-based design.

• 2:11:56Lex Fridman?

  Details.

• 2:11:57Speaker 01

  But a lot of data, a lot of data-driven designs of what could we, what can we deliver in volume? What can we do different things? So you always had these constraints that you had to work with under. And sometimes they, and the team, not just I, would say, we need this. And we're like, we can't deliver that. But maybe we were able to work together to find different design characteristics and different implementation characteristics that could get to that point without what they were describing. And instead of yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, let's find some other way to solve the problem together.

• 2:12:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, is, and I've seen this in several companies I've more closely interacted with, like Tesla is an example. Sometimes, you know, talking about curves.

• 2:12:46Lex Fridman?

  Sometimes it's very painful on the engineering side to deliver a very specific kind of

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:12:54Lex Fridman?

  And one question that comes up in my mind is like, well, how far should we go to try to deliver a tiny adjustment in a curve, in the curvature, or in like whatever the form factor is, and the color of the material, when the cost is like 10x to deliver, not financially, but just in effort.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, personal cost to do it.

• 2:13:17Lex Fridman?

  How many problems to have to solve? I don't know, I don't know if you can say wisdom to that, because when you're thinking about curves, you're designing in a space of ideas, you're like platonic forms kind of thing, not always grounded to like, how much this is, how much pain is going to be involved in delivering this, but that's as you should perhaps, because then if you're always thinking about the pain required to deliver this thing, you'll be too conservative. You wouldn't do the wild ideas.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. But you have to understand, again, the why behind it. And at Nest, when we had limited resources, you know, putting a screwdriver in the box, a custom designed screwdriver in the box, was born out of those experiences I had at Apple and seeing how you can create something that's emotional, it's part of marketing and it's part of the product experience overall, even though it seems extraneous. I went back and made the design team and the mechanical team change some curves on the Nest Protect, the smoke and CO detector we did at Nest, after they had already tooled it. And I said, they're saying this costs more, I said, it doesn't look right.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  There is a, but they're like, oh, well, we had, I said, no, you're going to go back and you're going to make that change. I told you, you want, we needed to do it. We had a better looking model, that is going to get done. I know it's going to be a terrible cost to you, but we already had this discussion and that's the way it's going to have to be. And I'm sorry, but it is what it is. Um, you know, because it's better for the customer and it looks better in the pictures and all the other stuff. And then we did it and it was great. And everyone agreed it was great at the end, but it was pain to get there. Um, those are where those little details are where the magic comes out, right? And, you know, if you don't do, if you don't take those pains and put in the love, the customer's gonna feel, it's gonna, they're

• 2:15:18Speaker 01

  either they're gonna feel the pain or they're gonna feel the love if you put it in, right? So it depends on, you know, how much time and effort you want to put into something and what really matters to you and to how you communicate what you do.

• 2:15:31Lex Fridman?

  We're human beings after all. Is there something you've learned from sort of the the tensions that are natural or that happen in teams when they're passionate and they're trying to solve these problems? Is that the way of life? And there's the human drama? Is that just, is that always good? Is that it is what it is? Does that make you better? Actually, the the drama, the tension between personalities and all that kind of stuff?

• 2:15:59Speaker 01

  Look, a roller coaster ride without ups and downs is no fun. It's the journey. It's the journey that brings, it brings out the best in everyone. We're, we're, we're, we're forged, we're tempered by those experiences, not all the ups, but also the downs. And that's when you get the humanity and the connection. And we can tell these stories till we're blue in the face and smile every time because we did something together that we each of us couldn't do apart. But it, when it comes together, that's where all the emotions happen. And that's where, if it's born out of the right reasons and the right story and the right way, that's where the magic happens, not just for the customer, but for

• 2:16:40Speaker 01

  how it transforms each person who is working on it. And they will never forget those experiences in their life, positively and negatively, that happened at the time, but they look back and it's only positive because they did something that mattered.

• 2:16:55Lex Fridman?

  Yet another brilliant idea that you brought to life is Nest, Nest thermostat and the big umbrella of Nest.

• 2:17:07Lex Fridman?

  Again, as part of this Netflix series, season three,

• 2:17:13Lex Fridman?

  what was the most memorable, the most painful, the most insight laden challenge you had to overcome to bring Nest to life?

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  Well,

• 2:17:28Speaker 01

  the first thing for me was making someone care about their thermostat.

• 2:17:36Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  No one considers it. They never had any customer choice. They didn't install it. They usually don't even use it because it's so complicated or what have you. They just like, they just, they bitch at it. They hide it in a corner and then they just pay the bill, right, of whatever it is, right? It's totally unloved, unconsidered, right? So how do you wake up, like I said, the virus of doubt? How do you wake that up and get people going, you know, remember every day when you go in and it's like, you're just frustrated and then you get the bill and you pay the bill. So you have to do that. So that was one thing. I think the other big one was not delivering, you know, it was, all of it was hard, right? It was constrained. We had only so much stuff. We were bootstrapped. We didn't have massive funding. We didn't get hundreds of millions of dollars. It was, but we did it for the right reasons. But I

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  think the other big part of it was not just building a disruptive product because a lot of the people on the team had done that. We knew what we were doing and, and that was, if we got the design right, we could deliver it with enough time.

• 2:18:39Speaker 01

  It was getting the disruptive go to market. In other words, how to take that product from the end of the production line and get it into the customer's hands. Because there was no retail or customer choice in thermostats. No one even, it was never considered purchase. They never thought they had choice. Some guy, usually in suspenders and a butt crack, told them, looked around, looked at their house and said, this looks like somebody who's got as well to do. This thermostat is now going to cost you $350. Thank you very much. And you're like, I'll take whatever you give me, right? And then, and it goes into another house. It's worth a hundred dollars. It was the same damn thing. Right? So there was no price transparency. There was no choice. You just got what you were given.

• 2:19:25Speaker 01

  So how do you go and, and, and this was an entrenched industry? That's why there was no, there was no innovation in it. Because it was doing just fine because every house needed them. The, all the installers were programmed by the, the product deliverers by, you know, bonuses. And, and bonuses to say, you're going to only carry our product. And if you sell this many, you're going to get a free trip to Hawaii. Right?

• 2:19:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:52Speaker 01

  And for these guys who install, I get a free trip to Hawaii. That's dream for them, right? So this whole channel was fully controlled by the product guys. And it was almost monopolistic in a way. So how do you go around that? So creating a disruptive go to market channel. One was direct to consumer, right? And all the marketing that was necessary to get that message across. Another one was getting the installation right. No one was self installing thermostats. So how do we get enough people who are early adopters to be able to self install them confidently? So they didn't still have to call the guy to come and install it. Because then he would say, this is a crap product. No, I got the must better product, right?

• 2:20:37Speaker 01

  So you had to get rid of that friction. And then ultimately, how do you get the people who were not just early adopters, but people who needed to see it and touch it before they bought it? How do you get that into retail? When the large brands of the time of thermostats and Home Depot and Lowe's had contracts that they couldn't bring in any other brands? They were owning the channel all the way to where there was any sort of slight customer choice. And it was really contractor choice more than it was and consumer choice. So all of that had to be innovated along with the product. And so to me, that was a huge challenge and something I had never done. Most of us had never done, and we had to, to, to create.

• 2:21:19Speaker 01

  That was as much as a project as actually delivering the, the product itself.

• 2:21:24Lex Fridman?

  So it turned out to be a giant hit.

• 2:21:29Lex Fridman?

  And it was acquired by Google for $3.2 billion. As a founder and leader, just out of curiosity, in these cases of acquisition, is it always a good thing? Is there any part of you and the team that considers saying no?

• 2:21:48Speaker 01

  We considered saying no all the way along the process, right? We had all been in big companies before. We knew what it was like and the politics and all the other stuff. And what I came to learn, especially from Philips, because Philips was a very, it was 375,000 people, it was a big, it was massive company, right? And tons of politics. And I was like, do we want to go back into that work? Because I had so many negative experiences from that. But then going to Apple, which was, you know, not big, but it was big enough that it could have all these dynamics. But then when you saw a leader rise up and get rid of those dynamics or not allow many

• 2:22:28Speaker 01

  of them to flourish, then you're like, oh, with the right leadership, this can be a beautiful marriage, right? And so for four months, we were working together with them, with Google, to make sure that we had the right leadership and we were going to be in the right environment that it felt right. So that happened. It absolutely happened. We worked on all the detail. We didn't even talk about price. We were talking about, how's the brand going to work? Who's the team going to work with? How are we going to get IP? How are we going to do exchanges? How are we going to get budgets and all that stuff done? So we worked through all of that before we actually sealed any kind of deal because they were already investor in the company. So we already knew, you know, they knew relatively where the, you know, the endpoint was for the price.

• 2:23:10Speaker 01

  So working through all those prerequisites, I knew that as a individual product company that was trying to create a platform, no investors were going to invest in a platform that could take three, four years and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars to build without all kinds of new products at the same time. And products that we were having, which were successes, but they weren't even break even yet, right? We were still developing them. So how are we going to get more people to fund all of these things and this platform that I really want to create? Because my worry, and I had seen this many times in Silicon Valley, is these small startups have bravado and they said, I'm going to take on the big guys, right?

• 2:23:53Speaker 01

  With a platform. But when those platform guys show up and Apple says they're gonna get in the, at the time, nobody cared. They were, they were curiously, curious, what's next? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Apple wasn't in the market, Google wasn't in the market yet, Amazon wasn't there, Microsoft, Samsung. They were not, they were all just, that's curious. Right?

• 2:24:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:16Speaker 01

  And I had watched, if you said, I'm gonna go challenge them and I'm gonna build a platform. And then they all of a sudden, one by one, go, oh, well, we're building a platform now, we're building a platform. They fudged you to death, fear, uncertainty, doubt. And the developers run away and you can't make that platform. So I'm like, before the landscape gets changed on us, because we attract so much attention, they announce something. We need to change the landscape on them.

• 2:24:42Speaker 01

  Let's go to the best place where we can build out the platform, have the right leadership behind us. To help us grow this thing into what the vision it should be. And that's what we believe we were doing with the, the Google acquisition.

• 2:24:55Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible to take on the platforms? So you said, there's a lot of startups with bravado and all that kind of stuff.

• 2:25:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:25:03Lex Fridman?

  Doesn't mean, you know, James Joyce, when he was 20, said, I'm gonna be the greatest writer of the 20th century.

• 2:25:11Lex Fridman?

  Before he wrote anything of, of value. You know, one of them is, might be actually right.

• 2:25:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, in this modern world, when you, so first of all, people should definitely, uh, get your book, Build, has just, just a, this giant number of advice on this exact question of how to build cool things. How to build a startup, how to, all the different stages of that team and hiring.

• 2:25:40Speaker 01

  It's mostly human nature. It's not technical, it's mostly human nature behind it.

• 2:25:44Lex Fridman?

  And it turns out, it's, you know, turtles all the way down, that's human at the bottom. Yes, so.

• 2:25:52Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible to build startups that take on the big guys? Whatever that is of the modern era. So for now, it's these platforms of Apple, Google, Twitter. I don't even know Meta, I guess called now.

• 2:26:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:26:08Lex Fridman?

  Is it possible to take them on?

• 2:26:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But you don't take them on on their same turf. You take them on on the turf they're gonna want to have in the future. Right? Spotify is a platform. It started as an application, is now a platform.

• 2:26:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:23Speaker 01

  Right? Think of WeChat. Think of all the super apps out there that are now wallets and delivery services and travel services and transportation services, all within an app.

• 2:26:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:37Speaker 01

  They've innovated in a different level, in a different space that the platform companies weren't. Right? Or they, you know, Google was an app, was an app company. It was solving search. And then it became a platform company. Apple was solving personal computing. And then it became, or iPhone was doing, you know, solving internet browsing, all that stuff. And then it became a platform company when the App Store was added. If you look it out, there's no such thing as building a platform company. You build a great app first, and then you can expand it and have the right to become a platform.

• 2:27:13Lex Fridman?

  Your whole book is just a bunch of advice for young people, but let me ask.

• 2:27:18Speaker 01

  And older people.

• 2:27:19Lex Fridman?

  And old, well, everyone is young at heart. If you're not, you should be. So what, in terms of picking a career, you have advice on this point. What advice would you give to a person on how to pick a career?

• 2:27:33Speaker 01

  What is it you want to learn? And who is it you want to learn from? Just like you pick a university. You're like, I want to go here for this expertise. I've heard about these programs, especially graduate, graduate studies. You go for a certain program with a certain set of people. Why don't you do that when it comes to, you know, a job? You just don't go, or in a career. You just don't go and say, I just want to go work at Google, or I just want to work at Apple. You want to go to a certain team with a certain set of people and work with them on something that you're really curious about and you want to learn about.

• 2:28:09Lex Fridman?

  That's such, I just wanted to comment that it's such a, it's a subtle but a brilliant framing of just ask the question, what do I want to learn? And then see what career path is going to maximize that.

• 2:28:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:28:28Lex Fridman?

  That's so interesting.

• 2:28:29Speaker 01

  It's the first question I ask anyone who interviews with me. When I say I'm going to bring somebody on the team, first question is, what do you want to learn? I don't want the expert, like we talked about earlier, says, I'm the expert in this. You're going to hire me as the expert. We're doing something new. You're not an expert because we're not an expert either. What is it you want to learn?

• 2:28:52Lex Fridman?

  And on the topic of learning, what is the best way to learn? What, starting, you go into this new place, into this new world, into maybe V1. You said you're building V1. I mean, the whole world is full of V1s or V0s waiting for the V1 to come along.

• 2:29:18Speaker 01

  Zero to one.

• 2:29:19Lex Fridman?

  Zero to one. What's the process of that look like? What's the process of learning? How do you learn?

• 2:29:28Speaker 01

  Well, let me put a framing and then we'll talk about that last piece. I have now, looking back, especially writing this book, I have a version one of myself, a version two, a version three, a version four. I had a lot of opinions about myself and what I wanted to do. Sometimes those opinions for certain people, those opinions are formed and they get the data from their parents. And they go do what their parents told them to do or their surroundings. My opinions was like, I want to go and learn this. I'm curious about that. I made the zero to one move. And then over time, by doing, I was refining those things and learning what I was really curious about and what I was really good about. Because I was getting data.

• 2:30:10Speaker 01

  And then I was like, then I had another set of opinions to create version two of me. And then I would go and do it. So I was learning by doing, starting with the opinion, you're not going to get any facts. You know, most people like, where do I make the most money from my position? They're trying to start with data.

• 2:30:29Speaker 01

  Start with the why. What's your curiosity? What do you want to learn? And then follow that. I took the lowest job on the totem pole at, you know, at, at General Magic. Cause I wanted to get in there to work with the right team. I didn't even know what they were doing. Right? But I thought that it felt right. Right? I, I was barely living above the poverty line, working there, working, you know, 80 hours a week. Cause it was so amazing to learn, just like a college student. Right? That's what I was doing. And then that's that. And then I learned more from that and then changed those opinions into data. And then I found other opinions. And so it's the same thing. But it was by doing. Right?

• 2:31:10Speaker 01

  The way you find out what you want to do in life is by figuring out what you don't want to do.

• 2:31:15Lex Fridman?

  And the only way you find that out is by doing a bunch of stuff.

• 2:31:17Speaker 01

  Doing a bunch of stuff and refining it.

• 2:31:20Lex Fridman?

  That's hilarious. Yeah, that's brilliant. So in terms of the career path of leaping into the startup world and launching a startup, what does it take to successfully found a startup? To have a chance to succeed? And maybe how do you decide to take that leap? Is there sort of having founded, having been part of many V1s, many of some of the most successful V1s ever? What's, what's it take to take that leap? Maybe leave your job, cushy job at a company and do the startup.

• 2:32:05Speaker 01

  What does it take? It takes belief in yourself. That's the first thing. Belief that you can do it. Not, but hopefully with mirrors or mentors around you or coaches around you to make sure you know you're not crazy. It's a crazy smart idea, but you're not crazy and you're just working on something as a, like a lone mad man or woman, you know? You have a great idea and like I said, great ideas chase you. You can, in this world, there are so many people who have more ideas than they have time to implement. I used to be like that. I would like, oh my God, have this idea, this idea. And you do, you try to do all of them. But the best ideas are the ones that you can really focus on.

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  And you, you shut out all those other things and you bring them other ideas into the thing you're trying to do. So I try to run away from a great idea. And then it stalks me.

• 2:32:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:58Speaker 01

  It hunts you down because you're like, ah, that's gonna have this problem. I'm gonna put it aside. And then all of a sudden, uh, you know, a few days later, oh, I think I know how to solve that problem. Or I talked to somebody and you're just always kind of niggling around the edges of it. And then at some point, it's like, it just becomes, it becomes like this black hole that just sucks you. And you're like, I can't think about anything else but this. It's almost like a relationship in, in the world, right? You know, when you have it with a, you, you find your partner. You know, you're like, hmm, hmm, wait, hmm, something. And then you're trying to like, and then all of a sudden it just, it comes together, right? It's kind of like that.

• 2:33:36Lex Fridman?

  Ultimately achieve focus. See, I'm, I'm different. I just dive right in.

• 2:33:39Speaker 01

  I used to do that too. I used to dive right in.

• 2:33:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:42Speaker 01

  But I learned that you need time.

• 2:33:44Lex Fridman?

  More effective to run away from it.

• 2:33:45Speaker 01

  Run away from it. And so it chases you because it makes you think harder about that story.

• 2:33:51Lex Fridman?

  This is not dating advice. We're talking about startups.

• 2:33:56Lex Fridman?

  But ultimately, so you have a chief, uh, focus on it. But you also said, so believe in yourself. So it's not necessarily even the ideas, the human that, um, believe in the human being.

• 2:34:10Speaker 01

  You have to believe in yourself and the idea that you have. Cause if you don't have that belief, then you can't project that to other people to say, join the team.

• 2:34:22Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you, because you mentioned mentors and you've talked about having had incredible mentors in your life. You're also a mentor to a very large number of people. What does it take to find a mentor? How do you find a great mentor?

• 2:34:38Speaker 01

  Usually, they also find you.

• 2:34:41Lex Fridman?

  Is it like with the ideas?

• 2:34:43Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. What happens is you're in the right, you have a community around you. Okay. And because you've been building a network, because you can't do it alone. So you have to create this network around you and of relationships that don't, not transactions, but relationships over time that you really cherish and people you talk to. Okay. And you share vulnerable or nascent ideas with or crazy opinions with, and then you argue them through. But you start to see resonate, and it's not about age, it's just about this connection. Right? I have mentors, obviously, when I was young, all my mentors were older. And as I get older, I have mentors who are younger than me or the same age, right? They're not all just

• 2:35:27Speaker 01

  older, right? And so it's about that connection. It's about being on that same wavelength. But they also, they can counterbalance you. They complement you in some way. Like, my best mentors had nothing to do with technology. They didn't know anything about technology, right? The way we know it. They were all about human nature and they could reflect that and help me get more human focused and more empathetic. Because I was so detailed in the technology, I needed to see from other perspectives. But then they wanted to learn more about the technology, right? Or they thought that this idea was so great that it should exist. Now, let's work together on that. So it's really, they have to find you and you have to find them, and

• 2:36:08Speaker 01

  that's by sharing. You just don't go and look it up on, you know, on the internet and say, who are the best mentors in the world? It just doesn't work that way.

• 2:36:17Lex Fridman?

  So form a network of people and see where, I mean, it's like finding relationships, finding love, all that kind of friendship.

• 2:36:26Lex Fridman?

  Venture capitalists, money. Do VCs help or hurt a business in general? So like, in those early stages in the chase of developing a V1, just what's the constructive and destructive power of money in the development of a brilliant idea and the deployment of a brilliant idea?

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  I have seen brilliant venture capitalists. I have seen horrible ones. Ones that care about their LPs more than they care about the entrepreneurs. Of course, everyone's in it. You know, at the end of the day, especially venture capital, they have to give a return to their, their limited partners, the people who invest in money that they, you know, that they have to shepherd that money and make sure it's watched over properly. But when there's not a balance, a pushback in a venture capitals between what the LP needs and what the entrepreneur needs. And that the entrepreneur might be trying really hard, but if they don't see the VC doesn't see the exit's gonna happen in two years and they just leave them hanging.

• 2:37:29Speaker 01

  When it's, there's no, the value exchange is only money and not mentorship or ideas or other things. When there's not a relationship, but really a transaction. That's when money is toxic. Because you can get money everywhere. Maybe it's a little harder today, you know, over the last month. But you can still find people with money who are on that, who wanna enable your mission and can be mentors. Not always, not all of them, but some of them can be mentors. But they, they're on your side. Then it's incredibly powerful because it's not just one plus one equals two. Right? It's something bigger than that. Because then they can bring their networks of people and their networks of companies and other people they worked with that might wanna join your, your, your mission.

• 2:38:14Speaker 01

  Right? That's the kind of venture capitalists and, and smart money that's out there. Right? But you have to build a relationship. People go, oh, look at that valuation. Oh, it's the brand name of the VC that, that's investing me. No. It boils down to who's that partner? And how experienced are they? Don't just give me the brand. Give me the person. Because that's the person I'm gonna be interacting with.

• 2:38:38Lex Fridman?

  I have to, there's a million questions I wanna ask you, but we're

• 2:38:41Speaker 01

  Season four.

• 2:38:42Lex Fridman?

  We're season, season, we're on season five already. But let me, let me ask you, it's, it seems like, out of all the brilliant things you write about, it seems like not an important question, but it's fascinating to me is lawyers. You write about this, so, uh, does a company need lawyers? And why? And what kind? So you write about sort of the value of this game, I guess.

• 2:39:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:39:06Lex Fridman?

  It's a game.

• 2:39:07Speaker 01

  The legal game.

• 2:39:08Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's.

• 2:39:12Lex Fridman?

  Why do we need lawyer?

• 2:39:13Speaker 01

  You sound exasperated by lawyers.

• 2:39:14Lex Fridman?

  I don't have a good question, I guess. I, um, well, because-

• 2:39:18Speaker 01

  The why of lawyers is what you're asking.

• 2:39:19Lex Fridman?

  The why of lawyers, yes, exactly.

• 2:39:21Speaker 01

  Okay, the why of lawyers.

• 2:39:23Lex Fridman?

  Thank you. You even do the question.

• 2:39:28Speaker 01

  We just have to put why in front of everything you ask and then we'll be there.

• 2:39:31Lex Fridman?

  Lawyers, why?

• 2:39:32Speaker 01

  Why? Even mafiosos had lawyers.

• 2:39:37Speaker 01

  Okay? You know, Tony Soprano, uh, you know, uh, Scarface, all of them had lawyers, right? Why? Because there are things in this world that you don't always consider in the government, in laws, in, uh, competitors. Because you're so focused on what you're doing, they have to watch out for you, right? Now, the best kind of lawyers are the ones who try to work with you to enable what you're doing. And see gray areas. Law is not black or white, it's how it's interpreted, right? And so they can help interpret things a certain way, or help push on things a certain way

• 2:40:18Speaker 01

  to get change happen, or allow change to happen, because if you have lawyers who are always, just like you were talking about PR people, if you have lawyers who are always saying no to everything, because their job is to really say no, or maybe, they'll never say yes.

• 2:40:31Lex Fridman?

  And you also say, their job is to say no and bill you by the hour?

• 2:40:34Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:40:36Lex Fridman?

  Depressing.

• 2:40:37Speaker 01

  Right? If you don't want to know, don't ask them, because you're gonna get a no, maybe a maybe.

• 2:40:42Lex Fridman?

  You'll get charged for it.

• 2:40:43Speaker 01

  And you'll get charged for it anyways, right? So, so, to have a partner, to have them on your team, to help you see maybe some of the things you don't see, some consequences, they help to rein that in, or change your, their language, like, are you gonna get sued for this ad? Just change this one word, and it helps, right? So you need to have a partner. Most of the times, especially engineers or designers, they see lawyers as only stifling. Lawyers can actually, if you do it right and you have the right type, they can actually open up a whole new world for you because of the interpretation and how we go about doing things.

• 2:41:21Lex Fridman?

  And they help you not get bogged down in the pain of stupid little mistakes that didn't mean anything.

• 2:41:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. You shot yourself in the foot and you didn't even know it. You didn't even know you were carrying the gun.

• 2:41:32Lex Fridman?

  Just to jump around, Charles Bukowski once wrote, "Find what you love and let it kill you." So the question is about work-life balance.

• 2:41:42Speaker 01

  That's like finding an idea and let it chase you.

• 2:41:45Lex Fridman?

  Yes, but a little more aggressive.

• 2:41:49Lex Fridman?

  So what does work-life balance look like that maximizes success and/or happiness? Is there such a thing as work-life balance? Can you speak to this?

• 2:42:04Speaker 01

  When your work is your life, and I mean that in the positive sense. When you're on a mission that really matters and you know that you can really affect not just yourself, but other people's lives, and then that is very rewarding, right? That's not work. That's, like I said, a mission, right? You adopt that. But that said, you still need to have boundaries yourself. At General Magic, wonderful documentary, if no one's seen it, you gotta see that. It's amazing. I was physically and mentally unhealthy, socially unhealthy as well, because I put every waking minute into this thing. Every ounce of me into it. And when it was a spectacular disaster, we were making the iPhone 15 years too early.

• 2:42:51Speaker 01

  The bottom fell out. I had nothing left. I had to get healthy socially, emotionally, physically after that, that trauma. I let everything go. I learned from that, that you have to, even though you might put everything into your work, you need to find balance outside of it. Now, that doesn't mean you're always, you know, it's three days a week working and four days a week, or whatever it was, you're still working as hard as ever. But what you're doing is you're making sure when your thinking time is during work. That you're not ruminating at three in the morning. You use the tools that you have to put those ideas into databases or on pages or somewhere else. So you can go back and look at them.

• 2:43:35Speaker 01

  So you're not always having to remember, because what happens is most people don't write this stuff down. So they just sit here, I gotta remember this, I gotta remember this, I gotta remember this. If you just put it into the tools and you can come back to it, you can come back fresh. A lot of the time is about ruminating about what I need to get done and remembering everything instead of doing the work.

• 2:43:53Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating. So if you just put it down on paper, you can, you can actually escape it.

• 2:43:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:43:58Lex Fridman?

  Escape it for a time, to have peace for a time. You mentioned, um, uh, general magic. Let me ask you the Russian question.

• 2:44:10Speaker 01

  The Russian question.

• 2:44:11Lex Fridman?

  What's the, uh, what's been the, uh, the darkest moments of your, of your life? Where are some of the darkest places you've gone in your mind? You've talked about, you know, if you're doing these kinds of things with startups, you're gonna have to face a crisis.

• 2:44:27Speaker 01

  Right, absolutely.

• 2:44:28Lex Fridman?

  If you're doing it right, you're gonna face it. So for you personally, where were some of the tough, tougher moments in your life?

• 2:44:36Speaker 01

  Growing up, I went to 12 schools in 15 years. I was always the new kid.

• 2:44:45Speaker 01

  Put yourself in those shoes, right?

• 2:44:47Lex Fridman?

  You picked on, were you picked on?

• 2:44:50Speaker 01

  Well, absolutely, but even more so, I was the geek with the computer. Remember the nerds in the eighties? You do, you probably don't know this, but believe me, we were made fun of. What were these computers? What were these things? You're off in a cold, they're all up partying or going, whatever it was, and I'm sitting there like, duh. And they're like, this guy is just this alien, right? Who's this new guy who just showed up and, and then, you know, you would ask the smart questions. And you couldn't be the smartest in the, because then you get picked on too. And you're the new kid. So you're in this environment that's ever changing. You don't fit in and you are just asking questions because you think they're the right questions to answer. But then they like, you're making us look bad. Don't ask these smart questions because you're gonna make us do more work.

• 2:45:35Speaker 01

  So right there, it's pretty tough. And I'm moving cities, right? And I didn't have the internet to stay connected to people. There was no internet. Phone calls were $2 a minute.

• 2:45:46Lex Fridman?

  So it was lonely too.

• 2:45:47Speaker 01

  It was lonely, right? Right? I was a latchkey kid.

• 2:45:53Speaker 01

  Right, I had my brother, but he was a skateboarder and he had a different social way of working. He loved to do that stuff and be outside. I loved the computer.

• 2:46:02Lex Fridman?

  So even in the computer, you were alone in the family?

• 2:46:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:06Lex Fridman?

  With the computer in the family, you were alone?

• 2:46:07Speaker 01

  I was absolutely alone. That was just me. But then, then you could find the other geeks, right? But there were just a few of us and we made this little thing. But then when you moved away, you know, then I had to use a BBS, a bulletin board system and a dial-up modem. And then, then I started hacking the phone system to get free codes out of MCI and Sprint back in the day, to get long distance, to get free codes to call my friends, the geeks on the other side, right? Or to dial into a BBS cheaply that was in another part of the world. So this was this subculture and that was not accepted in any way and not the heroes that you see today that are on the, you know, on, you know, the richest

• 2:46:48Speaker 01

  people in the world and everything. So, so that was the first set of trauma. And then the next one really was general magic. You know, the end of that, like I described before, and pulling yourself out and going, just because I got so insular in that world of geeking out and, and building stuff, that I just tore all the social ties, right? Because it was just, it was a drug. I was hooked on that. I was a junkie. I had to get, I had to get clean.

• 2:47:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And that made, that made you who you are.

• 2:47:22Speaker 01

  Tempered.

• 2:47:26Lex Fridman?

  So Steve Jobs is no longer with us. One day you also will no longer be with us. That's the, the thing about this life, it ends.

• 2:47:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:40Lex Fridman?

  So no matter how many incredible things you brought to this world, no matter how many inventions you built, you too shall perish. Do you think about this? Are you afraid of your death?

• 2:47:56Speaker 01

  I am not afraid of my death. I am an atheist. And I think about the soul. Because I do, even though I'm an atheist, I think about the soul. And the soul is the thing that you instill in others when you go that lives on. It's not this thing that's magically in space. It's the thing that you've imparted onto people that you've worked with and those relationships you've had. And that soul lives on in the stories that they tell. Right? And through Build, I'm hopeful that those stories stay relevant because they're human nature. They're not about who knows what the next iPhone thing is or the next iPod thing is.

• 2:48:39Speaker 01

  The stuff that I have been able, the privilege to make and work with people, those are all ephemeral. The iPod's gone now, right? This week, it was announced iPod's dead after 21 years. It is that, those human connections. It's that growth that you've helped someone, just like they helped me. Just like Bill Campbell or Steve Jobs is gone, but they made me be better. That's the soul that I believe in.

• 2:49:07Lex Fridman?

  It's fascinating that you say that. Yeah, so many of these products, I mean, to push back a little bit. So even though the iPod is an end of an era.

• 2:49:18Speaker 01

  Using it every day.

• 2:49:20Lex Fridman?

  I think that, I mean, the number of people that impacted is just, so I suppose the soul is carried by the people.

• 2:49:30Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:49:31Lex Fridman?

  Sometimes the products you create is the sort of the transport mechanism.

• 2:49:35Speaker 01

  It's the vessel. And they felt the love and they felt that love and it transformed them, even if they don't have the vessel anymore.

• 2:49:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And in that way, the soul lives.

• 2:49:45Speaker 01

  Just like the body is the vessel.

• 2:49:47Lex Fridman?

  That's beautifully put. Why do you think we're here? What's the meaning of life, Tony?

• 2:49:54Speaker 01

  Jesus, man, we're going all around. Meaning of life?

• 2:49:58Lex Fridman?

  Why? Because you said it's important to have a press release.

• 2:50:04Lex Fridman?

  If humanity, if life on Earth, if this thing, the consciousness, the falling in love and building bridges and iPods and rockets and trying to extend out into the cosmos, why? Why do you think we're doing it?

• 2:50:24Lex Fridman?

  Is there any meaning to it?

• 2:50:25Speaker 01

  We are naturally curious. We're naturally curious individuals. And we are always looking for meaning. We're always trying to ascribe meaning to something or understanding of something, right? And through that, it's just like evolution, right? And Darwinism, it's just that thing that's baked into our being at the most fundamental level.

• 2:50:53Lex Fridman?

  Driven by curiosity.

• 2:50:55Speaker 01

  Driven by curiosity.

• 2:50:57Lex Fridman?

  Creating some pretty cool things along the way. Tony, and speaking of cool things, you've created some of the coolest things ever. And on top of that, you're just an amazing human being. It's a huge honor that you will sit and talk to me today. This is fun.

• 2:51:11Speaker 01

  Lex, this is great. I didn't know where I was going and I'm, let's talk, I'm looking for season seven, eight, nine.

• 2:51:18Lex Fridman?

  Six, seven, yes.

• 2:51:19Speaker 01

  Let's go hang out and have dinner and just rap about all kinds of crazy. I'd love to continue this.

• 2:51:25Lex Fridman?

  I would too. Thank you so much, Tony.

• 2:51:26Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 2:51:28Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tony Fadell. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Tony Fadell himself. The most wonderful part of building something together with a team is that you're walking side by side with other people. You're all looking at your feet and scanning the horizon at the same time. Some people will see things you can't, and you will see things that are invisible to everyone else. So don't think doing the work just means locking yourself into a room. A huge part of it is walking with your team. The work is reaching your destination together or finding a new destination and bringing

• 2:52:10Lex Fridman?

  the team with you. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.