00:03:01 · Scott Kirby, John Collison
[00:03:01] S0: Because we're the only one in the world. And we sort of launched the market. Like, you know, for Boeing, they kind of could go to other customers and say, look, United believes you should too. Right. [00:03:11] S1: So I remember... It's very striking. I remember that period of people over extrapolating COVID. Like the tech version of that was companies deciding that they're going to be fully remote forever, and a lot of companies decided that, and then were like, wait a second. No, that's not right. Why were people so wrong on the travel side of things? Because [00:03:30] S0: there are two things that are human nature that are mistakes. One is to extrapolate the current into the future. Assume that everything that's happening today is going to continue into the future. And two, trusting people on surveys. Surveys are the absolute worst way to figure out what's going to happen in the future. Because the reason travel experts thought travel, they did surveys and people were terrified. Like everyone's dying. Right. And you ask them, Are you going to travel internationally Yeah. No. It's like, but, and that was true of what they thought at the time. But like once it was over, of course they were going to go back to traveling again. So ignore... And by the way, I said this sort of like, experts live in the world of two standard deviations. They force fit everything into things that they've already seen. And so when things happen outside two standard deviations, when the tails happen, which is where you create all the The frequency
00:03:30 · Scott Kirby, John Collison
[00:03:30] S0: there are two things that are human nature that are mistakes. One is to extrapolate the current into the future. Assume that everything that's happening today is going to continue into the future. And two, trusting people on surveys. Surveys are the absolute worst way to figure out what's going to happen in the future. Because the reason travel experts thought travel, they did surveys and people were terrified. Like everyone's dying. Right. And you ask them, Are you going to travel internationally Yeah. No. It's like, but, and that was true of what they thought at the time. But like once it was over, of course they were going to go back to traveling again. So ignore... And by the way, I said this sort of like, experts live in the world of two standard deviations. They force fit everything into things that they've already seen. And so when things happen outside two standard deviations, when the tails happen, which is where you create all the The frequency [00:04:19] S1: in finance, the frequency of Six Sigma events is...
00:04:19 · John Collison, Scott Kirby
[00:04:19] S1: in finance, the frequency of Six Sigma events is... [00:04:22] S0: That's where I first started. You know, like, know, VAR, valuation at risk is the dumbest model in history. It's stupid. Like, you know, things that shouldn't happen in the history of the universe happen once every five years because it's a dumb, dumb, fundamentally flawed mathematical model that assumes everything is normally distributed. It's not. And it's just the perfect... I had a debate when I was getting my master's degree back in the 90s. This was about black souls. You know, this is such a dumb model for valuing options. Like, because it assumes a normal distribution. The world's not normally distributed. The tails are much fatter in everything that matters. And anyway, that applies to everything, but especially in a crisis. [00:05:04] S1: Black Scholes has a lot of assume a spherical cow like assumptions baked into it. Okay, love hearing you talk about the over fixation on surveys, But like the travel industry, the airline industry loves surveys. United probably surveys people up the wazoo. And definitely at Stripe, find we need to deprogram people a bit because in tech, people love running things via metrics and you can outsource your thinking to the dashboards and And so we're trying to encourage people to... I mean, your opinions should survive contact with reality, but the metrics are not going to tell you what to do. That sounds like...
00:05:04 · John Collison, Scott Kirby
[00:05:04] S1: Black Scholes has a lot of assume a spherical cow like assumptions baked into it. Okay, love hearing you talk about the over fixation on surveys, But like the travel industry, the airline industry loves surveys. United probably surveys people up the wazoo. And definitely at Stripe, find we need to deprogram people a bit because in tech, people love running things via metrics and you can outsource your thinking to the dashboards and And so we're trying to encourage people to... I mean, your opinions should survive contact with reality, but the metrics are not going to tell you what to do. That sounds like... [00:05:38] S0: So we use survey. I like surveys for how did people feel about stuff we've already done. I ignore surveys for what we could do in the future. [00:05:46] S1: AppleFamously does not do a lot of focus group testing on the products. They just like build the products [00:05:50] S0: That's they want to the way I, you know, stuff that we're doing right now. Like today, we rolled out a Starlink tracker. We didn't ask anyone about that. Like, I sit on an airplane and talk to customers and I know they're gonna think that's cool. Yes. And they do think it's cool. [00:06:02] S1: Well, you're getting to the second thing which is people try to over measure tiny steps and it's just like, do the Starlink tracker. If it's not useful, whatever. Doesn't matter.
00:06:02 · John Collison, Scott Kirby, Ben Thompson
[00:06:02] S1: Well, you're getting to the second thing which is people try to over measure tiny steps and it's just like, do the Starlink tracker. If it's not useful, whatever. Doesn't matter. [00:06:10] S0: Yeah, and that's like, and especially in a world of AI, you can do so much so fast. Like, it's really powerful. I have a different view of what we'll probably talk about, but I at least have a different view of where the value is going be created in AI. But you can just try so much so fast. And some of it doesn't work and people don't care. Somebody do, like it takes me to take more time to do a survey or a focus group, and just do it, see if they like it, and if they don't, stop, and if they do, do it, more of it. [00:06:35] S2: How important is your ability to do these sorts of experimentation? We talked, you know, eight months ago, redoing your whole tech stack so you could sort of put all these things on top of it.
00:06:46 · Scott Kirby
[00:06:46] S0: Is that So, we, like, I've always been a big believer in technology. Have a computer science degree. You're one of us. Yeah, yeah. But eight months ago when I talked to you, I not yet had my AI epiphany, but I've always wanted to get on modern platforms. And so during COVID, nothing we did, like in the middle of COVID, said, When everyone else is cutting back at airlines, cutting everything, we're gonna double down on technology investment. We started a several $100,000,000 project to get, not just on the cloud, but get everything off of mainframes to build databases, you know, that are modern that we can, you know, access the data. Just to really modernize our tech stack. And there was no ROI, there was no payback, which is why companies don't do it. Like it's really hard to do the ROI on something like that. But what it does is it enables you to move fast and do things. Like we're doing stuff that other airlines frankly can't do because they don't have the right tech stack. And we can do them easy and do them fast. So we started that, you know, in 2020 in an anticipatory and it's really paying off today. So my AI epiphany that I think has happened within the last eight months is I don't think AI, like summarizing documents and all that kind of crap, think is like ridiculous. Like my calendar, summarize my day. Like I can read my calendar. Like I don't need to summarize my day. But the power of programming. So, I hired a tutor and took three one hour sessions. And if you want me to, I can tell you the stuff I did.