Relentless
01:02:13 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[01:02:13] S1: I'm not a designer anyway. I would I would not... I I try to be, like, pretty good about realizing what I'm not good at, and I I wouldn't try to have a strong opinion there. What are you the worst at [01:02:25] S0: on the business building side? [01:02:27] S1: Maybe product. Really. Maybe. Okay. [01:02:31] S0: How do you find great product people if you're bad at product? [01:02:35] S1: This is a thing that I've never quite agreed with people on. There's like there's like a there's like a business meme that you can only hire people and things that you deeply understand. I think it... You know if they're great. I think this is just clearly not true. I don't understand design either. I know Johnny's great at design. Like, there's lots of things I can point to when you talk to him for thirty minutes. It's very obvious. [01:02:53] S0: Which things do you try to actively get better at? And then which things do you just try to outsource and understand that you're just never gonna be one of the best? [01:03:00] S1: I am a big believer in you should try to get better at your strengths and the whole, like, obsession with I'm gonna get better at the things that I'm just not good at at all and never gonna be good at. Huge trump. Super good at your strengths. [01:03:11] S0: Okay. What are your biggest strengths if you had to, like, force rank? [01:03:15] S1: I hate this question. I don't hate this from a false modesty perspective. I think it's very hard to say anything insightful about your own strengths.
01:03:15 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[01:03:15] S1: I hate this question. I don't hate this from a false modesty perspective. I think it's very hard to say anything insightful about your own strengths. [01:03:22] S0: You're clearly good at really rallying people around some objective. [01:03:26] S1: Sure. But I don't think I could teach someone who isn't good at that how to be good at that. I think the things that come supernaturally to someone are very hard to... I don't know. Or at least in my own case, I don't, like, deeply understand why I'm good at that or what to do about it. Although I think we talked about earlier this category of things that you can learn but you can't teach. [01:03:48] S0: I [01:03:49] S1: think this is quite important to understand. If you want to get good at something like that, asking someone to explain it to you, in my experience, never works. Really studying them and like sitting with them in meetings and just trying to observe it and learn it yourself, that does work. But and like when there has been something that I do want to get better at, I have tried to just be around someone who's great at it and really deeply study it. But I don't think they would have been able to explain it to me. Don't think they could have, like, taught it to me by talking to me
01:03:49 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[01:03:49] S1: think this is quite important to understand. If you want to get good at something like that, asking someone to explain it to you, in my experience, never works. Really studying them and like sitting with them in meetings and just trying to observe it and learn it yourself, that does work. But and like when there has been something that I do want to get better at, I have tried to just be around someone who's great at it and really deeply study it. But I don't think they would have been able to explain it to me. Don't think they could have, like, taught it to me by talking to me [01:04:19] S0: about it. I think that's totally right if you look at, like, the way that the best people in the world learn video games. If you're playing, like, CS:GO. You, like, play some CS:GO so you have, like, the basic game dynamics, and then you just go watch a pro and, like, see how they interact on the map 100%. At different points in the game and stuff. When you think about, like, organization pace, you know, there's, like, ambition, all these other things. But, like, you ideally, over time, want your organization... You obviously don't want it to slow down, but, ideally, it even moves faster. How do you, like, bake that in? I think it's,
01:04:19 · Ty Morse, Sam Altman
[01:04:19] S0: about it. I think that's totally right if you look at, like, the way that the best people in the world learn video games. If you're playing, like, CS:GO. You, like, play some CS:GO so you have, like, the basic game dynamics, and then you just go watch a pro and, like, see how they interact on the map 100%. At different points in the game and stuff. When you think about, like, organization pace, you know, there's, like, ambition, all these other things. But, like, you ideally, over time, want your organization... You obviously don't want it to slow down, but, ideally, it even moves faster. How do you, like, bake that in? I think it's, [01:04:49] S1: like, 90% of people you put in leadership roles. Okay. There's, like, other things you can do. People have all these different sort of operating rhythms and how they try to run the company and this management technique in that one, and I think it's... I think it mostly just comes down to the people. Definitely something I think about with everybody in a role like that is, like, are they a fast mover or a slow mover? [01:05:07] S0: Do you measure that without actually having worked with them in the past? [01:05:11] S1: Well, ideally, you have worked with them in the past. I I think most of the time, executives at a company should be promoted internally, not hired externally. [01:05:19] S0: Okay. [01:05:21] S1: But when you do need to hire someone externally, you spend a lot of time talking to them, spend a lot of time reference checking, you try to work together in some kind
01:05:21 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[01:05:21] S1: But when you do need to hire someone externally, you spend a lot of time talking to them, spend a lot of time reference checking, you try to work together in some kind [01:05:29] S0: of casual way. Slightly different note. What was the most painful thing that happened in the last twelve months? [01:05:35] S1: Honestly, having kids and working really hard at the same time is brutal. It's just extremely painful. Like, you, like, know you're... I I I... And I think I'm, a very present dad relative... Like, I don't do anything but work and hang out with my family really at this point, but I still feel like I'm missing so much of this, like, one time thing. It's very painful. When you [01:05:57] S0: think of someone like Masa, for example, what about, like, his brain and the way that he sees the world is so different? I think he will end up being, like, one of the wild successes [01:06:11] S1: Yeah. Of this Incredible person. Yeah. Dear friend, incredible person. Massive conviction and belief and not afraid at all of big numbers and scale. And it's great. There are not many masa like people in the world, and we should be very grateful for them. [01:06:28] S0: What made him? Like, what what... I I don't know if you've, like, talked with him. But [01:06:34] S1: I mean, as far as I can tell, he was, like, always like this. [01:06:37] S0: Do you also have the same sort of just, like, no cons... Like, no ceiling concept of scale? [01:06:44] S1: Not... I I I think Masa is, like, a n of one character.
01:06:44 · Sam Altman, Ty Morse
[01:06:44] S1: Not... I I I think Masa is, like, a n of one character. [01:06:48] S0: Do you kind of view OpenAI as a little bit like the golden goose? In what way? Spawning a bunch of very valuable things over time and just building, like, a core competency of increasing intelligence in the world? [01:07:02] S1: Not really how I think of it. I get I get what you're saying. But it it doesn't feel like we're just, like, spitting out golden eggs. It feels like we're building this kind of compounding thing. [01:07:11] S0: I think one of the... My favorite mental models that I've taken from you is this idea of real trends versus fake trends. And... Oh, yeah. This is a... [01:07:18] S1: This is an important thing. [01:07:19] S0: Like, whenever people talked about bubbles or anything else, I was always kind of confused. Like, I'm... Know, you I studied Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger a bunch, and so they love to talk about bubbles and things being overvalued. I was trying to, like, decipher how do you figure out whether or not something is real or fake and whether or not it's going to persist and continue or it's just going to, you know, revert to the mean. [01:07:39] S1: And what'd you figure out?