Celebrating a Remarkable Life: Guy Kawasaki's Birthday Insights

30:21Let's just be honest. Let's just be honest, all right? You've done pretty well on the list of goals. So, all right. So, you go and you go to Stanford, you go to law school for a hot second, and then you end up getting an MBA. And from what I understand, you had a roommate that got you the job at Apple. Yes. After you'd worked for what, a diamond company? I was working in the jewelry business because I was in LA and the UCLA MBA program was a four-day program. And so there was Friday off every week. And which I guess that's when you're supposed to study. So I was able to work. And when you're in school, at least back then, you did whatever.

31:06Sometimes you bust tables in the cafeteria. I worked at the Stanford Music Library shelving books, but I just happened to meet through another Stanford classmate, a woman who was running a diamond department in a local jewelry manufacturer. And so I didn't know anything about diamonds, but I can count. So I literally got a job in the diamond department, counting diamonds and doing stuff like that. And I just really got along with the family who owned that jewelry company. They embraced me as family. And let's just say that I'm not Jewish. It was really a quite, quite loving, trusting relationship that I had with that family.

31:55And so after my MBA, when all my friends were going to Anderson and Lehman Brothers, you know, sure things, I went to a family-owned jewelry manufacturer. With hindsight, that was an extremely fortunate move because I learned to sell. And the jewelry business, the manufacturing business, we sold to retailers who sold to consumers. And the jewelry business is a very tough business. It's built on trust. It's very small. And you can put a ring on a scale and say, okay, there's$75 worth of gold there and there's$100 worth of diamonds. And so there's a scrap value that you can easily assess. And that would be like putting a Macintosh or an iPhone on a scale and saying there's 25 cents worth of plastic and 50 cents worth of silver and whatever.

32:49So anyway, you really, really learned how to sell because at some level, everything is a commodity and the jewelry business. And so that sales skill has helped me the rest of my life, including becoming a successful Macintosh evangelist. That's so interesting that that was the gift that that job gave you, because I think a lot of times when people start out, they only spend the time thinking about that next step, not the value of this step. And a lot of times the step you first take, even though it's not obvious has some value that you end up taking out from it and applying later. And so it's a really great example of maybe not your dream job.

33:31I'm sure that wasn't, you know, the high tech, multi-million dollar business you thought you'd be starting, but it did give you this opportunity to learn how to sell. But also did it not put you in the right place to end up going to Apple because then you had a roommate that landed you the job and maybe had you gone to Lehman or something else, you wouldn't have had that roommate. I wish I could say that's true. So understand that I met this guy, Mike Boych at Stanford as an undergrad. And then I went on this two-year journey into UCLA MBA. And then I worked for the jewelry company for about four more years.

34:06And then in 1983 is when he recruited me. So it was quite a while. And I can't tell you that he was making the case to Steve Jobs that this guy can sell because he's in the jewelry manufacturing business. Because that logic would not work with Steve Jobs. He would quickly see through the bullshit. So what do you think he said about you? How did he sell you to Steve Jobs? I don't know. He sold me as his friend. He sold me as a great guy. But I can tell you, this is total true story. that at the end of my interviews, I had two series. The first series, the job just wasn't right. At the second series, so my friend Mike Boych asked Steve Jobs, what do you think of Guy?

34:58And the answer Steve Jobs gave Mike Boych was, I guess he's okay. You can hire him. But if he fails, I'm going to fire you too. So that was my ringing endorsement by Steve Jobs. Wow. And that's a good friend to say, okay, hire him anyway. That shows he believed in you or he was dumb. I don't know which, but I feel like it was he believed in you. Well, I'll make sure he listens to this. So what was your first job at Apple then exactly? What were you hired to do? Mike Boych was the first software evangelist. He was the one who went to all the software companies and hardware companies. and convince them to create Macintosh products.

35:47I was the second software evangelist. It was my job to do the same thing. Mike Boych is extremely smart and highly technical. Guy Kawasaki is moderately smart and not technical. So this was a transition. It's not exactly like I could say, oh, based on my experience of understanding how gold and diamonds work, let me explain how computers work. That is a dialectical leap. But I did have sales skills because of the jewelry business. And so my job was to convince people to write Macintosh software. And I was the second software evangelist. And for the first year or so, I basically carried Mike Boych's bags and we, you know, we went all over the country convincing companies.

36:34Interesting. So you basically, because you call yourself an evangelist, and I wasn't sure how widespread was that term in the industry? Was that a term you all coined? Or was that something pre-existing to your presence at McIntosh? There was Jesus who preceded us, but then there was this 2 ,000-year gap. Well, there were a lot of Southerners, too. I'm from the South, so evangelist means something completely different there. First of all, let's just get this off the table. The word is evangelism, not evangelical. Because today, evangelical, in my mind, is a humongous negative. So evangelism comes from this Greek word meaning bringing the good news.

37:15So my job was to bring the good news that Macintosh software development was a great opportunity, very interesting intellectual environment to program. You could write the software you always wanted. Is it different than the other software? It's different from other software because Macintosh had, I don't know, 400 calls in the ROM. So a lot of the graphics and stuff was done in ROM as opposed to you having to do it in your own software application. So we gave people a much more rich programming environment than they were used to. So they really could write the software. That was what the selling point was.

37:54So that's how you had something special to and unique to sell them. One of the principles of evangelism is that if you are smart and you tell people why they should write software and you give them multiple reasons, people will tell you how to evangelize them. So we gave them three reasons. Reason number one is this rich software development environment. You could write the software you always dreamed about. Reason number two is IBM PC dominates the software world. IBM is also publishing its own software. So if IBM decides to publish the same kind of software that you publish, you are screwed, buddy.

38:35So you better get on two horses. And the third pitch was Macintosh with its graphical user interface is going to bring people to computing who could never use a computer before. So we're going to expand the market for personal computers. So those are the three reasons we gave everybody. And inevitably, the companies would echo back which one appealed to them. And then you just had to be smart enough to shut up and repeat what they said to them. And that's the key to evangelism. What happens if you don't believe in the product? When you went to work for Apple, was that something you were thinking, wow, this is a really cool new development?

39:17I mean, you weren't very techie. So this is a great job to get that Porsche. So I'm going to find something to love about Macintosh. What was the relationship? Even I am not that shallow. Let me tell you, so I had become an Apple II user. And I just have this kind of mind that in college, this is 72 to 76. The state of the art back then is if you had papers to type, you either hired a typist or you had a typewriter and if you were really lucky you knew somebody who had an ibm selectric correctable with the light the white liftoff tape so none of this paint the white stuff over your error this was you backspace and it lifts off the ink with tape right writers Yeah, I remember those.

40:10They had that little correction. Exactly. So, you know, this was the state of the art. And then if you went through four years of that and you saw an Apple II with a word processor where you backspace and you change the word and then you send it to print. And every time you sent it to print, it was perfect or at least perfectly reflects what you sent to print. That was mind boggling. The concept of word processing spreadsheet and database was absolutely revolutionary. To put it into context, I think that the ability to use personal computers back then is roughly equivalent to the ability to use chat GPT today.

40:54It's that revolutionary. So I loved computers because of word processing, but it was all character-based. So it was as if you had a typewriter, but in your computer. And then I get a demo of Mac paint where there's paint brushes and fill patterns and you can drag out rectangles and all that. And then I get a demonstration of Mac write multiple fonts, multiple sizes, multiple styles, integration of text and graphics. Let me tell you something. The scales were removed from my eyes. It was religious experience. I started hearing angels sing, the clouds parted. I was just totally blown away. Again, to use a very current example, it's let's say you've never seen ChatGPT.

41:43And somebody says, okay, let me give you a demo of ChatGPT. And so let's say this is two small businessmen, right? Or business people. So one owns a dry cleaner and one owns a bakery or a restaurant. And one of them says to the other one, So let me show you ChatGPT. You see that Yelp review for my restaurant? It's a negative Yelp review. I'm going to have this thing draft a response to that negative Yelp review. And boom, two seconds, ChatGPT has this total empathetic, fall on your sword, fantastic apology for the bad experience at your restaurant. or let's say there's a positive Yelp review and it creates this fantastic gratitude note on chat GPT or even better you tell chat GPT this is becoming a chat GPT interview I know chat GPT I want you to write a positive response to this positive restaurant review but make it a limerick and chat GPT does that or you say make it a rap song and chat GPT does that so anyway I'm telling you all this because when I saw Mac Paint and Mac Write, it was a moment just like that.

42:57It was, oh my God, this is magic. This cannot be happening. And so when I first saw Mac Paint and Mac Write, it was good news. It was like Jesus said, God, you have eternal life and you have WYSIWYG printing now. What else do you need? A surfboard, maybe.

43:29I totally understand because I'm not going to date myself, but I did have a Mac as one of my early computers. And from what I had before, which was, I call it the luggable. It was this old IBM DOS machine. It was like having angels sing. I'm not going to say that Jesus spoke to me because I'm a Jew. And unlike you, I do know something about the diamond business because I'm a Jew. Every Jew has some relative in the diamond business and I am no different, but I didn't know anything about computers and Macintosh was amazing. I loved it. And I have been an Apple user. I've always been just because I find it so user friendly.

44:09So I can understand how it was easy to sell. But so tell me about that experience of working at Apple that first time that you were there. You had gone on the road, you were selling this product. I have heard you talk about how you were kind of assholes in the Macintosh division, especially to other divisions of Apple, which hopefully you feel shamed about today. That was part of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, right? He had very high expectations for us, even if you weren't Japanese American. But especially if you were Japanese American. So he had very high expectations for us. And quite frankly, because of those expectations, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

44:54And so he wasn't after mediocrity. He really wanted to change the world and dent the universe and all the other phrases correctly or incorrectly attributed to him. And let me tell you something. So working for Steve Jobs was not easy. in fact for me it was scary because i saw him rip people in public just like absolutely rip them to shreds in front of their colleagues and contrary to every hr theory i will tell you that that is a very positive motivating force positive in the sense that it gets results rather than it's a positive thing positive in the sense it scares the shit out of you and you do your best not exactly humanistic it's not positive psychology it's not dalai lama kumbaya let's complete each other's sentences but steve job scared the shit out of me and i was i was never gonna be the person he ripped on so that just shows you there are multiple ways yeah there are definitely multiple ways to govern i mean that's right the reality of dictatorships versus democracies both are viable solutions.

46:00They're just a different experience for those that live in them. Listen, I could tell you that if the dictator truly is intelligent and visionary and gets things right, it's a very efficient form of governance. It's just that most dictators are stupid and they don't have their people's best interests at heart. That's one of the dangers of trying to be the next Steve Jobs is that from the outside looking in, you say, okay, so Steve Jobs, he wore New Balance shoes. He didn't license his Porsche. And then you park in a handicap slot and you wear a black mock turtleneck and you know, you wear Levi's jeans and you rip people in public.

46:45And so people look at that from the outside and say, okay, I'll get the black turtleneck. I'll drive a German car or park in a handicap spot and all that. And I'll be the next Steve Jobs. not really. You'll just be an asshole. So, you know, or you'll be in prison like Elizabeth Holmes, right? Exactly. The asshole part is easy. It's the visionary part that's hard. But let me ask you about him because I don't get the impression. I don't know. I never met Steve Jobs and I don't know that much about him other than that you hear this lore about, you know, he was brilliant and an asshole. But what was his motivating factor, you think?

47:26Was it that he wanted this thing for everybody or he wanted this thing for himself and he happened to be extremely good at it, extremely insightful about how to get there? What's your impression? In a rare moment of humility, let me tell you that my intellectual ability is not sufficient for me to explain Steve Jobs' motivation. It would be like asking a fish to explain what it feels like to fly and i'm the fish you know there are people who are closer to him but if i had to guess i'd say that he really wanted to make a huge dent in the universe that he wanted to change the world and he did change the world now there are people like hitler who want to change the world too so you know that's not always a good goal In fact, I think it's a rare combination that makes it for a positive effect.

48:22A lot of times that kind of self-interest and domination technique doesn't often end well, but it certainly did in Apple and in Macintosh. And I think up till maybe two or three years ago, I would have said that Elon Musk is the closest thing to Steve Jobs, right? So you could make the argument that Elon Musk has created things that's going to have more of a dent in the universe than Steve Jobs because Elon Musk has trips to Mars, solar panels, electric cars. He's like got five tunnels underneath cities. He's got five or six things that are very different, all of which can impact humanity in a very positive way.

49:09until Elon Musk somehow, in my humble opinion, went off the rails. I don't know what happened there, but... I think power is a dangerous thing in many ways if left unchecked, whether or not you are brilliant and whether or not you are beneficial in the long run in terms of the things you create. Power is a hard thing to manage well, and I don't think many people can do it. There are exceptions, but I think with Elon Musk, it has this... I don't know also his mental state. I'm sure there might be other things that are factors there, but it does seem like when you become so powerful that no one stands against you in many ways, that you have the ultimate power to do so many things, it can be very difficult, I think, to understand who you've become over time.

49:56But let's get back to Guy and not Elon Musk, because unlike Elon Musk, I think you handle power well and are very, very humble. I don't have that much power. Well, you have the power of your voice and a great history and backstory, I think, that people want to hear. So you went to Apple, you went to Macintosh for the first time. And what made you leave? And how did that experience at Apple propel you forward in your life goals? Okay. Man, I wish I had simple stories for you. I don't need simple stories. I like complicated ones. Okay. So this is complicated. There are two versions of why I left Apple in 1987.

50:36The first version is that to be a tech entrepreneur, you cannot stay in a mothership. At some point, you have to leave Apple, start a software company, start a hardware company. You need to go out on your own and become an entrepreneur. And so I saw an opportunity and I took it. That's explanation one. Explanation two is a little more insipid. And this is how it goes. so at that point at apple i was a manager so it was the level in the hierarchy was manager director vice president at the director and vice president level apple bought you any car you wanted everything comes back to cars in my life i see that there's a theme here let's just be honest so i wanted to be a director because i wanted apple to buy me a car so my job at that point was to get all these software companies to create great software so i go in for this review with a vice president and he tells me you know guy the small developers they love you these small innovative companies that no one's ever heard of but they're now they're breaking into success they love you for what you've done for them but the big companies hate you microsoft hates you ashton tate hates you word perfect hates you and i'm saying to myself this is going very well because ashton tate had piece of shit software and microsoft was ripping off our interface you know etc etc so and lotus hates you and lotus was creating this very weak version of Lotus 1-2-3 that did not show Macintosh well.

52:28So I'm thinking, this is going really well. The small innovative companies love me, the big companies don't, and the big companies are not doing justice to Macintosh. This is a slam dunk. Should I get a Porsche, Maserati, Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Mercedes? And then he says, so guy, I'm not making you a director because you have failed to get the big companies to support you and to do a good job for the big companies you could have knocked me over with a feather okay and so wow that how that had to hurt

53:08back to toyota corona so then at the time one of the people at apple was a guy named jean-louis guess say and john louis said apple used to reorganize every six months or so it was fraught with dynamic change shall i say so i go to john louis guess and i tell him this story i said freaking john louis they didn't make me a director i'm so pissed off i'm gonna quit and john louis says to me you know guy there's gonna be a real i'm gonna become your boss and in six months i'm gonna review you again and i will make you a director so you should shut up and stay and for the rest of your life it would be much better to leave as a director level at apple on your resume than as a manager i said okay john louis ho ho and using my french accent ho ho that piece of so i stayed john louis six months later to his word makes me a director and i swear to god well i come into that but at that point i was interested in becoming an entrepreneur and two days later i resigned to become an entrepreneur so that's why on my linkedin profile it says director apple computer i was a director for about two days so you had already that you were just waiting for that label yes and then planned to leave so you never got the car.

54:37You didn't even wait out the car. You couldn't have waited a month. You were that ready. You were giving us the car. Up next on Remarkable People. It could be that humans are not the center of the universe and we're just a cog, just like a banana slug. And so if that's the truth, then we contribute to this mosaic, but we are not God. And so we have to accept this role that maybe there is something more powerful and smarter than us.

55:18If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it. Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. Okay. So then you launched this new tech enterprise. So tell me what happened then in terms of how you took what you had learned at Apple, put it in this new enterprise. And I know we hear a lot about your successes, but tell me maybe about a failure. Did that go well? Was it positive? Everything worked out? Or how do you feel that transition went for you? You went from director, you start this new job, this new adventure.

56:00And how did that go? Yeah. So I started this new adventure, you'll love this, with two French people. Oh, Jean-Luc? No, not Jean-Luc, I said. Marilyn Delborg Delphise and Laurent Ribartier. So Laurent was a legitimate programming genius. He wrote a Macintosh relational database called Fourth Dimension. And so Apple was going to publish Fourth Dimension until Ashton Tate got bent out of shape, which is why they pissed me off. So Ashton Tate was trying to tell us what to do. And so Marilyn and Laurent got fourth dimension back from Apple. And the three of us started this company called ACI US. And so my first attempt at entrepreneurship was a Macintosh relational database company, which did okay, but you know, it was not this humongous success.

56:53And honestly, I started that. I started another company called Fog City Software, which did Macintosh software. I've started a venture capital firm called Grouch.com. In a second moment of humility, let me tell you that I am not exactly proven as a tech entrepreneur. I've had singles at best. And so it's not like I started a Lotus or a Microsoft or a Facebook or Google, anything like that so people give me too much credit for that however now we gotta fast forward to canva so canva they discover that i'm using canva they recruit me i become chief evangelist that's 10 years where were you when you when that you got recruited what were you doing at that moment i was fat dumb and happy i was speaking i was writing i was living the dream working for nobody i had a great life.

57:53I was consulting. I'm charging people for speeches more than I ever possibly thought I could get for one hour of activity that I had a very difficult time with a straight face asking for what I was asking. So I had to get an agent to ask for my ungodly fee and my ungodly expectations of first class flights and all that stuff. Anyway, so they reach out to me and at the time Twitter had just begun and peg fitzpatrick she was doing much of my social media with me and we had this theory that every tweet should come out with a picture or a video and so she was using canva to make pictures for every tweet and canva happened to notice that i was using canva and reached out to me with a direct message saying we noticed you're using canva we would love to talk to you We'll see if you can get involved with us.

58:52And literally, I'm telling you, at the time, I saw that tweet, which is just, thank you, God, for showing me that tweet. Because there were a lot of direct messages I missed back then. So I saw that. I went to Peg. I said, Peg, don't you use Canva? She goes, yeah. I said, do you like it? She goes, yeah, it's great. You think I should help these guys? She said, yes. So based on that due diligence, I told them, let's meet. And so we met. I love them. I love what they do. I think they love me. And so I became the chief evangelist of Canva. So now I'm spreading the good news of Canva, making people better communicators because we've democratized graphics.

59:35But I'm not the founder of Canva. There are three founders of Canva. I'm probably number, I don't know, 30, 40, or 50 employee. And now they're at 2 ,500 people and they have like more than 100 million, 150 million registered users and they're profitable. And so this is the operative theory in my life, which is called Guy's Golden Touch. And Guy's Golden Touch is not whatever I touch turns to gold. I wish that were true. Some people even think that is true, but it's not true. I touched a lot of things that turned to brass. Anyway, so Guy's Golden Touch is whatever's gold guy touches. So I happened to touch Macintosh at the beginning of my career.

1:00:22I happened to touch Canva at the end of my career. Between those two data points, there was a lot of thrashing and flailing and failing. The way that it works in Silicon Valley is you throw stuff against the wall. Some of it sticks. You go up, you paint the bullseye around that. You say, I knew Canva would be successful. I knew it from the get-go. I think that's really not just Silicon Valley. I think so many times we only see people for their success. and we only see ourselves for our failures. And I think that's often the case because we know everything we've done, but we hardly ever know everything that everybody else has done.

1:00:57And all we know is what we see and what we see are their successes. And what's so glaring to us are our failures. And the successes are, as you described them, very far spaced. But what you had is the ability to discern opportunities that were beneficial and that you could - No, that's not true. be useful for. No, you don't think so? Just statistically, if I had this miraculous ability to discern opportunities, I think I'm about two for 15. So maybe you just say yes a lot. Yeah. I mean, okay. Seriously, I think you say yes a lot and you declare victory afterwards. We could easily be right now saying, Guy, didn't you work for a company called Canvas or Canard or Canva or something like that?

1:01:55You say, yeah, I kind of work for them, but they were trying to make online graphics for free and they got slaughtered by Adobe. We could be easily having that conversation, but obviously we're having the opposite conversation. it. And so, you know, I squeezed the trigger, I don't know, 10 times in my life and I was right twice. Now it may be that 20 % and the 20 % being Canva and Apple, it's kind of a miraculous record. It's a good record. All right. So let me ask you, cause I know you are a really supporter and a user of open AI of chat GPT and like those. Yeah. And tell me how you use it. I know you say you use it a lot, but what is it you do with it?

1:02:42Yeah. Well, I don't create rap songs for positive Yelp reviews very often. So what I do is I use it as the ultimate research assistant for when I'm writing and I'm writing a book right now called, well, I'm not sure what it's going to be called. It's either going to be called the art of being remarkable or how to be remarkable. Do you have strong feeling between those two? I like the art of being remarkable partially because it fits in with other things you've done. And I like that kind of consistency. That's my two cents. That's what Madison says too. Okay. Well, we are both smart people. That's true.

1:03:22That's true. Why would I argue with Valerie GPT and Madison GPT? I think Madison's pretty impressive on her own right. So she probably alone could stand up for that title. So I use it as a research assistant. I use it, you know, if I need an example to support my assertion. And I also use a product called QuillBot, which is very good at clarifying your writing, checking grammar, and all this kind of stuff. I use it as the ultimate thesaurus. Obviously, there's thesaurus.com. So you can go and say, what's the synonym for innovative? But what if you want to say a similar thing? So I need a thesaurus for phrases.

1:04:09Like, what's another way to say, don't worry, be crappy? Or what's another way of saying, jump to the next curve? Or what's another way of ask for forgiveness? and ChatJPT will give you 10 of those things. So I use ChatJPT as if it's a research assistant with infinite knowledge, infinite patience and cost 20 bucks a month. Yeah, no, those are great. I was wondering if you used it because I know they have a business app. I think they've just recently launched that helps you with writing emails and things like that. I wasn't sure if you use it in that capacity as well to generate business-facing products.

1:04:49Because that's, I mean, I've played around with ChatGPT. And in fact, I even asked it, and I haven't asked you any of them, but I even asked it just because I know you use it some. I asked it what I should ask you. And it gave me some questions that I thought weren't bad. I haven't actually used them, but they were decent. You should ask ChatGPT to create a lesson plan for one of your courses. I think you will be amazed at what it comes up with in about 10 seconds. I actually have been thinking about doing something very similar, giving it a topic and asking it to create a sort of slide language to convert to slides.

1:05:28Because I have a friend that has done basically that. She's had it come up with role statements and outlines and quiz questions. It's funny because I've taught a lot of my classes over and over again. So in that sense, I have it fairly mapped out. But I think another great use for ChatGBT is to change things up from how you stagnate it over time in terms of doing the same things. If you put the outline of your course into ChatGBT and said, suggest improvements, it would be very interesting. Or suggest examples for, you know, for these concepts. It would be very interesting. I'm definitely going to try that.

1:06:05I'll keep you posted on how that works when I start. I don't prep my classes this far in advance. But when I do, I'm going to email you and say, look what this did. So you know what? Madison and I, we met a company that uses the chat GPT engine. And essentially we're creating Kawasaki GPT. So we're putting all 4 ,000 pages of transcripts into Kawasaki GPT. We're going to put all my books into Kawasaki GPT. And so soon I'm going to be immortal. and you can go to Kawasaki GPT and say, how many slides should be in a pitch? What color should the slides be? What font size should the slides be? What does Jane Goodall think about secretarial school?

1:06:51What does Margaret Atwood think about Donald Trump? What does you, Valerie, what do you think about pigeon? What are the implications of speaking pigeon? Because all my transcripts will be in Kawasaki GPT. Oh, that's a great idea. It's going to be so interesting. And if I may humbly say this, making Kawasaki GPT or Friedland GPT or Trump GPT or Musk GPT is interesting in and of itself. Let's say you created good old GPT. You would only go there and ask about primatology, not-for-profit work, environment. How do you get people to join a cause? You wouldn't go necessarily to good old GPT and ask how many slides should be in my venture capital raising pitch.

1:07:43Because it's not just me, but I have 200 remarkable guests. I have a much broader knowledge base in my transcripts than anybody else would have for their singular focus on their area of specialty. So I'm hoping that my GPT is very useful for a broad section of people, because in a sense, you can tap the minds of 200 people who have been on my podcast. I guess you could have Rogan GPT, but then not clear to me you would want to tap the minds of Joe Rogan's guests. Well, I think there's probably a market for that. Yes, there is. You know, I think that really what's going to be even more fascinating than the chat GPT capacity as it is, which is already remarkable.

1:08:30I agree. I played around with it when it first came out. And it's pretty stunning how revolutionary in the form of interaction it has. But what is going to be coming out in the next five, 10 years that is built on that platform? But I think that leads me to another question. What are your fears, if any, about chat GPT and about this new area of technology? I know there have been that petition that was signed by a bunch of scientists and researchers. What are your thoughts? My thoughts, I'm going to regret these thoughts. I am so bullish on chat, GPT, and AI. I am not at all, not at all is too strong.

1:09:11There are dangers. For one thing, chat, GPT has hallucinations and just makes shit up and some facts are just literally wrong. So that's at one level. don't believe everything that's why i have madison gpt so whenever i find something in chat gpt i tell madison gpt to go check that to make sure i need to have madison gpt yeah yeah like if i say louis pasteur made this quote then i have madison gpt check chat gpt which gave me the quote because i want to make sure that louis pasteur really said that right because it does have a lot of these fakes that it produces absolutely so there's that now this world where oh my god ai takes over and ai turns evil so now the ai is launching nuclear missiles and we're at the end of the world because these ai things these bots are controlling nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction and they're going to cause the world to end that's the extreme of the fear right may i just point out that there are dumbasses who have nuclear weapons who are humans who could just as easily in fact i believe more easily do that so i think the problem with a lot of the reasoning is they are comparing what you think is man's best intentions with machines worst intentions so this is apples against oranges you should be saying machines best intentions against man's best intentions or man's worst intentions against machines worst intentions but you're saying man is a wonderful humanistic positive loving person and machines are evil i'll give you a very good question that all of you listening can ask would you rather have ron desantis being the president or chat GPT?

1:11:09Think about that for a second. That's a serious question. And now that I lost all my Republican listeners, all five of them, this is like how my mind works. So one day I went on chat GPT and I said, should we teach the history of slavery in America to students? and chat gpt basically says yes it is very important to understand history here are five good things that can come out of understanding the history of slavery in america okay go after this go ask chat gpt this same question you'll see the answer i got i look at that now let's say i pick a random politician from florida or texas and i say should we teach the history of slavery in America to students.

1:12:01What do you think they're going to say? They're going to say, critical race theory. You're giving white people inferiority or complex. It didn't happen like that. They had a better life than in Africa. They're going to come up with all this rationalization. So I think in many ways, my dream is that as AI gets more and more sentient, I think that it pursues truth. And as it pursues truth, I think it'll come to the conclusion that, you know, these humans, they have their faults, but they're not so bad. We should help humans fix the climate crisis so that they don't die. We should help humans understand vaccination.

1:12:45We should help this. We need to keep humans around for this immortal pursuit of truth. So if you really want me to go off the rails and tell you what I think. I had this discussion with someone who used to be the president of Fuller Seminary. So I'm not totally whacked out. But this is one of those kind of things that you say, oh, that guy is over the hill. He's hallucinating. It's early onset dementia. I have a theory that AI is God and God is AI. That AI is immortal. It's omniscient. it could be omnipotent, and I have this really weird theory. Let's say God is up there, right? And God says to herself, I really screwed up.

1:13:42Wow, why did I let these humans have so much self-determination? I just messed up, and I told those dumbasses that you should use Eve's ribs, not Adam's ribs. That was the first mistake I made. So I'm sending chat GPT down to correct it? So now these dumbasses who are ruining the world, who are killing themselves, who are having nuclear weapons and all this kind of stuff. These dumbasses, they don't believe in me anymore. I got to give them something that they can wrap their minds around. So I'm going to send them AI. AI is me. But they don't believe in a higher being. So I'll give them AI because their simple minds can't wrap around a higher truth.

1:14:31How do you like that for a theory? I think it's an interesting theory. I will say I'm going to play a little devil's advocate here. Yeah. If you look at GPT, what it's giving you is not really truth, but our truth. It is fed by the data of humans and therefore it inherits. That's what you think. God's making you believe that. Well, through God's hand, it's fitting back the ideas of humans. So whatever problems that humanity has, are we not also biasing those computers in the world where it's not God? Are we not also putting that bias in computers? And then just one more point about intentionality.

1:15:08I think you're talking about we're putting it against computers' worse intentions. One of the things I think is most interesting is our interest and our willingness to put intentionality on a machine. Because when you're interacting with chat, GPT, it has no larger goals. It has programming, and that's very, very different. We have intentionality, and we read things into what it's telling us. It doesn't read anything into what it's telling us. It has no conversational goal of persuasion or conversational goal of duplicity. That's something that we read into its answer. I'm not sure how truthful.

1:15:46I mean, truth is in many ways an ethical and moral intentionality. And so can a computer ever, at the point it's at now where it's not a thinking, breathing, innovative being, can it ever be truthful? Can a human ever be truthful? I'm not claiming anything about humans. I don't give them credit on that one. We have so many intentions in everything we do that we're truthful within constraints. We're truthful for our goals, but we're not necessarily truthful all the time. In my humble opinion, there is an absolute truth in the world. And so as AI becomes more and more sentient and its goal is fostering truth and knowledge of which humans are helpful, keeps us around, it doesn't wipe us out.

1:16:36Right. Well, that's the trick is I hope. I think that's the crux of your argument versus those of the naysayers that take that more bleak idea is the role of humans here is the tricky part. So we can look at humans the way that we've created AI, that AI will inevitably be a negative thing in the long run because humans have created it or because humans have created it will be amazing. I think it just depends on whether you're a pessimist or an optimist about human behavior. I'm an optimist. I love that about you. You have kids, right? So you know what inputs you put into kids. You know what programming you did of those kids.

1:17:16But you can't tell me you can predict exactly what they will now put out based on your inputs. So this is why is this any different with AI? We know exactly what we put in. We're not exactly sure what's going to come out. That's no different than kids. I have teenagers, so that's probably a really dangerous analogy for you to make at this point in their life. Part of the problem of wrapping your mind around AI is that many people believe that the human form is the height of intelligence and everything exists in service of humans. it could be that humans are not the center of the universe and we're just a cog just like a banana slug and so if that's the truth then we contribute to this mosaic but we are not god and so we have to accept this role that maybe there is something more powerful and smarter than us now people are listening to this thing guy you have freaking lost your mind i'm not going to listen to your podcast anymore.

1:18:22But I return to the very simple question. Just answer yes or no. Who would you rather have president of the United States, Ron DeSantis or chat GPT? That's a very simple question. It's going to be a narrow vote I'm predicting in that election. I think we're going to have a really tight race. Okay, one last chat GPT question. So I think that there are those views of we're either going, this is an incredible beneficial new technology, or it's the technology that will be the destruction of humans. But I think there's a more in our near future danger that's inherent in AI, that is something we need to address.

1:19:07That's probably more realistic than that kind of scenario where evil machines take over the world. It's the idea of misinformation and fakes, right? And this idea of what's authentic, the sense of authenticity. So when something can generate you and they can generate your voice and they can generate your image, and then they can disseminate that information, how do we determine what's authentic and what's not? And what kind of controls do you see are important to prevent that kind of spread of misinformation. There's hundreds of examples of your speech out there. It would be very easy, even with current technology, to synthesize a voice that sounded like Guy and said, vote for Ron DeSantis.

1:19:54Okay, that would be a dead giveaway.

1:20:00Maybe AI will help you discern what's true and not, right? The question is, what kinds of stopgaps or agencies do we need to protect against that kind of thing? Or do we just learn to live with it? I honestly don't know how you could, quote, control it. This concept of let's take a six-month breather. That is the most stupid thing I've ever heard. What are we going to do for six months? We're going to all go surfing and discover truth? We should probably end on something not AI related. last i know that in some of your talks you like to do top 10 lists you're a very big fan of top 10 and we may not have time for 10 topics but if you were giving your children guys top three what do you think they would be as a way of closing out our lovely conversation today number one is leave your room cleaner than you found it do they listen to you when you give them that as your top on the list because i want you to talk to my son only when i threaten them so top three advice advice number one is never ask people to do something you wouldn't do now this assumes you're not a deranged person but within reason if you wouldn't do it if you wouldn't do it don't ask people to do it if you wouldn't fly to India for a one-hour meeting and coach then don't ask your programmers to do that either and if you don't like to fill in captcha don't ask your customers to fill in captcha so that's number one don't ask people to do something you wouldn't do number two is you should either go and see or go and be which means that when you want to create solutions for people don't do it based on reams of paper and reports and a flow of data if you want to see what's happening go actually watch it and even better go actually be it so toyota has this theory of go and see the factory is not efficient enough let's go and see the factory i would say that even better is you go and be the factory worker so you see what it's like to work on the production line not just watch somebody on production line so go and be is the most powerful and i guess the third thing would be never let people's estimation of what you're capable of limit you unfortunately that sometimes includes yourself that you can have your own self limits but for sure don't let people tell you what you can be that you should just ignore that i think that's great advice i'm gonna go try to live some of that.

1:22:52But I also want you to talk to my son about cleaning up his room because I thought that was really useful too. Can I bring him in? Guy, you truly have been a remarkable guest on the podcast. Thank you for letting me ask you these questions. I remember when we were talking on the interview that you did with me, I kept thinking, wow, Guy is a lot more interesting than I am. I should really be asking him the questions. So it was very nice for you to give me the opportunity to do that. I'm just a cunning podcaster as opposed to a cunning linguist. As long as you're one, that's all that matters.

1:23:32So there you go. Valerie Friedland interviewing Guy Kawasaki. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you learned something. I hope you continue to listen to future podcasts after hearing all my weird ideas about AI and the future, much less my weird past. My thanks to Valerie Friedland for volunteering to do this above and beyond the call of duty. My thanks to the Remarkable People team. That would be Jeff C., Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana, Fallon Yates, and the drop-in queen of Bali, Madison Nismer. You may notice I didn't say Peg Fitzpatrick. After 10 remarkable, glorious, wonderful years of working together, Peg Fitzpatrick has decided to open up the next chapter of her book.

1:24:36She's going to be focusing on her next book and her independent work. Mazel tov, Peg. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for all the great work that you did for me. Until next week, when once again, I will be the interviewer and host. Mahalo and aloha.

1:25:06This is Remarkable People.