Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 1: Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of innovative technology going on in this world,
Speaker 2: and we have a couple of headlines. Semaphore reported the
Speaker 2: US and China likely agreeing to set up a formalized
Speaker 2: channel for talks on artificial intelligence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we also learned that YouTube is going to soon
Speaker 3: require video makers to disclose whether they've uploaded manipulated or
Speaker 3: synthetic content that looks realistic just think generative AI. So
Speaker 3: they got to disclose that.
Speaker 2: John mentioned Nvidia up for a tenth consecutive session, longest
Speaker 2: streak of advances since record setting dash back in December
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen, and Video, the world's most valuable chip maker,
Speaker 2: announcing updates to its AI processors. So we want to
Speaker 2: talk AI. We want to talk innovation, kind of talk
Speaker 2: the next big thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we got a great guest to do that. Andrew
Speaker 3: McAfee as principal Research scientist at mit IS. He's out
Speaker 3: there of a new book, The Geek Way, The Radical
Speaker 3: mindset that drives Extraordinary results. He's also the visiting a
Speaker 3: visiting Fellow, the Visiting fellow, the only one Tech and
Speaker 3: Society at Google, where he's working with Google and research
Speaker 3: related to the societal impacts of genitive AI. Andrew joins
Speaker 3: us on Zoom this afternoon slash evening from Lisbon, Portugal. Andrew,
Speaker 3: how are you.
Speaker 4: I'm well, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Hey, well, thanks so much for joining us. The book
Speaker 3: is called The Geek Way. What is the Geek Way?
Speaker 4: The geek Way is an upgrade to the company. It's
Speaker 4: a better set of philosophies and practices for running this
Speaker 4: thing we call a company. And I decided to write
Speaker 4: the book because I kept on seeing in industry after
Speaker 4: industry the disruptors were beating the incumbents at their own game.
Speaker 4: And I thought that was a really important phenomenon and
Speaker 4: I wanted to understand it, and it turned into this book.
Speaker 2: Hey, listen, we use the word geek like you're such
Speaker 2: a geek. Oh, I'm being so geeky, you know, like
Speaker 2: we kind of toss it around. But what exactly do
Speaker 2: you mean?
Speaker 1: I know, you've got four norms to.
Speaker 2: Talk about the geek Way. I mean, is that how
Speaker 2: you define it?
Speaker 4: No? And this is a really important question because when
Speaker 4: I was a kid geek was an insult, and it
Speaker 4: was usually meant somebody who was way too into computers.
Speaker 4: So I was guilty of that. And the thing that
Speaker 4: makes me happy is that the definition has broadened out
Speaker 4: and I don't think it's an insult anymore. A geek
Speaker 4: is somebody with two characteristics. They get obsessed with a
Speaker 4: really hard problem. They're tenacious, they can't let it go.
Speaker 4: And if their solutions are unconventional or outside the mainstream,
Speaker 4: they don't care. So my shorthand phrase for a geek
Speaker 4: these days is any kind of obsessive maverick. And the
Speaker 4: geeks that I wrote the book about are the geeks
Speaker 4: that got obsessed with this really hard problem of how
Speaker 4: do you run and keep succeeding with a company in
Speaker 4: today's really uncertain, turbulent environment.
Speaker 1: So elon musk A geek.
Speaker 4: Geek, big geek, not perfect, not by any stretch, but
Speaker 4: adheres deeply to a couple of these norms that I
Speaker 4: talk about in the geek way.
Speaker 1: Well, let's get to those norms. There's four of them.
Speaker 2: Speed, ownership, science, and openness. Speed. You're talking about not
Speaker 2: doing necessarily something fast, but you do something, create it
Speaker 2: in a meaningful way, and then you get useful feedback
Speaker 2: on it. I feel like it's every time I get like, hey,
Speaker 2: an iOS update or something i I'm helping with that speeds.
Speaker 4: That's exactly right. And of all the norms, Elon and
Speaker 4: his companies epitomize speed the most. For me, Tesla is
Speaker 4: willing to blow up rockets. Now, no people are on
Speaker 4: those rockets, and they don't have any loss of life yet,
Speaker 4: but they will iterate and get feedback and learn from
Speaker 4: reality and learn from physics and blow things up. And
Speaker 4: their results really speak for themselves. And if you look
Speaker 4: at Tesla and it's market value and its ability to
Speaker 4: build affordable electric cars profitably, they are clearly disrupting the
Speaker 4: entire incumbent automotive industry and taking it into a different chapter.
Speaker 3: What about Tim Cook? Is Tim Cook a geek?
Speaker 4: Tim Cook is a geek. Apple is a very secretive company,
Speaker 4: and in some ways that are a little hard to penetrate.
Speaker 4: But one thing that I learned about Apple, in addition
Speaker 4: to being very fond of this iteration of approach, they
Speaker 4: also followed the norm, the great geek norm of science.
Speaker 4: And what I mean by that is not do a
Speaker 4: bunch of fancy statistical ab tests or anything, but settle
Speaker 4: your arguments based on evidence. And there's a wonderful story
Speaker 4: about that portrait mode on the iPhone and the fact
Speaker 4: that the background is blurry and you can control the
Speaker 4: blur when you're setting up the photo. There is a
Speaker 4: debated Apple and they're rolling out that feature about whether
Speaker 4: we should have the ability to control the blur in
Speaker 4: advance or only see the effects after we take the picture.
Speaker 4: Someone in a big meeting did a demo of the
Speaker 4: feature where you can preview the blur, and that's settled
Speaker 4: the argument. That's what science is. It's an evidence based argument.
Speaker 4: The geeks love to argue and they love evidence, right.
Speaker 1: I love that one.
Speaker 2: You write about a lot in the book, which is
Speaker 2: really interesting. The other thing I like is openness, which
Speaker 2: you know you've got to be able to share, be
Speaker 2: open to Well, wait a minute, maybe we should do
Speaker 2: something a little bit differently, or and maybe we have
Speaker 2: to change. It's so easy to be defensive with, you know,
Speaker 2: with anything you do.
Speaker 1: Tackle us a little bit more about this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and maybe I'm wrong, and maybe we need to pivot,
Speaker 4: and maybe this thing that I've invested a ton in
Speaker 4: and this thing that I'm hanging my reputation on is
Speaker 4: not the right answering we need to change. So for me,
Speaker 4: openness is just about exactly the opposite of defensiveness, of
Speaker 4: clinging to what you have and never letting it go.
Speaker 4: And that defensiveness is very clearly tied to an attitude
Speaker 4: inside a company of winning all the time, of just winning,
Speaker 4: winning the argument, winning the day, winning whatever. I don't
Speaker 4: think it's a coincidence that Jack Welch's autobiography was called
Speaker 4: winning and walking away from that. And it's not that
Speaker 4: the Geeks love losing. These are incredibly tough competitors, but
Speaker 4: they realize that if you're going to win over the
Speaker 4: long haul, you have to take risks. You have to fail.
Speaker 4: Sometimes you have to not punish people when they are failing.
Speaker 4: And I think it's amazing that Jeff Bezos, in one
Speaker 4: of his shareholder letters a few years ago, said, look,
Speaker 4: if we are not incubating multi billion dollars inside Amazon
Speaker 4: right now, we are not innovating at the right scale.
Speaker 4: We are not taking enough risks. Now it looks like
Speaker 4: a Lexta was one of those multi billion dollar failures.
Speaker 4: But the culture at Amazon is one that that not
Speaker 4: only tolerates that, but in any cases celebrates it.
Speaker 3: One of those maybe that I don't know if we
Speaker 3: can consider it a failure at this point, but one
Speaker 3: of those that wasn't a failure was AWS. And the
Speaker 3: guy who you know was charged and tasked with building
Speaker 3: that out is none other than Andy Jassey, who's now
Speaker 3: the CEO of Amazon. Okay, so Andrew, tell us about
Speaker 3: some folks who maybe aren't geeks that you've come across
Speaker 3: in your research, who are high profile and we've heard of.
Speaker 4: I mean, you can look at the unbelievable ly short
Speaker 4: lifespan of Quibi, which was this short vio streaming quick launched.
Speaker 1: We all watched it from from our homes during the pandemic.
Speaker 1: But go ahead, no, we didn't. That's why.
Speaker 2: That's why it is.
Speaker 4: We didn't watch you tube and hit top, but not
Speaker 4: Quibi very much. But think about that. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who's
Speaker 4: the founder of it, is an actual Hollywood vision area,
Speaker 4: a huge string of tape measure home runs in that industry.
Speaker 4: He drafted a recruited Meg Whitman to be the CEO
Speaker 4: of Quibi. They raised coming on two billion dollars to
Speaker 4: execute Katzenberg's vision of short form entertainment. Now, they didn't
Speaker 4: do geeky things. They didn't listen to a lot of evidence,
Speaker 4: they weren't very open to changes in direction. They didn't
Speaker 4: build a beta of their product. They just realized this
Speaker 4: full vision and released it out there into the world.
Speaker 4: And it lasted as a live streaming platform less than
Speaker 4: two hundred days before they announced the shutdown of it.
Speaker 4: It was just this really old fashioned approach where you're
Speaker 4: just going to blindly follow the vision of the leader,
Speaker 4: com hell or high Water. And I contrast that with Netflix,
Speaker 4: which is funded by this complete outsider to the entertainment
Speaker 4: industry and is now disrupting that industry even as we speak.
Speaker 1: Fascinating.
Speaker 2: Is there so thought in terms of AI? We're all
Speaker 2: like agg it feels like over artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my John Tucker's looking at me. Yeah, guy, thank you.
Speaker 2: But how do you think about it?
Speaker 1: Especially?
Speaker 2: Is there a geek to follow when it comes to
Speaker 2: AI that you think is going to be on it.
Speaker 4: Well, I think first of all, that this period that
Speaker 4: we're living through of unreal science fiction progress with AI,
Speaker 4: and in particular this latest chapter of generative AI, these
Speaker 4: are some of the most powerful tools we humans have
Speaker 4: ever invented to help us accomplish our goals. We're living
Speaker 4: through an astonishing ceriad of innovation. Now, what kinds of
Speaker 4: companies are going to be successful at harnessing that technology.
Speaker 4: I think they're geek companies. This technology is so new
Speaker 4: it's deeply weird. The future is very uncertain. I think
Speaker 4: maybe the only way, but certainly the best way that
Speaker 4: you're going to get smart about it and learn how
Speaker 4: to use AI and generative AI is by following this
Speaker 4: geeky approach of taking a little risk, trying something, getting feedback, iterating,
Speaker 4: moving into the future. That way, I'll be astonished if
Speaker 4: AI helps the people still following the industrial era playbook
Speaker 4: come back against the geeks. I do not predict.
Speaker 2: I'm so dying to ask you about metaverse, but we've
Speaker 2: run out of time. You're gonna have to come back.
Speaker 2: This was fascinating. Andrew McAfee, Principal Research signists at MIT.
Speaker 2: His book is called The Geek Way, The radical mindset
Speaker 2: that drives extraordinary, extraordinary results, extraordinary works, extraordinary too, really
Speaker 2: fascinating right in terms of how you look at things.
Speaker 3: The Geek Way