Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: We're gonna stay in technology and how it continues to
Speaker 2: transform himid the AI backdrop, and it takes us to
Speaker 2: someone who's been innovating and disrupting as well, and remembers
Speaker 2: all too well the boom and bust and changing landscape
Speaker 2: of the dot com era. He's best known as the
Speaker 2: founder and CEO of Zinga, the social games company that
Speaker 2: iPod in twenty eleven, but he's built and invested in
Speaker 2: so much more and through every iteration of the Internet,
Speaker 2: the nineties boom and bust, the social media boom of
Speaker 2: Web two point zero, and now the AI era. Carol.
Speaker 2: He's also a prolific investor.
Speaker 3: He is. Indeed, he's invested you'll know these names, folks, Napster, SpaceX,
Speaker 3: and he had he held on to his shares. His
Speaker 3: thirty eight thousand dollars seat investment in Facebook now Meta
Speaker 3: for about half a percentage of the company would be
Speaker 3: worth many, many billions of dollars right now. Smart investment.
Speaker 2: I would say, we're talking about Mark Pinkas he's got
Speaker 2: a new book out and we know all this thanks
Speaker 2: to the new book. It's called Life at the speed
Speaker 2: of play, launch products, people love. Mark Pinkus joins us
Speaker 2: here in the Blue and Interactive Broker's Studio. Welcome, Welcome,
Speaker 2: How are you. Congrats on the book.
Speaker 1: Thanks, thanks, by the way, I really am happy about
Speaker 1: the memory stocks.
Speaker 4: What's why?
Speaker 1: Well, for diving right into the AI trade, let's not
Speaker 1: mess around. I'd say that that it's it's a pretty
Speaker 1: simple trade at this point.
Speaker 4: It's a belief.
Speaker 1: And either you believe that the AI infrastructure investment is
Speaker 1: going to pay off and keep playing out, in which
Speaker 1: case all of these companies are generationally undervalued and it's
Speaker 1: a generational buying opportunity.
Speaker 4: If you're getting a PEG ratio of.
Speaker 1: Point three you know or less, or you think that
Speaker 1: it's not going to play out, and then you should
Speaker 1: stay away from all of it.
Speaker 4: So well, I'm a believer.
Speaker 2: It's funny because we just spoke with you with Ted Oakley.
Speaker 2: He manages money for Oxbow Advisors, and he sent us
Speaker 2: a bunch of stocks, and missing from there we're names
Speaker 2: and memory names. He does own some tech, but he
Speaker 2: said the memory got too expensive. And he said, I've
Speaker 2: been doing this for decade, many decades. I remember the
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties we sold Intel, and I watched Intel stocko
Speaker 2: up for the next twelve months before then it went down.
Speaker 2: So he understands these cycles. Are we in one of
Speaker 2: those cyclical moments right now?
Speaker 1: Well, we'll know in the future, but it'll be it's
Speaker 1: only cyclical if this, if these AI growth rates and
Speaker 1: numbers don't play out, If they play out, I think
Speaker 1: he would even agree that they're still undervalued.
Speaker 3: You know, Mark, one of the things that we're thinking,
Speaker 3: we want to get into the book and talk about
Speaker 3: the you know, life at the speed of play and
Speaker 3: what it all means.
Speaker 4: But we are curious.
Speaker 3: You have been in Silicon Valley for all of the
Speaker 3: iterations of the mettle no no season, like a great wine.
Speaker 3: Like That's how I think it. Love talking with people
Speaker 3: who have seen cycles right and can sometimes figure out
Speaker 3: the silly from the stuff that really matters. How do
Speaker 3: you like, how do we make sense? Like we see
Speaker 3: the money going in, We see the circular financing that
Speaker 3: makes us a little uncomfortable. We see the narrative around
Speaker 3: AI changing. I get it, disruption, this is what happened.
Speaker 3: But help us understand, like is this a boom cycle
Speaker 3: with no bust? Or is there going to be a
Speaker 3: breaking point at some point or for only maybe for.
Speaker 4: Some it's the I have the perfect answer.
Speaker 3: You wouldn't be talking to us.
Speaker 4: I would have held my metastoptik.
Speaker 3: You did, okay, you did, okay? How do you think
Speaker 3: some of this?
Speaker 1: I built a boring enterprise software company in the middle
Speaker 1: of the dot com boom. You know, it was called
Speaker 1: support dot Com, but it was actually an early SaaS company.
Speaker 1: We went public on the last day of the IPO window.
Speaker 1: I'd say that then versus now. My peers and I
Speaker 1: thought it.
Speaker 4: Didn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: During the dot com bubble, we thought it was crazy
Speaker 1: what we saw going on around us. And now my peers,
Speaker 1: my smartest friends, think this makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it was dark fiber then and now
Speaker 1: it's like hot GPUs.
Speaker 4: I mean it's actually being used.
Speaker 1: It was betting on a whole consumer that that didn't show.
Speaker 4: Up or didn't show up yet.
Speaker 1: And now the the investment the infrastructure is going to
Speaker 1: enterprises who are bottom line oriented. And you know, then
Speaker 1: it was eyeballs and now it's arr you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's actual revenue. So it's definitely not the same. I
Speaker 1: think what we do have is extreme volatility. And I
Speaker 1: think that the volatility comes from where it's hard to
Speaker 1: remember this level of growth market. And when there's this
Speaker 1: level of growth like we've seen just this week and today,
Speaker 1: when there is a negative data point or even absence
Speaker 1: of more positives, it starts to be run for the
Speaker 1: hills and doom and bubble. And then when we see
Speaker 1: like microns numbers and guidance, all of a sudden, everyone's
Speaker 1: bullish again, and we're going to keep seeing that.
Speaker 4: It's my take.
Speaker 2: One thing that you write about in the book repeatedly
Speaker 2: is that you know, when you get into your whole
Speaker 2: background Wharton, Harvard Business School, going and working for some investors,
Speaker 2: that our household names of the Bloomberg audience, I mean
Speaker 2: Steve Ratner, John Malone, I mean, these are legends. You
Speaker 2: are constantly saying you don't know how to code, you
Speaker 2: don't know how to write code, yet you built all
Speaker 2: these companies. What struck me about reading that was that
Speaker 2: that kind of doesn't matter now in a way that
Speaker 2: it mattered when you were building all these companies. You
Speaker 2: write about, how has the idea of like open Ayes,
Speaker 2: Codex or Claude code from an How does that completely
Speaker 2: change the game moving forward?
Speaker 4: Well, if you.
Speaker 1: Pull the camera back and even think more broadly, like,
Speaker 1: how has the game of startups just changed? And how
Speaker 1: has this another step function changed? In each chapter, the
Speaker 1: amount of capital that you needed to get going has
Speaker 1: gone down, you know, not up. When I was starting
Speaker 1: my first company, I had to recruit these government mainframe programmers,
Speaker 1: have them learn C plus plus and HTML, and I
Speaker 1: needed a fair amount of money to convince them to
Speaker 1: quit their jobs.
Speaker 4: And each my subsequent companies.
Speaker 1: Today, you know you don't need that, right, You don't
Speaker 1: need as much capital. You don't need to go and
Speaker 1: necessarily recruit a whole team of the world's best engineers.
Speaker 4: It's being democratized today.
Speaker 1: Really there, it's more possible than ever for somebody with
Speaker 1: an amazing idea who's willing to move on it now
Speaker 1: to really get somewhere in a far more capital efficient way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I feel like we also said that
Speaker 3: in the pandemic of people just being able to start
Speaker 3: things while they were home. I am curious about the
Speaker 3: speed of play because that is on your book. Talk
Speaker 3: to us about that and the importance of it.
Speaker 1: Sure, so there was a lot of debate with my
Speaker 1: co author Carly, my amazing editor Hollis.
Speaker 4: On the title to the book.
Speaker 1: It was originally called proven Better New, which we can
Speaker 1: get into. But that's that's kind of some of the
Speaker 1: core value in the book, and I eventually said, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just that's not the whole gist of the book.
Speaker 1: It's life at the speed of play. And that's because
Speaker 1: it's both. It's both the place that we are moving
Speaker 1: into in this AI era. It's it's really I like,
Speaker 1: I start the book by saying that that this is
Speaker 1: Elon is the one person who's already been living his
Speaker 1: life at this b of play, and I definitely think
Speaker 1: he's having more fun than the rest of us.
Speaker 4: Okay, he's also working harder.
Speaker 2: I want to push back on this because Caroly and
Speaker 2: I talked about this.
Speaker 3: He doesn't always look like he's having fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he really. I mean, I think he's been really
Speaker 2: public about having this tortured existence and how difficult it
Speaker 2: is to be Elon Musk and the challenges that he
Speaker 2: struggled with personally, I think more so than professionally. Do
Speaker 2: you actually think he's having more fun than the rest
Speaker 2: of us?
Speaker 4: I do.
Speaker 1: He's got an amazing sense of humor. He's every time
Speaker 1: I see him, he's joking, laughing. I was with him
Speaker 1: at a friend's house one night and it wasn't long
Speaker 1: after he had bought Twitter, and it was basically like
Speaker 1: an hour of the best stand up comedy I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: I mean, he the way he talked about his experience
Speaker 1: of coming in to Twitter and how insane the company
Speaker 1: was was just was just really funny. So so my
Speaker 1: point of view, I mean, whether he's having more fun,
Speaker 1: who knows. I think that that what I what we
Speaker 1: can see, you know, I said, maybe he's the one
Speaker 1: who solved the simulation. What we can see is that
Speaker 1: he can almost tweet something into existence that he said, there,
Speaker 1: this traffic in la is terrible. There should be a
Speaker 1: boring tunneling company. And then a few months later and
Speaker 1: a few billion dollars raised, there was. And my point is,
Speaker 1: to some degree, we all are on the brink of
Speaker 1: living a part of that. And the reason I called
Speaker 1: this life lets Speed of Play is that to me,
Speaker 1: what the book is really about is a product mindset,
Speaker 1: and and I think that every so many of us
Speaker 1: have an idea we don't know how to pursue it,
Speaker 1: or we are pursuing an idea, but the odds of
Speaker 1: success are too low, too many, too many founders are
Speaker 1: feeling for the wrong reasons.
Speaker 3: So a good idea is a good idea, but that
Speaker 3: that's not enough necessarily to run with something and build
Speaker 3: something that lasts for longer or has some significant impact. Correct.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it might be that you have a good idea,
Speaker 1: but it's behind some like obvious mistakes that you're making.
Speaker 1: That the more junior product maker or a founder is
Speaker 1: and the less experienced they are, the more likely they
Speaker 1: are to do too much new to just reinvent everything.
Speaker 4: Steve Jobs talked about this.
Speaker 1: So the point of the book is I like to
Speaker 1: think that this book is like a cheat code that
Speaker 1: you can whatever it is you're doing, you can change
Speaker 1: your odds of success and getting to a hit. It's
Speaker 1: the book I wish I had early in my career.
Speaker 3: Just as for founders, like, who do you think about? It?
Speaker 3: Sounds like it is for people who have an idea
Speaker 3: or want to run with something, right.
Speaker 1: This book is every one of your listeners right now
Speaker 1: probably has some instinct. They have some sense it's either
Speaker 1: a speci of an idea or a sense that something
Speaker 1: could be better, And the book is the point of
Speaker 1: the book is that they should What is when you
Speaker 1: think what should they do with that instinct? Very few
Speaker 1: of them will act on it and turn that into
Speaker 1: a product or a company, and then their odds of
Speaker 1: success will be solow because they're going to take one
Speaker 1: shot on goal and it's probably going to miss well.
Speaker 2: I like how you write about that in the book
Speaker 2: because you use the idea of Uber as an example
Speaker 2: in the book. You had the idea for Uber in
Speaker 2: two thousand and two. I did SMS dispatching to a cab.
Speaker 2: You're not Travis Kalanik. He did not start Uber. No,
Speaker 2: so you make this argument that I think a lot
Speaker 2: of people everybody has these ideas.
Speaker 4: I had that idea. Yeah, because you had.
Speaker 2: That idea, it doesn't mean you actually create the company.
Speaker 2: Why was Travis able to do it? But Mark Pinkus,
Speaker 2: who was in Silicon Valley in two thousand and two,
Speaker 2: wasn't able to do it.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you why Travis was, but I can
Speaker 1: tell you why I wasn't.
Speaker 4: I didn't.
Speaker 1: First of all, I looked at the world as it existed,
Speaker 1: not as it could exist the way that Travis did.
Speaker 1: And by the way, in two thousand and two, there
Speaker 1: wasn't a mobile, you know, smartphone then, and I thought
Speaker 1: about it in these conventional ways.
Speaker 4: Oh, I'm going.
Speaker 1: To deliver your order to the taxi broker, who will
Speaker 1: call a cab. I didn't ever think Travis's idea of
Speaker 1: the gig economy. I'm going to let anybody become a
Speaker 1: driver and have a driver within a minute of you.
Speaker 4: That was that was brilliance. But but I had.
Speaker 1: An instinct, an instinct that we should be able to
Speaker 1: order a phone through order a taxi through our phone.
Speaker 1: And you know the importance The point I'm trying to
Speaker 1: get people to focus on the book is that if
Speaker 1: you assume your instincts are right, you know, ninety five
Speaker 1: percent of the time, and your idea is right at
Speaker 1: best twenty five percent of the time, what would you
Speaker 1: do with that information? You know, it's like a time machine.
Speaker 3: You write about these instinct veins deep sources of insight
Speaker 3: about human needs and behavior that can spawn multiple product ideas,
Speaker 3: even whole new industries. Is that what AI is right now,
Speaker 3: like what we're doing, is that what that is or.
Speaker 4: Is that beyond an instinct vein?
Speaker 1: I mean, AAI is is a fundamental shift in in computing.
Speaker 1: I mean the way that the Internet was, and so
Speaker 1: so I wouldn't.
Speaker 3: Apples to apples. Yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting. You know.
Speaker 3: One of the things that I find also is some
Speaker 3: of the things you talk about, like leadership, you talk
Speaker 3: about micromanagement is beautiful. And I think about how many
Speaker 3: times when you think about leaders that it's like, don't
Speaker 3: micromanage people? Yeah, right now, think about it, Like you
Speaker 3: bring in you know, you know, experts or consultants and
Speaker 3: they're like, don't micromanager people? Why is it so important?
Speaker 4: Why is it so important that you do do that?
Speaker 4: You do micromanage?
Speaker 1: Yeah, because the point I'm trying to make here is
Speaker 1: that at the end of the day, what matters most
Speaker 1: is your customer experience, not how you delivered it.
Speaker 4: And so the point to me.
Speaker 1: Is deliver the best possible customer experience any way that
Speaker 1: you get there. And if it's through micromanager, if you
Speaker 1: can guarantee the quality, if you can guarantee the delivery
Speaker 1: because you micromanaged, then by all means do that. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't care that McDonald's served fifteen million burgers today.
Speaker 1: That doesn't make mine any better if I want the
Speaker 1: kernel cooking mine, you know, individually.
Speaker 2: Well, that's a major theme in the book is sort
Speaker 2: of throwing out this idea of the minimum minimal viable product. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to repeat what the chapter's called.
Speaker 4: Because no, we're FCC regulated here, but we're family. Well,
Speaker 4: that chapter you can say, was the MVP trap. Okay,
Speaker 4: other chapters no.
Speaker 2: Okay, maybe, yeah, great, there it is why we've been
Speaker 2: sold this idea though, of iterating and Silicon Valley sort
Speaker 2: of throw something, you know, see if what sticks, and
Speaker 2: iterates on that over and over again. Why wasn't that
Speaker 2: ever right for you?
Speaker 1: Well, the original concept that Eric Reese had of minimum
Speaker 1: viable product and moving fast and being in the market
Speaker 1: is a great concept.
Speaker 4: It's just that we now we don't.
Speaker 1: The point I make is that we no longer have
Speaker 1: time to go wait, the learning.
Speaker 4: Is too slow.
Speaker 1: If we build a minimum viable product, there's hope in
Speaker 1: the word viable that this might be your launch product,
Speaker 1: and then you're going to invest more in that product
Speaker 1: than you should. And I like to say, just build
Speaker 1: it wrong before you build it right, just build to learn.
Speaker 1: Be whatever gets you signal from your customer the fastest
Speaker 1: is and and in the age of AI, we can
Speaker 1: prototype something or test something so much faster, but it's dangerous.
Speaker 1: What I'm seeing with AI is less that people are
Speaker 1: using AI to test and learn faster, but more build faster.
Speaker 1: And so if I can build something now in three
Speaker 1: months instead of three years, that's so alluring that I
Speaker 1: might go do that. But I don't have three months
Speaker 1: to learn.
Speaker 4: I'm wrong. Does that makes sense?
Speaker 3: I don't know that makes sense.
Speaker 4: So the viable word is tricky.
Speaker 2: Well, I think you had also shared in the book
Speaker 2: the example of Twitch and building. You know, the founder
Speaker 2: of Twitch, their team was was changing their product every
Speaker 2: two or three days at that point. Yeah, they were twitchy,
Speaker 2: and that was that ended up being a good thing
Speaker 2: for them. Yeah they got immediate feedback.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well they I don't even know if it was
Speaker 1: getting any customer feedback.
Speaker 4: The feedback was just from themselves.
Speaker 1: It was I don't like this product idea anymore, let's switch.
Speaker 1: So that's also important. And I guess part of what
Speaker 1: makes this so hard to be a founder.
Speaker 4: To be a CEO is that we're supposed to.
Speaker 1: Express confidence when we don't personally feel confidence, right, And so,
Speaker 1: how do you come in on Monday and what if
Speaker 1: you just what have you learned something in the past
Speaker 1: week that just said this product isn't quite right or
Speaker 1: it's finally part built and you're like, I'm just not
Speaker 1: that into it. Do you come to your team on
Speaker 1: Monday and say, guys, I know I got you to
Speaker 1: work nights and weekends for this, but I don't think
Speaker 1: this is right anymore. Or do you say, well, I
Speaker 1: don't want to demotivate my team and so I'm just
Speaker 1: going to continue on this path for this whole product cycle.
Speaker 4: Or I can't.
Speaker 1: I'm afraid to tell my investors who backed me that
Speaker 1: I was wrong. Right, And so questions, are you more
Speaker 1: committed to the intellectual honesty or to harmony?
Speaker 3: I would say intellectual honesty.
Speaker 4: People would not I most people would not active.
Speaker 3: I know, but it's like, I don't know. At some
Speaker 3: point you need to be doing that. Hey, we're talking
Speaker 3: with Mark Pinkus, founder of Zinga. He's got a new
Speaker 3: book out. It is entitled titled Life at the Speed
Speaker 3: of Play. Launch Products that people love? Are there products
Speaker 3: I mean, the product cycle is it getting shooters or longer,
Speaker 3: especially when it comes to technology, because I feel like
Speaker 3: there are things that people are so into and then
Speaker 3: they move on to the next thing, and there's so
Speaker 3: much out there.
Speaker 4: From a consumer standpoint.
Speaker 1: Well, I say in the book that I think there's
Speaker 1: a metric that I don't know anyone but me who
Speaker 1: focuses on it and my former teams day three sixty
Speaker 1: five retention. So if one hundred people were using your
Speaker 1: product today, you know, or a year ago today, how
Speaker 1: many would still be using it today? And it's such
Speaker 1: a hard thing to build against because we don't have
Speaker 1: a year to wait, right, But.
Speaker 2: You never would have made your own That maybe works
Speaker 2: from a product perspective of building a company, but from
Speaker 2: a venture capital perspective, that doesn't work. You write about
Speaker 2: what attracted you to Mark Zuckerberg when he was a
Speaker 2: teenager still was that they were able to sign up,
Speaker 2: you know, school's twenty percent on the first day, the
Speaker 2: next eighty percent the next week. Like that happened instantly.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, I didn't know. But it turns out that
Speaker 1: this is necessary but not necessarily complete and sufficient. Is
Speaker 1: that that if you have sixty percent engagement, sixty percent
Speaker 1: of your users show up every day, which has been
Speaker 1: true to this day. With Facebook, the likelihood that you
Speaker 1: have high day three sixty five retention is highly correlated.
Speaker 1: It may not be the case, but it's highly highly correlated.
Speaker 3: Did you know the minute you spoke with him that
Speaker 3: this was just something remarkable?
Speaker 4: Meaning Facebook?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 4: Yes, and and by the way, so would you both
Speaker 4: of you.
Speaker 1: So people who point to the fact that they invested,
Speaker 1: you know, early on in Facebook, these companies as a
Speaker 1: sign that they're a great investors, it does not necessarily
Speaker 1: mean that they are a great.
Speaker 4: You know that their judgment is.
Speaker 1: So great because we all would have said, yes, their
Speaker 1: access is very impressive.
Speaker 4: You know that they had and you didn't have. So
Speaker 4: But here's what's so painful.
Speaker 1: If you think about it, that story is less like
Speaker 1: kudos to Mark that he invested, and it's more like, like, Mark,
Speaker 1: how is it?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 4: Think about this?
Speaker 1: How is it that in two thousand and four when
Speaker 1: I met him, I was doing Tribe. I was doing
Speaker 1: one of the first social networks right before I started,
Speaker 1: before he did. How did I manage to fail? It's
Speaker 1: an act of willpower that I failed It wasn't just Facebook.
Speaker 1: There was eight or nine social networks.
Speaker 4: There was bebo.
Speaker 1: Tagged, MySpace, Friends, Friends, Sir, which I invested in. They
Speaker 1: all worked. I had to pick one idea that didn't
Speaker 1: work and stoically heroically stick with it no matter what.
Speaker 4: I don't care.
Speaker 2: But we are with Mark Pinkus, he's the founder of Zinga.
Speaker 2: He's the author of the new book it's out this week,
Speaker 2: Life at the Speed of Play, launch products, people love.
Speaker 2: I want to pick up with a headline that we
Speaker 2: just heard from Amy just now. It's coming from the
Speaker 2: New York Times about how open ai is leaning toward
Speaker 2: waiting until next year for its IPO. Rob Copeland and
Speaker 2: Mike Isaac writing this over at The New York Times,
Speaker 2: saying that they're holding off on their initial public offering
Speaker 2: until next year. Three people involved in the company's deliberations
Speaker 2: said it punctuates an uncertain future for fast rising AI giants.
Speaker 2: That's again coming from the New York Times. Mark, you're
Speaker 2: an investor in open Ai. You understand also what it's
Speaker 2: like to take a company public. You did that with
Speaker 2: several companies in different periods of your professional.
Speaker 1: Everything sometimes right, sure, yes, like the last day of
Speaker 1: the dot Com IPO.
Speaker 2: And yeah, just you your thoughts on on open ai
Speaker 2: and its path to becoming a public company.
Speaker 1: I I'd say, I the one hand, I'm not sure
Speaker 1: how much the timing matters other than if it changes
Speaker 1: their access to capital. So I don't think they can
Speaker 1: afford to get, you know, significantly behind in the you know,
Speaker 1: capital and.
Speaker 4: Build out race.
Speaker 1: But it's not clear that you know, you have to
Speaker 1: necessarily go public these days, and if you look at
Speaker 1: the the sizes of investments. So I think open Ai
Speaker 1: is just an amazing kind of generational company. And I
Speaker 1: think people who count them out and say this is
Speaker 1: all anthropic are short sighted. And I think that open
Speaker 1: Ai has to.
Speaker 4: Catch up on the coding side.
Speaker 1: I think we'll see that happen with Codex, and they haven't.
Speaker 1: They have a clear advantage on the consumer side, which
Speaker 1: I think is currently being under weighted. I think people
Speaker 1: wrongly think this is all just about coding and enterprise,
Speaker 1: and I just think that is where the action is
Speaker 1: right now, That's where the most revenue growth is right now.
Speaker 1: But there's no question to me that consumer, the consumer
Speaker 1: side of AI will be just as big, if not bigger.
Speaker 1: So I know.
Speaker 4: CO two put out a report.
Speaker 1: Calling it a six trillion dollar market, and I thought
Speaker 1: it was interesting that they they capped consumer at five
Speaker 1: hundred billion consumer AI out of six trillion.
Speaker 3: That doesn't make sense to you.
Speaker 1: Two trillion just for the engineering, the coding side. No,
Speaker 1: that doesn't make any sense to me. That's not the
Speaker 1: way we've seen the internet play out.
Speaker 3: You seem to be someone who can think super big
Speaker 3: about things like how should we be thinking about AI
Speaker 3: and how it changes our world as consumers? Like how
Speaker 3: is it going to at home, at work, at play?
Speaker 3: How is it going to change or world? Or is
Speaker 3: it just another amped up way of communicating online? I
Speaker 3: don't know what is it? How do you think about it?
Speaker 1: It's not a way to communicate online yet because it's
Speaker 1: still oddly a single player experience. Right, we're not in
Speaker 1: the AI, we're not in the GPTs and the chats together.
Speaker 1: But if you break your question down, I think, first
Speaker 1: if you think, you know, how will it impact our
Speaker 1: jobs in the job market, I think we're very very
Speaker 1: quickly transitioning from a knowledge worker economy to something else
Speaker 1: we don't have a name for, but it's going to be,
Speaker 1: you know, a prompt worker. It's going to be about
Speaker 1: being generative, and we're going to be whatever our job is, it's.
Speaker 4: Going to be very quickly.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's probably changed a lot for you guys,
Speaker 1: and right the amount that we have to rely on
Speaker 1: the AI, but the amount of leverage we get and
Speaker 1: the amount that it's it's moving from a value on
Speaker 1: knowledge to a value on questions and curiosity.
Speaker 3: But you also have to have knowledge to ask a
Speaker 3: smart question, for sure, right Like, and we're learning too,
Speaker 3: and we talk about this a lot that I forget
Speaker 3: who the one of the interviews we recently had that like,
Speaker 3: a really good question with AI is going to be
Speaker 3: several paragraphs long, right like, if you really want to
Speaker 3: get a smart, useful information.
Speaker 1: You guys both impressively read my book and you have
Speaker 1: great questions, and I think if you'd relied on the AI,
Speaker 1: you know, and I'll say, even writing the book, I
Speaker 1: had this love hate relationship with AI that if first
Speaker 1: it's magical and you're like, oh my god, it can
Speaker 1: take this long talk it is gave and condense it
Speaker 1: or can or editing is so painful wordsmithing, and then
Speaker 1: you start reading it, and it's getting it starts to
Speaker 1: get homogenized. Yeah, and it's like it starts to feel soulless,
Speaker 1: and it's like, where do my voice go in this?
Speaker 1: And I even try to style a guide and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I want you sound like my voice, and eventually is like,
Speaker 1: I don't want you to change my words unless you
Speaker 1: absolutely have to. And then eventually I said, you know what,
Speaker 1: it's really helpful for some things. It's part of a
Speaker 1: process to take a long talk track and condense it
Speaker 1: to make it more organized. But I started to really
Speaker 1: kind of like a vinyl record, appreciate the imperfections of
Speaker 1: how I talk and say, you know what, that's my voice,
Speaker 1: and that's how you know it is me?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: You know. A major theme in the book is making
Speaker 2: decisions that your future self will respect. You have this
Speaker 2: framework the Book of Life, which is I think a
Speaker 2: really important way to set up the book. I want
Speaker 2: to talk about that just in the last couple of
Speaker 2: minutes we have in the context of you being so
Speaker 2: public in twenty twenty four coming out and saying, after
Speaker 2: so many years and so many millions of dollars donating
Speaker 2: to democrats, I am now coming out in support of
Speaker 2: President Trump. I was surprised, I think a lot of
Speaker 2: people to see you do that. How did your book
Speaker 2: of life framework and your idea of like looking back
Speaker 2: at that decision inform that decision at the time.
Speaker 1: It's it's such a good question, you know. It's it's
Speaker 1: definitely not something I signed up for in my book
Speaker 1: of life. However, it's it is important to me. Intellectual
Speaker 1: honesty is important to me, and being willing to take
Speaker 1: an unpopular stand. And and I feel like, if if
Speaker 1: I can't do that, if I'm so scared because of
Speaker 1: groupthink and the consequences of being taking a very unpopular
Speaker 1: position in my you know, a lot of my communities
Speaker 1: than who can And and it was actually my daughter
Speaker 1: Georgia I. I didn't decide until the Sunday before the
Speaker 1: election that I was going to vote for Trump. I
Speaker 1: decided I was definitely not going to vote for Kamala,
Speaker 1: and I had lost faith in the Democrats and the
Speaker 1: mainstream media establishment that that I stopped trusting in that
Speaker 1: whole process. But I was also being very transparent in
Speaker 1: public on Twitter. I started I wrote a post in
Speaker 1: the Free Press saying not that I support Trump, but
Speaker 1: that Biden at that time in late July of twenty
Speaker 1: four felt even riskier than Trump was, and that alone
Speaker 1: started a chip storm.
Speaker 4: If I can say that word, it's out there. Okay,
Speaker 4: so too late to pick back to.
Speaker 1: But Georgia came to me on a Sunday before the election.
Speaker 1: She said, Dad, you know you're going to vote for
Speaker 1: Trump at this point. And I said, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: you're probably right that then you have to tweet that
Speaker 1: because you've been so open and transparent, and I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, And so then I wrote a whole post
Speaker 1: I think the most viral post I've ever put up,
Speaker 1: because I think it was it was oddly a touchstone
Speaker 1: for a lot of people because I was kind of like,
Speaker 1: this that big Democratic donor and breaking ranks, you know,
Speaker 1: was and I'm kind of like, it's funny to call it,
Speaker 1: but I'm kind of like part of the like rank
Speaker 1: and file Silicon Valley founders, and so it was I
Speaker 1: think a little scary to some of the establishment to
Speaker 1: see this crumbling. And and I put the post out
Speaker 1: and I put my reasons out, and it was on
Speaker 1: the front page of the New York Post like the
Speaker 1: next day.
Speaker 4: I didn't think it would be news, and.
Speaker 1: You know, and it really really it was much louder
Speaker 1: than I anticipated. And but I was like, you know,
Speaker 1: what if if I'm gonna do it, I'm I'm I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna. It's silly that we should have to hide
Speaker 1: our political views because we're tagged with an identity. And
Speaker 1: I'll just say this, I'm not on any team. And
Speaker 1: I said that throughout. I said, I'm not on team Democrats,
Speaker 1: I'm not on team Maga. It sounds cheesy. I'm team America.
Speaker 1: I'm team my family community. And in this environment where
Speaker 1: we just saw three pretty extreme left democratic socialists win
Speaker 1: in New York, I don't know that any of us
Speaker 1: can really say we're identified with one party, because who
Speaker 1: the party is is really shifting. I'm a Chicago liberal.
Speaker 1: That's I've always been that. I'm you know, socially liberal.
Speaker 1: I want people to have their own rights and freedoms,
Speaker 1: and I'm fiscally and economically conservative.
Speaker 4: I want to see a responsible government.
Speaker 1: I think I'm stating some obvious things here that eighty
Speaker 1: percent of people one hundred, I don't know ninety percent
Speaker 1: of people agree with and so for that to then
Speaker 1: define me as being right, you know, far right, and
Speaker 1: to hear journalists, I need to get a I couldn't
Speaker 1: find a far right founder in San Francisco.
Speaker 4: Can I interview you? And I'm like, you want me?
Speaker 4: I'm far right?
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm still here, nothing's changed, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so it's And the partner with my future self
Speaker 1: is I I.
Speaker 4: Even though it.
Speaker 1: Was painful and there was some dislocations and I did
Speaker 1: lose a couple of dear friendships over it, I am
Speaker 1: happy that Mark twenty twenty four. No, I'm happy Mark
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four took a stand.
Speaker 3: God. I feel like that's a perfect place to wrap.
Speaker 3: We don't really want to wrap. We hope you will
Speaker 3: come back.
Speaker 1: This is really fun and I was not expecting you
Speaker 1: guys to have read my whole book and have all
Speaker 1: of these really insightful questions.
Speaker 4: So I hope you guys.
Speaker 1: Follow the the you know, the format in my book.
Speaker 1: I hope that you take an idea, prosecute it, and
Speaker 1: as a side hustle, you build a huge business and
Speaker 1: then this becomes your hobby.
Speaker 3: I love it. I love it. You give us a
Speaker 3: lot to think about, and I have to tell you.
Speaker 3: We still have a bunch of questions like I mean it,
Speaker 3: please come back, I love I love it. Mark Pinkas,
Speaker 3: founder of Zing, of course, founder of several companies, but
Speaker 3: his new book is Life at the Speed of Play,
Speaker 3: launch products people love. There's a lot in here and
Speaker 3: a lot of great stories.