Greg McKeown:
I want to still come back to this notion. You know, your sort of solution to the dilemma that Mary Murphy’s positioning gave you and the way you solve it is this idea that if you really, I mean, this was language that was part of this research from these years ago. But this idea of being a genius maker, you know, but I think with Steve, it wasn’t like, are you a genius or a genius maker? He was a genius and a genius maker.
And that seems to be what you’re describing, and of course, that has to be the ideal scenario, but it helps us to create a hierarchy, right? Like the hierarchy isn’t. It’s like, don’t try to be the genius, don’t try to be the genius maker, try to be a genius who’s a genius maker, right like it at least somehow produces something of what you want to have.
When I’ve interviewed or worked directly with people that worked with Steve, one of the things they say to me and I’m curious about your take on this. They said, “Look, you don’t do the best work of your life working for a jerk.” Right?
So the idea, the good media narrative, is an oversimplification, oversimplified narrative to say, oh yeah, well, Steve Jobs is just always a jerk. It’s like they’re like whatever, man, that’s just people that didn’t know or didn’t understand, or whatever. What’s your sense of that? Would you agree with that sentiment? Would you see it differently?
Guy Kawasaki:
His mission was, I think, to make the world a better place with computers, and that’s a very, very admirable mission. And so I think, you know, all things can be forgiven and accepted and even enjoyed and embraced. But he was driven to make the world better, and that’s okay.
Greg McKeown:
Well, and I want to double click on it, just one more level, because you know there’s been a lot you’ve seen, and surely you’ve seen more than your fair share of it, of leaders who have tried to copy the trivial surface skin deep media version of Steve. Like oh, I’ll wear, you know, the black turtleneck top, because that’s what did it. You know, that’s what it was. It’s like, I will treat people a certain way that I perceive that he was so eccentrically excellence-driven. I’m going to also be very black-and-white with people because that’s how it is, and I thought about this all the way through this trial of, you know, the Theranos trial, right? I mean, this is someone who is absolutely enamored with everything about Steve that didn’t matter. You know everything about Steve that isn’t what generated the breakthroughs, the innovation, and thought; well, if I just do all of that stuff with a surface understanding, therefore, I will be successful. What’s your take on that?
Guy Kawasaki:
My take on that is that everybody should understand basic statistics and that the number one rule of basic statistics is correlation is not the same as causation. And they thought that the turtleneck, the Porsche, the Mercedes, the parking in the handicapped slot, the ripping people in public, you know, the new balance shoes, the 501 jeans, all of that is correlated. It didn’t cause Steve Jobs, and you can also see that in a corporate sense that everybody used to come to Silicon Valley and they get the tour of Google and you know, oh, they see the volleyball, they see the sushi bar, they see the barbecue bar, they see the salad bar, they see the dry cleaning on campus, they see the dentist van, they see the car changing oil change in the bottom. They see the buses helping employees commute with Wi-Fi, and then they go back to their companies, and they put in the sushi bar, the ping pong table, and the volleyball and all that, and they just have better fed employees. That’s correlation, that’s not causation.
Greg McKeown:
It’s such shallow; it’s copying isn’t it? It copying the shallow code of a company or of a leader and not getting to the heart of it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Listen, if you could put a drop of blood and get all the diagnosis, Theranos promises. Well, for one thing, Elizabeth would not be in jail today. But she could wear a white turtleneck, she could wear stiletto heels, she could drive a Prius, it would not matter, right? We would love her. She would be a hero, right?
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, like, just minus all of the innovation from Apple, there’s not much of a story, right? Like, be the chief evangelist, minus all the products.
Guy Kawasaki:
That’s an oxymoron.
Greg McKeown:
Right, but exactly, that’s what Theranos knows was. It’s like we’ll copy everything but the actual ability to get the thing done. To actually break through what’s been done before and that idea, I’ll just keep on selling this vision. I’ll just keep on selling it and selling it and framing it and reframing it. I mean, at some level, maybe what she was hoping for was that, eventually, the innovation would catch up to the external story, but it seems to me that wasn’t really that. That’s the most generous telling of the story that I can muster, but it seemed so centrally full of self-deception that the deception was the point. Not that that was the goal, but it’s like, I want to tell this story. I want to be Steve Jobs, so I’ll just try to take the mantle without doing the work.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think even more disturbing than Elizabeth and Sonny was the complicit and just, I mean, just like irresponsible act of the board of directors. I mean, they just went along with it. I mean, these are secretaries of state. You know, these are people who declared war on countries. So you’re telling me, these secretaries of state, they once controlled whether America would go to war, but they couldn’t figure out that her results were fake. I mean, like my head is exploding, right?
Greg McKeown:
Well, I mean, that’s one way to frame the awakening. But another way to frame that awakening is what is the point of a board of directors? And I’m not saying I am against a board of directors in making that question. It’s just there’s like a saying in England. It’s like, you know, what’s the point of view, you know, it’s like a sort of joking put down like what is the point of view? What is the point of view, boards of directors, if such a thing can happen, like what is really happening in the boardroom, in those board meetings? What is the level of connection to the people inside of the organization a few layers down? If you can operate in that way.
Like, that’s one way to frame it, and another way to frame it is, isn’t all you are competent in making decisions or going to war, but not in this. It raises for me questions about, I don’t mean individuals, I mean overarching decision-making competence in the highest offices of the land. And it makes me feel queasy because, you know, you get to a certain age in life, and suddenly you’re like basically the age of the people who are making these decisions. You know, you’re either a little older or a little younger, but you’re in the ballpark, and you go, well, I know what I know, and I know what my life experience is, and they obviously have different experience and different, but they don’t have more life experience, they just have different. And I know all the things I still don’t know, and I’m appalled by everything I don’t know. And suddenly, the world feels very, very sketchy to me now. It’s like, yeah, I worry about the implication of those people having made those kinds of decisions about war and the level of sophistication in that thinking, too. That’s what it raises for me. Does it for you or am I being overly negative? Yeah, not being overly negative.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, we’re not.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, not being overly negative.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, we’re not.
You know what I mean. Maybe some theologian will correct me, but I am under the impression that the Roman Catholic church, the Pope, the Vatican they had this person called the devil’s advocate. And the devil’s advocate’s job was to be the naysayer when someone was nominated to be the Pope. Right, this person was supposed to go find all the reasons not to make the Pope the Pope. And they did it just so that they could have, like a, to use a buzzword, like a 360-degree view. They didn’t want everybody just jumping on the bandwagon. They wanted somebody to say just a second, here’s something you should think about.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I mean, I really agree with you completely. I mean, it brings into mind this, you know, it’s a classic Harvard Business School case study that is still taught in their negotiation courses now and even in executive education courses. But it’s where they compare JFK’s decision-making before the Bay of Pigs and then when he was dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it’s so brilliant. I mean, yeah, so you could say it’s dated, or you could worry it’s dated, but it illustrates so brilliantly the difference. The first time, he just took the authority figures like surface conclusions at face value. Well, they must know what they’re talking about. They’re all saying it together. He’s such a young president. He’s going with their, you know, fine, let’s go. Trust everything you’re saying, and by the time everything goes wrong with that, everything. He’d been told every assumption to that to be wrong. It’s a disaster. And by the time he gets to the Cuban Missile Crisis, he’s like, no, we will debate, we will wrestle this down, we will figure this out, we will.
To use Steve Jobs is something that’s been said, I think correctly, about Steve Jobs. This is an Intel CEO at the time. Andy Grove said of Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs always got it right, and they’re like, oh, he’s got it right. How can you? Course, he didn’t always get it right, and he’s like, I didn’t say he’s always right; I said he always got it right. Meaning he wasn’t focused on being right; he was focused on getting it right, and I think that’s a kind of growth mindset as it applies to leadership because you want to get to, you aren’t so, so fixed about everyone else and about me that we just have to play the roles we’re currently playing. You’re going, hey, we are going to get to the data together. We’re going to get smarter together. We’re going to make a better decision together than we would have made before when I just trusted you on the surface.
Guy Kawasaki:
I love that distinction. I will tell you something: though you were going to go tell Steve Jobs that he was wrong, you could do it, but you better be right.
Greg McKeown:
I mean, that’s, so I had Ron Johnson on here, and he told the whole story at Apple about when he did go to Steve. They’d already been building for months what this Genius store would look like, what the Genius Bar and the new Apple store would look like. And he suddenly came back to me, and he said look, if what you’re saying is true, that you want a hub system, then the way we’ve designed everything is wrong.
And so they had this really awkward drive in the Mercedes you’re describing, like silence the whole time they’re driving to their makeshift store that’s inside of a, you know, it’s just in some big warehouse, and when he arrives, they walk in together, and he says, “Ron has just told me that we’ve done everything wrong and he’s right and he’s going to stay here and work with you till we fix it.”
And that story, to me, was such a great encapsulation of some of these things that we’ve been able to talk about today, of this, like whatever that is. That’s a willingness to completely rethink your previous thinking, going, “Oh, I have to. I am right. It’s like, okay, that is right.”
That drives me crazy that we got that wrong. That’s a waste; it’s exhausting, but okay, now we’re going to get on with the next thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let me be the host, and you be the guest, now, okay, for one question.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I like it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think Elon Musk has a growth mindset?
Greg McKeown:
Yes! I’m going to go with a yes that he does because I mean, I’ve seen, this is a tiny micro evidence, but, like, he was interviewed by someone about, you know, about one of these ships that in SpaceX, and the person asks him a very specific question about those cone of it, and he’s answering it and then he goes mid-sentence, oh no, I’m glad you asked me that. No, that’s wrong. We’re doing that wrong. No, we have to change that. Thank you for that. That’s great. We’re going to change that. And I thought, man, show me the CEO, the Polish CEO, who wants to look right all the time, wants to look like they have the right answer that would be able to do that. They cannot do it. They could certainly not do it real-time, because it illustrates, oh, I didn’t know before, and what kind of a CEO wouldn’t know something in the past. You know, and so. So that’s the microcosm of something, but the ability to not to do it once or twice, but to innovate multiple times, not just within the same company over 20 years, but to do it again and again and again in different industries. It’s very, very hard to be competent and successful in two or three different industries. Like, you can’t fake competency in multiple areas of your life. You actually have to be smart and learn fast to do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, by that test, you have to give Elon Musk more credit than Steve Jobs. Because Steve Jobs was, you know, just computers, right? No, maybe just computers and phones and whatever, but more or less, he stayed in the same lane. Whereas Elon is tunnels, panels, cars, and space. I mean, you name it, chips in your head. Although he’s the last person in the world I would let put a chip in my head.
Greg McKeown:
I’m not putting any. I don’t want to put any chip in my head. Are you kidding? This is not, this is.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have a cochlear implant in my head. It’s okay.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, well, maybe you’ll be more comfortable earlier than me, but I’m like, I don’t want to be on the cutting edge of that technology. I want to be on the hype, you know, the hype cycle. I want to wait until we’re in productive.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed, I think that’s about, I think that’s valid. I mean, I suppose that, in some ways, the most compared leaders now by generation, right, like, okay, Musk is the new Steve Jobs, right? Because of this fearlessness in pushing innovation forward and being dissatisfied with whatever is and actually trying to, you know, wrestle it down. Why can’t we do it? Don’t tell me we couldn’t do it before, just because. Why, let’s go deeper and deeper. I do think that there are more similarities than differences in them, certainly in terms of growth and grit. Grace, I don’t know, that’s it.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would make the case that Elon Musk is also more dangerous than Steve in terms of if he goes off the wall, it’s going to be bad.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I mean, what’s pretty remarkable, I think, about your question about Musk? Like, if Steve had lived 10 years longer, we sort of, I feel like I kind of know what would have happened. Not precisely, because there would have been another wave of breakthrough innovation that Apple didn’t go through, and it seems to me that Apple has innovated and they have improved loads of things, but if Steve had been there, the focus wouldn’t just have been on scaling with excellence, which is, I think, what has happened at Apple. There would have been this: let’s challenge a whole new area. You know, maybe not watches, it would have been television or been, you know, I don’t know something earlier. That’s my sense. But it would have been within Apple, and it would have been within a certain range.
Musk. I never get the, I do not in any way get the sense that his story is written, even now. It’s like the next 10 years could be; we have no idea. It is, I think it’s, I think it’s. I think that is a wild, wild future, and we’re going to have to hold on with it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I’ll get my chip in my head after you.
Greg McKeown:
Well, none of us should be getting a chip. I’m like, I want to see him with it first. Musk first. He was asked that in an interview. Would you get it? And he was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe not the very first thing?”
I’m like, “Yeah, that’s the way the rest of us feel. You first, Musk, then we’ll see.”
Guy Kawasaki:
It’s not exactly the same, as you know. Okay, you be the first person to ride a Segway scooter.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, exactly. And I’m not convinced. I’m not convinced that well, I actually have a point of view, like I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to have the internet in my head. You’re like, the closer the internet has come to my life, the bigger the trade-offs. I mean, I’m literally saying it’s true, right, like AI at my fingertips has, it is place, but as you’ve put smartphones, okay, I got a final question for you. I’m going to make a statement, and I want you to tell me if it’s true or not. This is good coming from the chief evangelist of the, you know, chief evangelist of Silicon Valley here.
Okay, the device in your pocket is not a phone; it is a $3 trillion military-grade, disorienting, addictive, disconnecting machine, and you’re no match for it.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what’s the question?
Greg McKeown:
True or false?
Guy Kawasaki:
False. I believe that it is a great tool. I believe that I mean, if you’re particularly talking about the AI aspect and the soon-to-be AI aspect of phones and devices. We may differ here, but I think that AI may be the last hope for saving mankind.
Greg McKeown:
That’s such a good evangelist take. So, I’m not uniquely positioning this about AI. I think it’s about if you go back and as we look at the data that we have now, from starting, let’s say, 2012, which is a key moment, a tipping point, one because that’s when all the problems start showing up for adolescent girls, and massive increases in depression spikes, and anxiety spikes, and lower friend levels. Not just adolescent girls, but that’s been the worst of all categories. You go back, and you say, OK, well, it’s where social media combines with smartphones in your pocket. Like that’s the, that’s the unholy alliance, and so I don’t need AI in the picture to come to this position.
I just think, this thing, this thing, was so different than Steve’s original vision for it. Right, there were no, there weren’t even any apps for it. There certainly wasn’t any social media for it. So the original vision of a very smooth, clean, simplifying experience, I think, has been co-adopted into something that I think has done, yeah, I think it’s done a lot of damage. Yeah, that’s what I think. What a note to end it on.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I have two thoughts. One thought is I seldom get involved in this kind of question where it’s purely theoretical, right, because you know we can’t put that horse back in the barn.
Greg McKeown:
That genie is outside of the bottle.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, so that’s one. And the second thing is, this is a case where it’s it’s hard to wrap your mind around the true impact of something because, yes, you can pick isolated, you know, teenage girls having this problem, child pornography, you know, whatever. There’s a whole litany of bad things, right? But you have to keep in mind all the good things too, and I think, on balance, it’s a good thing.
And I mean, I guess one test would be everybody just give up your phones and see what happens. Is it all good or all bad? Listen, I sleep better at night knowing that my son could call me if he has a flat tire than before. I do. There’s no question about that.
Greg McKeown:
Okay, so you made you’ve made a compelling argument for having mobile phones with that example. Not the combination of $100 billion on testing, on any given day, 1000 versions of Facebook, to more and more precisely figure out exactly what maximizes the amount of time someone spends on the device, right? Like no individual is even aware that’s happening. Never mind the level of precision that this data is giving. It’s not like having an addictive book that you’re reading and binge-reading. That thing is what it is when you pick it up, and you can put it down. The phone is this infinitely more adaptive device, and it’s like this double exponential curve.
So the technology is advancing, like the actual hardware is advancing, the software is advancing, but also the precision with which an individual can be addicted can be pulled down a path that they weren’t expecting to be pulled down. Aren’t even aware they’re being pulled down, right? The radicalization of things, and so on.
So it’s an interesting place for us to get in the conversation. It’s like we’re launching it to a whole new conversation, which we’d neither have time to do at this moment. But you would just say, all in all, the good has outweighed the bad. You say net, net, it’s better.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, I would say that about phones; I would say it about the internet and social media. And I’ll go on the record right now: I’m going to say that about AI. I think AI is our last great hope. You know, Greg, I ask you two simple questions. If you were designing a school curriculum for your kids, would you rather have Ron DeSantis do it or chatGPT?
Greg McKeown:
I mean, you’re asking it as a rhetorical question because you think it’s so obvious that it should be chatGPT rather than Ron DeSantis. But I think it’s, and I’m not, I don’t need to respond to it from a, where I am on the political spectrum because I’m politically independent anyway. But the question is, well, I’m not sure that your rhetorical question works as you would like because, with Ron DeSantis, I know what his political bias is, right? So, the political bias can be assessed more clearly.
With AI, and this is Musk’s primary argument against AI, even though it seems to me that he has done more than any other single person to accelerate AI and you know, he’s the only person I see building an AI robot, it with any likelihood of achieving it. So it’s like pretty weird to me to hear him talk about it and then at exactly the same time be creating more with AI than anyone else. Well, I don’t know; that’s its own question, but his primary argument is like, if the bias within AI becomes so sophisticated that nobody knows. That’s the biggest threat because how would we know? Eventually, how do you know? If it infiltrates, if it becomes your mechanism for seeing everything, right? So I see.
I use chat GPT more than Google now. I mean, that’s true, and I know I’m not alone in that, right? This is the first potential Google killer that exists. That has existed since Google came into the picture. And, of course, their response to it is already, and is going to be okay, well, here’s our AI advancement of Google, right? So that you know, it’s, how do we make you know that Google suddenly has to dance. But when I’m already using it that way, and of course, I know, logically. Well, there’s bias in this, and sometimes I’ll be reading things that I know personally a decent amount about, and I go, well, it’s wrong. You know what it’s saying. You know, I can see that being wrong. But it’s like, over time, you stop worrying about that, and your perception of the gap reduces because you’re just using this as a tool all the time.
And so I think, well, you know, people create this stuff. Just to state it again, Facebook was designed by someone. And obviously it was many, many more people than Zuckerberg. But Zuckerberg’s assumptions of the world were still built into the original Model of Facebook. You know, a presumption that you could digitize the human experience, the social human experience at all, is an assumption that he held that gave him fire for the deed. Those are interesting assumptions. If you’re wrong in the original code, you create mayhem above you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, but okay, to push back on that line of thinking, I would make the case that Program Ron DeSantis and somebody decided that white males should run the world, and that’s the bias in Ron DeSantis. He’s been programmed that way. Just like somebody could program chatGPT. So it’s not like Ron DeSantis has like investigated all these things and has come to this intelligent conclusion. The Republican National Committee, the Koch brothers, they programmed Ron DeSantis.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, it’s a, I mean, what we’re talking about is the prevalence of deeply entwined bias, whether in technology or people. And and both are, it’s a very tough toss-up between them because, you’re right that, in the sense that humans are carriers of bias, obviously. You know, 95% of the decisions we’re making are subconscious. So, something’s doing all of that. There’s biology, but there’s also, like, just some conscious ideas about the world. We’ve been talking about growth mindset. It’s one example of 1000 mindsets that we have. Fixed mindset views that we have.
You’ve just expressed some yourself, right? Well, my view of the Republican committee is X and white males, should you know. Those are all frames as well, right? So, meaning frames, and it’s not obvious to me which is more dangerous. To automate that inside of humans or to automate that inside of technology. My experience is that automation cuts two ways, right? I had the president of Microsoft, on the podcast recently, and he wrote a book about weapons and tools and about how technology can be both. And he’s like one of the only senior technologists I’ve ever heard seriously admit that. Even though everybody knows, logically, that it’s there.
The drinking of the Kool-Aid is so strong. I mean, I’ve worked at Silicon Valley, not as long as you have, obviously, but for the last 15, closer to 20 years now. I’ve worked with every major company, and everybody drinks the Kool-Aid. And that’s good because you need that too, as you said earlier. You need that motivation if you’re gonna try and create new things and sacrifice in order to do it and challenge assumptions. But if you do it, always seeing it only the upside, you keep, it’s like exactly what happened to Facebook suddenly is like, “Oh well, geez, that experiment didn’t work the way we thought.”
And so there’s this downside. It’s not that I’m anti-technology; I’m not a Luddite. I don’t think I’d be the perfect chief evangelist right now, would I? I don’t think that’s the next job for me.
Guy Kawasaki, I wish we had longer. I’m so late for my next meeting and you, I’m sure, are too. But I definitely want to stay in touch, and I want to carry on this conversation, because this is a good one. This is a good debate to be having. Guy, thank you so much for your time today.
Guy Kawasaki:
Thank you, and if you’re out there listening, I hope you’ll at least look at the book after this discussion.
Greg McKeown:
Of course they will. They’ll love how real you’ve been. You know they’ll just love it. Thank you, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
All right, take care.
