Sam Schillace: belief

Transcript context

…Is there another example of you using this what-if approach either on a product you worked on or something you've seen and it working out? I'm doing a lot of it right now, honestly. I mean, that's probably the most immediate example. But I could almost point at any product and there's moments like that in there. But right now there's a lot of why-not stories, right, around generative AI. So it's expensive, it hallucinates, you can't necessarily... It's sarcastic, it's random, it doesn't do the same thing twice. Yeah, they're real, they're actual issues to solve, but I look at it and think, "Well, what if? What if we can build software around it? What if we can build more complicated programs than what we've been able to build? What if we actually have a reasoning engine that we can use to do meaningful things? What if this is really the second Industrial Revolution where, in the first one, we had a surplus of physical energy beyond just our bodies and things like water reels, and now we have a surplus of cognitive energy beyond just our brains, right?" And that's a really transformational idea. So I'm completely in that mode right now, honestly. I think that's just the right mindset for something that's obviously this disruptive, right or wrong. Tesla is a great example. SpaceX is a great example where people are like, "That doesn't make any sense." And Elon's like, "Well, what if you could land rockets and reuse them and they get really cheap? That's pretty amazing. What if I can fix the battery problems and a car is basically a software product, right?" Those are pretty amazing what-if questions, right, of those products. Yeah. So in this work on understanding what first principles actually looks like when you're thinking from first principles, the steps are essentially, figure out what you want to do, figure out the levers that keep you from achieving that thing, and then basically question every assumption that stands in the way of making this possible. So I think Elon's a great... The classic example. You can't talk about first-principles thinking without quoting Elon, telling stories of Elon. But essentially, it's just, okay, how much would it cost to make this if we were to start over and not...…

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