The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future by Mike Maples Jr, Peter Ziebelman

Episode Date: July 20, 2024

Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future by Mike Maples Jr, Peter Ziebelman https://amzn.to/4bQrwrx Based on extensive research and real-world examples, this book upends accepted wisdom about how to achieve success when launching a startup or creating a new product. The breakthrough concepts of Pattern Breakers come from the observations of Mike Maples Jr., a seasoned venture capitalist, who noticed something strange. Start-ups like Twitter, Twitch, and Lyft had achieved extraordinary success despite their disregard for “best practices.” In contrast, other startups deemed highly promising often failed, even when they seemed to do everything right. Seeking answers, Maples and coauthor Peter Ziebelman set out to discover the hidden forces that drive extraordinary start-up success. Pattern-breaking success, they reveal, demands a different mindset and actions to harness developments others miss or that may, at first, seem crazy. Pattern Breakers is filled with firsthand storytelling about initial interactions with some of the most transformative start-ups of recent times. Maples and Ziebelman challenge us to rethink how to transcend the ordinary and achieve the extraordinary. About the author Mike Maples, Jr. is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is focused on backing the founders of startup companies at the very beginning of their startup journeys. As a co-founding partner at Floodgate, he’s been on the Forbes Midas List eight times for his investments in companies such as Twitter, Twitch, Okta, Outreach, Rappi, Chegg, and Applied Intuition. Maples co-authored Pattern Breakers, which entrepreneurship thought leader Steve Blank calls “the most important book on startups in the last ten years.” He additionally hosts a podcast and newsletter, which explore the pivotal role of pattern-breaking founders in reshaping business and culture in the 21st Century.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you having guys. As always, the Chris Voss Show is the big show. We certainly appreciate you having us.

As always, the Chris Voss Show is a family that loves you, but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mother-in-law, because she wanted you to marry. She wanted her daughter to marry somebody better, and you're still working on it. But the great thing is, if you're listening to the Chris Voss Show, you have the best chance of making more money, being more successful, and finally, maybe getting into her good graces or not.

But refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrissfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrissfoss, chrissfoss1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. You can also buymeacoffee, buymeacoffee.com, 4chesschrissfoss. We have an amazing author on the show today.

He is the author of the newest book coming out July 9th, 2024. It's called Pattern Breakers, Why Some Startups Change the Future by Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Zibelman, I believe. Did I get that right, Mike? Peter's not on the show to defend himself, so I'm just going to abuse his name. I'll try not to besmirch his honor too much yeah he's a great guy we love him mike is the co-founder and partner at floodgate a silicon valley venture

capital firm that pioneered seed stage investing floodgate backed many of the most dynamic startups of the last two decades at their inception including twitter Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, Okta, Cruise Automation, Applied Intuition, and Rappi. Is it Rappi or? Rappi. Rappi. Rappi. There you go.

I was never, I'm into Metallica, so I never got into Rappi. Welcome to the show, Mike. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I've really been looking forward to this. There you go. So have we.

And congratulations on the new book. Give us the dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Let's see. For the book, it'd be patternbreakers.com. And just at the internet, probably my site is www.floodgate.com for the venture business. And then on Twitter, I'm at M2JR. There you go.

So give us a $30,000 over your new book, Pattern Breakers. Yeah. The book, you know, it's funny. A lot of venture capital folks try to suggest they have a crystal ball and that hasn't really been my experience. And so about 10 years ago, a company that I was involved with called Twitch was acquired by Amazon for $970 million. And we made over 80 times our money on this investment. And you'd think that that's good, right? But here's what was unsettling about it. I'd forgotten I was a shareholder in Twitch. In fact, I didn't know what that I was. I had invested in a company called Justin TV and it turned into two companies, right? And SocialCam was one and Twitch was the other.

And then Social Cam was acquired. And so I thought that was the company. So I had to explain to my investors that we had just gotten this financial windfall. And then I'm really sorry we didn't have it in our financial statements. Do you need me to restate those? Or should I just send you the money? They said, nope, we're good. Just send the money? They said, nope, we're good. Just send the money. So then I kind of, and then the same week I had to help a founder shut his company down.

And he'd done all the stuff you're supposed to do. He would have been a Harvard Business School case study of what to do, except for the fact that it didn't work. And then I started to look at everything I had done in the last decade leading up to it. And 80% of our exit profits of the money that we'd made on these startups had come from what people call pivots. They turned into something radically different than what they started as. And so I'm sitting here thinking, am I just a lucky fool? Is this just all random? How do you think about what business you're in

when in the success case, it's 80% likely to change? What were you even investing in the first place? It's like the Twitter guys, I invested in them when they were deciding whether to call it TWTTR or voicemail 2.0. And Lyft started as Zimride and Okta started as Sasher. And, you know, we just talked about Justin TV. And so all of these things, it felt really wild and it felt really confusing. And it felt like I needed to get to the bottom of what was happening here or retire before I get exposed. Or I thought maybe I've just been lucky and my luck's going to run out. And so that was kind of the genesis of the book was trying to figure this out. And like, why is it that some startups change the future even when they don't seem to do the stuff you're supposed to do?

And then other startups don't seem to succeed in spite of the fact that they were kind of a poster child of doing it the right way. There you go. What do you think about Twitter? Because Twitter was, I think someone put it accurately, Twitter was the clown car that crashed its way into success somehow, despite all the efforts of the three stooges, I call them, to make it not work. You know, they fought retweets.

They fought incessantly among themselves. I might have caused one of those fights through, what's his face at Union Square, Fred Wilson. What are your thoughts on Twitter? Do you write about that in the book? Yeah, I do some. So first of all, I tend to be like the entrepreneurs are my peeps, right? So I tend to unconditionally love the founders. And in fact, I invest so early that I think of myself as more of a co-conspirator than an investor, right? So I tend to want to give unconditional love to any founder who is brave enough to go after these ideas. So I do talk about Twitter some in the book. The thing that I've learned, so why did I call this book Pattern Breakers? What I've seen is that startup capitalists are a different

kind of business person than a normal corporate leader. A normal corporation has customers, they have profits, they have supply chains, they have a brand. They're trying to compound their advantages in a persistent way. They want to have moats. Startups have none of those things. And so the way a startup capitalist creates value in the economy is they change the subject. They deny the premise of the rules. And what a startup needs to do if it's going to win and be a major breakthrough is it has to deny the premise of the current rules. It has to show up with a radically different new idea that changes the subject. And so Twitter was largely successful at that, right?

Nobody said, okay, there's Twitter. How does that compare to whatever else? It was its own thing. And so I think that they were largely successful at that. Uber, would you say, fell into that? And then, of course, you invested in Lyft, I guess. Uber was kind of that way where they threw out the taxi rules and everything else, much to the chagrin of the taxi business. Yeah, and it's interesting, right?

So Twitter, to me, was a great example of a pattern-breaking idea. At the time, it seemed kind of crazy. You know, 140 characters or less, there's no revenue model, there's no roadmap. It was just 140 characters or less, you say what you're doing. And a lot of people kind of made fun of me for making the investment at the time. So that was a pattern breaking idea. What you described with Uber and Lyft, I think, was a good example of pattern breaking actions that the founder engages in. And so if you ask the city of San Francisco, can we launch this service? Of course, they're going to say no.

And so you have to you have to launch the service and have the customers fall in love with it so that now if they outlaw it, they're taking something away from their constituents. You know, so like the pattern breaking actions are necessary because the present will fight back and it won't fight back fair. You know, the status quo has an embedded status that it wants to protect. And so what a lot of these founders have to do in addition to having the unconventional breakthrough idea, they have to be willing to do things

that most of us would find uncomfortable or most of us would find maybe even crazy to to succeed yeah i remember justin tv and i believe i justine is the one that got pulled away from justin tv to start youtube if i recall rightly because i was hanging out with her back in the day and i remember watching justin tv it was like really amazing and then youtube was like stole a bunch i think their top talent away and and off they went and it was crazy the twitch thing was amazing too i think in 2013 i was at the g what do they call the g3 it's the big gaming convention down in there in LA and G7.

Anyway. So I was down there and I was at a party and I was a YouTuber. I was making all this money on YouTube, doing reviews and gaming and stuff. And, and I, I ended up sitting at a party in a booth with this lady sitting next to me. And one of my friends goes,

Hey, you know, these guys are with the twitch and I think she was a vice president or something she give me a card and I've lost it but so I go twitch what's twitch and they go yeah Chris is a YouTube rock star I wasn't like that huge I just Dean but but you know we're making some good money a month off our channel and they go yeah there's this switch thing I'm like twitch what the hell is twitch so she explained to me twitch and she goes yeah there's people making 20 grand a month here

to watch other people play games i didn't say it to her but i was like yeah that's cute sure yeah yeah it's hard to even believe that it could be true it wasn't even believable and i and i remember thinking in my head and i went back and told people, I go, I just heard the dumbest thing ever. There's people that think you can make money watching other people play video games. Like, why wouldn't you just go buy the video games and play them yourself? But I was an idiot. It's a great illustration, though, of what we talk about. So a lot of the ideas seem kind of crazy at the time that you had to decide as a seed investor. So I met Brian Chesky when it was called Airbed and Breakfast.

And at the time, the host would stay in the house with the guest and feed him Pop-Tarts or cereal the next morning. And, you know, when he pitched me it was a room full of cereal boxes so he had captain mccain crunch and obama o's and he would sell in this cereal so that he could fund the company and it's oh wow so the first part of the meeting i'm like okay wait wait a second why why are there cereal boxes all in this conference room i thought your airbed and breakfast but but you know that that was another example of Brian being a pattern breaker, right? He was doing what, you know, Justin Kahn, who we just talked about, the company he started before Justin TV, Kiko, was going out of business. And so they decided to sell it. And he sold it on eBay. And I remember

thinking, who does it? Like, who sells their company on ebay but he did it is two years out of college made quarter million dollars selling the company so you know and i started i've started to realize that those types of those types of inclinations are much more of a feature than a bug right because it's the those are the types of people are going to have the out of the box ideas about how to pursue an opportunity. Is that why VCs invest a lot in younger people? Because maybe they don't know what the rules are so much. Or it's easier to break the box.

It's easier to break the mold. Because when you're young, you kind of, what is it, apologize later? You kind of do what you want and apologize later. I don't know. I think it varies. I have this term that I think it varies. I have this term that I like to use called founder future fit. And what I mean by that is that most great ideas don't come from trying to think of a startup. They come from a founder who's living in the

future before the rest of us. And then they build what's missing. And so like in the case of Justin, Justin wanted to be an influencer before there was a word to describe influencers. So he was building the thing he wished he had himself to become more famous. And he was live streaming his life 24 seven. You know, Mark Andreessen did this when he did the mosaic browser at the University of Illinois. He was in a supercomputer lab making minimum wage and he creates the mosaic browser, make the internet useful. And so sometimes it's a young founder. If they're at the cutting edge of a future where very few people understand it and the understanding of that future is more

valuable than their knowledge about how to be a business person. But then there's the other scenario would be like Todd McKinnon, when he started Okta, he was VP of engineering at Salesforce and they created identity management software for cloud applications. And, you know, if you're using Salesforce and you're using all these cloud applications in your IT department, you want to look across the table at a CEO and think, okay, yeah, that guy could do the job, right? You're not going to give your business to a college dropout or, you know, somebody who's

really young. So I like to say that the best startups come from founders that are a very authentic match to the future that they're living in. Yeah. And so they're living in the future. The rest of us just haven't got there yet. That's right. We've got to figure it out now you mentioned something about pivots and the key to a lot of these successful startups and being able to pivot clearly some of the people that you did

you know i remember when twitter started out it was technically over text and one of the things that was killing them was the cost of the text you know per text that you would you would do and they're like we got to come up with a better way to do this. If I recall rightly, you may know better than I that story. Airbnb, of course, obviously you had to switch from selling breakfast. That's a funny story. I didn't hear it. I've never heard that one.

Here's the other thing that's so funny about Airbnb. And by the way, I wish I could say I was smart enough to have written Brian a check because I would have made 6,000 times my money if I had. But it started as a WordPress site, so they couldn't afford to pay their rent. Brian moved in with his roommates, and they couldn't afford to pay the rent. They're brainstorming startup ideas, and in order to pay the rent, they put up this WordPress site because they knew a bunch of people were coming to a design conference in San Francisco. Oh, wow. So the irony is they didn't even think of it as a business idea at first.

They were using it to just pay the rent while they came up with their real startup idea. And it ended up being the idea. And, you know, Brian, to his credit, was very good at the artistry of entrepreneurship. He was very good at listening carefully and noticing things and reacting. And, you know, he would just launch it over and over again. If he had an unsuccessful launch, he would just launch it again because nobody knew what he did. And so he was just very, very full of hustle and very, you know, very good at sort of being like MacGyver, you know, just improvising all along the way. What is that? What is that thing? Necessity or is the mother of all

invention is the mother of invention that's right yeah so sometimes those things you need the most like how to pay the rent oh for sure it's a health motivator so there you go so you so in the book i mean does your blueprint that you're giving people a way to really help identify those? Can you smack more home runs with reading the book and identifying some of these key principles? I think so. So basically, a startup that is going to change the future has to deny the premise of the current rules, has to offer something to the world that the world has never seen before, that is nothing like that's ever come before it. And so the first thing that I look for, and we talk about this some in the book, is what I call inflections. And if we use ride sharing,

for an example, the inflection was that the iPhone 4S had a GPS chip in it. And so that all of a sudden created a new form of empowerment for people, because now you could locate people just with an algorithm. Couldn't have done that before the iPhone 4S. And that happened independently of Uber and Lyft. But then what also happens, and this is where the founders creativity comes in, they have what I call an insight. And an insight is a non-obvious truth that's possible in the future that most people would disagree with. It has to be non-consensus and right. And it harnesses inflections. And so the insight for ride sharing was, oh, now we can do Airbnb for cars. Because now you're going to be able to locate riders and drivers in real time.

You're going to be able to do the same thing. Now, what was non-consensus about it? Who's going to want to get in a stranger's car? That's crazy. Like, that's scary, right? And so now Ann and I had, my partner at Floodgate, had foolishly passed on airbed and breakfast. And so we're like, you know, we passed because we didn't think somebody was going to stay in a stranger's house. So we're like, I don't know, maybe they will get in a stranger's car. Maybe we should take a run at this. And so we did.

But as you can see, like in the case of Lyft, though, the initial product wasn't called Lyft, it was Zimride. And they were doing corporate transportation and at schools. And this is, I think, the crucial point of the idea piece is that the product can change a lot. And this is where pivots come in. But the insight needs to persist. They need to know something about the future that's not obvious and that empowers people. And if that insight is still valid, they can pivot the product from a corporate campus transportation system to peer-to-peer ride sharing. And the insight still persists, but now the implementation of the product is a better match for the opportunity than the first implementation. So that's kind of how we think about the ideas

in the book yeah i remember i remember seeing a meme about ride shares and uber and left and stuff or it was like in the 70s it was like hey let's go hitchhiking and then eventually with all sorts of weird stuff going on this yeah it's dangerous to get in people's cars and then like uber came along and hey it's okay to get cars now if you're paying for it, I guess. Yeah, and it's interesting because the mistake that a lot of people make when they do startups is they, and I'm very sympathetic to the mistake,

they say, I want to go after a really big market. So I'm going to go talk to a lot of customers and I'm going to find a big market that has unserved customers that are experiencing pain. And like, why wouldn't you do that? Why wouldn't you go after customers who need something that's not being met? The problem, though, is it buys into something that the founder doesn't know that they're buying into, which is they're going to compete by the current rules of the current market.

And the current rules have been established by somebody already. And business is never a fair fight. The only question is who's going to get to fight unfair. And if you approach a market by the rules of the incumbents, the default is they get to fight unfair. So the way the founders fight unfair is they come up with a pattern-breaking idea and they use inflections to bend the arc of the present to a different future to a radically different future and it's it's kind of like the rock and david

slingshot against goliath and so what they do is they they they kind of turn that that inflection into an asymmetric weapon to fight against the present. And that was the thing that it eluded me for so long. Originally, I thought, okay, the company with the best business model is going to win. The company with the biggest market is going to win. The company with the best presenting founder is going to win. The company with the most traction is going to win. What I realized was it's the company that can make the change

most radical and disorienting to incumbents that wins. There you go. You know what I want to see? I'm waiting for someone to combine the Uber concept and Airbnb where you can rent a car to sleep in. Yeah, or pretty soon

you'll have a self-driving car that drives you as you sleep. Yeah, I'm going to be sending you a pitch deck after the show on that idea, by the way. Okay. Fair enough. The cars you can sleep in. Sadly, there's a lot of people sleeping in cars. So can we fix that, politicians and economy?

Anyway, you know, I mean, these are really interesting ideas in looking at this. How do you see, you know, clearly, at least I hope so, or I don't know if I hope so, clearly the future is AI, right? So how is a VC or, you know, applying the techniques in your book, how can you apply that to AI and the future with AI? Because, man, there's some crazy stuff we're heading towards. Yeah, I think that the biggest challenge I'm finding with AI is I can see the inflections. You know, every day something new ships that's exciting and empowering,

and I can see how people would love that. But the challenge that I see with a lot of these is I don't know what the fundamental insight is. A lot of these ideas, I'm like, yes, that's great. People are going to know that's great. Lots of people are going to try that idea. And so we're going to experience mindless competition among startups. And I don't want that. The best competitive strategy is to not compete at all. And that's the challenge that I've seen is how do you come up with an AI strategy that is not going to be easy to copy and it's not obvious to a lot of people already.

Yeah, like ChatGPT just, I guess they were out there working on their own. I guess Elon Musk is really angry he bailed on it. But, you know know it's it's it's so amazing and they're kind of like the xerox of of generative ai i guess technically at this point you know xerox reached that point where every copy you call xerox and i'm sure it pissed off everybody who wasn't a xerox copier but yeah it's it's going to be really interesting how how ai is going to play out and even i just it took me a while to kind of get on board with it but now that i'm on board it's just it's really amazing and one thing one thing is that it really helps with your creativity

like i thought it was creative i've started a lot of companies, and I've been creative and innovative, but it really helps my creativity. It really makes me think of things outside of the box more than anything else I've experienced. Yeah, I agree. I don't know how much time. I probably spend about three or four hours a day in chat GPT now.

Some combination of chat GPT and perplexity and the one that Anthropic has. hours a day and chat GPT now, you know, some combination of chat GPT and perplexity and the one that Anthropic has, but it's just, it is transformative what they can do. It's just unbelievable what you can do. Just the force amplification that you can get for coming up with ideas, for writing, for, you know, even something as simple as generating a graph. It's just, just extraordinary what you could do. You know, it's funny. I, I think a week or two ago I bought Speechify.

There's, you have to buy an annual thing for it annoyingly. And, and so I was going to use it to start reading stuff. You know, I get tired of reading the New York times and, you know, just, just read it to me. Right. And so I was, I went into into chat gpt and i was designing some new logos and stuff and i'm like huh the new chat gpt is talking to me and it was talking to me in prompts and i didn't realize that it was the speechify that's talking to me and so for the longest time i'm like holy shit the upgraded chat gT is talking back to me. And we're having a conversation, kind of.

Only I'm still typing to it. And then it suddenly occurred to me. I'm like, oh, it's Speechify. But even then, it was pretty fucking cool. Oh, it was incredible. Like I was just like talking to an AI thing here. So, Chris, here's a VC thought for you. When I was a kid, the personal computer came out.

And what we now understand is I call that the era of mass computation. And so basically, transistors became so commoditized that their cost approached zero. And you put a computer on every desk and in every home. And the valuable company was Microsoft because software became a scarce resource. And then you had around the early 90s what I call the era of mass connectivity. And you went from trying to put a computer on every desk in every home to connecting every citizen of the world on a broadband network. And the thing that became approaching free was no longer just chips, but it was also communications bandwidth. And so the valuable companies became the owners of these networks. Twitter was one of them, for example, Facebook, obviously, Google. Now, what I think is happening now is the era of mass

cognition. And so the thought experiment I like to run is, are there types of intelligence that will become approaching zero cost over time? You know, and it makes your mind kind of go wild in a lot of ways, right? You start to say, OK, how important is new knowledge going to be, relatively speaking, compared to pre-existing knowledge, I think it'll be really important, right? Because there are some places I got to go to school to learn to get a credential and I get paid a lot of money, but I'm not learning any new knowledge. I'm learning, you know, like some legal fields are this way, right? You're learning the law, but in theory, the internet and the ais will be the accepted system of record of all of that information it's already been pre-discovered whereas that you know it's interesting to kind of think about okay what type of knowledge is going to be created by humans what type of knowledge

would be valuable and then what type of knowledge is pre-existing and will be automated and effectively be free i'm just wildly curious about that question you know it's interesting to me i've got a mom that she always asks me you know about stuff and i'll constantly tell her and i love my mom but you know sometimes i'm busy doing stuff because you know she's retired and i'm not and you know she'll ask me about very simple things and i'm like mom you can google that you, for 10 years I've been going, mom, you can Google that. And really, where is that Google at? You know, the Google, the Google, just Google it.

What's funny is I have friends now that when we talk about stuff like, you know, I was talking about some issues my dog is having, my friends will send me chat GP teach conversations where the chat GPT is centralizing the data of, you know, normally when you pull up Google, you get like this, all this crap and sponsor crap and you know, you can't figure out what's truth and what's whatever sometimes they'll, they'll start, they'll start sending me over messenger or email like their chat gpt thing that they looked up on whatever the topic was and it actually has a pretty good assimilation i i doubt that it's right all the time because i've heard stories but it has a pretty good like a summation of of data yes and you're just like damn and you guys are doing that

like they're not doing google anymore they They're doing chat GPT searches. It just blows my mind. You know, I saw a guy the other day do a search on LinkedIn. It pulls up a bunch of names. He paced all of the names from that search into chat GPT and says, can you arrange this in a table for me? First name, last name, company they work at, all this stuff. Next thing you know, he has a lead list. Holy crap. That is amazing. And it's just like, you watch somebody do that in real time and it's just like freaking magic.

It's just, you're just like, how is that even possible that that could happen? Yeah. Yeah. We're seeing things like that over and over again, where you just like, you're just like you're

just like man it's a great time to be alive with all this stuff coming out linkedin is going to be happy they're going to be as angry as as reddit was you know before they got a deal yeah because they were evidently a lot of their stuff was being scraped from them but yeah it's it's it's going to be it's going to be an interesting world and you know i'm just you know we had a we had a guy on one time who uh wrote a book and he basically aligned ai with darwin's what's the book on species oh well we're gonna i think i know what you're the origin of species. Yeah. And so he basically aligned the birth of AI and artificial intelligence with Darwin's, the birth of species or the origin of species, whatever it is. And his claim was that AI is a species.

Huh. That we have born into a life, a species, and it's a new species. And it's a standalone. it's not something that's going to be dependent upon us eventually you know if you put ai and all the chips i mean you you have a matrix sort of experience going on and his his thing was kind of interesting he said if if ai becomes its own sentient species sort of thing it's going to have a different paradigm of looking at the world and everything that we know as humans. Because as humans, we're mostly designed to be breeders.

We're mostly designed to propagate the species. And everything we do is pretty much circumvents, circles around all of that. Have kids kids breed, take care of the kids die. And that's kind of how we operate. I mean, as a man, I know everything I do is to,

you know, get things, buy things, get myself into a position to get a good girlfriend or wife, you know, it's in women, you know, they buy things to get attention,

you know, so they can get the best men. And we kind of, we kind of live in this bubble. I didn't really think about it until he the best men. And we kind of live in this bubble. I didn't really think about it until he talked about it, but we kind of live in this bubble where we're kind of really focused on that. But he says, you know, the species of AI isn't going to have those limitations where it's trying to get laid all the time.

It's going to be like thinking about, I don't know, quantum quadruple physics or something. Like it's going to be thinking about stuff that don't know, quantum quadruple physics or something. It's going to be thinking about stuff that we're busy walking around trying to figure out how to pay the bills this month, and I don't know, do we have enough McDonald's in our belly? It's going to be working on it. It's not wasting any of that time. We had an Air Force guy on who talked about the AI Air Force planes

that they're running, and they're doing dogfights with and fake scenario dogfights with real pilots versus AI planes and the scary thing is up against even our best pilots the AI planes they go insanely ballistic and aggressive to the highest order because they're not constrained by the fear of death or the fear of loss. They don't have to worry if they're going to see their kids tomorrow. And so they became more and more and more and more aggressive and risk-taking to a point that it was really scary. And, yeah, it'll be interesting.

I mean, if AI becomes its own kind of sentient being or something along those lines of species, it's not limited by the scope that we are as humans, that it's just going to make us look kind of, I don't know, we're just going to be like those monkeys on Planet of the Apes. It's funny, there is a school of thought that kind of says, if AI gets smarter than we are, then it stands to reason that we'll be subjugated to it, right? There aren't very many examples of where the smartest species isn't in charge, not historically.

And there aren't very many examples where the species in charge didn't really become in charge, right? Like, when the Europeans came to North America, they didn't say, okay, American Indians, you go hang out here, we'll go hang out here, we don't have any ambitions of owning all this land. And so that's one school of thought, is that the AIs will be smarter than people. I'm a little skeptical of that, but I do believe that there are still real issues to think about. But I'm much more worried about what humans with AI will do to each other.

And, you know, your example of military weapons or, you know, deep fakes or, you know, I think that AI is so empowering that some people use it for a type of empowerment that's not good for humanity. And that's the thing on the horizon that I get the most nervous about. What happens if you can't tell, let's say some future show, you can't tell if I'm who I say I am or if I'm a deepfake. That could affect politics. It could affect diplomacy. It could affect war and peace you know lots of lots of different things and so that's a little bit

scary yeah we just saw i think we're gonna see more of the selection cycle but i think there was a biden video that was running around that was fake you know one of the things we talked about i think with either that author or another author is how we really shouldn't connect ai to a weapon systems because you know if it decides to launch a missile one time without the checks and balances of human you know who knows where we're at and of course we're competing with china and russia who you know russia's probably dumb enough to hook up ai to its its weapon systems you know and and then where are you so it's it's to be an insane world, really. And it'll be interesting to see, you know, how you can pick the next future Twitters

and Lifts and Ubers and stuff. Yeah. And, you know, I think that the argument that I am more attracted to is that AI is going to create lots of different types of intelligences rather than one omniscient being, say, that knows more than everybody combined. It's more like already, if I use a calculator, it can calculate numbers faster than I can by a wide margin. And so the way I look at it is I think we're going to have more cognitively intelligent, dedicated purpose tools that will be valuable. But I think that what we're going to discover is that that's the better way to go about it in terms of solving problems is to not try to have one all-knowing AI system, but instead to try to apply the tools to where they can have the biggest impact with the least

resistance. There you go. Final thoughts as we go out and tell people where to pick up the book on pattern breakers. So I have a couple. The first is one of the things I've seen in these pattern breaking ideas, and I think this will be interesting for some of your viewers is that it's actually a good thing if most people don't like it at first. Like when you think about it, human beings are conditioned to like things. And so if everybody likes your idea, it's too much like what they've already seen, which means it's too incremental. And so the best startup ideas have a bunch of naysayers or a bunch of people kind of don't care, maybe even people who are hostile. And then a tiny number of people who say, oh, my God, where have you been my whole life? Let's go co-create the future together. I'm super jazzed about this idea.

And so why does that matter? Right. Somebody in your audience might have a startup right now and they may be be hearing that's a stupid idea and that doesn't mean it isn't but it doesn't mean it is either right like just just because people don't like your idea doesn't make you wrong and in fact if you're going to achieve a great breakthrough in this world you're going to have nasa it's true in every field is you know copernicus was under house arrest for saying that the Earth orbited the sun. Right. And the Catholic Church wouldn't agree with him for another 200 years. And so all of these great ideas that seem obvious now started out as a heresy. who was promoting the idea and trying to change the future had to overcome the inertia of the present fighting back and not fighting back fair and not wanting to see them succeed.

I always like to say to founders that don't give up because people don't agree with your idea. If your insight is valid, that comes with the territory. There you go. This is why I eat Doritos in bed, because it's the future. Maybe your future. Cheeto dust. Cheeto dust is the future. Cheeto dust beds coming to a bed near you. You can get them with the Airbnb Uber sleep in a car.

In fact, those are the best place to get Cheeto dust is sleeping in a car, because you just fall asleep as you're eating those Cheetos, and you get the best dreams. So speaking of Cheetos, kind of the other idea that I think people might find interesting is that when it comes to startups, better doesn't matter. So you have to force a choice and not a comparison. Startups lose when they get compared. So for example, if you like, if you like, say Cheetos, I can't sell a 10 times better Cheeto to you as a startup. What I need to do is I need to show up with something totally different. I might say, okay, I am a, I'm a fruit roll-up and it's, you know, you may not value the advantage of a fruit roll-up, but you're never going to say,

how does that compare to a Cheeto? And so what you want to do is you want to say when you're a startup, you want to force a choice and not a comparison. And you want to say, look, you may not even value the thing I have, but for the small set of people who do, I'm the only person that has it. And so we want to find the people who value our advantage, and we don't want to allow ourselves to be compared to what's come before. We want to be radically different enough that they can't unsee it once they see it. There you go. Mike, it's been fun to have you on the show. Thank you for coming on.

Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah. I'm still a Twitter home team guy, at M2JR on Twitter, or I have patternbreakers.substack.com where I talk about some of these ideas. If people want to get kind of a preview of some of the ideas of the book or just my other meanderings. There you go. There you go.

Mike, it's been fun to have you on. We've talked about a lot of stuff and covered a lot of ground. Yeah, thanks, Chris. It was great to meet you. There you go. Pleasure to meet you as well, sir. the book folks wherever fine books are sold stay away those alleyway bookstores because you might get cheater dust on you it's called pattern breakers

why some startups change the future out july 9th 2024 thanks for tuning in go to goodreads.com fortress chris foss linkedin.com fortress chris fuss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Christmas, Christmas 1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.