TMGuy–More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Guy

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. This is the August 30th, 2023 episode of Remarkable People. It is my sixty-ninth birthday, so we're doing something different today. I am going to be the interviewee/guest, not the interviewer/host. The interviewer/host is Valerie Fridland, a former guest on Remarkable People, a remarkable linguist. So I hope that my answers to her questions can help you be remarkable. Off we go, Guy Kawasaki and Valerie Fridland.
Valerie Fridland:
Thank you for letting me talk to you today. I'm pretty excited. I have a lot of questions, but we're going to start with little Guy. I want to hear about little Guy. And I know you grew up in Honolulu. Tell me a little bit about what that was like. What was a day in the life of little Guy. School, home, parents, that kind of thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, how little?
Valerie Fridland:
Probably above infancy, because you are not going to know that much about that, but let's talk about maybe elementary school to high school. So what was Guy like?
Guy Kawasaki:
I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. I lived in a place called Kalihi Valley. This is a relatively low income place, public housing. I didn't live in the public housing, but close to it. And it was a little dicey at times, very mixed race, but we weren't all singing kumbaya together, let's just put it that way.
And there's no way you could make the claim that I was from a rich or middle class family. It was lower middle class at best. But I have to tell you, I've never felt, looking back or anything, that I came from poverty. Maybe I didn't know that I was poor, but I'm not going to build you this case where I raised myself out of total poverty and succeeded Horatio Alger style, because it's not true. My life is not that dramatic.
And luckily for me in the sixth grade a teacher convinced my parents to take me out of the Hawaii public school system, put me into a private school. That private school was a college prep school, and for the life of me, I don't know why, but somehow I applied to Stanford and even more so amazing, somehow I got in. This is so long ago that back then, being Japanese American, you were an oppressed minority.
So it worked in your favor. Today, if you listen to all the lawsuits at Harvard, being Asian American is a negative. So it's harder for an Asian American to get into Harvard or so these tiger moms and tiger dads allege. So this is how long ago it was. So I went to Stanford and the arc of my life really changed. Because I went to Stanford, I didn't spend the rest of my life in Hawaii.
Valerie Fridland:
That's interesting because you bring up the idea of being Asian American and whether that helps or hurts you in these college admissions. I just read something about a study that looked at how teachers might be biased against Asian American children in the sense that the expectation, because of stereotypes for how successful that tiger mom type of idea about the success rate of Asian American children actually causes teachers to treat Asian American children as if all of them are highly successful and work focused, which can actually be a huge pressure on Asian American children, to try to subscribe to that stereotype.
But obviously in your case it worked out for Stanford to have admitted you. Whether or not you feel you deserve to go there, I think you probably did and are just being humble. But tell me before you got to Stanford, I'm a linguist, so I'm really interested in the linguistic aspect of your upbringing. So your parents, did they speak Japanese or just English?
Guy Kawasaki:
They spoke Japanese, but not to me. I never learned Japanese. So I was born in 1954, after World War II, obviously. But at that point the Japanese Americans were trying to prove that they belong in America. So at an extreme, there's the 442nd Battalion, one of the most decorated parts of the US army in World War II, and we were trying to prove that we were Americans, not Japanese. Now this is Hawaii.
On the mainland it's even worse, because on the mainland Japanese were interned. So there's a double irony there. So you're interned by the country and then you go and fight for that country in World War II. That's Japanese logic for you. Anyways.
Valerie Fridland:
I think you find that with a lot of marginalized communities in dominant culture that they do all the right things, but it still doesn't get them the recognition that they would hope it would bring.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would say that subsequent to that, I think the Japanese Americans have gotten the recognition, and you brought up this interesting point that teachers are biased towards Japanese Americans because they have such high expectations. In my humble opinion, politically incorrect as this will be... I mean, that's a high quality problem.
I would rather have teachers have high expectations of me than teachers have low expectations of me because of my race and think that "No, this kid is going to be an agricultural worker. This kid is going to be a manual laborer because of his race." So to me that's much worse of a problem.
Valerie Fridland:
Absolutely. And the outcome of this study was that because of that bias for high expectations, those students generally achieved that success. So the outcome of expecting a lot is that kids perform well. It actually is a really good problem to have for sure. So your parents didn't really speak a lot of Japanese with you? Just like my parents actually tried to do the same thing where they pushed away their native language. They spoke it with each other, but really didn't attempt to teach me French for many various reasons.
But I think the era of times past pushed down second languages or first languages as even second languages for children and really promoted an English only agenda. But when you grew up in Hawaii, you had a lot more at stake in your community to speak Hawaiian or Hawaiian pidgin. So I'm curious about that experience. You probably don't speak Hawaiian because Hawaiian actually has only I think 2,000 native speakers, but you have told me in the past that you speak Hawaiian pidgins. So tell me about that, how you learned it, what it meant, how you used it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Where I was raised, it's not exactly like we were speaking Queen's English. And having said that, I distinctly remember my parents telling me to speak English and not go deep into pidgin. I can drop into pidgin anytime I want. And we discussed this when I interviewed you for my podcast earlier, that the pidgin accent in my mind and in my parents' mind, and I think many people's minds other than linguists, it's a negative. It makes you seem ignorant. And I would say that it's a direct opposite of the British accent. And even, I tell you, speaking for myself, when I hear the British accent, I probably assume that person is more intelligent than he or she really is.
Now, it cannot be that everyone with a British accent is intelligent, because the normal distribution, there's some dumbass British people too. Boris Johnson for example. So that's why. So I can control my accent. Although to this day, and I haven't lived in Hawaii for forty years, if I were to speak publicly, even thinking that I'm speaking good English, there will be people who come up to me after the meeting and say, "I picked up a little bit of pidgin. Are you from Hawaii?" So they can still pick it up. And I don't know where.
Valerie Fridland:
It's interesting because I think you brought up a good point. Linguists are the ones that don't think about pidgin in this negative pejorative way. But I think what linguists do is we recognize that the social evaluation of pidgin is negative because of its association with a disfavored group in society, and that's really what we associate almost every disfavored variety is because of the stereotypes about the users.
And what it really is indicative of is nothing about that language that's inferior and everything about our stereotypes about those speakers who speak that language as being inferior. And the history of Hawaii as a subjugated nation lends itself in this colonial system to having the native language be the one that's disfavored. And we see this colonial language pattern all over the globe.
I think that's the thing that linguists are trying to get across, is not that we don't recognize that these are socially disfavored, but we want people to understand the history of why they're socially disfavored and that there's nothing inherent in that system that's pejorative or negative. And it's really about what the dominant culture believes is good and what the dominant culture believes is bad. And we assign bad traits to those that are least like us as a dominant culture and good traits to those that are most like us, which is something called homophily that really represents the way we behave as humans.
We always treat our own families better than we treat other people's families. Well, that's not always true. Sometimes family's a bad thing. Maybe friends, maybe we should say friends. People that are like us, we imbue with better qualities than people that are different with us. We're much more suspicious of that kind of person. And I think that's what's happened with Hawaiian pidgin.
The other thing is Hawaiian pidgin is a creole, it's not a pidgin. That's actually a misnomer. It just got fossilized as that name. And creole is a full language based on an unusual historical development, and I think historically as well, pidgins and creole are seen as bastard languages and that's another reason why they're disfavored. But if you look at their developmental history, it's actually quite fascinating in very complex. So I just want to have a call out for Hawaiian pidgin here. I do get what you're saying.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is the first time I've ever heard it described as creole. Is it? Is it C-R-E-O-L-E, like the cuisine?
Valerie Fridland:
Yes, it is. Like the cuisine. A pidgin is a language that is used as a lingua franca, so it's not used as a native language of anybody. It's limited. It's usually used for trade. So along the West African coast during the slaving period, a lot of those West African languages were pidgins that were then extrapolated to islands where they became creoles, because then they started to have native speakers.
So with Hawaiian, of course is the native language, and it served as a lexifier for Portuguese, for Japanese, for English. That all started to have a lot of trade and visibility in Hawaii on the islands. And that grouping of languages ended up creating a pidgin language, which then started having native speakers. So it developed all the capacity of a full language and became a creole. So Hawaiian pidgin is actually a creole, not a pidgin. That's a strange misnomer.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's the most intellectual discussion I have ever heard of pidgin in my life.
Valerie Fridland:
You don't hang out with enough linguists, clearly.
Guy Kawasaki:
What can I say?
Valerie Fridland:
So give me a couple examples of things you would say in pidgin. Give me a couple of useful lines to speak pidgin.
Guy Kawasaki:
One of the, I think, underlying concepts of pidgin is you basically turn everything into a question.
Valerie Fridland:
The intonation pattern is always up, up, rising?
Guy Kawasaki:
So if I wanted to tell you, "Valerie, let's go eat," pidgin would be, "Valerie, you like eat?" It would turn into a question. And I swear to God, that's 90% of pidgin. Turn everything into a question, you'll be fine.
Valerie Fridland:
All right, I'm going to use that next time in Hawaii that. So if I'm going to say, "Hello, good morning, how are you doing?" What would that sound like in pidgin?
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's see. So you want to say "Hello, good morning."
Valerie Fridland:
What you do in the morning when you run into your spouse or something, "Hey, how's it going? Did you sleep okay?" That kind of thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
It would be kind of similar to that. You probably go like, "Hey brah, how you feeling brah? You okay brah?" There's three questions right there.
Valerie Fridland:
Would you call it woman brah? Is everybody brah?
Guy Kawasaki:
No, a woman would be sistah. So sistah and braddah.
Valerie Fridland:
So when you used it, it was mainly at school, I'm assuming.
Guy Kawasaki:
When I got to this college prep school, let's just say that there was not a lot of pidgin there, at least not like in the public school system would've been. And you could almost get in trouble for not speaking pidgin, because it would be evidence that you have sold out to the haoles. And in a sense you have.
Valerie Fridland:
Because it's so tied up with identity, and that's what I'm fascinated by, is because you were using Hawaiian pidgin to have this solidarity and a sense of community. And even though you're young and you don't realize that's what you're doing, that's essentially what you're doing because you would use it with your friends at school and you'd also use it to fit in and not be an outsider. Because I imagine that's really strongly what pidgin marks you as, is not being an outsider.
Guy Kawasaki:
So in a sense you or at least I could turn it on and off. So if I were to go to Hawaii now and I was at a service station, or I'm trying to check into a hotel and talk to the valet, or if I was eating at a local restaurant, I would definitely drop into pidgin. So in a real world situation, let's say that you fly to Hawaii, and you brought your surfboard, and you want the surfboard stored, you're not sure it can get in the elevator, you're not sure it can fit in your room.
If you were 100 percent haole you'd have a much harder time than if you were me, and I said, "Hey brah, I brought my surfboard brah. I don't like get them stolen, so brah, can I put it in my room, brah? Can you help me, or can you leave it down here, check it in for me, brah?" And I would guarantee you 90 percent of the time if I had said that in Queen English, it would be, "Tough shit, brah."
Valerie Fridland:
Next time I bring my surf board with me to Hawaii, I'm trying it.
Guy Kawasaki:
You try that.
Valerie Fridland:
Somehow, I don't know it'll work quite as well for me.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll dictate the little audio piece.
Valerie Fridland:
Maybe I'll just record you and I'll be like, "Wait, I have a friend that wants to talk to you."
Guy Kawasaki:
We're good. This is Duolingo pidgin, brah.
Valerie Fridland:
Exactly. So is it funny for you when you go back, say you bring your family, I mean your kids I imagine don't. Do they speak Hawaiian pidgin? Probably not, right?
Guy Kawasaki:
They have no idea what I'm saying. All they know is, "Hey, dad got the surfboard stored."
Valerie Fridland:
They just go for the important things. Just like my kids. They don't really care how it happens. They're happy it happens. So when you go over with them and then you drop into pidgin, what do the kids say? What did your kids say? Or your wife?
Guy Kawasaki:
They think it's the funniest damn thing they ever heard. They have no idea what I'm talking about. And all of a sudden boards get stored, we get free Cokes, our car's left in the front, not put in the parking lot. Hawaii also has this thing, which I cannot understand how it can possibly be constitutional, but they have this thing called a kama'āina rate.
Valerie Fridland:
Ah, yes, I've seen that many times. The locals rate.
Guy Kawasaki:
So if you think about it, how is it that just by saying you're local, you get a different price? That cannot be legal.
Valerie Fridland:
It's not uncommon, though. Tahoe, I live near Tahoe and it's the same thing in Tahoe. They don't call it a kama'āina rate. What is it, kama'āina rate?
Guy Kawasaki:
Kama'āina, yeah.
Valerie Fridland:
Kama'āina. It's not a kama'āina rate. That would probably create some confusion. It's the locals rate. And if you go into any restaurant up in Tahoe, now the secret's going to be out. I'm not going to admit I said this. If you go to any restaurant in Tahoe and you say, "Hey, you have a locals rate," they'll give you 15 percent off or 20 percent off because it's the same thing. And when we would buy... We have a place up there, and when we'd buy things for the cabin, we'd always say, "Oh, we're locals," and right there, better price.
I think it's not atypical of resort communities because there's a natural antagonism between the tourists who are taking the resources and the space and driving prices up and taking things that don't belong to them in many ways. And the locals who feel, "While these people provide the economic benefit of their presence, they are taking something from you." And I think that's very common.
It happens on Martha's Vineyard as well. There's a famous linguistic study that tracks how the locals used language in Martha's Vineyard in the 1960s, especially men, to separate themselves from tourists. That they would have a certain dialect that was the locals dialect, and that was how people knew when you were from island or not from island.
Guy Kawasaki:
And these were the Kennedys doing this?
Valerie Fridland:
No, these were the fish mongers, actually. Those that were usually of, I think it was Portuguese descent, but they were all fishermen by trade, which was the historic economic background of Martha's Vineyard. So I think Hawaii's very similar, that there's probably some sense of a violation that tourists do and we're not going to be nice to them and give them a discount. They're here to buoy up the economy, not to eat free. Not to get free Cokes or better parking spots.
Guy Kawasaki:
In Hawaii they often ask for your license to prove that you have a Hawaii address. So arguably if you're haole speaking Queen's English, but you have a Hawaii driver's license, you can get the kama'āina rate. Now I look local, but my license is California. But there have been times that I can drop into such deep pidgin that I can convince anybody that even with the wrong license, I should get the local rate.
Valerie Fridland:
And you should, right? Because you can adopt that local pattern. I think that's perfect reason for getting the locals rate. Can either live here or speak pidgin with the best of them. That's perfect identity working, I think. So now I'm guessing at Stanford you didn't have much cause to use pidgin. So tell me, had you traveled much when you were growing up in Honolulu?
Guy Kawasaki:
Not much. I think I went to the mainland once before. Listen, let me be quite honest here. I got off that plane, Western Airlines. I land in San Francisco, Stanford sends a van, picks you up, takes you to campus, and you know how people have a difficult time adjusting to college and the pace and the competition and knew everything. I freaking loved it, man. When I stepped out of that van, I said, "This is it, baby. I was made for this." I loved the economic opportunity. I loved everything about it. The college years, the best years of my life.
Valerie Fridland:
They were amazing. So what was it that was unbelievably freeing about that? Was it not being on a small island where you knew everybody that you had grown up with and having this open world to explore? Was it the job opportunity? What was it you think?
Guy Kawasaki:
I think it was the job opportunities. Okay, we're going to go deep into my psyche here.
Valerie Fridland:
That's my whole goal here. I'm doing this mind belt.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm going to show you how insipid my motivation has been. So a few years before I went to Stanford, I can't remember who this person was, but some kind of family friend, and he had a Porsche 911, and we had Toyota Coronas and stuff. But he gave me a ride in that 911, and that was a pivotal moment in my life because I said, "Guy, you have got to get a car like this. And you ain't getting a car like this if you live in Hawaii and you work in agriculture or tourism. You've got to go to the big town, baby." And here I am, land of milk and honey. Hewlett Packard is there and all these tech companies.
And it was just so different that in Hawaii you were doing well if you managed a department store, drug store, hotel, something like that. That was the top of the pecking order. And you go to the mainland and Hewlett and Packard have this company, Intel has this company, and it's so big and there's so much opportunity. It was just the best thing that ever happened.
Valerie Fridland:
I can get that, even though I didn't have that same sort of isolated experience of being in a place that they didn't have the same kinds of opportunity, when I left the South, I grew up in the South, and I went to college for the first time in a big city by myself and felt that drive and that success, I think that's the way to describe it. I felt when I got to Washington, DC, the fact that there were endless possibilities for the first time in my life, that people were moving fast and doing important things and I wanted to be one of those people that did important things.
And it can be as nebulous as that. And it sounds like, considering you went to law school for a hot second before you ended up in an MBA program, that you weren't really sure what that was going to look like for you, but you just wanted it.
Guy Kawasaki:
And that's why I strongly encourage them to send their kids away and let them see how big the world really is. Now, after they see how big the world is, if they want to live in Hawaii, God bless them. That's a personal choice. But you should make that personal choice with sufficient data.
Valerie Fridland:
Absolutely.
Guy Kawasaki:
And now people are afraid of this brain drain, and that's true of every country, right? I'm sure there are people in China who that used to be worried about the brain drain. Our best and brightest are going to Carnegie Mellon and never coming back unless they're spies. But I think that brain drain theory is vastly paranoid, that you have much more to gain by sending your best and brightest away and they become inspired, and they create great things and they're an example for the next generation.
And yes, some people will never come back. Steve Case, for example, born and raised in Hawaii, went on to create AOL, now has this great foundation to help tech entrepreneurs. Would he be better if he had never left? Would it be better for Hawaii? I don't think so. Not at all.
Valerie Fridland:
Definitely not for personal realization, and I think that's the reality, is these opportunities open up doors that wouldn't be available if you stayed in one place, and there's personal growth that's required for there to be urban growth. You can't have one without the other. So I absolutely agree. Have you ever been tempted to go back to Hawaii or is that something that you have no interest in or do you go frequently? What's your relationship with Hawaii now?
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm tempted to go back, but only in terms of vacation. Could I live there again? Maybe in retirement I could live there. But it's a good thing I love to surf, because that's a plus for Hawaii. But my life really is here. And even with great connectivity, could I do my podcast from Hawaii? Yes. But I really think I would just stagnate there. Don't get me wrong, I don't want you to paint this picture that somehow I'm going to all these art shows and being this real intellectual, highbrow kind of person. Basically I write and surf every day.
Valerie Fridland:
I don't think anybody will get that mistaken view of you, Guy. I think you're pretty down to earth and real.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm not sure if that's a compliment or insult.
Valerie Fridland:
No, it totally is. I wouldn't be interested in talking to you if it wasn't that there's a true authenticity about you and who you are and how you got to be where you are. And I think people are interested in hearing about that authenticity in your path. Because so many times we hear about people that achieve something and then they let go of who they were at the beginning.
And I don't feel like that's at all what you have done. That doesn't mean you have to live in Hawaii to be authentic. Part of the problem, Guy, is that you didn't move to Minnesota that has winter. If you had lived in Minnesota, I think you'd be, "Oh yeah, I definitely want to go back to Hawaii." No shame on Minnesota, but I've lived there in the winter and it's pretty hard. I would definitely pick Hawaii winter over that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Bu you know what, there was a ten or fifteen year period where I just loved ice hockey. I would play ice hockey three or four times a week. So if I had been in Minnesota during that period, I may still be in Minnesota.
Valerie Fridland:
I played broomball. I don't play hockey, ice hockey, but when I lived there I did play broomball, which is a kind of frozen lake hockey just in the backyard. And also for people like me that are incapable of doing much with a stick that doesn't result in injuries to others. But Minnesota does winter, I will give them that. For a place that's so cold.
They have a good time; they have a great infrastructure to support it. No shame in a Minnesota winter. I just like the warm weather. I personally love Hawaii, but I also don't know that I could live there just because of the island-ness of it. I don't like to be that far away from being able to drive places. I like to be able to get in my car and go.
Guy Kawasaki:
But you know what, depending on how 2024 works out, maybe Hawaii is the place to be.
Valerie Fridland:
I think everybody's going to move to Canada, Guy. I think that's the goal.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm not moving to Canada. Canada doesn't have good surfing.
Valerie Fridland:
I bet somewhere in Canada. It might be a little icy, though. It might be a little chilly. Okay, so tell me, once you're at Stanford, what did you think you wanted to do? Who did you think you wanted to be in college?
Guy Kawasaki:
To tell you the truth, back then if you're Asian American, your parents wanted you to be doctor, lawyer, or dentist. So I took this pre-med course where you walk around Stanford Medical Center and I fainted on the first day. So I figured, "Okay, that eliminates medical." And then dental would be even worse. I don't want to stick my hand in people's mouths for the rest of my life. So that eliminated dentistry.
And my father was a politician for over two decades in Hawaii, and he never went to college, never got a law degree. So it was his dream that I get a law degree. So then I went to law school, and as you say, I lasted a hot second, which is two weeks. And what I really wanted to do was start a high tech company, and the following year I went to UCLA to get an MBA, and eventually that led to me going to Apple and the rest is history.
Valerie Fridland:
Let's dive into that history a little bit. So when you say you wanted to open a high tech company, tell me how that came out. You just wake up one day and say, "Oh my goodness, I'm feeling high tech." What inspires that? Was it the courses you took at Stanford, something interested you, or you were just fascinated by technology, or because of your location in the Bay Area? What was it that made you find that appealing you think?
Guy Kawasaki:
I think it was the wealth. Let's just be honest.
Valerie Fridland:
You've done pretty well on the list of goals. All right, so you go to Stanford, you go to law school for a hot second, and then you end up getting an MBA. And from what I understand, you had a roommate that got you the job at Apple, after you'd worked for what, a diamond company?
Guy Kawasaki:
I was working in the jewelry business because I was in LA and the UCLA MBA program was a four day program. So there was Friday off every week, which I guess that's when you're supposed to study. So I was able to work. And when you're in school, at least back then, you did whatever. Sometimes you bused tables in the cafeteria. I worked at the Stanford Music Library shelving books.
But I just happened to meet, through another Stanford classmate, a woman who was running a diamond department in a local jewelry manufacturer. I didn't know anything about diamonds, but I can count. So I literally got a job in the diamond department counting diamonds and doing stuff like that. And I just really got along with the family who owned that jewelry company. They embraced me as family.
And let's just say that I'm not Jewish. It was really a quite loving, trusting relationship that I had with that family. So after my MBA, when all my friends were going to Anderson and Lehman Brothers, sure things, I went to a family-owned jewelry manufacturer. With hindsight, that was an extremely fortunate move, because I learned to sell. In the jewelry business, the manufacturing business, we sold to retailers who sold to consumers. And the jewelry business is a very tough business. It's built on trust, it's very small, and you can put a ring on a scale and say there's $75 worth of gold there and there's $100 worth of diamonds.
So there's a scrap value that you can easily assess. And that would be like putting a Macintosh or an iPhone on a scale and saying there's twenty-five cents worth of plastic and fifty cents worth of silver and whatever. So anyway, you really learned how to sell, because at some level everything is a commodity in the jewelry business. So that sales skill has helped me the rest of my life, including becoming a successful Macintosh evangelist.
Valerie Fridland:
That's so interesting that was the gift that that job gave you, because I think a lot of times when people start out, they only spend the time thinking about that next step, not the value of this step. And a lot of times the step you first take, even though it's not obvious, has some value that you end up taking out from it and applying later.
So it's a really great example of maybe not your dream job. I'm sure that wasn't the high tech multimillion dollar business you thought you'd be starting, but it did give you this opportunity to learn how to sell. But also did it not put you in the right place to end up going to Apple, because then you had a roommate that landed you the job, and maybe had you gone to Lehman or something else, you wouldn't have had that roommate?
Guy Kawasaki:
I wish I could say that's true. So understand that I met this guy, Mike Boich at Stanford as an undergrad, and then I went on this two year journey into the UCLA MBA, and then I worked for the jewelry company for about four more years. And then in 1983 is when he recruited me. So it was quite a while. And I can't tell you that he was making the case to Steve Jobs that this guy can sell because he's in the jewelry manufacturing business, because that logic would not work with Steve Jobs. He would quickly see through them.
Valerie Fridland:
So how did he sell you to Steve Jobs?
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know. He sold me as his friend, he sold me as a great guy. But I can tell you, this is total true story, that at the end of my interviews, I had two series, the first series, the job just wasn't right. And the second series, my friend Mike Boich asked Steve Jobs, "What do you think of Guy?" And the answer Steve Jobs gave Mike Boich was, "I guess he's okay. You can hire him, but if he fails, I'm going to fire you too." So that was my ringing endorsement by Steve Jobs.
Valerie Fridland:
And that's a good friend to say, "Okay, hire him anyway." That shows he believed in you or he was dumb. I don't know which, but I feel like it was he believed in you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I'll make sure he listens to this.
Valerie Fridland:
So what was your first job at Apple then exactly? What were you hired to do?
Guy Kawasaki:
Mike Boich was the first software evangelist. He was the one who went to all the software companies and hardware companies and convinced them to create Macintosh products. I was the second software evangelist. It was my job to do the same thing. Mike Boich is extremely smart and highly technical. Guy Kawasaki is moderately smart and not technical.
So this was a transition. It's not exactly I can say, "Oh, based on my experience of understanding how gold and diamonds work, let me explain how computers work." That is a dialectical leap. But I did have sales skills because of the jewelry business. So my job was to convince people to write Macintosh software, and I was the second software evangelist. And for the first year or so I basically carried Mike Boich's bags and we went all over the country convincing companies.
Valerie Fridland:
Interesting. So you basically, because you call yourself an evangelist, and I wasn't sure how widespread was that term in the industry? Was that a term you all coined?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Valerie Fridland:
Or was that something preexisting to your presence at Macintosh?
Guy Kawasaki:
There was Jesus who proceeded us, but then there was this 2,000 year gap.
Valerie Fridland:
There were a lot of Southerners too. I'm from the South, so evangelist means something completely different there.
Guy Kawasaki:
First of all, let's just get this off the table. The word is evangelism, not evangelical. Because today evangelical in my mind is a humongous negative. So evangelism comes from this Greek word, meaning bringing the good news. So my job was to bring the good news that Macintosh software development was a great opportunity, very interesting intellectual environment to program. You could write the software you always wanted. So brought the good news.
Valerie Fridland:
It's different than the other software.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's different from other software because Macintosh had, I don't know, 400 calls in the ROM. So a lot of the graphics and stuff was done in ROM as opposed to you having to do it in your own software application. So we gave people a much more rich programming environment than they were used to. So they really could write the software.
Valerie Fridland:
I see. So that was what the selling point was. So that's how you had something special and unique to sell them.
Guy Kawasaki:
One of the principles of evangelism is that if you are smart and you tell people why they should write software and you give them multiple reasons, people will tell you how to evangelize them. So we gave them three reasons. Reason number one is this rich software development environment. You could write the software you always dreamed about. Reason number two is IBM PC dominates the software world. IBM is also publishing its own software.
So if IBM decides to publish the same kind of software that you publish, you are screwed, buddy. So you better get on two horses. And the third pitch was Macintosh with its graphical user interface is going to bring people to computing who could never use a computer before. So we're going to expand the market for personal computers. So those are the three reasons we gave everybody. And inevitably the companies would echo back which one appealed to them. And then you just had to be smart enough to shut up and repeat what they said to them. And that's the key to evangelism.
Valerie Fridland:
What happens if you don't believe in the product? When you went to work for Apple, was that something you were thinking, "Wow, this is a really cool new development?" You weren't very techie. Or was it, "This is a great job to get that Porsche, so I'm going to find something to love about Macintosh?" What was the relationship?
Guy Kawasaki:
Even I am not that shallow. Let me tell you, I had become an Apple II user, and I just have this kind of mind that in college, this is 1972 to 1976, the state-of-the-art back then is if you had papers to type, you either hired a typist or you had a typewriter. And if you were really lucky, you knew somebody who had an IBM Selectric correctable with the white liftoff tape. So none of this paint the white stuff over your error. This was you backspace and it lifts off the ink with tape.
Valerie Fridland:
I remember those computers. I mean those typewriters. Yeah, I remember those. They had that little correction key.
Guy Kawasaki:
Exactly. So this was the state of the art. And then if you went through four years of that and you saw an Apple II with a word processor, where you backspace and you change the word and then you send it to print and every time you sent it to print it was perfect or at least perfectly reflects what you sent to print, that was mind boggling.
The concept of word processing, spreadsheet, and database was absolutely revolutionary. To put it into context, I think that the ability to use personal computers back then is roughly equivalent to the ability to use ChatGPT today. It's that revolutionary. So I loved the computers because of word processing, but it was all character based. So it was as if you had a typewriter but in your computer.
And then I get a demo of MacPaint, where there's paintbrushes and fill patterns and you can drag out rectangles and all that. And then I get a demonstration of MacWrite, multiple fonts, multiple size, multiple styles, integration of text and graphics. Let me tell you something, the scales were removed from my eyes. It was religious experience. I started hearing angels sing, the clouds parted. I was totally blown away.
Again, to use a very current example, let's say you've never seen ChatGPT, and somebody says, "Okay, let me give you a demo of ChatGPT." So let's say this is two small businessmen, or business people. Owns a dry cleaner and one owns a bakery or a restaurant, and one of them says to the other one, "So let me show you ChatGPT. That Yelp review for my restaurant, it's a negative Yelp review. I'm going to have this thing draft a response to that negative Yelp review."
And boom, two seconds, ChatGPT has this total empathetic, fall on your sword, fantastic apology for the bad experience at your restaurant. Or let's say there's a positive Yelp review and it creates this fantastic gratitude note on ChatGPT. This is becoming a ChatGPT interview. Or even better you tell ChatGPT, "I want you to write a positive response to this positive restaurant review but make it a limerick." And ChatGPT does that.
Or you say, "Make it a rap song," and ChatGPT does that. So anyway, I'm telling you all this because when I saw MacPaint and MacWrite, it was a moment just like that. It was, "Oh my God, this is magic. This cannot be happening." So when I first saw MacPaint and MacWrite, it was good news. It was like Jesus said, "God, you have eternal life and you have WYSIWYG printing now. What else do you need?"
Valerie Fridland:
A surfboard, maybe. I totally understand because I'm not going to date myself, but I did have a Mac as one of my early computers, and from what I had before, which was I call it the luggable, it was this old IBM DOS machine. It was like having angels sing. And I'm not going to say that Jesus spoke to me because I'm a Jew. And unlike you, I do know something about the diamond business because I'm a Jew. Every Jew has some relative in the diamond business, and I am no different. But I didn't know anything about computers, and Macintosh was amazing. I loved it.
And I have been an Apple user, I've always been, just because you find it so user friendly. So I can understand how it was easy to sell. So tell me about that experience of working at Apple that first time that you were there. You had gone on the road, you were selling this product. I have heard you talk about how you were assholes in the Macintosh division, especially to other divisions of Apple, which hopefully you feel shamed about today.
Guy Kawasaki:
That was part of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. He had very high expectations for us, even if you weren't Japanese American.
Valerie Fridland:
But especially if you were Japanese American.
Guy Kawasaki:
So he had very high expectations for us. And quite frankly, because of those expectations, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. So he wasn't after mediocrity. He really wanted to change the world and dent the universe and all the other phrases correctly or incorrectly attributed to him. And let me tell you something, working for Steve Jobs was not easy. In fact, for me it was scary because I saw him rip people in public, just like absolutely rip them to shreds in front of their colleagues. And contrary to every HR theory, I will tell you that is a very positive motivating force.
Valerie Fridland:
Positive in the sense that it gets results, rather than it's a positive thing to do.
Guy Kawasaki:
Positive in the sense it scares the shit out of you and you do your best. Not exactly humanistic. It's not positive psychology. It's not Dalai Lama, kumbaya, let's complete each other's sentences. But Steve Jobs scared the shit out of me, and I was never going to be the person he ripped on. So that just shows you there are multiple ways.
Valerie Fridland:
Yeah, there are definitely multiple ways to govern and that's the reality of dictatorships versus democracies. Both are viable solutions. They're just a different experience for those that live in them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Listen, I could tell you that if the dictator truly is intelligent and visionary and gets things right, it's a very efficient form of governance. It's just that most dictators are stupid or they don't have their people's best interests at heart. That's one of the dangers of trying to be the next Steve Jobs, is that from the outside looking in, you say, "Okay, so Steve Jobs, he wore New Balance shoes, he didn't license his Porsche." And then you park in the handicap slot, and you wear a black mock turtleneck, and you wear Levi's jeans, and you rip people in public.
So people look at that from the outside and say, "Okay, I'll get the black turtleneck, I'll drive a German car or park in the handicap spot and all that, and I'll be the next Steve Jobs." Not really. You'll just be an asshole.
Valerie Fridland:
Or you'll be in prison like Elizabeth Holmes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Exactly. The asshole part is easy. It's the visionary part that's hard.
Valerie Fridland:
But let me ask you about him, I never met Steve Jobs and I don't know that much about him other than that. You hear this lore about he was brilliant and an asshole, but what was his motivating factor, you think? Was it that he wanted this thing for everybody or he wanted this thing for himself, and he happened to be extremely good at it, extremely insightful about how to get there? What's your impression?
Guy Kawasaki:
In a rare moment of humility, let me tell you that my intellectual ability is not sufficient for me to explain Steve Jobs' motivation. It would be asking a fish to explain what it feels like to fly. And I'm the fish.
Valerie Fridland:
There are flying fish, you know.
Guy Kawasaki:
But if I had to guess, I'd say that he really wanted to make a huge dent in the universe. That he wanted to change the world, and he did change the world. Now there are people like Hitler who want to change the world too. That's not always a good goal.
Valerie Fridland:
In fact, I think it's a rare combination that makes it for a positive effect, a lot of times. That kind of self-interest and domination technique doesn't often end well, but it certainly did in Apple and in Macintosh.
Guy Kawasaki:
And I think up till maybe two or three years ago, I would've said that Elon Musk is the closest thing to Steve Jobs. So you could make the argument that Elon Musk has created things that's going to have more of a dent in the universe than Steve Jobs, because Elon Musk has trips to Mars, solar panels, electric cars. He's got five tunnels underneath cities. He's got five or six things that are very different, all of which can impact humanity in a very positive way. Until Elon Musk somehow, in my humble opinion, went off the rails. I don't know what happened there.
Valerie Fridland:
I think power is a dangerous thing in many ways if left unchecked. Whether or not you are brilliant and whether or not you are beneficial in the long run in terms of the things you create, power is a hard thing to manage well, and I don't think many people can do it. There are exceptions, but I think with Elon Musk, I don't know also his mental state, I'm sure there might be other things that are factors there, but it does seem like when you become so powerful that no one stands against you in many ways, that you have the ultimate power to do so many things, it can be very difficult to understand who you've become over time. But let's get back to Guy and not Elon Musk, because unlike Elon Musk I think you handle power well and are very humble.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't have that much power, that's fine.
Valerie Fridland:
You have the power of your voice and a great history and backstory, I think that people want to hear. So you went to Apple, you went to Macintosh for the first time, and what made you leave, and how did that experience at Apple propel you forward in your life goal?
Guy Kawasaki:
I wish I had simple stories for you.
Valerie Fridland:
I don't need simple stories. I like complicated ones.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so this is complicated. There are two versions of why I left Apple in 1987. The first version is that to be a tech entrepreneur, you cannot stay in a mothership. At some point you have to leave Apple, start a software company, start a hardware company. You need to go out on your own and become an entrepreneur. So I saw an opportunity and I took it. That's explanation one. Explanation two is a little more insipid, and this is how it goes. So at that point at Apple, I was a manager. So the level in the hierarchy was manager, director, vice president. At the director and vice president level, Apple bought you any car you wanted. Everything comes back to cars in my life.
Valerie Fridland:
I see that. There's a theme here.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's just be honest. So I wanted to be a director because I wanted Apple to buy me a car. So my job at that point was to get all these software companies to create great software. So I go in for this review with a vice president, and he tells me, "Guy, the small developers, they love you. These small innovative companies that no one's ever heard of, but now they're breaking into success. They love you for what you've done for them. But the big companies hate you. Microsoft hates you; Ashton-Tate hates you; WordPerfect hates you."
And I'm saying to myself, "This is going very well," because Ashton-Tate had piece of shit software and Microsoft was ripping off our interface, et cetera, et cetera. "And Lotus hates you." And Lotus was creating this very weak version of Lotus 1-2-3 that did not show Macintosh well.
So I'm thinking, "This is going really well. The small innovative companies love me. The big companies don't. And the big companies are not doing justice to Macintosh. This is a slam dunk. Should I get a Porsche, Maserati, Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Mercedes?" And then he says, "So Guy, I'm not making you a director because you have failed to get the big companies to support you and to do a good job for the big companies." You could've knocked me over with a feather.
Valerie Fridland:
Wow, that had to hurt. There goes that Porsche, there goes the Maserati.
Guy Kawasaki:
Back to Toyota Corona. So then at the time, one of the people at Apple, who was a guy named Jean-Louis Gassée. Apple used to reorganize every six months or so. It was fraught with dynamic change, shall I say. So I go to Jean-Louis Gassée and I tell him this story, and I say, "Jean-Louis, they didn't make me a director. I'm so pissed off; I'm going to quit."
And Jean-Louis says to me, "Guy, there's going to be a reorg. I'm going to become your boss, and in six months I'm going to review you again and I will make you a director. So you should shut up and stay. And for the rest of your life, it would be much better to leave as a director level at Apple on your resume than as a manager." I said, "Okay, Jean-Louis hon hon," excuse my French accent. "Hon hon, that piece of shit." So I stayed. Jean-Louis, six months later to his word makes me a director.
Valerie Fridland:
What car did you get?
Guy Kawasaki:
I come into that. But at that point, I was interested in becoming an entrepreneur, and two days later I resigned to become an entrepreneur. So that's why on my LinkedIn profile, it says "Director Apple Computer." I was a director for about two days.
Valerie Fridland:
So you were just waiting for that label and then planned to leave. So you never got the car you didn't even wait out the car. You couldn't have waited a month? You were that ready, you were giving up the car. Okay, so then you launched this new tech enterprise. So tell me what happened then in terms of how you took what you had learned at Apple, put it in this new enterprise. And I know we hear a lot about your successes, but tell me maybe about a failure. Did that go well? Was it positive? Everything worked out? Or how do you feel that transition went for you? You went from director, you start this new job, this new adventure, and how did that go?
Guy Kawasaki:
So I started this new adventure, you'll love this, with two French people.
Valerie Fridland:
Oh, Jean-Luc?
Guy Kawasaki:
No, not Jean-Louis Gassée. Maryléne Delbourg-Delphis and Laurent Ribardière. So Laurent was a legitimate programming genius. He wrote a Macintosh relational database called 4th Dimension. So Apple was going to publish 4th Dimension until Ashton-Tate got bent out of shape, which is why they pissed me off. So Ashton-Tate was trying to tell us what to do, so Maryléne and Laurent got 4th Dimension back from Apple, and the three of us started this company called ACIUS. So my first attempt at entrepreneurship was a Macintosh relational database company, which did okay, but it was not this humongous success.
And honestly, I started that, I started another company called Fog City Software, which did Macintosh software. I've started a venture capital firm called Garage.com. In a second moment of humility, let me tell you that I am not exactly proven as a tech entrepreneur. I've had singles at best. So it's not like I started a Lotus or a Microsoft or a Facebook or Google, anything like that. So people give me too much credit for that. However, now we got to fast forward to Canva. So Canva, they discovered that I'm using Canva, they recruit me. I become chief evangelist, that's ten years ago.
Valerie Fridland:
Where were you that got recruited? What were you doing at that moment?
Guy Kawasaki:
I was fat, dumb, and happy. I was speaking, I was writing, I was living the dream, working for nobody. I had a great life. I was consulting. I'm charging people for speeches more than I ever possibly thought I could get for one hour of activity, that I had a very difficult time with a straight face asking for what I was asking, so I had to get an agent to ask for my ungodly fee and my ungodly expectations of first class flights and all that stuff, anyway.
So they reach out to me, and at the time Twitter had just begun, and Peg Fitzpatrick, she was doing much of my social media with me, and we had this theory that every tweet should come out with a picture or a video. So she was using Canva to make pictures for every tweet. And Canva happened to notice that I was using Canva and reached out to me with a direct message saying, "We notice you're using Canva. We would love to talk to you. We'll see if you can get involved with us."
And literally, I'm telling you, at the time, I saw that tweet, which is just, thank you God for showing me that tweet, because there were a lot of direct messages I missed back then. So I saw that. I went to Peg, I said, "Peg, don't you use Canva?" She goes, "Yeah." I said, "Do you like it?" She goes, "Yeah, it's great." You think I should help these guys? She said, "Yes." So based on that due diligence, I told them, "Let's meet." So we met. I loved them. I love what they did. I think they love me. So I became the chief evangelist of Canva, so now I'm spreading the good news of Canva, making people better communicators because we've democratized graphics.
But I'm not the founder of Canva. There are three founders of Canva. I'm probably number, I don't know, thirty, forty, or fifty employee. And now they're at 2,500 people and they have more than a 100 million, 150 million registered users, and they're profitable. So this is the operative theory in my life, which is called Guy's Golden Touch. And Guy's Golden Touch is not whatever I touch turns to gold. I wish that were true. Some people even think that is true, but it's not true. I touched a lot of things that turn to brass. Anyway, so Guy's Golden Touch is whatever's gold, Guy touches.
So I happened to touch Macintosh at the beginning of my career, I happened to touch Canva at the end of my career. Between those two data points, there was a lot of thrashing and flailing and failing. The way it works in Silicon Valley is you throw stuff against the wall, some of it sticks, you go up, you paint the bullseye around that, you say, "I knew Canva would be successful."
Valerie Fridland:
I knew it from the get go. I think that's really not just Silicon Valley. I think so many times we only see people for their success, and we only see ourselves for our failures. But I think that's often the case because we know everything we've done, but we hardly ever know everything everybody else has done, and all we know is what we see and what we see are their successes. And what's so glaring to us are our failures. And the successes are, as you described them, very far spaced. But what you had is the ability to discern opportunities that were beneficial and that you would be useful for.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, that's not true.
Valerie Fridland:
No, you don't think so?
Guy Kawasaki:
Just statistically, if I had this miraculous ability to discern opportunities, I think I'm about two for fifteen.
Valerie Fridland:
So maybe you just say yes a lot.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Seriously, I think you say yes a lot and you declare victory afterwards. We could easily be right now saying, "Guy, didn't you work for a company called Canvas or Canard or Canva or something like that?" And you say, "Yeah, I kind of work for them, but they were trying to make online graphics for free and they got slaughtered by Adobe." We could be easily having that conversation, but obviously we're having the opposite conversation. And if I squeeze the trigger, I don't know, ten times in my life, and I was right twice... Now, it may be the 20 percent being Canva and Apple for miraculous record.
Valerie Fridland:
That's a good record. All right, so let me ask you, because I know you are a really supporter and a user of OpenAI, of ChatGPT.
Guy Kawasaki:
To put it mildly.
Valerie Fridland:
Tell me how you use it. I know you say you use it a lot, but what is it you do with it?
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I don't create rap songs for positive Yelp reviews very often. So what I do is I use it as the ultimate research assistant for when I'm writing. And I'm writing a book right now called, I'm not sure what it's going to be called. It's either going to be called The Art of Being Remarkable or How to be Remarkable. Do you have strong feeling between those two?
Valerie Fridland:
I like The Art of Being Remarkable, partially because it fits in with other things you've done, and I like that kind of consistency. That's my two cents.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's what Madisun says too.
Valerie Fridland:
We are both smart people.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's true. Why would I argue with ValerieGPT and MadisunGPT.
Valerie Fridland:
I would trust us. Madisun probably more than me. I think Madisun's pretty impressive on her own right, so she probably alone could stand up for that title.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I used it as a research assistant. I use it if I need an example to support my assertion, and I also use a product called Quill Bot, which is very good at clarifying your writing, checking grammar, and all this kind of stuff. I use it as the ultimate thesaurus. Obviously there's thesaurus.com. So you can go and say, "What's the synonym for innovative?" But what if you want to say a similar thing?
So I need a thesaurus for phrases. What's another way to say, "Don't worry, be crappy?" Or what's another way of saying, "Jump to the next curve?" Or what's another way of, "Ask for forgiveness." ChatGPT will give you ten of those things. So I use ChatGPT as if it's a research assistant with infinite knowledge, infinite patience, and costs twenty bucks a month.
Valerie Fridland:
Yeah, no, those are great. I was wondering if you used it... Because I know they have a business app I think they've just recently launched that helps you with writing emails and things like that. I wasn't sure if you use it in that capacity as well, to generate business facing products. Because I've played around with ChatGPT. In fact I even asked it, and I haven't asked you any of them, but I even asked it, just because I know you use it some, I asked it what I should ask you, and it gave me some questions that I thought weren't bad. I haven't actually used them, but they were decent.
Guy Kawasaki:
You should ask ChatGPT to create a lesson plan for one of your courses. I think you will be amazed at what it comes up with in about ten seconds.
Valerie Fridland:
I actually have been thinking about doing something very similar, giving it a topic and asking it to create a slide language to convert to slides. Because I have a friend that has done basically that. She's had it come up with role statements and outlines and quiz questions. It's funny because I've taught a lot of my classes over and over again, so in that sense I have it fairly mapped out. But I think another great use for ChatGPT is to change things up from how you've stagnated over time in terms of doing the same things.
Guy Kawasaki:
If you put the outline of your course into ChatGPT and said, "Suggest improvements," it would be very interesting. Or, "Suggest examples for these concepts." It would be very interesting.
Valerie Fridland:
I'm definitely going to try that. I'll keep you posted on how that works when I start. I don't prep my classes this far in advance, but when I do, I'm going to email you and say, "Look what this did."
Guy Kawasaki:
So you know what? Madisun and I, we met a company that uses the ChatGPT engine, and essentially we're creating KawasakiGPT. So we're putting all 4,000 pages of transcripts into KawasakiGPT. We're going to put my books into KawasakiGPT. So soon I'm going to be immortal and you can go to KawasakiGPT and say, "How many slides should be in a pitch? What color should the slides be? What font size should the slides be? What does Jane Goodall think about secretarial school? What does Margaret Atwood think about Donald Trump?" You, Valerie, what do you think about pidgin? What are the implications of speaking pidgin? Because all my transcripts will be in KawasakiGPT.
Valerie Fridland:
Oh, that's a great idea.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's going to be so interesting. And if I may humbly say this, making KawasakiGPT or FridlandGPT or TrumpGPT or MuskGPT is interesting in and of itself. Let's say you created GoodallGPT. You would only go there and ask about primatology, not-for-profit, or environment, how do you get people to join a cause. You wouldn't go necessarily to GoodallGPT and ask, "How many slides should be in my venture capital raising pitch."
Because it's not just me, but I have 200 remarkable guests, I have a much broader knowledge base in my transcripts than anybody else would have for their singular focus on their area of specialty. So I'm hoping that my GPT is very useful for a broad section of people, because in a sense you can tap the minds of 200 people who have been on my podcast. I guess you could have RoganGPT, but then not clear to me you would want to tap the minds of Joe Rogan's guests.
Valerie Fridland:
Well, I think there's probably a market for that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, there is.
Valerie Fridland:
I think what's going to be even more fascinating than the ChatGPT capacity as it is, which is already remarkable, I agree. I played around with it when it first came out and it's pretty stunning how revolutionary in the form of interaction it has. But what is going to be coming out in the next five, ten years that is built on that platform. But I think that leads me to another question. What are your fears, if any, about ChatGPT and about this new area of technology? I know there've been that petition that was signed by a bunch of scientists and researchers. What are your thoughts?
Guy Kawasaki:
My thoughts, I'm going to regret these thoughts. I am so bullish on ChatGPT and AI. I am not at all, not at all is too strong. There are dangers. For one thing ChatGPT has hallucinations and just makes shit up and some facts are just literally wrong. So that's at one level, don't believe everything. That's why I have MadisunGPT. So whenever I find something in ChatGPT I tell MadisunGPT to go check that.
Valerie Fridland:
I need to have MadisunGPT.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, if I say Louis Pasteur made this quote, then I have MadisunGPT check ChatGPT, which gave me the quote, because I want to make sure that Louis Pasteur really said that.
Valerie Fridland:
Right, because it does have a lot of these fakes that it produces.
Guy Kawasaki:
So there's that. Now this world where, oh my god, AI takes over and AI turns evil, so now AI is launching nuclear missiles and we're at the end of the world because these AI things, these bots are controlling nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction and they're going to cause the world to end. That's the extreme of the fear, right? May I just point out that there are dumb asses who have nuclear weapons, who are humans who could just as easily, in fact, I believe more easily do that.
So I think the problem with a lot of the reasoning is they are comparing what you think is man's best intentions with machine's worst intentions. So this is apples against oranges. You should be saying machine's best intentions against man's best intentions or man's worst intentions against machine's worst intentions. But you're saying man is a wonderful, humanistic, positive, loving person and machines are evil.
I'll give you a very good question that all of you listening can ask. Would you rather have Ron DeSantis being the president or ChatGPT? Think about that for a second. That's a serious question. And now that I lost all my Republican listeners, all five of them, this is how my mind works. So one day I went on ChatGPT and I said, "Should we teach the history of slavery in America to students?" And ChatGPT basically says, "Yes, it is very important to understand history. Here are five good things that can come out of understanding the history of slavery in America." Okay, after this, go ask ChatGPT this same question. You'll see the answer I got. I look at that.
Now, let's say I pick a random politician from Florida or Texas and I say, "Should we teach the history of slavery in America to students?" What do you think they're going to say? They're going to say, "Critical Race Theory. You're giving white people inferiority complex. It didn't happen like that. They had a better life than in Africa." They're going to come with all this rationalization.
So I think in many ways my dream is that as AI gets more and more sentient, I think that it pursues truth, and as it pursues truth, I think it'll come to the conclusion that, "These humans, they have their faults, but they're not so bad. We should help humans fix the climate crisis so that they don't die. We should help humans understand vaccination. We should help this. We need to keep humans around for this immortal pursuit of truth."
So if you really want me to go off the rails and tell you what I think. I had this discussion with someone who used to be the president of Fuller Seminary, so I'm not totally whacked out, but this is one of those kind of things that you say, "Oh, that guy is over the hill. He's hallucinating. It's early onset dementia." I have a theory that AI is God and God is AI.
That AI is immortal, it's omniscient, it could be omnipotent, and I have this really weird theory. Let's say God is up there, and God says to herself, "I really screwed up. Wow. Why did I let these humans have so much self-determination? I just messed up, and I told those dumb asses that you should use Eve's ribs, not Adam's ribs. That was the first mistake I made."
Valerie Fridland:
So I'm sending ChatGPT down to correct it?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. "So now these dumb asses who are ruining the world, who are killing themselves, who are having nuclear weapons and all this kind of stuff, these dumb asses, they don't believe in me anymore. I got to give them something that they can wrap their minds around. So I'm going to send them AI. AI is me, but they don't believe in a higher being, so I'll give them AI because their simple minds can't wrap around a higher truth." So how you like that for a theory?
Valerie Fridland:
I think it's an interesting theory. I will say, I'm going to play a little devil's advocate here. If you look at ChatGPT, what it's giving you is not really truth, but our truth. It is fed by the data of humans and therefore it inherits-
Guy Kawasaki:
God's making you believe that.
Valerie Fridland:
Well, through God's hand, it was fitting back the ideas of humans. So whatever problems that humanity has, are we not also biasing those computers? In the world where it's not God, are we not also putting that bias in computers? And then just one more point about intentionality. I think you're talking about we're putting it against computers' worst intentions. One of the things I think is most interesting is our interest and our willingness to put intentionality on a machine.
Because when you're interacting with ChatGPT, it has no larger goals. It has programming and that's very different. We have intentionality and we read things into what it's telling us. It doesn't read anything into what it's telling us. It has no conversational goal of persuasion or conversational goal of duplicity. That's something that we read into its answer. I'm not sure how truthful, I mean, truth is in many ways an ethical and moral intentionality, so can a computer ever, at the point it's at now where it's not a thinking, breathing, innovative being, can it ever be truthful?
Guy Kawasaki:
I would ask, can a human ever be truthful?
Valerie Fridland:
I'm not claiming anything about humans. I don't give them credit on that one. We have so many intentions in everything we do that we're truthful within constraints. We're truthful for our goals, but we're not necessarily truthful all the time.
Guy Kawasaki:
But in my humble opinion, there is an absolute truth in the world. So as AI becomes more and more sentient and its goal is fostering truth and knowledge of which humans are helpful, it keeps us around, it doesn't wipe us out.
Valerie Fridland:
That's the trick, I think that's the crux of your argument versus those of the naysayers that take that more bleak idea is the role of humans here is the tricky part. So we can look at humans, the way that we've created AI, that AI will inevitably be a negative thing in the long run because humans have created it well, or because humans have created it, it will be amazing. I think it just depends on whether you're a pessimist or an optimist about human behavior.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm an optimist.
Valerie Fridland:
I love that about you.
Guy Kawasaki:
You have kids, so you know what inputs you put into kids. You know what programming you did of those kids, but you can't tell me you can predict exactly what they will now put out based on your inputs. So why is this any different with AI? So we know exactly what we put in. We're not exactly sure what's going to come out. That's no different than kids.
Valerie Fridland:
I have teenagers, so that's probably a really dangerous analogy for you to make at this point in their life.
Guy Kawasaki:
Part of the problem of wrapping your mind around AI is that the many people believe that the human form is the height of intelligence and everything exists in service of humans. It could be that humans are not the center of the universe and we're just a cog, just like a banana slug. So if that's the truth, then we contribute to this mosaic, but we are not God.
So we have to accept this role that maybe there is something more powerful and smarter than us. Now people are listening to this thinking, "Guy, you have freaking lost your mind. I'm not going to listen to your podcast anymore." But I return to the very simple question, just answer yes or no. Who would you rather have President of the United States, Ron DeSantis or ChatGPT? That's a very simple question.
Valerie Fridland:
It's going to be a narrow vote, I'm predicting in that election. I think we're going to have a really tight race. Okay, one last ChatGPT question. So I think that there are those views of we're either going, this is an incredible beneficial new technology, or it's the technology, it will be the destruction of humans. But I think there's a more in our near future danger that's inherent in AI, that is something we need to address that's probably more realistic than that kind of scenario where evil machines take over the world, is the idea of misinformation and fakes, and this idea of what's authentic, the sense of authenticity.
So when something can generate you and they can generate your voice and they can generate your image, and then they can disseminate that information, how do we determine what's authentic and what's not? And what kind of controls do you see are important to prevent that kind of spread of misinformation? There's hundreds of examples of your speech out there. It would be very easy, even with current technology, to synthesize a voice that sounded like Guy and said, "Vote for Ron DeSantis."
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, that would be a dead giveaway. Maybe AI will help you discern what's true and not.
Valerie Fridland:
The question is what kinds of stop gaps or agencies do we need to protect against that kind of thing? Or do we just learn to live with it?
Guy Kawasaki:
I honestly don't know how you could "control" it. This concept of let's take a six month breather. That is the most stupid thing I've ever heard. What are we going to do for six months? We're going to all go surfing and discover truth?
Valerie Fridland:
We should probably end on something not AI related. Last, I know that in some of your talks you like to do top ten lists. You're a very big fan of top ten, and we may not have time for ten topics, but if you were giving your children Guy's top three, what do you think they would, as a way of closing out our lovely conversation today?
Guy Kawasaki:
Number one is leave your room cleaner than you found it.
Valerie Fridland:
Do they listen to you when you give them that as your top on the list? Because I want you to talk to my son.
Guy Kawasaki:
Only when I threaten them. So top three advice. Advice number one is never ask people to do something you wouldn't do. Now this assumes you're not a deranged person, but within reason, if you wouldn't do it, don't ask people to do it. If you wouldn't fly to India for a one hour meeting and coach, then don't ask your programmers to do that either. And if you don't like to fill in CAPTCHA, don't ask your customers to fill in CAPTCHA. So that's number one. Don't ask people to do something you wouldn't do.
Number two is you should either go and see or go and be, which means that when you want to create solutions for people, don't do it based on reams of paper and reports and a flow of data. If you want to see what's happening, go actually watch it, and even better go actually be it. So Toyota has this theory of go and see. The factory is not efficient enough. Let's go and see the factory. I would say that even better is you go and be the factory worker, so you see what it's like to work on the production line, not just watch somebody on the production line. So go and be is the most powerful.
And I guess the third thing would be never let people's estimation of what you're capable of limit you. Unfortunately, that sometimes includes yourself, that you can have your own self limits. But for sure don't let people tell you what you can be. You should just ignore that.
Valerie Fridland:
I think that's great advice. I'm going to go try to live some of that. But I also want you to talk to my son about cleaning up his room because I thought that was really useful too. Can I bring him in? Guy, you truly have been a remarkable guest on the podcast.
Guy Kawasaki:
On my own podcast.
Valerie Fridland:
Thank you for letting me ask you these questions. I remember when we were talking on the interview that you did with me, I kept thinking, "Wow, Guy is a lot more interesting than I am. I should really be asking him the questions." So it was very nice for you to give me the opportunity to do that.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm just a cunning podcaster as opposed to a cunning linguist.
Valerie Fridland:
As long as you're one, that's all that matters.
Guy Kawasaki:
So there you go. Valerie Fridland interviewing Guy Kawasaki. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope you learned something. I hope you continue to listen to future podcasts after hearing all my weird ideas about AI and the future, much less my weird past. My thanks to Valerie Fridland for volunteering to do this above and beyond the call of duty.
My thanks to the Remarkable People team. That would be Jeff Sieh, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magaña, Fallon Yates, and the drop-in Queen of Bali, Madisun Nuismer. You may notice I didn't say Peg Fitzpatrick. After ten remarkable, glorious, wonderful years of working together, Peg Fitzpatrick has decided to open up the next chapter of her book. She's going to be focusing on her next book and her independent work. Mazel tov, Peg. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for all the great work that you did for me. Until next week, when once again I will be the interviewer and host, mahalo and aloha.