无人知晓的 AI CEO：构建物理 AI 的未来

你最近决定加入 Twitter，发了第一条推文。马克·安德森引用并转发说，这是最不为人知的优秀 AI 首席执行官，我们最好的工作是独自安静完成的。你每写一分钟供公众消费的东西，就没有把非常有限的时间花在客户和产品上。你在构建我们将要生活的未来。未来几年会是什么样子？

You decided to join Twitter recently. Put out your first tweet. Mark Andreessen quote tweeted it and said this is the best AI CEO nobody knows our best work is done alone and quietly. Every minute you're writing something for public consumption you're not focusing your very limited time that you have on your customers and your product. You're building a lot of the future that we're going to be living in. What does the next couple years look like?

我们解决像癌症这样的一些不可能问题，将直接与这波 AI 热潮相关。人类整体的净痛苦应该会显著下降。

Us solving some of these impossible problems like cancer are directly going to be related to this AI boom. Net suffering in humanity overall should go down significantly.

这个播客中出现的一个观点是，AI 来得正是时候，可以拯救我们。

A threat that has emerged on this podcast is that AI is coming just in time to save us.

AI 在未来 5 到 10 年的真正影响将体现在农业、采矿和建筑业。这些行业需要自主化，而且来得越快越好。看看农民，农民的平均年龄在 50 多岁。10 年后这意味着什么？

The real impact of AI in the next 5 to 10 years really is going to be in farming, mining, construction. These industries they need autonomy and it couldn't come soon enough. If you look at farmers the average age of a farmer is in their late 50s. What does that mean in 10 years from now?

人们对 AI 将给世界带来什么有很多焦虑。

There's a lot of anxiety about what AI is going to do to the world.

恐惧的核心根源是误解。如果你在家对 AI 非常焦虑，最好的办法就是花时间去理解，你会很快看到它的局限性。了解它，然后积极让这项技术被用于善事。

The core root of fears is misunderstanding. If you at home are very anxious about AI the best thing that you can do is spend time to understand and you will quickly see the limitations. Get to know it then actively make the technology be used for good.

今天的嘉宾是 Qasar Younis，Applied Intuition 的联合创始人兼首席执行官。你可能从未听说过 Qasar 或 Applied Intuition。这是我遇到过的最重要的低调 AI 公司和首席执行官。这是一家价值 150 亿美元的公司，在过去十年里悄然成长。他们所做的是将 AI 添加到车辆中，比如汽车、拖拉机、飞机、潜艇、采矿设备等等。前 20 大汽车制造商中有 18 家是他们的客户，还有全球最大的建筑、采矿和卡车运输公司，以及美国国防部。他们基本上就是 Waymo 或特斯拉，但没有硬件。Qasar 本人出生在巴基斯坦的一个农场，在底特律长大，职业生涯始于通用汽车的工程师，然后在博世工作。之后他创办了几家公司，然后才创立了 Applied Intuition。我喜欢这一集的一切，非常兴奋能带给你。别忘了查看 Lenny 的产品 fast.com，那里有专门为 Lenny 的新闻通讯订阅者提供的超值优惠。在简短地感谢我们精彩的赞助商之后，我们开始吧。

Today my guest is Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition. You've probably never heard of Qasar or Applied Intuition. This is the most important under the radar AI company and CEO that I've ever come across. It's a 15 billion-dollar company that has been growing quietly over the last decade. What they do is they add AI to vehicles like cars, tractors, planes, submarines, mining rigs, and a lot more. 18 out of the top 20 automakers are customers as well as the biggest global construction, mining, and trucking companies. Also the Department of Defense. They're basically Waymo or Tesla but without the hardware. Qasar himself was born on a farm in Pakistan, grew up in Detroit, started his career as an engineer at GM, and then at Bosch. He then went on to start a couple companies before starting Applied Intuition. I love everything about this episode and I'm so excited to bring it to you. Don't forget to check out Lenny's product fast.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.

本期节目由 Omni 赞助。如今许多产品团队都在讨论如何推出 AI 分析功能。难点显而易见。让 LLM 在生产环境中猜测 SQL 是一团糟，而且是个坏主意。Omni 采取了不同的方法。他们内置了一个语义层，因此当你嵌入他们的分析时，AI 实际上知道你的业务定义，而不仅仅是原始表格。你可以在任何内容进入生产环境之前测试查询、验证推理并锁定权限。如果你想在你的产品中加入 AI 分析，而又不想从头构建整个堆栈，请访问 omni.co/lenny 获取免费 3 周试用。Perplexity、DBT 和 BuzzFeed 等公司使用 Omni 来提供客户可以信赖的分析。网址是 o m n i 点 c o 斜杠 lenny。

This episode is brought to you by Omni. Many product teams today are in the process of debating how to ship AI analytics. The hard part is obvious. Having an LLM guess at SQL in production is a huge mess and just a bad idea. Omni takes a different approach. They have a semantic layer built in so that when you embed their analytics, the AI actually knows your business definitions, not just your raw tables. You can test queries, validate the reasoning, and lock down permissions before anything hits production. If you want AI analytics in your product without building the whole stack from scratch, check out omni.co/lenny for a free 3-week trial. Companies like Perplexity, DBT, and BuzzFeed use Omni to ship analytics their customers can trust. That's o m n i dot c o slash lenny.

我的播客嘉宾喜欢谈论工艺、品味、自主权和产品市场契合度。你知道我们不喜欢谈论什么吗？SOC 2。这就是 Vanta 的用武之地。Vanta 帮助各种规模的公司快速合规，并通过行业领先的 AI、自动化和持续监控保持合规。无论你是初创公司应对第一个 SOC 2 或 ISO，还是企业管理供应商风险，Vanta 的信任管理平台都能使其更快、更容易、更具可扩展性。Vanta 还帮助你以快五倍的速度完成安全问卷，从而更快赢得更大的交易。根据最近的 IDC 研究，Vanta 客户每年削减超过 50 万美元，效率提高三倍。建立信任不是可选的。Vanta 使其自动化。在 vanta.com/lenny 获得 1000 美元折扣。

My podcast guest tonight love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry-leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you can win bigger deals sooner. The result, according to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/lenny.

Qasar，非常感谢你来到这里。欢迎来到播客。

Qasar, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

谢谢邀请。

Thanks for having me.

你基本上在构建我们将要生活的未来，人们甚至可能没有意识到这一点。这有两面性。一方面，让我问你这个问题。如果一切顺利，随着 AI 和物理 AI 的出现，未来几年对人们来说会是什么样子？未来的愿景是什么？

You're basically building a lot of the future that we're going to be living in and people may not even realize this. And then kind of there's two sides to this. On the one side, let me ask you this question. If things go really well, what does the next couple years look like for people with the emergence of AI with physical AI? What are the vision of the future?

我先从更宏观的 AI 角度讲，然后再具体谈物理 AI。宏观上，我认为这就像工业革命。如果你生活在 19 世纪末，我们可以关注工业革命带来的许多坏事，比如童工、垄断的出现、战争等。但如果没有工业革命带来的价值观和好处，现在几乎是不可想象的，比如我们从未见过的更广泛的医疗保健、更广泛的商品和物质财富，以及我们习以为常的取暖和制冷。有一个很棒的 YouTube 频道，专注于二战初期德国战俘的信件，他们看到美国时，写信回德国描述所见所闻。他们震惊于火车经过的城镇灯火通明，到处都是汽车。二战中 80% 的德国城镇没有电。这很令人费解，因为我们假设所有技术都是均匀分布的。所以积极的方面是，这些原本只有富人或能接触技术的人才能拥有的东西，现在每个人都能拥有。比如，拥有一个专门针对你的教练，而不是一个给出泛泛答案的通用 ChatGPT，这是非常强大的。我认为我们解决像癌症这样的一些不可能问题，将直接与这波 AI 热潮相关。所以，我认为人类的净痛苦，就像工业革命一样，总体上应该会显著下降。我从根本上持乐观态度，认为技术会带来这种积极影响。

Let me take the broader AI point and then the more specific one on physical AI. Macro, I think about this like the Industrial Revolution, right? So, if you're sitting, let's say in the late 1800s, there's a lot of, you know, we can focus on a lot of bad things that happened because of the Industrial Revolution, right? You have child labor and you have monopolies emerging and you have abuse of, you know, your wars end up happening. But there's also it's an almost unimaginable present without the values and without the kind of benefits we got out of the Industrial Revolution, which is broader access to health care like we've never seen before. Broader access to goods, material goods, things like we take for granted like heating and cooling your home. There's this great YouTube channel that focuses on POW letters from Germans who are seeing America in the early '40s and they're writing letters back to Germany about what they're seeing as they're basically prisoners of war. And they're kind of blown away that the towns that they roll by in these trains as they're going to their POW camps are all lit up or that there's cars everywhere. 80% of German towns in World War II did not have electricity. And that's kind of a mind-bending thing because we just assume all this technology is equally distributed. So, the positive version is these things that let's say folks who are wealthy or folks who have access to technology, these things everybody has access to. The fact like simply having somebody who's a coach to you and having that coach very specifically to you, not a generic ChatGPT that's giving fairly generic answers. This is a very powerful thing. I think us solving some of these impossible problems like cancer are directly going to be related to this AI boom. So, I think net suffering in humanity, I think just like the Industrial Revolution overall should go down and should go down significantly. And I'm a fundamental optimist in that view that technology will bring that positivity.

具体到物理 AI，当你拥有自己的车、四肢和感官时，你会把开车视为理所当然。但对于残疾人或买不起车的人来说，近乎免费的出行能力意义重大。让自动驾驶汽车对所有人免费，可以改变世界——比如在卢旺达，离最近的医院要两小时车程。很多对 AI 的负面看法来自生活优渥的人。我并非天真地认为没有弊端，但我看到更多积极面。未来 20 年，那些我们习以为常的坏事会突然消失。某些疾病和基本服务的不可及性开始消退。例如，免费发消息——来自巴基斯坦的人过去因为长途电话太贵而无法与家乡联系。现在你可以免费联系任何人。这有弊端，但也有好处，比如免费与所爱之人保持联系。AI 能以近乎零成本为更多人带来富足。

In physical AI specifically, when you have your own car, limbs, and senses, you take driving for granted. For someone disabled or unable to afford a vehicle, nearly free mobility is a big deal. Making self-driving cars free for everyone could change the planet—like in Rwanda, being two hours from the nearest hospital. A lot of negativity around AI comes from people living in a very good existence. I'm not naive about downsides, but I see more positive. In the next 20 years, things we take for granted that are bad suddenly disappear. Certain diseases and inaccessibility to basic services start going away. For example, messaging people for free—people from Pakistan couldn't communicate back home because long-distance was expensive. Now you can contact anyone for free. There are downsides, but also upsides like staying in touch with loved ones for free. AI can bring abundance to many more people at near-zero cost.

另一方面，人们对 AI 对工作和机器人的影响感到焦虑——中国有机器人耍双节棍的视频。股市对可能无法长期生存的公司做出反应。身处中心，你如何看待未来几年？你乐观吗？有什么建议让人们保持冷静？

On the flip side, there's anxiety about AI's impact on jobs and robots—videos from China with robots using nunchucks. The stock market reacts to companies maybe not surviving long term. Being at the center, how do you envision the next few years? Are you optimistic? What advice do you have for people to stay calm?

这是两件事：对技术变革的焦虑，以及公众投资者对特定股票的反应。我们分开谈。恐惧的根源是误解。如果你担心 AI 对工作的影响，最好的办法是花时间了解它。你会很快看到局限。YouTube 上有视频试图让 Gemini 通过倒置杯子来理解杯子是什么——它失败了。如果 AI 霸主连杯子的上下都搞不清，革命就不会来。耍双节棍的人形机器人是预编程的，制作那个视频花了 1500 万美元。这不是假的，但也不是你大脑填补的那样——有知觉的自主行为。那是编程好的马达。汽车工厂 25 年来一直有先进机器人，但我们不害怕，因为我们理解其中的差距。我们不明白双节棍机器人是怎么做出来的，所以用焦虑来替代。多了解技术，你会看到它的边界。这是否解决了社会是否会受到根本伤害的问题？在任何技术变革中，比如 WhatsApp，有些人会受到伤害——公司倒闭，人类受损。作为社会成员和领导者，我们可以引导方向。去掉“AI”这个词——它太情绪化。就叫技术。技术可以用于善或恶。了解它并主动让它用于善，无论是作为创始人、员工还是公民。关于公众投资者，我没有研究，但这是我的猜测。我在哈佛读了 MBA，出身不富裕。我看到了高端金融世界。那很开眼界。

Those are two separate things: anxiety around technical shift and public investors reacting to stocks. Let's separate them. The root of fear is misunderstanding. If you're anxious about AI's impact on your job, the best thing is to spend time understanding it. You'll quickly see limitations. There are YouTube videos trying to get Gemini to understand what a cup is by holding it upside down—it fails. The revolution isn't coming if AI overlords can't understand a cup's top and bottom. The nunchuck-wielding humanoids are pre-programmed and cost $15 million to make that video. It's not fake, but it's not what your brain fills in—sentient beings acting on their own volition. It's programmed motors. Car factories have had advanced robots for 25 years, but we don't fear them because we understand the gap. We don't understand how the nunchuck robot was made, so we substitute with anxiety. Learn more about the technology and you'll see its edges. Does that address whether society will be fundamentally harmed? In any technical shift, like WhatsApp, some people are damaged—companies go away, humans are harmed. As society members and leaders, we can steer the funnel. Remove the word 'AI'—it's emotional. Call it technology. It can be used for good or bad. Get to know it and actively use it for good, whether as a founder, employee, or citizen. On public investors, I don't have research, but here's my guess. I did an MBA at Harvard, coming from a non-wealthy background. I saw high finance. That was eye-opening.

你可能会像我以前一样，以为对冲基金或大型公共股权基金的人非常细致、深思熟虑。他们会在白板上用极其深奥甚至理论化的数学来决定是买入还是卖出 Figma。但实际上并非如此。在这个具体案例中，我认为他们做的就是买卖股票。他们是聪明人，工作也很努力，这点我不否认。但他们并没有你想象中那种坐在纽约摩天大楼里的人所拥有的根本优势。顺便说一句，这也是为什么散户投资者已经成为市场中如此活跃且重要的一部分。所以，这些人去找了 AI 顾问，也找了那些公司里的实际开发者。他们会说：‘嘿，你能在一周内给我做出这个应用吗？’然后，咨询公司会拿回一个看起来像 Figma 或其他网页应用的东西。那位对冲基金经理会说：‘嗯。’如果公司创始人坐在那里，他们会说：‘不，不，这看起来像我的应用，但实际不是。它没有那么深入，没有所有这些功能，也没有与其他系统的集成。’但对于公共投资者来说，他们会想：‘是啊，但只花了几周或一个月就建成了。而你用了 500 名工程师花了好几年。这个 AI 可能是真的。我在 X 上读到的关于用 vibe coding 取代价值数十亿美元公司的文章，可能成真，市场立刻就把这个风险定价进去了。’这就是抛售的来源。但这并不意味着所有情况都是如此。就在过去 24 小时内，我遇到了一位——我不能说他的名字——但他看起来是一位非常审慎的投资者，他说现在是买入的时候，因为这些公司实际上不会消失。所以我认为社会上的焦虑和抛售是两件截然不同的事情。它们由不同的动机驱动，都是更大 AI 叙事的一部分，但我不会把它们混为一谈。并不是对冲基金投资者说：‘我担心社会，卖掉 ServiceNow。’不是那样的。至少这是我的印象。

And you might think, as I did, from far away, that folks at hedge funds or at large public equities funds are extremely nuanced and thoughtful. And they are like, you know, on whiteboards with extremely deep and maybe even theoretical math to figure out should they buy or sell Figma. And that's not actually how it works. I mean, really what these folks are is in this specific case, I think what's happening is they buy and sell stock. They are smart people and they do work hard. It's not to take that away. But they don't have a fundamental edge that you would assume that somebody who sits in a skyscraper in New York has. And by the way, that's why retail investors have become such an active and kind of significant part of the market. So, those folks have gone to AI consultants and have gone to people who are literally developers at these firms. And they'll do something like, 'Hey, why don't you build me this app in a week?' And then, this consultancy will come back with an app which kind of looks like maybe a Figma or another web app. And said hedge fund manager, they're like, 'Well.' And then, if the company was sitting there, they would say, 'No, no, this just looks like my app, but this is actually not my app. It's not as deep. It doesn't have all these things. It doesn't have integrations with all these other systems.' But for the public investor, they're like, 'Yeah, but it only took like a few weeks or a month to build this. It took you 500 engineers a couple of years. This AI thing could be real. And the things I'm reading on X about just vibe coding your way to replace billion-dollar companies, that might be the case and the market immediately prices in that risk.' And that's where that sell-off comes from. That doesn't necessarily mean all of this. I mean, I just within the last 24 hours I had a — I can't say his name — but he looked like a very, let's say, calibrated investor who said this is the time to buy because these companies are not actually going away. And so I think those two anxieties within society and the sell-off are two very different things. They're motivated by different things. They're part of the larger AI narrative, but I wouldn't conflate those two things. It's not that the hedge fund investors are like, 'I'm worried about society. Sell ServiceNow.' It's different than that. At least that's my impression.

这就是我们一直在说的阿尔法。是时候买入了。这不是投资建议。但这真的是很好的建议。我认为真正的建议是克服恐惧，我感受到那种焦虑，尤其是当我去密歇根州，走出硅谷泡沫时，就像试着去了解一点你所害怕的技术，然后你就会开始看到一些边缘。

This is the alpha we've been talking about. Time to buy. This is not investment advice. But that's really good advice. I think the real advice is to fight fear and I feel that anxiety, especially when I go to Michigan and I'm outside of the Silicon Valley bubble, it's like just try to learn a little bit about the technology that you're afraid of and then you'll start seeing some of the edges.

我喜欢你关于自动驾驶汽车本质上是机器人的观点。我们不这么叫它们，但它们就是机器人。绝对是的。你看到一辆自动驾驶卡车行驶——一个机器人，一辆自动驾驶汽车做坏事可能已经非常危险了。所以这是一个很好的重新框架：如果你把它看作另一个机器人，它对我们一直很好。顺便说一句，以自动驾驶为例，无论你如何分析自动驾驶公司提供的统计数据，它们都比人类驾驶员安全得多。我确实相信在 20 或 30 年后，不会太久，我们会回顾过去，就像我们看待童工一样。工业革命后，那是一件正常的事。你会送初中生去工作。今天在第三世界国家仍然如此。背后没有太多情感，不被认为是剥削，因为你别无选择。每个人都会看，我认为 25 或 30 年后我们会说：‘人们当时就是疲劳、受药物影响、极度压力、经历创伤性生活事件，然后跳进车里。’这太疯狂了。对于每个人来说，大家真的应该情感上想一想，仅在美国，明年就有超过 3 万人死于这些事故。斯大林那句老话：一个人的死亡是悲剧，一百万人的死亡是统计数字。我们只是让统计数字从头顶飘过，说：‘哦，是 3 万人。’但如果你和经历过车祸悲剧的家庭谈过，那真是难以置信。突然间，所有对 AI 机器人的恐惧都消失了，你真正看到了对人类的影响，意识到实际上我们开车是没有意义的。没有其他原因，就是因为人们会死。我已经成了一个大——我有特斯拉，我现在一直用自动驾驶。就在几个月前它变得非常好，以前让人紧张，现在就像：‘哇，这好多了。’

I love your point about how self-driving cars are essentially robots. We don't call them that, but they're robots. Absolutely. And you see an autonomous truck wheeling — a robot, a self-driving car doing bad things could be very dangerous already. And so that's a really good reframe that if you just think of it, it's just another robot and it's been really good for us. And by the way, the self-driving thing as an example, whichever way you slice the statistics that are available from self-driving companies, they're supremely more safe than human drivers. And I do believe in 20 or 30 years, not that much longer, we'll look back and we'll kind of be like — it's kind of like we think about child labor. You know, in a post-industrial revolution, that was a normal thing. You would send kids who are in middle school to go work. It happens in third world countries today. There isn't a lot of emotion behind it. It is not considered to be exploitative because you have no choice. Everyone just look and I think we'll look back in 25, 30 years and we're like, 'People were just like tired, under the influence, after extremely stressed, going through a traumatic life experience, and then they jump into a car.' That is crazy. And just for everyone, everyone should really emotionally think about just in the United States over 30,000 people will die in the next year from these accidents. The old Stalin line, it's like a one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. And we just let the statistic kind of go over our head like, 'Oh, it's 30,000 people.' But if you've ever talked to a family of somebody who went through a tragedy like a car accident, it's unbelievable. And suddenly all the fear of AI robots goes away and you really see the human impact and you realize actually us driving doesn't make sense. And it's not for any other reason than literally people die. I've become a huge — I have Tesla and I just use self-driving all the time now. Just like a few months ago it got very good and it used to be nerve-wracking and now it's like, 'Wow, this is much better.'

而且你不是把开车当作工作。想象一下，如果你是一名商业卡车司机，或者在矿井工作，或者在那里——一点智能，一点帮助，在非常危险的任务中，那是不可思议的。我认为人类大脑有些特点，当你提到自动驾驶卡车这样的现实时，人们立刻会说：‘那卡车司机的工作怎么办？’不用说，我们没有足够的人想做那份工作。所以，先把那个事实放在一边。我认为你真正应该关注的事实是，人们死于卡车事故。我们不能因噎废食。所以，我恳请所有广泛思考 AI 特别是物理 AI 的人，始终认识到你的猴子大脑因为几千年的洞穴生活、几十万年的野外和洞穴生活而被编程，当你听到灌木丛中的沙沙声时，你会认为那是蛇，因为我们的祖先就是这样被编程的。所以现在当新事物进入我们的心理时，你的观点不是：‘如果矿井变得自动化，不会失去工作吗？’而是，那些是可怕的工作，人们会死在里面，最好的证据是人们不想做那些工作。这就是最好的证据。

And you're not using driving as a job. Imagine if you're a commercial truck driver or you work in a mine or you work — there a little bit of intelligence, a helping hand in that very dangerous task, it's incredible. And I think there's something about the human brain where when you bring up that reality of like self-driving trucks, the immediate people are like, 'Well, what about the trucking jobs?' Needless to say that we don't have enough people who want to do that job. So, leave that fact to the side. I think the fact that you really focus on is the fact that people die from trucking accidents. We can't throw out the baby with the bathwater. And so, I think I implore everybody who thinks about AI broadly and physical AI specifically to always recognize that your monkey brain is programmed because of thousands of years of being in caves, hundreds of thousands of years of living out in the wild and being in the cave that when you hear the rustle in the bush, you think it's a snake because that's what our ancestors were programmed. So now when something new enters our psyche, your view isn't, 'Well, if mines became autonomous, wouldn't that lose jobs?' It's like, those are awful jobs that people die in and the best evidence is that people don't want to work in them. That's the best evidence.

人们看到 AI 在软件方面以各种方式进步，看到所有这些模型发布，现在它驱动着 100% 的人的代码。你真正酷的地方在于你看到了硬件的这一面。我认为我们生活中最大的变化之一将是机器人四处走动为我们做事。你感觉到我们离日常机器人有多近了吗？

People are seeing AI advance in all these different ways on the software side and they see all these models being released and it's driving 100% of people's code now. What's really cool about you is you see the hardware side of this. And I think one of the biggest changes to our lives will probably be robots walking around doing things for us. Do you have a sense of just how close we are to just robots around us day-to-day?

所以，我认为这里的框架很重要。是一个频谱。我们周围已经有机器人了，比如 Roomba，你睡觉时它们清洁地毯。你煮咖啡时也有机器人，那是一个自动化机器，根据你的输入做一系列事情。所以你真正在问的是，我们多快能沿着这个频谱上升到拥有一个只需很少指导就能完成大量任务的机器人。我的思考方式是，假设我们坐在这里录播客，不是 2026 年，而是 2006 年。你问我同样的问题，关于移动设备。你说，“移动设备要来了。”这是 iPhone 发布前一年，iPhone 是 07 年出的。大家都有翻盖手机。所以我们周围已经有了一些机器人。但问题是，我们什么时候能得到那个能做所有事情的《星际迷航》手机？我想那时我会说，因为我甚至不知道 iPhone 一年后就会来，我会说，“嗯，Lenny，我不知道。也许 1 到 5 年。”而不到 5 年后，Uber、WhatsApp、Instagram、Snapchat 都成了产品，被成千上万的人使用。所以，当你想象坐在 2006 年，为什么你的大脑无法预见到 Instagram 的到来？因为如果没有带应用商店、双摄像头、普遍可用、很多人都有的手机，Instagram 很难被构想出来。而且人们要习惯于社交网络。2006 年，那还很早期。那是 Twitter 之前，Facebook 还不大。MySpace 很大，但那是不同类型的私人通信。所以我的观点是，我认为它可以来得很快。但它的方式和形态很难预测，就像很难预测 Instagram 会出现一样，因为那种特定硬件中的智能——关键是“普遍可用”——将真正影响使用场景。所以我认为早期最明显的用例将是那些性价比最高的。性价比最高的就是自动驾驶汽车，或者智能采矿车。原因是，制造这种巨型挖土机所需的工程在过去 50 到 60 年里已经完成了。所以你只是往里面加入一点智能，并利用公司和人们开发的其他一切。所以我认为，我不是在推销自己的书。我们是一家物理 AI 公司。我仍然相信，我们的大脑在情感上喜欢人形概念，因为我们是猴子。但实际上，更务实地说，就是把智能放进我们周围已经存在的东西里。一旦发生，新的应用就会出现，我认为在 5 到 7 年内我们会开始看到。所以让我们向前看 5 到 7 年，看看现实是什么样子。然后也许我们可以从那里跳向未来。

So, I would think about the framing here matters again. Of a spectrum. So, there are robots around us like Roombas, you know, they clean your carpet while you're sleeping. There's robots around you when you make a coffee. That's an automated machine that is taking an input and doing a bunch of things based on what you need. So, what you're really talking about is how fast can you go up that spectrum to where you have a robot that can take on lots of tasks with little guidance. And the way that I would think about this is, let's say we're sitting in this podcast happening not in 2026, but 2006. And you're asking me the same question about mobile. And you say, "Well, mobile is coming." This is pre-iPhone, which comes out in '07. Everyone has those flip phones. So, we have some robots around us already. But like it's like okay, so what when are we going to get that Star Trek phone that can do everything? And I think at that time I would say, because I don't even know the iPhone is coming a year later, I would say, "Well, Lenny, I don't know. Maybe it's 1 to 5 years." And it's not 5 years later that Uber, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat are all products and they're being consumed by many, many millions of people. So, what happens when you think about sitting in 2006 and why can't your brain figure out that Instagram is coming? Well, Instagram is very hard to even conceive without phones that have an app store, have cameras on both sides, are generally available, that lots of people have it. And the fact that people are comfortable being on social networks. In 2006, it's still an early thing. This is pre-Twitter and Facebook is not that big. And MySpace is, but it's not the same type of private kind of communication. So, the point I'm making is I think it can come pretty fast. But the way and the form factor it'll come is hard to pick, just like it's hard to figure out Instagram's going to happen because the intelligence in that particular type of hardware, which will be generally available, that's the key word, generally available, is really going to impact the use cases. So, I think the most obvious use cases that will come early are going to be use cases where you get the most amount of bang for buck. And the bang for buck is a car that drives itself, or a mining robot which is a mining vehicle which is now intelligent. And the reason is all that engineering required to make this giant machine that moves dirt has already been done over the last 50 or 60 years. So, then you're just putting a little bit of intelligence into it and leveraging everything else that companies and people have developed. So, I think, and I'm not just pitching my own book. I mean, we're a physical AI company. I continue to believe that our brain emotionally loves the humanoid concept because we're monkeys. But actually, more pragmatically, it's just putting intelligence in the things that already exist all around us. And then once that happens, then new applications will emerge which I think we'll talk about in 5 to 7 years, which we'll start seeing. So, let's just move forward 5 to 7 years. And let's see what reality exists. And then maybe we can try to jump into the future from there.

那么，我们就向前推进 5 到 7 年。看看现实是什么样子。然后也许我们可以从那里跳向未来。

So, let's just move forward 5 to 7 years. And let's see what reality exists. And then maybe we can try to jump into the future from there.

我认为总的来说，现在地球上的每一家汽车公司都在开发类似特斯拉 FSD 的产品。每一家汽车公司，无一例外。许多公司都在开发通过廉价传感器套件实现完全自动驾驶的版本。所以，根本区别，简单来说，特斯拉方法和 Waymo 方法的区别是：Waymo 方法使用大量传感器、大量算力和地图；特斯拉版本使用很少的传感器、没有地图或没有高精度地图——我只是泛泛而谈——以及更便宜的算力。特斯拉版本的产品，行业内称为 L2++ 产品，将无处不在，因为它更便宜且不需要高清地图。Waymo 产品在地理受限区域表现更好。所以，快进 5 年，这两种技术都将更加普及。L2++ 和 L4 不仅会在湾区或中国部分地区普及，而是全球范围内。全球都有公司在做这个。所以，我不知道你是否记得，导航系统曾经是汽车上的大件。你要花几千美元，导航系统是每个人都想要的。我们现在正处于 L2++ 系统的那个时刻，人们愿意为半自动驾驶车辆支付几千美元。这不会持续太久。你已经在中国看到这种情况，自动驾驶产品的价格压力将使其接近免费。所以，快进 5 到 7 年，每辆车都有一定程度的自动驾驶。现在你必须在心理上接受这个现实：每个买车的人都会得到 FSD。然后你开始看到一个不同的世界，因为普通人不再怀疑自动驾驶是否会来；他们一直在使用它。他们不再考虑导航。导航系统方面，CarPlay 和 Android Auto 出现了，非常自然。人们会说，“哦，我有手机，插上就行。”CarPlay 和 Android Auto 的革命其实非常巨大。它们为你的汽车带来了免费导航和免费应用，而且相当普及。所以，我认为 5 到 7 年内发生的下一件事是，完全自动驾驶成为每个人的期望。

I think generally speaking, every single car company on the planet right now is working on a product that's like a Tesla FSD product. Every single car company, without exception. Many companies are working on versions of that that will become fully autonomous within a cheap sensor suite. So, the fundamental difference, just to simplify it all, the Tesla approach versus the Waymo approach, just to really keep it simple, is the Waymo approach is lots of sensors and lots of compute and maps. And the Tesla version is very few sensors, no maps, or no high-fidelity maps. I'm just generalizing here. And a cheaper compute for the lack of better word. And the Tesla version of a product, this is in the industry called an L2 plus plus product, is going to be available everywhere because it's literally cheaper and it doesn't require HD maps. The Waymo product functions better in a geographically constrained area. So, you fast forward 5 years, both of these types of technologies will be much more ubiquitous. L2 plus plus and L4 will be much more ubiquitous not only in the Bay Area or in parts of China, but really globally. There are companies working on this globally. So, now do you I don't know if you remember, but nav systems used to be a big deal in cars. You would pay thousands of dollars and nav systems are kind of the thing that everybody wanted. We're at that moment for L2 plus plus systems where people are willing to pay thousands of dollars for a semi-automated vehicle. It will not be a long time. You're already seeing this happen in China where the downward pricing pressure for that autonomous product, for the lack of better word, will become close to free. So, now you fast forward 5 to 7 years and every car has some level of autonomy. So, now you have to mentally live in that reality that everybody who's buying a car, they just get FSD with it. Now you start seeing a different world because now the average person isn't wondering is self-driving going to come; they use it all the time. They don't wonder about navs. And what you have in nav systems is CarPlay emerges and Android Auto emerges and it's very natural. People are like, "Oh, I have my phone. I just plug it in." And there wasn't a big revolution about the CarPlay and Android Auto revolution is actually huge. It brings free navigation and free applications to your car and it's fairly ubiquitous. And so, I think the next thing that happens in 5 to 7 years is then full autonomy becomes a thing that everyone expects.

所以，我认为你会看到伤亡明显减少，因为有一些智能在帮你驾驶。我用消费级车辆作类比，只是为了让人们理解。但在采矿、国防以及每一个有人类操作大型物理机械的垂直领域，都是同样的结构。与机器协作就是未来。当你不再把机器看作有知觉的存在，而是几乎当作一个物理智能体来协助你完成目标时，所释放的生产力是难以想象的。我喜欢像 Moat Book 这样的东西，以及正在发生的 open claw 革命。但我认为，巨大的影响仍然只触及社会很小的一部分。我对影响力的衡量标准是：你去底特律机场，坐在登机口，环顾四周，问有多少人在用 open claw？你可能就是唯一知道那是什么的人。其他人都在过自己的日子。对他们来说，AI 的影响将体现在这个物理世界里。

And so, I think you will see a clear decrease in injuries and death because you have some intelligence helping you drive. Now, I'm using the consumer vehicle analogy just so people can understand it. But this is the same construction in mining, in defense, in every one of these verticals where there are big physical machines that humans are interacting with. Teaming up with that machine is the future. The productivity unlocked from just you looking at a machine not like a sentient being, but almost like a physical agent of something you're trying to accomplish unlocks things that are very hard to think about. I love things like Moat Book and the open claw revolution that's happening. But I think the big impact is still such a small part of society. My barometer of impact is: you go to the Detroit airport, sit at a gate, look around, and ask how many people here are using open claw? You might be the only person who knows what that is. Everybody else is living their lives. To them, the impact of AI is going to be in this physical world.

我是 open claw 的皈依者。这就对了。完美。很快会上播客，所以我弄了些龙虾爪。

I'm a convert to open claw. There you go. Perfect. Coming on the pod soon, so I got some lobster claws.

是的，我认为 AI 在未来 5 到 10 年的真正影响将体现在农业、采矿、建筑和自动驾驶卡车上。那才是真正产生影响的领域。我喜欢这些平台上发生的事情，但坦白说，它仍然局限于开发者和社会中非常小的一部分人。

Yes, I think the real impact of AI in the next 5 to 10 years really is going to be in farming, in mining, in construction, in self-driving trucks. That's where you're going to have a real impact. I love the stuff happening on these platforms, but it's still segregated to frankly developers and a very small part of society.

我本来没打算在这里花这么多时间，但这非常有趣，我认为让人们听听像你这样的人对未来的看法很重要。每个人都在想：发生了什么？我的未来会怎样？工作问题真的很有意思。这个播客最近出现的一个话题是，人们害怕 AI 会抢走他们的工作，但实际上 AI 来得正是时候，可以拯救我们，因为人口在下降，人们在老龄化，我们需要一些东西来帮助我们。我知道这是你和 Mark 讨论过的事情。请帮助我们更好地理解 AI 不会抢走我们的工作，反而会拯救我们。

I wasn't planning to spend so much time here, but this is extremely interesting and I think it's important for people to hear from folks like you about where things are headed. Everyone is just like, what is happening? What is going to be my future? The jobs piece is really interesting. A thread that has emerged on this podcast recently is that people are afraid AI will take their jobs, but in reality AI is coming just in time to save us because populations are declining, people are aging, and we need something to help us. I know this is something you and Mark talked about. Help us feel better about how AI isn't going to take our jobs and actually going to save us.

老实说，这些行业需要自主性。来得再快也不为过。这不像人们还在争抢那些卡车司机的工作。看看农民，农民的平均年龄在 50 多岁，大约 58 岁。这意味着 10 年后会怎样？很多农民将要退休，如果还没退休的话，20 年后问题就更大了。顺便说一句，每个垂直领域都是如此。我的假设是，不像人们说的麦当劳招不到人或者当地矿场招不到人，人还在。我认为只是权衡不再值得了。在 80 年代和 90 年代，做长途卡车司机意味着家庭要牺牲，父亲连续几天几周不在家。今天，同一个工薪家庭可以做出决定，说，你知道吗，我会为 Uber 或 DoorDash 开车。我愿意这样做，因为我可以关掉那个应用去接孩子。我优先考虑这个。这就是现实世界中这种智能革命将要填补的空白。我不相信整个行业突然消失并被自动化的未来，主要是因为用机器人取代整个行业的现实仍然太复杂。总有一天会发生，但不会很快。到那时整个社会都会不同。用工业革命作为一个好的例子。如果我不是 AI 生态系统中的一员，并且有这种焦虑，读历史书是理解社会如何处理这个问题的好方法。有很多文献，因为工业革命不是发生在基督教黎明时期，那时没多少人写作和阅读。过去 150 年里有很多人在写作和阅读。你可以读到工业革命中受影响的人和受益的人。总的来说，这是一个非常积极的经历。这并不意味着没有负面影响。我们应该减轻负面影响。但我们不能做的是踩技术刹车。那样的话，美国经济最终会停滞，这对劳动力市场最底层的影响远大于其他任何人。在试图帮助最边缘化的人时，我们实际上伤害了他们最深。欧洲和美国之间的统计数据已经非常明确。在过去十年里，美国经济增长速度要快得多，而这种增长并非来自密歇根州底特律。它来自山景城、桑尼维尔、湾区。换句话说，这是因为新的前沿技术。所以，因为害怕意外后果而踩下前沿技术的刹车，实际上会对我们最想帮助的人产生真正的预期后果。现实非常根本。在一个不考虑普通工人和普通美国人的未来里，我们会有更大的问题。所以我们需要一个考虑到这一点的解决方案。

Honestly speaking, these industries need autonomy. It couldn't come soon enough. This is not like people are fighting for those trucking jobs. If you look at farmers, the average age of a farmer is in their late 50s, 58 or so. What does that mean in 10 years? Many of those farmers are going to be retiring if they're not already retired, and in 20 years we have an even bigger problem. By the way, every vertical is like that. My hypothesis is that unlike what people say about McDonald's can't hire or the mine locally can't hire, the people are still here. I think the trade-off is just not worth it anymore. In the 1980s and 1990s, doing the long haul trucking job meant the family had to sacrifice, the father not being there for days and weeks on end. Today, that same working class family can make that decision and say, you know what, I will drive for Uber or DoorDash. I'm willing to do that because I can turn that app off and pick up my kid. I prioritize that. That is where this kind of intelligence revolution in the real world is going to fill those gaps. Rather than an entire industry suddenly gone and automated, I don't believe that future mainly because the realities of replacing an entire industry with robots is still too complex. One day it will happen, but not anytime soon. The entire society will be different by that point. Use the Industrial Revolution as a good version of that. If I'm somebody who is not in the AI ecosystem and I have this anxiety, reading history books is a great way to understand how society deals with this. There's a lot of literature because the Industrial Revolution didn't happen in the dawn of Christianity where not many people were writing and reading. Lots of people were writing and reading in the last 150 years. You can read both the people who were impacted by the Industrial Revolution and those who benefited from it. By and large, it's a very positive experience. That doesn't mean there aren't downsides. We should mitigate the downsides. But the thing we can't do is pump the brakes on technology. The issue then is the American economy really ends up stuttering, and that impacts the lowest end of the labor market way more than anybody else. In the attempt to help the most marginalized, we actually hurt them the most. The statistics between Europe and America have been pretty explicit. In the last decade, the American economy has grown at a much higher pace, and that growth hasn't come from Detroit, Michigan. It has come from Mountain View, Sunnyvale, the Bay Area. That's another way of saying it's because of new frontier technologies. So, putting brakes on frontier technologies because we're afraid of unintended consequences will actually have real intended consequences on the people we're trying to help most. The reality is very fundamental. In a future that does not take the average worker and the average person in America into account, we'll have much bigger problems. So we need a solution that takes that into account.

但解决方案不是踩刹车，说 AI 不好、前沿技术不好或技术不好，或者任何你不喜欢的东西。我认为那会带来非常非常糟糕的后果。我们不踩刹车的原因之一就是对中国的恐惧和与中国的竞争。最近的 Nanchaku 机器人就是一个例子，让人惊呼‘哦，糟了’。而你对中国的威胁程度以及他们的做法有一种反传统的看法。

But that solution isn't just pump the brakes, AI is bad, or frontier technology is bad, or technology is bad, or whatever, you know, whatever thing that you don't like. I think that that'll have really, really bad consequences. One of the reasons that we don't pump the brakes is just fear of China and competition with China. The Nanchaku robots being a recent example of like, 'Oh shit.' And you have kind of a contrarian take on just how much of a threat China is and how they're approaching things.

简而言之，我们公司最近读了一本书《华为之屋》，这是一本非常棒、有趣的书。华为是一家非常了不起的公司，因为它做出了伟大的技术。但在华为工作的几十万人中，大约四分之一是共产党员。华为的目标不是增长利润或股东价值，它是一家私人公司，实际上是国家的延伸。所以，华为这个名字的字面意思就是‘中国的雄心’。想象一下，如果你有一家公司叫‘MAGA’，公司里一半或四分之一的人属于某个政党，他们说‘我们的目标不是盈利，而是扩张’，那它就不再是一家公司了，而是别的东西。所以，我认为当我们美国人谈论中国时，我们错误地把对市场和公司的理解套用到了中国身上。我们以为华为做手机，就一定像苹果一样。但事实并非如此，它们完全不像。因此，我恳请每一个思考中国问题的人，尤其是那些焦虑的美国人，首先认识到：你不是在拿公司与公司比较。这不是苹果对苹果，而是非常非常不同的东西。所以，不要认为 OpenAI 在跟 DeepSeek 竞争，而要说 OpenAI 在跟中国政府竞争。不要认为苹果在跟华为竞争，而要说苹果在跟中国政府竞争。甚至可以把‘中国政府’这个词去掉，但关键是，它不是一个以盈利为目的、私人拥有、独立的一群人合作开发产品推向市场的组织。这是第一件非常重要的事：你不能把中国当作另一个美国、另一个欧洲或别的什么。第二，如果你的目标不是盈利，你可以做非常了不起的研究，而且可能极具吸引力。但正如我们所见，如果系统不可持续，那它也不是一家可持续的公司。我举一个鲜明的例子：中国电动汽车被广泛称赞为非常有趣的产品，对吧？你经常听到一些相当肤浅的分析说：‘看中国多好，看慕尼黑、底特律、东京、首尔这些全球汽车中心多差。’美国有一家类似中国电动汽车的公司叫 Rivian。它做出了很棒的产品，但生产这些产品亏损了很多钱，因此公司估值不高。如果我说湾区前 50 或前 100 的公司，我不确定 Rivian 能上榜。这不是说产品不好或 Rivian 的人无能或不努力，只是这个行业本身很难。电动汽车行业很难。那么，我们怎么能一边说‘中国电动汽车公司多棒，本土公司多差’？只是因为本土公司被当作企业来评估，它必须盈利，因为不盈利就被公开投资者打压。而另一边甚至不是一家公司。如果我们做苹果对苹果的比较，美国只要造出好的电动汽车——特斯拉和其他所有公司加起来，而且我们不在乎利润——我认为美国也能拿出一些非常棒的产品，让人惊叹的产品。所以，这种比较完全错了，我认为这造成了误解。然后，也许最哲学的问题是：中国能成功，是否意味着美国必须失败？反之亦然？如果你相信开放自由的市场，你就相信每个人都能在这些市场中成功，这一点在过去 100 多年里已被证明。我认为我们正在经历的是：中国如何在这个生态系统中发挥作用？因为我刚说了开放自由的市场，而中国不是开放自由的市场。但这不一定意味着你们必须是对抗关系。这当然不意味着中国无能，也不意味着它不值得我们的关注和重视。但这也绝不是一对一的比较。我认为我们应该非常谨慎，不要暗示这是一对一的比较。顺便说一句，这种 5 分钟的解释永远无法传达给坐在密歇根州底特律机场等飞机的普通人。他们接收到的信息就是‘中国坏’。但事实并非如此，没那么简单，要复杂得多。

The summary version of this is I think the way we recently read as a company, we read this book House of Huawei, which is just a really great, interesting book. And Huawei is a really amazing company for the reason that it makes great technology. But the couple hundred thousand people that work at Huawei, about a quarter of them are members of the Communist Party. And Huawei's goal is not to grow profits or shareholders, it's a private company, it's really an extension of the state. So, literally the name Huawei means China's ambition. So, imagine if you had a company called, you know, MAGA, and half of the company or a quarter of the company was a certain political party, and they said, 'Our goal isn't to make profits and our goal is just the expansion of it.' It's not even a company anymore. It's something else, right? And so I think we incorrectly when we specifically speak of Americans we think about China, we impart our understanding of markets and companies onto China. So we think Huawei, since they make phones, they must be just like Apple. It's like no, no, no, no. Actually, they're not like Apple at all. And so I think the first thing I would implore everybody who thinks about China, especially with anxiety in America, is you're not comparing companies to companies. This is not apples to apples. This is very, very different. And so imagine instead of thinking OpenAI is competing against, you know, Deep Seek, you say OpenAI is competing against the Chinese government. Instead of Apple competing against Huawei, Apple's competing against the Chinese government. And you can even remove the word 'Chinese Government' is the best word to define what this organization is, but it's not a for-profit, privately owned, independent group of people who are working on projects together to build products to market. So that's the first very important thing. You cannot treat China like another America or another Europe or another whatever. Number two is if your goal isn't to make profits, you can do incredible research, and it can be extremely compelling. But like we've seen, if the system is not sustainable, that's also not a company that's not sustainable. Let me give a very stark example of that. Chinese EVs are really lauded as being this exceptionally interesting product, right? And you constantly get the stream of I would say fairly shallow analysis which says, 'Look how good China is. Look how bad Munich, Detroit, Tokyo, Seoul are, the other epicenters for automotive globally.' There is a Chinese EV-like company in America. It's called Rivian. Makes great products, but they lose a lot of money making those products, and therefore the company is not very highly valued. I think if you said top 50 or top 100 companies in the Bay Area, I'm not sure Rivian would even make that list. And it's not that the products are bad or the people at Rivian are incompetent or they're not working hard. It's just the business is a tough business. The EV business in automotive is a tough business. So, how can we hold these realities so we say, 'Look how amazing these Chinese EV companies are and look how bad the home team is.' It's just because the home team is being assessed for being a business. It has to make profits and because it doesn't, it gets hammered by public investors. The other thing is not even a company. Now, if we did apples to apples, you see this America just has to build great EVs. That means Tesla and everybody else combined and we don't care about profits, I think America would field some very good products and they would be wow products. So, the comparisons are really really off and I think that creates a misunderstanding. I think then the maybe the most philosophical question. Can China succeed and does that mean America has to fail or vice versa? If you believe in open and free markets, you believe everybody can succeed in those markets and that's been proven for over 100 years. And I think what we're experiencing right now is how does China play in that ecosystem because I said open and free markets and those are not open and free markets. And so, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have an antagonistic relationship. It certainly doesn't mean that China is incompetent and it certainly doesn't mean that it doesn't warrant our attention and our focus. But, it's also not a one-to-one comparison. I think we should be very careful in implying it's a one-to-one comparison. And by the way, that like 5-minute explanation is never going to get to the average person sitting at an airport in Detroit, Michigan waiting for their flight. They just all they consume is China bad. Like it's not like that. It's not that simple. It's way more nuanced.

本期节目由 lovable 赞助。他们不仅是历史上增长最快的公司，我也经常使用，强烈推荐。如果你曾有过一个应用创意却不知从何下手，lovable 就是为你准备的。Lovable 让你只需通过 AI 聊天就能构建可运行的应用和网站。然后你可以自定义、添加自动化，并部署到在线域名。它非常适合营销人员快速搭建工具、产品经理原型新想法、以及创始人启动下一个业务。与无代码工具不同，lovable 不只是静态页面，它构建具有真实功能的完整应用，而且速度很快。过去需要几周、几个月甚至几年的事情，现在一个周末就能完成。所以，如果你一直有一个想法，现在是时候把它变成现实了。免费开始使用 lovable.dev。那就是 lovable.dev。那么，你最近决定加入 Twitter，发了第一条推文。你的第一条推文就是‘你好，我要开始发推了’。那条推文获得了大约 200 万次浏览。Elon 回复了你，Marc Andreessen 引用转发并说‘这是最棒的 AI CEO，没人知道。关注他获取免费 Alpha。’著名投资人 Elad Gil 形容你是 AI 领域最成功、最安静的公司。对我来说，这很有趣，因为大多数创始人被告知要公开构建、建立粉丝群、大声说话、走出去、不停地谈论你在做什么。而你恰恰相反。

This episode is brought to you by lovable. Not only are they the fastest growing company in history. I use it regularly and I could not recommend it more highly. If you've ever had an idea for an app, but didn't know where to start, lovable is for you. Lovable lets you build working apps and websites by simply chatting with AI. Then you can customize it, add automations, and deploy it to a live domain. It's perfect for marketers spinning up tools, product managers prototyping new ideas, and founders launching their next business. Unlike no-code tools, lovable isn't about static pages. It builds full apps with real functionality and it's fast. What used to take weeks, months, or years, you can now do over a weekend. So, if you've been sitting on an idea, now is the time to bring it to life. Get started for free at lovable.dev. That's lovable.dev. So, you decided to join Twitter recently, put out your first tweet. Your first tweet was just like, 'Hello, I'm going to start tweeting.' That tweet got like 2 million views. Elon replied to you. Marc Andreessen quote tweeted it and said, 'This is the best AI CEO nobody knows. Follow for the free alpha.' Elad Gil, famed investor, describes you as the most successful, most quiet company in AI. And to me, this is really interesting because most founders are told build in public, build a following, be loud, get out there, talk all the time about what you're doing. You did the opposite.

你一直非常低调，保持沉默，埋头建设，然后后来才决定，‘好了，现在是时候讲讲我们的故事了。’所以，我觉得这种反叙事非常有趣，而且我认为会激励很多创始人，让他们不必觉得必须这样做。你保持沉默然后开始的哲学是什么？

You were very under the radar, stayed quiet, build, build, build, and then decided later, 'Okay, now it's time to talk about our story.' So, I think this counter narrative is really interesting and I think will inspire a lot of founders to not feel like they have to do this. What was your philosophy of just staying quiet and then starting?

是的，这是个很好的观点。首先，这是有意的，而且如果由我决定，我们会永远这样做。我们深受像伯克希尔·哈撒韦这样的公司启发，而不是硅谷的宠儿。我会告诉你为什么我改变了看法，但在一些创始人没有真正思考就立即采纳这个建议之前：我能这样做是因为我在生态系统中已经知名。我亲自认识这些人。所以我不需要建立一个引人注目的品牌来让人们记住我、想到我。所以如果你——如果是我做前两家公司，它们在我真正成为 YC 之前知名度低得多。所以我们所有的公司价值观可以归结为两个词：激进实用主义。所以在采纳建议之前，确保它适用于你的情况。原因之一是，我们的投资者兼朋友 Naval 说，名声本身就像一种工具，而且很强大。如果你没有网络，但能获得追随者，那是招募人才、投资者和客户的绝佳方式。但对我们来说，我认为 10 多年前这不是硬性要求。另一件事是，我觉得 Peter 和我——有句老话说，生活就像你做了事然后合理化你的行为，对吧？所以从根本上说，Peter 和我从公开活动中得不到很多情感满足。如果我要做业余心理学家，试图找到理性观点（专注于客户和产品）之外的根源：你每做一分钟播客、每发一条 X 帖子、每写一篇公开文章，你就没有把有限的时间花在客户和产品上。最终，只有这些才能产生结果。但 2026 年的现实是，即使像我们这样知名的公司，或者像我这样在生态系统中知名的人，你仍然希望传播更广泛的信息。这就是我在 X 上谈论的一点。所以这绝对是反主流的，但并非为了反主流而反主流。它反映了我们自己的心理。然后我想补充一点：我是在移民家庭长大的。我小时候从巴基斯坦来到美国。名字有点奇怪，在密歇根州沃伦市的底特律长大。当你觉得自己处于社会边缘，可能不在主流中时——这对某些人有共鸣，但不是所有人——你会对主流非常怀疑，因为你长期处于外部。我认为很多创始人的心理都可以追溯到这种被排斥的感觉。然后你发现自己成了 YC 的 COO，而‘我是局外人’的叙事——我不知道还有什么比 YC 的 COO 更‘内部’的了，对吧？所以我认为在我的职业生涯中，这种调和必须发生，也许这只是个奇怪的事情。当我与 Marc Andreessen 交谈时，他强烈推动我上线，或者 Elad 或其他任何人，他们的观点是把你的包袱和创伤放在背景中，更务实地思考。务实之处在于，无论我是否喜欢做这类事情，从根本上说，它有助于传播信息。信息可以是非常微小和短视的，比如物理 AI 和机器变得智能，或者更宏大的，比如我们正在经历的社会根本性变革。我有幸看到了完整的经济光谱。我看到了两端的极端情况，真的。像 Marc 这样与我们公司关系密切的人说，‘这些想法值得传播，而不仅仅是为了推广你的公司。’我实际上可以支持这一点，即关于思想以及技术变革对社会影响的辩论和讨论。所以，我就在这里了。

Yeah, it's a great point. So, number one, it was intentional and I think if it was up to me, we would do that forever. I think we're very much inspired by folks more like a Berkshire Hathaway and less like, let's say a Silicon Valley darling. And I'll tell you why I changed my views, but before some founders go and take that advice immediately without really thinking about it: I can do that because I'm known in the ecosystem. I know these folks personally. So I don't need to have a brand out there that is getting a lot of attention to remember me and think about me. So if you're, if I'm doing my first two companies, they were a lot less known before I really became a YC. So all of our company values can be reduced to these two words: radical pragmatism. So before you take the advice, make sure it applies to your situation. One of the reasons, and Naval who's one of our investors and a friend says, fame itself is like a tool and it's powerful. Now if you don't have a network and you can get a following, that's a fantastic way to recruit people to your company, to recruit investors to your mission, and of course customers. But for us, I think that wasn't a hard requirement 10 plus years ago. The other thing is, I think Peter and I, the old saying about life is kind of like you do things and then you rationalize the thing that you do, right? So I think fundamentally Peter and I, we don't get a lot of emotional satisfaction out of doing very public things. And if I was really to play armchair psychologist and try to get to the root of why beyond the rational view which is focus on your customers, focus on the product. Every minute you're doing a podcast, every minute you're doing an X post, every minute you're writing something for public consumption, you're not focusing your very limited time on your customers and your product. And ultimately, that's the only thing that's going to produce and yield results. But the reality of the situation today, in 2026, is even a company like us that's known, or somebody like me is known in the ecosystem, you still want to get that broader message out. And that's what I talk a little bit about on X. So it is definitely contrarian, but it's not just contrarian for contrarian's sake. It plays a little bit of our own psychology. And then I would say just to finish that thought: I grew up, I'm an immigrant. I came to the US from Pakistan when I was a kid. Have a little bit of a weird name and I grew up in Detroit, in Warren, Michigan, specifically for all those at home. And when you feel that you're a little bit on the edge of society or you're not maybe in the mainstream, and this resonates with some people and not as much with everybody. You feel very skeptical of the mainstream because you're just on the outside for so long. And I think you can trace a bunch of founders' psychology to this feeling of being an outcast, actually. And so then you find yourself in a situation where you're the YC COO, and the narrative of 'I'm an outsider' is like, I don't know if there's anything more inside than being the YC COO, right? So I think that reconciliation over my career also has had to happen, which is like maybe that's just a weird kind of thing. And so when I talked to Marc Andreessen, who really pushed me to go online, or Elad or whoever it is, their view is leave your baggage and your trauma in the background, and let's think more pragmatically. And the pragmatic thing here is whether I like to do these types of things or not, fundamentally, it helps get the message out. And the message can be something very small and myopic, like what's happening in physical AI and machines become intelligent, or much larger, which is what's happening in society through this fundamental change that we're going through. I've had the rare privilege of seeing the full economic spectrum. I've seen the extreme ends of both sides and truly I mean that. And so somebody like Marc, who is close to our company, says, 'Well, those are some ideas that are worth getting out beyond just promoting your company or something like that.' And that I actually can get behind, which is the debate and discussion about ideas and what's happening to our society because of these technical changes. And so, here I am.

太棒了。好的，我想顺着几个线索聊下去。一个是你，正如你所说，曾是 Y Combinator 的 COO。你近距离观察了很多创业公司。这是你自己的第三家创业公司。我听到你谈到的一点是，成功的公司几乎总是很早就显示出 traction。很多创始人会说，‘不，继续努力奋斗，也许 4 年后我们会成为下一个 Figma 或 Notion。我们会搞定的。’你的经验是什么？对那些早期没有看到 traction 的创始人，你有什么建议？

Amazing. Okay, so there's a few threads I want to follow there. One is you were, as you said, COO at Y Combinator. You saw a lot of startups up close. You had this is your third startup on your own. Something that I hear you talk about is that successful companies almost always show traction very early. A lot of founders here like, 'No, just keep trying fighting and maybe we'll be the next Figma Notion 4 years in. We'll figure it out.' What's your experience there and what's your advice to founders who aren't seeing traction early?

细微差别。我的意思是，如果我再创办一家公司，我会叫它‘细微差别’。好吧，我认为你说的没错。我仍然相信这一点。我认为好公司往往很早就有了 traction，然后持续十年以上。对于那些正在挣扎的创始人，比如说如果你在听，你的公司大约两年了，你可能在建设、融资和打造第一款产品方面遇到困难，无论是通过留存率还是收入，消费者或企业都真正喜欢的产品。两年是一个困难时期。我会用的启发式方法是：如果我从市场获得的信息没有让我走上越来越具体的道路，我会考虑重置。

Nuances. I mean, if I was starting another company, I'd call it Nuance. All right, so I think what you're saying is correct. I continue to believe that. I think good companies tend to have traction fairly early and then just sustain it for a decade plus. To the founders that are toiling, let's say if you're listening and you're about 2 years into your company and you're maybe having a tough time building, getting money, and building that first product that consumers or businesses really love either through retention or dollars. Two years is a difficult time. The heuristic that I would use is: if I'm not, if the information I'm getting from the market is not informing me on a more and more specific path, I would consider resetting.

我所说的重置，很多时候——戴着 YC 的帽子看过成百上千家公司——是指联合创始人关系，就像房子的地基一样，根本不对。想象你建了栋房子，每次放点水上去，它就滑下桌子摔到地上。你还要一直调桌子吗？可能地基才是错的。整栋房子都歪了。地基不仅可能是你的联合创始人，也可能是你所在的市场，你的人生阶段，以及你愿意为成功付出的努力程度。所以公司失败的原因有很多。你必须能够说，‘我不知道原因是什么，我只能硬重置了。’

And what I mean by reset is oftentimes, and this is wearing my YC hat seeing hundreds and thousands of companies, is oftentimes the co-founding, like literally the foundation upon which the house is built, is not correct. It's like imagine you built this house and every time you put a couple of water on it, it slides off the table and falls on the ground. And you keep adjusting the table? It's like maybe the foundation is actually wrong. The whole house is off kilter. And the foundation might not only be your co-founders, it could be the market that you're in. It could be the phase of life that you're in and the amount of effort that you're willing to put into that thing in order to make it successful. So there's a bunch of reasons that a company can fail. And you have to be able to somehow say, 'I don't know what is the reason. I'm just going to have to hard reset here.'

我想告诉创始人们——我在 Applied 也常说——创始人本身就是一个阶层。在 Applied Intuition 工作过的人现在开始创办自己的公司。我们有一千多名工程师，随着时间的推移，他们开始创立自己的公司。我对他们说：想象一下，第一次创业的头三年，结果为零。摆脱它一定会成功的期望。你是个手艺人。如果这是个木工播客，你说你做的第一张桌子摇摇晃晃，你不会说‘去 Crate & Barrel 上班吧’，你会说‘哦，那是第一张桌子，我们继续努力’。做创始人本身就是一块肌肉。你要锻炼那块肌肉。但很多创始人，尤其是早期，给自己施加了巨大的压力，想一鸣惊人，结果反而错过了第一轮真正得到的东西：学习和锻炼那块肌肉。第二次、第三次也是。我的第三家公司是最成功的，这并非偶然。这种情况屡见不鲜。有些基金几乎只投连续创业者，对吧？就是这个原因。

One thing I would tell founders, and I tell a lot at Applied, is creating a founder class in itself. People who work at Applied Intuition are now starting their own companies. We have a thousand plus engineers and over time they're starting their own firms. And I say to all of them: just imagine the first time you're going to do a startup, for the first three years, it's a zero. Just rid yourself of the expectation that it's going to be successful. You're a craftsperson. If this were a woodworking podcast and you said the first table you built was wobbly, you wouldn't say, 'Go work at Crate & Barrel.' You'd say, 'Oh, that's the first table. We're going to keep at it.' Being a founder is its own muscle. And you want to exercise that muscle. But I think a lot of founders, especially earlier in their founding career, put such incredible pressure on themselves to make it great out of the gate that they actually miss the thing you're getting in that first round, which is learning and building that muscle. And the second and third time. I think it's not random that my third company is the most successful company. I think you see that more often than not. There are funds which are almost exclusively focused on multi-time founders, right? For this reason.

我喜欢这个建议的一点是，最好的想法往往来自你期望很低的时候，你只是在玩，在捣鼓，而不是‘我要打造下一个伟大的谷歌’。你只是在享受乐趣。我就是这样找到了我现在所处的这个世界、这条道路，Open Collective 就是一个很好的例子。我觉得这个建议之所以难以接受，是因为如果你听到这些，而你正处于所谓的战争中，你会想，‘这些人到底在说什么享受乐趣？这很难。’所以你必须在脑子里同时持有两种对立或冲突的观点：这件事非常非常重要，你应该全力以赴；同时它也没那么重要。这真的很难调和并保持平衡。你创办这家公司时保持低调的方式，我认为很有帮助，你没有……

What I love about that advice is often the best ideas come from when you have low expectations, you're just playing around, you're just tinkering, you're not like 'I'm going to build the next great Google.' It's just you having fun. And that's like how I found this world that I'm in right now, this path, and Open Collective is a good example of that. I think what makes that advice so difficult is if you hear this and you're in the proverbial war, you're like, 'What the hell are these people talking about having fun? This is hard.' So you have to hold these contrasting or conflicting views in your head: it's deeply very, very important, and you should give it your all, and it's also not that important. And that's a really hard thing to reconcile and keep in balance. And the way that you approached this company where you stayed quiet like that, I think helps a lot where you're not...

完全同意。即使在 YC，当我成为 COO 时，我对当时的总裁 Sam Altman 说，‘我们一年内先别宣布这件事。’因为如果合伙人不想让我当 COO，那就不算成功。我不想承受公众审视的压力：‘你怎么只当了 6 个月 COO？’我认为作为创始人，你必须对自己非常诚实。那些事情很重要。别人怎么看你很重要，它会影响你自己。成为焦点……我常说，在融资之前、在招人之前，转型很容易。没人在乎。一旦你融了资，更重要的是，一旦你招了员工，员工是加入一个非常具体的使命的。你走进办公室，面对 10 个人说，‘伙计们，结果发现这是错的。我们要换个方向。’想象一下如果这是战争：‘搞什么？我们正在攻打那座山，你现在说那座山不重要？你怎么知道下一座山重要？’作为领导者，你会失去很多信誉。这不仅仅是表面上的可信度问题，而是很实际的。当你非常公开时，创业公司就成了你的身份。然后突然之间，你不得不承认那件事其实不对。所以这是我们公司的核心价值观之一。公司早期有句话：‘我们最好的工作是独自安静完成的。’我深信这一点。所以创始人，我会这么想。但这是出于务实的原因，不仅仅是因为低调很酷。它能让你更平静地工作。

Absolutely. Even at YC when I became COO, I told Sam Altman, who was president, 'Let's not announce this for like a year.' Because if the partners don't want me to be COO, it's not a successful thing. I don't have the pressure of public scrutiny: 'Why were you COO only for 6 months?' I think you have to be very honest with yourself as a founder. Those things matter. What people think about you matters and it impacts yourself. Having the spotlight on you... I always say it's very easy to pivot before you raise money and before you have employees. Nobody cares. The moment you raise money, and more importantly, the moment you hire employees, employees join a very specific mission. And you go into the office and there's 10 of them, and you say, 'Guys, turns out this is wrong. We're going in a different direction.' Imagine if this was war: 'What the hell? We were attacking that hill and now you say that hill is not important? How do you know the next hill is important?' And as a leader, you lose a lot of credibility. It's not only the superficial issue of being a credible leader; it's a practical nature. When you're very public, the startup becomes your identity. And then suddenly you have to reconcile that actually that thing is not correct. So it's one of our core values in the company. Early in the company we have this line: 'Our best work is done alone and quietly.' I deeply believe that. And so founders, I would think of it that way. But it's for pragmatic reasons. It's not just because it's cool to be under the radar. It allows you to work in a bit more peace.

我很喜欢你分享的这些核心价值观。最后这个‘最好的工作是独自安静完成的’，我完全同意。‘激进实用主义’是你之前分享的另一个。还有别的吗？这些都是珍宝。

I love these core values you've shared so far. This last one, 'the best work is done alone quietly,' I'm so on board with that. 'Radical pragmatism' is the other one you shared earlier. Are there a couple more? These are gems.

是的，那些是元价值观。我们有非常具体的运营原则。这是我能给创始人的最实用的建议。所以，当你有了一点势头时，就可以制定你的价值观。我这么说是因为在足够早的时候……制定价值观的方式不是像哲学家一样问‘我们应该有什么价值观？’不。你应该弄清楚我们为什么成功。把成功的五到十个原因写下来。那些就成了你的价值观。我们就是这么做的。第一个是速度高于一切。我们就是要快。第二个是永远不让客户失望。技术精通。高产出很重要。一直到不那么明显的，比如‘多笑’。从公司成立之初，这就是一个核心价值观。当你在做高强度的事情时，如果你没有保持脚踏实地、拥有全局观的能力，笑声和幽默也是获得微妙反馈的一种方式。这比直接说‘这很烂’要稍微不同。

Yeah, those are like the meta values. We have very specific operating principles. And this is as tactical as advice I can give to founders. So, we can come up with your values when you're getting a little bit of traction. The reason I say that is early enough where you... and the way you come up with the values is not like, 'What values should we have as philosophers?' No. You should figure out why are we being successful. Literally write down the five to ten things that are the reasons you are being successful. And those become your values. So we did that. Our first one was going to speed above everything. It was us being fast. The second one is, never disappoint the customer. Technical mastery. High output matters. All the way down to ones that are not obvious like 'laugh a lot.' That's been a core value from the beginning of the company's history. When you're working in intense things, if you don't have the ability to keep grounded, have perspective, laughter and humor also is a way to get subtle feedback. That's slightly different than saying 'this sucks.'

你可以说，“这不是最好的。”所以你实际上是在创造一个框架，让员工学习如何在公司内彼此相处。如今，价值观确实像指导原则一样指引着我们。每周的新员工会议上，彼得和我都会见所有新成员，我们几乎总是在详细深入地讨论价值观。另一个价值观：一半的工作是跟进。就是做笔记并跟进。这就是业务本身，没有比这更复杂的了。多笑是我最喜欢的新公司价值观。

You can say, "It's not the best." And so you're really creating the framework in which people are learning how to behave with each other within the company. Today the values really serve us as guiding principles. In new team meetings every week, Peter and I meet all the new team members and we're almost always just talking about the values in some level of detail and depth. Another value: half the work is follow-up. Just taking notes and following up. That is the business. It's not more complex than that. Laugh a lot is my new favorite company value.

听起来是个很棒的工作场所。最后一点，Stripe Press 刚出了一本书，关于维护工作，以及维护部分是多么有价值但被低估。

Sounds like a wonderful place to work. And then on the last piece there, there's this book that just came out by Stripe Press about maintenance and how valuable and underappreciated the maintenance part of work is.

完全同意。如果要从我的理念中提炼一点，我们一开始讨论为什么“推销”有那么多负面含义，但为什么不推销呢？因为一切都有成本。如果你专注于手艺，把产品做得非常好，真正倾听客户，你成功的可能性就大得多。然后你总是可以去规模化。其中一部分就是你提到的维护。我的根在汽车工程，那是一项质量练习。你是在大规模制造非常复杂的机器。人们说火箭非常复杂，但你每几天才发射一次火箭。你每 30 秒制造一辆汽车，极其便宜，全球竞争。所以你深入到工厂运行的细微之处。工厂关乎安全和维护。没有太多复杂的事情。运营强大意味着关注少数几件事并把它们做好。我相信这句格言：不能指挥自己的人不适合指挥他人。那个维护方面就是其中一部分。如果你维护好自己和自己的工作，你就维护好了你的团队、公司，产品就会从那个系统中产生。我认为很多创始人没有把他们的公司看作一个系统或机器。我恳请你这样做，因为那样你就会专注于机器的工艺、构建它、让它更卫生、更调校良好。就像那些热爱汽车的人痴迷于维护，他们会清洁驾驶座下面。作为一个自己洗车的人，没人会看那里，但这是出于同样的关心工艺的精神。既然时间有限，很难既关心 X 又确保公司卫生。在公司不同阶段有不同理由做不同事情，但这就是精神。

Absolutely. I think if there's a takeaway from my philosophy, we started the conversation around why being promotional has all these negative connotations, but why not be promotional? It's because there are costs to everything. If you focus on the craft and making the product really good and really listening to your customers, you have a much higher likelihood of success. Then you can always go and scale. Part of that is the maintenance you're talking about. My roots are in automotive engineering, which is an exercise in quality. You're building very complex machines at scale. People talk about rockets being really complex, but you only send up a rocket once every couple of days. You make a car every 30 seconds, extremely cheap, globally competitive. So you get into the nuance of how a factory runs. A factory is about safety and maintenance. There's not a lot of complex things. Operationally strong means keeping an eye on a handful of things and doing them really well. I believe in the adage: a man who cannot command himself is not fit to command others. That maintenance aspect is part of it. If you maintain yourself and your work, you maintain your team, the company, and the products come out of that system. I think a lot of founders don't think about their company as a system or a machine. I would implore you to do that, because then you focus on the craft of the machine, building it, making it more hygienic and well-tuned. Just like people who love cars obsess about maintenance, they detail underneath the driver seat. As somebody who details my own cars, nobody's going to look at that, but it's under the same ethos of caring about the craft. Since you have limited time, it's hard to care about X and also make sure the company is hygienic. There are different reasons at different points to do different things, but that's the ethos.

我喜欢你一直强调保持安静、埋头工作、不谈论它。你最后一点让我想到“分数会自己照顾自己”。经典。

I love how you keep coming back to just staying quiet, working on the thing and not talking about it. Your last point makes me think of "the score takes care of itself." Classic.

是的，乔·蒙塔纳实际上是我们的投资者之一。在 D 轮融资中，我们说的是“估值会自己照顾自己”。我们属于那一类。有时人们来我们办公室会说，“哦，办公室真干净。你们一定有一大群清洁工。”实际上，我们自己打扫办公室。就像在日本学校，学生打扫自己的学校。我们每周有一次清洁禅，每个人打扫自己周围区域。重要的是不要沉迷于自己的叙事，比如“我是斯坦福软件工程师，我做 AI”。清理你的桌子。有像这样的基本事情。我不知道更大的哲学是什么，但这是我们推动的哲学。我们的成名之处，有点疯狂，是我们从未花过我们筹集到的任何钱。在公司历史上，这听起来几乎像是编造的。公司快 10 年了，有 1000 多名工程师。我们是一个没有使用筹集资金就能运转的业务。我认为这在某种程度上与我们打扫办公室有关。我不知道怎么关联的。

Yeah, Joe Montana is actually one of our investors. In our series D, the post was "the valuation takes care of itself." We fall into that category. Sometimes people come to our office and say, "Oh, it's such a clean office. You must have a giant cleaning staff." Actually, we clean our office. Like in Japanese school, students clean their own schools. We have a cleaning zen every week and everyone cleans the area around them. It's important not to get so wrapped up in your own narrative like "I'm a Stanford software engineer and I do AI." Clean up your desk. There are basic things like that. I don't know what that larger philosophy is, but it's a philosophy we drive towards. Our claim to fame, which is kind of crazy, is we've never spent any money we've ever raised. In the history of the company, it almost sounds made up. The company is almost 10 years old, with 1,000+ engineers. We're a functioning business without using capital we raised. I think it's somehow connected to us cleaning the office. I don't know how.

这些清洁成本。一切都说得通了。

These cleaning costs. It all makes sense.

是的，我们仍然有清洁人员，但员工也意识到周围环境。我认为安静独处、清理桌子和编写良好软件之间有直接联系。我不知道那是什么，但都在同一个弧线上。我知道你们也因为同样的原因有不穿鞋的政策。这也是受日本影响。我在那里工作过，我们有类似的办公室设置。另一种思考方式：如果我要把我所知的一切传授给创始人，因为那些信息非常有限，每个人都在试图编造，我恳请你作为创始人真正尝试吸收日本最好的、德国最好的、中国最好的、底特律最好的、硅谷最好的。有时人们引用乔布斯的话并扭曲它，说“伟大的艺术家偷窃”。他真正说的是不那么宽厚的版本：保持谦逊，向周围的一切学习。作为领导者，要全面发展。

Yeah, we still have people clean, but employees are also aware of their surroundings. I think there's a direct line between being quiet and alone, cleaning your desk, and well-written software. I don't know what that thing is, but it all falls in the same arc. I know you also have a no shoe policy for that same reason. It was also influenced by Japan. I worked there and we had a similar office setup. Another way to think about this: if I'm trying to impart everything I've known to founders, because that information is so limited and everyone is trying to make it up, I would implore you as a founder to really try to take the best of Japan, the best of Germany, the best of China, the best of Detroit, the best of Silicon Valley. Sometimes people take that Steve Jobs line and deform it when they say "great artists steal." What he's really talking about is the less magnanimous version: be humble and learn from everything around you. As a leader, be well-rounded.

我认为阅读……查理·芒格有句话：‘我从未见过一个非常成功的人不经常阅读。’我也非常属于这一类。那么，如果你要剖析一下为什么，为什么读纸质书能让你成为更好的创始人？我就直接问这个问题。

I think like reading is... there's a Charlie Munger line where he says 'I've never met anybody very very successful who doesn't read all the time.' And I like very much fall into that category as well. And so if you like unpack why that is, like why does reading a physical book make you a better founder? I just ask that question the most direct way.

我不读新书，尤其是我阅读的信条是读旧书。不要读任何新东西。读旧书，因为时间已经过滤掉了大量噪音，所以你得到的是很多信号。在你的一生中，你最多大概能读一千本书。普通人可能只读 50 到 100 本，这其实挺少的。所以你读不了多少，所以不要读低质量的内容。人类思想中有真正的支柱。你吸收那些思想，然后由你来解读这些思想如何反映在你所领导的企业或你正在开发的技术上。我绝对相信读一本像《马尔科姆·X 自传》这样的书会让你成为更好的创始人，而且它不是直接一一对应的。我认为我们总是想要这些非常简单的 if-then 陈述，但我认为成为一个全面的创始人，理解你周围的社会和历史，会以某种方式让你构建出更好的产品。我不知道如何以及为什么，但我认为这绝对是真的。我确实看到了其中的联系。然后像查理·芒格这样的人，显然不是 AI 创始人，也相信这一点，我认为这里面有某种模式。

I'm not reading, you know, especially my ethos of reading is read old books. Don't read anything new. Read old books because time has filtered out a lot of the noise. So you get a lot of signal. And in your life, you're going to read a thousand books maybe, in the best case scenario. You're going to read probably 50 to 100 books, which is kind of crazy for the average person. So you're just not going to read many. So don't read low quality content. There are true pillars of human ideas out there. You consume those ideas and then it's up to you to interpret how those ideas then reflect upon the business that you're leading or the technology that you're developing. I absolutely believe reading a book like Malcolm X's autobiography will make you a better founder, and it's not directly one-to-one related. I think we always want these very simple if-then statements, but I think being a well-rounded founder where you understand society around you and history around you somehow makes you build a better product. And I don't know how and why, but I think it's absolutely true. I do see a connection there. And then people like Charlie Munger, who are not an AI founder obviously, also believe that, and I think so there's some pattern there.

这很有趣，这和 LLM 的比喻是一样的。你喂入所有这些数据，它们不知怎的几乎变得有意识。这是怎么发生的？没人完全知道。你和马克·安德森在思维方式以及消费内容的方式上如此相似，这很有趣。

Like it's interesting, this is the same metaphor for LLMs. You feed all this data, somehow they become almost conscious. How does that happen? No one fully knows. It's so interesting how similar you are to Mark Andreessen in your way of thinking and the way you consume content.

我们都是秃头。

We're both bald.

这里有一种压力，这就是真正成功的重要因素。

There's a pressure here, just here's how important ingredients to being really successful.

是的，我的意思是马克，我们很幸运能够选择我们的投资者，这是一种真正的特权。我在第一家公司没有这种待遇。我们花了好几年，一分钱都没融到。所以我当然很感激，但如果我有过导师的话，马克就算一个。在我加入 Applied 之前就认识他，我们经常辩论和交谈。我认为马克也是那样，对吧？他真正消费我们这个行业之外的内容，我认为这让他成为更好的投资者。

Yeah, I mean Mark, we're fortunate enough to choose our investors, and that's a true privilege. I didn't have that in my first company. We spent years, we didn't raise a dollar. So I certainly appreciate it, but if I've ever had like a mentor, Mark would fall into that category. And as I knew him before Applied, we debated and talked a lot. I think Mark is also like that, right? He really consumes content outside of this little industry that we're in, and I think it makes him a better investor.

是的，我们会引导人们去你的网站。你有一个你推荐和喜爱的书籍列表，非常长，而且不是你经常看到的那种。我忍不住想问：有没有几本书对你的思想影响最大，对你的生活影响最大？

Yeah, we'll point people to your website. You have a list of the books that you recommend and love, and it's very long and very not what you often see. I can't help but just ask: are there a few books that have most influenced your thinking, most influenced your life?

是的，那个列表我思考过。我对此很用心。我之所以用《马尔科姆·X 自传》这样的书作为例子，是因为我知道它不在列表的顶端。如果我说《高产出管理》——安迪·格鲁夫的经典，你们都知道。所以部分是为了娱乐你，同时也给你作为听众提供新信息。我认为一个好的例子：我目前正在读的书是一堆随机选的书。我在读新出的《Vibe Coding》这本书，我们整个公司都在读，这是一本新书，有点违背我的经验法则。但《众病之王》，那本关于癌症的书，非常棒，我快读完了。我认为它改变了我的思维方式。当一段材料改变了你对生活的现有框架时，这是好的。在 LLM 的用例中，这在某种意义上是相关的，即多样化的数据使你对世界的理解更丰富、更细致，因此更好。但是，是的，我总是受到启发，给出更古怪的例子，而不是显而易见的那些。但显而易见的那些，如果我真的不是在做戏，我认为山姆·沃尔顿的《美国制造》是一本不可思议的书。非常非常好。他是在临终前写的。《我的美国之旅》也非常好，科林·鲍威尔的书。它不在我的网站上，但真的很好。我是一个试图将一些点联系起来的人，从我们是穴居人到如今生活在硅谷、作为风险投资支持的 AI 公司创始人工作。所以像《枪炮、病菌与钢铁》这样的书真的在列表顶端，非常棒的书。或者《崩溃》，同一作者。所以，是的，但我对创始人的观点是：去读那些东西。你仍然可以去实体书店。读那些既古老又受好评、而你一无所知的东西。我经常在寻找下一本书时，记得我拿起《SPQR》——那本关于罗马历史的书——的方式是：我其实对罗马历史了解不多。我知道一些高层面的东西。所以想想宇宙中所有的思想，从哲学到历史到耆那教到日本作为封建国家的崛起。那些你并不真正了解的领域。然后找到那个领域最好的书。我认为你开始填补空白。所以这通常是我理解生态系统的方式：我对什么一无所知？然后让我去找那个领域最好的材料。是的。

Yeah, that list is like I've thought about it. I've been thoughtful about that. The reason I use books like the autobiography of Malcolm X as an example is I know that's not on the top of the list. Everyone's going to, if I say 'High Output Management' classic Andy Grove, you guys know that. So it's partly the theatrics of also entertaining you but also giving you new information as a listener. I think a good example: the books I'm currently reading is a random slot of books. I'm reading the 'Vibe Coding' book that came out, that our whole company's reading, which is a new book and it kind of goes against my heuristic. But 'The Emperor of All Maladies', the cancer book, fantastic book, I'm almost done with it. I think it changes the way I think. When a piece of material changes your existing framing on life, this is good. In the LLM use case, this is somehow related in the sense that diverse data makes your understanding of the world more rich and nuanced, and therefore it's better. But yeah, so I'm always inspired to give more wacky examples rather than the obvious ones. But the obvious ones, if I really wasn't being theatrical, I think Sam Walton's book 'Made in America' is an unbelievable book. It's very, very good. He wrote it on his deathbed. 'My American Journey' is also very good, Colin Powell's book. It's not on my website, but it's really good. I'm somebody who tries to connect some of these dots from us being cave people to now living in Silicon Valley working as a venture-backed AI company founder. And so books like 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' really are top of that list, fantastic book. Or 'Collapse', also same author. So, yeah, but my point to founders is read the stuff. You can still go to physical bookstores. Read the stuff that is both old and well-regarded and you know nothing about. I often, when I'm trying to find the next book to read, I remember the way I picked up 'SPQR', which is the book on Roman history, was like I don't actually know a lot about Roman history. I know the high-level stuff. So think about all the ideas in the universe from philosophy to history to Jainism to the rise of Japan as a feudal state. Areas you don't really know. And then just find the best book in that space. And I think you just start filling in the blanks. So often that's the way that I grok the ecosystem: what don't I know anything about? And let me go find the best piece of material in that. And yeah.

是一本书吗？嗯，我喜欢这个。所以马克的策略是杠铃策略：只看今天的新闻（比如 X）和 10 年前的书籍。我喜欢你像是‘不，我几乎就是倒 T 形。只有今天。’

Is it a book? Well, I like that. So Mark's philosophy is a barbell strategy of only today news like X and 10 years ago books. I love that you're like 'No, I just like upside down T almost. Just only today.'

是的，你知道，马克对我加入 X 有很大影响。所以他传播了那个观点。我真正同意他的一点是，随着我们公司成为社会上更大、更有影响力和冲击力的公司，作为联合创始人兼 CEO，我有责任至少将我的想法传播给我们的第一个 AI 创始人社区，然后是更广泛的技术领导层，然后是整个世界。所以这是其中的一部分。我认为对于马克，正如马克真正做到了这一点，你想想 VC，不久之前你甚至都不知道他们的名字。

Yeah, you know, Mark was a heavy influence in me getting on X. So he's propagated that view. The thing that I really do agree with him on is as our company becomes a larger, more influential, and impactful company in society, it is my responsibility as a co-founder and the CEO to at least propagate my ideas to our first AI founder community and then the larger technology leadership and then the world at large. So that's part of it. I think with Mark, as Mark has really taken it, and you think about VCs, not long ago you would never even know who their names are.

我的意思是，他们就像那样——你知道，他们就像私募股权人士或对冲基金经理。你甚至想不出名字。他们就像一团团听起来不祥的“黑曜石公司”之类的。只有 A16Z 和少数几个人，比如 John Doerr，真正创造了“嘿，我要成为个人投资者，我要传播一套特定的想法，这将在硅谷产生引力”的模式。这会影响创始人，让他们创办特定类型的公司，然后他们当然会投资这些公司。

I mean they were like this they were like, you know, they're like PE guys or you know, hedge fund managers. You can't even think of names. They're like they're just blobs of ominous sounding Obsidian Corporation or something like that. And it's only A16Z and a couple of other folks, John Doerr, who really kind of created the hey, I'm going to be the individual investor and I'm going to propagate a certain set of ideas and that's going to create gravity within Silicon Valley. It's an influence founders to then make certain types of companies and then of course they invest in those.

我这条线索是关于通过阅读来找到你几乎不同意、或者没有想过的领域。我知道你的管理方法之一，也许是有价值的，就是鼓励你的领导者倾听反对者，不要制造这种正反馈循环。谈谈为什么这很重要，以及你如何将其付诸实践。

I'm this thread about reading to find almost areas you disagree and and don't, you know, haven't thought about. I know one of your approaches to management and one of the maybe of value is to encourage your leaders to listen to naysayers, to not create this positive reinforcement cycle. Talk about why that's important and how you operationalize that.

所以，想象一下，我不是公司的创始人，Peter 也不是联合创始人，这只是一家普通公司。普通公司的理想状态是你可以容纳许多不同的竞争性想法。文化是你会把这些想法筛选出来。其中没有情绪。谁带来最好的想法，谁就赢。那么，为什么公司做不到呢？坦率地说，很多时候问题出在创始人身上。创始人被大众媒体、人类体验生活的方式以及我们的部落心态告知，你必须持有强硬的观点，每个人都必须跟随你，否则你就是一个软弱的领导者之类的。我认为我们根本不相信这种哲学。我相信，更战术性的说法是，我们接受环境输入——具体来说，我们的客户、员工、竞争对手、投资者以及整个社会正在发生的事情——这些都会影响我们的战略。我认为这是我们非常成功的原因之一。我们没有傲慢到认为因为我们有创办公司的雄心，我们就拥有所有答案。我认为这渗透到了一种非常具体的文化中。我认为我们建立的文化也不是为了反对而反对。对吧？我持有的一个观点是，情绪通常无助于做出理性决策。它们几乎与理性相反。有时激情和领导力被认为应该是宽宏大量或情绪化的。我们根本不相信这一点。我认为这更多地体现了 Peter 和我的中西部根源。所以，我们不是说“嘿，反对房间里的一切”。我们具体说的是：“说出来。说出来。每个人都必须说出来，因为那个人有他们的独特经验——他们曾在 Zoox、Waymo、特斯拉或中国公司工作过——当讨论我们在太空领域（字面意义上的太空）该做什么时，他们脑海中的那个想法，即使他们是最资浅的人，或者他们觉得上次辩论中他们的意见没有被采纳，或者他们有焦虑，他们必须分享那个观点：这实际上是正确的想法，或者这是错误的。如果你能创造这样一个环境，让最好的想法胜出。你知道，甘地有句话：真理是经得起时间考验的东西。我们试图——我认为这已经成为湾区的一种迷因，比如“追求真理”作为一种文化。但事实确实如此。我们试图找到最好的想法。也许“真理”这个词不对，也许是“最好的想法”。找到最好的想法，然后全力以赴去实现它。

So, imagine you know, I'm not the founder of the company and Peter's not the co-founder of the it's just a generic company. The ideal situation with the generic company is one that you can put in lots of different competing ideas. The culture is one where you will shake those ideas out. There's not an emotion in it. Whoever brings the best idea wins. So, why can't companies do that? Frankly speaking, a lot of times it's the founders and the founders are told by popular media and the way that human beings experience life and our tribal kind of outlook that you have to have this hard view, and everyone has to follow you, or maybe you're a weak leader or something like that. And I think we just don't believe that philosophy. And I think we believe that what maybe a more tactical way of saying that is we take inputs of the environment, our customers specifically, our employees, our competitors, our investors, and what's happening in society at large, and that impacts our strategy. And I think it's one of the reasons we've been very, very successful. We're not so arrogant to think that we just have the answers because we had the ambition to start a company. And I think that permeates into a very specific culture. And I think the culture that we've built is one it's also not being contrarian for contrarian's sake. Right? I like if one view I do have is emotions are generally not helpful in making rational decisions. They're almost like the opposite of it. And sometimes passion and leadership are supposed to be magnanimous or emotional. And we just don't believe that. And that's I think a bit more of our kind of Midwest roots showing for Peter and I. And so I think it's not that we say, 'Hey, disagree with everything in the room.' What we specifically say is, 'Speak up. Speak up. Everyone has to speak up because that one person with their one experience because they worked at Zoox or Waymo or whatever, Tesla, or they worked at a Chinese company, whatever it is, that one idea they have in their head when the debate is happening about what we should do in space, like literally the space of space. And something maybe we don't know much about. That one person's one idea, they have to feel comfortable sharing it even if they're the most junior person or they feel that they didn't get their way in the last debate or they feel whatever anxiety that they might have, they have to share that opinion that this is actually the right idea or this is the wrong idea. And if you can create that environment where the best idea wins. You know, Gandhi has this line, truth is what stands the test of time. We're trying to and I think this has become a little bit of a meme in the Bay Area like truth-seeking as a culture. But it's kind of is like that. We're trying to find the best idea. Maybe truth is the wrong word and maybe it's the best idea. Find the best idea and then let's go full bore at that best idea.

让我们用一个反事实的例子。为什么公司拥有优秀的人才和看似所有与 Applied Intuition 相同的要素却会失败？可能是因为最好的想法没有被提出来，当然也可能没有被采纳。或者，更常见的是，我认为非常成功的公司往往在一个特定方向上拥有 momentum（势头）。这种 momentum 形成的声墙淹没了任何新出现的声音，比如“嘿，市场在变。市场在变。”你根本听不到，因为所有 momentum 都朝着一个特定方向。我有一个很好的例子，我在 Google 工作时亲眼目睹。那是 Facebook 崛起的时代。当时 Google 是这样的——人们不记得 2000 年代末和 2010 年代初的 Google。Google 不仅仅是一家公司。它是硅谷的顶级掠食者。苹果呢，MacBook Air 刚刚推出。Steve Jobs 正朝着正确的方向前进，但远非今天的苹果。Amazon AWS 还年轻。Nvidia 濒临破产。我是说，所有你想到的巨头——Microsoft 由 Ballmer 运营，Twitter 还很小。但 Google 已经是超大型的头号公司。每个人都想在 Google 工作。没有多少公司有那样的地位。然后在外围，这家小公司 Facebook 开始崛起。Google 拥有地球上最好的工程师，每月现金流 10 亿美元，试图与这家小公司竞争。我记得当时 Facebook 可能只有一千人。而 Google 的规模是它的 15 到 20 倍，现金流充裕。为什么 Google 打不过 Facebook？因为 Google 不是 Facebook。就像那句儒家名言：大猩猩如何学会飞翔？通过不做大猩猩。Google 赢得社交媒体战争的方式是成为一家社交媒体公司。但它根本就不是。所以，大公司经常发生这种情况：你 consciously 或 unconsciously 沿着一个方向前进，因为所有员工、文化和工作都围绕那个方向。然后市场发生了变化，你根本无法转向。我认为这种情况在小公司中也会惊人地发生。创始人有一个观点，然后那个观点就成了唯一的方向。

Let's maybe use a counterfactual. Why do companies fail when they have great talent and they have, you know, seemingly all the same components that an applied intuition have? It's because maybe the best ideas are not being surfaced and certainly maybe they're not actually being adopted. Or more often than not when I think about companies that have been very successful is they have momentum going in a specific direction. And that momentum over that wall of sound overwhelms any new sound that's emerging which is hey, the market's changing. The market's changing. You just can't even hear that because there's all this momentum going in a particular direction. A good example I had front row seats for this when I worked at Google. It was the era where Facebook was emerging. And here was Google and people don't remember Google in the late double O's and early teens. Google wasn't just a company. It was the apex predator of Silicon Valley. Apple was just, you know, the MacBook Air had just come out. Steve Jobs was getting in the right direction but nothing like Apple is today. Amazon AWS was still a young thing. Nvidia was teetering off of bankruptcy. I mean, all these giant companies that you think of, Microsoft was run by Ballmer, you know, Twitter was a small thing. And then you So, it wasn't it was But Google was this already larger than life number one company. Everybody wanted to work at Google. And there were not many companies with that stature. And then in the periphery, this little company Facebook starts emerging. And Google, who has the best engineers on the planet, is making a billion in cash flow a month, tries to fight this little company. And I remember Facebook at that time maybe had a thousand people. And Google was like, you know, 15x, 20x the size with a lot of cash flow. And why couldn't Google fight Facebook? It's because Google is not Facebook. It's like that Confucian saying, like, how does a gorilla learn how to fly? By not being a gorilla. The way that Google would have won the social media wars by being a social media company. It's just fundamentally not. And so, the large This happens in companies all the time, which is you're just going in one direction with momentum, consciously or unconsciously, because that's what all the employees are, that's what the culture is, that's what they work on. And then something changes in the market and you just can't even move there. And I think that also can happen surprisingly at really small companies. So, where founders have a view and it's like that view is the view it's going to be.

实际上，可能只是偏离正确路径 10°，整个公司就被带偏了。他们选对了市场，甚至可能解决了正确的问题，但就是差那么一点点。所以我们非常害怕失败、害怕输，我会谦卑下来，倾听别人的意见。他们会说：‘嘿，我们偏了 5°。’然后我就说：‘好，那我们修正一下方向。’一旦这成为你的文化，就很难输了。因为每个人都不是为了完成预设路径，而是为了找到获胜的方法。

And actually, that can be just 10° off from what was the correct path and the whole company's kind of led astray. So, they were in the right market. They might have even been solving the right problem, but they were just a little off. And so, we're so scared of failing and so scared of losing that I will humble myself and listen to other people. And they say, 'Hey, we're 5° off course here.' And it's like, 'Okay, let's maybe fix the course.' And then once that becomes your culture, then it's really hard to lose. Because everybody's not about fulfilling a preset path. They're just about finding how to win.

这正是我想问的。每个听众要么觉得：‘哦，是的，我们非常开放，绝对会听取每个人的意见，理性地决定正确的道路。’

This is exactly what I wanted to ask about. Everyone listening to this either is like, 'Oh yeah, we're very open-minded. We're absolutely going to listen to everyone's opinions and decide rationally the right path in practice.'

从来不会发生。

Never happens.

对。或者他们觉得：‘我们就是不擅长这个，我们对彼此太好了。’你如何在一家不擅长此道的公司做到这一点？根据你的经验，这必须由 CEO 自上而下推动吗？必须成为文化的一部分吗？如何在一家不像你这样的公司中落地？

Right. Or they're just like, 'We're just not good at this. We're just too nice to each other.' How do you do this at a company that isn't good at this? Does it have to be the CEO top-down in your experience? Does it have to be part of the culture? How do you operationalize at a company that's not like you?

你知道，中间路线通常是正确的。但找到中间路线很难，因为这些都是相互冲突的想法。这些是你设定的护栏或标杆。一边是‘我们只管往前冲’，另一边是‘我们太不确定了’。你必须以某种方式，在辩论之后，自信地沿着那条路走下去。这又是矛盾的。我刚刚说‘要足够谦卑去倾听’，但一旦做出决定，就要果断……在我们的价值观中，第一个价值观，速度价值观，具体措辞是‘快速行动，安全行动’。就是这个词。我们根据管理者对这些价值观的遵守程度来评估他们。我们真的根据这些价值观来发放薪酬和晋升。它们不是抽象的价值观。所以，我们在速度下真正考察的行为是果断。我们是在审视这些冲突的东西：一个是‘保持开放’，另一个是‘快速决策’。你必须让它们保持张力。这就是为什么你作为公司的联合创始人或创始人能赚大钱。你必须做到这一点。你必须知道什么时候该虚张声势，什么时候该坚持，什么时候该放弃，就像他们说的那样。所以在某个时刻，这个时刻有时比你想象中来得更快，你将得不到更多信息，必须做出决定。所以你是在走一条非常细的线。

You know, the middle way is typically the right way. And it's hard to find the middle way because these are conflicting ideas. These are the guardrails or the flag posts you just set. One side is like, 'We're just going to go.' And the other side is, 'We're too unsure.' And you have to somehow once you do have that debate, you have to then confidently walk down that path. And again, this is conflicting. I just said 'Be humble enough to listen to what's going on.' But then once that decision is made, the decisive... In our values, that first value, the speed value, which is specifically the wording is 'Move fast, move safe.' That's specifically the wording. We assess our managers on adherence to those values. Literally, we compensate and promote against those values. They're not just abstract values. So, the behavior we're actually looking at under speed is decisiveness. So, we're setting a that is looking at these conflicting things. One is like, 'Be open.' And the other one's, 'Make decisions quickly.' And you have to hold those in tension. This is why you as the co-founder or founder of the company get paid the big bucks. You got to do that. You got to know when to bluff and when to hold them and when to fold them, as they say. So, at some point, and that point comes sometimes faster than you think, you will not get any more information and you have to make a decision. So, you're walking this very thin line.

你关于情绪的观点非常有趣，我想确保人们不会误解。我发现非常有帮助的一点是，与你的建议一致，就是把情绪剥离出去。我在工作中使用的方法是：当你必须做出艰难决定时，假装没有人会受伤，情绪不参与。你会怎么做？如果没人介意，一切都很好。那么在那个世界里你会怎么做？然后你就知道，那其实是正确的事。然后就是：我如何帮助人们对此感到安心？我如何处理这条路径的负面影响？

Your point about emotions was extremely interesting and I want to make sure people don't take away the wrong takeaway here. So, what I actually found really helpful, which I think is aligned with what you were suggesting, is taking emotions out of it. The way I've used this in my work is when you have to make a hard decision, pretend nobody's feelings would be hurt and emotions are not involved. What would you do? If nobody cared, if they're like totally great. So, what would you do in that world? And then that tells you, okay, that's actually the right thing to do. And then it's, okay, how do I help people feel okay about this? How do I deal with the downsides of this path?

是的，我认为这是显而易见的版本。也许另一个版本是，我们换一条路。你作为领导者或接受指示的工程师，已经预设了‘这是我的想法’。这是一种情感构造，围绕所有权和所有权感。所以，我确实属于那种更……甚至可能最根本的问题是：什么是情绪？情绪是一系列反应，是通过生活经验植入你大脑的框架。而这些生活经验可能并没有让你优化，它们没有被优化用于在产品评审中做决策。所以，你越能剥离它，一个好的启发式方法是：公司里多个人做出的相同决策会得到相同的结果。这样你就移除了一点那种滤镜。你几乎可以把情绪看作一个滤镜。所以我喜欢让原始图像通过，原始决策通过，这样我们可以反复一致地分类它。不想太抽象，但不知道这有没有道理。

Yeah, I think that's the obvious version of it. I think maybe another version is, let's take another route. You as the leader or as the engineer who is getting direction, you already have some preset view that this is my idea. That's an emotional construct, it's around ownership and feeling of ownership. So, yeah, I really fall into that category of like the more... So, even like maybe most fundamentally, what is an emotion? An emotion is like a set of reactions that have been a framework that's been imparted in your brain through life experiences. And those life experiences might not actually make you optimize, they've not been optimized for you to make a decision in a product review. And so, the more you can pull that away, a good heuristic would be the same decision being made by multiple people in the company gets the same result. So, you're removing a little bit of that almost like filter. You can almost think of that emotion as like a filter. So, I like to have the raw image come through, the raw decision come through so we can consistently classify it again and again. Not to get too abstract, but I don't know if that makes sense.

是的，有道理。我还有一个问题，但我注意到一个有趣的趋势，人们在谈论 AGI 时，我越来越多地听到缺失的一块是：情绪可能正是创造意识的东西。迈克尔·波伦出了一本关于意识的新书，他的观点是，不仅仅是更多的智能，实际上是情绪导致了意识。我认为，认为人类思维只是观念、事实、词语、字母的输入输出关联，这低估了人类思维的复杂性。不仅仅是那些关联，创造力也有点像那样。就像老话说的，技术精通是掌握复杂，我认为计算机做得很好，而创造力是掌握简单。我肯定三年后最好的艺术家会让我食言……是的。所以我认为这又回到了我的哲学：广泛吸收输入，然后尝试移除那个滤镜，尽可能诚实地看待事物，在公司里创造类似的文化，不看重想法来自谁或来自哪里，但最终作为领导者你做出决定，而且你必须正确。这是我认为很多创始人没有足够强调的。创始人喜欢把功劳归于自己，这是人性，每个人都这样。但现实是，你必须正确。仅仅创办公司是不够的，仅仅拥有这个愿景也不够。你必须正确。证据就是公司是一个可持续的独立业务。因为我们专门在谈论硅谷的风险投资支持的 AI 公司。我所有的……我一开始就应该说这个。

Yeah, it makes sense and I have one last question but there's an interesting trend I've noticed with people talking about AGI. The missing piece I've been hearing more and more is just emotions are what creates consciousness potentially. Michael Pollan has a new book out about consciousness and his take is it's not just more intelligence, it's actually emotions that led to the consciousness. I think it's undermining how complex human thought is to think that it's just the inputs and outputs of association of ideas, facts, words, letters. It's not just those associations and creativity is a little bit of that as well. Like with the old saying of technical mastery is mastering the complex and I think computers do that really well and creativity is mastering the simple. I'm sure I'm going to eat my words on this as like the best artist in like three years will be... yeah yeah. And so I think this goes back to my philosophy of consume broad inputs but then try to remove that filter, see things as honestly as they possibly can, create a culture in the company that is also similar and doesn't put any weight on who the idea came from or where it came from but then ultimately as a leader you decide and by the way you got to be right. Like that's the other thing I think a lot of founders that were just not where we don't emphasize enough. Founders love to take credit for things, it's just human nature everybody does. But the reality is you have to be right. It's not enough to just start a company. It's not enough to have this vision of the world. You have to be right. And the evidence is the company a sustainable standalone business. Because we're talking specifically about venture-backed AI companies in Silicon Valley. All of my... I should have said this at the beginning.

我所有的建议都专门针对那个狭窄的群体，也就是湾区 AI 风险投资公司的创始人。说到这个，最后一个问题。我一直想问这个，因为你的观点很有趣、很有争议。你认为硅谷很多 CEO 其实品味并不好。我很想听听你的经历和看法。

All of my advice is specifically for that narrow group, which is founders of AI venture-backed companies in the Bay Area. Speaking of that, last question. I've been wanting to get to this because it's an interesting spicy take that you have. You have this view that a lot of CEOs in Silicon Valley don't actually have great taste. I'm excited to hear about your experience there and what you think about that.

是的，我也想小心别让人觉得我品味很好。我也属于那个群体。我认为这确实是真的，有几个原因。无论是艺术意义上的品味，还是具体到经营公司、制定 HR 政策等方面的品味，很大程度上是因为他们没有接触过很多有趣的好东西。这贯穿了我们整个对话：就是不断接触更多事物。当我遇到一些人——我没有特指谁，所以如果这说的是你，你是我的朋友，我道歉，我不是在说你——你在库比蒂诺长大，上伯克利，毕业后第一件事就是创办公司，然后 20 年只做这一件事。你甚至从未当过员工。为什么我觉得这很重要：我在大型组织工作了十多年，真正的大公司，员工超过 10 万，比如通用汽车或博世。当你身处那些组织的底层，你会明白当员工有多糟糕。上层的官僚主义，领导层不了解情况，行业、过时的工具等等。为什么个人经历这些很重要？因为当你成为领导者时，你要制定政策、创造文化，你必须牢记这些。很多创始人从未有幸处于底层。这只是培养品味的一种方式。这并不意味着你必须看布列松或毕加索的照片，但道理类似。你有时会遇到一些创始人，他们擅长很多事情，而不仅仅是做湾区 AI 公司的创始人。这与品味有关。因为你真正谈论的是理解人类、理解生活，然后能够用判断力辨别什么是好的、什么是不好的。如果你的生活经历非常狭窄，你仍然可能很好，有能力辨别，但我认为如果你花几年时间背包环游世界，我莫名相信你会成为更好的创始人。我无法指出同行评审的研究来证明这一点。所以这就是我的意思：品味是需要培养的。

Yeah, I also want to be careful not to imply that I do. I fall into that group. I think it is true for a couple of reasons. Both taste in the most artistic sense and in the most specific sense like running a company and HR policy for point X. A lot of that is they're just not exposed to many interesting good things. That's been a theme in this whole conversation: just get more and more exposure. It's very unfortunate when I meet somebody—and I'm not thinking of anyone particular, so if this is you and you're one of my friends, I apologize, I'm not talking about you—but you grow up in Cupertino, go to Berkeley, and the first thing you do out of school is start a company, and that's all you do for 20 years. You've never even been an employee. Why I think that's so important: I spent over a decade working in large organizations, truly large like more than 100,000 employees, like General Motors or Bosch. When you're in the back alley of that organization, the bowels of those organizations, you learn how bad it is to be an employee. The bureaucracy above you, leadership doesn't know what's going on, the industry, your antiquated tools, all this stuff. Why that's so important to experience as an individual is then when you become a leader, you're making policies and creating culture and you have to keep that in mind. A bunch of founders who never had the fortune of being at the bottom of the totem pole. That's just one version of how to develop taste. It doesn't mean you have to consume the photos of Bresson or Picasso or whoever, but it's something similar. You can sometimes meet founders that would be good at lots of things, not just being a founder of an AI company in the Bay Area. There's something about taste there. Because what you're really talking about is understanding humans and understanding life, and then being able to discern with some judgment what is good and what's not good. If your life experience is very narrow, you could still be good and have the ability to discern, but I think there's something about if you've backpacked for a few years around the world, I somehow believe that's going to be a better founder. I don't know how I can point to peer-reviewed research that says that. So that's what I'm getting at: there is some developing of taste.

嗯，我觉得我们在这场对话中帮助人们培养了品味，用更多见解和不同视角喂养了他们的模型。我觉得我们可以聊上几个小时，但我知道你得走了。

Well, I feel like we have helped people build their taste, feed their model with more insights and different perspectives in this conversation. I feel like we could chat for hours, but I know you got to run.

是的，我不确定除了零之外还有什么真正的收获。我们真的聊得很广。如果你有特定的问题想深入，我很抱歉。我们走遍了所有完美的方向。

Yeah, I'm not sure if there are any real takeaways other than zero. We really went everywhere. I'm sorry if you had a particular line of questions you wanted to go down. We went in all the perfect directions.

很好。Qasar，非常感谢你来做这个节目。非常感谢你来到这里。最后一个问题，人们在哪里可以找到你？听众如何能对你有帮助？

Good. Qasar, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for being here. Final question, just where can folks find you online? How can listeners be useful to you?

这是个好问题。我喜欢听我不知道的书。所以那总是好的。我最喜欢的一些书就是被随机推荐的。所以我会接受。当然，我也看研究。所以如果有特别新颖的东西，显然我们公司和我个人会关注所有主流内容，但那些有点冷门的东西，我们一直在寻找。不过，如果你对我们特定的领域——物理 AI，以及 AI 将如何影响矿山、农场、建筑工地、机器人等所有方面——有特别的看法，我总是乐于听取新的观点，甚至可能带有不同视角的旧观点。所以，如果你看到我，你可以在网上找到我。当然，我也一直在。我总是对那种反馈持开放态度。

That's a great question. I mean, I love to hear what books I don't know. So that's always good. Some of my favorite books have been randomly recommended to me. So I'll take that. Of course, I consume research as well. So if there's something particularly novel going on, obviously all the mainstream stuff we as a company and me as an individual are going to consume, but things that are a bit off the beaten path, we're always looking for that. But yeah, and if you have a particular opinion about specifically our domain, physical AI, and how AI is going to impact mines, farms, construction sites, robotics, all of that stuff. I'm always interested to hear new opinions on that or even old opinions maybe with a different viewpoint. So yeah, if you see me, you can see me online. Of course, I'm always around as well. I'm always open to that feedback.

你现在在 Twitter 上。这就对了。是的，没错。在那里关注我。这就是答案。行动号召。模仿我的内心 Mark。

And you're on Twitter now. There you go. Yeah, exactly. Follow me there. So that's the answer. Call to action. Channeling my inner Mark.

这就对了。Qasar，非常感谢你来做这个节目，感谢你来到这里。

There you go. Qasar, thank you so much for doing this and for being here.

是的，谢谢你邀请我。非常有趣。大家再见。非常感谢你的收听。如果你觉得有价值，可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你最喜欢的播客应用上订阅本节目。也请考虑给我们评分或留下评论，这真的能帮助其他听众找到这个播客。你可以在 lennyspodcast.com 找到所有过往剧集或了解更多关于节目的信息。下集再见。

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.