2012 May 18
Some of you have gone to the lectures. I think it's really amazing how this community was built in such a short amount of time. I think it's really the next level after the accelerator: people sharing knowledge, people coming together on a regular basis trying to build products, build startups.
In a previous life, Mike worked in Silicon Valley for Apple, but before this, for a company creating Tap Tap Revenge, which was fairly successful. So he has a lot of experience in product marketing— uh, product design, I mean. Quality.
And today we asked him to share his story like people like Rush, Oskar have in the past. I think it's going to be an inspiring talk because Mike is an amazing speaker. So please give a Rockstart welcome for Mike Lee.
Applause
You're all sitting, so I'm going to sit, so that I'm not awkwardly standing there.
So, I got here in Amsterdam about a year-and-a-half ago, and I started basically going around telling everybody, "This is who I am. This is where I came from. This is what I've done. These are the things that I've learned in doing these things."
And, you know, sort of talked about the way that this business should be done. And I got away with that for about a year-and-a-half before people started pretty much thinking I was nuts.
Because at first, when you come, and you talk about things, everybody says, "Sure. That's great. That's wonderful. I'm going to incorporate this new information into who I am and how I'm doing things. You tell me that I should be doing great things? Great. I believe in that too. I'm doing great things."
But then, you get to the point where you actually have to look at things and say, "Oh, but wait. You said if I did great things, that I would be successful, and yet, I'm not successful. Why is that?"
And then I have to say, "Well, maybe it's time to examine the possibility that you maybe you haven't made great things. Maybe that is, in fact, a false assumption on your part."
And when that happens, people become very defensive. You walk around as an individual, and individual means that you have ego. Ego means that you have a barrier between you, and everybody else, and the rest of everything.
That means that every time somebody has something to say to you that doesn't agree with your vision that you have of yourself, you're going to find yourself trying to fight that information, trying to figure out how you are right, and everything else is wrong. That's how your brain works. That's just the default way that things happen.
And so, I come. I tell people a bunch of things. They say that's great, that sounds great. And then when it actually comes time to talk about serious things, then people are less interested. And so, I stopped doing that. I passed that off onto other people.
Appsterdam is now a community owned and operated community. It owns itself. We're working toward democratic elections, where the members themselves will decide who runs the board, and who sets things up. It is its own thing.
I'll continue to be a part of it. I'll continue to be the spiritual leader of Appsterdam, if you will, but for now, they're on their own. And when I say "they," I mean all of you guys, because what is Appsterdam but the people who actually believe in making change from this city. Not just in this city, but from this city.
And so, what I'm doing now, I went away to Taiwan for a month. Not Thailand; Let's make that very clear. Taiwan. And in Taiwan, I basically spent a month thinking about what I had learned, what I believed in, what I was going to do, and how I was going to do it.
I had, if you saw me before, really long hair and a big beard, and a whole persona. You know, sort of the Space Pirate, as people often describe it, or the Space Cowboy. Whichever. I don't really care what you call it.
But the thing was, I don't have time for that stuff now. I don't have time to go around wearing costumes. I don't have time to wash my hair every day. It's time for work.
It's just like when you go to war. When you go to war, it's no longer time for long hair. It's no longer time for the luxuries and the niceties of everyday life. It's time for war. And when you're going to real work, that's war. That's what it is.
And I'll tell you why I say that. Not because I believe in a violent way of doing things. I certainly don't. But because, when you talk to soldiers who are returning from war, as opposed to soldiers who are just returning from training exercises, and they've really experienced what we call war, you will ask them why they went, why they made the sacrifices they made, why they did what they did.
And all of these easy answers—because of patriotism, because it was the right thing to do—all of that shit falls away. What those guys will tell you is, what they were doing it for was as simple as the guy next to them.
And nowadays, when we say the guy next to them, guy, girl, whatever, it doesn't matter. The point is that you are a soldier, and you do what you do for the soldiers around you, because that's how soldiers are. The ego dies, and you become part of something bigger. You become part of something so much bigger than yourself, and that's why you're doing things. Because you're part of that something.
And so, what I want to talk to you guys about, is not about a bunch of happy fun stuff. You'll get that from everybody else. The most irritating thing when you're trying to get something done are the people who are going to tell you what a great job you're doing, because that is not useful to you.
When you're done, when it's shipped, when there's nothing else you can do about it, they can buy your product and tell you how great it is. But up until that point, when somebody tells you that you're doing a good job, they are doing you a disservice.
Because what they're not telling you is what they really thing, which are all the ways in which you screwed up. And you might think, "But how do I know that I've screwed up?"
You're always screwing up. Everyone's always screwing up. I'll prove this to you. Go around outside and hang around the people out there. Give yourself five minutes, and come back and tell me that you don't think you're surrounded by idiots.
Laughter
Hey, this is Rembrant Square (local tourist area). This is different.
It doesn't matter. Everybody in this room thinks that they're the smartest person in this room, and everybody else in this room is an idiot. Maybe you can think of one exception, but it doesn't change the basic fact that you think that you are smart and other people are dumb.
And you think that because you spend your entire life seeing all the ways that everybody around you is messing up, but you are not seeing the ways in which you yourself are messing up. That's the way your brain is, the way your brain works.
This is basic neuroscience for you. Let's talk about the visual cortex. The most real thing that is real: the things you see in front of your face. You see something. You see a person that's approaching you.
It's a certain combination of colors and shapes and motion, and that lights up some neurons in your visual cortex, and those neurons light up the neurons around them, that they've been connected to with previous connections.
So what that does is, it lights up this big pattern, where really only a small number of neurons have been stimulated. That's you remembering the things that you've seen before. All of that extra detail is filled in for you, and you see your friend coming toward you. You see details of your friend that you cannot see if you sit down and do the math, yet, you see them.
And then, when that person gets this close to you, just like that, snap! It's not your friend anymore. It's somebody else, and there's a brief moment of terror, as your brain shifts its perspective from the world that it thought it understood, to a new world that it doesn't understand, and back to a world that it understands.
That's the way the brain works. That is the fundamental wiring of the circuitry of the brain. What that means is you are not seeing the world as presented to you. You are seeing the world that you expect to see, based on whatever data from the outside you're willing and able to accept.
And the rest of your brain is a bunch of filter systems that prevents you from bombarded with the everything. If you want to prove this to yourself, just look at either any newborn child, who is screaming because of how overwhelming the world is to them; or to somebody who has been born blind or deaf, and now has a prosthesis turned on, and given the ability to see, or to hear.
Read about these experiences that these people have. When we invented the ability to give someone that is born blind sight, the ability to give someone who is born without hearing, hearing, we thought it would be like flipping a switch, and you would just flip it on and say hello, and you'd hear your loved ones' voices for the first time.
But that isn't what happened. What actually ended up happening was that all of that input, all of a sudden, without the brain having developed the filters to deal with all of that? It was a terrifying and overwhelming experience.
Light so bright that it not only burned your eyes, but you tasted it, and you heard it, and you smelled it. Sounds so loud, so cacophonous, that you tasted them, and smelled them, and saw them. This is what happens if you overload the circuitry of the brain. This is what happens when the filters aren't there.
Most of the time, we don't realize that the filters are there. This is why people like Steve Jobs became so into things like meditation and entheogenic drugs, and fasting, and every other way of just knocking yourself off of the route that you've been put on, and seeing a little bit of the world around you as it happens without you in it.
Of being disconnected from the Matrix and being able to see the fundamental reality, which is that every single thing on this planet, everything that you interact with, everything that you consider real, was created by people—people who are no smarter than you.
You have the power to take your part in this. You have the power to create, as these things have been created. And that's the realization that you have to have, the humbling realization that you have to have, if you're going to ultimately be successful.
Yes?
To summarize this, we should meditate more and use more drugs.
If that's what it takes.
Laughter
If that's what it takes. There are a lot of different paths. It's more than that. If I could tell you right now, "Go outside and take some mushrooms and you'll see the universe," then I would tell you that. Unfortunately it's more complicated than that. For one thing, it's not enough to see the universe. You also have to be able to understand and interpret the universe.
This gets us more into a little bit of neurochemistry. There's an experiment where they compared what happens when you take people and rats and put them in rooms with things that they're unfamiliar with, but that they can figure out.
Let me tell you what I'm talking about. If I have a square room, it has white walls, white ceiling, white floor, and I put a chair in that room, and I spin you around, and I say, "Sit in the chair."
If you can see the chair, then it's great. You go right toward it. But if you're facing one of the other walls, you're going to have to guess whether you're going to turn right or left. And so you're going to get the right answer about 50% of the time.
On the other hand, if I paint one of the walls blue, then you'll be able to orient yourself from the blue, and say, "Oh, the chair is on the left side of the blue wall, and so you'll always know where you are.
Well, with rats, we can do a similar thing, except chairs are a little bit more esoteric, so we use food. And what we find is that, when you put a rat in a white room, it's 50-50, and when you put it in a room with a blue wall, it's also 50-50.
Now, the key to figuring out what goes on here is to actually try doing this with humans of different ages, because it turns out that if you use a baby in that same experiment, a baby does no better than a rat. It's also 50-50.
And so somewhere between the time we're born, and the time we get up to adulthood, we learn whatever trick is necessary to figure that out. And it turns out there is one thing that happens in human development that actually determines when you are able to make this decision based on the blue wall. Any guesses what that is?
...
It's the development of language. It's the development of realizing things have names, that there's such a thing as blue, that there's such a thing as a wall, that there's such a thing as you, and that you can turn in one direction or another.
The languages that we learn, the words that we learn, the concepts that we learn, the memes that we put in our brains are the patterns that we are able to recognize, and those are things that we're able to understand.
And so, it's not simply enough to be told something, because you won't understand it. You have to actually have the concepts in your brain. This is how communication works.
Now, I'll prove this to you. How many times have you had that experience of, you hear an interesting word that you've never heard before, and then all of a sudden, everybody's using that word, and it seems like the whole world started using that word on the day that you discovered it.
And of course we know, the Copernican principle, which is the basis of all science, says you are not special. The universe does not revolve around you. Everybody didn't start using the word the day that you learned it. That doesn't make any sense. It has to be something else.
The only logical conclusion is that everyone was always using the word, and you never noticed. And that's the reality of the world that we live in. If you look at things like these gorilla experiments where you these people, they're passing a basketball—this is a famous experiment in psychology.
People are passing a basketball in a video, and volunteers are asked to look at this video of people passing the basketball and count how many times the basketball gets passed. And then you're like, "Oh, the basketball was passed six times," or whatever.
But did you notice the gorilla? And it's like, what gorilla? Then they play the video back in slow motion, and a gorilla literally walks through this crowd of people, stops, waves at the camera, walks off, and nobody ever notices the gorilla.
Unless you know to look for the gorilla, then you do notice the gorilla, but then did you notice that the curtains were changing color. We are terribly bad at this. They have done experiments where they actually swap out the person having a conversation and you don't notice—even if that person is a different gender.
Imagine, a woman comes up to you and asks you a question, and then you're distracted, and you turn around, and it's a man, and the conversation continues. You think you would notice that, but in actuality, most people don't.
That's how the world is. You walk around completely ignorant of most of what's going on around you and you don't even know it, because how can you know the things that don't know?
So when we talk about communication, we have a fundamental problem, which is why it's important for us not to get caught up in words and assigning specific meanings and semantics to words, and letting that get in our way.
Because the way communication works is, I have a recipe. I really like it. It tastes really good. I have the ingredients. I have the measurements I used. I have the techniques that I used, and I write that recipe down.
And the I send you the recipe, but the problem is that, first of all, I do stuff in American units. You do stuff in metric units. You can convert it, but it's not quite the same. Maybe it matters, maybe it doesn't. The point is, it's not exactly the same.
When I'm thinking of eggplant, I'm thinking of a big round purple thing. You're thinking of a long skinny thing. When I'm talking about one ingredient, when I say "coriander," I mean the seeds of a particular plant, but you think I mean the leaves of that plant.
And so, even though the information is ostensibly the same, because I have to convert my pure and perfect knowledge of this food to a recipe using only words and numbers, and then send that to somebody else, who themselves have to reinterpret those words and numbers into some fundamental truth, by the time it gets to you, who knows how accurate it is, or how similar it is?
Maybe you taste this recipe and say, "This is terrible! Why would you ever recommend this to me?" and I don't understand how that could possibly be, and now we have a communications problem, and that communications problem is echoed again and again, across the world, and causes so much misery to the human race, that fundamental problem of being unable to communicate, of being unable to basically look at the angle of something that somebody is looking at and say, "Oh yeah, you're right. It does look like a person's head."
When I was in Taiwan, I went to a geological park, and this whole park—they love nature in Taiwan—so there's this park of, like, rocks that look like stuff, and the star of the show of the rocks that look like stuff is called Queen's Head, and it's this big boulder, and if you look at it at just the right angle, it looks like the bust of Nefertiti that we're all familiar with, hopefully. If you're not, you don't have the meme, you have no idea what I just said.
The point is, it looks like a person's head, it looks like this famous statue. The thing is, you can stand and look at that rock, but you can stand at any of 360 degrees around that rock, and only at one of those degrees do you see the head perfectly. In other degrees you see it slightly less, and from all other degrees, it just looks like a rock.
We can stand across from each other and argue until we're blue in the face, until we become violent and disrespectful, over whether or not this rock looks like a face, and communication, successful communication, is all about saying, "Well, let me come over here and stand see if—oh, you're right. It does look like a face! Come see what I was seeing. I thought it was just a rock. How foolish I was!"
This is why it's very important for us to basically walk around not feeling like we know what the hell we're doing, but to understand that we don't, and the human being who knew more than anybody still knew a hell of a lot less than there was to know. This is just how it is.
So there's one particular piece of advice, one bit of a rant, if you will, that all of this is leading up to, and this is because, on getting back from Taiwan, I did some mentoring here, and I did some mentoring with some other people, and I found myself saying the same thing over and over again, talking about the same idea over and over again, and so I thought that, rather than give you a bunch of information about me, I would share this with you, because this is the thing that I'm thinking about. If you want to think like me, this is what I'm thinking about.
I'm thinking about the most important minute of my life, and for all of you, it will be the most important minute of your life, and here is that minute, here's the story as I've come to think of it.
When I worked at Apple, the legend was that, if you were ever stuck in an elevator with Steve Jobs, which is to say, you go to catch the elevator, and then you get in the elevator and you realize, "Oh shit, I'm in the elevator with Steve Jobs."
You had until the end of that elevator ride to convince him what the hell you were doing there, or else by the end of that ride you were out of a job. And so you figure, you've got maybe a minute, from the point at which those doors close, he looks at you, he asks you what you do, and you have maybe a minute until you get to the bottom, or the top, or whatever, and the doors open again, and he either turns to you and says, "See you around," or he says, "You're fired."
Laughter
Is that a joke, or?
Well, see, that's the question. I assume it's apocryphal, and even though I walked around campus, I thought, "That's probably not true. OK, maybe that might have happened once, when he was feeling very obnoxious. That's probably not true. But still—"
I mean, "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" sort of expressed that.
Yeah, but here's the point: it doesn't matter if it's true. What matters is that, what if it was true? There was a part of me, a very small part of me, maybe it was one one hundredth of one percent part of me, that believed, A) that I would ever be stuck in an elevator with Steve Jobs, but B) that that was even a real thing.
But here's the thing: let's just say, by some roll of the dice, that I do end up in an elevator with Steve Jobs. What am I going to do with that minute?
And I'll tell you one thing: the minute that I spent by sheer coincidence in an elevator with Steve Jobs, that will be the minute that defines my life, because not only will what I say about myself in that minute influence the future of my time at that company, and possibly on this planet, but I will always look back on that minute, and either look on it as, that was the minute that changed my life, or that was the minute where I had the opportunity that I let slip by.
Once in my life I had the chance to talk to Steve Jobs, for just that elevator ride, and I blew it.
I think it's sort of putting all your cards into one vision, like—
That's perfectly fine, but let me tell you this, OK? Regardless of whether you ever found yourself in the elevator with Steve Jobs, regardless of whether that was the minute that changed your life, and regardless of the fact that it doesn't matter so much what it is as what you think it is, here's the thing:
That question of who you are, and what you're doing here? That is the fundamental question, not just of entrepreneurship, but of life. Because ultimately, the real enemy here, the real person who's boring their eyes at you and wondering what your answer to the question of who the hell you are and what the hell you're doing here? The ultimate person you're going to have to answer that question to is yourself.
You can roll your eyes. That's fine. I don't care, but you're going to have to answer that question to every stranger you run into who wants to know who you are. You're going to have to answer that question to every business associate who you run into who wants to know what you do. You're going to have to answer that question to every client you talk to about what you do. And ultimately, when you're looking at yourself in the mirror, you're going to have to answer that question for yourself.
Now, when I was younger, when I was 18, I almost killed myself. I put a gun in my mouth and I really asked myself the question of why I shouldn't pull the trigger, and the reason for that is because I read a book—a book that was so powerful that that's what it did to me.
The book was maybe one of the greatest books ever written. It's a book called "Kokoro," which is Japanese. It means "heart." Not just the heart as in "I love you from my heart," but it also means the heart of the matter. It's used in the same way.
To give you a little bit of background on this, Natsume Souseki, the greatest author, I think, who ever lived, he's so beloved in Japan, where he did his work, that he's on basically their one dollar bill. Which is to say, technically it's a thousand-yen note, technically it's worth about ten dollars, but the point is, it is the bill with the highest circulation. The Americans put George Washington on there. The Japanese put Natsume Souseki, this author.
So of every general, and every leader, who ever had anything to do with Japan, the person they choose to honor the most with their currency, is Natsume Souseki. It must have been a hell of a book.
The reason for all of this is because, what happened with Japan, they were tops when the rest of the world was going through the middle ages, the bad times, Japan was really ruling the world when it came to culture, when it came to military prowess. There was a time when the samurai were the greatest guys on the planet.
If Japan had wanted to build ships and starting taking over the world, they could have been up there with every other empire, but instead, they chose an isolationist policy, and they just had their own thing: 400 years of wonderful peace.
Then the white man showed up with his big scary gunboats, and let them know that the world wasn't going to tolerate that anymore. And so, Japan was all of a sudden forced to do what we're all forced to do at some point or another, which is to grow up.
And so, the entire ancient culture, with thousands of years of thinking about the deepest, philosophical questions, was suddenly forced to have a great cultural adolescence, and that is what we call the Meiji era of Japan.
The Meiji era of Japanese literature is the finest adolescent literature ever written. It is the same existential crisis of everyone who enters adulthood, whether that be your actual adolescent, or whether that be one of the many transitions in your life.
But it is told from the perspective of people who really had some deep insight and vision into the way of humankind.
The book itself is really un-extraordinary, and even as I stayed up all night, turning page after page of reading this book, I didn't know why. And yet, I was compelled to read the entire book.
Basically, the book is just a series of stories—a series of stories of people who are just telling the story of living their lives and doing what they did, and being faced with those decisions, and ultimately being forced to ask themselves the same question: Why did I wait so long to die?
There are several suicides in the book. There are suicide notes within suicide notes. It's not a happy book, right? Life isn't always happy. In fact, most of it isn't.
But that is the fundamental question. That is the heart of things. Why did I wait so long to die? When you get to the top of a tall building, look down and you will feel terrified. Even if you're the bravest person in the world, even if you have no natural fear of heights, there is a terror there that you cannot escape.
And to understand that terror, Jean-Paul Sartre said that the fear is not that you will fall off the building. The fear is that you will jump. We are all born with an innate desire to kill ourselves. The Greeks called that "Thanatos." It is something that nature instills in us, and that is because nature does not tolerate uselessness.
Nature is a relentlessly efficient system. When things in nature do not have a purpose, those things die, and if something else doesn't come along and eat them, they will kill themselves. They will go in the woods, they will starve to death, and they will die. That is one of the fundamental rules of nature.
It is, having gone through a severe bout of depression myself, where depression comes from. It is— why is something like depression, something self-destructive, why did that not evolve away? That is because it is a fundamental rule of nature. Entropy is nature's account book, ultimately.
And so, we are all being forced to ask ourselves that question, if we're going to live with ourselves, if we're going to live without the delusions that we carry ourselves through day to day living in most of the time, if we're really going to be able to look ourselves in the eye, in the mirror, and face ourselves, let alone our customers, let alone our investors, and let alone our peers, we have to answer that question for ourselves.
In one minute: who the hell are you, and why the hell do you think that you can be here, separate from the everything, using the earth's resources? Just by existing, you are an affront to nature. You are an affront to the everything, because you are a separation. You are that thing that is not meant to be.
You are that thing that will eventually be terminated, because it is not the natural order of things for everything to split up into multiple pieces. That is a little game we play called life. It is this thing we do, of generations throwing generations away from the darkness, and all we know about the universe, is that it will eventually catch up to us.
We will eventually lose this game. Every one of us, eventually, will die. Our species, our planet, our star. All of it will be gone, because entropy is relentless and downhill. But life—
So how do you look on it on a positive note?
Laughter
'cause there's so much negative in it, right?
You know, this is what we call catharsis. Catharsis is digging until you get to the other side, and the thing is, every day you live your life, you're subjecting yourself to the misery of living, and you have to ask yourself why? Why subject yourself to that?
Now sometimes there's good times, and you don't have to answer that question. This is why one of the fundamental truths is that success is more dangerous that failure. Like, I have had great successes. I have had great failures. If I want to talk about companies being destroyed, inexplicably, when I wasn't looking? Success is what did that.
Success is very deadly, because when you're succeeding, you assume that everything is awesome, and everything is going to always be that way. When you're failing, then you're forced to deal with the reasons that you could be better, and aren't. But when you're succeeding, you're not.
Not only that, are you not only not going to fix your bad habits, you're going to develop worse habits, because success does not really aid you in making yourself better. It really doesn't. And everything is impermanent. Everything is fleeting.
One of the truest phrases ever spoken: this too shall pass. It is the phrase that makes poor men smile, and rich men weep. This too shall pass. Whatever you're doing, however good it is, however bad it is, eventually, it will be over, just as your life, and this grand experiment called life, will be over.
If everything is futile— If everything is futile, and everything is the same, and it ultimately doesn't matter one way or the other when you're dead what people thought about you, or what you did with your time on this planet, then what the hell are you still doing here?
That is the question that you have to answer if you're going to actually change the world. If you're going to come up with delusions, if you're going to make jokes, if you're going to say, "Fuck that guy. I'm too young for this shit. I'm going to live forever," that's fine. It doesn't bother me.
I've talked to people before about stuff, and they don't take it seriously, and then they go out, and you know what? Shit happens, and they realize, and maybe it's 30 years later, before they realize what I'm saying, and maybe they never do, and what a tragedy for them, but usually they do.
But you can't plan for failure. I have to plan for success. Otherwise, you're going nowhere.
I would suggest that you should plan for both, because with success comes failure, and with failure comes success, and that's what planning for those two things means.
Out of three failures, you might have one success, but if you plan for failure, then you're heading there, and you're not going to have, uh— You're not going to have—
Let me ask you a question.
No.
If you went outside, and you weren't paying attention, and you got hit by a tram, and that's the end of you.
Could be.
What happens to your family? What happens to your loved ones? What happens to the people here? What happens to the files on your computer? What happens to your Facebook account? What happens to the disorganized mess that is your life?
Uh...
Laughter
If you worry too much about these things, uh, it sort of— How do you live with yourself, then, right? If you worry too much about, uh, what is going to happen bad, then you're not going to be focused on what is going to happen good, and enjoy what is going to happen good.
See, that's the kind of thing that you say when you are afraid of confronting the things in your life that are bad. I mean, if being happy were simply a matter of going out and enjoying yourself, and doing everything for yourself, and doing what you want to do, then everybody would be happy, because that's what everybody tries to do all the time.
But the weird and perverse reality, is that in selfishness comes unhappiness, and in selflessness comes happiness. When we suffer, it makes us happy, and when we're happy, it makes us suffer. That is the nature of things.
I think when you suffer a lot, then you start being happy by the smallest things.
That's certainly one mechanic in which that happens, yes. I do believe so. For example, I talk about the weather here, right? People are always like, "Oh, the one thing that sucks about this place is the weather," and I'm like, "Actually, I like the weather here."
And I grew up in Hawaii. I grew up in Honolulu, so, you know, it's not that I don't know any better. But the thing about Honolulu is, first of all, people think that they want to live in the tropics because they visit the tropics for two weeks, and they're like, "Wow! This is awesome! We should live here."
But I actually lived in the tropics, and it's not all that. There are other things going on. There are a lot of other things that determine all kinds of things, other than just how you experience the weather on your vacation.
The other thing though is that I seriously enjoy the changes of seasons, of the passing of time, and even the days when it's cold, and rainy, and windy, and I'm on my bike, and when the wind blows, it stops me moving, like I've applied the brakes somehow, and I just want to get home, because the wind is pelting me, and the rain is coming down on me, and I think to myself, "These are the days that make me appreciate the sunshine."
What I love about this city, as opposed to any other city, is that when the sun does shine, as rare an event as that may be, then truly, everyone is happy. Everyone in the city revels in the glory of it, right?
Like, if you walk around in Hawaii going, "Oh my God! The sun is shining! It's a beautiful day!" all the other people around you will be like, "What the hell is wrong with you, brah? You wen smoke da pakalolo o wot?" (Hawaiian pidgin for "Are you high or what?")
People are not going to accept that from you. Here, when the sun in shining, you walk down the street and you say, "Oh my God! The sun is shining! It's such a wonderful day!" people say, "Hell yeah it's a wonderful day. High five!"
That's life where you have balance, and you're right—you cannot mire yourself in misery. You cannot find some random homeless person and say, "You live here now," and then go live on the street in their place. It doesn't work that way. It's not that easy, either.
That's why the Buddha talked about the middle way. That's the whole idea of the middle way. The whole idea of the middle way is that you're not going to find the answers, and you're not going to find yourself, in extremes.
But even the middle way has limits, because what is halfway between life and death, and would you ever want to experience that? That's the thing. There are no easy answers, and when you find yourself at the point of a total ego breakdown, for whatever reason—maybe you took a bunch of mushrooms, or maybe your startup failed. Both of them will do it.
When you find yourself at a total ego breakdown, when you realize that nothing else matters, and your entire life has been futile, these are the questions that you have to ask yourself. These are the realizations that you have.
If you do it just right, if you find yourself facing what, for all intents and purposes, as far as you know, is death, and you come out on the other side, you find a world that has been destroyed, and it is yours to rebuild.
How do you know when you've found the thing that you're meant to be doing, when you've found the thing that defines that most important minute of your life? Steve Jobs described this as "It is like Armageddon, as your whole future is destroyed."
When I knew the product I was going to build, the product that I'm working on now, the product that— I don't have time to hang out and drink with you guys tonight, because as soon as I'm done talking, I'm going to go back to working on this product that I'm working on, because as of yesterday, I know exactly what I'm going to build.
And I knew when I knew exactly what I was going to build, because not only did it destroy my future, it destroyed the future of everybody who I told it to. That's when you know, and when you find that thing, everything else is sacrifice. Everything else is what is to be burned at the altar of getting what it is that's so important.
Once you find the thing, then it doesn't matter if you pour yourself into that thing and it costs you your life. Hell, it doesn't matter if it costs you your life only to create a fraction of that thing, and other people carry it on, and nobody even remembers your name, and you get no credit for it, because that thing has to exist. That future has to exist.
That is your Dharma. That is your purpose. That is your thing. That is what you will spend a minute of your life describing, over and over and over again.
Wha- wha- wha- What are you building?
Laughter
I'm making a chemistry set for the iPad, that is going to save Madagascar, and possibly the world.
Madagascar?
Yeah. I could tell you more than that, but I'm being intentionally mysterious because I would like the chance to build it first, so I can show you all what I'm really talking about.
I came here, and I built this community, and then I decided that the real problem of the world— Well, I discovered— I figured out how I could build the singularity, and then I started thinking about it— do you guys have any idea what the singularity is?
No.
Let me put it this way, I figured out a way that you could put people's brains into computers, and people would be able to live forever, so even if your friends and relatives were dead, you'd still be able to talk to them on Facebook. You'd still be able to go online and play World of Warcraft with them. They would still exist in the Internet.
I had the team to do it, I had the algorithm to build it, and that's what I was thinking about. But I realized, you know what? If I build the singularity it would fail. It would fail because it would be destroyed. It would be destroyed because there's too much turmoil in the world, caused ultimately by inequality.
In the same way that the uneven heating of the earth by the sun causes the atmosphere to swirl around, and that's where we get the weather, so does the inequality inherent in this existence with us all separated result in a swirling amount of turmoil that causes all of the misery, and all of the pleasure, and everything that we experience with human relationships.
In order to solve that problem, I realized, first of all that it couldn't be about equal results. In that way lies madness and war. So it had to be about equal opportunities, and the best way I know of providing equal opportunity to the people is to educate them.
And realizing that building the singularity was going to be a multigenerational task that would take 100 years, it would take three generations of people, and that the first step by the first generation is to massively increase the amount of knowledge and understanding of the system by the person who are in it, who have the goal of fixing it, stabilizing the system before it destroys itself.
In some instances of the multiverse it will destroy itself, and in some instances it won't, and when you make a decision like dedicating your life to solving this problem, you decide which of the doors of the multiverse you'll go down, and which of those possibilities you will experience.
I would rather experience the ones where I'm trying to make things better, and so I realized that what I needed to do was make educational software for kids. I thought the first thing I would do is to make a chemistry set for the iPad, because it seemed like something that was really missing, and then I figured out how to do that.
It took a couple of months. It took a couple of trips. It took a lot of talking to a lot of different people, but I eventually figured out what I had to do to build it, and I'll you one thing, it's a hell of a lot more complicated than just building a chemistry set for the iPad, or else I wouldn't be telling you that.
Laughter
So that's what I'm doing.
Well, you don't spend your whole life building this iPad app.
I've spent my whole life getting ready for build this iPad app. How can I stand in front of a bunch of people and say that I'm not only going to make a hit game, but I'm going to make a hit game that is going to open up an entire market of hit games, the way that the iPad openend up an entire market of tablet computing?
How could I say that and not seem completely insane, if I hadn't already shipped the first million-download game on the App Store? If I hadn't gotten those 30 million downloads? If I hadn't had my company bought out by Disney? How could I even stand here with a straight face and say this?
You all already think I'm crazy.
...
Well, you should.
Laughter
You should. And, I mean, this is the thing, right? Everything you do leads up to the thing that you're meant to do. Again, according to Steve Jobs— one of, just, my favorite people. I've spent a lot of time thinking about him recently, for obvious reasons, but he said when you look back, only when you look back, can you see all of the inflection points of your life lining up to form your destiny.
And when you realize what you're supposed to be doing, just when you have one of those neurons that lights up, and somehow is stacked on a bunch of other neurons that light up, and all of a sudden, all of these things overlap, and all of these things come together, and you see the grand and connected relationship between all things in your mind.
So it is when you find the thing that you're meant to do and you realize that everything in your life, even weird little experiences that you don't even know why you had, or why you remember, were leading you up to this moment.
That is the one thing. That is the thing you'll spend your life obsessing over, and when you find yourself in front of a total stranger who asks you the question, "So, who are you?" and you're doing this, and you're waving at this great product that you made.
Actually having that product there? Actually having that thing that will make you proud to answer that otherwise terrifying question of why the hell you're still on this planet? That's the rest of your work. That's your day job, is building this, so that when you're standing there, having that most important minute of your life, you will be ready.
It's like parenthood, but then different.
It is actually a lot like parenthood. I don't have kids. I don't plan on having kids. My feeling is that there's plenty of other kids. I'm more interested in passing on my memetic legacy, and I'm willing to sacrifice my genetic legacy in order to make myself more effective.
Laughter
And for a while I thought myself pretty damned clever for that sort of thing, but the realization that I had was that, you know what? Having kids? Having a family? Creating the next generation? That shit's just as valid.
Whether you create the next Facebook, or the next Angry Birds, or the next whatever the hell big hit thing, or whether you have some kids, and you raise them right, and you arm the next generation to do better than you did, better than your parents did—that shit's equally valid.
This is why, to me, Appsterdam is not just about, lets recreate Silicon Valley, let's have all the madness of Silicon Valley. Like, when I went to Silicon Valley, I was married, and when I left, I wasn't.
I try to have balance with things. It's not just about working yourself to death in your twenties. You have to take a break. I had to take a vacation. I had to go to Taiwan, take a month off, get some sleep, because I felt like I was dying for at least a year and a half, and then my friend said, you look like you're dying, and I had to realize, it's time to take a break. It's time to step back. It's time to reassess. That's just something that happens.
You have to find balance in things. You have to continue, and you have to always understand that you're never going to be perfect, that you're always going to wish you were better than you were, that you're always going to feel like you're surrounded by idiots, and that you're the biggest one among them. That's just how it is.
We're all imperfect, all of us, and that's why we have to have each other. That's why we have to help each other. That's why we have to not only be willing to take feedback from each other, but to give feedback to each other, to be honest in that feedback, and never to allow ourselves to believe that we really have created something that is that great, that there's nothing better we can do with it.
We always have to have a kind of pessimism, because in pessimism lies optimism, and optimism, I think, just leads to pessimism eventually. When you have an unrealistic view of things, it's like having an unrealistic view of a hero.
I worked with this guy Wil Shipley. Wil was my mentor. I spent three years with him, and to give you an idea— Yes, I shaved my head to start this project. Maybe that's not that impressive to you. It's not that big of a sacrifice. Hair will grow back, even at my age.
But when I went to do this apprenticeship, when I actually had something that I believed in—not just a job, not just a career, not just caring about my salary, but actually caring about who I was, and how I thought about myself—I sacrificed everything.
I moved into this guy's basement. I had a house. I sold my house. Wife, gone. Everything I owned, I had to get rid of, because there was no room for it, because he let me stay in a room in his basement that was, I think, two square meters?
It was just big enough that I could open the door, and then there was the bed, and that was it. That was all I had room for, and other than what I could fit in the closet, mostly clothes, everything else had to go.
I gave it away, and I threw it away, and I burned some of it—I mean, I just got rid of everything. I shed everything. My entire lifetime of possessions, and bearing in mind, I didn't have a lot of possessions in my life. The things that I had were all very hard won.
I work in labor. I taught myself to code because people around me were dying, and I didn't want to be next. I knew that having a skill would give them a reason to take me out of that dangerous situation and give me a job that maybe wouldn't kill me.
And so sacrificing everything— It wasn't what I planned on doing. If I had known what it was going to cost me at the beginning, I probably wouldn't have done it, but one step by one step, that's what it took to get there.
The three years that I spent with Wil Shipley— I wasn't the first person to try to learn everything that Wil knew, and I certainly wasn't the last person. But I might actually be the only successful person in really getting something out of Wil Shipley.
Because what happened for most people is that they would see him as this person who had, you know— he was what they wanted to be. He'd made the app. He'd built the product. He'd been successful. He'd had the millions.
He had his own house. He had his own car. He made his own schedule. He had more money than he knew what to do with. He was everything that people want to be—and he was smart! It wasn't just that he was a lucky guy. He was actually a smart guy.
He wrote all of his own code. Dude was a seriously, seriously, seriously smart guy, and used his brain so he could roll around like a rock star. He's one of the original rock star programmers.
Most people also figured out that he pretty much stopped maturing when he got to be about 15, made his first million, never figured out how to talk to people of the opposite sex—hell, never learned to talk to people of his own sex.
He just didn't really know how to deal with people. He had lots of things about him that made him this sort of shallow, detestable, even laughable person at times.
And so you just saw this cycle of so many coming in and worshiping him like a hero, discovering that he's really flawed and human, and then being disgusted by him and discarding all of the lessons there.
But what a terrible, tragic mistake that is! Because the reality is, we're all half awesome and half terrible. That's how we all are. The thing is, you can either think that someone is 100% awesome, find out how they're not, and then be very disappointed and bitter for the rest of your life.
Or you can realize that people are part awesome, part terrible, a lot of in between, and you can learn good things from the good things, you can learn anti-lessons from the bad things.
Wil Shipley not only taught me how to become a regular at a restaurant. He also taught me how not to talk to girls. These were both important lessons.
Through his failures, through his very human failures, he gave me things so that I don't have to make the mistakes that he made. Learning to take the good with the bad, to see the bad in the good and the good in the bad. Learning to be suspicious of the people who are everything that you want to be. Learning to take lessons from people who you think you have nothing in common with.
Walking around, not seeing the world through the filter of "how am I right," but "how could I be wrong?"
A lot of times I'll say things on Twitter, for example, that are very controversial. Like I said, "Our very idea of gender is outdated," and a bunch of people said a bunch of really predictable things like, "Oh, you must have a really nice set of breasts then!"
So now having breasts defines you as female? Tell that to somebody who's had a mastectomy! Or tell the man who has gynecomastia, that that's what makes them male or female. Or, you know, X chromosomes, but then, what about Klinefelter syndrome?
Or what about people who have had sex change operations? There are lots of shades of gray in what we consider to be normal gender. We think we live in a binary system where you're either male or you're female.
But the reality is, it's a statistical system, where you have mostly male, mostly female, some outliers, a lot in-between—it's really a lot more complicated the simple binary way that we try to make it.
You can either look at it one way, or you could look at it another way, and you're going to learn from it one way or the other, but the one that's going to be most instructional is to figure out how you're wrong.
If somebody says something that you think is wrong, really think about, not just all the ways in which that person is an idiot, but all the possibilities, where maybe that person knows what the hell's going on and you don't—even if after five minutes you completely reject that position, and say, "No, that guy was just an asshole."
Laughter
Like I had a situation today. I'm standing, just standing by the street, minding my own business. I've got my backpack on. I've got my umbrella in my backpack.
This guy is like, sliding behind me. There's plenty of room on both sides, but for whatever reason, he decides he's going to rub himself against me as walks past.
As he does so, the handle of my umbrella catches on his jacket or something. So I'm standing there, and somebody bumps me and says, "Look out! Be careful!"
At first I'm thinking he must think that this umbrella is a sword, because it has a sword-like handle, and it's a common mistake, so I'm like, "it's just my umbrella."
And then he says, "Well, it takes up space, so be more careful!"
And I'm like, I mean, yes, it takes up space. I take up space. I mean, this is the space that I'm taking up, and we generally accept the fact that other people are going to take up space, and that if we're the ones moving, and we bump into them, than we're the asshole.
I sat there and thought about, how can I be wrong in this situation? Then I realized, you know what? I'm not. I'm just standing here. The thing that made me wrong in this situation was that I didn't just laugh it off in the first place, that I actually played into this by being like, "What?"
Right? Because— Yes?
You had some stats that could guide you to a very easy answer. But in most of the times, these stats pull you in different directions. So, I have a question. When is it wrong to think that you might be wrong in the beginning, and question yourself?
You should always question yourself.
Always?
Always.
Isn't there— Isn't this tied up to an emotional feeling?
Yes, but you act as if emotions are somehow separate from you are. You feel the emotions that you feel for a reason. When you feel emotional about something, you should think about why that is. You should reflect on that. Do you know what emotions actually are?
...
So, your brain needs to communicate with the rest of your body, and the easiest way for it to do that is by sending, not very specific signals, which it also does, but by sending contextual signals, which basically flavor how all things are interpretated (sic).
These are what we call the hormones. This what we call the limbic system. Your brain has certain general contexts that it needs you to operate within, and so in order to set those contexts, it releases these hormones, and you experience that as emotion.
And so the same set of inputs, the same basic neurotransmitters, what they're going to affect you to do is going to be based on what your overall mood is. That's what emotions are. They're part of who you are.
So isn't that tied up pretty well?
I think you should trust your emotions. OK, I'll give you a story about emotions and not trusting them:
When I started at Tapulous, there was one partner who was pretty cool, and there was another partner who, I didn't really know anything about him, but what I did know is that he made my skin crawl. Every time I saw this guy, I just felt this, like, flinching feeling, for no reason whatsoever.
Guy seems perfectly polite. I didn't know anything about him. I had no reason to believe that he was anything other than an awesome guy. And yet, he made me recoil every time I saw him, and I told myself, "Here's what this is:
"You were with Shipley, and Shipley was really hard to deal with, and you had three years of this shit, and it just got you in this really jumpy mood, and you're just feeling something that isn't real.
"You need to just get over the feeling that this guy gives you."
And then it turned out that the guy was just a total douchebag asshole, and he ruined the company. The reason why the company isn't the amazing company that it should have been, and is just some has-been, bought by Disney, one-hit wonder company was because this asshole ruined the company, because he was an asshole.
Because he didn't get what anybody else was trying to do, and he wanted to sabotage anything that anybody else was trying to do that wasn't what he was doing, because he was an asshole.
And ultimately, because he was an asshole, people had to make decisions, things had to fall on one side or another, and that's what happened.
I could have trusted my emotions. I could have listened to my gut, and I could have said, "I can't explain why, but this guy makes my skin crawl. Maybe I should pay attention to that. Instead of that, I dismissed it, and then I ended up paying the price.
Now, I learned some very important lessons there, but one of those lessons is that, if you find yourself standing across the aisle from somebody and you're supposed to be saying "I do," and it's not the happiest moment of your life, and you're actually kind of terrified?
You listen to that. That means something.
Laughter
A lot of stuff doesn't happen.
No, a lot of stuff doesn't happen, that's true, and that's another lesson that you have to learn. Maybe sometimes you think to yourself, "Maybe I should jump out the window right now, because this situation is really intense."
But you don't do that, because you know better than that. The difference between what makes you crazy and what makes you not crazy is not the shit that goes on in your head, but how the shit that goes on your head affects what you do in the real life.
But you need to be advised: you should listen to the different forces of your body the same way you listen to your friends. You take their advice, you try to understand what they're saying, and then you ultimately make a decision for yourself that you're the one who's going to have to live with.
And you know what? You're going to have to make a decision. You're going to have to go down this door, or that door. You're going to have to take this path, or that path. The worst thing you could do is half-ass it. The worst thing you could do is try to go down both paths at once. The worst thing you could do is always looking down this path, while walking down that path. Pick a path and go with it.
Whether you're going to logic your way through it, whether you're going to go emotional, whether you have no freaking idea and you're forced to flip a coin and let the universe decide, pick a path, believe in it, and go with it.
And if you don't believe in it, then you have to think about that. That why I say, it always comes down to this one minute, this most important minute. When it really comes down between you and your god, and he is asking you, in 60 seconds or less, to describe why you should be up here, and not down there, what are you going to say?
If you find yourself in a situation like I once found myself in, with some people who are stealing a car from you, have a gun in your face, and really are on the fence about whether it would be more convenient to kill you or let you go, and you have to answer for yourself, in that moment, why should you spare me? Why should I not die? What are you going to say?
What did you say?
At the time, I said, because it really wasn't worth the effort. I wasn't worth killing. I didn't have any money. There was nothing in my wallet. I didn't have any ideological thing against these guys. I just worked for this car company, I thought those guys were assholes, I thought these guys were