Creative teams need room for bad ideas

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:04:40

   Yeah, I actually think LLMs and the latest advancement in AI kind of have created an excellent framing on this and to talk about this sort of high-temperature notion. So in LLMs, you can basically tune up the temperature. And if you tune up the temperature, you know, it basically starts hallucinating. So, you know, the bad thing with the hallucination, of course, is you have no idea what's true or not.

2. 1:05:06

   But there is spurs of vocational brilliance that comes out of there and the truly new ideas that come out of there. So the criticism of the current generation LLMs is they're not very creative. and that's ultimately because we've kind of turned down the temperature on them and we safety train them to the point where we keep them within the guardrails so there is a way when you train these things to be highly creative but batch it crazy and that's just turning up the temperature yeah and i believe that um you know one of the the and and this is by the way something that um i intend to focus a lot more on in the next decade um you know i'm very reflective at the moment because i I am in my 19th year, and I think it's interesting you sort of talked about big companies because I used to think – before I sort of ran a big company myself, I just used to think they're bad, period.

3. 1:06:00

   And I've sort of revised my view, and now I think they're really good at doing what they're already doing and doing it better. So back to that point, like a large-scale corporation, what they do is they just get better and better and better at doing what they already do. And the way to do that is obviously minimize mistakes. So, you know, that also means minimize brilliance, minimize waste, minimize all these other things.

4. 1:06:29

   So naturally, what you end up having is more and more capitalism, public markets, all of these things drives you towards one thing. Optimize what you're doing to the point where it's the most efficient thing that it can possibly be. but that is not how conducive to how you get the best ideas and what i'm greatly you know satisfied and happy with and i've been fortunate enough as i don't anymore run spotify as much day-to-day as i used to i'm still very involved but i'm not involved in all the team meetings and doing all the things that I used to do, so I was like 90% internally focused on just getting the machine to run, is that I've been more and more able to not just have the free time to think, but I've been more able to meet more people. And part of the beauty of that is that it brought

5. 1:07:25

   me back to music again. And it brought me back to the creative process of music again. And it is something remarkable in a studio where you have um a bunch of people um just throwing ideas at each other and musicians actually in many ways uh know more about the entrepreneurial process than most people give them credit i think it's the same thing filmmakers like athletes yeah 100 and so so this point then is that um what i truly believe the very best musicians do and the most creative people do is they are not afraid of throwing out ideas, even terrible ones. And it's in even the most terrible one, there may be a nugget. You and I, we talked about this over breakfast where, you know, there was a person who sort of gave some bad advice to you.

6. 1:08:26

   But sometimes even, you know, the insight behind the advice, sort of the question behind the question can lead to some really interesting things. And so what I've come to do, realize is most people want conformity and they value sort of a reliable consistency of, you know, giving X amount of impact per seconds or minute or, you know, truthfulness, you know, over X percent, they have some sort of heuristics for what is valuable person from a business context or whatever sort of context you're judging it on, but certainly in a business concept, this conformity.

7. 1:09:08

   So you want to sort of put people in about this person is good and they're always good. But, you know, what I'm more interested in these days is I'm interested in this idea I'd never heard about before. And I find it with some people that even in an hours-long conversation with the best people in the world where I've learned the most, it may be 55 minutes of that conversation that honestly was completely worthless, not that interesting for me.

8. 1:09:46

   But then there's a spur of the moment, two, three minutes of brilliance, which I never heard before, which will deeply and profoundly impact my life. Those are my people. That's what I'm interested in. And I've come to learn that most people don't like to be around those people, but I love it. And I think it's such a rewarding and interesting thing. And I'm looking forward to spending more time with those people in the coming decade.

9. 1:10:21

   And it's sort of one of those things that I've sort of want to do more of and learn more from. I think this is related.