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**Steve Yegge:** Herd mentality, for sure. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So what you say though, Steve, about leadership and being hard - I think that, to the level that Bill Gates, the level that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, you pick your well-known FAANG organization leader, and at some point in their journey, they transition or already were sociopathic. To be in... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, we could find a counter-example maybe that would disprove the theory. Like, is there a really nice, down to earth, rational, well balanced person that's like the head of -- or founded and built a Fortune 50 or Fortune 100? |
**Steve Yegge:** Benioff? |
**Jerod Santo:** Maybe. I don't know. |
**Steve Yegge:** I never met him, but I've heard good things... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, maybe. |
**Steve Yegge:** Or the dude that founded Twitter originally, I think, maybe. I'm not sure. I don't know about that... |
**Jerod Santo:** Ev Williams? |
**Steve Yegge:** Definitely Benioff. I mean, there are examples. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So it's possible, but it just seems like it's more rare. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Benioff is Slack, is that right? |
**Steve Yegge:** Benioff is Salesforce. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Salesforce. Okay. I thought so. I was like -- |
**Steve Yegge:** I mean, unless I'm wrong... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, they own Slack, so you're in the same ballpark there. |
**Steve Yegge:** Yeah, yeah. But sociopathic - I mean, maybe. You certainly have to be thick-skinned. Because too much empathy has been my historic failing, and you really have to kind of dial it back a little bit. You have to have empathy, but you can't let it ruin you, because too much empathy is gonna stall you. I d... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Here's a definition, to give some context. |
**Steve Yegge:** Alright. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And sociopathic doesn't mean you have sociopathy; it just means you have a -- it's like an itis. It's like a version of it. It's described as a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong, and ignores the rights and feelings of others. Which kind of des... |
**Steve Yegge:** Honestly, that would be a really useful life skill, I guess. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughter\] That's something to strive for... |
**Steve Yegge:** I guess... But I mean, seriously, the word that you used that really resonated with me, Adam, was grounded. They're not grounded, and maybe that's why they've become the way they are. Because of course, over time anybody can become jaded to other people's problems if they're not feeling them. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[45:53\] Well, if you have a cadre or a jury near you that's well-seasoned veterans, that only facially express when you facially express, those are yes people. And if you surround yourself in no grounding, and no-no people, people that push back on -- that really know you and can push back against... |
**Steve Yegge:** That's right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...that you can't empathize or react in that way. So you just naturally hurt them even if you don't want to. |
**Steve Yegge:** And this is one of the many reasons that diversity at a company is so important, and getting a diverse set of voices and backgrounds and experiences to help ground it. Because -- I was gonna say, I was talking about Eric Schmidt, and his failing with 1,000 flowers. We weren't representative, because we... |
**Jerod Santo:** How long have you been outside of Google? |
**Steve Yegge:** Oh, gosh, I've been gone for about - I guess it was 2017, so five, six years now. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. What's your assessment now, in terms of innovation, the company? It seems like they've had such a lead on AI stuff internally, with DeepMind, and with all -- I mean, tons of effort going into it, and yet, at least from the outside, it seems like they were caught very much off-guard by ChatGPT spe... |
**Steve Yegge:** Yeah, I mean, I think Google's never had to innovate, because they've found the moneymaker early on. |
**Jerod Santo:** That's so good. I mean, it's such a moneymaker. |
**Steve Yegge:** It was so good that they never felt any pre-- they wanted to innovate, because they're like "Well, we better come up with something just in case..." But that was about the amount of passion and energy they've put into it. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Steve Yegge:** And so most of Google's focus forever has been on basically their ads monopoly. And yes, I did say monopoly, and you shouldn't edit it out. I mean, I do not think that Google has a monopoly on most things; having been there, I can see that we're desperately behind in most places cloud, and so on... But... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** See you again, holding onto the past. |
**Jerod Santo:** You probably still have your collection. You've got a collection? |
**Steve Yegge:** Yeah. And so Amazon was forced to be innovative, and forced to try in many, many things. And so Amazon got good at innovation. Google never really got good at it. They never did. Now, LLMs have kicked them in the pants... |
**Jerod Santo:** I was gonna say, do you think that monopoly's really at stake in? |
**Steve Yegge:** Well, honestly, the bigger threat to their monopoly is the EU, and I hope they're successful in breaking it up a bit... Because we need to have other players in the ads ecosystem. I don't think ads should ever go away. When you see an ad that's perfectly done, you don't know it's an ad. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah. |
**Steve Yegge:** In fact, if you go on Amazon's mobile app, and just shop... Like, 80% of the stuff you're seeing there is ads. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I know. |
**Steve Yegge:** It's targeted placements. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The ones that I'm looking for - like, I search for things, and there's a little video there... I welcome those things. Like, give me a great demo... |
**Steve Yegge:** \[49:58\] If they know what you're looking for... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Exactly. |
**Steve Yegge:** If I see a guitar ad, I will always be happy. So I don't think ads are going away, but the way ads are done today is very much dictated by Google and Facebook. Those are the two networks, for slightly different purposes. Amazon is, of course, actually passing them both... But again, so maybe Google doe... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, even Amazon has competition too with TikTok's shop feature. |
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