Interviews with the Masters: A Companion to Robert Greene's Mastery

Interviews with the Masters:

A Companion to Robert Greene’s Mastery

by Robert Greene

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Robert Greene 2013. All rights reserved.

A companion to the #1 New York Times Bestseller Mastery

More than 20,000 hours of research and thought went into Robert Greene’s stunning book, Mastery. In a departure from his previous works, Robert Greene interviewed nine contemporary masters, including tech guru Paul Graham, animal rights advocate Temple Grandin, and boxing trainer Freddie Roach, to get their perspective on their paths to greatness. Those interviews are now available to readers for the first time. Interviews with the Masters presents more than 700 pages of revealing insight directly from these contemporary Masters; from how they learn and think, to how they put it all together and create.

You’ll learn how

-Paul Graham used a hacker’s mentality to create a programing language and a billion dollar portfolio.

-Santiago Calatrava combined the disciplines of art, architecture, and engineering to design revolutionary moving structures.

-Daniel Everett solved the 300 year old mystery of the Pirahã language, forever changing the linguistics field and challenging Chomsky’s Universal Grammar theory.

-Freddie Roach’s trademark techniques made him one of the most well-known boxing trainers in the world, guiding talents like world champion Manny Pacquiao and UFC Champion Georges St. Pierre.

-Yoky Matsuoka pioneered a new field called neurobotics.

-Cesar Rodriguez Jr. went from the bottom of his Air Force class to become the Last American Ace.

-Temple Grandin emerged from a chaotic childhood with autism to become a leader in animal sciences.

-Teresita Fernández used her fascination with alchemy to design beautiful conceptual art.

-VS Ramachandran’s obsession with anomalies led to major discoveries that solved bizarre neurological syndromes like phantom limbs and body-identity disorders.

This companion to the #1 New York Times Bestseller Mastery is a playbook to the lives of  today’s Masters that readers can use to guide them on their own path to Mastery.

Contents

Introduction

Paul Graham

Temple Grandin

Daniel Everett

Teresita Fernández

Yoky Matsuoka

VS Ramachandran

Santiago Calatrava

Freddie Roach

Cesar Rodriguez

More Lessons Available

Introduction

There exists a form of power and intelligence that represents the high point of human potential. It is the source of the greatest achievements and discoveries in history. These powers are something that great masters in all fields experience over long periods of time, and it comes to them through a process of learning and experimentation. It is a path that all of us can follow.

I discovered the elements of this process after some twelve years of intense study of powerful people and high achievers whom I wrote about in my first four books. In going deep into their stories, I could piece together details that transcended their fields and indicated a universal pathway to power.

Many of the figures I had studied were mediocre students; they often came from poverty or broken homes; their parents or siblings did not display any kind of exceptional ability. We normally imagine those who achieve great things in the world as somehow possessing a larger brain or some innate talent, giving them the raw materials out of which they can transform themselves into geniuses and Masters. Based on my research this did not seem to be the case at all. Instead, this intelligence came from the intensity of the desire to learn and the process they went through to develop high-level skill.

In the stories of the greatest masters—past and present—we can inevitably detect a phase in their lives in which all of their future powers were in development, like the chrysalis of a butterfly. By looking at their various paths we can deduce an ideal apprenticeship that transcends their fields and indicates something essential about the brain and how we learn.

Throughout history we read of masters in every conceivable form of human endeavor describing a sensation of suddenly possessing heightened intellectual powers. After years of intense absorption in a particular field over a long period of time (well past the 10,000 hour mark), they come to understand all of the parts involved in what they are studying. They reach a point at which these parts become internalized and they are now seeing the whole, the dynamic itself of their particular field. For example, the great chess Master Bobby Fischer spoke of being able to think beyond the various moves of his pieces on the chessboard; after awhile he could see fields of forces that allowed him to anticipate the entire direction of the match. Albert Einstein suddenly was able to realize not just the answer to a problem, but a whole new way of looking at the universe, contained in a visual image he intuited. The inventor Thomas Edison spoke of a vision he had for illuminating an entire city with electric light, this complex system communicated to him through a single image. In all of these instances, these Masters experienced the power of intuition, or a fingertip feel.

In a departure from my previous books, I interviewed nine living masters in order to include their perspective and insight into the process of developing one’s chosen craft. I sat with these masters for many hours, extracting their stories and their individual path to greatness. I met with Paul Graham in Palo Alto. Santiago Calatrava in New York. Freddie Roach in Los Angeles. I met with the various masters in their studios, in their offices, and in their homes.

For those of you who have already read Mastery, you have seen their stories in the book. What you have not seen is the raw transcripts of our time together, where the masters provided valuable information and lessons that I was not always able to include.

In reading these transcripts—which we are now making available in a slightly edited form—you can get a deeper feel for their way of thinking, their creative process, and the particular obstacles they had to overcome along the way.

Remember: the greatest danger you face in the world today is that you are replaceable. As you get older, people who are younger, cheaper and more in tune with trends are rising up and threatening your position. Your only salvation is to mine your uniqueness, to combine various skills that set you apart. No one can do what you do. That is your endgame.

In these interviews, you will see in even greater detail the importance of discovering your calling, of immersing yourself in a subject that excites you, and the critical role that the apprenticeship phase plays in the lives of all successful people. You will read about turning points, critical moments in their careers in which they corrected their path, decided to take risks or go out on their own. Perhaps you are at such a point now in your own career. What often separates masters from others is this willingness to be different and unique. I hope the stories that you will read here will inspire you.

These transcripts are meant to serve as a companion piece to the book itself, almost like the side material in my first three books. The more you understand the process that leads to Mastery, the less mysterious it will become and the more likely you will be to follow it and make yourself truly irreplaceable. 

Paul Graham

@paulg

PaulGraham.com

Paul Graham was born in 1964, in Weymouth, England. His family moved to the United States when he was four, and he was raised in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. Graham obtained a BA in philosophy from Cornell University, and a PhD in computer science from Harvard University. He studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Academia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. In 1995 he cofounded Viaweb, the first application service provider that allowed users to set up their own Internet stores. After Yahoo! acquired Viaweb for close to $50 million (and renamed it Yahoo! Store), Graham went on to write a highly popular series of online essays about programming, tech startups, the history of technology, and art. Inspired by the reaction to a talk he gave the Harvard Computer Society in 2005, Graham created Y Combinator, an apprenticeship system that provides seed funding, advice, and mentorship to young tech entrepreneurs. It has since become one of the most successful tech incubators in the world. The total value of the over two hundred companies he has invested in is currently worth more than $13 billion, and includes DropBox, Reddit, loopt, and AirBnB. He has published two books: On Lisp (1993) about the computer programming language, and Hackers and Painters (2004). his online essays can be viewed at PaulGraham.com.

Robert:      Did you have some things that you were drawn to? Where did your mind go to? What was your sanctuary?

Paul:           I realize now it was stuff from outside Pittsburgh. [laughs] Books. Books were basically letters from people who lived in places that were not Pittsburgh.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           And programming was pretty cool. Computers were just becoming available then.

Robert:      We’re talking, what? 1980?

Paul:           Well, I graduated in '82. So, junior high school, when I first started programming, the Mac first came around in 1977 or 1978.

Robert:      It’s hard to believe.

Paul:           Right? I found the one Mac that my school district possessed. My father wouldn't buy a computer. Computers were very expensive back then.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           Computers have basically stayed the same price, but inflation has caused everything else to become cheaper.

Robert:      Right. What drew you to the computers in the first place? Because that is a weird thing in 1978.

Paul:           A lot of kids just see a computer and it is immediately fascinating, because you can make it do a lot of stuff. That was obviously some visceral thing.

Robert:      Uh-huh.

Paul:           Like it is for probably almost all hackers. You see this thing and you just have a sense of the possibilities.

Robert:      See, because I am not a hacker. So I am trying to understand that a little bit.

Paul:           Ah, huh.

Robert:      Yeah. It’s fascinating.

Paul:           You know what it’s like? You know when you see a Leatherman tool, even if there is not something that you need it for it is kind of exciting because it can do stuff.

Robert:      Well, what could you do? Because it didn't look exciting. Those first computers didn't look exciting.

Paul:           It looked exciting to me. I mean, the cases don't look exciting.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           But if you know that you can tell it to do anything and it will do it as long as it is precise. I mean, it might not finish doing it, but you can at least tell it. So it is sort of like a super Leatherman.

Robert:      Uh-huh.

Paul:           It is like, it has, for hackers at least, when hackers see a computer, it is like the kind of appeal that a Leatherman tool has, but just multiplied by a million, because it is a million times more flexible.

Robert:      So where did you see your first computer? Do you remember?

Paul:           No.

Robert:      When you began your love affair.

Paul:           No. No I don't remember.

Robert:      Really?

Paul:           I mean, they are in movies and stuff like that.

Robert:      Yeah, but didn't have a friend who had one? Where did you get your first PC? Was it a PC back then?

Paul:           No. No, the IBM PC, I remember when the IBM PC came out. That was a big deal.

Robert:      So what was the Mac at that time?

Paul:           There was no Macs. They were Apple IIs.

Robert:      Yeah. Right.

Paul:           Apple IIs were around. And there were a bunch of other computers people used. Heathkit made these computers that you had to solder together. And there was the Commodore PET. All these computers.

Robert:      What did you have?

Paul:           Have long since disappeared. We had a TRS-80. The Radio Shack TRS-80.

Robert:      You actually got your dad to get you one?

Paul:           Finally, yes. He got a TRS-80.

Robert:      You made him get it.

Paul:           Well, I certainly nagged him and nagged him for years.

Robert:      Okay.

Paul:           But the first computers I used were at school.

Paul:           Gateway High School was the name.

Robert:      Gateway High School.

Paul:           Well, they had one. In our junior high school, they had one. It was the school district’s computer that they used for printing out grade reports and scheduling classes and stuff like that. It was the school district IT department. They had this computer called an IBM 1401.

Robert:      Uh-huh.

Paul:           What we would now consider a mainframe.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           Except it had 12K of memory, if I remember correctly.

Robert:      12K.

Paul:           Maybe it was 4K. You could see each bit of memory. It had magnetic doughnut, magnetic core memory. These little round magnetic doughnuts drawn on wires. You would look in the case and there was the memory. The memory was not silicon chips.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           It was like little bits of metal, and you had to program it using punch cards.

Robert:      You did that when you were in junior high?

Paul:           Yeah. I programmed using punch cards.

Robert:      They let you do that on the school’s computer?

Paul:           You know, they had in our school this gifted program. If you were in it, you were supposed to do something individualized. So I sort of used this as a way to get into the computer room.

Robert:      So you are like an original hacker.

Paul:           I actually got in at the tail end of programming on punch cards. Yeah. In Fortran.

Robert:      In Fortran, yeah.

Paul:           You didn't have any choice about what programming language you used. This computer only had two languages. Fortran and COBOL. I didn't want to learn COBOL. So I learned Fortran.

Robert:      So what was the excitement for you? Just explain, because I want to get it.

Paul:           Well, I can't remember how I learned about computers. But I think it must have been from movies. In movies, there was the electronic brain. If anything, movies over-emphasized what computers could do.

Robert:      You mean like Space 2001 or things like that?

Paul:           Movie after movie. You look back now at things from the '60s and '70s and the computer does things no computer could do even now.

People would take that deal to get the kind of things computers could do, it would take something the size of a room. You could put an entire Google server farm to work on these problems and not get some of the answers that they used to get in these movies.

Robert:      You mean like Star Trek? Things like that? The TV show?

Paul:           Yeah. Everything. I don't remember the particular shows. It was just part of the culture.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           The computers were these electronic brains.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           And you can, so, of course. How could you not want to control the electronic brain?

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           Not about just a math problem, but something computers still can't do to this day. How could you not want to figure out how to make those brains work?

Robert:      So the power that it could give you.

Paul:           Yeah. Yeah. It’s the ultimate tool.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           Like a Leatherman, but a million times more flexible. Because that is what you like about a Leatherman. You look at all of those different things and they do something to matter.

Robert:      Right. Right.

Paul:           Computers are this super duper Leatherman.

Robert:      Did you feel like, when you discovered computers, that that was it? That this was what you were going to be doing for your life?

Paul:           No, actually. There weren't a lot of programmers around back then. So it didn't seem like, it wasn't clear that you could have a career as a software developer. I didn't know anybody growing up that I would have called a software developer. I mean, they used computers a lot to do calculations in the design of nuclear reactors. In fact, my father was one of the first programmers.

Robert:      Oh.

Paul:           But he didn't think of himself as a programmer. He thought of himself as a guy who designed reactors and he had to write programs. Just like now he would use a calculator to actually do the same things probably. But he didn't think of himself as a software developer.

Robert:      Did you learn from, was it in the air, in the family, in the house?

Paul:           He surely didn't teach me anything about programming.

Robert:      Oh.

Paul:           I don't remember him ever saying anything about this. But how can I not?

Robert:      You absorbed it somehow.

Paul:           How can I not have heard him talking about computers? It was just in the air.

Robert:      What were you thinking you would end up doing in life? Did you have any idea?

Paul:           No. I had no idea. You would take these surveys that would tell you something random, like, you are supposed to be a photographer when you grow up. You are supposed to be an insurance salesman.

Robert:      What were you supposed to be?

Paul:           I don't even remember. I don't even remember. It seemed like the choices were all so boring like an actuary or something like that.

Robert:      So where did you go to college, undergraduate?

Paul:           Cornell. I went to Cornell.

Robert:      Very cool.

Paul:           Yeah. And it had a particularly good computer science department.

Robert:      Oh. So that’s when, as an undergrad you started getting deeper into this.

Paul:           Yeah. I was pretty deep into it already. By the standards of the day in high school.

Robert:      Oh. What could you do with it already on the computer?

Paul:           You mean before I went to college?

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           Well, computers, even probably the biggest computer I used before I went to college had 16K of memory and ran only Basic. So, how much of a program can you write in a 16K of Basic? You can write the Game of Life. Conway’s Game of Life.

Robert:      I have heard a lot about the Game of Life.

Paul:           That’s a hacker symbol, a glider from the Game of Life.

Robert:      Were basically self-taught? This was just you doing it?

Paul:           Everybody was self-taught. Even these days, actually, programmers are all self-taught.

Robert:      The best ones probably.

Paul:           Because they start programming when they are 13.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           The really good ones. What happens is, they learn how to write code using a bunch of cheesy hacks, and then they show up in college with all of these bad habits. They can get shit done, but in the most egregious way. Then, in college, functional programming boffins try to clean up their act and teach them how to do everything cleanly.

I was a classic example of this. I knew how to write. I don't think I knew the concept of recursion, for example. I don't remember.

Robert:      What do you mean the concept of recursion? I mean, I know what that means, but for computers, I don't.

Paul:           A recursive algorithm is an algorithm that solves a problem by referring to itself.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           For example, if you have a list of things lined up, and you can only look at the next thing. So you are walking along the list like this. An algorithm for figuring out the length is, if you are at the end, then the length is zero. Otherwise, it is one plus the length of the rest of the list. So I apply this algorithm and I am at the first thing. That means it is one plus the length of this list. Okay. Which is, I don't know. Let’s see. Well, it is one plus the length of this list. Right? Eventually, you get to the end and there is no more. You say, Well, that’s zero. Then, on the way back, as the function returns, it ends up adding up all these numbers.

Robert:      Going on the way back is the recursive element.

Paul:           It means, literally, a function whose definition contains a reference to itself. That’s what it means. So, the length function looks like if you are at the end of the list, the result is zero. Otherwise, it is one plus length of the rest of the list. That’s a recursive function, because it has got that length reference in the definition of length itself.

Robert:      So you didn't know anything about that.

Paul:           No. No. It is sort of a test for how much someone understands about computer science, whether they understand recursion, because a lot of the most elegant algorithms are recursive. The typical cheesy high school hacker, who can get things done but in a very ugly way, would tend to do things that could be solved elegantly by recursion in some inelegant way. Essentially reinventing recursion without knowing it.

Robert:      Oh. Wow. This is very interesting. Well, I'll explain why a little later.

Paul:           So, in college, I cleaned up my act. And I learned about Lisp.

Robert:      Oh. So it was in college you learned about Lisp.

Paul:           Yeah. You couldn't run Lisp on any of the computers that I used in high school. It just wasn't even feasible. Not back then. But in college, they had powerful computers and people who actually knew about computer science. [laughs]

Robert:      Wow. Exciting for you.

Paul:           So, I encountered Lisp for the first time in 1983. I have never been able to tolerate programming in any other language since.

Robert:      I don't want to get too technical, because no I don't even understand it. But just briefly, what is it about Lisp that was so exciting?

Paul:           Okay.

Robert:      If you could explain it to a non hacker.

Paul:           If anyone can, I can.

Robert:      Okay.

Paul:           Because I am the explainer of Lisp. The raison d'être of Lisp is that it is what you get if you try to write a language in itself. One kind of program that you can write is called an interpreter. There are all kinds of different programs you can write. You can write programs to generate pictures, add numbers together, do spreadsheets or something like that. But one of the many kinds of programs that you can write is a program that is self referential in the sense that the input that it takes is a program. What it does is run it. It is a program that runs other programs. And that is called an interpreter.

A number crunching program that takes numbers as inputs and tells you as output if the bridge is going to fail or not. A graphics program takes a description of the world and creates an image of outputs. An interpreter takes as input a program and produces as output the result of executing the program.

Lisp is what you get if mathematically you are trying to create the smallest thing that you can then write an interpreter for, in itself, Lisp is that thing. I wrote an essay about this. If anything can explain this to you, this essay can. It is called The Roots of Lisp. And it walks you through the original paper.

Robert:      I can get it on the Internet?

Paul:           Oh, yeah. It walks you through the original paper that John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp, wrote about Lisp, where he did this.

Robert:      Is there something intellectual or whatever about your attraction to it?

Paul:           Well, the byproduct of designing a language by making the language that is sort of mathematically the smallest thing that can be written in itself is amazingly elegant and powerful.

Robert:      What did you end up getting a degree in at Cornell?

Paul:           Well, I did not have a name for what my degree was in because Cornell had this program called the College Scholar Program, where you didn't have to have a major. You could just make up what you were going to study.

Robert:      Oh, okay. So, what did you make up?

Paul:           Well, what I was trying to study was artificial intelligence.

Robert:      Oh. Artificial intelligence.

Paul:           Yeah. Back then, in the early '80s, everybody thought, 'Okay. This is when AI is finally going to happen. We are going to make Hal. Computers are powerful enough." There was this AI bubble in the early '80s followed by an AI nuclear winter. So that was right at that moment and I got totally fooled by it and thought I was going to produce AI. That is what I wanted to do in college.

Robert:      Then, I know that you went to, was it, did you go to RISD?

Paul:           Yeah. After Harvard.

Robert:      After. You went to Harvard for what?

Paul:           Grad school. I went to grad school in computer science at Harvard.

Robert:      Computer science at Harvard. Wow.

Paul:           Yeah. Well, everybody thought I was a computer science major at Cornell. I just wasn't. But I was always in that computer science building.

Robert:      Did you go all the way at Harvard?

Paul:           Yeah. I got a Ph.D.

Robert:      You got a Ph.D.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      So what made you then go into painting?

Paul:           Well, I didn't work. I didn't get far enough as an undergrad to realize it was kind of all a big fraud.

Robert:      Yeah.

Robert:      So you got into something completely different?

Paul:           Well, I got to Harvard, and I’m like, Fuck. This stuff doesn't work. What am I going to do? So, I thought, what can I salvage from the wreckage? [laughs] Of all this stuff that I know, and all the stuff that is going on in AI, what is good? You know what was good about it? Lisp. The programming language, the programming tools that they used in AI, and in retrospect I was right, because of all the legacies of all that work that people did in AI, their biggest effect has been in programming languages.

So I thought, all right, of all the stuff, what is actually, genuinely good? Programming languages. So I decided I would work on programming languages. But programming languages, although kind of fun, are not as exciting as making Hal. [laughs]

Paul:           I mean, imagine. I really believed that was going to work.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           When I went to grad school, I really believed that if I worked hard enough, I would be able to make this machine that I could talk to and have a conversation.

Robert:      Yes, right.

Paul:           Seems crazy. But I really, truly thought that.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           And a lot of other people did too.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           It wasn't just because I was young and stupid. There were a lot of people in the government who thought that enough to give universities millions of dollars to work on it. And something like that probably will happen. But it will take hundreds of years.

Robert:      You think so?

Paul:           Yes.

Robert:      Well, that is a whole another discussion. That is a very interesting discussion about language and human reasoning and how you get a computer to reason like a human. I’ve seen that debate, and there are people who believe it will never happen.

Paul:           Never say never in technology.

Robert:      I know. I know.

Paul:           If you want to say never in an impressive sounding way, no, say it will take arbitrarily long.

Robert:      It will take arbitrarily long. But if we could just chart your course in life.

Paul:           Yeah, okay.

Robert:      Would we say, because, for me, for instance, I was a writer when I was a kid.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      But then I went through a great wandering period until I found my way back to writing books.

Paul:           Oh, same here.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           I was a writer when I was a kid, too. In high school, what I thought I was going to do was I thought I was going to be a writer.

Robert:      Oh, really?

Paul:           Yeah. But I had no concept of how one was a writer. So it was pretty demoralizing.

Robert:      Oh. Well, maybe that is what you should have been. You are a great writer.

Paul:           I know. I just don't do it for money.

Robert:      Actually, because that is very impressive. Your writing is really quite exciting. But do you feel like you ended up where you were meant to go in life?

Paul:           I don't know. I still am trying to figure out what to do.

Robert:      Oh, really?

Paul:           From day to day, I feel like someone going down some rapids in a boat. And I have just been sort of tossed about.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           I am still making it up as I go. Really, honestly. Even Y Combinator itself.

Robert:      Yeah. But that is probably why it is successful. But we’ll get to that. But I guess, then you would answer this is still sort of a question mark. You never felt like there was a destiny that you were fulfilling?

Paul:           No.

Robert:      Because a lot of people have talked about that. And a lot of people that I’m looking at had that from an early age. Like Napoleon is sort of the classic with his star and it is guiding him from when he was young. You don't fit that mold?

Paul:           Some of these things could be made up. If I were a politician, I would make up stories about how I was destined to lead the people. Only in Napoleon’s case.

Robert:      Well, he certainly would be capable of making it up. [laughs] But, for me, I felt like I was going to end up a writer.

Paul:           Well, I thought that I was going to be a writer. I mean, that’s what I do.

Robert:      Well, you did become a writer.

Paul:           I know. I know. I just don't do it for money. But that’s what I actually do.

Arguably, Van Gogh didn't paint for money either. He only sold two paintings in his whole lifetime.

Robert:      Yeah. But, I mean, the sense that, that excitement you initially had with computers and the power that it represented, I am just trying to see if there is a link to where you are now. Maybe I can't.

Paul:           Well, I still like programming. I love programming. I know a lot of people who were studying programming when I was, and who don't do it anymore. I feel sorry for them.

Robert:      You created Arc, essentially.

Paul:           Yeah. It’s a new dialect of Lisp.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           And Hacker News is written in Arc. Hacker News. Hacker News now gets almost a million page views a day.

Robert:      Okay. So you are the exception, then, that proves the rule.

Paul:           We’ll see. Maybe you don't want me in this book. You can see for yourself.

Robert:      No. No. That’s not true. That’s not true. It’s totally fine, because you are open and you kind of go where life takes you, which is a whole other interesting way to do it.

Paul:           Well, you know, you can't have a destiny to do something, to do a career that didn't exist when you started.

Robert:      Yeah. But here’s the idea. The reason why I have it there, I’m not trying to prove something that maybe isn't real. But the sense of you are not going to master something unless there is a genuine love of it.

Paul:           Well, that is certainly true.

Robert:      Well, that love has to come from something deep within. Whether it is genetic, whether it is something from when you were two to three years old, it has to be really deeply rooted in you.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      That’s what I am trying to get at.

Paul:           Well, you have got me as your guy for programming and entrepreneurship or something like that.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           And, actually, probably, it is writing.

Robert:      Oh.

Paul:           More than anything else.

Robert:      Oh. Okay.

Paul:           But I do love programming.

Robert:      Well, you love programming, because you liked it when you were a kid and you saw those movies and the power and the sense of being able to control something and create these kind of Frankensteins. And then you liked the entrepreneur because you are unconventional and you don't like working for other people and you want to be, that kind of thing.

Paul:           I asked Zuckerberg, actually, what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would detect people like him. And he said, When was the first time you realized things were broken and you wanted to fix them?

I think people don't become entrepreneurs so much because they can't stand working for anyone. It is because they want to do something and the only way to do it is to do it themselves. A lot of them try to do whatever it was in some company that they work for. And the company won't do it, and they have to quit to do it. But they just want to make stuff.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           That’s what, I mean, I like making stuff.

Robert:      So now I want to get into what I would consider your apprenticeship phase.

Paul:           In programming.

Robert:      Whatever it is. Because you went through it. Otherwise you wouldn't be here today. So, to me, it seems like there is two phases — programming and then what ended up being the entrepreneurial thing with Viaweb leading to Y Combinator.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      It sounds like a lot of your apprenticeship phase, some of it would come at Harvard, where you learned about programming there. You didn't go out into the world and work for IBM or anything.

Paul:           No. I think, basically, all of my twenties, I didn't make much money. Either because I was in grad school or I was in art school or I was in neither, but just sort of making a little money consulting. I spent my whole twenties just learning.

What I learned was all sorts of different stuff. I mean, if AI had worked, if my illusions going into grad school had been correct, then I would have been super energetic, super excited to work on it and would have maybe been one of the people who made Hal. [laughs] It would seem like I had been one of these people who had an early calling. [laughs]

Robert:      I see. I see what you are saying.

Paul:           But I was fooled. [laughs]

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           The bad side was all of my plans were lying me around like a smoking wreckage. The good part was I could then learn about anything I wanted. So, I was in grad school. It was kind of cool to hang out in grad school. You had some amount of prestige as if you had a job. People could say, What do you do? And you could say, Oh, I’m a grad student at Harvard.

Robert:      Right. That’s good.

Paul:           Which is just as good as having a job. But you didn't really have to be in an office at all or have a boss or anything like that. So I just hung out and learned about all sorts of different things in grad school. That’s what I did. I just hung out. Then, at the last minute, I coddled together this crappy dissertation about programming language just to get out and go to art school.

Robert:      What was your first job? Not outside of school?

Paul:           I certainly didn't learn anything at that. Well, actually I learned a lot of lessons about how not to do a startup.

Robert:      Exactly.

Paul:           My first and only job ever was, like, only normal job. Actually, I probably never had a normal job. But I used to do a bunch of random consulting in grad school. But I didn't actually have to go there.

Robert:      Consulting? What does that ever mean?

Paul:           It means you write, it means freelance programming. That’s what it really means.

Robert:      Oh, okay.

Paul:           Someone needs a programmer and then they will pay you to do it. That’s what it means. I mean, I did it for like one year.

Robert:      Okay.

Paul:           I went to RISD and then the Accademia in Florence, straight out of grad school. Then, when I came back from the Academia, I was out of money. I had to work for a year to get some money to go back to RISD. I worked for just one year. I had this deal with this company called Interleaf, now deceased, that I would work for one year writing code for them. It was miserable.

Robert:      Was it a large company?

Paul:           Not that large. They thought of themselves as a startup. I think they had a few hundred people. Oddly enough, they got acquired about the same time Viaweb did for slightly less.

Robert:      Oh. Wow.

Paul:           Yeah. I went to work there, and I don't think it was a particularly formative experience.

Robert:      It could be negative for you.

Paul:           It was. I learned a lot about how not to do a startup.

Robert:      Okay.

Paul:           I learned a whole bunch of negative lessons about startups. Do not move to the suburbs. Do not have a sales guy in charge of a company. Do not let the original technical guy quit. Do not take too long between releases.

Robert:      Valuable stuff.

Paul:           Be wary about selling things to the government.

Robert:      Uh-huh.

Paul:           I did have sort of a job. I had what was a lot like a startup after college. I started my own consulting firm in college and got a contract from the DOE.

Robert:      Oh.

Paul:           To write software. As Paul Graham Associates.

Robert:      Oh.

Paul:           That was sort of like a job. I mean, you couldn't really do a startup back then. Not right out of college. But that was as close as you could get.

Robert:      And how was that? What did you learn from that?

Paul:           That probably made me into a libertarian.

Robert:      [laughs]

Paul:           To see how the government did things. It was just shocking.

Robert:      The waste?

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           That made me just think, I want to stay as far away from the government as I possibly can for the rest of my life.

Robert:      That’s a good lesson.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      Is there anything in your life that we can point to? Because programming is just all self-taught. You are doing it over and over again.

Paul:           Almost everyone is self-taught. That’s the way programming works.

Robert:      In programming.

Paul:           Yeah. In general. In general, you will find few cases where people have this classic apprenticeship relationship in programming.

Robert:      Well, the apprenticeship doesn't have to involve a mentor, someone instructing you. But you have to be going through a process of learning.

Paul:           Yeah. Sure.

Robert:      What you could do when you were 21 isn't what you could do when you were 35.

Paul:           Yeah. You learn by writing programs.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           Everyone learns by writing programs. By the time you get to college and you decide to become a computer science major, it is probably too late.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           I know of very few examples of people who didn't take up programming before college. But, mostly, you learned it in high school. And there is no one around in high school, even now.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           There is no one around to tell high school students what to do. So, they find books.

Robert:      That’s a good thing, though, isn't it?

Paul:           Now, thanks to the Internet, there are online communities where they can learn stuff.

Robert:      But learning things for yourself is a very good trait.

Paul:           You become your own apprentice. There is this quote, Your twenties are always an apprenticeship. You just don't know what for.

Robert:      Okay. Well, so it’s true about your twenties. Some people are more directed than you and I, but I would say that.

Paul:           I don't know what my twenties were an apprenticeship for, actually. I mean, I learned how to program. I know how to program.

Robert:      I mean, all of the valuable things that you are today that lead to your success, Y Combinator, etc., things you have invented, there must have been a process that led to it. The things that you learned when you were in your twenties are who you are now.

Paul:           Yeah. I learned about programming from the Lisp community.

Robert:      Uh-huh.

Paul:           Which was pretty tight. I mean, nowadays, programming language communities are often pretty tight. But the Lisp community was arguably the original programming language community. So I learned about programming from the Lisp community and actually from Robert Morris, who I met pretty soon after arriving in grad school. Harvard was not a big place for hackers. The theory was what they prized.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           So people were often writing things on paper. But there were a few hackers who were sitting up late at night in a computer lab. Me and Robert were the two biggest ones. So, I learned a lot just from talking to Robert.

Robert:      Oh, really?

Paul:           I don't know if he learned anything from me. It would be interesting if it was a one-way thing and I simply was Robert’s apprentice. That would be very embarrassing because he was a year younger than me. But it might be the case that I was Robert’s apprentice. That would be very funny. But I am not too proud to admit it. You should ask Robert if he learned anything from me.

Robert:      Well, you learned something from him. That’s the important thing.

Robert:      I am sure he learned something from you.

Paul:           Well, we’ll see.

Robert:      It was back and forth. Otherwise, you know.

Paul:           I don't know. I wouldn't presume it. It is quite possible he didn't learn anything from me. Robert is certainly smart enough to have not learned anything from me.

Robert:      So what kinds of things did you learn from him? Or was it all just very technical? You wouldn't call him your mentor, because he is your age. I guess.

Paul:           Well, a mentor is someone who is more sophisticated than you, not older. He was certainly a lot more sophisticated.

Robert:      Well, you know, that thing that you were saying where you look at someone from behind and see what they are doing and imitate it.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      It is that sort of thing. Where you look at how someone is doing something and then you know how to do it.

Paul:           I mean, if there was anyone like that, it was Robert.

Robert:      Well, how about the fact that to do programming, you have to have incredible focus and concentration?

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      Is that something that you developed in this period?

Paul:           It was genetic. George already has it.

Robert:      Oh. God damn, you are ruining all of my ideas. [laughs]

Paul:           Sorry. Sorry.

Robert:      What do you mean it’s genetic? Come on. It is hard, when you had the same focus when you were 16 that you have years later when you came up with Viaweb?

Paul:           Yeah. Sure. I didn't know where to point it. I had this powerful gun and I was shooting around at random. Focus for a while on some girl, and be like the crazy boyfriend.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           And then focus for a while on something that I was bad at and be better than I should have been, like soccer or something like that.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           But you just have to learn where to point it.

Robert:      So there is no, in this twenties period, we can't think of any kind of skills that you are sort of building up.

Paul:           Yeah, sure. Let’s see. Well, I definitely did learn how to program. I definitely learned how to program. I wrote a book about Lisp in my twenties that was based on my thesis. My thesis was a pretty lousy thesis, but it made a decent book.

This book called, ‘On Lisp’. I decided I was going to write a book. At age 22 or something like that, I thought wouldn't it be cool if I wrote a book. So I wrote this book about Lisp and when I started writing the book, I still didn't really understand Lisp. But in the course of writing the book, I was forced to understand it.

Robert:      Oh.

Paul:           So, probably the single biggest thing that I did to learn was write that book.

Robert:      Uh-huh.

Paul:           I had to write exemplary code because all of the code in there was examples.

Robert:      No.

Paul:           One of the things I wanted to do, which was hard then, is to put whole programs in the book. And Lisp is so elegant, so concise, that you can actually do that. You can write an entire program that is that small, it will fit on one page. But only if you are really careful and don't have anything in inessential in it.

Robert:      That kind of forced you to master Lisp in a way.

Paul:           Yeah. Really, really deeply.

Robert:      That’s good.

Paul:           I really understood it. And to understand Lisp is, if you remember what I said about the history of programming, to understand Lisp is to understand modern programming, because that is what all programming now is basically what would have been considered Lisp programming in the 1970s.

Robert:      It helped you become a writer, too. Or not?

Paul:           No, not really. But writing that book was something I did, it was almost the result of a conversation with Robert. I didn't just sit down and write that book. I rewrote it over and over and over, and talked about everything with Robert as I was writing it.

Robert:      Oh.

Paul:           A lot of the ideas in that book are half Robert’s, and it is impossible to tell where one begins and the next ends.

Robert:      Okay.

Paul:           So that is sort of what I did in my twenties. I wrote this book and I spent a lot of time programming with Robert. You are helping me, actually.

Robert:      [laughs]

Paul:           I never tried to figure this stuff out.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           I always felt like I was always waiting for some apprenticeship to happen, and it sort of was in a weird, backwards way.

Robert:      Well, as you said in your quote, it happened anyway in your twenties. It was an apprenticeship, just what was it for?

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      I guess it was for, how old were you when you decided to launch Viaweb?

Paul:           30. And Robert was 29.

Robert:      There we go.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      So that is what it was all leading towards.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      I guess.

Paul:           I remember when I decided to make money.

Robert:      All right. Let’s hear about that, then.

Paul:           I went to art school, and then I went off to New York to be a painter and to be a starving artist and all that. I was sort of an unpaid assistant in the studio of my grad school art teacher, Idelle Weber. I was stretching canvas with a staple gun.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           I was listening to some radio station that was talking about, they were just listening to it in the house. I hadn't chosen this. Or maybe it was the TV. But they were talking about this guy who managed some big fund for Vanguard and made vast amounts of money. The idea just occurred to me, You know, I bet I could do that.

Robert:      Do what?

Paul:           I could just make vast amounts of money. Because up until that point, I had been living hand to mouth. You have probably done this at times in your life, right? There’s stuff you want to work on.

Robert:      In New York, too, yes.

Paul:           Yeah. So you get a bit of money, and then you're okay. You have some money in your bank account, and you can work on the stuff you want. It gradually runs out and you're like, Oh, my god. I’ve got to get more money. So then you shift into panic mode.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           Then you try and frantically work until you get more money. And then you build some up and then you can work on what you want again.

Robert:      That’s like the story of my twenties and thirties.

Paul:           Yeah. A lot of mine, too. So that is what it was like in New York.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           So I heard about this guy who was making tons of money managing some fund for Vanguard. And I thought, I bet I could make lots of money. I should just try to make lots of money and then I won't have to do this.

Robert:      Stretching canvas.

Paul:           Well, no, I wasn't getting paid for that. I just happened to be stretching canvases as I was hearing this. I was doing freelance programming, basically.

Robert:      Oh, I see.

Paul:           Consulting. That’s what I always did, except for that one bit at Interleaf.

You can make a lot of money programming. If you want a day job where you can make tons of money that won't take up a lot of time, it has got to be the most efficient.

Robert:      Well, I am figuring out why things like maybe The 48 Laws of Power are kind of irrelevant a little bit to your life. Because you really weren't having to deal with that.

Paul:           No.

Robert:      And you were kind of avoiding it.

Paul:           No. Yes. Deliberately.

Robert:      Which is very good. But that is not how, it is an unusual story. Most people have to suffer through that.

Paul:           Well, you should make another law actually, that’s like, If possible, avoid places where these laws are enforced. [laughs]

Robert:      That would be the 49th. You're right. But, for a lot of people, you can't. I mean, how are you going to make that law for people who get into politics?

Paul:           Don't. Don't go into politics. Seriously. I think, more and more, you can avoid it.

Robert:      Yes.

Paul:           It used to be, like in the mid-20th century, it was all about large organizations and economies of scale, and to participate in that you had to put up with politics.

Robert:      Even now, with Y Combinator, with the success that you are having with the 20,000 applications that you are getting, you are dealing with people, some of whom might try and trick their way in or whatever.

Paul:           Oh, yeah.

Robert:      You’ve got to develop a bullshit detector. You have to know how some people are charming. And in fact the latest thing that I read is you are not so interested in people’s ideas. You are interested in what they’ve done before.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      Do you know what I’m talking about?

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      So, it is almost like you are interested in their character.

Paul:           Yeah. Yes. Absolutely.

Robert:      That is total 48 Laws of Power stuff right there.

Paul:           Yeah, but you know what?

Robert:      You are getting in through the back door.

Paul:           You know what my solution is?

Robert:      It’s unavoidable.

Paul:           No, it’s not. Here’s my solution. I outsource that. Jessica has perfect pitch for character.

Robert:      Okay.

Paul:           She is one of these weird people. She is almost an idiot savant for character. I can just ask her.

Robert:      Okay.

Paul:           We call her at Y Combinator the social radar. So, I just ask her, Is this person good or bad?

Robert:      Okay. But, if you didn't have her. You were smart enough to find a tool, Jessica, to use. It is still unavoidable.

Paul:           No. I didn't find her. I already knew her when we started Y Combinator.

Robert:      Right. But you knew that she could fulfill this great function for you.

Paul:           I don't know if I knew that at the time, actually. Y Combinator started very much by accident. But, as we were doing it, it became clear that that’s how it was going to work. It was really an experiment that worked. It could have been an experiment that failed.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           The reason it worked was because we happened to have all of the ingredients necessary.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           We didn't know at the time.

Robert:      Okay. All right.

Paul:           A lot of things I did were experiments that worked.

Robert:      Well, okay. I mean, I agree with you, that would be the ultimate thing is to never have to deal with the laws of power.

Paul:           I should read the book so I know what I am talking about, because I really don't remember in detail what they were. I just remember it was a bunch of sneaky crap.

Robert:      No. No. I'd say a third of it is sneaky crap.

Paul:           Okay.

Robert:      Another third of it could go either way.

Paul:           [laughs]

Robert:      And then the other third of it...

Paul:           For actually getting things done.

Robert:      Another part of it is common sense, noble wisdom.

Paul:           Yeah. I am very, very interested in how to get things done.

Robert:      Okay. You might like this, then. It is more like that.

Paul:           Oh. The most interesting thing I’ve heard in 2010 was probably from Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose came to Silicon Valley and had lunch with a couple of people from Silicon Valley at Ron Conway’s house. That guy has interviewed 20,000 people. Or, rather, he has done 20,000 interviews. There have been a lot of duplicates. He knows how the world works, probably more than anybody else.

Robert:      I should be interviewing him.

Paul:           You should. Boy, if you want a master, you really should.

Paul:           But you know what he said?

Robert:      What?

Paul:           He said, I don't know how this came up, but he said, The way things get done in the world is because of two things — relationships between people and focus. That is how shit happens.

Robert:      That is exactly right. I have no disagreements with that.

Paul:           Yeah. And I realized after he said that, that that’s what Y Combinator supplies. Focus followed by relationships.

Robert:      But the relationships can't help but involve politicking.

Paul:           I don't think so. Like my and Robert’s relationship was fabulously valuable. But I don't think there was a lot of politics. There really wasn't. If you have a bunch of peers who are working together, really, they can't be manipulating one another. 

Robert:      Well, that’s a good thing. That’s fine. But, as I said, it would be useful to be able to know. Because I am a little bit more in your direction, honestly. It would be useful to know when people are doing it to you.

Paul:           Oh, yeah.

Robert:      And upon occasion, use this when necessary.

Paul:           One of the things that I like about Y Combinator is it is more like a jellyfish than a vertebrate. It is sort of like a company in the sense that there is all these large numbers of people all working on things to generate wealth and some amount of it filters to us. But it is not this top down brain telling the body what to do.

Robert:      No.

Paul:           It is like some more primitive animal. Secretly, I am kind of hoping it is the replacement for the corporation. We’ll see.

Robert:      I am totally for that.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      I hate all that stuff. I hate the old way of doing things and the corporate mentality and advertising budgets and the whole scale that they have.

Paul:           Yeah.

Robert:      And I think it is going away. But human nature won't change because of that.

Paul:           Human nature is still the same as it was, I mean, I don't believe that evolution has changed our tendency to murder one another and cheat on our wives and stuff like that.

Robert:      Right.

Paul:           But I don't think people murder one another and cheat on their wives as much as they used to. Certainly they don't murder one another as much as they used to.

Robert:      No. But that aggression has been channeled in other directions.

Paul:           Okay. But that’s better. [laughs] That’s better.

Robert:      Yeah.

Paul:           Far better to kill people on shoot ‘em up games.

Robert:      Well, the 48 Laws isn't about shooting people, it’s about how aggression gets channeled in ways we don't expect it to.

Paul:           You are saying it’s inevitable that I will have to worry about people doing this kind of thing to me?

Robert:      No, I don't think so.

Paul:           And if we were trying to create a Google, then, yeah,