Craig Cannon: How are things?

Sam Altman: Good, busy, good. YC’s going to be huge next batch. Interviewed with more than a thousand companies. OpenAI’s going really well, excited about that. I’m ready for this year to be winding down, but it’s been a good one.

…I think it’s very easy to spend a decade being incredibly busy and incredibly stressed every day and feeling like you’re working incredibly hard and creating a ton of movement but not moving forward. And I think this is like a big trap and it’s so easy to get caught up in things that are urgent but unimportant. Or it is so easy to get caught up in like the trifles of office politics and plain status and power games that don’t matter, but feel so fun and so important, or just like random other bulls—t that piles up in life.

…I mean the best thing I can say is I’ve like, I follow my interests, I try to pursue a lot of projects that seem interesting. I realize that most of them will fail and I don’t care. And then the ones that, as long as the ones that work really work. So like, OpenAI really works, YC really works. I’ve done plenty of other things in the last 5 years that have not worked at all…Like I invested in a bunch of companies that failed. I got really excited about a few companies I wanted to start that turned out to be bad ideas for different reasons.

C. Cannon: We should explore that because I think it’s something that’s not talked about and it’s to the detriment of everyone. So for example, like last year, a year before, you were doing a lot of political stuff. [see 2016 profile, Governor run platform]

[Networking] A Altman: Yeah, I still think that is gonna work. I am, let’s not, let me try to frame it in like an area where a lot of things went wrong at once. But in a way that was really good.

Okay. So I sold my startup [in 2012] when I was like 26, something like that. And I worked at the acquiring company for a little while, maybe 25, I don’t remember.

And then I took a year off. And in that year, which is hard to do, it’s really hard to do in Silicon Valley, because in a place where social status is determined by your job and what you’re working on. Like when you show up at a party and someone says, oh, what are you working on? And you’re like, I’m kind of just taking the year off. Like you can sort of see in real time, their eyes like look for someone else in the room to talk to, it doesn’t feel that good. But it’s an incredibly privileged thing to be able to do this, but if you are in the position between jobs where you can take a year off, I highly recommend it. I think it was like 1 of the 2–3 best career things that I ever did. In that year, I read like many dozens of textbooks. I learned about fields that I had been interested in. I didn’t have any idea that they were all gonna come together in the way they did, but I learned a lot about nuclear engineering.

AI was starting to work, [eg. AlexNet, DQN] so I learned a lot about AI. I learned about synthetic biology. I learned about investing. That was the year that I started being like, well, I had made like maybe 4 angel investments before this, that I was like, all right, I’m gonna get serious about this and try it and see if I like it. [Presumably Hydrazine Capital] I traveled around a lot. I kind of like really got a feel for, a much more of a feel for like, what the rest of the world is like. I met people that were working on all sorts of different things who were nice enough to talk to me. I got badly needed time to reconnect with my friends and family. I just got caught up on life.

And I just sort of like helped people that seemed, I had unlimited time, right?…I met someone interesting and it seemed good and needed help, I would just help them. And they would teach me stuff, or they would, like, offer me the chance to invest in their startup later. And I left myself unscheduled. So I’d like, at the drop of a hat I could fly to another country for a conference [eg. Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, crucial for the OA/MS relationship]. And I started doing all this random stuff and out of all of it, almost all of it didn’t work out. But the seeds were planted for things that worked in deep ways later. [Lesson: never neglect small favors, especially ones that cost you little.]

[Manipulating people] S A: …The things that I think have taught me a lot about business are poker and angel investing. So I recommend both of those. By the way, as a quick plug for poker, so I played a lot in college, fairly seriously, and it’s not for everybody, but I strongly recommend it as just a way to kind of learn about the world and business and psychology and risk and everything…I went to school on the peninsula, and so I would go down there a lot…It did not fund my startup, but it funded my like living expenses as a college student…But I would have done it for free, like I just loved it so much…Playing poker is one good way to do it [understand risk & become more ambitious] and reading poker books was good. Like reading biographies of people who have done, like, really amazing things, I think, is helpful. Like, I love reading about sort of like the great, the big iron science and engineering projects of history.

C C: Yeah, okay, did you ever get into the online stuff, like 10 hands at once?

A: I did, I did. That was not as fun and then I kind of stopped.

[modafinil] C: …Right. How many hours do you think you have good hours every day?

A: It’s always in flux but. I mean like if you take a armodafinil or something you get 20.

C: Yeah but I don’t know if that’s necessarily the best version of Sam Altman.

A: I would say I can definitely like sit down and be like super productive for 8 hours in a row…But it’s definitely not like 16. And I think the people who say 16, I feel like I get much more done than they do. So I just don’t believe it.