Sam Altman – OpenAI Founder Reveals His Writing System

David Perell (Host) 00:00.550

what got you to start writing the personal blog

Sam Altman (CEO) 00:03.150

i wanted to like practice writing i had this like sentence i had watched paul graham write and he's an amazing writer i never had any aspirations that i was going to be anything like that but i i had seen how powerful it was for helping startup founders and forgetting to invest

Sam Altman (CEO) 00:18.190

in good startup founders so i wanted to get i wanted to like try to get good at it i'm like i'm not a naturally gifted writer but i believe like you know with practice anybody people can get good at a lot of things i wanted to like kind of continue doing the thing that seemed to

Sam Altman (CEO) 00:37.470

work so well for YC getting good founders umm but honestly it wasn't it's not my calling in life i don't really do it anymore

David Perell (Host) 00:49.510

you wanted to be a novelist that

Sam Altman (CEO) 00:51.030

astounded me i did but only for the like romantic life of it not that i thought i was ever going to be a good writer just seemed like this like very cool friend to sit you know smoking in a cafe in paris and

David Perell (Host) 01:03.070

yeah you can still

Sam Altman (CEO) 01:04.030

do that i could i could probably not the path of my life is what i've gone but i

Sam Altman (CEO) 01:10.240

could so it turned out i'm like not a very good writer and i'm not going to be a blogger and that's OK but i am still very happy at the experiment because i learned that i can like right for myself to clarify my own thinking and that has been super powerful

Sam Altman (CEO) 01:28.150

even the ability to like write a message to like explain to a team what a plan is and why we're going to do it i think doing that in writing versus doing that in a meeting is often very

David Perell (Host) 01:38.150

powerful have you done that recently

Sam Altman (CEO) 01:40.390

it's like if we're starting a new project or if we're putting together some sort of like plan that we're going to execute on forcing myself to write it down rather than just like sit in a meeting and let it spitball around has

David Perell (Host) 01:51.070

been very good do you have a format of

Sam Altman (CEO) 01:53.070

sorts no no i mean i try to like keep it under i don't think long

David Perell (Host) 01:58.030

is good yeah so

Sam Altman (CEO) 01:59.350

i try to keep it short but beyond that no real constraints

David Perell (Host) 02:02.470

tell me about your just communication lessons that you've learned from peter thiel he is so distinct in the way that he communicates i know you've spent a lot of time with him especially early in your

Sam Altman (CEO) 02:13.150

career he's an amazing communicator and one thing that he does super well he comes up with these like very evocative very short statements that really stick in your brain and i don't know i don't know how to do that i don't really know anybody else who does that like he does but

Sam Altman (CEO) 02:30.790

it's a he has like very interesting things to say and very interesting ways to say them and most people you're lucky to get one or the other he is like a very rare combination of both it's super impressive

David Perell (Host) 02:43.110

what do you think contributes

Sam Altman (CEO) 02:44.110

to that he thinks about the world in this sort of like deeply unconstrained way he has yeah i mean the first thing anybody would say about him is he is a truly brilliant original thinker and that's just rare

David Perell (Host) 03:00.990

there's a boundlessness about your thinking that really stands out like i feel like you have that same sort of lack of constraint

Sam Altman (CEO) 03:08.710

i think he's he's more of a like here is this totally here's a totally different view on something that no one else has ever expressed and now sounds like obviously at least interesting and often obviously correct and i think my view of the world is often more like can we just

Sam Altman (CEO) 03:32.980

do more like we have this like vector can we push on it harder

David Perell (Host) 03:37.340

is that like the david dortch sense of like everything is possible that's not limited by the constraints of

Sam Altman (CEO) 03:43.060

physics and and also that there's not enough people don't to tie back to peter i remember sometime someone asked like a long time ago someone asked him what was your biggest investment mistake ever and everybody expected him to say something like well i invested in this company

Sam Altman (CEO) 04:00.910

but also money and it blew up and he said the biggest mistake i don't remember the B or C but the biggest mistake ever let's say it was not investing in a series B of facebook and that is the kind of mistake i try not to make so i'm like a big believer and find what is working

Sam Altman (CEO) 04:15.870

and like go aggressively after it

David Perell (Host) 04:18.870

ideas are such a power law and it's about finding that core thing and just doubling tripling down on that

Sam Altman (CEO) 04:24.710

yeah i think that the really good ideas are rare and when you find one you should quadruple down on it and the only thing you push on you know you should audit on a few of these things in writing and business whatever i really i really really believe in this principle and i mean

Sam Altman (CEO) 04:44.790

i think this is why like all business almost all business books are terrible right there's like three good ideas and three hundred pages and what a reader wants is three good ideas on one page

David Perell (Host) 04:55.150

yeah did paul graham teach you anything specifically about writing

Sam Altman (CEO) 04:59.070

yeah mostly just by reading his essays i think like many other people my introduction to the startup world and excitement about it came from reading PG 's essays he's like an unbelievable writer and that was the topic of like great interest to me and many other people i think a

Sam Altman (CEO) 05:15.710

whole generation of us like copied PG and all of these ways