The Child Prodigy Teaching Other People How To Learn

I don't know. I don't do like a crazy intro. Um, I'll keep it pretty quick, but I'll babble here just for a second. And, um, I don't know. You feel okay? Anything else? No.

Good. Let's do it.

Andrew Su, thank you. For coming.

Of course. Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure. Absolute pleasure. I know your brother Patrick, who runs the Arc Institute, this temple of science.

Not too far from here.

Not too far. Yeah, down the street in Palo Alto. And this is a really cool place. I'm sure hopefully we'll have Patrick on at some point. He— his life story, which I'm going to write about and I'm behind on writing about, Just got me so fascinated with your, your family and you guys' background. And, and, and so, and then I got interested in you, you know, and just, just after speaking to him a little bit. So, um, okay. So set the table for people who might not know. Um, you are the co-founder and chief technology officer of Speak.

Yes.

It helps people learn new languages. You guys were ahead of the AI curve. I feel like you started it. It's almost 8 years old.

Yeah, so we were YC Winter 2017. I think we technically incorporated at the end of 2016, but yeah, it's been about 8 years.

And it was like AI from the beginning, right?

I mean, yeah, it was always about AI and about this idea that at some point in 5 to 10 years, this is back in 2017, language models, speech models would become superhuman and that would let us build all sorts of really cool AI products that would be very transformative. And you know, that It was a good prediction.

Yeah, like really good. I feel like you guys were ahead of the curve. Transformers hadn't come out yet. I mean, people were doing AI stuff, but not— that was a good, good bet. Um, so we are going to get into Speak. Another reason, and I hope this is— I don't think this is embarrassing, maybe. I mean, I, I don't know. I mean, you've been described as a child prodigy. Yes, whole life. And, and, and we're a child prodigy. I mean, you and your brother. I only know you— there's 3 brothers.

Yes.

But I only know you and Patrick's story as well. And so, but both flew through school, ended up being homeschooled, went to university super early. You dropped out of your PhD program and we can get into all that. But basically we're just like flying through, winning science contests, writing books. You even were like a really good athlete, I think, as well.

When I was young, that was a long time ago.

Yeah, so just, um, like incredible, um, accomplishments. And, and I did— yeah, just, I think it's like this fascinating window into a, um, unique life. And, and so I wanted to get into that, um, a bit. So maybe can— if we— if, if you're okay, we'll kind of start biographically and then, and then get into Speak and, and the rest of the world.

Yeah, totally.

Um, as always, this podcast is made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. Thank you, E1 Ventures, um, for doing your thing. Okay, here we go. So, so you're okay talking about this? This is not—

oh, I'm very used to talking about it.

I know, I know.

Let's do it.

I'm sorry. Okay, the, the—

don't be sorry.

So Taiwanese parents, I believe.

Yes.

And but grew up in around Seattle.

Yes.

And, and it's like these stories, you know, I was doing my research. I mean I don't know why they necessarily highlighted this, but at age of 2, building towering Lego robot structures, and then 6, doing multiplication, reading classical literature, and then started homeschooling around 8. Yeah, I mean, when did you— I've read enough to see that you were— it sounded like you were frustrated at the pace of school, and— but you must have started to have some sense that you were a bit different than the other kids. And you're the oldest brother.

I'm the oldest, and Patrick is 1 year younger. And then we have a third brother, the youngest, who is 9 years younger.

Okay.

Yeah.

Benjamin?

Benjamin.

That's right. Okay. Okay. And so, so you're the one who's like going through all of this first?

Yes.

Yeah. So what was that? I mean, what was that like?

Yeah. So we were in the Seattle area, grew up in Issaquah and lived in a few places around Seattle, but in general, I was in public school, public elementary school track. They put me in the gifted track and I think it was 3rd grade, 4th grade where I was just, remember being really bored in class and I would sort of complete all of the quizzes and the tests really fast and then start bothering people, start bothering other kids. And then eventually it was so distracting that they tried to put me in the adjacent empty classroom just to read so that I would stay quiet and not be annoying. And then, you know, in hindsight, this is a pretty crazy move, but my parents decided that, okay, this is clearly not working and we should homeschool him. So they took me out of school and then decided to basically devote their lives to homeschooling their kids. And, you know, I think from my perspective, obviously I've only had one experience, right? It's— it felt normal at the time, but it's objectively pretty weird, right? Very accelerated. And I started being homeschooled. I had a bunch of private tutors that my parents hired. They did everything they could, I think, to provide us with opportunities and resources to just learn as fast as possible. And I think that naturally I was kind of like a sponge and I, you know, I just loved learning and I still do today. And we'll talk more about that. But in general, the path progressed where eventually I was 11 and I had gone through like a sort of virtual high school curriculum and it was just kind of obvious that, hey, there's nothing else, the next step is college. So I took the SATs, ACTs, and then started college when I was 12.

And then you got 3 or 4 undergraduate degrees, right? Yeah. By the time you were 16.

I did 3 degrees in 3 years.

Neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry. Yeah. And a minor in math. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Unbelievable. And I saw your mom made what seems like a sensible decision. You'd applied to other schools, but she didn't want you to live in a dorm.

And so, yeah, I was living at home and I would take the bus to college every day. And Yeah, it was, it was weird for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think, look, I mean, people read about these stories, they always catch people's attention. Was it— yeah, does this— I don't like— what is it like to— people are writing stories about you from such a young age, and I couldn't tell if one feels like a freak, if one's proud, if it's just your life, you don't know anything else. And so just— yeah, what it is.

You kind of mentioned this, but I was also a competitive swimmer before college. So, you know, I mean, this is much younger, like ages 9 through 12, and I was pretty good for that age. And I think through that track, that was kind of my sort of socialization with kids of a similar age. Yeah, but I think I, I just rapidly normalized everything and became very comfortable and normal that, oh yeah, all my friends are 18 and 19 and 20, right? And I'm just very comfortable spending time and hanging out and having conversations with adults that are 10, 20 years older than me.

Yeah.

So that was pretty normalized. Yeah.

And you're— what did your parents do? What did they do for, for their jobs?

So they've also had kind of unusual lives where they were immigrants. And they basically worked on a variety of initiatives. Basically, my mom is an economist by training and then she became a stay-at-home mom. And my dad was a computer scientist by training and then did that for a while. And then really, I think when they made the decision to homeschool me, that really reconfigured their entire lives. And that was kind of the main focus from then on, you know, like a enormous amount of energy. But before that, they had, I think, done just many random things. Like, we built our childhood house and they were general contractors for that. They ran an art gallery, a bunch of other small businesses as well. And I think maybe there was part of me through just hearing about that and seeing that, it also normalized this idea of agency that you can do You don't have to follow the normal path. You can do many things that other people might consider unusual or like non-traditional. And that became very normal.

And they were working while they were— I mean, you talked about your mom, but was your dad working while you were—

They were mostly not. I mean, it was because Patrick was homeschooled as well after a few years. And I think setting up all the structure and, you know, they were also personally teaching us for a bit. I think that was basically the full-time job.

And if I could ask, I mean, how did they pay the bills and like keep things tight? Or they had done well?

I think they did a good job sort of shielding us from those details when we were younger. And I think they had basically saved through their early career and essentially decided that there's actually nothing more important than essentially giving all the opportunities that we humanly can to our children. Okay. Right. That's like their fundamental life philosophy.

Yeah.

So, you know, I think they— it wasn't easy, but I think they made it happen and they viewed it as like by far the most important thing they could be doing with their lives.

I'm sure some people who hear your story or hear us talking now will think tiger parents. And every time I've seen you and Patrick talk about your parents, though, it seems like quite loving and that you guys— it's not like you guys— my impression is that it wasn't like you were super stressed out and being pushed to it was just that you were super bright and into all kinds of—

Yeah, yeah.

Interesting things.

I think there's a lot of nuance there, right? It's not as simple as just Tiger parent or not, right? I think it is just this fundamental attitude of having a bar of excellence, caring a lot about sort of learning and education and opportunity. There were so many sort of what I now know as excessive things that they did just to kind of provide us with a whole menu of options. I mean, this is kind of absurd, but I remember at some point taking ballet lessons, and we did clay pottery lessons, all sorts of private tutoring and just things to try, I think. And I think certainly there was kind of the idea that Patrick and I were different, right? And this was a different path of excellence. Um, and, uh, yeah, that was like very much normalized.

Reminds me, I remember, I'm sure there's quite a few people like this through history, but reading about John Stuart Mill and what his parents did with him. I mean, by the time he was 5, I think he was reading Greek and Latin and, and all kinds of texts. Sort of this idea of his father wanted to— could tell that he was precocious and, but wanted to build a type of Renaissance man, somebody who was well-rounded. And I mean, it sounds like it was similar, vague, giving you all these avenues to see what clicked and you were really drawn to.

Yeah.

And both you and Patrick, quite science— quite drawn to science from a pretty young age.

Yeah, I think it was always pretty natural curiosity, this idea of understanding the world around us, understanding biology, understanding the human body. That was just always just extremely fascinating. We also got into computers and the internet and making websites, and that was kind of the start of my own software journey, I suppose, pretty young. Yeah.

Yeah. And did you guys, did the two of you feel competitive or was it nice to have somebody there for this Well, I'm sure—

I'm sure Patrick would have a pretty different perspective on it than me. I think we were— I mean, we were both young and I think we also felt under different pressures and, you know, growing up as young adolescents, we have a pretty close relationship today. And he lives in the Bay Area as well, not too far from me. San Francisco, which is awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, okay. And, and, um, at one point I was reading, it felt like people were asking you about all this so much that even as a teenager, I think you wrote like a book. And I tried to find it last night, but I couldn't find it.

Like, I think it's probably out of print now. But, but yeah, I, um, I was kind of like a, like a minor celebrity in some circles, I suppose, right, due to these unusual events.

Like, when I was in the Pacific Northwest and Taiwan, it's, it seemed like, yeah.

Yeah, that's right. And I— we did like a little tour of Taiwan and we visited a bunch of schools and there was a bunch of press. So I think like I've, I've been just very used to that and being in the spotlight for a long time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it seems anecdotally, it seems like 60 Minutes every like 6 years runs.

Yeah, it's like a human interest story.

Yeah, there's this kid, but— and then sometimes I Google these people and then they, they can, it can get weird. They could take some weird— they often don't end up kind of like where you think. I feel like you and your brother, at least I know your brother a bit better, yeah, feels like quite grounded and, and like a nice part, you know. I don't know, like, like normal, and who gives a shit what normal is, but, but like, you know, functional and And high functioning.

Yeah, I think we turn out okay.

Yeah, yeah. And did you, um, yeah, were— I mean, were there cautionary tales you or your parents were trying? Because I, I feel like, isn't this kind of a thing that this doesn't actually usually end that well?

I think the sort of, uh, you know, main— the generic typical cautionary tale, yeah, is that child has been sort of told their entire life that they're smarter than others.

Yeah.

And then they grow up and find out that's not actually true, or that, um, you know, they've never had to deal with adversity and failure and can't handle it and have a huge crash out and then like a breakdown or whatever. Um, I'm sure that happens a lot. Maybe that's even the default case. Um, I think that, um, definitely part of it was luck. If you look at kind of the journey after college, I came down to Stanford for grad school and I spent a few years in grad school doing a PhD in neuroscience and then dropped out for the first class of the Thiel Fellowship. And that's kind of how my whole sort of startup software integration into Silicon Valley journey started.

Yeah.

So maybe, you know, like maybe in some sense I got lucky. Just through that path and through that path, meeting all sorts of, you know, also very precocious, just incredibly intelligent people that went on to do amazing things. Yeah. So maybe, you know, fell in with the right crowd.

Right.

Whatever. Right. Yeah.

And you— okay. And I did want to get into that. I mean, so you, you do these undergrad degrees, you go to Stanford, you're heading towards a PhD in— was it biochemistry?

Neuroscience.

Neuroscience. And So obviously still quite young doing this.

Yeah, I started grad school when I was 16.

16. Yeah. And you're, you're in this.

I had my first drink at a happy hour in grad school when I was 17.

Is that— was that— they let you do that?

Actually, a few people were horrified, I remember.

Yeah. Did you— oh, before we get there, did you ever meet Nathan Myhrvold when you were growing up?

No, I didn't.

Okay.

But I've read his books, obviously.

Yeah, but I mean, he experienced this.

That's true. Yeah. He has a similar story, right?

He lived right near you guys. That's right. So I was curious if you had run into each other. Okay. And then it seemed like you were quite close to like finishing your PhD or you must have been.

I was 3 years in.

Yeah.

And, you know, so I don't know, maybe like a little bit more than halfway and it was Stanford, so the heart of Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

And a lot of my classmates were also becoming disillusioned with academia, dropping out to join startups. That was like the first place where I learned about startups and just like the whole concept. And yeah, it was really fascinating to me and I felt like, I think this could be a possible path. That seems interesting. Seems like a way to get more leverage. And also pursue my interest in technology, you know, help more people eventually. And I started taking more classes at the GSB, eventually learned about the Thiel Fellowship. A friend told me about it and the timing just lined up really well, frankly.

And you mentioned that it was the very first class.

Yeah, so I was 19 at the time and it was 2011, which was the first class.

And I mean, it was like a con— it was a very Peter's always controversial, I guess. But, but this was super controversial thing when he announced it. Yeah. I mean, you know, and like, as time has gone on, you feel like it would be an easier decision to make just because other people have gone down this path. But I mean, that must have been— I don't know if scary is the right word or so, but, you know, to be the very first to make this jump and take this $100,000 and, and not only that, but be pushing against society wants and desires.

I will say, I think I was a bit more of an unusual case because I did finish college, right? Everyone else was a college dropout. So I was a grad school dropout. Still a dropout though.

Right, right, right.

So yeah.

And how did your parents react to that?

No, they were supportive. I think that they wanted me to blaze my own path and be happy.. And I think that they could see that this made sense as well.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. And you, you talked about wanting to help people, um, and, and you've done a couple startups. They all would fall into like education, I think is fair to say. Um, and, and helping people that way. And even when you, um, and Patrick, I think when you were teenagers, you also did, um, Weren't you kind of fundraising or you'd created a charity or like, this seems like it's always been a thing.

Yeah. I think sort of going back to the earlier childhood years, something that my parents, our parents always emphasized was sort of virtues and, you know, having a strong moral compass and a sort of purpose in your life. So, you know, I definitely credit them with starting that philosophy within us that part of the meaning of life is the opportunity to help other people and to raise them up as well. And I think that that has always been something I've really loved about the ethos of Silicon Valley and tech, where it's the opposite of a zero-sum game, right? Like literally the act of building a startup is the act of going from zero to one of creation in some sense. So I think that's always been a part of my core life philosophy. And obviously through my own experiences, just being able to learn stuff really fast and really enjoying that, I've just always been really obsessed with the idea of how do I scale this, right? How do I build ways for other people to experience the same thing? Okay, because I totally think it's possible.

Well, and this is, this is like why I really, really wanted you to come onto the show, because when, um, when I look at your brother, um, it makes more sense to me in some ways. Super, super bright, could do anything you want. Um, he, you know, he's pushing the edges of biology. For people who don't know, I mean Harvard Institute does a variety of science. Patrick is doing a lot around gene editing. I mean, really, like, helped— was— designed CRISPR. And, you know, I mean, like, yeah, like cutting-edge stuff. And so that's sort of where my brain might— if I had all these talents at my disposal, it's like, okay, I'm going to go cure cancer, you know? I mean, that's— I guess that's like the stereotypical kind of thing. Sometimes I think of Patrick and John Collison, who I know well, and I I do not want this at all to sound trite or any— Stripe is incredible. They've built this multibillion-dollar company. They've not only made wealth for themselves, they've made it possible for thousands upon thousands of companies to start and make money all around the world. I get that. They're also interested in so much stuff. They take classes on physics, on law, on everything. They read everything. I am sometimes—

True Renaissance men.

Right. They are. And so sometimes I'm surprised that they have stayed in finance as long— stayed on one thing, I suppose, as long as they have.

Yeah.

You're kind of heading on this path where, you know, it looked like you might be unlocking the secrets of the mind, maybe. And then when you take the startup route, now you've done two. So the first one is Aerie Labs?

Is that right? Yeah, that was the startup that I started. I mean, it was the first company that I started right after dropping out of grad school. When I started the Thiel Fellowship.

And around— educate— it was, it was kind of—

it was educational games.

Educational games.

That was my, my first failed startup, I would say.

And then, so, okay, so this is my, you know, it's a long-winded question, but yeah, I mean, you could have done anything. I know you talked about sort of how you wanted to help people and how you saw it, but when I was hearing about your story, I was kind of like, man, I don't know if I, if I had all these choices, I think I would probably be inclined to try to cure cancer or get into unlocking the mysteries of the mind or something like that.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I would argue that the promise of software and of technology is it, you know, is that it allows us to build systems that a billion people can use, right? That's kind of unprecedented. So, you know, you could argue that if you were a doctor, for example, you can help one person at a time in a single surgery. Um, not that I'm not saying I'm a utilitarian, but I think the promise of where I want to take things, um, is really using the power of AI and these types of models to really unlock this like 100x speed for everyone on Earth to learn things. And I think that will You know, that is, I think, a really profound goal and sort of inevitable consequence of the AI revolution. So that's kind of where I see like the ultimate, ultimate goal.

So you feel your quest is to unlock human potential? Is that—

that's one way of putting it. Yeah. I mean, you know, like maybe in a less grandiose, form, it would just be to really help everyone learn things 100 times faster.

Okay. Okay.

And because I think that's how you lift people up. I think that that's how people change their lives.

I want to get into this. I'm going to ask this one now because I, I, there's other questions I have from what you just said. I, I was reading some description in here. Um, you were, you, in this interview I saw you did, you were at this very methodical, um, way of learning. I saw you do some quote where you said like, yeah, I mean, maybe some of this is genetics, but a lot of this was just, was focus and rigor and, and goal setting. Um, it reminded me, I interviewed Lowell Wood one time. I don't know if you know.

No.

So he's, he a couple years ago surpassed Thomas Edison as the US leading patent holder.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. He's, he's, he's older and, um, worked at Lawrence Livermore Labs for many years. Um, did— he's amazing. He knows like chemistry, you know, did a lot of nuclear. Yeah, he knows a lot about everything. I was sitting with him one time and he's like, uh, you know, I'm not that much smarter than other people, and, and it's just when I read, I just remember everything I, I read. But he said, he's like, anyone can do that, you know, you just have to, you have to be disciplined and you have to train yourself for this retention. And I, I'm just I'm like, not convinced that's true. And did I get that quote? Like, you're thinking on, so you see some genetics in this, but you also see, I don't know, what's the balance?

I understand that might sound ridiculous coming from somebody who went to college at 12, for sure. But I do, I am pretty convinced that everyone can learn things 100x faster. There are ways of explaining concepts to people. And I think something I'm good at personally is explaining a concept or some sort of idea in a way that is easy to understand and digest. And to do that is not easy, right? That is a skill. You need to sort of have a full mental model of the person that you're talking to. And the person that you're teaching or tutoring. But I do think that it's something that is scalable, that everyone can do, and that is solvable through technology.

And how did Aerie Labs try to do that?

So the approach originally there was, it was focused on kids, which turned out to be just a really hard business. And it was essentially more focused on early education, developing basic sort of math, reading, writing, grammar skills. You know, I, it was my first time in Silicon Valley out of grad school, young founder, didn't really know what I was doing. So that never really went anywhere. And there were a few years afterwards where I worked on sort of side projects that may or may not have turned into a startup. They were all sort of in the same vein roughly though, of let's use the power and leverage of software to build systems that teach people things faster, that provide leverage in that way. And I think like, you know, arguably you can categorize Speak like that as well.

Yeah. And just before we get to Speak, this has been an obsession of Silicon Valley especially. So Aries starts in 2011.

Yeah.

And then I'd say it was, it was around that time or a little bit later, we had things like AltSchool, just tons of education. In Silicon Valley, we get dinged for this, right? People would be like, oh, you're trying to fix education with technology. And like, you guys don't understand, this is a much softer, more nuanced thing. And, and all this money got spent. My, I had a son who went to AltSchool. It was definitely a mixed, mixed experience. It didn't, didn't end well. And all this hope, right? Because there's a lot of this that makes sense. It's like, oh, of course we AltSchool was a little different. It was like, we'll apply technology to the infrastructure part. Schools shouldn't have to all spend individual money on all the software in the back. We'll do this really well and efficiently, and we'll do, um, cameras in the classroom to see the actual interactions between the teachers and kids. We'll actually monitor their grades and see if you're— there were things that made a lot of sense. It didn't sort of work out. I saw when I was reading, it looked like you guys at the end got caught up in the whole, um, you know, cause there was a backlash and then when, when these companies didn't do well, everyone like shat on them and was like, see, we told you. And it seemed like you guys got caught up in that. Um, totally, I painfully obvious question. I mean, yeah, as somebody who had had this string of life success and everything. Um, yeah. How did you, how did you deal with that?

Yeah, it was painful for sure. It sucked. I think just like the public spotlight and the expectations as a Thiel Fellow. But I think also I felt in my heart that it was just like a blip on the journey and that I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I knew what I stood for and I was like on to the next thing. So yeah, definitely, definitely sucked. But I think that, you know, it's the sort of thing where you just kind of like stand up after and then keep walking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, what else can you do?

Yeah. So I think I've, I've always only followed my own internal clock and internal standards for myself. So anything external is frankly just not like if somebody doesn't like what I'm doing or is okay, that's a bad example. But like external standards are kind of irrelevant to the way that I think about the world, if that makes sense. So it's like I go by my own internal measuring tape.

Yeah, it does make sense. Again, this is why I want to talk to you. When I looked at your biography, I'm like, oh, this dude, this dude is— I think people could be like, oh, You're tiger parents and you've been programmed to go after life some particular way. And then when I looked at your biography, it's just like, oh, you made a bunch of like courageous, hard decisions, I think. And it seems clear that you're chasing whatever you're into. So that's what I found was like really, I think it was hard to do. I find this super fascinating.

Yeah, definitely took some big risks. Yeah, I think, you know, like maybe you can argue they were impulsive, but I've always found that I pretty strongly believe in just following my intuition and my gut. And, you know, it's always worked out so far.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you said after the startup was struggling, you were trying— you had other ideas bouncing around in your head. And so tell me when Speak emerges up to the top and how it, how it really— Yeah.

So The sort of short story, and we're kind of breezing over several years here, but through the Thiel Fellowship actually, the first few years of the fellowship, I met many of my closest friends today and it was just an awesome social circle and sort of introduction to the world of technology, I suppose. So we'll always be indebted to the fellowship for that and lived in Mountain View and Palo Alto for a while. And then I moved up with a bunch of friends to a group house in San Francisco on Fell Street on the Panhandle.

So it was the group house. Yes.

And so this, you know, it was, it was kind of like a— I hesitate to call it a hacker house because I feel like it was a little bit sort of cleaner and more, more mature than that. But, you know, it was a bunch of Thiel fellows. It was a bunch of our friends. It was a great, built-in social circle. We would just leave the front door open and we had just like 50 friends or so that would just often come and hang out in the living room.

Are there folks we know in that cohort?

Well, so my co-founder Connor, our COO Colton, you may know Delian from Founders Fund.

Oh, he was in that?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. There are several other people as well. So all some of my closest friends today. It was a lot of fun. I think it was almost like, like it felt like almost my true college experience, if you will. And yeah, like we all kind of came up together in our early 20s and were working on startups and we started Speak out of the third floor of that house. Okay. Our Wi-Fi password is still 1864 Fowl, which was the address of that house.

And you said I skipped over a few years. Yeah, what was going on in that time?

We were, well, we were living in the house and I was working on a few other startup efforts, built some products, nothing really clicked in the market. But I think like all this time I was sort of gaining experience as an entrepreneur and in thinking about the world and about markets and what I wanted to build. Essentially the Speak story is that in 2016, I was talking with my now co-founder Connor, who was one of my best friends, and we were just looking at some recent papers that came out. DeepSpeech, right? It's the new deep learning speech recognition model from Baidu that seems like it's starting to work. And this is when deep learning winter was starting to thaw. And it was just very obvious to us initially that if this stuff keeps working this way, then it clearly will be the dominant technology of the future. And we were talking about, okay, what do we want to be doing with our lives in 5 years? We were kind of in between things, a little bit lost, just trying to figure it out. And we both immediately had the same concept, which was we want to work with AI somehow. And we think that there is huge potential in building products that AI uniquely unlocks or makes possible or makes 10x better. And it would be cool to be sort of running a product lab together or some sort of AI product company. And we decided to take a sabbatical and basically drop all the companies we were doing and just study deep learning. And we went pretty deep, read a lot of papers, wrote a bunch of code, wrote a bunch of models, snuck into a bunch of classes at Stanford and Berkeley. And through that, Speak started. That was kind of the— we considered a bunch of ideas, but I think it was clear to us that language learning was super universal. Everyone struggles with fluency and most people you know want to learn another language. It's very commercially valuable. If you're serious about fluency, you're hiring a human tutor and the whole market is like $50 to $100 billion of spend a year around the world. And uniquely, it's very human-based, but AI is going to change that. And we, like I mentioned earlier, had this prediction that, okay, speech models are going like this, language models are going like this. And remember, this is 2017, right? So we felt like, okay, in 5 or 10 years, they're going to take over the world, obviously, right? They're going to become superhuman. It will let us build products that can act like humans. And specifically, basically like in our sabbatical, we had built an accent discrimination model for fun as like a toy problem. But that was kind of the genesis of the idea that, hey, we can build some sort of model that can understand non-native speakers and give them feedback. And previously you needed to hire a human to do that. So yeah, that's how it started.

Well, and I, I do remember it would— image recognition started to kind of work and then, and then translation was, was the first big thing that I really remember coming out of Google and Microsoft as like, oh, okay, this machine learning stuff. Stuff is kicking off, but definitely no LLM things.

Yeah, that wasn't until 2022, right?

And when you, when you are doing this, you're reading all these papers. I know clearly you're— you've identified this need, you see the basis for a company, but OpenAI is just forming then. DeepMind has been around. Um, yeah, you didn't think, I want to go work on, on the really— this foundational stuff of this?

Yeah, we, we wanted to build products that people can use. Not do fundamental research. And I think we were, you know, this is kind of a repeated pattern for ML startups, but we were excited to work on ML problems. And the reality was that for the first few years, we were struggling to find product-market fit and we were just building different versions of the Speak app. And it felt like until we basically solved this very existential issue, we couldn't do what we really wanted to do, which was more ML research. But yeah, it took a while. I would say 2017 through 2019, we launched 3 times. Nothing was really working, but we just had such a strong view of this future that we knew would come to pass that we never pivoted. We just kept going and we made the decision to essentially like relaunch the modern version of Speak, but really focus it. So we chose South Korea as our first market. That was like a critical decision.

Yeah. So there's a lot of people in South Korea that want to learn English.

Yeah. All over Asia. But South Korea was particularly crazy and we basically felt like, okay, people here are really serious about English and it's all human-based. So they're paying for private tutors. There are skyscrapers full of English classrooms that people schedule and then they go to. If we can win here in some sense and build something that starts to become popular and is meaningfully different, then that's a strong signal. We chose that market in a sense because it was a hard market.

And this wasn't the original intuition. How did you, you came to realize that over a couple of years that particular market existed or It was, so there were a bunch of things.

I would say that in terms of vision, it was the vision of using speech recognition models and language models to build a better way to reach fluency. We were limited by the technology in what we could do initially, and we were spending a lot of energy on finding PMF through just testing many versions of the product, right? So, you know, There were a lot of pretty specific learnings that we put into Modern Speak from the past few years of iterations, like how the course worked, how the content worked, what types of actors we should hire for the teaching, et cetera, et cetera, right? Like hundreds of things.

Okay. And then it takes off like a rocket, doesn't it? After that? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, like it felt like we really picked the lock in some sense. And the first version of the app that started to work wasn't even that great, but it was more of the supplemental speaking practice tool where we had all this content. As a user, it was kind of an outlet to speak. And I think that people had been just really wanting an outlet to speak and actually make the sounds and get some sort of immediate feedback. Even if it wasn't all the feedback that we had dreamed of in the beginning. So yeah, that started to grow quite quickly. And then in 2022, that was the LLM moment. And that was kind of the first 5 or 10 year thing that we had predicted. And that was when we were like, oh shit, it's here.

And I have the stats here somewhere, but you guys just raised some money.

Last November, we raised Series C.

And your value, you're a unicorn. You've you've unicorned. And how many people use Speak?

So yeah, so we have over 10 million downloads. You know, like we're the biggest English app in South Korea at this point. Things have grown from— it was really cool to see it go from, you know, obviously nothing to, oh, when we visit Seoul, some people would be using it on the street and we'd see that. To now, you know, our teachers in the app are minor celebrities and people will go up to them on the street and say hi. And we do giant influencer commercials with the most famous people and billboards and TV commercials and like really everything. So yeah, now we have, you know, like a decent amount of scale and are, you know, breaking out, teaching English in many more countries in the US as well.

What are the other, what other countries have really taken off?

So there's a bunch of other Asian countries that were the first ones that we went to. So we're growing really fast. Japan, Taiwan, a bunch of others. US is growing really fast as well. There's people that are interested in learning English in the US, ESL, and then there's native English speakers that want to learn Spanish and French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, et cetera. And we're launching all of that this year, like very shortly.

And you guys have always emphasized speaking more. I mean, I see people on Duolingo all the time and then they always want to— the gamification thing works really well for them. I know my mom stresses out if she's not hitting her, her streak and God bless her. I don't want to undermine her quest to learn Spanish, but I feel like she's been doing Duolingo for, I want to say, 7 years or something and has made progress, but not, not, um, she's, she's She could do with some help. Yeah.

You know, the way that we have always benchmarked our product and conceptualized what the product should be and where we're going is against humans, right? So the thought experiment is really think about what the single best human English tutor or Spanish tutor or Japanese tutor or whatever on earth could do. Let's build that, put it on your phone, scale it to a billion people. So it is really a sort of experience that was not possible before AI. And therefore we kind of see it as the next generation of language learning where one framing is, do you remember Rosetta Stone? So maybe call that Gen 1 of language learning, CDs, airport kiosks.

Pimsleur.

Yeah. And Gen 2 was associated with the mobile era. So apps like Duolingo, just massively popular, but also very casual language learning apps that are extremely well gamified, right? Super engaging. And now Gen 3 in the AI era is products like Speak, and we're the category leader here where it's focused on functional fluency, on speaking, you know, it's almost like a private gym where you can use the muscles in your mouth, like actually make the sounds. You're not, you know, it's like not embarrassing. You're free to make mistakes. You get over the confidence hump. We have a whole pedagogical method we've developed that is highly focused on just becoming automatic and on spoken fluency. So that's the whole philosophy. Yeah, so we see it as something that is pretty new.

I'm sure what I say next will not be novel to you, but these are the obvious questions that were tumbling through my head the second ChatGPT started— the voice stuff started working. And I opened it the first day and I was like, pretend you're my Spanish tutor. And I go to Mexico a lot and I was like, don't speak to me in a Spain Dialect, speak to me in a Mexican dialect. It killed it. And now I'm having a conversation with this app and it's correcting, it's telling me how I could do better. And I just immediately thought of Duolingo in particular, just because I see my mom using it all the time. Yeah. I was like, oh, they're toast. You know, this is, this is over. I know you guys have a partnership with OpenAI. Um, but, and again, I'm, I know you've thought about this, but yeah, I mean, it seems like a curse and a blessing. It seems like the underlying technology good, helps push your things forward. On the other hand, these apps themselves seem quite functional and that they're all heading to where they could be our tutor. And, and I know clearly focus is a good thing and OpenAI is not zeroed in on this, but yeah, I mean, it must be a little bit of a shock to the system if we have, um, general-purpose AIs that can, can do a lot of this.

Well, so I think the framing here is there's kind of two types of AI companies, right? There's the ones that are really scared when the models get better and are worried that ChatGPT will eat them. And then there's the ones that are excited because the models are better and now we can do more things and build this roadmap that we had been dreaming of. So I would put us into the latter category, right? Like the way that I view it is the more people that know that AI, whether it's a text model or a voice model, is good for learning things or for having a conversation in Spanish, that's almost like lead gen for us, right? That increases awareness. And I think that there, until superintelligence takes over and the economy's over anyway, there will always be the need for more specialized workflows and tools. And if you think about the solution that we're building with Speak, the voice part where you're talking with a Mexican Spanish tutor is one part of it. It's a really cool part, but as soon as you want to go deeper, I'm guessing you had a few conversations, but then after that, if you want to keep learning, you kind of hit a wall. You need more systems. You need a whole sort of learning operating system.

100%.

That's a lot of what we're building.

It's sort of frustrating and mentally exhausting really, because it is not designed to for what I'm trying to do.

Yeah. And it needs to really like understand the full state of your Spanish knowledge. What are the words you know and you don't know? What are your goals? Um, it should explicitly design drills and practice that are based on the types of mistakes you've been making over the past week, right? There, there's all these very sort of hyper-specific vertical domain-specific products and flows that we're building out. And I think that, of course, ChatGPT will continue getting better. I think it's just going to take over and win, frankly. But, you know, it's a horizontal personal assistant use case. I do think they will win that use case. I think they'll win the horizontal personal assistant that can do everything.

Okay.

But I think that is very different from the best language tutor on Earth.

Okay. And Foundry Fund, Sam, and Sam Owen are investors in Speak, and they are. Okay.

And, and we have a long list of awesome investors.

Yeah, I saw that. Um, and then the— and then OpenAI is an investor or just a partner?

OpenAI led our Series B.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. So there—

so that, that was cool because, um, I think we both saw in 2022 quite immediately that language learning was just a very perfect application layer vertical for all their technology, for the LMs, now the voice models. Even early on, everyone was worried about, oh, these LMs hallucinate and it's a huge problem, maybe unsolvable. That was the main thing. And we were just like, it doesn't matter at all because we're building these roleplays where you're talking with your Uber driver, or you're just trying to set up a functional scenario driven by AI. And it doesn't matter if it's not 100% factual. That's not really the point, right? The point is now you can talk with somebody and get feedback. So it's just like a weirdly good fit and has been this whole time.

And when the AI seemed so, so good at learning languages, it seems like they know all languages already. And why is it hard for you guys to move country to country Is it because you have to set up all these systems that are unique country by country and what people are trying to do?

Yeah. So we, a big part of the product is the content and we've always done everything in-house and verticalized and really seen it as super core to the whole experience. And it is, it is localized for the native language. We take a lot of care. In building it. So going from teaching English in Korea to teaching English in Japan for the first time, there was some amount of change, but we're good at that now. Now what we're doing is going from teaching English to teaching French, teaching Chinese, Japanese, right? And there are sort of new challenges, but a lot of the underlying platforms around proficiency tracking, and so on are the same.

Again, not crazy insightful question. It couldn't stop it from bouncing around my head though. But you guys are early to AI. You make the right bet, comes along. It's amazing. People talk all the time. Maybe we don't even need to learn languages now because we're all going to have our— we're pretty close to having your AirPods that just are translating in real time. Victim of your own success type thing?

So a lot of people ask that. My take here is that that's actually a completely different thing. And what will happen is that we will build a real, like an awesome real-time translation experience into Speak that'll be integrated into the rest of the experience. And if you're an American traveling to Italy for, you know, like a quick trip, you might use that. And then later we'll integrate it into your learning, into your Italian learning experience. That will never eat the core use case of Speak, which is that people want to become fluent for connection. Our users in Korea want to be able to look me in the eye and speak English to me. And also there's the sort of like more prosaic logical reason of You can't actually do real-time translation fast enough where it feels good. For example, in German, the verb is at the end of the sentence. So logically, you can't translate a German sentence into English until you've heard the whole sentence.

I speak a little German. I hadn't fully thought about that.

So you have a minimum one-sentence lag, which actually makes all the difference.

Totally.

It's very binary.

Yeah. And then, I mean, I think there's this— I do wonder if we'll hang on to this forever, but there's this obvious cultural— you win a lot of respect and love when you can speak somebody's language, even if you're stuttering through it.

That's another huge part of it.

Yeah. And if it feels like you're cheating.

It's about human connection.

Right.

Yeah.

Right. And you think we hang on to that for— that sticks around for 30, 40, 50 years?

I think so.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

I'd be willing to make that bet.

Yeah. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes I think no. Yeah, that one's tricky. I think we— you had— I'm changing gears for a second.

Just, yeah, real quick. The bet I'm even more willing to make though is beyond language, one of the most profound consequences of AI will be it will completely change how we learn things, right? For me, you know, I've talked a bit about how much I love learning things. It's been really indescribably crazy just how much ChatGPT has unlocked for me. It's 100x'd the range of even questions that I allow myself to ask because now I know I can get an instant high-quality answer. It's so cool. So I think that our sort of long-term vision is beyond language and a lot of the platforms that we're building are theoretically applicable to other types of knowledge as well.

Okay. This is exactly—

as a tutor.

This is exactly what I want to talk about in a lot of ways. I was reading, this goes back a little bit to a thing we were talking about earlier, but you were talking about your goal setting in this, in an interview and that you're, you felt like people could be, they can learn more like we were talking about, but you have to be quite precise and you were talking about Setting goals every single day, what you're trying to accomplish by the end of the day, checking your metrics. Have you— it was intense. And I don't think most people live like this. Can— if you still do this system, do you still do a system?

Yeah. So I think of it as sort of my personal OS, also sort of work OS. I spend most of my time working, right? So at this point it's really the same thing. But I think that being pretty ruthless about, as a founder, prioritizing what you need to get done and what is actually P0. One of my friends, Eric Simons, who I don't know if you know him, but he runs this company called Bolt. It's like AI vibe coding, one of the big ones now. But he has this analogy that I've heard him say publicly around how it's kind of like a lone fire truck in a town that's on fire and you have to let most of the fires burn, right? And prioritize the few fires that will save the whole town, right? So don't worry about saving individual buildings, worry about saving the town. And I think you do have to be fairly clear and ruthless about that in execution. And that's the thing that as we've grown at Speak, we're now 100 10 people. Not that long ago we were 20 people, right? So things have changed a lot. We're still obviously in the grand scheme pretty small, but I think as we've grown, the importance of being clear about what you're going to get done on a daily basis and on a weekly basis and monthly basis has only sort of risen in importance.

What is— what's your— what are your methods? Do you set goals for the next day each night? Do you do it in the morning? None of the above?

Um, I, I try to do it in the morning. I think I'm still experimenting with things, frankly. It's like a work in progress. And I think that as sort of, you know, I'm now married, I don't have kids yet, but, you know, I'm thinking about it soon. So I kind of expect that all of this will continue to change and adapt and be pretty fluid. But I think that there's some sort of core axioms there around intentionality and just really setting up systems in your life so that you don't really have to rely on motivation. It's just kind of the assumed default, if you will.

This is like the Bryan Johnson philosophy of—

Yeah, I mean, this is not a particularly original line of thought, But it's, it's worked quite well.

Granted. But for me, do you have specifics? People are so interested in this stuff. Yeah. And you say like you've thought about this a lot. I mean, as specific as you're willing to be, what, what— tell me your daily routine on goal setting.

Sure. So I guess like in the morning I will— and sometimes happens the previous day as well. And, you know, some of these P0s are sort of prescheduled for like Wednesday on Monday, for example, right? So, you know, it's kind of contextual, but I will just try to have like a list of the P0s for the day that I absolutely must get done.

That you type out or write down?

I've tried both. I now type it out. Okay. I think I saw like probably 10 years ago at this point, I think maybe it was Sam Altman, had a thing where he would use index cards and he would write them on like an index card. I've seen that.

And he's—

I tried that for a while.

So Sam has a, Sam has a ongoing Word document that is always open. That is, seems to be categorized by short-term, long-term type things. Do you, are you doing this just in a document or, or where?

I have, so I, I have Trello board. I went through a phase where I'm like, okay, you know, simplify. Let's just use Apple Notes, right? Just a note. We use Notion at work. So I have like a mission control file in Notion as well. And I try to do this on a daily basis. And I also have a weekly scratch file where I do this on a weekly basis. I'm realizing now as I talk through this that I'm still very actively experimenting. And I think that as we've grown, the nature of my role and my responsibilities have also changed quite a bit. And so that's probably part of the driver of this. Yeah. And let's see what else. I use reminders heavily on my phone. Oh yeah. Another thing is that I'm heavy into the dictation. I've dictated 95% of my text messages for the past 5 years, and I will shamelessly do it in public. And I just try to rely on systems that are simple and reliable. I use reminders a lot. I'll often be talking to my phone. I try to always prioritize and bias towards action, and I like to do things immediately if I know that in the next 5 minutes I can get it done. And then it's off my back. So I think I have frankly at this point probably an overly strong bias towards doing things immediately. So I should probably dial it back a little bit. But that's something that I think has worked very well for the past few years.

Okay. And then in this quote that I read from you before, it said set the goals every day and then review them at night and measure how well you did. Do you still do that?

Yeah, I'm probably not as disciplined about doing that on a daily basis anymore, but I do like to do weekly reviews, for example, and then think about, okay, like, how did I do each day, right? Did I actually finish all my P0s? Are there outstanding things? I mean, frankly, like, the state of Speak right now is that there's just a sort of unrelenting number of fires and issues. So something that I've been trying to be a lot more intentional about is not being in reactive mode all the time. In Q4 of last year, it got pretty bad. I felt like I was always in meetings, always in like reactive mode. And I've been trying to be a lot more strategic and actually carve out holds on my calendar. We have shared public calendars at Speak. So people like putting on meetings because there's a lot of urgent things, right? But I've been a lot more intentional about carving out holds for strategic thinking and visioning.

Okay.

Yeah.

I saw you had thoughts on the education system, which I find fascinating because you, of your background and having worked on, on education. If you could, if you could do anything to the American education system, what would you do?

Well, so part of the, um, uh, sort of inspiration for Speak was the Diamond Age, like the Neal Stephenson book where every child has essentially this AI little book. It's the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer that is this companion that's ever-present that teaches them everything through a story-like format and it fully understands them. It's the perfect AI tutor. And that was a very sci-fi concept, a decade ago. Now it feels very much within reach, um, and I think that is the future. That's sort of what we're building towards with Speak as well. So, you know, probably that's like— I would say that's the dream, for every child to have something like that.

Yeah, and I think the quote I saw was before LLMs and everything had really taken off, but you were talking about smaller class sizes and school mostly being a place maybe to socialize, exercise. Do you think that's where we're heading?

Yeah, I mean, I think that most people would probably agree at this point that schooling is mostly childcare. You're not actually, you know, learning very much. And if you actually focus on learning, then you could probably learn things 100x faster, right? And there's many sort of AI school companies now, like Synthesis School, that are super cool and are starting to prove this out. So I would say that feels like definitely the future. I don't really know how to solve the childcare issue. I think that's more of a structural sort of societal issue. But in general, it's the same principles I think that I've always been interested in and building to all of my companies, which is that smaller groups are better. The best in terms of learning is private tutoring. Like the Bloom 2 sigma problem. If you have a private tutor, outcomes are 2 standard deviations better. And that also intuitively makes sense. I think that's where the world should move.

This is again not— please do not take this offensively at all. I mean this from a very genuine place. Same thing kind of as the Patrick John question. You could do anything. It is a great achievement to build something that thousands and perhaps millions of people use that helps them learn a language. Totally get that. Just a great achievement to make like a thriving company, right? Jobs— it's a, it's a puzzle on its own. But same question. I mean, you, you, um, you've been doing this roughly 8 years, 8 years, right? I mean, you know, and I just, I sort of put myself in your shoes. And then, um, you don't see your brother off at the Arc Institute with all money, getting to chase whatever curiosity is grabbing him at the moment, and wishing you could do that?

Um, I think that I, I don't know, I just don't really see it that way. I think that what we're working on has the potential to be insanely impactful and transformative for hundreds of millions of people around the world. So, you know, arguably doing this in the lens of a startup and a for-profit company is a more direct way of achieving impact. It's a different type of impact, right? You know, it's like, I think it's a big world. There's many different things that you can do. I think that what I'm working on right now feels like, like, yes, it's taken 8 years to get to this point. And I wish it had been faster, but now it feels like it's on an exponential takeoff sort of runway, if you will. And the opportunity here is really the opportunity of a lifetime, right? It is the opportunity to build a company that can sort of scale what I always dreamed about as a child. Which is that I find it really fun to learn fast and to teach other people things fast. I think that if everyone could do this, it would solve a ton of societal problems and it would help people improve their own lives in many ways. So I think arguably this is equally valid of a lever to do that. In general, I think I'm a pretty strong believer in capitalism and in building companies. And I think that is probably the strongest driver of human prosperity that humanity has ever created. So, you know, that's the approach.

And the language part, I totally get for the reasons we discussed, this bond between people.

Yeah.

I spend a lot of time in Mexico. It doesn't get more intimate You actually get to be part of the culture and make real friends and, and changes your whole experience. The intelligence part, there's that tweet from Ilya from a couple of years ago, you know, if you've been valuing intelligence as a human trait, you're in for a rude awakening. I am starting to feel like I'm tilting more.

There's a fair amount of AI anxiety.

Absolutely right. I mean, some of your, your ultimate quest, doesn't that get undermined if learning things turns out to not really be the thing that humans need to focus on.

Yeah, you know, I suppose it's possible. I think that, um, it is— I think that if superintelligence is achieved, there will be a completely different sort of economy, a new world order, right?

Worry about that, wouldn't it?

I don't, I don't really worry too much about it. Yeah, I think that Frankly, this is kind of how I feel as well about everyone that's on X talking about everything AI. And I'm actually on the ground trying to build a cutting-edge AI product. And things are just always slower. In fact, there's like way more inertia in the real world, right? Think about how long it's been since GPT-4 came out and how people were talking about how the world is over because GPT-4 came out. Obviously we've made a lot of progress since then, but has the world really changed that much? I would argue not that much. So it's going to take an enormous amount of effort to build things that people find valuable and actually affect their lives.

And I'm kind of with you. I feel like this is going to ooze through society a bit. However, this is not somebody from X, it's like somebody— people, lots of people I know who work at the top labs, 100%, or, you know, 2 years, 3 years, whatever number you want to pick. It's all— the world is 180 flipped upside down. And, and those are people working on foundational stuff who I think are pretty rational. But you, you think that's, that's not how this is going to play out?

Well, I'm not saying it won't happen, right? I'm saying that I think change will take longer than most people think it will. I just think there's a lot of inertia in the world and that we need more people building applications that actually use these technologies and translate them into economic value. If you look at most AI companies over the past, I mean, since 2022, it's been mostly picks and shovels. There haven't been very many breakthrough consumer apps. We're one of them, but there just really actually like aren't that many others.

Yeah, I think that's right.

More are coming though.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think it's starting.

Um, well, Andrew, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you being indulgent on that.

Of course.

Because this childhood prodigy is going to follow you forever.

Yeah, no, I mean, I— Yeah, I don't mind it. Like, I don't— Uh, I like talking about it, right? Because I think it's an interesting story.

I don't— because I don't think of it as like the circus freak kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, I find it just fascinating. I mean, it's like, I love human potential.

And yeah, and I think it's an interesting story and that it also connects really well to a lot of what I care about and, um, am currently working on. So I love talking about it.

Is there anything that you would have done differently, or you wish this had played out a different way? Or, or I guess that's such a hard question for anybody, really.

Yeah, I mean, uh, I think, I think when— I think everyone has decisions they would probably make differently, right? Um, I think that I've been extremely lucky And there was probably a world where I could have shortened some of the pain early on in the career, but also, you know, there's no counterfactual, who knows. And I think it is definitely weird to think about how, you know, when I dropped out of grad school and I started, I was, you know, this sort of young prodigy and at this point now, right, I see all these sort of like 17-year-old YC founders and I'm like, wow, I've been at this for a while actually. And I see some of my early self in them as well. Right. And it's, it's so different and so interesting. So, you know, in some sense, I think I feel like I'm now— I've been fortunate enough to have been sort of advised and lifted up with no expectation of return by many people over the past 15 years. And I want to start sort of giving back and doing that as well. And I just feel like also everything in my life and in my career has been almost building up to this moment where I really do feel like Speak is in the perfect position to build this thing that I'd been dreaming of. And really take over the industry. Yeah, I wouldn't really give that up for anything.

Okay. No, it's cool. I mean, I was looking at the numbers. I mean, you guys are growing. What is it, like 50% a year or something like that?

A lot more than that.

A lot more than that.

Yeah.

Yeah. What do you, what do you and Patrick talk about when you guys hang out?

Oh, man. He's super social. He is.

I'm like, I wouldn't say notorious, but everyone tells me he's at like every party.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I don't know how he does it.

High energy.

And somehow he finds the time to keep publishing Nature and Science papers. That's the most mystifying part of it. So I think it's been really fun as well to see his explosive trajectory. And he now also does AI investing and thinks a lot about AI and computational biology in his work. So it's always really fun just to be able to talk with him about about, you know, about the future and what he's building as well.

Did you have to do like Taiwanese talk shows?

And yeah, you did a lot of them.

As what, like a 12-year-old?

Yeah, yeah, it's like a, yeah, 10 or 11-year-old. So I've, yeah, all of this is very weird for sure, but I'm, I'm like, yeah, I'm like, doing stuff on camera is, is a thing I've, I've been doing for a long time, so it's like not at all weird for me.

Yeah. And so, and I went hunting for the book, but I'm not gonna— I'm probably not gonna find it.

I think it's out of print. Maybe I'll hunt one up.

Usually we've got to find like a PDF out there or something. Yeah. Um, but it— and it was even— it would— but it won a bunch of awards or some massive award.

Yeah. Well, so I think, um, people have always been interested in my own personal life story. So there, there was like a sort of Autobiography when I was 12, and then there was another one where Patrick and I interviewed a bunch of Nobel Prize winner scientists and were super interested in understanding the methods behind their success and just the commonalities and the ways that they would think about super intensely, usually, what they were devoting their life toward.

I don't want to sound— this to sound as kiss-assy as it's going to come off, but I, I, having met you and your brother and Patrick and John, um, I've always wanted— I have wanted to— I think there is a genetic component to this, but then something your parents were all doing was right because they're very like high integrity, um, personable, um, both had roaring at a million miles an hour, but also able to have conversations with just about anybody, um, polite. I don't know, I want to do a book on something about parents that get things— there's some sort of brothers, um, book in there. There's this other book that nobody's read, The Bulls and the Hintons, about, um, these two exceptional families that, that, you know, had a lot of, um, marriages and overlapping, you know, it's like 300 years of, of just success going.

Bulls and the Hintons.

Yeah, going from, from Bull inventing logic that would one day play roles.

Oh, Bull.

Okay. Yes, yes, yeah. The mathematician in, in AIs to, to Geoff Hinton who like, whatever it is, 200 years later.

That's right.

You know, but they had, there's one of the people in the family invented like the jungle gym. The other one invented the concept of like the tesseract. One went to like China and started schools. And it was just, it's just somebody invented the concept of GDP. You know, it's like, it's wild. Yeah, somebody had to invent that, right? And then, you know, so obviously there's some sort of genetics at play, but there's also this, um, I feel like there's this, there's these people who sort of figured, families that figured life out a little better than the rest of us.

So I would read that book.

Please write it. All right. I'll work on that. Thank you so much for coming in. Thank you.

I really appreciate the time. Of course. Thank you.

Core Memory is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. The show is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme music is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited by the John Sortland. Thank you all for listening. As mentioned, the show is sponsored by Yuan Ventures. Thanks.