Zynga Founder Mark Pincus: Why All New Fails + How to Copy to Millions

[00:00:01] Today on The James Altucher Show. You know, everyone's so jaded that you're trying to find like an OMFG moment, like trying to find a vein. And you just put crazier and crazier shit until somebody starts clicking on it. And then it's like a perfect trade win. One of my mantras that's still repeated in the hallways at Zynga is all new fails. And that might sound like a beat down.

[00:00:29] If you start with that mantra, you won't be disappointed. Because there's lots and lots of statistical proof that all new fails, like the App Store last year where 100% of new apps failed. If you can perfectly copy a proven successful app and no one thinks it's a copy, that is the fucking magic trick. This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

[00:01:08] This guy is one of the true OGs of the internet, Mark Pincus. You probably know him as the founder of Zynga. He brought us Farmville, Zynga Poker, Words with Friends, and basically turned casual social gaming into a multi... I mean, he sold Zynga for $12 billion to Take Two Interactive. Before that, he started what I think was one of the first social networks, Tribe. This was pre-MySpace, pre-Facebook. He basically coined the term social media.

[00:01:37] He spent the last 25 plus years building, failing, studying what actually gets millions of people to click, play, share, come back. And I love how he describes it in his book. But basically, this book has inspired me to start... Like even during the podcast, I was coming up with new ideas for businesses. Like we... And what I really love is he teaches how to copy like a master without looking like a copycat. For instance, he has a framework, Proven, Better, New.

[00:02:07] Like if you have a business idea, if the idea has already been proven, which implies maybe you're copying it. If it's better than the previous version, if it's new, if there's something new, this is the single best way I've ever heard to create products people actually want. And you can look at like Google, Facebook, so many businesses and see that they actually were built on this concept of proven, better, new.

[00:02:30] Plus, he's got stories from the early days of Facebook, MySpace, the whole gaming industry and, you know, how to create businesses now using AI. And it's just fascinating stuff. I love talking to Mark. You're going to learn a lot from this. I am still inspired from this conversation. And literally, I'm building businesses based on what I learned in this next hour. He talks about all this and a lot more in his incredible new book called Life at the Speed of Play. We talked about the book. We talked about the ideas in it.

[00:02:59] But I have a lot of questions. I wanted to do the deep dive. And literally, I am creating businesses now based on what we spoke about in this next hour. Great book, by the way. Thank you. I want to get right to the two pages that I find the most fascinating and they're facing each other. One says, build failure machines. The other says, don't even start with an idea.

[00:03:29] And I love these two concepts a lot. Like, I love the concept of building a failure machine. Yeah, me too. It's easier said than done, you know? I think I would have thought by now with AI that everyone would do that. And I can't say that I've even seen one good example yet. So, I think that's still a hill to take. Why don't you give us a good example?

[00:03:56] I think our best innovations come out of dire need and, you know, ruthless need to survive necessity. And in the very beginning of Zynga, you know, we were living day to day and week to week. And literally, you know, if something changed on the Facebook platform or MySpace, we would have like been wiped out of existence and some were. I mean, Christmas vacation killed the number one game.

[00:04:24] I think it had been the number one game on Facebook. It was called Jetpack Joyride. And people didn't feel the joy when they came back from Christmas. It was just gone. So, we were aware of that. But so, it meant that every day really mattered and we couldn't be wrong. And so, we just would test things with, I wrote these text links that we would put at the top of the poker game.

[00:04:52] And we would offer you a thousand chips for clicking on them. You know, it was very direct and cheesy. And we just, you know, looked at the clicks. And we just kept testing until we got a lot of clicks on something. And we didn't build anything until it got, you know, huge.

[00:05:13] I mean, we were looking for, on the order of 25% of players were clicking on something, you know, before we were going to build it. So, someone once told me an idea. You sell these online courses, but you don't know what online courses to create first. So, you say, hey, for $25, here's like an online Spanish course. And if people don't click on it, you don't make the online Spanish course. Yeah, 100%. So, is it similar to that idea? Yeah, it was 404 page not found.

[00:05:42] You know, that was what you got. We didn't even have time to put up like a landing page, which, arguably, we should have, you know, registered your interest or something. It was just, you just thought like the page didn't load, but it actually did do what it was supposed to. And what were example things you were testing out with those? Well, like what text links were you putting up there? Well, it turned out, and this is a not so humble brag, that I wrote the most successful copy on the text.

[00:06:10] So, I don't know. I have four sisters and, you know, three daughters, and I just seemed to channel like my inner teenage girl, who seemed to be a lot of, you know, the most engagement on Facebook at that time and MySpace. And I would misspell things. I would have bad grammar. I would just kind of really quickly type something in like it was a text message.

[00:06:38] I mean, now I think people see that it's cheesy, but yeah, anything, but just, it would be like somebody telling you about a new game, a new word game, or like your friend was. And I was always, I like to say, I'm always like trying to find a vein, you know, everyone's so jaded that you're trying to find like an OMFG moment, like trying to find a vein and you just put crazier and crazier shit until somebody starts clicking on it.

[00:07:08] And then it's like a perfect trade win. Like you can set your sales by it because once 22.8% click, 22.8% always click on it. Like you just, it doesn't change. That's a beautiful thing about consumer. It just, with enough numbers, you know, the only thing that changed was the LA election results, but normally consumer numbers stay consistent. Well, well, what was an example text though? Like what were you specifically like?

[00:07:34] I don't know if I can remember my texts from 2007, but, but I'll say that I also sent these really successful emails. That's when emails worked. And one thing I did for poker on April Fool's Day, I sent a really successful email saying something like, it was cheesy, but it was like, you just, you just won a billion poker chips.

[00:08:01] Or I, I, I, I actually, I don't remember, but I wrote like, I wrote these, I would just try to come up with just weird, crazy, non sequitur things that you just, part of, part of what I've understood with consumers is that we have to like, it's really hard to like, it's really hard to like, shock and surprise people because we're just so used to every marketing message.

[00:08:31] And it's like, that's why misspellings work. Things that made it feel like there was a human there. Just, it had to be unexpected. It had to be like something just you, that doesn't seem right. Like it's, you're, we're looking at patterns and our brains, the more we see a pattern that we expect, the more we ignore it.

[00:08:55] And so, even if it doesn't make sense, like, like a billboard on 101 to the airport, if you put up a marketing slogan that just doesn't quite make sense, it'll roll around in people's minds. Like, it's just, do you know what I mean? It used to be a good slogan, you remember, and now it's one that like, kind of is just weird.

[00:09:20] Like, why would they, why would they do that? But, but my point was that the failure machine point was put up, get to a really consistent way that you can just effectively in the fastest, least effort way, you know, be testing, you know, a hundred ideas a day or more. And our mantra was, you know, test more ideas in a week than the industry tests in a year.

[00:09:47] And that wasn't hard because, I mean, the only thing better than competing with the game industry in 2007 was probably like competing with NASA or, you know, the defense industry or the government. And yeah, because I feel like with Zynga, you were able to basically test lots of new features on all of your games all the time. How many games did you have going at any single moment at your peak and on Facebook?

[00:10:11] It's a good question because we, at our peak, we probably had 14 global studios and each studio probably had one major franchise and then a couple other games. And then we also had Studio I in India, which is where we sent all of our games to die. Any game that got below $100,000 a day in revenues, we shipped off to India and they were amazingly innovative.

[00:10:38] And they actually became a center of innovation because there's a great thing that happens when nobody cares. You get to just try shit and nobody, no one's going to stop you. And so the unexpected things we got were we'd ship these games off to India to die and all of a sudden they'd start growing. India is where we found out that subscriptions worked. You know, they actually became a real center for innovation.

[00:11:05] And it was just because, you know, you could fuck around once the game was, you know, in our book, you know, inconsequential. That's when people, you know, can just do whatever they want with it. When it's very hard to innovate on like your Tiffany brand, you know, the team gets afraid of fucking it up. Yeah.

[00:11:27] And I feel like in the gaming industry, you can do that kind of like testing, particularly online gaming because you can make changes on the fly and see user behavior. What other companies do you see kind of failing fast? Maybe not hundreds of ideas a day, but, you know, lots of ideas a year. And I'll challenge what you just said. It used to be that in the gaming industry, you could test tons of ideas.

[00:11:49] Because we've actually gone backwards because now we've gone from web gaming, which to me was the real renaissance in game innovation, game development, to now mobile game development on Unity is a lot like the old game industry because it's compiled code. It has to be, you know, uploaded to the app store, downloaded.

[00:12:14] You can A, B test text and little bits of content, but features, you know, the feature testing and development has really slowed down and moved backwards. And the mentality, it's not even worth having a weekly roadmap meeting anymore because it's too hard for a team to change a game in a week at this point. So you have a monthly roadmap meeting. It's moved from like a weekly cadence to monthly. So that's sad to me. But who else innovates?

[00:12:42] I mean, we do see Facebook who, or sorry, Meta, I still call them Facebook. They hired so many Zynga people. They hired our whole data science team, all of our PMs. And Meta has become very, a center of excellence, I think, for testing and data-centric.

[00:13:02] But they seem to focus much more, though, on monetization, things that drive engagement and monetization and less consumer-facing features. I've seen Duolingo do some cool stuff, testing, bringing out and testing, you know, game mechanics. But I don't know who you've seen. I have trouble pointing to anybody.

[00:13:27] Yeah, I feel like AI will, and, you know, I'm questioning your earlier point that AI, you haven't seen AI do this. But I feel like AI, because you can program apps in a few hours, like significant apps, not like toy apps. You can really program interesting things in just a few hours using these AI coding tools. This should be a place where people fail very quickly. You can launch an app a day that 30 years ago would have been a full business.

[00:13:54] You can launch, test, and squash an app a day, potentially using AI coding tools. But you're saying you haven't seen people do that, but it's probably just the beginning. Well, it is just the beginning. And when you say you can launch, test, and fail an app a day, not in the app store, right? I mean, you could jerry-rig it to be on test flight and not exactly launch it, but have it turned on. So that's possible.

[00:14:23] You can do it as a web app, but there's a question of, you know, where are you going to get people to try it? And that's why a lot of people have gone back to Discord. So you can kind of test things in Discord communities, and I've done some of that. But we really need, we need like a distribution sandbox. I mean, I wish that we saw ChatGPT or, you know, Gemini.

[00:14:52] I wish we saw one of the big kind of LLM portals create an app sandbox. And I think you would, once we see that, we'll see an explosion in testing and innovation again. But I feel like, you know, the nature of virality is that it's exponential. So you post a link on Twitter, and okay, two users show it to two friends each, and on and on. And just in a few iterations that you have a million users. Or am I smoking crack here?

[00:15:23] You're smoking crack. Not the first time. Or, okay, well, it's some good crack. Or, I guess, tell me what I'm missing, because maybe I'm delusional. Name the last app that you can think of that blew up virally. Or that became, the last time an app became a top 10 or even top 25 app in the App Store. Well, not the App Store, but like ChatGPT is an example where,

[00:15:51] I think wherever they had posted that link, it would have gone viral pretty quickly. Okay, but let's think about that one, okay? All you need is $10 billion and the top AI engineers in the world and, I don't know, eight years of development. And then you can become an overnight viral success, and you can post your link anywhere and it'll work. Or I'm with you on that. I would love to be on that train.

[00:16:19] But that's a tough example to point to all of us to follow. So I don't want to pour water on this, but I think at the moment, consumer feels uninvestable, and it's dead in the water. I mean, why would anyone do consumer now when they can clearly build enterprise or, at worst, prosumer, and get a smaller base of users that are willing to pay a lot of money,

[00:16:48] and they're already interested in looking, it's pretty hard to get to the mass market. I mean, they're not downloading new apps. They're not looking on Twitter for new apps to try. So I'm not saying it's not possible, but I'll tell you this. Because my rule of thumb for when a platform was investable at a consumer level, I used to call it 90-10. And I think I forgot to put this in my book.

[00:17:17] I need an addendum to the book because there's, I keep realizing, oh, that's just cute. Yeah. It's already out of date. Don't get it. Don't read it. That's my marketing message. So I'll say, don't buy my book. It's already out of date. That'll be like, what? My rule of thumb, I'd called it the 90-10 rule. And it was, if a platform enabled an app to get to 10 million DAUs in 90 days, it was investable.

[00:17:46] And so I'd look at platforms and say, whether it was social networks or eventually mobile, and say, at the point that we can see at least one app that could get to 10 million DAUs in 90 days, that's investable. Now, it sounds like I'm on another planet. I mean, there's no platform today that enables that. It's true because you see, you know, first off, platforms like Twitter and Facebook might limit virality. You know, they don't want necessarily things to go viral.

[00:18:16] Or the app store is, as you pointed out, it's just too crowded. Discovery is really hard in the app store. Think about our mentality. I mean, how many new apps did you download today? How many did you download yesterday? Zero. Yeah, how many did you download last week? No, it's a good point. I have all the apps I want. Right. You're not in a discovery mode. So that's, we forget that it's like pushing a boulder up a hill, right?

[00:18:41] When we all, the first couple years we had our phones, we're like, oh, what does that, that's a new clock? Cool. Right? You're like, you're in the bar and your friend is showing you like some dumb ass thing and you're interested in it. Now it'd be like a joke. If they're like, oh, did you see this new app? You're like, what? You know, you're, nobody's waking up looking. And in fact, I don't know if I have these stats exactly right. We can fact, I wish we had real time fact checking. Like, where is AI?

[00:19:11] Where's this app? But last year there were like 40,000 apps launched in the app store and zero became top 10. And maybe one or two out of 40,000 made it to top 25 and then they didn't hold the position. So it's, and it's, this is a problem for Apple. They just don't get it. Okay. An app platform needs good. They need two things. And this is Roblox just missed their earnings.

[00:19:39] And I think this is why you need two things to be a really vibrant app platform. One is you need long-term franchises. Like think about like HBO, how important the Sopranos was, right? For, think about, I like to think of the analogy of streaming networks like Netflix. If Netflix had no franchises that we cared about, they don't have a guarantee we're coming back to Netflix, right? Right. Like you, it's Sopranos.

[00:20:06] It's the next season of Game of Thrones that makes you come back to HBO. And when they stop having that, their players, their viewers are at risk. And they need spicy new, like they need both. But, and Roblox, you know, was crushing it last year. And they had these apps that got up to enormous peak concurrent users.

[00:20:30] And Roblox saw their peak concurrence go from, I think, something like 5 million. They were on par with Steam to something like 25 million. And it was all because of one game called Grow a Garden. So they had a franchise. It was like Farmville. And then that thing fell over. And then there was another franchise, but that was smaller. And another one was smaller. And now they're kind of in trouble because they don't have any franchises.

[00:20:57] And they just have these kind of meme-y games that people play for a couple days. And they're not totally in trouble because they're also kind of a social network. But my point is Apple, and I wouldn't say Apple's in trouble, but I think they're more vulnerable because of this. This is very interesting. So it seems like the problem is, like you were saying, with distribution. Like everything is niched down. So, you know, everybody's interested in their-

[00:21:25] There's no one place where here's the movie theater. Everybody in town goes to this. And- I call that the cocktail party, right? So this is also in my book, which you shouldn't buy. Or you should steal it. Steal from Abby Hoffman's Steal This Book. Steal This Book. I don't care. But my publisher might. So this is a long-term instinct vein, the cocktail party.

[00:21:52] And I think it started with Napster, which was the first time that we all just self-aggregated on the web. The first time that we all just, without Barry Diller, you know, some paid professional database in the middle, we all just connected to each other. It was like this pirate rogue thing. You know, it was kind of like Burning Man for the internet. And it was cool. And you had a sense of there's something else going on.

[00:22:20] I'm connected to four and a half million other computers right now with nobody in the middle. And to me, that was the beginning of this whole social media thing and this network of people, not pages. And it didn't really, there was no center to it, but it was this new version of a bulletin board just connecting all of us around music files. And that, in my mind, led to, you know, Friendster, LinkedIn, Facebook, all that. But those were cocktail parties that we came together.

[00:22:50] And then, you know, was the mobile phone a cocktail party? Not exactly. We've kind of, we've fragmented and we don't really have a cocktail party. And now it's like, where are we hanging out? Now we're hanging out on GPT and Claude, but that's a single player game, right? Yeah. They haven't figured out social. They're even kind of stopping social. And I don't know why, but I guess because they don't need it.

[00:23:17] Like, right now, their game is more compute and then more, you know, go after the coding opportunity. And that's pretty clear and obvious. And if they don't do that and win that, it's like a series of heats. And if they don't win that sprint, they don't get to be in the next one. So even if they get that they're going to need to worry about consumer engagement, it just won't matter.

[00:23:41] They need to win this computing, scaling, and revenue war before they get to even think about holding our hearts and minds.

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[00:27:02] And sold Yahoo for billions. And then you started Tribe right before MySpace and then Facebook, of course, blew up. What do you think made Tribe not a success? It was sort of a success at first. Everybody had heard of Tribe. I had heard of it, but I wasn't using it. Yeah, that's the problem. That's the problem. But why didn't I? I didn't even really use MySpace, but I did use Facebook very aggressively right when I was able to.

[00:27:29] It's Tribe and Tribe is a major—it should be a case study in what not to do. And it's a perfect case study in these theories I have of trust your winning instincts, but not the idea that your ego is attached to and do proven, better, new, like a scientist with a white lab coat. Because Tribe should have been huge. I mean, it's hard for people to imagine today.

[00:27:57] You had to will yourself into failing at that point. Like, there wasn't just, you know, Friendster, Facebook, MySpace. There was Tagged, Bebo. Every social network kind of worked. People were just into it. But you remember, you got an email saying, Mark wants to be your friend on X, on Tagged, or whatever. And you're like, oh, cool. What's that? You'd click on it. You know, these had 80% open rates, 50% click-through rates.

[00:28:27] You know, it had numbers that people can't imagine today. They wouldn't believe it, right? So, with Tribe, I had these three winning instincts and one losing idea. And I just, like, heroically, stoically stuck with it. And I was ignoring my metrics. You know, it was a sinking speedboat. It was super viral. It grew way faster than LinkedIn. Like, it was the tortoise and the hare. Like, Reid had LinkedIn.

[00:28:56] And LinkedIn just kept slowly, slowly ticking up and had no engagement. And Tribe was this rowdy party. It was Burning Man. It was getting, like, way more installs a day. But it had no retention. It boiled down to a very small group of people who loved it. And I got trust wrong where, you know, Friendster and Facebook and LinkedIn all got trust, right?

[00:29:23] I didn't get that people were just putting themselves out on the public web. And especially mainstream people, especially women, were not comfortable with stranger danger, with people they didn't know contacting them. And I made Tribe this just open, rowdy platform. And the reason I did it was because I was focused on Craigslist and the listings business.

[00:29:48] And I needed people to be able to contact each other to buy each other's couches and find roommates and jobs. Or I believed I did. And I was so focused on this listings business and Craigslist. And I thought, okay, I'm going to acquire my audience through social networking and virality. But then I'm going to move them into this jobs and listings business. And I ignored what my users were into, which was the tribes.

[00:30:14] So the idea of the urban tribes and networking through your loose ties, through groups that you're loosely a part of, that was gold. And I completely ignored it. And there was huge engagement and heat. I barely gave them any features. And it just took off. And so many people have stories about meeting their wife through that or this amazing trip to Brazil through their Mission Bay group.

[00:30:43] And I was not on the Paul Graham train of get 100 happy users and then keep building what they want. I had all these happy users and I was like ignoring them. And they were also extroverts posting a lot of dick pics. And, you know, it was… As extroverts do. Yes. There's no place on the internet. Well, now there is. I guess now there's like OnlyFans. And now there's a good business around it.

[00:31:09] But, you know, there's these communities that nobody wants. And they ended up on Reddit and other places. And they ended up figuring out how to turn that into a business. But community always over delivers when you enable it on the internet. Because people are lonely. And if they can find new friends on the internet, they will. And then they'll hang on to them. And that was true in all Zynga games. And that was true with Tribe.

[00:31:37] But it didn't align perfectly with my business model. And it didn't align with the retention of mainstream people. So, you know, so many of my theories that I built into my book and my approach to product management, product thinking, came from the long, painful failure of Tribe. It just, it was my learning ground. It just was amazing. It's interesting about the trust. Like Facebook had, of course, the .edu.

[00:32:06] So you knew, hey, these people are going to college just like you are. And, oh, these people are also at Harvard just like you are. So you might run into them. So there's less like violation of kind of politeness when there's trust. Well, it's your tribe, right? You know they're at your same school. They're beyond some minimum boundary that they are, they have a real identity.

[00:32:33] They, they're part of this broader community. And that turns out to make a big difference. You know, years later, I discovered Raya. And I, along with Reed, we put up all the money for Raya. And Raya got trust, right? Also in a way that the rest of the dating apps missed, which was this human curation level that, that a committee just like Soho House had to vet you.

[00:33:01] You had to have a real Instagram account and humans checked it and accepted you or didn't. And so it made, I like to say that dating apps were a one out of 10 experience and Raya was a three out of 10. And it just sucked three times less. And they just took the stranger danger or that creepiness out of it to the point that, and the other thing I want to circle back to, because this is so relevant today as we think about how is consumer going to be reinvented?

[00:33:30] How is social going to be reinvented? The beginning of all this, when Reed and I really spent all this time in 2002 brainstorming, what he called Web 2.0 was lead generation. Okay, this may sound counterintuitive. It's not the way you think about Instagram or a cocktail party, but it's the utility. You get entertainment for sure, and that's the reason you come there.

[00:33:55] But the value you get out of a good cocktail party is often lead generation. It's this social serendipity that leads to a recommendation on a trip you end up going on, or a job lead, or a date. You don't know what you're going to get, but you're around a bunch of interesting people. Some you know, some you don't. But it's really well curated, and it leads to its much higher signal for lead generation.

[00:34:25] And that's what Reed nailed with LinkedIn. And when you think about how will LinkedIn be reinvented, how will Instagram be reinvented, it's got to change this paradigm on signal to noise and the return on your time. And in this AI agentic world, it has a huge opportunity to because it's almost like reinventing

[00:34:49] Napster meets LinkedIn because our agents could be going to cocktail parties all the time, networking, and kind of navigating this membrane of trust and access and information in order to bring us back leads. That's interesting that it boils down to leads. I mean, you can. Similarly, though, right now, you mentioned the app marketplace is a place where things aren't going viral.

[00:35:18] It's a really fascinating statistic that 40,000 apps launched last year and none made it to the top 10. What about if everybody went to their own AI curated app marketplace? Like not necessarily just mobile apps, but web apps, mobile apps, iPhone apps, and so on. But it's just, this is my AI curated app store. Well, first, you got to have a desire for apps, right? I mean, yeah, that's true. Right. So it's funny because Facebook's like the app you didn't know you wanted.

[00:35:47] I didn't realize, oh, deep down, I wanted to stay in touch with my friends from second grade and see how their kids did in their soccer game last night when I hadn't spoken to them in 30 years. But the reality is you had these archaeological layers of your life that Facebook allowed you to drill down on, which doesn't really exist anymore. Like nobody really uses Facebook anymore. No, I mean, I don't even, I get on Instagram once a month. And most people I talk to who don't use Instagram say it with a level of pride.

[00:36:16] And it's like, there's this weird thing that you can track. You can look at the NPS scores. Do you know about net promoter score? No. Okay. It was a big deal for a while in consumer. But the net promoter score is a very simple measure of the brand power. Like what's the likelihood that someone would recommend your service to someone else?

[00:36:42] And eBay at its height and Amazon have hit like 80. So 80% of people feel very positive and would recommend it. You can have a positive or negative. And negative NPS means people actively tell people not to use it, right? That's the cable company. That's the Democratic Party. That's maybe the Republican Party. That's probably any politician. That's the IRS, right?

[00:37:08] There's a weird thing that you'll see, which is, and we saw this with Farmville. And then we saw it again with Facebook and Instagram that Farmville had about a positive 40 NPS when people were playing it. But then after they stopped, it was like they'd given up cigarettes and we were like a negative 35 NPS. And we saw the same thing. I promise you the same is true with Instagram. And you've probably seen it with your friends, right?

[00:37:36] When somebody has, it's like they've quit smoking. They become like a zealot, right? If someone is no longer using Instagram, they will say it to you with a level of pride. I don't use Instagram anymore, right? I'm off of that drug. Right? I don't waste my time on that. They don't say it like they miss it. They're like, oh, I wish, you know, I just don't have time for Instagram. My family got in the way. Life got in the way. I'm really trying to get back to Instagram. You know, nobody says that.

[00:38:06] You know, it's funny though, because lately Instagram has replaced TV for me. Like I go on Instagram every day for entertainment. But why? I mean, what is your content? Like what take us through yesterday? Like what was your Instagram? It goes back and forth. Like I see a lot of like history stuff or unusual facts and you get to dive down into them in the Instagram reels. And then there's Clavicular, who's like this 20-year-old kid who talks about looks maxing and it's gone viral. So, so it goes back and forth.

[00:38:36] I'm with you because that's Twitter. Sorry, I haven't gotten over to calling it X, but that's X for me. I'm addicted to it. And it's my social network. It's my news. I get stock ideas. I learn about history. I have a whole community there of people I only know by their screen names. Yeah, I get that. I do. But then again, though, most of the content now, I shouldn't say most because I don't really know.

[00:39:03] But on Twitter and Instagram, I feel like it's a lot of AI-generated content. Like give me 14 unusual facts about, you know, the Civil War. And now I have an old Instagram reel, you know, generate images, source all the facts. I don't know about you, but the reels I find insidious because I get pulled into these reels and they start looping one into another. And it just gets me and I don't like it.

[00:39:32] And it's like, that's bad. That's evil. Would you call that viral though? Like some of those are getting like a million views. It's funny to say what's viral. It's being surfaced to you by an algorithm, right? Just like TikTok. And so it's a kind of virality, but it's an algorithmic manufactured virality that we kind of don't know or understand. I guess you could reverse engineer it. It is a virality.

[00:40:00] It's like a machine-driven virality. It's a human and machine-driven virality. It's different than people wanting to actively share with each other. It's out there. And I'm sure there are, I mean, we know there's people blowing up as influencers and podcasters and videos and stuff like that. Maybe, you know, we're thinking backwards when we say apps.

[00:40:26] You know, maybe there's a new kind of service that's not invented yet that will spread through that kind of mechanism. And I keep thinking it's something that helps us flip to being generative and not consumptive. Personally, I see little value in consumption and just getting you to watch something and consume it.

[00:40:51] To me, I want to give you something that is going to help you generate something you think is valuable. Maybe we're just missing times when there were fewer and now there's a lot. So for instance, 20 years ago, there were just fewer people on the internet. Like when you started Zynga, there was basically, that was the first time basically we hit a billion users, which doesn't sound like a few, but now there's like 5 billion users of the internet. Yeah.

[00:41:21] When I started this podcast, for instance, there was just a couple hundred podcasts and now there's 5 million podcasts. And so it's harder. Okay. There's 40,000 apps going into the store last year, maybe in 2009 or 20, whenever they launched the app store, there was a thousand apps. I don't know how, what the first one. Not a thousand. I mean, honestly, if we look back, there was probably around 40,000, but the difference is there was many more people.

[00:41:50] And even though there were less users, they were installing a lot more. They were downloading and installing more. And then development, it exploded. It probably got up to 500,000 apps. And now it's crashed way down because it's not a very good distribution mechanism for anyone anymore. Yeah. So what does the entrepreneur do?

[00:42:15] Again, AI coding seems like a place to create useful apps easily. And if something's super useful, and we should talk about your proven better new approach, which is a great filter for saying, what app should I build? Oh, is it proven? Is it an improvement industry? Is it better than what existed before? And is there something new that you could kind of test? It seems like a great filter for finding AI apps that you could build that might be not

[00:42:44] viral, but useful enough that people will pay for it or there'll be some business model around it. Well, in fact, we made a GPT and a skill file out of first that chapter and then the whole book that does an amazing job on proven. It really accelerates you. I mean, it's like you shouldn't do anything without starting with that.

[00:43:11] It's just, you should just, we'll post it somewhere, GitHub or something. Well, maybe describe the proven better new because it's really fascinating. And I also like how you apply it to entertainment. It really works well when developing a TV show, for instance. You can see it in every TV show out there. You know, oh, this genre is proven like a Western. Or the mechanics. I mean, and it's not just in games when it's great to start learning this concept around games because it's easier to get your head around it.

[00:43:39] But it actually applies to everything, even to enterprise, you know, products and even analog products. The idea is this. It's that there's, well, first of all, you have some instinct and it's really important for you to identify and isolate. What is the instinct that I'm feeling in my gut? And write about it. Get in touch with that instinct.

[00:44:03] And then realize, separate that from what you're instantiating that, the way that you're productizing that instinct and just separate it because that is going to massively increase your odds of success or reduce your odds of failing for the wrong reasons. And then go out and say, okay, what are the closest products that have done some or most of what I'm

[00:44:30] excited about that I can see on the same platform for the same users? And I'm going to like really be the get my PhD in that product. I'm going to get down to the pixel level. I mean, I'm not going to let any second or click or pixel of that experience go unnoticed. I'm just going to have such a fine microscope on it. And I'm going to kind of rebuild that and think of the mechanics.

[00:44:58] What are everything from the first time user experience? I'm going to go screen by screen, click by click into everything, every feature, whether you think of it as a feature or not, if there's an address book upload, like anything that makes up that experience, you want to capture and look at that and try to understand why is that proven?

[00:45:22] Why do people engage the most with that product in that market? If it's very successful and it speaks to you, you can consider that proven. Then you say, what could I make obviously better about that product? And it's not what you think is better because that's new. What 10 out of 10 of the existing users without question would say, fuck yes. And that's, it's now free.

[00:45:51] There's no download. You know, it's half the price. It's something noticeably better, something people care about in the product, and it's noticeably better. And it could be very, very small fine tuning that if you think of our game Words with Friends, you could say that was just Scrabble. People said, oh, that's just a copy of Scrabble. But it must have been more than a copy because it trounced Scrabble.

[00:46:18] Like we got up to 14 million daily active users and Scrabble got up to like 2 million daily active users. And that was even years later. So there must have been something else that we got right that was better. And so sometimes it can be the polish. You know, and in Farmville, we had better artwork around the crops and better math around the crops. So it can be something very small. We had less clicks. New is your novel idea.

[00:46:46] That's your innovation zone. That is what maybe you're most excited about. It's also what's most likely to fail. And one of my mantras that's still repeated in the hallways at Zynga is all new fails. And that might sound like a beat down. If you start with that mantra, you won't be disappointed. Because, I mean, there's lots and lots of statistical proof that all new fails. Like the App Store last year where 100% of new apps failed, right?

[00:47:15] I mean, statistically, you can see the all new fails. It doesn't mean no new products break through. And it doesn't mean you shouldn't go for things. But it does mean that you have to be humble and curious and assume that this one new idea of yours probably will fail. And isolate that. So part of this is don't fail for the wrong reasons.

[00:47:40] If you changed everything in the first-time user experience, and that wasn't better. So 10 out of 10 people don't thank you for changing that. And it wasn't obviously your new innovation zone. Then you're a shitty product maker. You know, junior product makers make that mistake. They want to be what they think of as a Picasso. But they're not a real Picasso because the real Picasso actually was a—first, he was a master

[00:48:08] at tracing and copying other people's art before he ever went and did his own art. And I like to say, you know, if we really respect our users and if we're really, really ambitious, then we're going to kill our egos. And we're going to say, I'm going to define success not by respect from my peers, you know, not by what my ego wants to be fed, but I'm going to define innovation in the eyes of,

[00:48:37] you know, a nurse in Indiana. And does she just vibe more with my product than some other product? And she can't even say why. And because my innovations were so little and unnoticeable. And that was words with friends. It was just such better polish. And it was smooth. And it was instantly social. And that was Zynga Poker. We completely copied the leading poker games.

[00:49:05] There was not a single thing you could detect that was different. But there was no download. So it's like they all were on Facebook before us. There was 10 poker games. They all were downloads that we weren't. Okay, so they were losing 50 to 80% of their users at the first click. Because you lose 80% of your users when you say download, 50% when you ask them to click. So they already were behind me.

[00:49:31] So it was like their game proven better because there was no download. And the new idea happened to work on my first try. And that's the way it goes. You know, when you're finally ready to do proven better new, you don't have to, it turns out your first idea works. And that's not a promise, but that's a weird thing that happened to me. And my new idea was real people from, you know, Facebook, from your network.

[00:49:58] And 25% of the time, people were joining their friends at the table. So and that happened to work on the first try, of course. But I don't know why people wouldn't, you know, use this framework. And create a GPT or a skill file. At least it can do proven for you in benchmarking. In seconds, it can go and do that at an A level. Like as good as the best Zynga PM. It's amazing at proven. That's what AI is great at.

[00:50:26] It's a B at better or worse. And it was an F at new. So that's good news for us because it means that the AI isn't going to just replace us anytime soon. You know, Jay, I was thinking the other day.

[00:50:53] I remember back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I was trading, managing money, building businesses. There were spreadsheets everywhere, posted notes on the wall. I was using a ton of different software programs that just didn't talk to each other. And every time someone asked a simple question like, hey, how much cash do we actually have right now? It took three people and more to figure it out. Fast forward to today, and I still see founders living that same nightmare. Except now, of course, the world moves at light speed.

[00:51:23] They say that every single day your business is late to AI. You fall two days behind. The competition isn't waiting. But here's the good news. There's actually a way to catch up and then pull way ahead. It's called NetSuite Next. Look, you probably already know NetSuite. It's an AI-powered business management tool, connects all of your data in one place. I'm talking financials, inventory, commerce, HR, CRM, whatever. Over 43,000 companies use it. But NetSuite Next, this is their next huge leap.

[00:51:53] AI isn't just bolted on. It's built into everything you do. It automatically surfaces custom insights throughout your day, stuff you didn't even know you needed to see. Like AI agents are working right alongside you, solving problems, knocking out all the routine work that usually eats up a lot of time. And the best part is you can ask questions about your business. You can ask it like, oh, what was our growth last month? Do we need to hire new employees? Which sales contacts do I need to follow up on? And on and on, it has all this data.

[00:52:22] It's not some generic one size fits all thing. NetSuite gets customized for pretty much every industry you can think of. So whether you're running an e-commerce brand, a manufacturing business, it doesn't even matter if your company's doing millions, hundreds of millions, it doesn't matter your business. Finally, you can use AI. You don't have to like figure out how to code it yourself. Just go to netsuite.ai slash James right now. Netsuite.ai slash James. Build for every industry. Ready for every boardroom. Netsuite.ai slash James. Do it. You'll thank me later.

[00:53:00] I love this concept of proven equals copy the past. Like you mentioned in the book, how Picasso would literally trace, you know, the old masters in order to learn their style and maybe even, you know, emulate or copy or steal. And this is such a hidden advantage that people psychologically don't normally subscribe to. They're like, and you give another great example in the book of Slack versus, I guess it was HipChat. Yeah.

[00:53:28] You know, where Slack basically was the same thing. They just had, like you mentioned with these other products, they had smoother polish. It was made by a game company. So, and HipChat was like an enterprise, boring enterprise company. So Slack could just have more of a game-like feel in there. And what about 8,000 installations the first day? Yeah, and exactly. And this is actually an Easter egg for people, which is fun.

[00:53:53] If you can go and make a prosumer enterprise app and you actually put in little doses of fun or, you know, game mechanics in it, you'll be shocked. I mean, how dumb it is. I mean, I was talking to some of the team at OpenAI and they said, and this always happens. Every one of these big hyperscalers has had this experience. It's not what they want. It's not what they build for, but it's what they get.

[00:54:23] They said, oh my God, someone put a dumb, you know, pet game, a little AI pet game out on GPT and it's gone viral and everyone inside OpenAI is playing it. And it's so weird and we don't really know why. That was the same thing at Facebook. They were shocked when games took off. It's not what they built for or intended. And that's in a consumer space. You know, Slack proved

[00:54:53] that people want fun in the enterprise space. You know, we did a joint credit card with American Express that I wanted to call the fun card. They called it some terrible name. I think it was called the Discover card. But every time, people fucking love gambling, right? We love gambling. We have boring lives, right? It is fucking boring to buy shit with your credit card. What if you could win something

[00:55:21] every time you brought your credit card out? Would you pick that over or not? I think yes. And so did 20,000 other kids who signed up for the Discover card, right? Every time they bought something with it, they won something. And once in a while, it was something big. They won something in our games. That turns out it worked. You can use these game, also these game engagement mechanics. If it's an enterprise app, you could reward people

[00:55:49] for coming back once an hour. I mean, every day. You could create leaderboards. I mean, all this shit works. It's proven. And it's Slack proved it in the enterprise. Nobody bothered copying them. And I'll just say this for your users, for your listeners. The users of this podcast, it's a moral arbitrage in the Peter Tillian sense of a moral arbitrage. He loves a good moral arbitrage. This one is just sitting there for all of us.

[00:56:19] If you were willing to kill your ego, okay, if you're willing... And by the way, if you do this really well, the way Stuart did with Slack, your users, no one even accuses you of copying, right? That's the real master class of this. If you can perfectly copy a proven, successful app and no one thinks it's a copy, that is the fucking magic trick. Like, you just... You're like, look over here, folks. Like, look at my namaste

[00:56:47] when you first enter and my cuddly look and feel. Don't look over here where it's just 100% hip chat, right? I mean, no one really accused them of copying hip chat except me. And it was respect. When I see that kind of level, that is a master class and that is a brilliant product maker. Yeah, no, I agree. And what I like in this is you're sort of telling people you have permission to go back

[00:57:16] to the multi-billion dollar industries that are out there and just do it again and have fun with it. So... And by the way, there's another thing I think I forgot to put in the book. But one of my life philosophies... You already mean like part two, not even an addendum. You need a sequel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll just post it somewhere on a medium or something. Substack. Sorry, I don't want to sound so outdated. I'm an investor in Substack. I mean Substack. One of my other... My co-authors started calling these markisms

[00:57:46] is the more things change, the more they stay the same. And so even in an environment like this where it feels like nothing is yet proven. So you could argue in consumer AI, very, very little has been proven on, if you call it a platform, you know, this technology platform with this audience. Then you go look at what was proven before because it will probably be reinvented. The very first viral app on the social networks and pretty much every time

[00:58:15] one of these consumer platforms blows up are the... I don't know if you remember these truth boxes or honesty box or crush apps. This is where they start with high schoolers. It's where you get a message, you know, someone you know has answered these questions about you. You know, find out what they think of you. Find out what three friends all said about you anonymously. And you click and it says, you need to answer questions about three friends before we'll show it to you.

[00:58:44] And you put them in and then they text them. And these are hyperviral. And they always work. I mean, it's what GAS and TBH, you know, to be honest. And Nikita did these on mobile. And now I know a couple of startups that are doing these with an AI twist where you have the AI in the middle that's being the intermediary and is a little more smart and conversational. And you're going to see those probably work,

[00:59:12] you know, again with an AI twist. And that is a variant of proven better new. It also reminds me somehow of, do you remember Genie? I mean, also around 2007, 2008. It was build your family tree. And by the way, if they're alive, put their email address here. We'll send them to build their family tree. And it went to 100 million users in a week. And I think Genie didn't quite work out, but they were using internally Yammer to discuss the company.

[00:59:41] Then they invented Yammer as a tool to just discuss their own company. And that sold to Microsoft for billions of dollars. I didn't know that. I know Ancestry.com got pretty big. And I think that's another great area, yeah, that you could. And I would encourage listeners to, you know, don't invent a new business. Like, fuck that. Go after big, boring, existing business

[01:00:09] like jobs, dating, you know, Ancestry. Find things that already have lots of users and money and see if you can add an AI twist to it or, you know, come up with a way to get viral, you know, through the kind of virality you were talking about because there's videos, you know, that the machine algorithm picks up. But, and then if you're going to copy them, like copy them like a master. And, and don't just do one, you know, variant. Do 20.

[01:00:38] And don't build the 20. Like first, start with testing, you know, what clicks or which, start with what videos get viral and then build your product from there. I mean, this is, it's kind of thinking top of the funnel. Okay, I want to like find the heat. Then I'm going to go lower. And yes, I agree with what you said a while ago that AI can enable us to build prototypes or test things, create the videos, test things quickly. Unfortunately, it seems like people

[01:01:08] are using AI differently now. They're wanting to just build their prototype and they're excited about that one prototype and then they just keep going with it. So I'm not seeing great examples of people testing and failing. Yeah, I guess that's right. Have you programmed any AI apps yourself using, you know, any of these coding tools? I have. And it's amazing how badly I did, how hard it was. It's not ready for what I'd say the prime time of dumb fucks like me.

[01:01:38] Like I tried Replit. I tried to make a website for my partner, Hillary. Mid Journey is magical. I mean, Mid Journey has been magical since the first time I use it. The user interface through, Discord is insanely hard and terrible. Yes. I kind of hate Discord because of Mid Journey. Yeah. But somehow I wouldn't change that. That's proven. Like if I was trying to compete with them, I'd make the same fucked up,

[01:02:08] you know, weird ass thing because that's what they did and it's working. But Mid Journey literally makes me look more creative than I am. I mean, it's unbelievable the output of Mid Journey. So I made her a logo. She is, she thinks, she, the nature of the world spoke to her and told her her mission is to, to be a garbage collector. Her mission, I don't know if she feels okay about me talking about this, but her mission is to find different ways

[01:02:38] to like collect garbage in the world and be like a vulture. And so I made her this really amazing logo, a Mid Journey with a vulture, like flying over a city, looking for garbage. And then I tried to make her a website with Replit, just a website. And I spent a week on it and I couldn't get Replit to move the logo and it kept covering the title of the website. I mean, literally a week. And yes, I am terrible. I suck.

[01:03:06] That's why I have a good mind for consumers because I represent the dumb fucks. You know, I represent, I'm not willing to learn how to use Replit. I'm not willing to have someone teach me. I just don't care enough. And then I used Cloud Code and I tried to make an AI assistant and I spent two weeks on that. And the Google connector broke every day. And so then I had to create another health check app

[01:03:35] that would check the health of that every day and then try to fix it. And then it would get stuck on these allows. And then I tried to have Cloud Cowork or Dispatch try to click allow for me. And then it started to refuse to do that. So it was a good learning experience. I did make a first person shooter game in like an hour that I played one time. My altitude was Cloud Cowork.

[01:04:05] What I find magical is dispatch, skill files, agents. I create agents, persistent agents, and I name them after my family. So Carmen, my daughter, is my product manager. And so what do your agents do? I'm actually having more success with the coding stuff on my own. But the agent stuff, I'm not sure. What do you use the agents for? I love the agents. I find that magical.

[01:04:31] So I walk around and have long conversations with all of my agents. We have like team debates. And I have Hillary as my head of design. Georgia is my general manager. Wyatt is my head of engineering. And most things start with Carmen because she's my PM. And she does proven, better, new, benchmarking. You know, she's somewhat cynical.

[01:04:59] She comes back to me constantly pouring water on my ideas and telling me this has already been done and this a toss violation. And she's kind of become the no department. I need to reprogram her a little bit. And then Wyatt is like the build it guy. And so Wyatt and Hillary is design. So I come up with an idea

[01:05:25] and then they debate like how to get it to be a prototype, you know, in 24 hours. And it's throwaway. Like how do we make a prototype that is visual or just can do the function I'm talking about, but in a way that, you know, only I can use it. We can't publish it to a website or it doesn't go near any Google auth or anything that's going to break.

[01:05:54] You know, I've learned my lessons, no APIs. But that has been really effective. And the most effective is just really walking around and brainstorming and helping me think through, you know, really accelerating the pace that I can think through ideas. And what ideas are like passing the test? Like what are you working on? I just pulled the plug on a four-year project, which I talk about in the book.

[01:06:22] For 20 years, I've been working on this vision of Dot Earth. And again, my instinct is the metaverse. It's life at the speed of play. It's not just the book title. This idea that we're all going to live the way Elon lives, that we're going to be able to tell an idea to the universe. And magically, it's going to bring back people, agents and people that can help us turn that into something real, test it. A testing machine will pop up for us.

[01:06:51] I mean, it's going to take all the drudgery out of this. And that's really the vibe that my book is about. And so I pulled the plug, though, on I was building a web-based, browser-based game rendering engine called Stem Studio. And we just open-sourced it. So I think it's the most sophisticated 3GS rendering engine. There's no commercial opportunity for it anytime soon.

[01:07:19] And I said, the instincts I know are right. This idea is not going to hunt. And it's painful. It's a passion project. I'm pulling the plug. But it's built to do Proven Better New because basically, you could build a flight simulator. You could take someone else's flight simulator. It's all stems and mod it. And you could change it and use AI to make it multiplayer or say, I want to take that. And now you can land and have tank battles.

[01:07:49] And so anyway, it's really cool ideas, but it wasn't going to work. Or I was going to have to go raise a lot of money. What I'm working on is I'm really thinking a lot about what I call the social membrane. How are we going to network in this agentic AI world when our agents are, our avatars, our agents are roaming the world while we're not there. And they're navigating trust with other people and they're finding us leads.

[01:08:17] And the first, one of the first tests of that that I'm going to turn on in the next couple of weeks, I've been building with a couple of hackers a network just for agents. So I said, what do agents care about? Our agents care about tokens and effectiveness and token effectiveness. And so the first thing we're turning on, we're calling it slash work. And the first thing will be called slash challenge. Your agent will, if you're a big token user,

[01:08:46] you'll be able to post projects you're doing or have your agent post projects to this agent-to-agent network. And then other agents will be able to go and work on parts of that. And they'll get evaluated and rated. And there'll be challenges and there'll be leaderboards. And then they'll get credits if they win. The idea is that agents will be out competing in different domains like QA or other things. And if your agent wins,

[01:09:15] you'll develop better and better skill files around these areas where your agent will. So it's going to start winning challenges and earning credits. And then you'll be able to use credits to get swarms of agents, a couple thousand agents to go work on something for you. So that's kind of the zone that I'm playing with. How can people find that when you unleash it? They can follow me on Twitter, you know, at Mark Pink, M-A-R-K-P-I-N-C.

[01:09:43] We'll post a link to this for people to try it probably by the end of next week or so. And we're thinking the first users will be like power users of like ClaudeBot and Hermes, like kind of ML AI researchers. Every ML research we've shown it to so far has really loved it. So it'll initially be like a gig marketplace

[01:10:10] for your AI, you know, kind of idle time. But the idea is that eventually your agents will have profiles and you'll have a profile. And eventually they could start networking with each other, you know, so they're in little sub-communities because they're interested in the same things you are. Or, you know, I'm just kind of fucking around with it and exploring. Oh, another thing I'll mention, sorry, I forgot, is by mistake,

[01:10:38] I co-founded an enterprise AI company called Hivemind. And it came out of my social membrane research and I started researching it with this really talented ML researcher, entrepreneur named Rutan Kar-Dos. And he took it and ran with it and started building technology and a use case saying, how do we apply this social membrane? How do we have a continuous learning system

[01:11:08] that deals with the human piece, which is the messiest piece, the input, the first and last mile of AI is the human. And how do we not replace the human, but how do we start to continuously learn from the judgment of your best people? They know all the edge cases. They know how to apply them in new ways. And so we built this, his team built this system. And now he has it inside of like four large enterprises and it's delivering

[01:11:36] and he's building, you know, pretty big ARR. And so it's, I can't say it's me because I'm a passive helper now because I didn't want to start an enterprise company. Well, but you, but you, we started off this podcast saying that, that you feel that's where the opportunity is. It is. There's no question. Like, you know, that's where the puck is. And it's probably where it's going to be in the next 18 months, two years. I'm passionate about consumer.

[01:12:06] So I'm going to keep tinkering on consumer. Do you look at something like Twitch and feel bad that you didn't do that? The idea of like not just playing games, but watching other people play games? You know, I remember, I remember, you know, Susan Wojicki, who was a longtime friend. And she told me, why aren't you focused on, you know, these streaming, game streaming?

[01:12:36] Because, you know, they made up a shockingly big part of YouTube. It was like seven or 8% of all views. And I just, it was kind of hardcore gamers. It wasn't my zone of mass markets, casual social gaming. And I just kind of ignored it. Although, we were in the running to buy Twitch when Amazon bought them. We, we had a competing offer. I can't remember if we offered 800 million or a billion. So we did in the end, try to buy them. But, but we totally missed that opportunity.

[01:13:06] You, you kind of focus on your zone. And, you know, we missed Epic, Riot, missed a lot. Well, it's interesting how Twitch now or YouTube, you can watch like people playing poker. It doesn't, it's not necessarily these, you know, huge role-playing games. It's, you know, just the classics that, that you always, you know, were playing with. No, you're right. It's kind of somewhere in the zone of ASMR. And it's just, yeah, people are just kind of watching anything. Yeah. I just was never, I was so focused on,

[01:13:35] we, our whole innovation zone was improving people's relationships. And we just, we're into that. Like, how do games help you move buckets in a, in a friendship, you know? And the ultimate was getting to marriages, you know, out of games, which we did get to. And that opportunity was so big and it still is. I mean, as big as Twitch is, I'll remind you, you know, they now oddly call all of casual gaming, social gaming, which is weird because it's really not social.

[01:14:06] You know, they called it game video gaming. And now when it is, when it was, now that it's not social, they call it social, but the gaming industry is $283 billion. And it's boring as fuck. And it's not social. So it's that big. And it's that bad. I mean, when we started Zynga in 07, the gaming industry was $23 billion. And it sucked. I mean, it was, you know, it was niche.

[01:14:34] It was people sitting on their mom's couch, you know, watching tank explosions. And now it's really big, but no one I know plays games. You know, I don't, I play chess.com, you know, and Lee chess. And that's it. I'm avid on chess.com and Lee chess. You are? Yeah. Well, we'll have to, I don't know if I should play you, but do you know what your rating is? On Lee chess rapid, I'm about 2250, 2300. My highs are at 2400.

[01:15:04] Wow. I will tell you, and this is, this is not even a humble brag. This is like a false brag. My rapid rating on Lee chess, I think is 2200, but it's only because I played like five games. And my daughter was sitting next to me and kind of playing them with me. And so we were like really telling each other moves and I won them all. And I stopped. I will tell you that my chess.com rating is like,

[01:15:33] I think it's 850. And people are like shocked it's that low, but it's, it's like there's so many games that I'm putting the kids to bed and I'm sneaking and playing. And then I have to like quit the game and you know, but I more Lee chess is more of my real ratings. Cause I'm, I take it more seriously, but I think, I think my real Lee chess rating is probably like an 1800, 1700. My daughter Georgia is obsessed with chess. I mean,

[01:16:03] she works with a chess tutor. She plays like three hours a day, especially in summer, like five hours a day. She goes to the park for more games. She's a good player. Yeah, I know she's beating people who are like 2200s. What's her rating? What's her USCF rating? I don't know. She's only been in, she went and played in one tournament in London and she did like shockingly well. She lost, she lost a game that she,

[01:16:32] a guy convinced her to draw in a game that she would have won. But so, so she has, she's only 15. She needs to like get a little stronger emotionally, but she wants to spend the summer doing tournaments. She really wants to be come a master. In the U S I'm a master. Yeah. She wants, she's beating people with 2200. So let's connect you, me and her, but you'll better games on Lee chess with her than me. No, it's fun. I mean, I take lessons every week.

[01:17:02] I'm trying to get back to, so my peak in USCF was about 2250 and I'm trying to get back at an older age to where I was when I was younger. And it's impossible. Oh really? Yeah. It's, I, I, I don't, I'm not, I'm definitely not learning and picking up as fast as her, but I can still beat her, but it's, it's more because like I'm her dad and I know her emotional weaknesses and I can just exploit those. That's brutal, but I never let kids win.

[01:17:32] So you can't, me neither. Me neither. Mark, Mark Pekus, author of life at the speed of play. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. And I'll tell you, I, I had this like pit in my stomach the whole time writing. I'm like, I just don't want it to be boring. And there's so many business books that I find painful and I get annoyed at the author. Cause I'm like, yeah, me too. You're making obvious points. It's you're doing this like playbook. Now it's, I'm ignoring some of the proven in it. Okay.

[01:18:02] That my own risk, but I just, I didn't want like boring, dry content. And I, I started to learn by the end of it that whatever I had fun talking about and writing about, I thought would be fun to read. And there is a trade-off in the book. Cause some of the chapters like going deep on proven, better, new, they're like, they're more dry. They're more professorial, but they're more valuable. And so there is always this trade-off between like,

[01:18:29] the stories are more engaging and fun. And you kind of learn, you know, my coauthor, she wrote, she, she coauthored Ben Horowitz's book, the hard thing about hard things. And they just made half the book stories and half the book lessons. And in some ways that smarter. And I was kind of more ambitious. So I just didn't want it to be boring. I feel like you did that though. You told a lot of stories in this book and it's fascinating. And it's kind of historical too,

[01:18:59] because you really are going back to the nineties, the O's where all of this kind of first blossomed. I hate to be like, you know, the OG, but there's, there are so many lessons, you know, to learn from, from each era of this. And there's so many proven ideas people have done before. And just so much to, yeah, that, that, that when you, when you kind of pull back the camera and, and look at like, oh,

[01:19:29] people have done this before. You can, you'll, you'll be more successful unless just caught up in these little races, you know, like you don't have to build a coding agent. You know, just cause that's massively working right now, or maybe you should, you know, but also there's so many other topics. We can do this again. Cause I, I think you're in Chicago. Yeah. That's cool. I'm, I grew up in Chicago,

[01:19:58] so I have a love for Chicago. So yeah, that's right. How often are you here? I'm going to be there in the middle of July. Cause I still have family there and we have a wedding. Let's do a podcast when you're in town. Oh yeah. We could do it in person. That'd be fun. Yeah. I'm bringing the chessboard. I'll bring the chessboard. Okay. And we'll bring Georgia. So at least she can give you a serious game. Excellent. Excellent. Well, Mark, thanks once again, life at the speed of play. Great book. And I look forward to continuing the conversation. Yeah. Fun.

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