Latest news with #LexFridmanPodcast
CNBC
a day ago
- Business
- CNBC
'Bad meetings' are essential, says CEO: You 'learn more' from them than the good ones
Neal Arthur doesn't mind having bad meetings at work. He actually treasures them, he says. Arthur is the CEO of Portland, Oregon-based Wieden+Kennedy, an advertising agency known for slogans like Nike's "Just Do It" and Bud Light's "Dilly Dilly." At his workplace, meetings that seem negative on the surface are essential to creativity and professional growth, he said during a June 13 episode of LinkedIn's "This Is Working" video series. When Arthur gathers employees after something goes wrong, a project doesn't land or a client is unhappy, he presents the negative feedback as an opportunity to think outside the box — instead of browbeating his team to get it right, he said. "We're not afraid to have bad meetings ... we really value [them]" said Arthur. "If we're only having good meetings, it's because we're sharing things with you that you expected and we need the space to be able to share things with you that you didn't."Bad meetings aren't for pressuring employees to fix mistakes or appease an unhappy client, because such motivation tactics often backfire, Arthur said. Instead, they're for generating great ideas — instead of rushed or uninspired ones — to get out of a rut. Say your team recently worked on a project for a client, for example, and they hated what you gave them. Telling your employees that they really dropped the ball and badgering them to get a new concept on your desk by day's end could result in safe, predictable ideas. Instead, using Arthur's approach, you might ask them to challenge themselves to pursue the craziest idea in the room, imagining what the project could look like without limits. "I think [it's helpful] to remind each other that pressure doesn't lead to better output," said Arthur. "I've never seen an idea get better because a creative was told, 'If this isn't awesome, then we're going to get fired.'" "You learn more from bad meetings than you do from good ones," Arthur added. Plenty of CEOs have their own preferences for how to run the best meetings. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for example, likes to conduct "messy meetings," which are brainstorming sessions that feature plenty of rigorous back-and-forth about people's ideas, he told the "Lex Fridman Podcast" in December 2023. These sessions often last longer than their allotted time slot, allowing the conversations to wander around. "When I sit down [in] a meeting, I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem," Bezos said. "The reality is, we may have to [let our minds] wander for a long time ... I think there's certainly nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and spit-balling and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth." Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, swears by his two-minute rule, he told CNBC Make It in 2018. "You have to give someone an uninterrupted two minutes to explain their thinking before jumping in with your own," Dalio said. "This ensures that everyone has time to fully crystallize and communicate their thoughts without worrying they will be misunderstood or drowned out by a louder voice." However you conduct meetings, prioritize creativity and authenticity over intimidating your employees to get something done, Arthur recommended. "Our best leaders absorb that pressure, and then everyone else feels like they're having a great time," he said.
Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoints, but Amazon's 6-page memos are legendary and every employee must obey
At most companies, meetings kick off with quick chats or PowerPoint slides, but at Amazon , there was writing and a lot of reading, as per a report. Jeff Bezos Replaced PPT Slides With Six-Page Memo Under Jeff Bezos' leadership, Amazon built a famously rigorous 'reading culture' centered around drafting six-page memos , according to Business Insider. These densely packed documents became a signature of how business decisions, new ideas, and major product strategies were communicated at one of the world's most influential companies, as per the report. Steve Huynh, a former principal engineer at Amazon, shared that, "I spent on the order of like 1-4 hours every day reading while I was a principal engineer," and added, "What an amazing culture that I think that almost every other company should replicate if they could," as quoted by Business Insider. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 이걸 발견한 후로 다른 모든 게임을 하지 않게 됐어요! 레이드 섀도우 레전드 설치하기 Undo He shared that, "I got really really good at just reading these documents to get up to speed," and explained that reading enough six-page memos taught him to express himself in the same format, according to the report. ALSO READ: Jim Cramer doubles down on Jensen Huang: Own Nvidia, don't trade it, says stock's up 42,000% since his pick Live Events Amazon's Internal Communication Built on Memo Culture Huynh joined Amazon in 2006, back when the company had only recently turned a profit and Bezos was still CEO, according to the report. Huynh highlighted that the e-commerce giant's approach of writing and reading the 6-page memos was part of its "secret sauce" and revealed that Amazon employees' writing was often constrained to the format during his tenure at the company, whether it was a business strategy, system design, or press release, as reported by Business Insider. Bezos had started this culture of memo-writing from the top down, and the Amazon founder insisted on dense, direct memos in 10-point font, as reported by Business Insider. In Bezos' 2017 letter to shareholders, he had written that "we don't do PowerPoint," instead opting for these six-pagers, and added, "Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely," as quoted in the report. While speaking on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2023, Bezos shared that Amazon employees read these memos together before meetings and also explained why he didn't ask employees to read the memos in advance, according to Business Insider. He said, "The problem is people don't have time to do that, and they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo, or maybe not read it at all," and added that, "They're also bluffing like they're in college, having pretended to do the reading," as quoted in the report. ALSO READ: Elon Musk calls Warren Buffett boring, but secretly begged him to invest in Tesla Andy Jassy Pitched AWS with 30 Drafts of Six-Page Memo During a 2017 talk at the University of Washington, his successor and Amazon's current CEO, Andy Jassy, who has worked at the firm since 1997, described writing his own memo when first pitching what would become Amazon Web Services, as reported by Business Insider. Jassy recalled, "I remember this six-page narrative, we called it a vision doc. We asked for 57 people, which felt so ballsy at the time. I was so nervous, I wrote 30 drafts of this paper, and Jeff didn't blink," as quoted in the report. Memo Culture Lives On Even under his own leadership, Jassy has continued the culture of memo-writing, reported Business Insider. In his 2024 letter to shareholders, he had revealed that only a six-page allotment made the memos "much easier for the audience to engage with and ask the right 'why' questions," as quoted in the Business Insider report. FAQs Who created Amazon's memo culture ? Jeff Bezos started it, and Andy Jassy has continued it as CEO, as per the Business Insider report. Can other companies copy this culture? Huynh says it's possible, but it requires top-down discipline and consistency.
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Former Amazon principal engineer says he spent '1-4 hours' reading daily — and it's part of the company's 'secret sauce'
When Steve Huynh was a principal engineer at Amazon, meetings began with a "study hall." Amazon had a "reading culture" even among engineers, Huynh recently told the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, speaking of his time at the tech giant. Employees frequently drafted six-page memos, he said, which they shared with the company to update progress and demonstrate new projects. "I spent on the order of like 1-4 hours every day reading while I was a principal engineer," Huynh said. "What an amazing culture that I think that almost every other company should replicate if they could." Huynh, who said the company's embrace of writing and reading the 6-page memos was part of its "secret sauce," said Amazon employees' writing was often constrained to the format during his tenure at the company, whether it was a business strategy, system design, or press release. Huynh started at Amazon in 2006, only a few years after the company turned its first profit and while Jeff Bezos was at the helm. Bezos famously instilled this culture of memo-writing from the top down. Bezos insisted on dense, direct memos in 10-point font. In his 2017 letter to shareholders, Bezos wrote that "we don't do PowerPoint," instead opting for these six-pagers. "Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely," he wrote. Before meetings, Amazon employees read these memos together. On the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2023, Bezos explained why he didn't ask employees to read the memos in advance. "The problem is people don't have time to do that, and they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo, or maybe not read it at all," Bezos said. "They're also bluffing like they're in college, having pretended to do the reading." Andy Jassy, Bezos' successor and Amazon's current CEO, has worked at the company since 1997. When first pitching what would become Amazon Web Services, Jassy described writing his own memo. "I remember this six-page narrative, we called it a vision doc. We asked for 57 people, which felt so ballsy at the time. I was so nervous, I wrote 30 drafts of this paper, and Jeff didn't blink," Jassy said in a 2017 talk to the University of Washington. Jassy has continued the culture of memo-writing under his own leadership. In his 2024 letter to shareholders, Jassy wrote that a mere six-page allotment made the memos "much easier for the audience to engage with and ask the right 'why' questions." "I got really really good at just reading these documents to get up to speed," Huynh said on the podcast, explaining that reading enough six-page memos taught him to express himself in the same format. Huynh no longer works at Amazon. He left to pursue YouTube content creation full-time, as he told BI in 2024. But Huynh still reveres the company's reading culture — even if he acknowledges it may not be easily reproducible. "The difficulty would be, you actually have to be disciplined and principled," Huynh said. His interviewer, Gergely Orosz, argued it could only be done from the top down. Huynh agreed.
Atlantic
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Conspiracy Theorists Are Turning On the President
The Trump administration had promised a bombshell. Americans, many of whom had spent years wondering over the unknowns in the Jeffrey Epstein case, would finally get their hands on the secret files that would explain it all. What really happened when the accused sex trafficker died in jail back in 2019? And who was on his 'client list'—a rumored collection of famous and powerful people who participated in Epstein's crimes? In a September 2024 interview on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Donald Trump suggested that he would release the list if reelected. 'Yeah, I'd be inclined to do the Epstein; I'd have no problem with it,' Trump said. He indulged speculation about Epstein after his reelection as well. In February, the White House hosted a collection of MAGA-world influencers and gave them binders full of heavily redacted Epstein-related documents labeled Phase 1, suggesting more to come. The Trump administration has been unusually focused on messaging about such information, making a show of pulling the curtain back on supposed secrets. Trump similarly promoted the release of further documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination, along with records on the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In an executive order signed this January, the administration framed these efforts as 'PROVIDING AMERICANS THE TRUTH.' At an April hearing on those files, Nancy Mace, a Trump ally and representative from South Carolina, brought up the so-called Epstein list. In a meandering statement, she spoke about her desire to see documents regarding Epstein, as well as Hunter Biden's laptop and the origins of the coronavirus. All have been recurring internet fascinations among Trump's supporters. 'Sunshine literally is the best medicine,' Mace argued. A personal wish list of coveted secrets is not exactly the same thing as a principled call for government transparency. But the two are easy to conflate and can have some incidental overlap, which can be politically useful. The promise of previously withheld revelations has allowed Trump to frame himself as an outsider fighting on behalf of voters who have been kept in the dark by the establishment. The catch is that once he was back in office, he was put in the awkward position of having to deliver. On Monday, the FBI released a memo saying that it had reviewed all of its files on Epstein and that it does not plan to release more after all; there will be no Phase 2. According to the FBI, only a 'fraction' of the remaining material would have become public if Epstein had lived to go to trial, because it includes 'a large volume' of illegal content involving underaged victims of sexual abuse—in other words, material that cannot be released to the public. The memo also noted, in one breezy paragraph, that the bureau's review had uncovered neither a client list nor evidence 'that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.' There will be no new investigation against 'uncharged third parties,' the memo said. This has come as a shock to a group of people who have long bought into the idea that Trump would one day unmask an evil ring of Democrats and liberal-coded celebrities. Anna Paulina Luna, a representative from Florida and the chair of the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, which facilitated the recent document releases regarding JFK, told me that she will be asking the Department of Justice to authorize the release of more Epstein details anyway. 'I think the American people still have questions and there is stuff that they can release,' she said. She didn't comment specifically on the existence of a client list and said she didn't yet know exactly what kind of documents the FBI might still have (clarifying that she agreed that the bureau should not release any private details about victims or child-sexual-abuse material). In the meantime, the about-face on the Epstein files is splintering MAGA world, and many Trump allies are feeling betrayed and unmoored. 'No one believes there is not a client list,' wrote Marjorie Taylor Greene, the representative from Georgia who has avidly promoted QAnon conspiracy theories. 'This is a shameful coverup to protect the most heinous elites,' one of the influencers who went to the White House in February, Rogan O'Handley (who goes by 'DC Draino'), told his more than 2 million X followers on Monday. Longtime Trump loyalists, including the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, started sharing a meme on Monday that depicted a bunch of cartoon lizard people laughing about having pulled one over on the unsuspecting public yet again. Strange—some readers may be old enough to remember when it was Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who were the shadowy reptilian elite, secretly shedding their human skin whenever out of public sight. Significant ire has been directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi, who responded to a question about a client list in February by saying it was 'sitting on my desk right now to review.' During a press conference on Monday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Bondi had actually been referring to 'the entirety of all the paperwork' on Epstein and not to a specific document. Shortly thereafter, the online crowd began questioning why Leavitt had not been wearing her usual cross necklace at the briefing—a sign, perhaps, that she was lying and didn't want to do so in front of God (to paraphrase the posts, which were mostly ruder than that). When I asked Luna if Trump's supporters had a right to feel frustrated, she deflected the question, saying, 'I can't speak for people on the internet or the president. What I can say is President Trump is on the cusp of negotiating a permanent cease-fire with Israel and Hamas in Gaza. This is overshadowing the amount of success the administration has had in that sense.' Yet this is undeniably a turning point for the highly online among Trump's base. The story of the client list had effectively morphed into a more palatable and plausible version of the QAnon conspiracy theory. As does QAnon, it features a secret ring of evildoers, though it doesn't have certain ostentatious elements of that conspiracy (no harvesting blood). But both theories encourage people to disbelieve everything the government tells them. Until now, Trump and his appointees were positioned as exceptions to that rule—the deal was that if they got back into power, they would reveal all. From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida's law school who has written about government transparency and conspiracy theories, observed to me that, with his administrative appointments, Trump had made implicit promises to his supporters. 'He specifically nominated people for high-level positions who have been engaged in conspiracy theories for the past five-plus years,' Fenster pointed out. For instance, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have offered wild theories about the Epstein case in the past—Patel once suggested that the FBI may be covering up evidence to protect unnamed elites, while Bongino said he'd heard a rumor that Epstein was a foreign intelligence agent. Now the conspiracy is mutating again to fit the administration's reversal. 'To hear Pam Bondi and to hear Kash Patel and Don Bongino saying there is no list—you're going to say, 'Well, they must be part of the conspiracy too,'' Fenster suggested, which is certainly one avenue people have gone down. Because the FBI's memo coincided roughly with a diplomatic visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, others have started suggesting that Epstein was secretly a Mossad agent (a claim often expressed with anti-Semitic rhetoric). Alex Jones, who was initially furious about the FBI memo, has since speculated that Trump has actually taken 'control' of the alleged list and is using it to blackmail the 'deep state' behind the scenes. Of course, some have started picking apart the FBI memo itself. It concluded with links to two videos of a hallway in the Metropolitan Correctional Center where Epstein had been held, showing that nobody went into his cell the night of his death. Viewers quickly noticed that the clock in the corner of the video skips from 11:59:00 to 12:00:00, which suggested to them that a minute of footage was missing. On Tuesday afternoon, when a reporter attempted to ask Bondi about the foreign-intelligence theory and the video-clock issue, Trump cut in. 'Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?' he asked incredulously. 'This guy's been talked about for years. You're asking—we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things, and are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.' Bondi said she didn't mind answering the question, but Trump went on. 'I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this where we're having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas,' he said, referring to the flooding that has killed at least 120 people. Eventually, he waved for Bondi to go ahead. She told the reporter she had no knowledge of Epstein being an agent, then explained that the video hadn't been doctored and that the clocks on the outdated cameras in the Metropolitan Correctional Center always jump ahead as they approach midnight. From what I saw, hardly anyone online was buying this explanation, which comes as no surprise. Trump and his administration invited conspiracy theories into the White House. Now they're going to have a hard time getting them out.
Time of India
10-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
CEO Sundar Pichai reveals Google's ‘Most Important Metric' and how company is tracking it
Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that AI has boosted software engineering productivity by 10%, a metric the company actively tracks. Google measures this by assessing the increase in engineering capacity, in hours per week, gained through AI tools. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has claimed that artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing the productivity of the company's software engineers. He also noted that the Alphabet-owned tech giant is actively measuring the impact of AI on its engineers. During a recent episode of the "Lex Fridman Podcast,' Pichai explained that Google is closely observing how AI is boosting the output of its software developers. As per Pichai, it is "the most important metric,' and the company 'carefully measures it.' He even mentioned that Google actively measures 'how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI?" Pichai noted that the company currently estimates a 10% boost in engineering velocity attributed to AI. How Google tracks AI's role in increasing productivity of its engineers According to a report by Business Insider, a Google spokesperson explained that the company tracks AI's role in improving productivity of software developers by measuring the increase in engineering capacity created, in hours per week, through the use of AI-powered tools. To put it simply, it's a way of measuring how much extra time engineers are gaining for using AI tools by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 5 Books Warren Buffett Wants You to Read In 2025 Blinkist: Warren Buffett's Reading List Undo As for whether Google expects that 10% figure to continue rising, Pichai didn't clarify. However, he noted that agentic capabilities, where AI can take actions and make decisions more autonomously, will unlock the "next big wave." Google has also developed its internal tools to assist engineers with coding. Last year, it launched an internal coding copilot named "Goose," trained on 25 years of Google's technical history, Business Insider previously reported. While AI is playing a growing role, Pichai said during the podcast that Google still plans to hire more engineers next year. 'The opportunity space of what we can do is expanding too,' he said, adding that he hopes AI will reduce some of the grunt work and free up time for more enjoyable aspects of engineering. Meanwhile, the company is also monitoring the volume of code being generated by AI within Google, a figure which is reportedly on the rise. At Alphabet's most recent earnings call, Pichai mentioned that more than 30% of the company's new code is now generated by AI, up from about 25% in October 2024. Apart from Google, Microsoft UK CEO Darren Hardman said its GitHub Copilot coding assistant now writes 40% of the company's code at London Tech Week this week. He noted that this change is 'enabling us to launch more products in the last 12 months than we did in the previous three years.' In April, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI could handle half of Meta's developer work within a year. HP EliteBook Ultra Review: Thin, light, power in a premium package AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
