Episode 61: Being an Evangelist w/Guy Kawasaki
About Guy Kawasaki:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is charismatic, enticing and Apple's 2nd evangelist Guy Kawasaki. Guy is the chief evangelist of Canva and the creator of the Remarkable People podcast. He was a trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation. He has authored Wise Guy, The Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, Enchantment, and eleven other books.
In this conversation, Guy reflects on his career that has spanned over 40 years from counting and selling diamonds, being an evangelist at Apple, how great products and leaders polarise people, the relation between humour and intelligence, the emergence of ChatGPT, Nithin Kamath, the CEO of Zerodha and much more.
If you have any feedback about this conversation, speaker and topic recommendations, you can drop me a line at pritish@onepercent.live. Subscribe to the show where ever you are listening to it and sign up to The One Percent Project's "Think" newsletter at onepercent.live, which brings highly curated content that adds value to your professional and personal development.
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Key Highlights:
People underestimate the power of luck. Luck, coupled with hard work, creates a promising future.
Great products polarise people. Great products hold the power to evoke strong emotions, and not all are always positive. A recent example is OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While some people think ChatGPT is a revolutionary tool, others believe it will open up new dimensions of deceit and lead to greater intellectually dishonesty. Similarly, great leaders also polarise people. The likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk are liked and disliked by many, but they continue to hold influential positions by virtue of their work.
For most questions that people are asking on Google, ChatGPT is the answer. If Google remains a search engine that provides links to sources rather than direct relevant answers, it could perish.
Today there exists peer-suasion, or peer-to-peer persuasion, in product purchase. People do not continue to be greatly influenced by what the Wall Street Journal tells them to use, like in the previous era, but because people are embracing certain products, the Wall Street Journal now has to review them, and the experts themselves switch to those products.
The success of Apple products has been the ease of use and, over time, the notion of coolness that has come to be associated with it.
Productivity tools used by Guy Kawasaki: Word and Evernote
Book recommendations:
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In this conversation, he talks about:
00:00 Intro
02:12 Guy's career
04:28 Being an evangelist at Apple
05:24 Great product polarises people
06:08 Emergence of Chat GPT
10:09 Connection between intelligence and humour
11:03 Tenents of launching products like a pro?
17:27 Why did he kick off his podcast Remarkable People
19:36 About Nithin Kamath, Zerodha
22:35 What makes Apple's unique selling point
24:38 3 Productivity tools
27:08 3 Books
Transcript:
Pritish: You have an analogy about great products polarise people, but do you think that is also true for great leaders?Pritish: Welcome, Guy, to The One Percent Project.
Guy: Thank you.
Pritish: How do you reflect on your career, which has spanned over 40+ years?
Guy: Sure, enough to make me feel old. There are two combinations to my career: one is luck. People underestimate the power of luck. I was lucky to be born in a family that was lower middle class, could afford to send me to the right schools, and sacrificed that I could go to a college. That I just hit the jackpot. Not jackpot in the sense that I am the son of a billionaire or anything because I definitely wasn’t, but jackpot as opposed to living in total impoverishment or someone living in a totalitarian society. So, that’s one thing. Then just by the grace of God in my upbringing, I was also taught to work hard. So, if you’re lucky and work hard, the world is your oyster.
Pritish: Brilliant! Before you got to Apple, your first job was with Nova Styling counting diamonds. What did you learn there?
Guy: As I look back on my career, looking backwards, you can, of course, connect the dots, and you can make sense; you went to college, you majored in Psych. Then the dots didn’t connect there for a while because I went to law school, I quit after two weeks, went back to Hawaii, worked for lieutenant governor, went back to UCLA to get an MBA, and there I met a woman who needed some clerical help literally counting diamonds. So, I worked part time, counting diamonds. Then after I got my MBA, I went to work for that company in sales and marketing, and we were a jewellery manufacturing company selling to retailers. So, we called upon retailers as opposed to consumers. Selling jewellery to retailers is hand to hand combat, which was a very good experience learning how to sell, which has helped me the rest of my career, including being an evangelist at Apple. Now at that time, if you think that I had this grand scheme that said, you know, Guy, you go to Stanford, you get a Psych degree, then you learn how to sell in the jewellery business so you can go into tech. I hate to burst your bubble, but there was no plan.
Pritish: When you kicked off an evangelist career, specifically with Apple, I don’t think it’s a well-defined career. So, how did you navigate through it?
Guy: I was Apple's second software evangelist, and our job was to convince software and hardware companies to create Macintosh products, and evangelism comes from the Greek word "bringing the good news," so I brought the good news at Macintosh. Macintosh would make people more creative and productive. For a developer, Macintosh enabled you to develop the software you dreamed of and tap a different market than IBM PC. So, our evangelism was bringing the good news of this new platform. I didn't think of the title, the title already existed at Apple, and that was because we didn't just want to sell a new personal computer; we wanted to convert people to believe in this computer.
Pritish: In one of your books, The Art of Innovation, you talk about “great products polarise people,” double click on that.
Guy: Yes. I have observed in my career that great products evoke strong emotions, and not all are positive. So, the IT infrastructure hated Macintosh because with a Macintosh, you theoretically didn't need any help to set up the computer and print and all that. So, that is good news and bad news. Good news is less work, and bad news is less work. That's when I first observed that, and if you look at today's products, like Tesla, some people think Tesla is good for the climate, the coolest car, but some people hate Tesla. A very recent concept is ChatGPT. Some people think ChatGPT is such a useful tool, profound consequence; I am one of those people. Other people think it's a way for people to cheat and be intellectually dis-honesty, and it's the end of the world. ChatGPT is another product that has definitely polarised people.
Pritish: You have been an advisor to Google. A lot of discussion is going on that Google will catch up with ChatGPT or go further. What are your views?
Guy: You would hope Google would go further, right? If Google remained a search engine that provided you links to sources, it would die because of ChatGPT. Now many discussions of ChatGPT are very high level. This is sentient; can it do lateral thinking? Is it creative? That’s above my pay grade, but I will tell you that I think that the bulk of Google searches are simple questions like “do I roast the turkey breast up or breast down?” So, if you went to Google when you asked how to roast a turkey, you would get two hundred and fifty thousand links: my cooking, your cooking, e-cooking, best cooking, Thanksgiving cooking, and so you just wanted to know breast up or breast down, you’re not trying to get two hundred and fifty thousand links, no. If you ask that same question to ChatGPT, which I did, it says well, if you cook breast down, the advantages is that the breast has a thicker meat, it is closer to the fire so that it will cook faster, on the other hand it will be in its juices so it won't brown. So, you should probably cook it for two and a half hours, breast down for the last half hour or two hours, flip it breast up and then get the crispy brown skin, and you get fast cooking. That’s what I want to learn. I don’t want to use fifty thousand links. From that standpoint if I were Google, I would be panicked. We are now at the first stage, so do you trust ChatGPT to tell you how to cook a turkey? That’s not a big deal, but still I think its Google or other search engines, all they tried to do was improve their search algorithm and links because I tell you something: for a question like how do I add a printer to an Apple network or how do I roast a turkey or the kind of things that I think 99% of people on Google or asking, ChatGPT is a better answer.
Pritish: ChatGPT is actually based on the data it has at the underlying layer, and Google has the most of it.
Guy: One way of looking at it is, I don't know how true this is, but according to what I read, ChatGPT was disconnected in 2021, right? So, the knowledge in it stopped at 2021, not that the technology about cooking turkeys has changed a lot in the last two years, but imagine when it is hooked up to the Internet. So, it will get better and better compared to today’s Google to what was the original Google; why shouldn’t the same improvements happen? I don’t know if it is ChatGPT specifically, but this expectation now that AI is not just about recognising that this kind of cell is cancerous, now you can go to this place and say, “who Guy Kawasaki is? How do you roast the turkey? How do you change a flat tire? It’s getting consumer grade very much.
Guy: Yes. Let's say that not everyone loves Steve Jobs, not everyone loves Elon Musk, and not everyone loves Bill Gates. Having said that, just because people dislike you doesn't mean you're great, either. You've got to be careful with the logic here.
Pritish: You are a prolific speaker and presenter, and your presentations are filled with humour and punches. Is that deliberate?
Guy: Very much so. That is in my DNA. I don’t think I could give a completely serious talk. I really don’t think it’s possible for me to give a completely serious talk. Maybe self-referential is. I take that as a sense of humour. Whether you are making people laugh or whether you laugh is a sign of intelligence. In America, there is a whole political party that I don’t find funny at all. Even when they are cracking jokes, I think their jokes are so stupid. I think it takes a great deal of intelligence to be funny, and I also think it takes a great deal of intelligence to appreciate irony, hypocrisy, and double standards. Let’s just say there are many people who don’t see double standards, hypocrisy, and irony.
Pritish: How do you launch a product like a pro?
Guy: First of all, let us assume you have a great product because that makes everything easy. So, you have a great product; instead of talking about its features, a much more important concept is you do a demo. So, a demo is worth a thousand slides. So, you do a demo; the more documentation you have, the better, the more open architecture so that other affiliates, partners and developers can participate and help you fill out your product where you can’t do it yourself. I’ll give you an example. So, when Sony introduced its alpha cameras, this was the email cameras. The big objection to the first Sony email cameras was the lack of lenses, and all the people with Nikons and Canons just say I got these ten lenses. I’m not switching, I got too much tied up in those, and even if I was willing to sacrifice what’s tied up in there, I go to Sony, and I don’t have this 800 millimetres lens, and then I don’t have this pancake 20 millimetre lens, and I don’t have an 85 millimetre portrait lens. I only got two or three lens to choose from. So, what Sony did is they make the e format an open system. Today you can get lenses from Tamron and all these other companies. Today, one of the reasons why people aren’t switching from Sony to Nikon or Canon is because Sony has so many lenses. Take the concept of an open architecture which requires documentation, is very important. And the last concept, I think there was an assumption in previous times that early adoption and stuff and influencers is a pyramid, and at the top of the pyramid, there are these elites who tell all the people underneath what to do. I don’t think that’s true anymore. I think that, if anything, the pyramid may be inverted. People you never heard of are writing reviews on Amazon; they are spreading the word. It’s peer-suasion, peer to peer persuasion. At some point, there is so much peer-to-peer peer-suasion that the experts must embrace what’s already becoming successful. That’s very different than what the Wall Street Journal tells you to use this particular laptop, and you go when you believe it. I think it’s truer today that many people are embracing this laptop that the Wall Street Journal now has to review.
Pritish: I’ll go back to your ChatGPT example. Do you think YouTube and Wikipedia will outlast everybody or everything on the Internet?
Guy: It depends on your time frame. Wikipedia faces an existential threat from ChatGPT, too, because the assumption with Wikipedia is that we have Wikipedians who create an entry that reflects citations that is unbiased and explains things. If you somehow are fortunate enough to have a Wikipedia entry about that topic, you go to the entry, and it has passed this test of objectivity and citations. In a world of AI, you can instantly search all the references of all languages. So maybe there’s an article about Guy Kawasaki in Croatian, and no Wikipedian from Croatia happened to edit my entry, but ChatGPT speaks all languages, and so now there’s a Croatian citation that was done two hours ago. So, now I don’t need to go to the Wikipedia about Guy Kawasaki; ChatGPT can do it in real time. Imagine that real time synthesis of information that day is coming. If Google is creating a real-time answer to how to bake the turkey, on the side, they can still sell ovens, cans, turkey basters, and stuffing recipes. They don't care, right? By searching for how to roast the turkey, you have qualified yourself as someone interested in turkey, so you might need to buy stuffing. Same thing for Google; what does it care?
Pritish: Before we get into your amazing podcast ‘Remarkable People,’ among all the opportunities you had, you chose to be an evangelist for Canva.
Guy: Let me be more accurate at how that went down. So, I was fat, dumb and happy eight years ago. I was writing, speaking, consulting, just not looking for a job or anything. I embraced Twitter relatively early. I figured out with Twitter that if you want to stand out, you need a graphic or a video. So, the person I am working with, Peg Fitzpatrick, and I decided that every tweet has a picture. So, now we got to create graphics for every tweet. She started using Canva. And so, I was using Canva, and she was posting as me using Canva. Canva happened to notice that I’m using Canva. So, it reaches out and says, Guy, we noticed you are using our tool, we would like to talk to you and two to three weeks later, they were in California, and the rest is history. I wasn’t looking for a job. It’s not like I considered hundreds of start-ups, did a careful internal RoR and cash flow analysis, and picked Canva because of its proven team, market, and technology; none of that is true. Basically, I embraced Canva because it was a creative tool that my team and I were using every day, and my due diligence was to say to Peg Fitzpatrick, “isn’t canvas the tool we use?” and then she said, “yes,” and I said “so do you like it?” and she said “yes,” I said “do you think I should help them?” and she said yes. That was my due diligence.
Pritish: Brilliant! That’s amazing. Let’s get into your podcast Remarkable People.^ I love it. It’s incredible. So, why don’t you tell us what it is about and why you started Remarkable People.
Guy: There are two reasons: one reason is the lofty high road reason. The lofty high road reason is that I have been very fortunate to have established visibility and connections to get many remarkable people to come on my podcast. I also have about forty to fifty years of real-world business experience. So, I have the background to know what to ask these remarkable people like Jane Goodall, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Margaret Atwood, Kristi Yamaguchi, or Steve Wozniak. So, you have the access, you have the background, and look at all these podcasts; you can do as good as them. Today I have a moral obligation to use these gifts to help people get information about how they can become remarkable too. That’s the high road answer. The low road answer is, I was just finishing a book called Wise Guy, I was on the road, and I was interviewing with a lot of podcasters for my new book because, as an author, that is what you do, in fact that’s how I get a lot of my guests. So, I was with this business podcaster, and I said let me understand your business. How does this work? Even if you interview me, it comes out to be an hour or two, you put it up; how do you make money? He says we sell an ad at the start of the podcast, in the middle of the podcast, and at the end. I asked how much do they charged? He said that the first is usually about 15,000, the second is 10,000, and the last is 5000. So, you’ve got 30,000. So, you’re telling me you make 30-40,000 an episode times 52. I can do that. It takes me four years to write a book; why don’t I become a podcaster? I don’t have to kill myself finding this book. So, that’s another reason. Those are the two reasons.
Pritish: One of your guests has been Nithin Kamath.
Guy: From India, in the stock market.
Pritish: How was your experience speaking to him?
Guy: He is remarkable. He saw the market; he did it in a very different environment. It was harder to do what he did in India than it would be to do that in America. So, in a sense he's democratising investing. He was a very polished guy; I remember he was a very accomplished chess player, right? So, to be a good chess player, not that I am a good chess player, but I have at least watched The Queen’s Gambit, so I know that you have got to be thinking moves ahead, just reacting to the last move, and that’s his personality, I think.
Pritish: I’ll digress and ask a question about Apple. Among all the products that Apple made, why hasn’t it made a projector?
Guy: First of all, if Apple made a projector, it would be 25 grams. It would have the most amazing image, but you would need a special cable that’s not compatible with HDMI, and to properly get the full effect of the Apple projector, every movie has to be remastered, and the projector would be just great. But then it would overheat or run out of power after 4 hours. You could ask the question, why doesn’t Apple make a printer? I think it’s because I don’t know if there’s enough ways to differentiate printer or projector. There is huge differentiation between Windows and Macintosh and Android and iOS, but how do you make a really different projector? You could make the menu structure better. Ideally you customise your projector using your iPhone, right? Instead of going through ten different menus, twelve different sub menus, and then you press back, and you didn’t press save. Rumour has it that Apple is making a car which will also be a frightening experience because I used to be a Mercedes Benz brand ambassador. I know what it takes to make a car. It’s one thing if your MacBook crashes; it’s another if your car crashes, right? And continuing on the theme of what I said about the Apple projector, if Apple made a car, it would be the most fantastic car, but it could only go 50 miles before it needs charging, and the charging is not compatible with any of the charging systems. Now you need a special dongle to hook it up to the connector, and that dongle costs 1200 bucks, so you can only get that dongle from Apple, and extreme it takes like 242 volts not 240. It would be crazy. Everything would be the touch screen, it sounds like a Tesla right there. I would not be first in line to buy an Apple car, to tell you the truth.
Pritish: That brings me to an observation. With so many constraints built in with existing Apple products, what do you think is the reason for its success?
Guy: Definitely ease of use and, over the time, coolness and in the long time, it locks you into a system. So, it’s hard to imagine that you will buy an Apple watch and not have an Apple phone. For a while you couldn’t do that. So, you need a phone, once you get the phone, you need a watch, once you get the watch, you need the phone. There is some cross platform stuff, but if it’s just a lot smoother if you have phone, tablet, computer, and watch, talking to other. Don’t get me wrong, but I’ve had Android phones, and there are some things I love about the Android phone. But when I don’t want to go to have to jump through hoops so that my reminders on my computer are talking to my Android To Do List, and I’m sure there’s a way using Google Keep or something, but man, just I add a reminder on my Macintosh here and butter bing butter bang, it’s on my phone, I don’t have to think about that.
Pritish: Going back to your podcast, among all the episodes you have recorded, which is your favourite?
Guy: That has hundred and fifty answers here. Believe it or not, beginners-luck, it’s very hard to beat Jane Goodall, which was the very first episode. After that, and that’s a tough act to follow. So, Jane Goodall, Stephen Wolfram, MacArthur award winner, PhD in physics in 18 or 19, Steve Wozniak was the act just because you know it if you listen to the Wozniak version, you are going to hear, let’s just say a different version of the Steve Jobs story.
Pritish: Before we close, I’d ask a few questions.
Guy: Sure.
Pritish: Three productivity tools, what are they, and how do you use them?
Guy: You mean software or hardware?
Pritish: It can be anything.
Guy: Obviously, I use the Macintosh, right? People cringe when I say this, but I’m a heavy Word user. When I write a book, I use style sheets and the outline view versus the print view. For example, today, I tried to clean up all my transcripts so that there are places in my transcript where it’s like Guy Kawasaki, colon, and one space later, it’s my interview text. There are other places where Guy Kawasaki, colon, space, carriage return, and it starts at the next place. Because of my OCDness I can't stand that some places just go straight from the semicolon, but some places go through carriage return. With the power of Word, you can search for wherever there is a ‘carriage return’ versus a small carriage return, and you can search and replace and do all that kind of stuff. You can search for special paragraph; paragraphing is search for tabs; you can sort special characters, this kind of stuff. So, I am a heavy Word user, especially when writing a book. Another one is Evernote. I just park a lot of information. With Evernote you can create notebooks. So let’s say you have a notebook called ‘House,’ so every time I get a bill, I just forward it to my unique email address, and the subject is @House, and then it gets filed in that notebook. I don’t know any other way to do that, maybe you do, but tell me. Now when I go to Evernote, I have all these things, and if an invoice is attached to an email about my house, that PDF is now filed in the notebook. So, Evernote is indispensable to me, and I am constantly, if I must admit, have been searching for the perfect email client, and I have not found one. This crying out loud, this is 2023, so I have not found the perfect email client, and I will also say that in 2023 it amazes me that there is not a good calendar program. Truly what is just so hard about it?
Pritish: Your three books.
Guy: Three books not that I wrote, three books that I recommend, okay. Book number one is If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. It is for anybody in any creative endeavour. It is not just for writers but also painters, video creators, programmers; you should read if you want to write that’s number one. Number two is a book called Ikigai; IKIGI is the Japanese word for you calling, what is the reason you exist. My Ikigai is podcasting, for example. So, that is a great book. The third book, if you are a leader, is to read a book called Risk by Stanley McChrystal, and I think it is the best leadership book I have ever read. I would put him in the same class as Peter Drucker. You and probably most of your listeners are too young to know who Peter Drucker was, but Peter Drucker was the first management guru ever. So, those are three.
Pritish: Brilliant! Peter Drucker’s book is right there.
Guy: Which one? The Effective Executive?
Pritish: The Essential Drucker.
Guy: That’s an anthology of his great works. Maybe someday somebody will make The Essential Guy Kawasaki; it might be thin, though.
Pritish: But still effective. Last question: what is your advice to your younger self?
Guy: Don’t quit Apple. I quit Apple twice, I turned Steve Jobs down for a third job; if I had stayed at Apple, I would be a rich. But you know what, if I had stayed at Apple till this day, that would make a lot of money on options, but I would not have nearly the breadth of experience. I have started companies, I have worked for other companies, I don’t know if Apple will even that you write a book. I have written fifteen books. There might be some employee agreement that you can’t work out on a book. If I were at Apple all this time, I wouldn’t have anything to write about. My data is limited, so there you go.
Pritish: Brilliant! Guy, that was a great place to close this conversation. Thanks for being on the show.
Pritish: Thank you very much.
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