Talking to Geniuses
"why I like my professor, and the best hire I nearly made."
06.03.24 10:09pm
There's a special feeling you get in some conversations. I've seen this talked about as a "sign of high agency" or a "sign of not being an NPC". I don't actually know what it is so I'm going to call it "talking to geniuses". These are the conversations that energize you so much that once you come out of it, you feel like you've drank a cup of coffee. You get pulled in to such an extent that the outside world genuinely kind of stops - you don't realise you're leaning in until you look around and notice everything else around you.
It's an amazing feeling to have when talking to someone, and I suspect it's highly cultivated and sought after, at least subconsciously. I'd imagine every salesman tries to get their targets into it, but in my experience they generally don't quite manage (apart from founders, they sometimes do). For my part, I experience it most when I'm talking to people about high-minded stuff like tech, the future, philosophy, startups etc. These kind of conversations do occasionally feel like an altered brain-state, amplifying visionary-ness and breaking down reticence.
I'm working on a project right now, my first that I'm going really big on. For those who know me and how I've operated over my life, it's weird to say I actually have a boss. Well, kind of - a professor at MIT who took me under his wings. We're co-founders, I suppose. The thing that really drew me to him, and I suspect what drew him to me, is that the vast majority of conversations we have feel like that. He's incredible at it, it's like his default mode of speech. I think it's what caused him to be such a popular figure - he's done the Lex Fridman podcast a handful of times, he seems to have this uncanny ability to know everyone and to reach out and cold email with abandon (although calculatedly, he's not shameless). Talking to him feels like a small portal to his world, and to an unimaginably bright future. Most of my work simply consists of clarifying his thousand-an-hour visions and distilling them into a single concrete thing. Sadly, I don't think the effect works on everyone - I've seen him flail in meetings when failing to pull people in, and while he loves Zoom, I think it harms his ability to create those special conversations.
I've done it to others throughout my life, too. I remember doing it to a team at Apple when I was a kid, and later to their VPs. I occasionally manage to do it to my team members, and to investors and clients. I had a moment this week where I did to a colleague I was trying to hire, also a sophomore at MIT. We sat down in the New Vassar dorm's dining hall (a horrible, totalitarian concrete prison built out of pure corporate inertia). We talked about everything - AI, my project, his projects, life, history, the future. After about an hour, I sat back and said I needed to go to class - and he basically asked if he could come work with me.
Sadly, that didn't work out. While we both liked each other, he already had a full-time job at NVIDIA, and they're scarier than I am about logging hours. It's crazy to look at from another perspective, though: the conversation we had was good enough to make him weigh up his job at NVIDIA!
I think I should try and reflect more clearly on how to have those kind of conversations intentionally. It would be a cool skill to have on demand.