two authors writing about silicon valley. one, the long-experienced kawasaki and the another, a new up and comer kylea chou with her

own take. plus bot, the experience with ai and the best experiences to eat. that's this week on "press: here". good morning, everyone, i'm scott mcgrew. my first guest guy kawasaki has done interviews for his podcast remarkable people, he and his podcast producer have assembled that into a new book called "think remarkable," nine paths to transform your life and make a difference. the book is divided into different sections like growth and grit. if you don't know guy, it may help to know that he was a very early employee at apple even before steve jobs was urging folks to think different which i suspect is why guy does not understand the difference between an adjective and an adverb. guy, it is supposed to be "think remarkably," isn't it? >> not if you're apple. the rules don't apply to apple

and steve jobs. >> because they think differently at apple. >> they charge per letter, so -- >> there you go. >> so you've interviewed all kinds of people including jane goodall who word the foreword, but the one i want to start with is mark robert, he is one of my absolute favorites and explain to people who mark roeber is. >> he used to be a nasa scientist and then he went to apple and started a youtube channel. if you haven't heard of him, and if you have teenagers and friends ask them about the shipping boxes where it explodes in their car or the squirrel olympics. he has about 30 million subscribers on youtube and his story is remarkable because of the career trancings he made and at the end of the interview he

said he still does want to be a physics teacher and this coming week on friday in austin, texas, in south by southwest it will be mark roeber and guy kawasaki on stage. >> can you imagine him being your physics teacher? i did have a physics teacher that would often come in character and whatever it happened to be and he would not break character. if you told him -- ask him what the quiz was for a bathroom pass he would say why would i know that information and he was one of the best teacher i've ever had. >> yeah. don't we all look backward and say this one teacher, these two teachers changed our lives? i have teachers like that, too. >> fantastic. carol dwek is at stanford and another person in your book, the mother of the idea of visualizing your goals, growth

mindset. what did she teach you? >> she taught me that at any given point don't accept what you are as the most you can be, that you can learn new skills, and i read her book in the early 2000s, and at 44 i took up hockey and at 60 i took up surfing. let's just say that those things are about 40 or 55 years too late, but it was a very important revelation for me that, you know, you're not static. you can grow and the opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, and i'm afraid that a lot of people have a fixed mindset. we need to end the fixed mindset. >> with fixed mindset becomes a fear of failure. one of the key insights in silicon valley is the idea that failure is okay. >> well, you know, i hesitate to endorse that concept. i would say that failure is not okay. you should do everything you can to prevent failure, failure is a

waste of time and money and people's lives, and this cavalier attitude that oh, failure is okay, pivot fast. that's not acceptable, but -- >> i want to say gordon morris said something if you're not failing you're not trying hard enough. >> that's right. that's right. so the key is not to think that failure is not a big deal. you do everything you can to avoid failure, but if you fail, you need to learn from that so that you don't fail the next time or at least you fail in a different way. >> one of the sections of the book is called management by zooming around. i'm going to guess it has something to do with hewlett-packard's old system zoom? >> yeah, so the person who, plains this in the book and in my podcast is none other than tom peters. many people may not know who tom peters is because i happen to be old, but he wrote the book in search of excellence and one of

his key concept in "search of excellence" is that you manage by wandering around and you press flesh and you meet the employees who work with you, so you go and see or you go and be. you don't just read management reports. now with the pandemic, that's a little more difficult, or was a little more difficult, but he has embraced zoom as a tool. so everybody talks about the short comings of zoom because you can't have personal interaction and see each other in the eyes and all that, but zoom is like any other tool. you can use it better and you can wander around and zoom especially if you have a multinational corporation. you cannot be at every place at once. so the skill is to learn to use zoom in a way to interact. >> did you interview your melanie perkins? she's your new boss, right? >> oh, yeah. melanie perkins is the ceo of

canva and founder of canva and canva is doing extremely well. it has 170 million active users. basically the company stands for democratizing design to help people become better communicators and she's a remarkable person and the story i tell of her is how 300 -- 300 venture capitalists turned her down before she found an investor and now canva had a tend or it. >> we had her on the show years ago. i mean, as she was creating it and she was talking about venture capitalist and bill ty, wasn't it, the investigator? >> yes. >> she tried to explain what venture capital was and i said most of the people get what venture capitalists and she's now worth something like $4 billion with a "b" dollars.

i think she's the richest woman in australia. >> i think she's the second richest woman in australia. you know, can i use profanity on this show? >> you cannot. you can use something like gosh darn. >> one of the concepts in the book is if you're going to be an oriface. >> sure. >> if you're going to be a not nice person. >> if you're not going to be a nice person, you should be a mission-driven person. i'm all tongue tied. you make me nervous. i'm saying that a mission-driven nice person can be a very good leader. >> yes. >> of course, the great example of this is steve jobs. >> mission-driven not nice person. >> yes.

>> he was mission drive tone make people more creative and productive and he would stand for nothing in his way. now they are ego-driven, mission-driven not nice people and all they care about is their glorification, but i will tell you that melanie perkins is an example of a nice, mission-driven person. >> good and that's the best boss to have. >> yes. >> what lessons have you learned from your own book that you didn't know until you wrote it? >> writing a book is a process and i would say that the sequence of events is i interview these 225 people from jane goodall, stacy abrams, vivek murthy, carol dwak and angela duckworth and each of them teach you something and at this point about six months ago, there's 250 hours and 5,000 pages of transcripts and nobody's going to go through all of that. we need to write a book so that people can benefit from the

information and inspiration from all these remarkable people and that's the genesis of this book, think remarkable. >> guy kawasaki, it's good to catch up with you and i look forward to seeing you back in the studio at some point. guy kawasaki is the co-author of "think remarkable" and "press: here" will be right back.

>> welcome back to "press:

here," language models use collective data to teach ai about one specific topic. for instance, if we took the thousands and thousands of interviews that we've done on this show over the course of the last 15 years, fed them into a large language model you would have an ai that could answer questions like what's the best way to pitch a venture capitalist or what's the most important first step when creating a start-up. if your database was thousands and thousands of award-winning restaurant reviews you would have an ai you could ask what's the best place to eat in san francisco that offers vegetarian dishes and has an extensive wine list and that's exactly what the san francisco chronicle has done. they call it chowbot. >> janel victor is the senior editor of food and wine at "the chronicle" and helped develop chowbot. what sort of things did you ask it at first? what have you tried? >> well, at first we tried to stump it a bit, but in terms of

actual things i've asked. where can i get great pizza near the 16th street bart station, where can i get delicious detroit-style pizza? where could i get gluten-free food in oakland? all kinds of things that our critics have written about over the last two years and then get spit out by this bot. >> that's the exciting thing, right? this is really good information. there's no computing phrase garbage in and garbage out and this is chronicle reviews dating back from a long time. >> yeah. well, it's funny, before woe started developing this i was just poking around on chatgpt and asking it where should i get brunch in oakland and it recommended the kitchen which, unfortunately, is a wonderful restaurant that closed years

ago. so these chatbots that just look at the internet give you a lot of bad, outdated information. so what we did was we feed our bot only guides in our top restaurant list programs. these are reviews we've written and researched over the last few years and we're constantly updating them. we are constantly removing restaurants that have closed. i, sadly, had to do that this morning for a ramen restaurant, and we are also revisiting restaurants and updating those recommendations so you're really getting a live result. >> and the neat thing about ai is it can make associations that we wouldn't necessarily make. it's very common for a food writer to say, i'm going to write the ten best brunch locations in san francisco article, but nobody ever writes the list of brunch locations that also serves sushi, but ai can do that. >> ai could do that if our

critics mentioned sushi. >> the best place to offer sushi. someone wants sushi, but we want to go to brunch, but there's no list of best brunches that has sushi, but an ai can say wait a second, this place does both. >> yeah. our developers did try to really train the bot to be super-specific and only focus on what our critics had actually written out and not make too many leaps. so it could be slightly frustrating sometimes. for example, our critics have written about a lot of dumpling restaurants in san francisco's chinatown. that's not a surprise, but the words they use in those reviews are more specific. they're talking about shalombao, so if you right now write that

you want dumplings in chinatown it won't actually give you an answer because it has these more specific words that it's reacting to. >> in speaking of trying to train this thing, i know one of the concerns that everyone has over ai is that it can give bad or inaccurate information which, you know, hey, that's just part of the fun of typing things into chatgpt or whatever. like it did in your example, i'll give you an example of not your chowbot, but chatgpt give you an example of a restaurant that had been closed, but when you're the san francisco chronicle, you also have a reputation of incredible accuracy that you're right every single time, and if i want to know what restaurant is halal or corner or what not, i expect the chowbot, you know, to have the weight of the san francisco chronicle and tell me. that's one down side or concern that a lot of us in journalism

have about ai. >> absolutely. and that is why we train the bot to be so specific and focused. so you're more likely to get an answer that is simply i don't know, i don't have an answer for you than a leap that is actually inaccurate, but it is based on human information, but it is a bot and it won't be 100% all of the time and ultimately asking a human like myself or one of my critics is usually going to give you a better answer, but we can't answer thousands of requests at a given moment. so we hope people look at this as a fun tool. >> a fun tool. absolutely. i do have you here, so i might as well just ask you. you can't handle a thousand of requests and maybe handle mine and without asking, what's a

new, exciting restaurant trend that i should be aware of? >> one thing we're seeing a lot of in san francisco that i think is fun and indicative of the times are fancier restaurants are doing shorter tasting menus or they're offering bar menus where you can just walk in and order a couple of dishes at the bar. i went to a dry-aged seafood fancy restaurant and not just beef and felt like committing to the long, multi-hour meal was much that night and i was able to try a couple of things which was awesome. there's also on the more casual end, chicago-style thin crust pies are quite popular right now. those are the opposite of deep dish, shareable, thin, crispy.

they're cut into squares so you can just scoop up a bite while you're drinking beer. that's a fun one. >> lastly, i want to get your take on brunch. first of all, brunch to me is not just on the menu as both eggs and sandwiches. brunch to me is more the las vegas style buffet when you go up and get things. where would you go for brunch in the bay area if you could choose anywhere? >> oh, my gosh, anywhere. the brunch that i had most recently and was most excited about was lulu. they are temporarily closed right now and they're in berkeley very soon and they do this palestinian mezze brunch where it's not exactly a buffet, but it feels like one. you can choose from ten different little bites that are on this big, beautiful colorful

platter in front of you and there's all these fresh baked breads and dips and vegetables and crunchy things and i am definitely looking forward to that coming back. >> i'll give it a try. janelle bitker, thanks for being with us this morning and janelle is editor of food and wine at "the chronicle" and developed a chowbot.

welcome back to "press: here." we talk to authors on the show

all of the time and usually they're non-fiction author, the authors of business reports or biographies and that kind of thing. i was struck by a new book in the book valley verified and you don't see many novels set in silicon valley particularly written from the perspective of a young woman. maybe the circle is the less tech book i can think of, but the circle was written by a middle-aged man. dave egers is a middle-aged author and this book is written by a young woman who might know better, kyla chou is about a woman who quits her fashion write's job to work if tech. kylea, that's kind of close to your own life. as i recall you used to work in vogue? >> yes. i move from the world of high fashion to high tech. >> how exactly accurate is "the

devil wears prada". >> not very accurate. i found the fashion world to be really supportive. >> oh, that's fantastic. your knopf cell set in silicon valley and people who will read it have probably never stepped foot in silicon valley. how would you describe silicon valley to those not familiar with it and if i were to write a book that was set in paris i might talk about the cafe tables or how grungy paris actually is, surprisingly. how do you get silicon valley across to people who have never seen it? >> you know, i did not grow up in silicon valley. i'm not native to the bay. i was born and raised in singapore and i only moved to the bay for college and then i graduated and i've been working here ever since. so as an outsider, i think i put a different perspective on silicon valley than someone who grew up here might, and so i

would notice certain things that might not catch your attention of someone who has been here a long time and that is the same case for my main character. she moves from new york to the bay and so she's going to have a different experience here, as well, and i think a lot of them are stereo typical ideas of what it would be. they think of the tech industry and skyscrapers and cool technology advancements and inventions, but to me, sill don valley has been my adopted home for the past seven to eight years and i think what makes it home are the small things like my favorite coffee shop. i'm a regular. i have my favorite library and my favorite restaurants and i go with my friends and i have my favorite pilates studio and there are all these things that make silicon valley so vub rant and it is also the people, and that's why i wanted to convey my novel that are little things that make the place so exciting.

>> why do you suppose there are so few novels set in the tech world in silicon valley in particular? we are such an important region checkly and in pop culture. everyone in the world carries an iphone. you know, they're designed here and yet very few of you authors use silicon valley as the backdrop for a story. >> yeah. there should be more stories set here. in fact, when i was doing research for my book i was looking for more books which had this setting and there weren't any there. people have a very fixed idea of what silicon valley is like and the kind of stories that can be told about it. like you said, it's hard to find fiction written from the perspective of a young woman and by a young woman. so i hope my book can pay a small part to describe the perspective that comes out of this place. >> so you're in your mid-20s and

your character is gen z. what do we need to know about gen z workers both real and fictional. >> we have been exposed to different options and career paths and it's not like my parents' generation where there was a idea of what a successful career looked like and it would come in the form of good, well-paying office onand these days there's social media and it is possible to get a viable career out of social media and be content creators and not just work one job, but have side hustles and to not be in the corporate world altogether and just go and do your own thing. so i find friends after pursuing very different paths and that's what makes it so vibrant. >> fair enough. kyla chou, i appreciate you joining us. she is the author of "just

verified" and "press: here" will be right back.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to our guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

damian trujillo: hello and welcome to "comunidad del valle," i'm damian trujillo, and today, the new president of west valley college on your "comunidad del valle." ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪