In this episode of the podcast Sam Altman expands on ideas that have come up in several of his essays. Specifically: choosing projects, creating value, and finding purpose.Sam’s the president of YC Group and co-chairman of OpenAI. You can find him on Twitter @sama.:55 – From The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short – Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it.3:20 – Stepping back and evaluating your work5:00 – Creating metrics for your projects6:00 – Taking a year off9:00 – Figuring out when to commit11:00 – Poker12:00 – From Productivity – Sleep seems to be the most important physical factor in productivity for me. Exercise is probably the second most important physical factor. The third area is nutrition.14:30 – From You and Your Research by Richard Hamming – If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?’16:00 – From The Days Are Long But The Decades Are Short – Things in life are rarely as risky as they seem. Most people are too risk-averse, and so most advice is biased too much towards conservative paths.17:00 – Perspective shifts19:45 – From Productivity – My system has three key pillars: “Make sure to get the important shit done”, “Don’t waste time on stupid shit”, and “make a lot of lists”.22:00 – What Happened to Innovation24:20 – From You and Your Research by Richard Hamming – He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.26:20 – The deferred life plan doesn’t work31:20 – From The Merge – Our self-worth is so based on our intelligence that we believe it must be singular and not slightly higher than all the other animals on a continuum. Perhaps the AI will feel the same way and note that differences between us and bonobos are barely worth discussing.33:40 – Weight training35:00 – The Way to Love by Anthony de Mello(function(p,l,a,y,e,r,s){if(p[y]) return;if(p[e]) return p[e]();s=l.createElement(a);l.head.appendChild((s.async=p[y]=true,s.src=r,s))}(window,document,"script","__btL","__btR","https://player.backtracks.fm/embedder.js"))