Replit CEO Amjad Masad 谈 AI 时代的年轻人应该学什么

Brief Description

Replit CEO Amjad Masad discusses what young people should learn in the AI era, the purpose of college, and how education can support curiosity, experimentation, and personal growth.

Table of Contents

• Young People as Heretics and the Purpose of College
• Designing a College Around Curiosity and Freedom
• Project-Based Learning and Practical Skills
• A Middle Ground Between College and Startups
• Trust, Student Autonomy, and Productive Rule-Breaking
• Character, Ethics, and Becoming an Adult
• What Amjad Looks for in Young Talent

Young People as Heretics and the Purpose of College

Ultimately, the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs—to be heretics. In today’s colleges, it’s almost the opposite: they beat any outside thought out of you. I want to see a world where it’s okay to go on a side quest and do something oddball that might turn out to be amazing.

Host: The future of companies is going to change.

Amjad: The whole industry has changed. It’s a complete reset from a technology perspective.

I’d want to go to a college that isn’t prescriptive about what I learn. I’m motivated by the skills it can give me to achieve what I want to build.

One of the academy’s core tenets sidesteps this problem entirely: we don’t care whether you graduate. We don’t have grades or tests. The amount of weight you have to push against should be much lower.

Host: When you meet an 18-year-old who really inspires you—someone who makes you think, “I have to spend time with this person”—what are they doing that captures your interest?

Amjad: I think the first thing is—

As we were talking, I remembered a science-fiction story I read once called The City and the Stars. It’s about a future city governed by AGI. Humanity has essentially invented AGI, and it now governs people’s lives. It solves all human problems: there are no wars or diseases, everyone lives forever, and people spend their time working on thousand-year art projects or doing all sorts of random things to fill their time.

But they run into a problem: they accumulate so much knowledge and memory that it becomes hard to keep it all in their heads. So they invent a technology that lets them go into a laboratory and compress their memories, a bit like the context compression we do with AI today. They review their memories, compress them, and then go through a boot camp to retrain for their lives.

They’ve invented a new way to be born, but you’re not fundamentally a new person. You’re still the same person; you’re just editing your memories. Then a glitch happens in the system, and someone is born fundamentally new. He immediately starts causing problems. During boot camp, he does strange, new things, and everyone reacts, “Whoa, that’s crazy. You shouldn’t be doing that. That’s not how we do things.” He becomes very disruptive.

Then, when they go out into the city, he starts asking questions: “What’s out there? What’s in the stars? What’s outside our city borders?”

They say, “We don’t talk about what’s outside the city borders.”

“It sounds dangerous out there.”

Host: It sounds a bit like Silo.

Amjad: A little like Silo, a little like Fallout. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but eventually he has so much drive to change things and discover the stars—that’s why it’s called The City and the Stars. He finds all sorts of interesting things out there.

I’m reminded of that story because, as we talk about what college is and what it’s for, I think a related question is: What is the utility of young people in society?

Ultimately, the utility of young people is to question deeply held beliefs—to be heretics. In today’s colleges, it’s almost the opposite. They beat any outside thought out of you. They tell you, “You’re stupid. We’ve figured everything out. You need to learn our way. We need to prepare you for the outside world so you can get a job, be a perfect citizen, get married, have kids, get a house and a car, and live happily ever after.”

That world doesn’t exist anymore. You can do really well in college and still be unemployed with a huge debt. But that’s not the only issue. The real civilizational opportunity we’re missing is the person in The City and the Stars. It took a glitch to create someone with a clear mind who could question deeply held beliefs.

We all have blind spots. Society has blind spots, and Silicon Valley has plenty of them. There are lots of ideas that don’t come out of Silicon Valley because there’s a monoculture here—a certain way of thinking. Every culture is in some way a monoculture, even radical cultures like Silicon Valley.

What do we need from young people? We need them to experiment. We need to encourage them to try impossible things. Every now and then, they’ll have a breakthrough—something we thought was impossible that suddenly becomes possible because the technology or something else has changed.

Ultimately, college should be about that: giving people with clear minds, Zen mindsets, and first-principles mindsets the encouragement to question deeply held beliefs.

Designing a College Around Curiosity and Freedom

Host: That’s well said. Imagine you were 18 today and could design your ideal experience: how much you go to class, what projects you work on, what kind of deep study you pursue, and what you study. What principles would you build into it? How would you think about being 18 to 22 in 2026?

Amjad: I’d want to go to a college that isn’t prescriptive about what I learn.

I’d want an environment where there are lots of different paths. Maybe there’s a class about something I haven’t even thought about, something outside my world.

We were talking about Steve Jobs. One of his most inspiring speeches was his Stanford commencement address, where he talked about connecting things backward. The way he approached college is, I think, an ideal college experience. He went to Reed College, but he couldn’t afford it, so he dropped out and kept dropping into different classes. One of them was calligraphy.

He didn’t know why he was interested in calligraphy; he just took the class and learned it. Later, when they were inventing the Mac and its user interfaces, he realized they should have proportionally spaced fonts and let people select different fonts. That was a direct callback to his college days, when he’d learned about fonts and calligraphy.

Modern society thinks this kind of meandering is useless. I think it’s one of the most useful things about college. Can you take a class that changes the direction of your life because you discover something completely new and outside your world? That’s one thing I’d want: enough freedom to choose what I study.

The other thing is that if I’m engrossed in building something, give me the space and time to do it. One of the hard things about my college was attendance. They counted it, and if you missed six classes, you could be banned. If I’m going to school, doing lots of different things, meeting interesting people, and then I have an idea that I’m working on manically, give me room to do it. Don’t expel me.

Host: Exactly.

Amjad: And the quality of the people matters. If you’re around conventionally minded people, eventually you’ll become conventionally minded. If you’re in an environment that encourages people to question deeply held beliefs, I think you’ll be able to do that.

I went to UC Berkeley—Go Bears!—and I enjoyed it a lot. One thing I really liked was that, in most situations, there was no expectation that you attend class. I had semesters when I had three jobs at once. Often, the time I was expected to work overlapped with class. I’d look at my midterm schedule in advance and say, “Okay, these are my two midterms. Hey, boss, can I take those two days off?” Otherwise, I was working.

It’s interesting because, looking back, I enjoyed that. But I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the environment had supported it. What if the environment had encouraged it?

When I talk to students today, 20 years later, they all do this. What used to be unusual is becoming the norm. The strange thing is that it still isn’t encouraged. It’s still not allowed.

I really want to see a world where it’s okay to go on a side quest and do something oddball that might turn out to be amazing. You should be able to use the college resources: the computer lab, the compute, the biology lab, whatever it is. You shouldn’t have to go against the grain. The college should actively encourage you.

In fact, if you have a crazy idea that’s taking off, the college should bring you more resources. You shouldn’t have to hide it from the college. They should be saying, “Oh my God, this is amazing. Let’s give you more.”

Host: Totally. There’s this kid, Eric, who I think is one of Rich’s friends. He has to take investor calls from the bathroom because he’s hiding at school. The school should be coaching him through it or enabling it somehow—maybe bringing in a demo day.

A couple of comments. Going back to calligraphy: people develop interests that might seem random, and maybe they are random, but they can connect in unexpected ways. Schools can help make those connections. It’s hard to force natural interest. For example, I was obsessed with basketball as a kid, but I was also the kid who’d ask my math teacher, “What’s the point of this? Explain it to me.” Maybe I would have gotten excited if she’d said, “You’re obsessed with basketball. You need to understand the salary cap,” or, “Basketball is very analytical now. People use statistics and data to evaluate players, so understanding this will make you a better student of the game.” That would have excited me.

That’s why I’m excited about Alpha School. They take people’s natural interests and use them to teach things they’ll need to know over time.

Project-Based Learning and Practical Skills

Amjad: The hard thing is that everyone in education—the academic industry, if you will, and the academic canon—understands that it would be great if every student had a customized curriculum. Joe Liemandt of Alpha School talks about this all the time. The problem is that it seems practically impossible.

But I think we’ve now reached a point where the opposite is true. It’s not just possible; it’s hard to imagine why you wouldn’t do it.

At the academy, if you’re going to learn coding, I don’t want you just to take a class on Python. Go build something you’re excited about in Python. Use it as a tool to learn the language. The great thing about AI today is that every student can do this on their own. They don’t need a customized syllabus or a set of exercises. They just need the freedom and confidence to know they’re allowed to do it—and that we’re excited about it.

Host: The buzzword for that is “project-based learning.” There shouldn’t be a buzzword for it; it should be the standard. The idea that you learn something without knowing its utility is a very modern invention. It’s strange that you could take a statistics class and never learn that you could use statistics for basketball or for something else you care about.

For a long time, we’ve had this inversion in how we learn. You learn things without knowing their utility or how you’d apply them in the real world. For someone like me—and for many people who are pragmatically minded—the pure pursuit of knowledge isn’t motivating. I’m motivated by skills. What skills can something give me to help me build what I want and achieve my dreams?

Every now and then, you find a teacher who can motivate you by explaining the skills you can acquire.

Amjad: Totally.

Host: There’s an interesting critique we’re trying to address: some school environments teach very few practical skills and don’t prepare students for the real world, even though they claim to. But there’s an opposite critique, too: that some people professionalize too soon and don’t have a childhood, or don’t spend time cultivating themselves intellectually or as people.

There’s an ineffable quality that people think they get from college: meeting new people, making friends, going to parties, studying the great books, and so on. What do you think about what people gain beyond the technical skills needed to build or work at a company?

A Middle Ground Between College and Startups

Amjad: I think young people today are given an unfair choice. Either they go to a four-year school with lots of structure around what they should be doing—attending classes, doing homework, taking tests, getting grades—or they can start a startup and have someone give them $50,000 tomorrow.

I think lots of people will still go to college and love it. And there are young people—even 16- or 17-year-olds—who should start startups. But I think there’s a large group of people who, like me when I was 17 or 18, knew they wanted to go into business but would have benefited from a couple of years to explore and learn without pressure.

Personally, I think the investor track should be much less used. Only a small number of teenagers should be raising money. Grants are great: do something temporary, and make it clear that it’s temporary. But the pressure of making a 10-year commitment at 18 isn’t right for most people. The structure of college isn’t right for everybody, either.

This middle ground is exciting to me: two years when you can explore and do whatever you want without pressure, while Silicon Valley provides information and resources. When you have a cool idea, you get more support.

Host: In programming, we have the concept of premature optimization. There’s a saying that premature optimization is the root of all evil: you start optimizing a program before you know whether it’s going to be relevant or consequential.

A lot of starting startups is premature optimization. I see many kids who are part of a group where their friends are raising lots of money and some are becoming unicorns. Their motivation becomes envy, which is negative, rather than something positive. They pre-commit to an idea they aren’t even interested in and raise money for it. They’re optimizing for a path they haven’t really reached yet.

That’s why I always come back to curiosity. What’s actually driving you? When you find an idea you want to dedicate your life—or the next 10 years—to, it’ll have so much gravity that you won’t be able to avoid it.

For me, I tried not to start Replit. I actively tried not to start it, but it kind of exploded into a startup on its own.

Amjad: That’s the feeling you should get: “I guess I have to do it,” because there’s so much momentum behind it.

I also think there’s something predatory happening right now. I’ve heard that VCs go to Stanford students and give them a million dollars—not even $50,000—before they have an idea. The moment you start your idea, you already have a cap table.

Host: I think it’s a bit like the music industry. Kanye has talked about how predatory it can be: you find a young artist, lock them into a contract, and they don’t even understand the contract.

Luckily, in Silicon Valley we have SAFEs, which are a great contribution from YC and Paul Graham. But it can still be somewhat predatory. You’re taking a young person and pre-committing them to something they shouldn’t have committed to.

It’s interesting to have you on this podcast and involved with the academy more broadly because you’re an entrepreneur, builder, hacker, tinkerer, and very pragmatic, but you’re also an intellectual. You’re curious and widely read across history, economics, culture, and politics. You spend time on memes and pursue your interests there.

You’re neither divorced from the economic real world nor an automaton. Some people are so career-focused that all they think about is making more money or making a project successful. People can get funneled into either of these paths. Have you always been this way? How can people be pragmatic about their careers while also making space for intellectual curiosity, even when it seems random or disconnected from their career?

Amjad: I tend to oscillate between wanting to build something and wanting to read, explore, and see what’s out there. They feed on each other. I accumulate enough knowledge and ideas from the things I explore, and then I really want to build something with them.

Recently, for example, I got really into chess. That’s late in life; usually you get into chess when you’re six. My six-year-old is getting into chess soon and will probably beat me.

I didn’t know why I was interested, so I started writing programs to solve chess. Then I started training models and wondering why large language models—like ChatGPT—are so bad at chess.

Host: Really?

Amjad: They hallucinate moves and all that. I wondered: if the ARC-AGI scores are getting up there and these models are almost AGI, why are they bad at chess? So I started training an LLM to play chess.

I spent a lot of time exploring how to train models. I’d never trained one before. I realized that AI is now capable of doing machine learning. Some people call it recursive self-improvement. In 2024, when Replit Agent came out—before “vibe coding” was coined—agents suddenly became capable of coding, and coding fundamentally changed.

I think we’re at a similar moment with machine learning. You could call it “vibe research” or “autoresearch”—I think that’s Karpathy’s term. I spent a lot of time in that world, and now I’m working on something at Replit to bring it to the world: a way for anyone to become a machine learning researcher, or for any business owner with data to fine-tune a model to solve a particular problem.

When I started playing chess, there was no obvious chain of reasoning that would lead me to build a new business line for Replit. I just followed something I was interested in. For me, that kind of thing invariably leads somewhere.

The same goes for memes and culture. I get interested in some random internet subculture and learn something about the world, society, markets, or where the world is headed.

Host: And you have alpha. You have an itch, and you listen to it. Sometimes the itch leads you to build something; sometimes it leads you to learn something. A lot of kids have the itch beaten out of them. Over time, they learn to ignore it in favor of going through the hoops.

It’s helpful to learn how to go through hoops, but it’s also helpful to learn how to listen to your curiosity—not necessarily more than people do now, but we need to learn how to follow as well as lead.

I think people spend their entire time in high school, and often college, learning how to follow: someone tells you something, and you do it.

Amjad: My belief is that the future of companies is going to change. Silicon Valley has seen lots of experiments to change the nature of firms and how companies work.

Host: Holacracy?

Amjad: Holacracy. Medium did that. GitHub tried having no managers. Those efforts blew up in spectacular ways.

But I think it was a technology problem. Now agents can function as the glue within organizations. They can handle bureaucracy invisibly in the background, while people have real autonomy to work on what they find most interesting. AI can judge your impact.

I don’t have fully formed thoughts about this, but I see it in our company. I’ve changed how I run it, and we talk about the idea of a “self-driving company”—eventually, the company will run itself.

Host: It’s funny: I don’t have an opinion about where this is going, but I know it’s going to change. Everything we’re doing now feels so different.

In starting the academy, I’ve spent all this time building the pitch deck in Replit. Thank you. I’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT—using all these services to speed up my work and imagining how that changes an entire organization.

The thing I feel certain about is that everything is going to change, and it’s going to change a lot faster than you think. If you don’t understand it natively, it’s going to be hard to make that shift.

Amjad: Or if you’re learning the ways of the past.

Host: Correct. Then you’re locked into a way of thinking and working that will put you at a fundamental disadvantage in the future.

Back to the point about following: I do think learning how to follow is important.

Amjad: Let me phrase it another way. You want to be disagreeable enough to have interesting ideas—to be contrarian, to follow your own curiosity, rather than just going through the motions. But we all know people who are so disagreeable that they can’t work with anybody. They alienate everyone.

Maybe a broader way of thinking about following is that you need to learn how to work with people, navigate systems, and get what you want—or achieve the best outcome.

There’s something important about respecting the elders, but also truly understanding that they haven’t figured everything out. Respect is important. When you join a company, you should respect what it has already built, but you should also recognize that many things are inadequate and change as much as you can.

At Replit, I named all the conference rooms after great people in computer science and technology. We have a Marc Andreessen room—the inventor of the browser, as you know.

Host: Of course.

Amjad: We also have Linus Torvalds, Robert Noyce, and others. What I try to tell people at the company is: we respect the past, but we’re unapologetically going to change it. People are going to be mad at us.

I don’t know if you remember 2025, when I was canceled for saying people shouldn’t learn how to code anymore.

Host: Wow. That was only a year ago.

Amjad: Now the same people who were against me say, “I don’t read code anymore. I just prompt my code.”

Host: It’s amazing how many things I’ve been wrong about—or right about five or ten years early. What I love about Silicon Valley is that people just move forward. They’re okay with it. They accept the takes.

Trust, Student Autonomy, and Productive Rule-Breaking

I also love the culture of the Valley. In my free time, I’ve been volunteering in local politics in Oakland.

Amjad: It’s a side quest for sure. Why would it be relevant at all?

Host: It really is a side quest. I think it’s helped me in so many ways in business. The skills are extremely transferable in both directions.

One of the most interesting things is appreciating how valuable trust is, and how much a foundation of trust throughout a society changes the way you can move forward. Take nonprofits as a simple example. If you run a nonprofit, raise money, and someone tells you, “I’ll give you $50,000,” there’s maybe a 20-to-50% chance that money will actually land in your bank account after they’ve made a verbal commitment.

Amjad: Right.

Host: Verbal commitments don’t carry much weight in Silicon Valley. I think the likelihood is probably 75 to 100%, depending on who you’re talking to and who you are.

That difference changes how you operate. I can confidently move forward with my business if I know the money is coming. By the time the check arrives, I’ve made six weeks of progress, so the check is more valuable six weeks later.

The reverse is true, too. Without trust, you start worrying: “What if this donor gets upset? Should I do this differently?” You’re not fulfilling your mission; you’re anxious and stressed. I think Silicon Valley offers a level of trust that can be applied to schools.

Amjad: In what way?

Host: Trusting students to do what they want and follow the threads they’re interested in is something we can uniquely offer. Silicon Valley is a place where someone with a unique idea or a different way of doing things can generally be accepted and allowed to try it.

There are social rules, of course. You can’t go around being mean to everyone or lying. It’s not that permissive.

But if we trust young people to follow what they want to do and empower them—even if we think it’s crazy—they’ll build the future you’re talking about. They’ll figure out the next version of holacracy that actually works.

Amjad: Let me ask you a tricky question. What are you going to do with the troublemakers? There will inevitably be people who break things. Zach famously built FaceMash, which was controversial. Or someone might hack into something.

Host: There are things that cross a red line into criminality.

Amjad: Sure. You have to draw a line somewhere. If someone violates our sexual harassment policy or is cruel to someone in front of everyone, there have to be rules. We need a culture of trust and positive-sum behavior.

At the same time, one of the academy’s core tenets sidesteps this problem entirely: we don’t have grades or tests. The amount of weight people have to push against should be a lot less. So many of these challenges matter less. You want to build FaceMash? Go for it. Who cares? I’m willing to defend your right to do that. And if someone asks me about it on a podcast, I can say, “Yeah, that was a weird idea. I didn’t love it, and I don’t know what that kid was thinking—but they got to do what they got to do.”

If you create an environment of trust and allow that kind of thing to happen, you can avoid creating an anti-authoritarian mindset and open up a lot of creativity and opportunity.

Host: I also think there’s an opportunity to channel the drive to test boundaries in a healthy way.

I was reading a story the other day about a kid who hacked into some government system and is facing two years in prison. In an interview, he talked about learning to hack on Roblox. Apparently, there’s a big trend of people learning programming and hacking on Roblox.

I was talking to Dave, the founder and CEO of Roblox. It would be great to have some kind of sandbox where people can play, discover their talents, and then be funneled into cybersecurity jobs.

Amjad: Or even into the government. Instead of sending these kids to jail, take them to work at the NSA or somewhere else. We need cybersecurity talent right now. Why put them in jail?

Host: There’s a line. Some kids are hacking in ways I wouldn’t be comfortable with. But others are doing it for reasons and in ways that are honestly fine. If we can be a little more permissive, we can create more opportunities for them and repurpose their talent.

Amjad: One site I was really into growing up was called Hack This Site—hackthissite.org. I don’t know if it’s still around. It’s a website with vulnerabilities built in.

Host: It’s like Capture the Flag.

Amjad: Exactly. We’re digging into one aspect of this, but you could have a bug bounty program at the academy.

Host: For sure.

Amjad: Or encourage students to participate in bounty programs at other schools or companies. Most companies have one.

Host: Absolutely. Going back to when to trust the elders and when to disrupt: what’s really important to develop is discernment. Rules and heuristics depend on the context and the case. You develop discernment through experience—by letting students make their own decisions, fail, and learn from them.

You coined “technicism” on this podcast. I’ll coin “meta-maxing”: knowing when to follow your instincts and when doing so might get you into trouble. It relates to asymmetric upside and asymmetric downside. You need experience, and a lot of project-based learning—or simply giving people more control over their time—is about giving them more opportunities to choose a path, succeed, fail, and learn from it.

Character, Ethics, and Becoming an Adult

Here’s my last question. Some people would say, “Remember when Peter Thiel launched his fellowship? People were mad at him. They said college is where you learn how to be a good person.” There’s something beyond technical skills and even intellectual development. People think of Dead Poets Society: you’re 18, you’re becoming a person.

In the Bay Area, you’re in an environment that is both very career-oriented and highly intellectual. How do you think about cultivating values, morals, ethics, and the process of becoming an adult?

Amjad: It’s interesting. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve been to refugee camps, billionaire’s houses, and met people from all sorts of backgrounds. Some of the kindest, most thoughtful, most grounded people I’ve ever met are here in Silicon Valley.

That doesn’t mean everyone is like that. There are real idiots who’ve made a lot of money. I don’t respect everyone who’s made money. But I think a positive-sum, high-trust ecosystem breeds really amazing human beings.

Interpersonal skills are an absolute pillar of the academy. We want our graduates, attendees, fellows—whatever we end up calling them—to be positive influences on society and the world. One of the academy’s missions is to create a positive-sum world.

We absolutely believe in spending two years growing as a human being, meeting other people, and creating an environment where people can see the benefits of a culture that many people don’t pay attention to, but that’s very much here in San Francisco.

I think having a reputation as a good person is valuable here. People trust you with their money and with governing your company. Developing that sense of character is important in a university, and being a well-adjusted person matters.

For a while, some people played the role of the autistic genius. Maybe at some point it paid off. I remember the Sequoia blog post about SBF—that was gold. They deleted it, but you can find it on archive.org.

I don’t think that works anymore. Silicon Valley isn’t a renegade culture now; it’s an institution, part of the establishment. We also have to interface with the rest of the world. People need to understand that we have a responsibility. We’re not just talking among ourselves.

When people outside the field don’t understand the technology, the language we use matters. Bernie Sanders read Dwarkesh’s blog post, and I criticized Maresh for the language he used. In my opinion, that post didn’t create more understanding for people who don’t understand the technology. They could learn the wrong lessons from it.

I think it’s important for the academy to create well-adjusted adults who can speak the language of the in-group—which is important—but can also eventually appear before Congress.

Host: Lastly, is there anything you want to say about cultivating values and being a good person? Does a school environment contribute to that? We mentioned the great books; it would be good to teach some of those things.

Amjad: I’ve spent a lot of time studying ethics and morality on my own. I read a lot of the utilitarian corpus, for example, and ultimately rejected it. I don’t think that’s the way of the world.

I found my moral compass by reading widely, introspecting, and coming to conclusions about how I want to act in the world. I might describe myself as closest to virtue ethics, from Aristotle. The idea is that I should act in a way I’d be proud of, regardless of who’s watching or what the impact is.

In a strange way, if you’re virtuous and have the right principles, the net effect is that you maximize utility. You also need to change over time and figure out where the world is headed so you can fit into it in the right way.

There’s value in the liberal arts: reading this material and trying to understand how you feel about how you want to act and present yourself.

Host: One thing that makes me more sympathetic to your argument is that the world is changing so much. It’s hard to have rigid principles—or a rigid philosophy—in a world that’s changing.

Amjad: Right. And, strangely, the opposite is also true. You can’t be a consequentialist utilitarian when we’re entering the singularity. You can’t really predict the future, and consequentialism depends on predicting the future.

It’s a difficult time. I think you need principles that evolve over time. You need some fundamental truths that you hold dearly, but they should be as few as possible.

Host: In closing, we’re grateful for your support of the academy. We’re excited to have people building on Replit, potentially interning at Replit, and potentially being funded by you.

What Amjad Looks for in Young Talent

As a last question: when you meet an inspiring 18-, 20-, or 16-year-old and think, “I have to spend time with this person or be involved with them in some way,” what are they doing that captures your interest? What are you looking for in young talent?

Amjad: The first thing is that they’ve gone really deep into something. They can teach me something.

I think I can be interested in anything. If you can tell me a story about a project you’ve done and you’ve gone really deep into it, that’s always impressive. Most people lack that kind of focus. They get bored easily and do the traditional thing. Did you actually follow a thread all the way through? That’s impressive, and it shows all sorts of good personality traits: persistence and intrinsic motivation. Maybe you’re following your curiosity even though there’s no immediate reward.

It’s also important to have strong opinions and be contrarian. But if you’re smart and young, it’s easy to think everyone else is an idiot—including me. I meet young people who talk to me as if I don’t understand anything.

It’s important to show respect and have good interpersonal skills. Otherwise, people won’t want to be around you.

Host: Totally. It’s about not being afraid to go deep into something. A lot of people show up too broadly and aren’t really amazing at anything. Follow something to its conclusion and see how good you can get at it. At the same time, have a baseline of interpersonal skills and be someone people want to be around.

Amjad: Be likable, but not in a contrived or fake way. Be authentic. People want to support people who are good people. And it’s endearing when you can nerd out about something obscure and interesting.

Host: Awesome job. Thanks for coming.

Amjad: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.