The Pomp Podcast - #1075 Dwarkesh Patel On Why The Future Will Be Wild

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Dwarkesh Patel is the host of the Lunar Society, and he also writes a blog at dwarkeshpatel.com. In this conversation, we talk about artificial intelligence, the miracle year of past scientists, long-termism, effective altruism, talent as leverage, the myth of the myth of the well-read person, popularizers as intellectual market makers, and the power of the human brain, including human enhancement. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Let's get into the conversation now. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of

Starting point is 00:00:47 him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, I'm here with Dwarkesh. I'm very excited about this conversation. I thought a great place to start would be around artificial intelligence, but not from maybe the perspective most people have. You said something to me recently that just stuck with me, which is the problems that computers have are actually some of the easiest things for human brains to do and vice versa.

Starting point is 00:01:29 Some of the hardest problems for human brains are actually the easiest things for computers to do. Explain that a little bit more. Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. I'm really excited about this. That's such an interesting thing. If you look at the things that AIs are really good at, and this is changing a little bit, to be fair. If you think of like calculating like 10 digit numbers you know computers can do that in like nanoseconds literally if you think about just some stuff that like babies can do right like recognizing faces um grammar like if you think about chomsky's universal grammar stuff you know just like how how sentences are strung together in a way it's really hard to like actually set up rules that

Starting point is 00:02:08 computers can understand about parsing grammar trees that's something you know again babies can do so it's really interesting um it but this is changing i don't know if you've seen like the dally through uh the dally to the gpt3 these people like the gpt3 is like actually producing essays like it writes essays better than probably most of the people in my college um dally is generating art that's like really fucking cool and so these are things you would think that oh no these are the things that are like humans uh humans expertise and you know the calculations we can export to the computers. So I'm not sure which way this is trending now because, yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:44 Is the problem that the computers can do the really tough calculations but they can't do things like facial recognition, something where just we haven't had enough technology innovation and eventually the computer will be able to do both the calculations and also what a human can do? I would think so, right? Because, well, it's really mysterious because if you think about, you know, it sounds impressive to say,

Starting point is 00:03:04 yo, you can do all these calculations. But if you think about it from a computer architecture point of view, it's like it's like a few gates to actually do these like integer addition multiplication this is like trivial stuff in terms of like how much actual computational hardware is needed whereas like recognizing a face i mean just think about like writing a program to do that directly you had to train these like huge neural nets to be able to do that um yeah so it's actually kind of mysterious that her brain didn't just like add a little faculty that's like yeah we would add big numbers but we i guess we just never had the evolutionary pressure to need that capacity um

Starting point is 00:03:34 But yeah, I would think eventually if our brains can do it and our brains are physical hardware, why can't we build artificial physical hardware that does the same thing our brains can do? And it can do everything we can do. It really feels like when we are building the software and hardware to be able to do this stuff. But we have to break down so much of what the brain does into math and science for the computer to be able to actually execute it. So if you look at facial recognition, like a lot of the facial recognition systems, they just use, you know, 12 points on a face and that's what they're doing. So it's less about some sort of arbitrary, like, that's a face, that's not a face, this face is person A, this face is person B, and it's much more mathematical, right? It's literally looking at, you know, sometimes 12 points, sometimes more, sometimes less, to try to get to the granularity of how does the computer actually recognize this is the person that it's looking for, this is the item. So there has to be something that fits within the framework of math

Starting point is 00:04:30 for the computer to be able to do it. Because at the end of the day, the computer is a math system. Right, right, right. This is one of the interesting things between the difference between Tesla and I don't know if you've heard of Comma AI. This is like George Hotz's startup. So the difficulty with self-driving is you have to account for all these edge cases. You can't have a self-driving car that's able to do everything,

Starting point is 00:04:52 but it'll run over a child. 99% accuracy is really bad. 99% of the time it'll hit the child. Yeah, so then you have to deal with all these edge cases, which makes it really difficult. You've hard-coded in the lane lines and everything, but you haven't gotten to not killing the grandma. You're fucked.

Starting point is 00:05:13 Is this why Tesla has such an advantage? Because they have every single Tesla on the road collecting so much data, and it ultimately is just a data problem? Or is there other ways to look at it? I'm actually not sure about this, But I think another interesting thing Tesla does is there's this great guy who has a blog about engineering, Austin Vernon, and he was writing about Tesla. One of the interesting things he pointed out is you look at the way Elon Musk thinks about problems of manufacturing. They've built like this amazing manufacturing machine and it's really difficult to do that, right?

Starting point is 00:05:44 Like they've got a bigger market cap than all the other automakers in the U.S. combined. And there was something about adding fluff in the top of the cars to make sure that the whole thing was insulated. And then it was just like adding so much overhead to the manufacturing because robots can't pick up this fluff. And then Elon just asked, do we really need this? Let's just run some experiments. Does it actually add insulation?

Starting point is 00:06:09 And they realized, no, it doesn't. So just simplifying the whole process so it can be manufactured fast and efficiently and reliably and precisely. I think there's a lot of interesting things Tesla's doing. Elon obviously didn't start out with ambitions in the 90s to build a car company he didn't start out trying to say hey I want to go to Mars or create rockets but he does have this apparent skill from a first principles thinking and kind of a framework how important is it that Elon didn't come from those industries to if he had been a rocket scientist or he had been a car

Starting point is 00:06:41 manufacturer and grown up in you know the Ford kind of executive program like would he have been able to do this or did it take an outsider yeah that's such an interesting question you because there's like aerospace was such a stagnant sector for so long and so maybe but that's what it takes right like elon comes from software obviously he founded x.com which became paypal and the whole scheme about software is we want to scale this as fast as possible we want to make this as cheap as possible we want the most amount of people to use it maybe that mentality just hadn't pervaded these engineering disciplines and so just that attitude he had maybe was the thing that was most important um because like the the difference between spacex and what came before it is like

Starting point is 00:07:25 huge it was it cost twenty thousand dollars per kilogram to send things to space in the 1990s i believe and elon brought that down to two thousand that's an order of magnitude difference like those kinds of differences space i mean space travel have been around for decades before that and it's like you can still bring it down in order of magnitude that's like amazing yeah and it feels like once he broke through right and kind of the tech innovation happened now everyone is like oh we have all these different ideas we have uh uh smaller rockets we have people doing space tourism like like it was almost kind of the roger banister four minute mile everyone thought about it the second that one person did it then a bunch of people went and ran the four minute mile and it

Starting point is 00:08:04 feels like elon kind of did that a little bit with space exploration yeah that's so interesting um there jimmy sony has a great book about the paypal mafia peter like uh people like peter teal max levchin obviously elon musk uh about how they founded this company and how they went on to do like found all kinds of other companies youtube linkedin this all comes out of the paypal mafia and one of the interesting hypotheses you can develop about like well why is it the case that paypal this one company led to a whole bunch of other companies in the form of the the founders exited then they just built like basically half of silicon valley and that would obviously Elon like most of car manufacturing most of the space industry so why why was this

Starting point is 00:08:45 group of people such prolific founders and one interesting hypothesis is you know maybe it was a fact that PayPal wasn't that successful in the sense that when they exited eBay bought them for I think like a billion dollars um which is a good sum of money but it's not like it's not like like it's not like we got about over 50 billion dollars and so these people who were super ambitious, they did have enough money to fund their next businesses, but it wasn't enough for them to feel complacent, you know? Yeah. Well, it's also most young founders. Uh, we always point when we think of young founders, we think of Mark Zuckerberg or, you know, whatever, but the average age of a successful entrepreneur in America is like early forties. Right. Right. So you have

Starting point is 00:09:27 experience, you have capital, you have network, you have connections, like all these different things. Um, but also usually people build their biggest companies, not as the first one. And so paypal right paypal wasn't even actually elon musk first company uh but if you think about it kind of in some way you have almost practice he does zip to then he does paypal right and then all of a sudden by the time you get to the third fourth fifth one you know the playbook you've got the reputation you've got access to capital you can attract talent which is incredibly important yeah and you also have a shit ton of experience yes right yes yes yeah i know that's super interesting i mean the thing with um paypal is interesting is that elon he got kicked out of

Starting point is 00:10:10 paypal by peter teal and others um but like the reasoning well one of the reasons was uh he had just like amazing expectations for the company could do he literally wanted to remake the financial system right and if you go see what he's done afterwards in every industry he goes into he just basically does it from scratch like takes it to an order of magnitude improvement and you know maybe that's the thing about like founders who end up being more successful in their first business than Elon was with like PayPal let's say they hit it big but it's like social networking or something like that maybe we're missing out on a lot of talent that could be going to like hard tech you know bio space those kinds of things but they're just like you

Starting point is 00:10:51 know they didn't have like a middling exit they just kept you know they had like a multi-billion dollar company which is like great but if it's somebody like Elon they could like remake entire sectors of the economy maybe these people should i don't know like be forced to quit at some point they're first startups i do think uh there's a level of boldness that it takes to build really really big companies um and in some way the easier path was like go build like an ad optimization you know software uh you could tell people you wanted to take it public but like you were hoping that you know google or facebook was going to come in and buy it for four or five hundred million dollars maybe a billion dollars and like amazing yeah but at some point people stop caring about

Starting point is 00:11:31 like the exit value and i think that's when they say like what could we really accomplish right and that's where like the boldness comes in uh now it's weird because people who find success some people actually lose the ambition they lose like the edge and so you do get a bifurcation like after somebody has had a successful exit of any material size they either become hyper ambitious and go take on crazy stuff uh brian johnson with a colonel he sold brain tree i think he sort of like 800 million dollars or something and then he was like i want to go solve this like brain computer interface problem and he went he completely dedicated you know his time to doing that he in i think he's the biggest investor in the company put a ton of money into it uh and

Starting point is 00:12:16 obviously went the hyper ambitious path, but then there's folks who like, I'm going to go to the beach. Right. And so it feels like that is a, a fork in the road for a lot of entrepreneurs is once they've tasted some level of success, you kind of find out like who's in it for the game and who was in it for the money. Dude, it's so hilarious when you hear people talk about engineers or founders have been really successful in the past. And when they talk about what problem they want to solve, they literally just start from like first principles. What is literally the most important thing i could work on they're doing it's not even a factor to them like how implausible does this sound like um john carmack had a great episode on lex recently uh john

Starting point is 00:12:53 carmack by the way is like this legendary programmer probably the greatest of all time created doom these other games um and yeah so he's like he's talking about like you know once i was done with all this game development stuff i was considering what should i do next and i thought oh nuclear fission is an important problem oh agi is an important problem artificial general intelligence so these are the hardest things a human being could like endeavor to do right and you're just like yeah that's one possibility i could work on um yeah that's that's one thing about some of these people who actually do become more ambitious afterwards is that instead of just looking at how they can make the most money they literally just start from complete first principles

Starting point is 00:13:26 what is the most important thing i could work on sam altman the former ceo of y combinator is another interesting example of this he's i think only in his 30s but um like right now he's the ceo of open ai which is like the company that's releasing all these crazy fucking models that are changing the ai industry he's also helping helion build fusion so that's like not vision this is like a completely different thing they're trying to make energy 10x cheaper than it is now just like working on the two two hardest problems you could possibly be working on at the same time it's kind of interesting when those kinds of people come around well we have a return back to that being the aspiration of a lot of founders like did the pendulum swing do you think too much

Starting point is 00:14:06 to like the social media consumer product ad optimization uh kind of end of the spectrum and now we're seeing a pendulum swing back to uh things like andrew yeah varda yeah uh you know uh a number of businesses like this hey hadrian you know we just go down the line there's a bunch of them like is the pendulum swinging back interesting well i don't know if you've heard this about um china but one of the interesting theories i heard about what they're up to is that you know they're cracking down on these like big tech companies in china like alibaba who knows where jack ma is right now um and and so the question is uh like what are they up to and one interesting theory i heard is they want they realize that the future is in large part going

Starting point is 00:14:55 to be controlled by whoever controls hard tech right who is making the advancements obviously ai is part of like i guess the more computer science aspect of it but also other things like energy who's controlling bio right um and they don't even have the same like sense of what is correct morally with regards like bio enhancement and things like that so whoever controls those industries is going to control the future and one of the interesting theories i heard about this is maybe their idea is we're going to like crack down on people going into programming and software and make them like almost force them to go into like these hardware tracks that are going to be super important in the future? Well, you see this in their geopolitical strategy as well. Like they

Starting point is 00:15:35 definitely have run around the world and tried to create, uh, financing advantages, uh, where they go to a country, uh, specifically they've been doing this to a lot of African nations and say, Hey, we're going to provide you a loan, uh, on some, you know, interesting terms. And it happens to be for your port, right. Or for some kind of critical infrastructure. Uh, and because we're the financier of it it gives them incredible leverage or access um or information into that hardware right which we don't think of the same way as we think of maybe like a computer but like what's more important is it to be the hardware manufacturer for the next great you know desktop computer or is it more important to have a specific advantage in uh very strategic ports

Starting point is 00:16:21 around the world yeah that's such an interesting question um because for since world war ii basically the u.s has been the hegemonic naval power it's basically said to the rest of the world like we'll protect the seas for you um but you're kind of part of our empire like grow a bitch basically right um and then yeah china is like trying to turn that around i happen to think i haven't looked too much into this but i happen to think that that's probably a good thing for the countries they're going into like people talk about it as like exploitative or something and part of it probably is but also like getting money on terms uh getting loans on terms that the rest of the world is not willing to offer to you assuming you have good leadership that's like

Starting point is 00:16:58 not just going to squander the money and then your future country's left in a bunch of debt yeah like i think that's probably probably a good thing so like basically you're saying it could be and again we got to see it play out but it could be good for the country bad for the u.s in some way yeah yeah who is that what is the name of that japanese um like crazy motherfucker who's uh the venture capitalist masayoshi yeah yeah i wonder if like china is a masayoshi son of of africa it's just like throwing crazy money after uh if you create don't your own money like why not i saw this uh hilarious tweet that was like um there's never been a greater marxist redistribution effort than saudi 100 billion dollars of saudi oil money going to masayoshi

Starting point is 00:17:40 shun who just gives it to like these stupid ideas about you know we're gonna like do pet delivery in antarctica or you know just like the craziest ideas yeah yeah well how much of it is you have to fund the dumb ideas to get the breakthroughs as well. Like, you know, when Elon shows up and says, I'm going to build a reusable rocket, a lot of people weren't like, Hey, here's money. Right. He wasn't Elon at the time, but, but, uh, also, uh, there was a hard tech component to it. And I think an aspirational goal, uh, that is different than like food delivery or pet walking or whatever. Um, but still it feels like you gotta do quite stupid deals to get some of the breakthroughs right like airbnb is a good example where you know if you're investing in two guys who

Starting point is 00:18:28 are like we're renting out air mattresses in our kitchen a lot of folks would have been like that's dumb but then it's followed up years later and a bunch of venture capitalists funded like remember juicero no it was like uh make juice at home kind of like a coffee machine but for juice and i forget it raised an ungodly amount of money and so of course when it didn't work all of the critics of the tech industry you know silicon valley were like look at these idiotic tech bros funding you know a juice machine why do you need you know 100 million dollars or 200 million whatever it was but it was like sure but you would have said the same thing about airbnb if it didn't work yes and so like it's important that they work because then people look like geniuses the

Starting point is 00:19:12 founders the investors if they don't work then the critics get ammunition and they're like you guys are morons i you know i'd be actually curious about your perspective on this because you actually did invest in airbnb what's up guys i hope you're enjoying this conversation do our cash has an awesome podcast called the lunar society you guys should definitely go into the description you could subscribe there both on youtube and to the audio all right let's get back into the conversation and i hope you guys enjoy it one thing i've been wondering about is if you think about like the stock market versus venture capital right the great thing like the reason i expect stock prices to be like generally correct is you can short a stock so if it's like too highly valued some you

Starting point is 00:19:46 know somebody will come in and like short it and sort of come to its correct fundamental value with venture capital there's like let's say you think that the marginal venture capitalist is making um a stupid deal right like you think that this company is super overvalued there's no way for you to short it and reduce its price to its correct value so it's like asymmetric in that way prices can only increase it's similar to like housing markets where you can think you can say like i think sf's like house prices maybe in 2020 or like i think they're overvalued right um and but there's no way for you to like make profit off that knowledge and so yeah like the market doesn't correct as easily is that would you say that's like a correct characterization of how the

Starting point is 00:20:26 vc industry works so there's correction mechanisms but they're done in a different way right so public stock let's say that i'm long it gets overvalued you're like hey it's overvalued you can short it and and uh the theory is that it finds kind of the equilibrium price of the market over time um in venture capital because it's private and illiquid uh people can invest on specific terms and we've seen it over the last eight nine months uh there can be corrections in the market where companies that raise money at huge valuations that maybe didn't have the financial performance or the growth kind of track record that fit those numbers from you know the end of 2021, the next round of funding, somebody may come in and say, Hey, I don't think it's

Starting point is 00:21:08 worth, you know, 2 billion. I think it's worth a billion. And so there's down rounds, but it's not done in the same way of like somebody is necessarily profiting off of the cut in valuation from 2 billion to a billion. It's instead that the people who actually are affected, they're affected negatively. It's either the investors who are investing at 2 billion, it's shareholders that we're already, you know, equity holders of the business and then employees, right? Who thought that, hey, our equity is worth 2 billion or whatever.

Starting point is 00:21:38 Now, actually, it's only worth a billion. And so it's a correcting mechanism, but because there is no liquid market, there's no shorting mechanism, which is like an interesting, you know, kind of alteration to eventually trying to figure out what is the market price. I've got a few friends who work at startups

Starting point is 00:21:52 and obviously given the market, basically a lot of their wealth is just in the equity that the startup is giving them and at this point it's like not only is it a liquid but if they sold it in private markets it would just be worth a lot less i mean they're just like sitting like basically they're like a liquid for the next few years until like their companies go public or yeah or like the market changes or something i was talking to a friend recently uh and he basically was like i've been trying to figure out how many of my friends made money in tech i was like what do you mean and he was like think about it he was like we happen to know a very wide spectrum of

Starting point is 00:22:28 folks we know people who have been working in the technology industry for a decade plus yeah and they have made no money and then we happen to be uh friends with or know folks who are the single best investors in the world and they've made an absolute killing but if you were to look at the full aperture of uh the folks we know in the technology industry most of them have not made life-changing money compared to the ones who have now the ones who have are well known and it has been explosive, you know, kind of profits. And so the power law takes over. And those are the people who everyone points to goes, Oh, look how much money you can make in tech. But it probably from an individual participation standpoint follows a lot of the distributions like venture

Starting point is 00:23:09 funds. It's like, I don't forget the exact numbers, but like 50% of venture funds don't make any money. And so if you were to just bring that to employees, like what percentage of employees in the tech industry don't make enough money to retire more than 50%, like they're still working. Right. And so you start to understand it's just like everything else. Like there are people who win, there are people who lose and everyone points to the extremes, but the actual experience of the everyday kind of average participant in the market is not what the extreme is. And so people forget that because they're holding equity. But I think we've seen over the last nine months, like the correction in the market shows them, maybe I didn't have

Starting point is 00:23:51 as much value of this equity that I thought I had. Yeah. And I think people also overestimate the upside of like working at a startup not necessarily founding a startup but working at a startup like if you think about let's say you get on board a startup that is

Starting point is 00:24:05 going to grow like gangbusters I mean the first challenge is like you basically have to think like an investor to like even figure out what startup you want to work in because what they're paying you in is equity

Starting point is 00:24:14 and how you value that equity is the same way an investor would value that equity right so you had to have that skill in the first place which is like you had to be a great programmer

Starting point is 00:24:21 and you had to know how to value startups in the market okay so you need both those skills let's say you have those skills okay and then you're an early employee at a startup they give you like 0.5 equity or something um even if you get that and even the company exits for like a billion dollars right which is like not going to happen like a rare kind of thing a unicorn everybody's heard of these companies so even if you happen to like pick that then you still exit

Starting point is 00:24:43 with like 0.5 equity you only get five million dollars at exit um whereas if you're that good a programmer or that good an engineer you could have just like worked for google for 10 years for the same amount of time it would have taken that exit and you could have made a similar amount of money. Or more. Yeah, exactly. And that's actually an interesting problem I've heard startup founders talk about,

Starting point is 00:25:04 which is given how much money was flowing around these markets for the last few years, one interesting challenge is, listen, you want to hire a second employee, a third employee, these people are not going to have the amount of equity that the founders have. So they're obviously going to be less motivated to get on board your company.

Starting point is 00:25:25 But like with your third employee, you basically need him to be like a founder quality person, right? You can't just have like some guy who does his eight to five as a third employee or something. But these people are not going to get the equity that you're getting. So if this person is good enough to start a startup, otherwise you shouldn't hire them. So if they're good enough to start a startup,

Starting point is 00:25:42 why wouldn't they just like raise their own money to build their own startup? This goes back to a lot of the first five employees. They take founder risk without founder reward, right? And what I've found is the people who are the best second, third, fourth, fifth hire, they know that they're actually not going to go start a company. So they tend to be younger people who are saying, I want to learn, and then eventually one day I'll go start my own company. So it's almost like an apprenticeship slash workhorse, right? um and then the second thing i would say is uh a lot of the best startups in the world

Starting point is 00:26:20 they basically hired their friends right if you really think you know uh i did an interview with david sacks and i asked him about uh paypal and the paypal mafia yeah and i was like how did you get all of these people and he's like well no one wanted to work for us so we just hired our friends yeah and it just happened to be they were all you know these amazing folks and so i do think um in hindsight we like to tell these like really sexy stories about like i knew that person was going to go on and found you know an amazing company and it happened to be chad hurley who did youtube yeah and then you find out you're like uh no like literally we needed somebody to program and like we found the smartest person we could who would come work for us and like it

Starting point is 00:26:59 happened to be this person yeah and then they went on and did something amazing yeah and so you have to be careful as to like the hindsight bias of it looks amazing but there is a kernel of truth of like max lefshin uh elon musk and peter teal who are pretty much the the people making the hiring decisions very early on they were great at selecting talent right and that talent just happened to then go start companies and everyone recognized them later on but these three fellas understood it you know on day one this episode is brought to you by compass mining the world's largest marketplace for mining hardware and hosting with compass everyone can mine bitcoin You can do it at home or in one of their 23 hosting facilities around the world.

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Starting point is 00:28:20 Again, that's lmaxdigital.com. And it's a really interesting question of how you spot this talent. This is like something I've been trying to think about from, like initially from the perspective of somebody who was like trying to get opportunities, like in college trying to figure out, you know, how can I get spotted and stuff like that. But I think this is one of the really interesting challenges of how you spot people who have talent. Not only that, you do, you spot people who others haven't already spotted. So you're just like going to go to like the Harvard job fair, you know, like people know these guys are smart, right? So, you know, like everybody else will be there. you want to spot the people other people don't know could be as valuable as you think like just

Starting point is 00:28:59 with the paypal mafia people like joe lonsdale you know wasn't he like just a stanford student they you know they got about an internship stuff like that um yeah so i think the harvard job fair is the last place to go look for talent yeah especially in startups because if you are at the harvard job fair you're looking for a job right like like that like that's why you're there right and so to some degree like actually the better thing to do is to go to the harvard computer science lab on friday night at 11 p.m and see who's there didn't paypal actually kind of do not with harvard i think but like another university i'm sure they did i think they basically did something very similar yeah and i think a huge piece of this is like you're

Starting point is 00:29:41 looking for the person who's already doing the job or who already shows a predisposition to being successful in this environment, not the person who is showing up and looking for how big is your organization? If I put on my resume, will it look good? How much do I get paid? What's my title? Like it's just playing a different game. And so what you want is you want people who are worried about the end result, not kind of what it looks like you're doing. yeah yeah i i always think of this as like the uh the parent test do you are you hiring somebody who cares what their parents think about their job or are you hiring somebody who wants to be able to say to their parents 10 years from now you know that thing that you use every day my team and

Starting point is 00:30:28 i built that and those are two different people yeah right like there are some people who is really important uh that their parents can say to their friends like my kid does x or my kid is a lawyer or a doctor or has this big title at some company yeah probably not for you know building innovative technology yeah no i think what you said there is really fundamental um i was trying to figure out there colin newport uh has this really interesting blog post where he points out um like you can think of you can like let's say you can reverse this back to college admissions just to get a sense of how to think about talent so if you think about a kid in high school right one of the kids is he's like started a business maybe he has like five figure cash flow he might

Starting point is 00:31:13 even have like a few contract uh employees um like i don't know he builds websites or you know just like doing something um and then you have a kid who's like the president of five clubs and he's on the varsity tennis team and he's i don't know like volunteered in ethiopia over summer um he got a selfie with a with a shovel um so you think about those two people um why is it the first one sounds more impressive it's not because he worked harder because to be a president like fight clubs or whatever you got to be work pretty hard maybe he's not even necessarily he's more intelligent right like again you still have to be pretty intelligent to like excel in high school get all these great sat scores whatever so what is what is the difference and he says it has

Starting point is 00:31:54 something to do with novelty that the second sorry the first kid the one who's like started this business he's doing something original creative shows that he has a vision ambition i think that's part of it, but I think there's something even more fundamental. If you think about how a call option is valued, right? Like call option being the right to buy something, the right to buy a stock at a predetermined price. So you're basically trying to maximize the upside. If you think about how a call option is valued, what do you care about? Well, you care about the volatility, right? If you have a call option on a stock, you might even care more about the volatility than its actual current value or its expected value. Because if the stock is moving around all the

Starting point is 00:32:32 time and huge uh then there's a chance it'll like move up like you think about like buying a call option on bitcoin right in like 2015 or something um you just care about the bitcoin being super volatile um because if it goes to the moon you have all that upside and you also want a big time to maturity so the distance between like where you know your current date and like when the call option is exercised again because there's more room for the underlying asset to experience large fluctuations in value you apply that to talent you think about the kid who is starting a business in high school that guy is like way more volatile right so buying an option on him is like buying an option on tesla buying an option on the second kid is like buying an option on ibm it's just like

Starting point is 00:33:15 how far off it's going to go right like the first kid could potentially become the next patrick collison the second kid might work for patrick collison well it also goes back to like uh in some way you have to pick the people that violate the societal conformism, right? Like the more that somebody is conforming to what society thinks you should do, the less likely they are to have volatility, right? Or to have the outlier components or kind of outcomes. And so if you go back and you look at a hell of a lot of people who have ended up being highly successful, they sure didn't fit kind of the normal box. Now you have to be careful because some people are just weird, right or or dumb and their ideas literally sound insane because they are insane yeah uh

Starting point is 00:33:58 but there's a lot of folks who are outside of kind of that normal framework uh and that's where the volatility lies and so with volatility it works both directions it can go up but it can't go down as well and so uh to some degree if you're playing a power law game which venture capital is you actually should go make almost all of your bets on highly volatile uh kind of opportunities because you only need one right which again sounds to the untrained person uh oh you're gambling but no it's your understanding the power law and what you're trying to do is you're trying to find the highest volatility you can find and if you pick correctly you end up hitting more and more and more there there was this great movie um hindi movie that i um it's one of my favorites

Starting point is 00:34:44 it's called once upon a time in mumbai and it's basically about this like mafia boss uh and so then he's like testing out this new recruit and the guy is just like he's just like a crook the new guy but he's also like really ambitious and really creative and then um so then he recruits him and one of his like i don't know he's like basically it's like the mafia boss's like chief of staff is like that guy doesn't seem straight that guy seems like all kinds of wicked and the mafia boss is like well we have no room we have no need for straight people in our business yeah but the dangerous thing is yes you want to take these leveraged bets on people the thing about leverage you know you can think of like a 10x engineer as not not just meaning

Starting point is 00:35:24 he's like 10x better but like apply the literal financial definition so you have like a 3x snp fund you can have like 10x levered tesla think about it's like actual financial leverage that's not always good right it's good if you have um if you've made a great bet if you made a great bet on um like a company you're really sure about your vision leverage can amplify your returns but if you've made the wrong bet you're just going to get liquidated faster um think about like somebody like napoleon so if uh the the after the revolution the government in charge of france was a directory and they made a highly leveraged bet in the person of napoleon right so he gave them stupendous returns austria italy even like went to egypt like fought under the shadows of

Starting point is 00:36:08 the pyramids um but it was the leverage bet there's a big downside one of which is he'll return and he'll get rid of the entire government and replace it with his own dictatorship um but what kind of person did you think was going to be the one that's going to conquer all of europe for you so yeah i think it's like really potentially rewarding but potentially very dangerous to hire those kinds of people elon said this on snl he was like i'm trying to like save humanity and go to mars like did you think i'd be normal right like i thought i was like like that's the most honest thing that I think anyone could say on national television. It's like, no, we shouldn't think that you're normal. And that's why you think that, you know, uh, I saw a clip

Starting point is 00:36:44 recently, his birthday is exactly 69 days after four 20. And he was like, this is a simulation, right? And it's like, of course this guy thinks it's hilarious. Right. So I, I, I don't know. It's a, it's a very weird thing. You wrote a piece about, um, miracle years. And I found this fascinating where a number of great scientists and inventors, uh, they basically had majority of their breakthroughs in a very compressed period of their career describe a little bit this idea of like miracle years and then like why do you think this is uh something that plays out no it's such an interesting um it's such an interesting pattern yeah that piece went like super viral more than i was expecting but i it was just one of these interesting patterns

Starting point is 00:37:26 you notice in the world and once you notice them you can start kind of start thinking it makes you maybe shift your perspective on certain things maybe come up with entire different theories about how to explain different institutions but yeah so this is a really interesting pattern in the careers of scientists not only scientists but especially scientists you see somebody like isaac newton age of 21 pandemic hits oxford he's sent home comes up with theory of gravity calculus starts making progress versus optics it said that by the way he he created calculus at the same pace that a college student learns calculus wow yeah uh all in one year at the age of 21, um, uh, Einstein age of 26, he's like PhD kind of got rejected. He's been sidelined out of

Starting point is 00:38:09 an academic career. So he's a patent clerk as a patent clerk. He comes up, uh, he, he explains the photoelectric effect because of what special relativity Brownian motion. Um, there was another important paper. Um, I think it was about, uh, Avogadro's constant, but anyways, four fundamental results like super important results in the history of science 26 one year um and it's not just science i mean there's there's other scientists who've had such miracle years von neumann goss euler but you look at the careers i don't know if you saw the brandon sanderson thing i did not okay well do you know like he's a fantasy um he's a fantasy author probably the like the biggest fantasy author these days he um since the pandemic started like two

Starting point is 00:38:50 years ago he he announced on youtube he's written five extra novels that his fans didn't know he was writing in addition to the ones he they already knew he was writing the kickstarter to access these novels he releasing them as a kickstarter 40 million dollars wow biggest kickstarter in history okay anyways so what is happening here why is um why are these people having these extraordinary years where they make um progress towards seemingly independent problems in such a short span of time there's a lot of interesting hypotheses here one is maybe there's like a brief window in a person's life where they're young enough to have creativity intelligence you know your intelligence kind of declines as you get older um ambition um but also they're

Starting point is 00:39:34 like mature enough to kind of understand what's going on the field it's similar to what you said with um um elon going into these new fields applying first principles thinking so maybe there's like a brief window in a person's life where they can do that and maybe it's like only a couple years in your entire life right and if those years you're concentrated you're able to work on the problem, you're going to make a shit ton of progress. Um, there's other hypotheses you could make. Like one is maybe just like a super sad story about, let's say you become successful, right? Let's say you win a Nobel prize. Let's say you become department head or something. Okay. What does that mean? Well, you've got like a bunch of obligations

Starting point is 00:40:07 that are sucking over your time, your energy. You got to like attend conferences, write pop side books, just like do interviews. Um, like deal with, if you're a department head, you got to do all this administrative stuff. And that's one thing where like maybe your universities are really fucking up because like maybe even like now the grad students are getting mired up in all this like um extracurricular duties so one thing is just like your success brings obligations that like destroy your capacity to do productive work um and yeah there's a few other interesting grab but i mean one thing is maybe these just problems are just linked with each other like maybe you the photoelectric effect and special relativity and brownian motion they're

Starting point is 00:40:44 kind of you start thinking a certain way and all these things just fall out you know they're like basically the same branch of a tree but i think it's such an interesting pattern like we really know how much of it is just they went through some event like you just mentioned uh a pandemic hits you get ordered to go home uh your thesis gets denied essentially uh and so there's like a um a negative event that then forces you to uh refocus or prove people wrong or some effect or also it's focus get sent home obviously the last two years with the fantasy writer right sitting at home during the pandemic like i i do think there's a lot of weight in today's society to i break distractions into two buckets there's like distractions we recognize and then distractions

Starting point is 00:41:30 that uh we don't think of as distractions and so distractions we recognize are simple notifications on your phone you're bullshitting on you know doom scrolling on twitter you're watching netflix like you're doing all these things that you're like this is mindless activity i may enjoy it but like it's definitely a distraction from productive work right then there's things which some of you actually mentioned uh email meetings conferences like obligations we don't think of those necessarily as distractions because we think that there's some reason why we're doing we've explained to ourselves it is an obligation and that's why i'm doing it but if you actually just look at both of those activities as distractions and say whether i'm doom scrolling or i'm at a

Starting point is 00:42:12 conference that i feel obligated to go to yeah and you just pull all that away how much more productivity how many more breakthroughs could people have in any industry by simply just focusing yes yeah no that's that's such a great point um like there's uh my friends in tech some of them are like startup founders you know they're like going to this conference here and like grabbing coffee here and um the question is like what is what is a what is your purpose on earth right now like what what is the thing you're trying to maximize right um are you trying to get more users or like let's say with a if you're like content creator you're like trying to get more people to hear your content um you have like a specific target you're trying to achieve

Starting point is 00:42:55 how does like grabbing coffee with a random person fulfill that goal um not that you shouldn't do it but you should understand that like that is not your job right that is not the thing you're like put on earth to do at that particular moment. Um, yeah, I think, uh, I think it's, I think another interesting thing is I wonder if like, like people listen to a lot of podcasts and audio books and stuff like that. I wonder if that, I honestly don't have a good opinion yet of, should I think of that as a distraction or should I think of that as, Oh, it's helping you think about the world. It's not making it more creative. So on. Um, because I think like a big part of the reason people listen to podcasts obviously not this one other podcast um is like

Starting point is 00:43:34 just vicarious like you vicariously just want to participate in like a conversation like with friends or something it goes back to like the the stoic argument of like how painful is it to sit by yourself with nothing right um and i don't know about you but for me uh i put aside intentional time to go for a walk outside and I don't look at my phone. And what I have noticed is like value per minute on that walk is off the charts compared to any other activity I do. It has nothing to do with what I'm actually doing. Yeah. Sure. There's science of your walking, your brain, you know, and all this activity, whatever, but it's actually just like my nose isn't in this supercomputer in my pocket and trying to figure out, you know, what's going on in the world. And so it goes

Starting point is 00:44:23 back to like focus and clarity and all these things it's just that the incentives and literally the way our brains are wired is to get the dopamine hit or just think about like people say they get their best ideas when they're taking a shower it's not because there's something magical about like water running down your face that makes you more creative is that that is the only time in your day that you are not hearing the input of other minds right that is the only time for most people you're driving you're listening to music you're listening to podcasts for you know you get home you're on youtube blah blah blah um you're at work meetings how much of your day in like actual minutes is you not consuming the input of other minds do you think that many of the

Starting point is 00:45:04 scientists inventors and kind of innovators of the past they had just so many distractions they didn't have supercomputers in their pocket but they had other things that served as distractions or do you think they just naturally given the lack of technology accessibility that we have today they just had less distractions and therefore could spend more time thinking i think that's got to be it right like if you um it just like would physically not be possible you're like walking somewhere you can't like plug in something in your ears it just like physically would not be possible to uh occupy all your time with uh the input of other minds right um or if you're doing it you have to do it in like a very intentional way of like i'm going to engage this person in

Starting point is 00:45:42 conversation yeah it's almost an interesting thing about like it's so almost unrelatable if you actually had to spend some time in a previous era me having grown up with like these technologies um it's almost like hard to relate to some uh i'm just i would just be very curious about like the day-to-day of somebody like that i also wonder how much of the breakthroughs that we've seen in math science hard technology uh in prior years and decades even centuries comes from the sheer number of people focused on those problems versus now going back to our conversation earlier how many of our smartest folks are thinking about other things like a great example how many intelligent people are focused on building facebook instagram uh google

Starting point is 00:46:29 tiktok and like e-commerce sites yeah i probably just nailed about i don't know 30 percent of like the tech industry right or whatever it is and again it's not to say that like google search has this amazing mission of like getting people information and like doing all this stuff but there is a very strong argument that those companies and technologies take talent away from nuclear power or from space exploration or something else and so it's hard to compare and contrast like which one is like better for humanity right uh because they are different things, but there's definitely something to the fact that like a portion of our smartest people or the people who would have those breakthroughs, they're not working on certain things because

Starting point is 00:47:17 they've chosen to work on other things. Yeah. I have a hard time thinking about what I should, um, cause I, you know, I went to India earlier this year and, you know, we get out of the airport and we're, uh, you know, I get in the car and the driver pulls up Google maps and I'm like, no way that shit works. I'm like, there are roads in India. You've got these, half of the roads are just filled with people so you can't even drive on them. How could this possibly?

Starting point is 00:47:43 He's like, no, no, no, it's actually gotten pretty good. You can actually use this for navigation and basically at least all the big cities and stuff. This is a technology developed in Silicon Valley by these people who are just like hard coders not working on these hard tech things. But now it allows this guy in India to navigate the difficult streets.

Starting point is 00:48:03 probably makes us quality of life much better in all kinds of different ways. Helps you make money, economic mobility. Exactly. So there's, I think, a lot of indirect ways in which big tech is actually really good all around the world, especially around the world. Because if you look at Facebook's revenue

Starting point is 00:48:17 for a user in America, what is it like? It's like, wasn't it like $20 per month or something like that? And like India, it's probably like less than a 10th of that. So they're probably losing money on working in these emerging markets, but American consumers are actually subsidizing them being one of their products for the rest of the world yes um so but i don't think that it's a

Starting point is 00:48:36 big tech is bad like i think that argument other than maybe the most extreme uh kind of folks that are critics of silicon valley believe that but outside of that i think everyone realizes like hey these companies are net positive for society and like how privileged are we to argue about uh disinformation in the united states when literally these some of these products are the you know whatsapp is the way that the world communicates you know in many countries and so uh it you know it's a first world problem right uh but that doesn't mean that the companies behind it or the work they've done are net negative it just means that nothing is 100 positive like everything hey there's cars that get in car crashes should we not have cars like no we probably should have

Starting point is 00:49:21 cars and make them safer right yeah and so uh it's just though that at what point is the incremental engineer that goes to one of those companies the output or productivity that they provide is not nearly as much as if they went and worked in another industry that maybe doesn't have as many people or the problem is harder or can affect more people i think that's a great point like i think once the industry's mature they get really good at recruiting people so you know if you're I just graduated computer science. If you're a computer scientist, you know exactly what to do to get a job at Facebook or Google.

Starting point is 00:49:54 You go to the job fair, you give them your resume, you know exactly what you need to do in terms of internships to get a job there. If you just want to think, a college student's first principles, he's thinking, what is the most important thing they could be working on? There's not an obvious way in which you're like,

Starting point is 00:50:08 the nuclear fusion guy's going to show up to your job fair. I think once these industries get big, companies get big, they're really good at recruiting, which means they get more talent because they've gotten good at it, which means that the new industries, they don't have the time or the knowledge to actually be able to recruit these people effectively.

Starting point is 00:50:28 And also, they don't have the prestige, right? There's a certain kind of prestige associated with working at Google. I think it's similar with finance people and working at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. And so if you are one of these small companies, I think it's very important you develop an edge. You can't just recruit the same person that Google knows to recruit,

Starting point is 00:50:49 you can't just be looking at, oh, these guys are really intelligent and he's hardworking and he has good internships on his resume. Because every other company is looking for the same thing, right? You need some, like with the PayPal mafia, right? You need some unique edge,

Starting point is 00:51:00 a unique way to think about talent that helps you find the people that Google would have ignored or Facebook would have ignored. When people say Harvard is selective, or Google is selective, it's selective in the sense that they reject a lot of people.

Starting point is 00:51:12 But often these are the best people. Often they're optimizing for the wrong thing. who is doing the selection? It's like some humanities person. People who write college essays know exactly how to game this shit, right? So yeah, you have to have that edge if you want to beat out these prestigious institutions.

Starting point is 00:51:29 Paul Graham talks a lot about many people have to unlearn what they learned or like learn to unlearn, right? And it's because in one of his essays, he talks about people who'd get to Y Combinator and they would say, okay, like basically what is the test, right? tell me what like like how do i do this so that i'm quote-unquote successful he's like that's the

Starting point is 00:51:50 problem like your entire life you were taught okay come to class take notes take the test regurgitate what you learned in class and in your notes on the test you know here's your uh a move on to the next thing and you just kept doing that over and over and over again he goes but now like there is no test right it is actually a ambiguous environment where there's multivariate uh, inputs that you then have to synthesize and figure out the answer. But the answer is not, you know, uh, the teacher or some standardized test is determining the answer. The answer is what do the customers want? And the customers aren't ever changing, you know, kind of target. They can, uh, like one thing on day one and they can like something else on day two. They may like

Starting point is 00:52:35 different severities. They could actually say, you know what, you both have, uh, you and your competitor have similar products, but price becomes a component or maybe it's quality. Like you have to figure all this stuff out. People who are good at school suck in that environment. And so I actually think that the reason why Google and a place like McKinsey or Goldman or whatever becomes so great at recruiting is because they're pulling from the largest pool. Most people do not want to take risk. They do not want to be the outlier and they do not want to go and have failure. Yeah. And so what is the quote unquote safe thing to do? go work at a place where you can go home and you're not worried about whether they're paying

Starting point is 00:53:19 payroll or not. You go home and you tell your parents, Hey, I work at Goldman Sachs. Hey, I work at Google. Right. And you work on something that is interesting enough because you're in this environment where somebody has told you like, this is the most important thing, or this is a prestigious thing to do. And so like you're satisfied because you almost don't know anything else. And so one of my favorite things to do is talk to people who are graduating college. Like I want to go be an investment banker. And I'm like, have you ever like spent time with investment bankers? Like, like go. And they're like, Oh, I did an internship. I'm like, cool. Tell me about the internship. Like, was it fun? And they're like, well, you know, we'd like do like a lot

Starting point is 00:53:56 of like happy hour things. And like, it was like kind of interesting, whatever. And I'm like, that's what you're going to try. We're just going to be happy. I'm like, okay. And then I'll talk to him like a year later and I'll be like, Hey, how's it going? And they're like, this is hard. right like yeah no shit it's hard right like they they are going to burn through a bunch of these young people and some people enjoy it and say and other people churn out now that doesn't mean people shouldn't go into investment banking or anything like that but what it does mean is that along that path there's a lot of people who opt out they thought they wanted one thing and they changed their mind i think society would be much better off if we made it more normal for people

Starting point is 00:54:32 to take bold risk yeah the problem is failure is a negative yeah and so most of society looks at it you tried something you failed you're an idiot yeah yeah instead if we just said look everyone's a scientist go run experiments and by the way if you run an experiment it's not that you failed it's that the experiment didn't work imagine how much further along we would get and how much quicker we would be able to create progress innovation in various pieces of technology if everyone was encouraged to try the boldest, craziest ideas they had. And if you, quote-unquote, failed or the experiment didn't work, it's fine, go again.

Starting point is 00:55:10 Yeah, this goes back to what you said earlier about we judge these ideas, some of which didn't work as bad, when before they sounded just as crazy or just as good as Airbnb. Afterwards, you know, if Airbnb had failed, we could say, like, come on, you're going to let strangers live in your house? That's stupid. And I think that's true of like a lot of things you could work on where the difference is just, you know, there is an element of luck where just like things you learn over time

Starting point is 00:55:39 where if Airbnb had failed, like, yeah, they'd get, they had like, you know, they had like what, like tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. So they'd probably be in like bankruptcy court or something at this point if Airbnb had failed. Yeah. So then you could just like laugh at them. But there's like a lot of counterfactual. If you're trying to do something really ambitious, like in most cases, you'll probably fail, right?

Starting point is 00:55:59 You're trying to make that small probability bet that this thing really explodes and that the small probability makes it worth it. But yeah, then it's, you shouldn't judge people who just ended up on the wrong side of that equation. We as a entire society went from the underdogs to the incumbent, right? And, uh, I always think about the idea of like, uh, everyone starts out as the underdog as the competitor, as the upstart. But if you live long enough, you either die or you become the man, right?

Starting point is 00:56:28 So Bill Gates was the kid in the garage trying to disrupt folks. Now the internet is like Bill Gates is the evil billionaire. He's like going to microchip everybody. Right. And so when you, when you view that countries can do that, societies can do that. And if you were to look at the energy around innovation and progress and kind of taking bold risks and this experimentation in a country like Nigeria and a country like India or a country like America.

Starting point is 00:56:57 It doesn't mean that there's none in America, but it definitely means because of demographics, because of the lack of anything really to lose, there is incredible energy. And so I believe that in the United States, if we can get back to that, the problem is there used to be one place in the country where that was heavily encouraged, which was Silicon Valley. And people could go there and you could fail over and over and over again. And no one judged you for it. It was just like, cool, what's the next idea?

Starting point is 00:57:26 I don't even want to talk about the other one. What's the next one? Because it's all power law. As that gets dispersed around the country, it goes one of two ways probably. Either one, other places learn that and then we get multiple areas of innovation or it disperses and kind of fades away

Starting point is 00:57:45 and we just become the fat cat that is ripe for disruption. Right. The reason that Silicon Valley has that spirit is because if you're wrong and you've publicly criticized a person you're like this won't work right if you're wrong it's like really like uh um who the who's the founder of andrew but what's his name andrew uh palmer lucky palmer lucky did you see the thing

Starting point is 00:58:07 about him going on jason clark uh him and jason that's gonna that's the next two decades that's gonna be the feud is like palmer lucky will never let that die and jason is also gonna not just let uh palmer turn him into a punching bag so like they're gonna keep going at it for decades the the hilarious thing is he like Jason tries to keep on like Twitter and on his phone. He like tries to like turn it around by like saying nice things about Palmer. And every time he does, Palmer just responds in the most brutal way.

Starting point is 00:58:35 Like, but that's the, that's the thing, right? Like if you're like, um, I don't want to like judge Jason in particular. I don't know the details,

Starting point is 00:58:41 but let's say you're the kind of person who judges someone too harshly too early. And you're like, Oh, this guy's an idiot. This thing's not going to work. If it does work, you look like a fucking idiot.

Starting point is 00:58:49 Right. And Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley happens so often that like people are like really averse to judging people who fail um yeah whereas in the rest of the world somebody doing something crazy i was talking to somebody who's um a software engineer in the uk and he was talking you know we're at this conference where people were like had these all kinds of cool ideas he was saying you know this was in the uk and somebody came up with like an idea like i want to build like a defense startup or something people just like laugh him out of the room right there's this

Starting point is 00:59:14 there's this like tall poppy syndrome um so i think america is still like conserved that spirit quite well actually um even in india because of the hierarchical like caste system kind of thing i i think like bangalore and other places that are like startup hubs they're they're probably different but so similar like hustle lake and valley is different from the rest of america or was but yeah i think america is still um like surprised like it's like if you're here it's being a fish in water but if you go to the rest of the world and you ask people go to japan or singapore or something how many of you want to start your own business no hands raised you come to the u.s and you like just go to random room how do you want to start your own business at

Starting point is 00:59:52 some point people might not do it but they're gonna raise their hand right so yeah it's almost like americans uh to some degree almost have like more arrogance like everyone raises their hand but only half of them do it yeah right have you seen those polls about they look at american kids and asian kids and they ask them like are you better than average in math and like all the american kids raise their hand and the asians are like a quarter raise their hand or something who's better right but like the generalizations end up having some kernel of truth yeah right um the other thing too about i think american like ambition and innovation uh is there is a uh resurgence i think where we hit this low and now you see a bunch of these companies that are coming up over the last

Starting point is 01:00:38 three or four years where they're taking big swings. Remains to be seen whether they would be successful or not. But I do think that this like almost renaissance to some degree is important, but it's coming from the entrepreneurs. It's coming from the innovators and kind of the scientists and all of that. It's not coming from the politicians or the government. And what's fascinating to me is that in the mainstream conversation, the conversation has very much shifted in america over the last 50 years to like what can the government do for yeah right but there's almost like this little group and and you can almost think of it like you know there's the general military and then you have like the navy seals like we need the navy seals to continue to

Starting point is 01:01:20 be ambitious and go do the shit that no one else wants to do right we need this the select group of startups to be highly ambitious and go try to drive innovation and do the impossible because the rest of society is one not going to do it they don't have the risk appetite to do it and actually they're they're shifting the other way and there's this rise of oh now we're gonna get free money like you know when's the next stimulus bill coming yeah and so i think that it's like a very interesting thing but it it's not a story that's over yet yeah um no that that's the like not only does the entrepreneurial part of society have to like be powerful but like just to keep up with all this redistribution and all this like rents not even redistribution the rent seeking

Starting point is 01:02:03 right it's the infrastructure bill like the money in there it's not like it's getting redistributed it's just like who knows where it's going um like some contractors like really wealthy and happy now but are there any more trains or railroads or bridges that are going to get built we'll see um there's actually um i think that after the 2009 bill for uh the stimulus in 2009 they had they gave like 30 billion dollars to build train tracks in uh in the u.s and zero new miles were built so literally if you just do the equation 30 billion divided by zero miles it costs infinity dollars to build a mile of railroad in america but yeah so you this part this is like the productive part of society they're actually building new goods and services they need to keep growing

Starting point is 01:02:47 exponentially just to keep up with the rent seeking from the rest of society but the optimistic white pill is since they're growing exponentially over time they'll become more and more important now maybe they become entrenched and maybe they become part of the new establishment, but hopefully like Elon is the wealthiest person in the world right now. Right. Hopefully more and more power goes to these kinds of, you know, people who are like building stuff, doing cool things. I mean, that's a white pill. If you think of Elon and Jeff Bezos, right. Those are the two, um, that battle back and forth on the wealthiest person in the world. Like there's a reason why they're the wealthiest. Amazon is an incredible business that I can press a button on my phone and something

Starting point is 01:03:27 shows up the next day like that is insane you probably should be one of the wealthiest people in the world right and so i think uh if you look at the top i think it's a top 25 of the force 400 none of them are day traders or like investment types right it's all again power law it's the people who built highly innovative products or who are in the family lineage right it's like the walmart family uh they end up being um each one of the walton uh siblings is up on that list pretty high but somebody in their family lineage built walmart which you know is similar to an amazon yeah no i think um that walmart is an excellent example of you know there's this um economist thomas picketty who wrote this book um capital in the 21st century it was hugely

Starting point is 01:04:15 influential a few years ago and the point he was making is over time um in societies what happens is wealthy people will accumulate resources. They'll hand them down to their kids. They'll accumulate resources. And the rate of return to capital, if you think about the S&P growth rate, is higher than the rate at which the price of labor grows. So over time, they will,

Starting point is 01:04:35 society is going to become more and more unequal, more and more hereditary. And he doesn't talk about this, but it's also true that there's a genetic component to this. Children of wealthier, more successful people are also likely to be more successful. And so in that way, even there's a genetic endowment that eschews things.

Starting point is 01:04:52 If you look through history, there's so often a complete drawdown of wealth because of war, because of revolution, because of some crisis. And then either the scales get completely leveled or the resources are redistributed. Interestingly, I think America is the only country in the Western world, maybe the entire world, but the only country where there hasn't been a complete drawdown of wealth. that you don't just like reset to zero that hasn't happened in america which maybe makes us more optimistic but also more um more maybe not cognizant of like the actual risk that civilization is taking but yeah so but the walmart is actually a great example of this because the the family as a whole is really rich right but like each individual waltonite is they're not the richest people in the world the richest people in the world as you just said are the people who just

Starting point is 01:05:42 like recently made their money which goes against the pickety thesis the the the um but is that not in a technology age will that not continue to happen where uh because of the rate of change and improvement in technology and the constant reinvention i mean if you look tiktok is now the most popular website in the world that didn't exist 10 years ago right um and so because of that occurring the incumbents are actually at a disadvantage to remain the wealthiest now they're still gonna be rich right uh or their companies will still be powerful and have a lot of resources but actually the advantage is to those who have speed and can continue to reinvent using the new technologies

Starting point is 01:06:20 and just naturally because of the innovator's dilemma, the incumbents likely don't do that as well as kind of new upstarts. Yes, I think that's a key. When people complain about wealth inequality, when they say the wealthiest 0.1% has so many of the resources, what they're not considering is that 0.1% is changing all the time, right? That would be really concerning in a country where there isn't that level of turnover

Starting point is 01:06:44 like you talked about. I think in Italy, if you look at the wealthiest people in the country in the 1600s or something, there's some guy did this brilliant study where he's looking at the last names and he's like, okay, who are the wealthiest people in Italy today?

Starting point is 01:06:56 Who are the wealthiest people in 1600? I think most of the top 25 or something are literally direct descendants. Wow. So from 1600 to now, in a country where there's no economic growth, basically, one of my friends put it this way, Europe is like a living museum.

Starting point is 01:07:15 Which is part of the reason why people like to visit. Right. But if you're going to be in the technology industry, I think there's a lot of people who say, hey, that's a disadvantage than maybe somewhere else. Yeah. You've done a lot of interviews around long-termism. What is that concept?

Starting point is 01:07:28 Like, why are you so fascinated with it? What's up, guys? I hope you're enjoying this conversation with Dorkesh. He's got an awesome podcast that I listen to regularly called The Lunar Society. You can go down into the description, click on the link there to either YouTube or the audio. All right, let's get back into the episode.

Starting point is 01:07:41 I hope you guys are enjoying it. Yeah, I know. I think this is going to be the things that we're really going to start talking about in a few years. And I think this is really interesting and important to think about. You look at, we tend to think about the world,

Starting point is 01:07:55 like what's going to happen in 10 years, what's going to happen in 20 years, what's going to happen in 50 years. But if you think about like how long a little civilization could exist, thousands, maybe millions of years, billions of years, right? Like civilization could hang around

Starting point is 01:08:06 for as long as the universe exists. And it's like 10 to the 500 power years until like all the protons decay away and there's like nothing left. So that gets really abstract if you think that far out. But you just think like, we want civilization to be around in a thousand years, right? We want civilization to be flourishing.

Starting point is 01:08:21 We want people, you know, we just want all kinds of creative, cool things to happen. Just think about how much the world has changed in like the last thousand years. We've grown so much wealthier. Life is so much better. Just think of that process could continue longer. And it's really interesting.

Starting point is 01:08:35 You can start to think from first principles because you can't just extrapolate trends if you're talking that far out. you really have to think about first principles of like what is going to matter in the long term it's going to be things like if we build through human enhancement or through ai things that are way smarter than us that's going to be a big deal uh if we go extinct because of the pathogen because of nuclear uh war because of you know other kinds of disruptions that's going to be a big deal um which allows you to ignore actually a lot of the day-to-day news like if you look at

Starting point is 01:09:05 a newspaper from 100 years ago how much of the stuff they're talking about actually mattered in the long run um same thing like if you open to the new york times like what are the odds that any article there is going to be something that 100 years from now people are going to be like that actually was important to think about at the time it's your chance right so then you start thinking about like what matters in the long term because if most people are going to live in the future and if people are like worth roughly equally as much most of the value that could potentially exist exists in the far future we want to make sure those people flourish as much as possible there's all kinds of interesting ideas about how to make sure their lives are good um

Starting point is 01:09:36 What is that idea? How do you make their lives better today? Yeah. So one thing is just making sure civilization doesn't go extinct, right? They can't exist if civilization goes extinct. But there's a big debate, and this is why this field is really interesting to me. There's huge debates about how to make sure that the future goes really well. And the good thing is it's not mired in politics or anything.

Starting point is 01:09:56 People are just thinking from first principles. One interesting debate, there's an economist, Tyler Cowen, who says that over the long term, the only thing that matters is economic growth. So you want to maximize economic growth. A really interesting anecdote he gives is between 1880 and 1990, if you, if the rate of economic growth in the U.S. had just been 1% lower per year. So, you know, like that's like a normal range of fluctuation, right? Just 1% lower every single year. The U.S. in 1990 would be as rich as Mexico was in 1990 per capita, right?

Starting point is 01:10:29 Wow. So over time, the rate of economic growth is the thing that matters most. but the um so right now the rate of economic growth is like two percent approximately worldwide and it's slowing down which is really concerning but this just raises an interesting prospect because if you think about like two percent growth that's like the economy's doubling every 35 years how long can it keep doing that like doubling every 35 years um they can keep doing that for maybe like the next 100 years maybe the next 200 years can it keep doing that for the next thousand years how about the next 10 000 years because if you extrapolate two percent growth from our

Starting point is 01:10:58 current economy to like 8 000 years from now that would mean that every single atom in the galaxy had to support as as much economic value as the entire world has today right so um which means that like probably this rate of growth can't continue for forever which means the the times that there's a lot of growth lots of things are changing lots of new technologies are coming about lots of new political institutions are coming about that may be the most important time in history because like that determines what happens in the far future so we could potentially be living in the most important century in history and that changes everything about what you think is important to work on because right now if we can one the economic growth already uh could

Starting point is 01:11:38 potentially make that argument but if we could increase economic growth through technology and other innovations uh then definitely it puts a emphasis on the current moment yes or just think about like let's say we develop ai right um full ai i think there's actually a good chance of how it's a century like it would like full artificial intelligence not like hey i have a startup and i use the term ai and like i don't even know what that means which by the way uh there have been people who have pitched me ai startups and i say uh this isn't ai this is machine learning and they say no it's ai and i'm like okay how do you do it and then they just like literally textbook description of machine learning like just linear regression or something like okay uh and by the

Starting point is 01:12:16 way like i'm not an expert right like i uh you know i can google but like like all right and so like i do think that this whole thing of like actual artificial intelligence is uh what seems to be much further off than i think most people realize yeah there's you think it could happen this century yeah i think it's actually more likely than not why because if you just extrapolate the trends in ai you think about gpt3 it's able able to write like full essays you think about how much more powerful that is in gpt2 um i think they've raised the parameters by an order of magnitude or something and it's just so much more powerful you do that like two or three more times you raise the order of magnitude i think the training cost of gpt3 was like 10 million or

Starting point is 01:13:02 something which is like you're talking about the potentially on the track of building the most powerful technology in history that's nothing right think about when people start throwing real money at it the idea that you could just scale a model like gpt3 to agi it's called a scaling hypothesis the basic idea is you just make this shit bigger um eventually it'll get smarter and smarter until it's agi you make what bigger you make the training sets or the just like the amount of parameters in the model okay i actually had a guy in the podcast recently who actually did an estimate of this of you think about the computational capacity of the brain and you think about how big these models are um or how much computational capacity they use

Starting point is 01:13:36 we're only a couple of orders of magnitude away from actually having enough computation to run emulate the brain that doesn't necessarily mean we'll like actually know how to do it um so that's why there's a lot of uncertainty there um but if that happens like this this thing could be seriously smarter than we are we had to really make sure that it's aligned um it's a lot like aligned with our goals um and another interesting thing like which would make this century really uh really impactful and this i think is a near certainty is human enhancement of um i just had this guy on my podcast it'll be released next week steven shu he's working on genomic prediction the basic idea is um you uh it's called embryo selection you basically do IVF

Starting point is 01:14:20 and in vitro fertilization you have multiple embryos you select the one that has the greatest potential to become like really smart right you do that over and over again over time you can get like somebody you can make somebody who's like way smarter than somebody who's ever existed by just selecting for all the genomic sequences is that controversial to do why well the the idea is oh the people are going to be afford this are the rich people um if you do that then like the rich people will be like actual genetic entrenched advantage over time but just like just read it's not that expensive like just give it give it to everybody for free right um but but like the actual act forget who's doing it for a second right like

Starting point is 01:14:59 if we have a human race and our goal is to improve the human experience right like whatever we're optimizing for is like constantly improve constantly progress one huge input is to have intelligent humans yes operating in the world on top of that you want people who uh have very specific components right or or kind of uh inputs into it that aren't just intelligence and so what those are obviously there's going to be debate right who gets to determine how do we measure do we know what certainty is a probability whatever but there's some framework that we're like cool these people will become more productive members of society and it feeds back to i have uh i have a friend uh who will go unnamed who believes that it is elon musk's

Starting point is 01:15:51 duty to humanity to have as many children as possible because he's elon musk and we need as much intelligence as possible and so like he's a pretty good person to like put put some life out he seems to be doing a pretty good job good job he's definitely doing it i don't know if that's why he's doing it but he's definitely you know he's up to i think he's in double digit kids which like you know hasn't been seen for a few centuries on average uh but if you think about this idea it's like okay i think what makes it controversial people is to your point one who's doing it right like the cost uh um barriers but also too like i think it just scares people that like what you mean that we as humans could have some element of contribution to the increasing

Starting point is 01:16:35 intelligence of humanity because i it makes us feel better to almost think like okay you know uh two people have sex baby comes out and just like whatever have you know whatever the combination of these two people and we almost think of it like eye color or hair color or whatever it is like let's see yeah but if you gave parents the ability to choose i don't know how many people would say they'd do it but i gotta think it's a pretty high percentage of people would say hey i do want to pick the baby's eye color i do want to pick the baby's you know hair i do want to pick uh if you give me four embryos and by the way we're gonna pick one of the four anyways right exactly then don't i want to have some data to pick a embryos that i can optimize for whatever maybe it's not

Starting point is 01:17:25 intelligence i want to optimize for maybe it's literally hey there's three that have a high probability of brown hair and one that has blonde hair and i want a blonde haired baby like or the data ends up being pretty important or like it's not even that like um the thing these companies start off with um and they they like to talk about like this is the only thing we're ever going to do right we're never going to talk about intelligence um the thing they start off with is just health so you look at the diabetes risk of these babies you look at the heart disease risk you look at the cancer risk and you're like okay well i want my kid to be healthy i'll pick the one that has the least risk of having these things that's where you start you

Starting point is 01:17:57 can't draw a line there right like you could pick any of these embryos i just want to pick the one that's going to be make sure that my baby is healthy as possible you go down that road right like health correlates with intelligence okay so why don't we just start testing for intelligence why don't we start testing we're high you can just go down this road right there's also other kinds of interesting technologies like just cloning like we can clone a fucking horse now right we can we could clone a human we could do it now and we have you think so yes i just like nobody gives a shit enough didn't some no this was the china they did the crisper thing wait you gotta back up for a second people can clone a full-blown horse yeah how does that work oh i

Starting point is 01:18:32 mean uh like i take like a 3d image of the horse and then i like 3d print the horse like no no how does this work i don't remember the exact details but it's like you it still has a gestate in like okay so it's basically somehow take the like the dna makeup of the horse it still goes through kind of a birthing process or whatever and then it becomes essentially the same exact horse so this is more genetic uh um kind of science than it is uh some sort of like oh no it's not like star trek yeah i was like all right i have not seen that i gotta go do some more research um all right and so your whole idea uh is like we could do the same exact thing because it's just genetics we could do it for a human yeah no this guy wrote a really interesting blog post about um

Starting point is 01:19:15 you know john what neumann was this like brilliant scientist in the 20th century the literal probably the most brilliant people who's a person who's ever lived that we know of right so he probably can iq of 180 he like um there's so many like stories of him uh just like he'll come people are working on problem for a week oh no there's a great example of this where he shows up late to a lecture and a professor is like writing down a theorem on the board and he doesn't realize that he's writing he missed the introduction where the professor was explaining that like he's trying to prove the theorem or explain it so von neumann just like he just like fills in the rest of the steps of the thing that the professor hadn't proved yet he just like proves the theorem

Starting point is 01:19:58 that the professor was trying to explain the introduction to um but no the the he's he worked on so many like nuclear ballistics he worked like he developed so many advances in like computer hardware in quantum mechanics quantum uh like all kinds of things right this guy was like the most brilliant person who ever lived his body is in a cemetery in princeton you dig that up you take a little sample you have this dna you do get it sequenced then you clone him maybe a couple million times why don't we do that that's what i'm saying like what do you know what the argument against it is i mean it's probably illegal in the u.s at least yeah but but like what why i actually heard this story about like this guy who's he's like a math project uh project and he was like

Starting point is 01:20:43 just emailing every single scientist uh like he knew about like uh he was like we know where the body is why don't we just go dig it up and like clone them and um um uh yeah so people have this idea i i don't like it just is it just an ethic this thing but so this is like a weird thing right like there's there are uh what i would consider morals right do not steal do not cheat do not like these things that uh i think most humans through most of history have bought into and said like yes for whatever reason whether you agree or not we have collectively agreed that like these are bad things to do and uh those morals i think are important because they keep the fabric of society together they uh give people a framework on how to act and you know obviously i don't think

Starting point is 01:21:28 anyone really wants to live in a society where it's like uh uh the purge like just like go crazy steal things kill people like you know every person for themselves like that doesn't seem uh to be super attractive to folks but then there's this like element of uh ethics which like i'm not clear as to why it is a bad idea to go find the smartest fucking person that's ever lived in the world and take their dna and try to recreate that over and over and over again so that we can solve some of our hardest problems these people matter a lot right like we clone elon musk the thing with him having kids is there's a lot of regression to the mean so his kids are probably not going to be as good as he was just because just the same way as like

Starting point is 01:22:11 einstein's kids weren't as good as he was it just like it's very hard to keep that right but if it's an exact clone of you and then it's a different story right just think about how much value elon musk has created for the world make a bunch of copies of him you know like we could have so much more uh yeah so i think um are people just scared like does that just scare the shit out of people and so naturally it's like oh we can't do that that's bad like it violates our ethics like that's illegal right but then in 100 years people will be like look how stupid these humans were who created laws it was illegal to do this yeah like if you go back and you look at laws that were written 100 years ago uh many times they've now been repealed or changed or whatever we laugh

Starting point is 01:22:50 at them yeah right we're like that was illegal like that's what we all do today yeah i think up and the thing is even if we ban it like china's gonna do it somebody else is gonna do it china don't give a fuck they gotta go find they're gonna go find the absolute smartest people they can they don't care if they're chinese or any other nationality or uh ethnicity and they are going to do everything they possibly can to get geniuses yeah and that's a huge advantage like if you think about who really like military tech for example or like just advances in physics hardware whatever you need the smartest people right and there's not that many of them around like this is also more of them you're you have a huge advantage does this also play out not just

Starting point is 01:23:30 with intelligence but like for example uh is the chinese military going to create like herculean looking cyborgs that all of a sudden we're like damn our humans aren't made like that and it's because they are using some sort of uh technology that may be from an ethical standpoint the u.s whether rightfully or wrongfully uh has decided we're not willing to use and they are yeah i think we're gonna see some really wild shit in the near future like i think there's two paths of the future um one is you have this human enhancement path and so then the most powerful people in the world are these like enhanced like just crazy um crazy alterations of these people and these people are like way smarter way more capable and the other path is you just go completely artificial

Starting point is 01:24:12 you have an age artificial general intelligence um one of these two things i think is likely to happen by the end of century and when you take that seriously i mean there's all kinds of other interesting trends that i think will happen this century i think we might have energy super abundance energy is like super fucking cheap um you can just travel from any point in the world to any other point in like a matter of minutes um why is it gonna get so cheap um so like solar and wind are getting like if you've seen the curves of the price on those they just like drop exponentially um there's the prospect that nuclear could be much better if you know about like the regulations um you know that it's been hamstrung for decades if you get rid of that

Starting point is 01:24:49 you know like nuclear could be way cheaper and way better that's another like uh fake ethical thing it seems like the thing with the epic stuff is you have during covid you had these bioethicists who were going to do uh people had decided you could do human challenge trials whereas you give somebody the vaccine we had the vaccine before the virus even entered america they had designed the vaccine so um so but it took till november december we had to fast track it and it still took us a year to approve the vaccine right so these people had the idea okay the way the current process works is you give somebody the vaccine if they happen to encounter covid and they averted then you know that the thing works right the idea was you uh you give these people the vaccine as

Starting point is 01:25:30 early as possible then you inject them with covid and if they're able to avoid covid or don't have the symptoms you know the vaccine works these people volunteer to do this they're getting paid to do it it's all you know it's all full disclosure and transparency it would have sped up the vaccine by many months would have saved more than 300 000 lives um yeah so yeah we were planning on this is something we could have done but then the bioethicists were like no this is unethical and i'm an expert on ethics so i can tell you that this is what the fuck does that mean exactly right i get like you're an expert in like the the proteins that make up the vaccine i get you could be like an actual expert in biology what is what does it mean to be an expert in

Starting point is 01:26:12 ethics i would argue you can't even be an expert in biology you can be one of the best first people on what we currently understand about biology but like we sure as hell understand less than the things that we don't understand right right and so like sure we'll call that expertise for now but on ethics uh it just feels like it it's made up i i want to stop shy of saying it's made up because there are like morals again right like there's things that i think as a society we all agree like do not cheat do not steal all that but ethics has become this like catch-all for just like anything that we think we could complain about goes in like the ethics bucket and so for example if you have consenting adults who say hey i'm willing to do this i understand the risks

Starting point is 01:26:59 and i'm signing whatever i'm a young healthy person you know yeah yeah whatever and somebody comes in and says that's unethical like fuck you right why do you get to tell somebody what they can do with their body yeah now it all of a sudden it starts entering into like the whole conversation around like wait a minute shouldn't you be able to do whatever you want to do and this gets out like well you can't go shoot up heroin well people still fucking do it and i don't see anyone being like yo that's unethical right like i'm a bioethicist and you shouldn't be allowed to do that. No, they make a legal argument. And so it is this very weird thing where I think our, uh, we've tricked ourselves as a society, specifically in America, that there are certain things in

Starting point is 01:27:47 science, math, and technology that are off limits, which means that we are not doing science. If things are off limits from an experimentation standpoint, again, there's the right way to do it. there there's opting in there's consent there's all this stuff but if people are willing to do it and we say you're not allowed to do that or we say um uh that is unethical what's the difference between science and religion yeah and i think a lot of this ethic stuff is just that you know people have different intuitions i get that right like some people they personally wouldn't want like to go through this experiment that's totally fine um people have like intuitions about i don't technology whatever right and so they're like i don't like that but if you say i

Starting point is 01:28:31 don't like that you can't get people you can't get like power to take your side you can't get the government to take your side but if you make the argument no no this is unethical right then that's like a political formula that's a thing that you can go to the government and say it's unethical therefore we should regulate it um an expert in ethics by the way it makes me think of like somebody saying uh i'm an expert in opinions right like like what does that mean yeah yeah uh And then it also, I think a step further is like, as a society, we need certain people to do shit that everyone doesn't want to do. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:29:02 Like the reason why we have a safe country for the most part is because there are bad ass men who are willing to go in the dark of night and kill people in other world. Guess what? Nobody likes talking about it, but I don't want to go do that shit. You don't want to go do that shit. And 99.9% of Americans don't want to go do that shit. Right. But we got some bad motherfuckers that'll go do it for us.

Starting point is 01:29:22 Yeah. And guess what? we celebrate them we do it in this weird way where it's like oh you're you're a navy seal that sounds courageous but like when you really look at like what they're doing on a day-to-day basis it's nasty shit yeah yeah there has to be in a bunch of other fields like what's the equivalent of the group of people who are willing to dedicate their lives to do certain things for some higher cause that the average citizen doesn't want to do but they're willing to do it yeah i think just the entire world is made up of these kinds of people i mean i don't know it feels

Starting point is 01:29:57 it feels squirrely to like be a be a programmer or like be a kind of creator or something and you realize that the building you're sitting in was made by people working at way lower wages than you doing much harder work than you right it's like often these are like illegal immigrants or people who don't even have like um who don't even have basic legal protections and stuff um that's who is basically build a civilization around you just think of like the guy who collects your garbage the guy who's making sure power is running to your house so much of the civilization is just like this api this interface you're connecting to and it required so much hard work um it's like astounding when you think like everything like think about a package you have and

Starting point is 01:30:37 you're like trying to get it to the other side of the country just like traveling the other side of country you can't connect to any corporations you can't connect to any government uh utility or anything you decide to do it yourself it would take you months years you would die on the way right the yeah i think people used to do it right exactly like take the horse and carriage right like we're going west yeah and it literally took months and they had a very high probability of dying right now obviously with certain uh advancements in technology you're unlikely to die but it sure would still take a long time to do it even with a car yeah yeah yeah and i think we also underestimate how much like when we think about history we often think in terms of these activist

Starting point is 01:31:12 movements or we think in terms of these political changes that have um improved lives and so the vision of history you have is very much like um 1776 1865 um 1965 you know like this political movement this activist movement i think the real history of uh the real uh understanding of history would also include maybe it would be more important to include just like technological changes if you think about um we had the green revolution in the 20th century if you uh norman borlau was a guy who created a variety of wheat that was more resistant to it was like more productive many times more productive than the one before and basically that was the thing that prevented like hundreds of millions of people potentially from dying in india and countries like that it said it said that he

Starting point is 01:31:55 probably saved a billion lives wow or think about the uh the haber bosch process for nitrogen fixation which is used to make fertilizer um without the fertilizer that has nitrogen like crops could not grow to anywhere near the capacity they grow and how there would be land would not be as productive agriculturally speaking at all there's an estimate that they allowed 3.2 billion people to live that would not otherwise exist so billions of people just like these technologies you talked about um we don't include nobody knows what these people's names right they're probably the greatest people who ever lived in terms of if you think about their impact um and then they're not included in our history there's one person one person a thousand

Starting point is 01:32:35 years that will be known that lives today satoshi no okay elon musk ah and it's not a guarantee yet yeah he has to get us to mars if he if he figures out mars he lives forever in the in the minds of a kid born a thousand years from now you think you think we'll be able to get there by 2030 the timeline's really hard i think that uh i think spacex will get a vehicle or something to mars um i question will we get a human on to the the surface of mars i don't know the next 20 or 30 years that one's like a tough one now they believe it's going to be in the next eight years which like would be fucking like actually the eight year part of that prediction is crazier to me than like get to mars because it feels like getting to mars is the

Starting point is 01:33:33 foregone conclusion at this point yeah it's the time frame that would be mind-blowing i'm not even sure it's a foregone conclusion like we could have you don't think we'll get to mars or i don't know if it's like if not for elon musk i think it could like could have taken decades more potentially never happened because i don't i don't think unless somebody else like him came along i don't think it was ever even people the thing he did was he allowed people to even imagine possible yeah yeah right and there's still a lot of people who are like why do you think it's possible because this dude said it right like like i don't know he seems to be the expert right and so like if he says it's possible then it must be possible and it kind of goes back to like um uh venture

Starting point is 01:34:12 capital due diligence like like there's some people who do the due diligence and there's other people who say like who's investing oh uh you know x firm all right cool they must have done the due diligence right the problem here is that like i don't have the uh the scientific expertise or knowledge to actually underwrite is it possible or is it not so like to some degree expertise uh is important because we can look to folks right like imagine if every single one of us had to go uh and learn about a virus a vaccine like all this stuff and then come to a conclusion as to like what we should do and then we all took like a democratic vote like that sounds like a nightmare by the way that's what dows are

Starting point is 01:34:50 uh in his current uh but if you think about um kind of like mars it's like yeah i do think that we will get there i just eight years is you know seven and a half years right seems impossible right like it really does like it is hard to think that way uh but i guess if you look back i mean how many flights or how many launches per year was spacex doing seven and a half years ago one maybe i don't know the numbers right but like they weren't doing one like every three days or whatever they're doing you know like the rate of progress there is so incredible that like sure maybe yeah yeah no it's crazy he's an excellent example of one person's vision can have a huge counterfactual impact i think after he uh founded paypal there was like he immediately it wasn't

Starting point is 01:35:52 like he was gonna like take a rest period anything he immediately started working on like tesla it's he had like plans for that immediately um he's like yeah it's astounding when you have a person who's like able to actually make their but think back a thousand years we couldn't name anyone we don't fucking know anybody right like literally no one yeah and guess what they thought they were important they thought their you know contributions to society were essential there's somebody who thought they were the the leader of you know the free world or whatever nobody remembers their names we over the history of earth i don't know 500 people maybe that we can think of that we're like okay these people are really important but the further you get away from their inventions

Starting point is 01:36:43 the less important they become yeah i think it's also another example of the power law you're talking about the mentor where if you think about impact on literature and who you remember shakespeare is like way up here he's like he's like the tesla of literature and then the next person is like probably less than half as important as them in terms of literature and then you have just a long tail of people who are like i'm gonna be a great author and nobody will ever remember your name yeah yeah um or true of philosophers true of like leaders world leaders the the person matters the most is going to matter so much more than everybody else combined also uh if things continue the way that they are going uh uh when we talk about human enhancement um i was thinking

Starting point is 01:37:22 to myself if you walked out on the street in middle america anywhere kind of outside of a tech industry uh kind of a hub and you said uh there's this thing called human enhancement we have uh option a and option b option a is we can make you super intelligent or option b is we can make you ripped with a six pack and like huge biceps yeah what percentage of people would pick super intelligence and what percentage would pick like visual enhancement well what do you what do you think because i have a i have a friend we debate this all the time and he thinks because i'm like okay everybody's gonna be super intelligent because it's like all the parents are gonna be like i want my kid no they want a six pack exactly they want to go they want to go hook up with

Starting point is 01:37:59 people like that's what they want they want the six pack like that's the problem is that like that is human nature right he's not like let me be super intelligent and like change the trajectory of my family and like oh shit no they're like cool if i have a six-pack i go to the beach like maybe i could find somebody that like will want to sleep with me yeah but the crazy like um this is like a i know the almost uh thing you don't want to admit the thing is intelligence is actually correlated with a lot of things like intelligence and good looks are correlated well explain that more which is um if you think about the most intelligent people are usually better looking than people like on average right and the reason is one of the reasons i mean there's

Starting point is 01:38:37 mutational load and there's other kinds of things one of the funny reasons is the most beautiful woman mate with the most intelligent men or just like people who are very competent in getting something done they were successful successful people on average are more intelligent they get the most beautiful woman you know what i mean like that kind of the so you're gonna see i think um and also the most intelligent woman also made with the most knowledge there's like attrition yeah exactly and that isn't nature already doing what we were talking about earlier in terms of picking the embryos like the advantageous embryos yeah i think yeah or i mean there's a disgenic effect because they're not having as many kids so in the sense nature is not picking nature

Starting point is 01:39:13 is segregating them but nature is actually preferring the um like on average this is like you know basic common sense we know that smart people have fewer babies than uh like college graduates have fewer babies than uh you know high school dropouts or something why do you think that is like what's driving that's that's really that's i think an interesting question because you see a broader um you see this throughout not just our society but throughout the world like the societies that are poorer have more kids as societies get wealthier their fertility like drops off a cliff i don't think we have a good answer to that and i think over the long term it's gonna have a big unless we get obviously if we already have agi who cares about the average intelligence right or if

Starting point is 01:39:48 we have human enhancement the dysgenic effect is not going to be that important but if that doesn't happen um i think the dysgenic effect is going to be like by the end of the century will be like two or three a little over three iq points dumber on average than we are now which doesn't sound like a lot because the average is a hundred but a small difference at the mean has a huge impact on the tails so the number of people who have like an iq about 130 will get like cut by more than half especially when the population itself is declining right so yeah i think that's a that's the thing to think about this episode is brought to you by alto ira they can help you invest in bitcoin and crypto in a tax advantage way that helps you preserve your hard-earned money alto's

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Starting point is 01:41:09 can also bridge Bitcoin natively across the Avalanche bridge and take advantage of the thriving DeFi ecosystem in that community? With Core, any crypto user can easily swap assets, display nfts in a beautiful interface and store your assets in a ledger enabled wallet plus you can put real dollars in your core wallet in just a few clicks go to core.app to access the full power of web3 today when we get these like brain computer interfaces going to this like human enhancement and intelligence uh should we be worried that people who opt out for either ethical reasons or just like they're uncomfortable like will they just get left in the dust yeah Or like, how does this work?

Starting point is 01:41:51 Or do we get to a point where they're like, yo, everyone has to do this. We'll just make it like separate reservations for them. They can like live as noble savages. It's a very crazy thing to think about where if, let's say it was a cost thing, right? Should the government say, if you don't have the money to enhance your intelligence,

Starting point is 01:42:11 then like, we're going to help you do that. Like that's going to become a conversation 100%. uh at the same time do the people who aren't opting in with their own money like you're not putting that chip in my brain and like i don't want to participate because my government's telling me to do it yeah i i think i think uh it'll be interesting there obviously will be a lot of people who reject working with that kind of stuff i think probably the reality is that they're not going to be that economically or politically important the the opposite hypothesis is that oh they're going to be like um they're going to be a minority of economic value like most of the economic value

Starting point is 01:42:50 is going to generate people who have been enhanced but they're going to still have if it's still democracy then they're still going to have a lot of political power if they're political power they can just like i don't know make it illegal or something but the difficulty is like how do you make it illegal somebody can just get a visa to go to panama or you know singapore is like some country which allows it you go do medical tourism you're actually making it more difficult for that that means that the elite people can still do it right they can just take a trip uh but the middle class people who could have actually done it they might not be able to um so if you just like add regulations you might actually be making inequality worse i think our redistribution genetic redistribution

Starting point is 01:43:25 in terms of just giving you these services i think it's probably going to be have you heard this is gonna be a crazy uh thing that i don't know why i know this uh have you heard of the brazilian butt lift you know what this is is it like the thing that kim kardashian has i'm sure she has it right but basically it's a surgical procedure uh which i'm not an expert on unfortunately. Uh, but they basically enhance your butt by doing some sort of like butt lift. And I, I believe that it is, uh, they put, um, uh, similar to like a breast implant or something, right. But in the butt, the reason why I know what a Brazilian butt lift is, is because one day I was doom scrolling on Twitter, wasting time. And, uh, I saw a photo and it was in the Atlanta

Starting point is 01:44:07 airport and somebody had taken a photo and bent and said something to the effect of like, uh, man, these bbls are really out of control and i was like what the hell's a bbl right like and it was literally the in the photo was just a line of wheelchairs of all like women maybe between the ages of you know again i'm guessing from the photo but like maybe like 25 and like 40 and i was like what's going on in atlanta right like what's a bbl and i google whatever uh probably got targeted with a million ads like some dude googling bbl and uh one of the things was that there's been an explosion of uh medical tourism i'll put under the category of people leaving the united states going to i forget one of the countries in latin america to get these done and

Starting point is 01:44:57 then they come back but once you get it done you can't walk very well so they need the in the beginning right after medical procedure right um and so what the photo was was a bunch of people coming back who were now in a long line of wheelchairs because they all had gone and like from this country and gotten these bbls and so i just remember sitting myself thinking like holy shit like this human enhancement stuff is already here to some degree we think of it as cosmetic right whether people agree with it don't agree with it whatever it's obviously happening uh uh but like that's what people are interested in yeah and so like what's the difference between the bbl where you have to fly out of the country to go get it done to hey i want to go get a brain

Starting point is 01:45:39 computer interface yeah i i wonder how common those are because i i don't know just walking around miami i might have seen a few of them with that or the girls are just gifted but it goes it goes back to uh society evolves that there's change that happens um and what is aspirational or what is uh kind of celebrated is emulated through a society right and this has been true of human nature for thousands and thousands of years uh but that's usually physical so what clothes you wear how you look right actions you do like all that stuff intelligence is this weird thing it's invisible yeah you know it when you interact with it and you have heard rumors or somebody can tell you oh that person is very smart or you assume because somebody accomplished

Starting point is 01:46:30 something that they are intelligent but you can't actually feel it you can't see it you can't you know whatever i think that that's a huge issue as to why when it comes to human enhancement people won't opt for that you can't flex your intelligence on instagram yep i think you're right no i think intelligence is one of the things where we have a difficulty talking about it because we don't want to admit that it's a big part of its inherited um and then there's actual difference genetic differences between individuals whereas you know people know that people look different right like there's differences in height there's differences even in health uh genetically but i think we're gonna have to face the biological reality of intelligence when

Starting point is 01:47:11 modifying it biologically it's going to be possible it well it already is possible to some degree right and one of the fascinating debates right now is around uh like ritalin or like adhd like all this stuff and it's well documented that like when i was in school adhd was not like a popular thing now it's like every kid has adhd let's drug them all up every adult has adhd apparently every adult apparently has adhd too yeah and so like why is it okay for us to like stuff pills down kids throats right and like get them drugged up versus hey let's put a computer to make you more intelligent like it feels both are going in your body yeah sure when you digest one is more of like a surgical procedure so like there's a severity

Starting point is 01:47:56 uh difference but it sure seems like it's probably safer uh in the end state to do the surgery than to keep like putting pills in our children and drugging them up yeah especially because those are just transient benefits right like you get rid of the drug you might even be worse off because you've built up tolerance or something and i don't think um there is difficult i don't think a drug will ever be able to like make you smarter it may just like those just are stimulants that help you focus right but to make you smarter you actually change the architecture of the brain and that's not going to be an easy thing to do after your brain is already developed i don't know how neural link stuff will develop but yeah um whereas i think yeah i think uh your brain on

Starting point is 01:48:39 adderall and your brain on embryo selection there's gonna be a big difference yeah um you wrote a piece about the myth of the myth of a well-read person what is this yeah so people have this idea that people don't realize that you can actually know everything. Okay. And I, so I have a podcast and I get a chance to talk to these people who have comprehensive knowledge about everything that matters, everything you can know, um, like Tyler Cowen, Bernhard Barth, these kinds of people. And there's nothing you could say to them that they haven't already considered. There's no objection that they haven't already looked at, no implication that they haven't already, um, analyzed. And the thing is, these people are just relentless infovores. And if you think about the

Starting point is 01:49:27 kind, the amount of knowledge you need to understand a subject, right? So take economics, for example. Let's say you've read a dozen books about economics, not just random books, but like books that give you a broad explanatory understanding of what's happening. Then you do that for biology. Then you do that for computer science. How long does it take you to read 12 books and be able to get a serious effort at it, right? You can do this for multiple disciplines in a single year now do this for the rest of your life if you read the right book every once every week or something for the rest of your life you could know 80 about every single field in the world right and people have this idea that oh knowledge is so specialized the you can't like

Starting point is 01:50:05 you know there's like new books every single day that you can't possibly ingest all the information if by information you just mean like you're memorizing trivial details like you're memorizing the gdp of different asian countries like how many ant species there are yeah sure you can't memorize all the information but just these basic explanatory frameworks they don't change that often in fact they if you think there's been a relative stagnation economically and in terms of knowledge recently they actually are turning over very infrequently like quantum mechanics right it's like you talk about quantum mechanics you're like oh that's super woo that's like a new thing in physics it's 100 years old right you these things don't change that much or like

Starting point is 01:50:40 neo-darwinian synthesis 50 years old fear of computation almost 100 years old so you can learn about these fundamental ideas and people don't seem to take this prospect seriously because how many people do you know who are actually making an effort to know everything i think it's a thing you can do and i think very few people are attempting it why is it important to know everything i think the returns to knowing more things have increased over time so if you think about like a farmer in the 17th century right even if he knew everything about everything all the knowledge i was able at the time what is he going to do with it right like he's not he only needs to know knowledge about the thing he's particularly working on like a book on

Starting point is 01:51:17 guano farming or tree cutting or something whereas today if you understand for example how economic growth works how finance works and you also understand let's say how nuclear fusion works and you also understand computer science you can put marriage the software and the hardware parts you can like build a multi-billion dollar business right or you can become like you are a content creator who's able to synthesize all this information and put it together and you can have like a huge brand that way so the returns to knowing about a lot of things in a deep fundamental way have increased a lot over time like i think today that i think elon musk is a great example of this this guy knows a shit ton about their stories

Starting point is 01:51:56 about he would like show up to parties after the paypal days um and then he would just like be reading of like a russian uh russian textbook by rocketry or something that that kind of him just having a obsession with learning about different uh fields reading textbooks on that papers on that that was the look at the returns he's had on that right yeah it also reminds me of this idea uh generalist versus specialist and obviously specialists are very important in certain fields you know uh you want your doctor to be a specialist you want your uh lawyer probably to be a specialist um and many other you know types of fields uh but the generalist i think society uh based on books and and articles and even twitter and the way the conversation plays out generalist

Starting point is 01:52:39 means knowing a little bit about a whole bunch of things, but really what it sounds like you're making an argument for is knowing a good amount about the right things. And there's a difference there. It's not just, Hey, do I, I've heard of quantum mechanics, right? And I know what field it is in. And maybe I read, you know, a one paragraph description one time, but if that is one of the 50 things that matter and are the right things to know about, then can I know 80% or can I know 50 about that field uh that's very different than like an inch deep and a mile wide yeah i know i think that's a great point you made because a big failure mode you can have is people when people say generalist they say i'm a generalist right often what they mean is like i yeah i don't

Starting point is 01:53:24 have uh specialty any like i don't know that much about any particular thing but like i don't know i've like looked into certain things um and i think this is a big problem with uh not a huge problem i think this is something to think about when you're reading these pop side books often they don't give you that deep an understanding of the subject they're talking about there's a really good some good really good exceptions to this but yeah if you take a serious effort to like actually understanding things which is very different from how do you do it like you said the myth of the myth of a well-read person is it just reading no well it really helps that i have a podcast because i can't just uh passively ingest information i have to really think about what the

Starting point is 01:54:03 point the person is making what implications their argument has what contradictions it has um and that i think uh that that really helps me make sure that i'm really understanding things in a deep fundamental way i really think that the thing i'm trying to do with the podcast i've had it for um i've been working on it full-time for not that long uh i'm trying to develop a worldview and by worldview i don't mean like a political worldview i don't like you know who should we vote for in the next election but just in terms of like where we are in history what is going to matter in this century? What is going to matter in the long term? It sounds vague and ambiguous when you describe it generically, but it requires you to understand a lot of fields deeply, which I

Starting point is 01:54:44 don't yet, but I'm trying to. You can't make an assessment on the broader question of where we are in history unless you understand where AI is going, where nuclear is going, where human enhancement is going, where the economy is going, what the rate of economic growth is going to be over time, how society and culture are going to change over time. You need to understand all these fields in i think there's a very people in the world and i'm by no means one of these people i think there's very people in the world who've actually developed a comprehensive worldview and i think when they do it's really remarkable and those people are really valuable so let's just go through this because this is a fascinating exercise uh develop a worldview is a very

Starting point is 01:55:19 intentional action i'm gonna go develop worldview why is that important is it just it makes you a better thinker it allows you to pick a occupation to go after like what is the importance of selecting that as okay this is an activity worth pursuing yeah usually when something is really rare um it often ends up being valuable there's if you look at a specialization in academia and other parts of the world there's very people whose job it is to just think about the whole picture um and so it is a rare thing to do and you ask like okay well why is it valuable just because it's rare doesn't necessarily make it valuable that's a fair point but if you look at some of the most successful people in the world like think of peter tiller right they say that his um his

Starting point is 01:56:02 hedge fund is basically like a think tank rolled up in a venture capital firm rolled up in a hedge fund but it starts off you look at what he spends his days doing there's you know he's like having seminars on strauss or hegel or something it starts off with these like very fundamental first principles thinking about like very different sectors are headed i think if you want to find the most important things to work on which is probably what you should be doing with your career you it's it would be very strange if you just accidentally happen to work on them to work on them. You need to have, you actually need a worldview that first actually points out to you what the most important things to work on are. Right. Um, I guess that you don't need to like, obviously it's more into

Starting point is 01:56:39 like actually start working on the thing itself as well. Right. And that's also part of how you develop that worldview. But yeah, to actually focus on the most important things, you need a worldview and that doesn't necessarily, I'm not just talking about like a philosophy or humanity stuff. It also requires like technical expertise in a lot of fields. Okay. So you say, I want to go develop a worldview. How do you then choose what are the things that are important within that? There's a million topics. You could go to a, uh, the New York public library and walk around and there's section after section after section. How do you know which ones are worth spending time on and which ones do you pass on? Right. And I think that actually is part of the worldview

Starting point is 01:57:15 is, well, one of the things the worldview tells you is what is the most important thing? What are of the most important things to be focusing on um i think you can it's very easy to see when something is not going to be the most important thing like i think it's important to take a barbell view of how to think about the the most important things are not if you look at the news right it's things that are transient and trivial people say the news is too pessimistic or it's too optimistic it's neither optimistic or pessimistic enough it doesn't focus enough on the upside the things that are really going to revolutionize the world you know new technologies um and you know like let's say making steel gets much cheaper what kinds of new things can

Starting point is 01:57:53 construct let's say batteries get much better what kinds of new uh what kinds of new uh robots and stuff uh you know cars things can be built it also doesn't focus enough on the downsides you know like what happens if there's a man-made pandemic a lab leak a new lab leak um that kills billions of people right uh what happens if the person who develops ai somebody like china where their uh their norms and values are not going to be aligned with ours so you it's not going to be the thing that most people are thinking about because the thing that most people are thinking about is usually something that people have already looked into and also it's likely to not be like you're just thinking about like what do people talk about day to day it's going to be the

Starting point is 01:58:32 things that nobody's talking about and but that requires you to yeah it's i think it's a good question i honestly don't have a good answer to like where do you start except just like look at everything and try to understand in a fundamental way. And then once you get into one of the topics, let's just use quantum mechanics as an example and say, Hey, I believe that this is an important field to understand better. What does that process look like to go from? I know nothing to I've got 25, 50, 80% understanding of this field. Yeah. I, um, I actually were learning about quantum computing was a thing that really made me decide that I wanted to do something more interesting with my career because yeah, I was taking Scott Ernst as like probably the

Starting point is 01:59:10 greatest uh living theoretical computer scientist in the world and i was taking his class on quantum computing and you know you you you think about how quantum computing works if you take the multiverse view of quantum mechanics it's literally different branches of the universe colliding to form an answer to a computer science problem you have um it's such an interesting problem and it's so much more interesting than like i don't know like building the database for google or something so but yeah so how would you learn about that i think um it's important to not get less in the details, but also to make sure that you're understanding. Uh, I think usually the best textbook on a subject are actually pretty good at helping you understand things. Um,

Starting point is 01:59:48 generally it's, you, you should do the exercises. You need to, um, you, yeah, you, uh, you don't need to memorize trivial details, but you should also understand the actual fundamentals in a deep way. Yeah. And then when you start to look at the, I'll call it like base knowledge, it's almost like you're going to the source materials, whether it's the textbook or whatever, to learn about the, information. You developed this worldview. Are there folks that you think have developed those worldviews that you're like, okay, you mentioned Peter Thiel. Are there others that you say, hey, these folks seem to have figured it out? Yeah. I think somebody like Berne Hobart, Tyler Cowen, there's a few people like this. And the thing is, there's not that many of them,

Starting point is 02:00:26 but you ingest their information. Will McCaskill. These people have different worldviews, right? That's what makes them interesting. It'd be really strange if you just happened to land upon the same worldview, if you're both thinking from different premises. they have different worldviews but the implication of these worldviews means that once they come out of that uh exercise of thinking about different problems um then they come up with these really interesting problems to work on uh those are some great examples uh but like for example one we have school is um this philosopher who has this new book on long-termism how to improve the future and so he just starts from the first premise of

Starting point is 02:01:00 well let's make sure the future goes well okay what are the things that could matter for making sure the future goes well well one thing is if society collapses we want to make sure that we can restart society okay well how do we do that well we would need another industrial revolution if the society collapses what do we need for industrial revolution well we would need coal right because coal is the easiest thing to find and burn photovoltaics and solar and stuff they just degrade really fast nuclear will degrade over time so you just need to like dig up some coal and start burning up the furnaces again okay so maybe we should um just conserve some easy to access ground coal that's close to the ground. Okay, so just starting from first principles, you come to

Starting point is 02:01:37 the conclusion that we need to set up some sanctuaries of coal, right? That's just one example of the strange implications that come from thinking of first principles. Austin Vernon comes from an engineering background. He has this blog that not that many people know about. He comes to this conclusion, he's looking at the declining cost of energy over time. He says, okay, if energy keeps declining over time, at some point, it will become economical to take co2 in the air in the atmosphere and use um electrolysis to uh convert that into actual materials used to build things or used as biofuels like ethanol formic acid things like that okay once that becomes economical people are going to start doing that a lot and once they start doing

Starting point is 02:02:15 that there's going to be a shortage of co2 in the air right okay so he starts off this very basic first principle thinking of what is the cost of energy what are the trends in energy cost okay maybe that means that there's a energy there's a short co2 shortage in the air which is much more dangerous than overproduction of co2 and does he put a timeline on something like that yeah he well he it's not super precise but he thinks by 2100 it'll be will be negative carbon in a way that's like substantially negative carbon i think it's at 2070 actually which goes counter to pretty much the entire mainstream conversation at the moment of uh we're going to be in the opposite situation You know, I think that's really strange, really interesting and strange.

Starting point is 02:02:55 If you look at some of the predictions throughout history that people have had, often they've actually identified the correct problem. They get the direction of the vector exactly opposite. Think of population, right? So in the 70s, there's books about how the world population is going gangbusters and, you know, there's going to be overpopulation. And if you think of it from first principles, it makes a lot of sense, right? The people who have the most babies are going to eventually make up most of the population. Over time, that's going to drive selection towards people who have more babies. And if you have a lot of babies, there's going to be a Malthusian thing where there's not enough food to feed all the people.

Starting point is 02:03:29 We'll hit the carrying capacity of the earth, and everybody over that will die of famine, plague, war, all kinds of nasty shit. So first principles, it makes a lot of sense. And they were right that population is the thing that's going to matter a lot. But the thing that actually looks like it's going to be, the trend is going to be that we won't have enough population. the real problem the real problem for civilization will be that

Starting point is 02:03:48 there's not enough people and it would be very similar to the carbon I'm not saying this is likely but with the climate change thing it would turn out

Starting point is 02:03:54 the real problem in 2100 is that there's not enough CO2 in the atmosphere right we identify the correct problem

Starting point is 02:04:01 which is the order the direction of it completely wrong I think this is an interesting trend it's like we didn't even identify the right problem

Starting point is 02:04:08 we identified the right topic right CO2 everyone thinks it's one thing but they misjudge and it ends up being the opposite problem.

Starting point is 02:04:17 And I've said this to you before, but to me, you're on the highway and sometimes there's an exit, which it looks like you're just kind of veering off the highway. It's not a very kind of high degree change in direction. It's not a 90 degree, hit the stop sign, go right. It's just, hey, we're all going together at 65 miles an hour

Starting point is 02:04:39 because we follow the speed limit. And then somebody in the far right lane, they just kind of peel off onto the exit. Some of those exits continue in the similar direction for a little bit, but some exits end up actually being 180 degrees and you basically do a 180, right? You just come around and then you end up going in the opposite direction. And that's what it feels like, which is when you're going down the highway of these ideas, you can actually end up in the far right lane or you can end up in the second to right lane. and that determines even though it doesn't look like a huge uh kind of divergence at the onset of the exit one keeps going straight and one of them ends up going in the other direction uh and

Starting point is 02:05:22 so to me there's a lot of these right where we end up seeing it what i don't know is how do we get people to understand maybe your conclusion is wrong you have identified the right topic to discuss but your conclusion is wrong yeah and to be clear by the way i think i think this is just like a hypothetical future the climate change thing i think probably it's more likely to be an overproduction of co2 than you think so well yeah so why do you think his analysis is wrong uh he requires energy to get significantly cheaper than it is now and i think that's possible but i'm not sure uh that let's say that that's at 50 right that energy gets an order of magnitude cheaper and then you have the probability that okay then people will really want to take carbon

Starting point is 02:06:03 dioxide out of the atmosphere to do these things instead of like making manufacturing these material is another way that's another probability i'd add and you just like chain together all the things that ought to be true for his vision to be true then you get to like something under 50 percent right um was that the same analysis in hindsight of the 1970s overpopulation like you had to believe multiple things no i think you're right because like their analysis the people who thought overpopulation was going to be a problem their analysis was pretty straightforward right It's just like people have kids, we have limited amounts of food, so then there won't be enough food and land for them. And if you were the contrarian in the 1970s, would the analysis have simply been, yes, there are people having a lot of babies today, but as the entire society becomes wealthier and there's like economic mobility, we know that there's less kids in those wealthier families.

Starting point is 02:06:56 and so therefore population overall declines and society across the world but specifically in the western world is naturally mobile upwards but how would they have even known that at the time because there were very few wealthy societies in the 19th I think fertility in the US was probably

Starting point is 02:07:11 I mean it was starting to decline because of the sexual revolution and stuff but even as recently as like yeah the 50s obviously baby boomers and stuff the fertility was super high how would you have possibly predicted back then even today we don't understand why fertility is declining right so how could you have known before it happened in the 50s that would have happened yeah it would have been really

Starting point is 02:07:32 tough and that's another thing about that predicting the future it's like really hard to know what you know we talk about like human entertainment ai energy supernova things i think the probably the most important things are probably things we haven't even realized are going to be really important i think it's really hard to predict the future it's definitely it's nearly impossible to predict the future um especially across so many different dimensions right so again, it goes back to almost being prepared, right, rather than a prediction. Can you simply know a deep amount about some good, important things, and then you're best prepared to handle whatever comes next, although you cannot predict it, right? Yeah. One of the problems that I

Starting point is 02:08:08 actually believe has much more impact on society than, one, people understand, you know, in terms a severity problem, but two is how far reaching the, um, problem, uh, or impact is, uh, is the declining testosterone. Yeah. Like 10 years ago, no one was really talking about it. Now I think there's like a kind of a subset of the population who says, Hey, you know, like red flag. Like, I think there might be a problem here. Um, my guess is five, 10 years from now, like it'll be a pretty widely accepted, like, why is this happening? Maybe we don't understand it, but like this is a problem. Um, but what's fascinating to me is if you look on the, uh, kind of small scale for one single person, the impact of low testosterone versus high testosterone is like

Starting point is 02:08:55 completely different people, right. In terms of energy, uh, productivity, sleep quality, health. I mean, like there's, it's so far reaching that it feels like if you then say, okay, across society, it's like, we're going to essentially downgrade all of these individuals in terms of performance, quality of life, all this stuff due to lower testosterone. And then we're going to add them all together to make up society. Yeah. Pretty important issue that, you know, we don't understand. Uh, and we probably underestimate, uh, the impact, like how much of, uh, the, a perceived increase in violence that we see, uh, is due to lower testosterone that leads to mental health issues that then leads to violence. And again, I'm not making the case that that's

Starting point is 02:09:44 what's happening, but if that 20 years from now there was an analysis and we could make those connections, we would all be left scratching our heads and like, holy shit, like no one saw that. Yeah. And so maybe it's not right, but who knows? I think you're at the, the, um, if you think about the difference between like a 20-year-old guy and a 40-year-old guy in terms of like their worldviews what kinds of problems like how how much energy they have like what kinds of risks they're willing to take if you think that happens over the entire society has turns from like basically oh the difference between a 20-year-old and a 40-year-old in terms of yes like being more risk averse uh be one of the things testosterone does is just makes effort fun yes right that's

Starting point is 02:10:26 why like 20-year-olds will like work you know 14 hours like you know in programming it's like a common thing right um just and then obviously like it's less common to see that as people get older and also that's why they're like these examples of like 20 year olds would like build these huge obviously it's the median startup founder is older but a lot of these people who end up becoming huge founders i don't know maybe uh it's like maybe jeff bezos is probably like i don't know a trt or something um jeff bezos today's a little different than jeff bezos 1999 yes it's kind of insane he looks younger than 20 years ago like i was not alive when he looked older than he looks now um but you know that i think testosterone is really interesting

Starting point is 02:11:09 because they've done these experiments on birds there's i forget the species but it's like a monogamous bird species the males of the species have high testosterone um like just naturally when they're single when they mate and they form a monogamous pair and especially after i have kids their testosterone just goes down declines um by like many factors uh and yeah so part of that is like you don't want to be this aggressive risk-taking person after you've already had kids you want to like make sure things are safe and low volatility once you have kids but the thing is there's more single men now so you would think that testosterone would increase as people being single increases um it's really mysterious i don't know if you have a good

Starting point is 02:11:53 understanding of it could be the um it could be like the receipts and chemicals and i just this morning i was getting the coffee and then it was like you got to carry this receipt from here to here uh they feel like make you take what is the argument for receipts i've heard water bottles and things like that but what is i don't remember the exact thing but like apparently the receipts have some chemical that uh through your skin will have some adverse impact on your testosterone so like stop receipts is going to become like a social movement to like like get rid of it yeah killing the environment wasn't a big enough deal right it's like but like to fuck with our testosterone when receipts are gone yeah fuck it we'll do digital um what do you think it is

Starting point is 02:12:31 like why are men's testosterone levels decreasing uh i don't think it's one single factor like these things are uh uh usually based on historical uh examples like multiple things that come together uh i definitely believe it has something to do with uh with water um both from like the tap and also, uh, water bottles. I mean, if you just look, we have a bunch of water bottles here. Um, it's going to turn me into a femme boy. Yeah. Well, if, if you also think about, um, uh, we're, we're talking earlier today about, uh, do you spend more time with your feet on the ground and a standing and walking position, or do you spend more time with your ass in a seat? Yeah. Right. And, and what we're talking about was, uh, should you spend more money on your

Starting point is 02:13:15 shoes or on the chair you sit in every day? Right. Like in some, in some ways, like people think of like oh i want to be comfortable when i'm walking like they're my everyday shoes but like the chair you sit in you actually may spend more time there than with the shoes on and so uh same thing goes for uh consuming liquids do you consume more liquids uh in a water bottle or without a water bottle right and i'm not talking like you know people have like these like uh titanium or whatever i think i'm talking about like actual plastic water bottles like if you start to almost audit your like liquid intake my guess is people would be shocked at the percentage of water they drink that that of a water bottle versus something else yeah and so

Starting point is 02:13:56 again there's debate as is it actually water bottles is it not whatever but like that seems to be have some impact to it the third thing is uh shit's safe like we live in the safest time in human history right like you don't need to uh be worried for the most part right uh that when you walk down the street someone may try to kill you you're not worried about a wild animal again for the most part you know coming into where you sleep and killing you at night you're not worried about going out and hunting for food um and so just naturally i think humans evolve and so like you get some drop that doesn't explain the significant drop in you know the last 20 years uh but definitely the longer term trend and then i think that there's uh uh a social thing and this is where

Starting point is 02:14:44 people get real weird and they don't like talking about it but like there is a very obvious at least to me uh trend of uh masculinity being uh maybe not deterred but definitely uh adding more friction to encouraging that and so you can see it in the type of content that is created from you know Hollywood and things like that. Uh, you can see it in, um, uh, social media and kind of sentiment changes. Uh, but also you can just see it in like what we ask of people in society. And some of this is not like a man thing. If we are a society that says, okay, we used to be a hundred percent capitalism. And now maybe we're like, ah, capitalism is good. But like now there's some times where like socialism is good. Right. And we don't say it that way, but like, that's what ends

Starting point is 02:15:34 up happening. What it does is it dulls, right? I think dulling is a good word because you don't take away certain aspects socially. What you're doing is you're dulling the self-reliance, the independence, the like kind of characteristics that for thousands of years, masculinity was very similar to. And so when you start to look at it, it's like you can't point to any one thing and you can't even point to one thing in the last 20 years necessarily it's all of this stuff coming together and so if you said to yourself like forget like maybe water and plastics and things like that like what would have the rate of decline been anyways right and what how had it fallen from you know i don't know a thousand a.d right to like 1500

Starting point is 02:16:19 yeah yeah yeah no i think um if you look at the history of violence or history where else would um you see i think it's a good thing that you see a huge declines in violence over time even if you look at the time that testosterone is decreasing let's say the last few decades look at like crime rates in the 90s look at crime rates now there's been a recent resurgence but over time crime rates have been like dropping a lot i think that probably has to do with the fact that there's less testosterone um just read like or read the iliad or the odyssey or something like people are constantly getting butchered um and i think that probably was not just the story i mean the thing itself was a story but i think that was an indication of the kind of society

Starting point is 02:17:00 these people lived in in terms of the ever-present nature of violence um of genocide of war and so you know maybe the way to think about declining testosterone is just as like declining volatility in the sense that yes you'll have fewer criminals if there's less testosterone um but you'll also have fewer Jeff Bezos than Elon Musk's because one of the things that drives them, at least when they were young and building up their career capital, building up their skills is I'm guessing the average startup founder probably has more testosterone than the average person. I was going to ask, I wonder if you could break down the person who takes the job at Google versus the person who starts a company. Right. And you did an entire study. Uh, the expectation, I think again,

Starting point is 02:17:40 you'd have to run the experiment to know would be that the startup founder would have higher testosterone right than the person who took the job at google and then i wonder if there was even a difference between the successful founder and the not successful founder right now some of it's outside their control there's market conditions there's all this type of stuff um but if there was a difference it would be interesting uh and you can imagine the backlash to a study that uh if it got to the conclusion and linked higher testosterone levels with higher success there would be fucking chaos right people would be like oh that's bullshit whatever because then all of a sudden the question would become should rather than sticking computers in people's brains like

Starting point is 02:18:18 it's the first step uh hey don't drug people with ritalin like instead just like hand out testosterone to people right like like all i'm saying is look at the amazon stock price in the last five years that's all i'm saying um but regarding the chemicals in the water i there's there's this blogger slime old time old that have been looking at the increase in obesity over the last few decades and their theory it's not just like people are eating shittier food it's also that maybe there's chemicals in the water they're trying to figure out what it is that are um that are causing this increase in obesity and one other pieces of evidence is if you look at places that are higher in elevation like places like colorado

Starting point is 02:19:01 they have lower obesity rates than places that are lower in elevation and next to rivers so think of like louisiana or texas or something those places have higher obesity rates so if it's and if it's just like runoff of chemicals that's exactly what you'd expect but how much of it is just like people in colorado like to go outside and people in louisiana you know the generalization would be like they go you know to mardi gras and yeah fucking fried chicken no i think that's right That's probably the good null hypothesis. I think that's also good. Well, and food is a fascinating thing.

Starting point is 02:19:33 So there's a small town in North Carolina that I drove through two years ago or so. And when we were driving through, Polina said to me, she goes, wow. I was like, what? She's like, look. And we were at a red light and we could see kind of through the town.

Starting point is 02:19:49 And there was, I don't know, maybe three lights or so, four lights, right? And it's next to a highway. So it's like right off the exit of the highway. every single place that you could get food was completely unhealthy. McDonald's, Wendy's, you know, all these things. And then it was like, you know, a cracker barrel, right? I mean, like, you know, every single thing.

Starting point is 02:20:14 And it was like, if you live in this town, other than go to the grocery store, there's not a single thing from what we could see that was a healthy option. and so low cost convenient and the abundance of options right ends up leading people to bad health and diets but also when you layer in some of this other stuff of sedentary lifestyle you know whatever and then you've got the genetics on top of it like it just stacks on top and I actually think for the average American living in a small town the deck is completely stacked against them doesn't mean it is not possible to live a healthy lifestyle to be in shape to do all this stuff but like it sure as hell ain't easy and so that then i think is also a contributor like you have

Starting point is 02:20:59 the stuff in the water but like you sure aren't optimizing your testosterone if you're eating mcdonald's every day yeah right and so how much is food how much is water how much is social like there's a lot of stuff in there that just ultimately leads to man testosterone is going down and like we probably should try to figure it out yeah and i think probably obesity is maybe the most important if you think about like what is the thing that's the biggest factor to testosterone declining i wouldn't be shocked if it's just obesity like people are fatter i think fat if i remember correctly becoming fatter decreases your testosterone or increases your estrogen or something like that uh because yeah obviously like the fat stores hormones um

Starting point is 02:21:35 but yeah i think this is not just testosterone but this is like a broader thing about society over time becoming more complacent and part of this is testosterone declines but if you look at like new businesses that are created you know you hear about these stories of startups and uh you know uber you know facebook google actually over time if you look at the number of new businesses that are created it's been declining over time um as people get wealthier you know you have more regulations you have a bigger welfare state maybe these things make sense at some level but also it's maybe it's like you basically you're the casino you're like one big if you're like a wealthy country and you're like okay i'm just gonna cash it in and so i'm

Starting point is 02:22:15 not gonna have economic growth but i'm just gonna like redistribute the wealth we already have that's basically what you're doing right you're like leaving the casino um but yeah it is concerning that over time wealthy societies become stagnant and complacent like this where they have regulations that make growth really hard um there's i i guess like even hormonal changes like literally the testosterone goes down over time yeah 100 you wrote a piece about popularizers or intellectual market makers uh what do you mean by popularizers and then what is this idea of like an intellectual market maker yeah so if you think about what a market maker does right a market maker is somebody who provides a service in the market um you go like robin hood or something uh you can see that

Starting point is 02:22:53 you can like buy any stock you want anytime you want why is that possible it's because there's somebody who provides a service where they're gonna buy your stock at let's say one dollar and one cent they're gonna sell it at 99 cents they're gonna make two cents of money off of that um so you're paying a little bit of fee to them to provide liquidity to take it off your hands anytime you want um and so you don't have to like wait for another counterparty to come around to be able to sell that stock um i think if you think about what popularizers do so people think like public intellectuals pop side book writers i think they actually provide a very similar service in the intellectual sphere so you think of somebody like malcolm gladwell right how does he

Starting point is 02:23:29 how did he achieve his notoriety one of the things is he takes this undiscovered study about hockey players and their birthdays and he converts it into this new york times best-selling book called outliers and then he makes money off that spread right and the thing about market makers is they provide an actually useful service so it's useful to both all three counterparties um similar with like gladwell brought up the profile of this guy who wrote a study about hockey players he brought like a useful book to consumers and he's making money off that spread um and people degrade these kinds of popular oh it's like alternative right you hear talk about like you all know harry's book it's like oh these are ideas people already had i think people miss the point that if you don't

Starting point is 02:24:11 have these intellectual market makers if you don't have these public intellectuals you don't have liquidity market makers provide liquidity right so you don't have liquidity in the intellectual marketplace and you don't have liquidity ideas can be exchanged there's not as much turnover and ideas people aren't exposed to ideas just if you didn't have market makers you couldn't like easily buy stocks off robin hood so people um when you think about it this way you understand the value that these popularized are providing you don't just think of them like oh they're just like regurgitating information the idea of a popularizer being an intellectual market maker uh is not new like you've said it in a way that that is new uh it is itself an example of intellectual market

Starting point is 02:24:54 making well guess who uh is probably the world's most famous popularizer thomas edison oh interesting say more thomas edison's entire model was that he would go find young incredibly smart uh innovators get their ideas bring them in fund them yeah and then help popularize those ideas huh so edison didn't create electricity edison didn't create you know all these different things but in some way it was a cross between like in today's society um y combinator and like joe rogan's podcast coming together to help discover fund operationally you know increase uh productivity and then popularize the idea and so in some way it wasn't write a book right it was more so like uh what we would consider uh action or productivity

Starting point is 02:26:00 but like at the end of the day like that's that was what the business he was in yeah yeah it's also sort of like peter teal right like him scouting out talent it's like he's basically market making between the talented scouts and the companies he creates and you know funds so yeah actually that's a really interesting way to think about people who spot talent and spot new ideas we interrupt this podcast to tell you about the most anticipated crypto event of the year masari's mainnet conference 2022 is happening this year september 21st to the 23rd in new york city it's three days of can't be missed keynotes fireside chats demos networking and more they'll have folks like Ryan Selkis of Masari interviewing Ripple's Brad Garlinghouse, and that one is going

Starting point is 02:26:42 to be absolute fireworks. They also have keynotes from Balaji Sreenivasan and OpenSea's Devin Finzer. You can get $300 off if you go to mainnet.events. Again, just type in www.mainnet.events, use promo code POMP, and you'll get $300 off. I'll see you this fall at Mainnet 2022. This episode is brought to you by BCB Group. With a dedicated focus on institutional payment services bcb group provides business banking cryptocurrency and foreign exchange market liquidity for many of the world's largest crypto engaged financial institutions the bcb business accounts allow businesses to load fiat currency and cryptocurrencies for payments operations and trading purposes bcb's blink network is the european crypto industry's first instant settlements

Starting point is 02:27:26 network and one of the first real-time payment networks of its kind to allow free real-time transactions across fiat and digital currencies bcb's vision is to empower the global financial revolution through sustainable and innovative banking find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com slash pomp today bcbgroup.com slash pomp innovators if you have to choose between finding somebody who is high performance high intellect outlier potential or like high volatility as we talked about earlier or somebody who is well versed at management and all this stuff the difference between the best investors in the world and the top quartile is that the best investors will pick the high volatility person interesting not the high management

Starting point is 02:28:13 person how do you find people who are high volatility what is it about their past about their presentation that you can tell this person's gonna the pattern that there almost is no pattern which is why they're they're high volatile um and uh probably the place that i find the most of them is on twitter interesting and they're usually talking about stuff that uh they almost never have a lot of followers right or a lower amount than you would expect yeah um they're usually talking about weird things uh and uh they usually actually you can tell if you read through their tweets they are high volatility like there's times where you can tell like okay this is like maybe in the content there's volatility so like they're talking about this one extreme thing then

Starting point is 02:28:55 they're talking about another extreme thing they're talking about this other and like you're like oh this is kind of all over the place but you realize it's because they're like a curious person or they're like high intelligence they're trying to learn or whatever uh there's volatility from an emotional standpoint so there's uh they get really excited they get not so excited and like that high uh emotion volatility ends up uh being something that you can tell if somebody's created uh tweeted enough or something on twitter and then when you talk to them you definitely can Um, and then also, uh, I think that you can tell, uh, based on ambition. So if you talk to somebody for long enough, you can tell a high volatility, uh, to the upside in terms of they're very,

Starting point is 02:29:34 very ambitious about some things. And then there is almost a complete counterbalance in that they are, uh, so disinterested and, uh, completely, uh, bored by things that actually usually society would be you know uh super excited about so like a good example would be i want to solve this really really hard problem and i don't care if i make any money right and you're like man those like those are two different ends of uh kind of the goal you know spectrum and most people optimize for the money and like if it happens to be a hard problem then like cool that's intellectually stimulating so there's a bunch of different frameworks and i think that what you end up just realizing is uh uh it's kind of like a volatility index like when the vix spikes like

Starting point is 02:30:21 shit's getting crazy people have like a personal vix score almost right and you just talk to him and you're just like this person is within this like narrow band or this person is not within the narrow band and like not being in the narrow band again like could have many different outcomes it could be like genius moron right like insane you know rational optimist but i think over time people have uh who look for these types of folks they just realize like the one thing that everyone is certain is avoid the people within the band because uh that's not where the outline outcomes are right yeah yeah and you know one worry you could have is we have institutions that homogenize so much that you're not reducing the media like the median on me like the median value of somebody

Starting point is 02:31:11 who like goes to Harvard maybe increases like maybe they're learning valuable skills but if you've gotten rid of the tail outcomes and if most of the value comes from those tail outcomes yeah then you've actually done something very bad I this guy wrote a really interesting you can ask a question of like why are there when Shakespeare was around the human population was like less than a billion it was like significantly less when Shakespeare was around and you know he's like said to be the greatest writer of all time or just go back to like Einstein Edison these people around the human population is a lot lower and these people are just like super outliers these kinds of people almost don't seem to exist today right like there's no writer who's as good as

Starting point is 02:31:46 shakespeare there's uh elon musk is like inventors is good at edison but like scientists is as good as einstein right and one thing that could be happening is you have institutions uh that if you think of like writers they go to like uh masters of fine arts right okay and they live in brooklyn so everybody who could be writing a really brilliant book they're not out there like melville you know like becoming fishermen or something and they're like getting exposure to a idea that gives them the idea right uh um write some like magnum opus on you know uh they're just like they're literally living the same lifestyle as everybody who's trying to do the same thing same it's like going to harvard right same network same ideas same skill set so if we're reducing the

Starting point is 02:32:28 volatility of versatility um through these kinds of homogenizing institutions i think we make a by just saying like oh the median hasn't decreased you're you're forgetting that what um you know somebody asked an interesting question like why don't we why do we only have one elon musk there should be like a thousand of them going around like what happened to the rest of them right did we just kill off the tail of that kind of outcome and then only one of them survived whatever filter we had there yeah i think that we probably have more than one there's just one who lined it all up. Ambition, uh, capital network, courage, right? Like, like it takes a lot of different things, but there's probably other people like that. And, you know, you could

Starting point is 02:33:15 look and say, uh, ambition is like a great one. What's ambitious to one person is not ambitious to another person and uh in many cases over history there's been people who have been highly ambitious uh and have come to conclusions that ended up being really important but at the time they were laughed at right um i'm gonna forget the uh the name of the person uh but there's a an individual who uh the world is round uh but the rest of the solar system does not revolve around the earth revolves around the sun i was killed for it yeah but was it copernicus i forget okay and so when you think of that like now we're like duh right but at the time crazy you're insane so then begs the question like what insane thing exists today that you actually think is more

Starting point is 02:34:13 likely right than wrong and so there's things that probably in the tech world we think of you know around solving problems or whatever but there's probably countercultural things uh in society that seem absolutely fucking bananas and then 20 years from now 30 years 50 years you know during our lifetime we'll be like oh i can't believe we didn't realize that yeah i do wonder i mean there's this movement of like trad i don't know if you've seen this stuff no what is it um basically like living living like people living like people lived like many decades or centuries ago but with like modern technology how would you do that well it's not like amish like you still adopt modern technology but you also have i guess more traditional lifestyles in terms

Starting point is 02:35:02 of like gender norms or um or like or just you know like what kinds of careers you choose things like that so um so you still have like a cell phone you still have electricity you still have whatever right but it's but you have you basically you have like a lot of kids or something okay yeah um and yeah it sounds weird uh actually that's not even that novel but i do think that the way we like organize families and communities today there is an element to it which is maybe over time it will seem like that was like a really isolating way to live and you know if you if your ancestors couldn't see how you live there'd be like they'd be super uh they'd be super anxious about the fact that you're just like alone most of the day right when they're trapped in a house

Starting point is 02:35:48 what you were telling me about you know going to the tenement museum in new york like 10 people in a small room okay that sounds maybe that's too much right but then just like millions of people living in an apartment by themselves it also probably sounds a bit dystopic to them from the opposite perspective and also probably the free to cheap information that you consume on your phone some of that would uh they would not approve of right so i think over time like the way we think of i wouldn't be surprised if fundamentally some of the ways we like live organized families communities today would be looked at in the future as um yeah that was like a really isolating and weird way to live at the time yeah 100 and it also uh if you look at a lot of society's problems

Starting point is 02:36:32 like probably could be boiled down to like a great way to solve it would just be better parenting but you ever see like a news story and you see somebody doing something and you're like man if that person had a certain type of parent like they'd smack them in the face right and just be like what are you doing yeah and uh again that's not the solution to everything right but like that is the proxy for uh there's definitely some something there around uh family parenting the way people are raised like all this stuff and like some of it's positive right like like there is this element of uh the way that some people were raised 50 years ago was actually bad for the kid right like it fucked them up as they grew up but then there are some other things like hey maybe

Starting point is 02:37:17 we need more, you know, discipline or whatever. Um, and it's, some of it's a story as old as time. Like how, how many different decades was the story like, Oh, young, energetic, you know, lost, unorganized man joins military, gets disciplined, becomes productive member of society. Like that's just a story that has always existed for a long time. Uh, but there's other examples of it in society and so like i always want to go back to just like again how many of the problems are fixed or addressed via social means versus uh legal versus like technology and the truth is that like actually a lot of our problems in society that are like fundamental problems that people feel on a day-to-day basis they're not technology problems yeah usually these

Starting point is 02:38:09 other things yeah but parenting by the way is one thing where i have like um where i think we're really doing a bad job in some ways it's like much better than the past right like kids are not getting like beaten or something so actually there was um dan carlin has a book on uh history where he says i think he estimated that like more than half the kids who have ever lived were like sexually abused or another way like physically abused because um i forgot what his evidence was but yeah like i think there's some pretty dark things if you look back at history like how kids were treated so in many ways we've like made a lot of progress but i think one thing i had this lady come on my podcast um she's some she's the founder of a movement called taking children

Starting point is 02:38:51 seriously and the idea is if you think about the way we treat children in terms of the rights we give them they're if you treat an adult this way it would just be a huge infringement on somebody's own personal autonomy like trapping a 16 year old in a government building from nine to five and it's like basically this prison and if you look at the outcomes of education like it's basically useless it's 100 prison for most kids yeah not every kid there's again there's a reason why traditional education is a part for certain uh occupations of but you're telling a child sit down and shut up for eight hours a day like that's not natural it gets even darker if you listen to these stories about um chinese education um there's this guy has a doorman he has a great

Starting point is 02:39:36 review of this book called little children where he talks about this lady um she she like moves from america to china and her kid is like enrolled in a chinese preschool and like there's a crazy one of the things that happens is he's forced to draw um raindrops or tear yeah raindrops but it's like hours a day they had to be the exact same shape and form and if you like mess up you like try to like actually make the figure different anyway they punish you or one time her kid was just he hated eggs so the school like fed the kid's eggs and the kid really hated eggs so they like physically force feed him eggs so that he can get over his aversion and when the mother goes to the teacher and she's like yo what the fuck are you doing she the teacher is like never talk back

Starting point is 02:40:24 to a teacher ever like the adults have complete authority the children are treated like shit um yeah so but but even like even if you think about like i if you look at the outcomes of education in the u.s right if you ask people who have taken spanish in high school or middle school just like remember anything about uh spanish right i took four years of spanish in high school i was in mexico city i have like i barely read anything but just like stuff like how many years of civics education people always talk about like we need to increase civics education or something how many years of civics education in history are you already giving the kids and you look at like polls you ask people what are the three branches of government or like how many branches of

Starting point is 02:40:59 government do we have it's like a small minority know that so educating is like completely useless or mostly useless outside of just like the basic numeracy and literacy and we're forcing kids to be miserable for hours a day um social control as well like what do you do with the kids right right yeah yeah like in some way uh many parents look at school as almost like a babysitter right it's like i gotta go to work and and again you can't lose the other side of this equation which is like if the parents couldn't go to work because they had to watch their kid like that's not an option you gotta go to work so then it's like okay well what are what is the cost to doing something with the child while you're at work yeah that's what i'm a fan of child labor child

Starting point is 02:41:42 labor yes all right explain this jesus so when people talk about child labor they think about the last time child labor was legal which was when they were like getting their hands burned off in some cotton factory you know what i mean like some tech shop nike exactly china but like nike doesn't do that they claim yeah um so that's what they think all right but that's not what jobs are today like the adults at the time were doing the same kind of work today it's like he would work at a donut shop or he would like work at mcdonald's or walmart or something and i would claim that the skills you learn at mcdonald's actually i i think this is actually something they do really well but it's like showing up on time being responsive being having like social

Starting point is 02:42:26 skills being having like self-control i would say that that's more valuable than any given day in like a public education system um so i agree except for i'm gonna twist this one way i would look at it less as like go work at mcdonald's go work at walmart or whatever uh and i think again i have an eight-month-old daughter so i'm like actively thinking through but i've got time to kind of figure out you know uh how to handle this uh i sum it up as like apprenticeship yep no i agree like apprenticeship model feels like uh a great way for people to learn without the downsides of like sit down shut up don't talk for eight hours right and um when you say this whole like taking kids seriously you know type movement it's just treat them like an adult and i think

Starting point is 02:43:14 they begin to emulate what adults do yeah right like if you treat a kid like a one-year-old kid uh and you're constantly telling them no and this not like they just act yep exactly like you're treating them if you treated a 25 year old like you do a 14 year old and you also did i guess they didn't realize they were 25 i don't know that's a weird thought no no they but you know what i mean still if you still treat them like they're 14 they they they uh revert towards the actions of a 14 year old which which also raises the possibility that if you treated 14 year olds now like they were 25 right so that you know like basically they're the beginning of their career not that they're like stuck in this infant primordial state of constantly getting more

Starting point is 02:43:54 education in ways that don't seem related to any obvious career but just like okay you're 14 you're gonna get an apprenticeship you're gonna like go intern at some you know like a programming firm or finance but whatever right like you're gonna like actually get a if you look through history you look at how um education worked in um uh how like careers worked and let's say like medieval times or something you know it was like you apprenticed for a black you apprenticed for the person you want to become in your career and parents would pay the person for the privilege of having their child work for them uh because they realize that the education like the first-hand education is way more important there actually is a scientist um i forgot his first name but

Starting point is 02:44:34 it's called this two sigma problem where he discovered that one-on-one tutoring is two standard deviations more effective than the current education system where you have like 20 kids in a school so just if you just had replaced current system which is like you give everybody an apprentice the problem is the way that um the way that the labor market regulations work here um like with internships that are unpaid you're the law literally says you're not allowed to get any economic value from them if you get economic value from them you're not allowed to have them have that be an unpaid intern but they're getting value out of they're getting experience which is like super valuable to them that's not legally allowed for you to give them that experience

Starting point is 02:45:14 and it's um and yeah so basically this puts a huge drag on people who would use this as like a lever to climb up in there warren buffett right like somebody asked him uh hey can i come work for you for free and he said no that'd be too expensive for me right like you're taking my time right which kind of fits along this um but yeah i just think if you took a 14 50 year old kid by the way i was a shithead 14 year old kid right and most especially young boys but most kids are their brains aren't formed like they act like idiots right they got too much energy like all these things uh but i'm willing to bet i would have learned more if you said to me hey every six months you're gonna go you know you're gonna work at this place you're gonna do this you're gonna do this you're gonna

Starting point is 02:45:56 do this and uh you could say okay cool you know when i was 14 uh there was like three or four things i thought could be cool potential uh like job paths and you said cool you're gonna go spend you know every day for you know every weekday you're gonna go spend with these people and you're basically gonna have this apprenticeship and you're just gonna do whatever they need you to do uh and at the end of two or three years i probably would have a pretty damn good education from like real world exposure but also i probably know better as to what i was most interested in and so like are we doing people a disservice by putting them through high school they graduate and then it's like go to college and like figure it out in college well like where you go to college

Starting point is 02:46:34 pretty damn important you know uh decision where's your study whether you go to college or not pretty damn important decision right and so you just don't have any exposure really because you know every once in a while i get an email from somebody who's like a high school senior and they're like hey i want to do like a summer internship or something and i'm like okay but there's like no model for that and by the time you're a senior that summer is like the summer before you go to college you already made all the decisions so like what if you were like a freshman sophomore yeah and different the um the crazy thing is not only that are you forced to kind of decide on those kinds of things when you're pretty young um in a way that is you had to do it without the

Starting point is 02:47:15 experience of what the careers are like um but the the the the amount of time it takes to go through that process like if you talk to a smart uh kid in high school and you're like okay how long did it take you to apply to colleges and stuff it is a huge bureaucratic time-consuming process these kids could otherwise be spending time doing a whole bunch of cool side projects that are going to be really help their career i mean in programming it's like you start a github account in your high school and you start programming some things people are going to notice and they're going to be impressed right it's like a proof of work um you don't have time for that if you're applying to colleges and writing these bullshit essays um where you got

Starting point is 02:47:52 to pretend that you're going to the college for the reason other than the obvious reason you go to a prestigious college which is you want to make a lot of money right did you see um maybe it's morgan housel somebody on twitter recently was like high school uh like you fail because you didn't meet the 10 page minimum essay requirement like real world uh promotion you sent me a two bullet point email right like whatever it was and it was basically just like like what are we talking about here right is you actually in the professional world get rewarded for being able to communicate clearly and concisely yep but somehow like we all did it in high school how do i do like 1.5 uh space right like ah they're gonna be able to tell 12

Starting point is 02:48:34 point font versus 12.5 font right like like can we play with the margins like like you play like you're just like i'm literally wasting time yeah right doing dumb shit uh to try to meet some you know uh made up requirement yeah yeah i think over time hopefully there will be more ways to signal that if you think about what is education signaling right um the main reason to go to college is to send a signal to future employers that signal is i'm intelligent i'm conscientious I work I can work hard I can do like tasks that are kind of boring and maybe not directly useful I can just work hard at them and I'm conformist right um which is like a thing that probably employers care about uh it has a negative connotation but it's like I'm not gonna like

Starting point is 02:49:16 you know like disrupt the workplace or something um hopefully there's ways to signal intelligence consciousness early on and better than college and if that happens the whole oligopoly we have of education you know the the schools that receive federal funding are the ones that get to determine if another school can receive federal funding for education it's a total like just a total oligopoly anyways so if if for programming let's say github your github resume becomes more important uh than where you went to college which it should be right like what you can actually do there's a clear legible signal of that then um hopefully the the power of these like people won't feel forced to go attend like a four-year university uh degree that way there was actually the i had

Starting point is 02:50:01 this guy on the podcast scott young i don't know if you've seen he's he did something called the mit challenge where if you look at mit's curriculum and all its courses to their credit they've made it all open source so all the lectures all the exams they're all open source so he's like okay let me see if i can speed around mit's computer science curriculum in one year he goes through all four years of cs classes at mit he i think he was going at an insane pace it was like one class a week um it just like worked all day all night at it and he would self-administer the exams and like if he he would like as long as he didn't fail those exams and those homeworks he would like say i've i graduated this course and so he did that it took him a year and he got like all

Starting point is 02:50:44 kinds of insane programming job offers after that because like that's a novel volatile thing to do people notice that it's almost a better signal than actually going to mit um hopefully over time you can do more of those kinds of things there is like two years of work in four years of college maybe two years yeah right yeah like there's a lot of bullshit that goes on i would be surprised if it's two years like that sounds like way too much yeah i i'm i got an economics degree which at the time uh i selected one because it was going to be the shortest path to getting a degree but also to uh i had some intellectual interest in it i think you had to take eight credits there's like eight classes jesus now you had to meet other requirements

Starting point is 02:51:21 or whatever you know they fill it out to make it so it's not just hey take these eight classes uh but yeah like that that was it yeah the unfortunate thing is they're adding at least um at my university at their this didn't happen with me they're adding like more bullshit classes you had to take as like a general curriculum kind of thing like one of the things they're going to force you to take in the future is um sustainability classes or something and we already had to take um global diversity or global you know just like all kinds of these things it's like kind of political propaganda classes you had to take so yeah it sounds good to the board of trustees right and then you think like well what is the actual value we're contributing to the

Starting point is 02:51:59 student um yeah i actually i made it a point of principle i never read a book i was assigned in school that's pretty good strategy i mean look there's good books that uh people may discuss us but for the most part they're probably not the ones that you're interested in right yeah it's um i don't know it's a weird thing would you do college again it's that's an interesting question because you have to approach it from the perspective of not knowing what i know now but i know now what even if i forgot everything i know about computer science i know now how i could teach myself those things or what kinds of opportunities and networking things i could do to give myself a leg up and go through things i've gone through much faster

Starting point is 02:52:42 i wouldn't know that when i was 17 and i also wouldn't know um like i i don't know if i'd have the discipline and the the conscientiousness frankly to go through that kind of stuff so i probably would still go through college but i think if i had a different kind of degree i probably wouldn't um and if i could like know what i know now about just like how to learn i wouldn't go through college yeah i'd go for the parties yeah like the social experience right yeah the education uh i mean maybe it helped um one of my favorite experiences from college uh uh i got deployed halfway through school so i came back and so i walked into some kind of government or politics class whatever it was and all of a sudden somehow like the middle east came up and i was

Starting point is 02:53:29 sitting there and you know my strategy was like just don't get noticed in class um and uh probably didn't take it nearly as seriously as i should have or i would now uh but the teacher started saying all kinds of like crazy shit uh about uh the middle east and like u.s relations like all the stuff everything and uh one of my buddies was sitting next to me and he like tapped me and he was like like what do you think and i was all bullshit and then of course like a fucking jackass right he he raises his hand he goes well he was just there so like he could tell us and so like it was fascinating though because like that was like again that was one specific instance and you know what ended up being five and a half years total uh from start to finish

Starting point is 02:54:13 um but like i probably was better versed like me personally than the teacher talking about that one part of the class and then it made me think i was like looking around the room and we had people from all walks of life like all these different things and i was like well what do you think right like what do you think like how do like why can't we make this less of like a lecture where it's one person who's up there who's just been a teacher their whole life why don't we all talk and i bet you i'm gonna be able to learn a lot more from some of these people than i am from the teacher and so some of it's like college itself and then some of it is just like even the uh the mechanisms that just like replicate what was high school because it's

Starting point is 02:54:51 different in high school yes you could learn from your classmates and stuff but like the world experiences aren't nearly as well developed as maybe by the time you get to college and if you have like freshmen and seniors that are together right in a class that's very different than like i don't know how many freshmen in high school are learning a lot from their freshman classmates except for if it's somebody who comes from a different culture a different place maybe has different life experience but like that's not nearly as much they've only been around for 14 years right of which you probably remember you know less than 10 so like how much could you really have done and then be able to articulate those ideas it's a little different right what

Starting point is 02:55:28 was the experience like going from these like life and death situations in the military um then to transitioning to college where it's a little bit contrived kind of uh you know just like it doesn't seem as visceral as being in a military situation so i was in college got deployed they came back to college right so it was like what was the transition like before and after going there um it wasn't real at first like that i've told story before but uh was in college i was playing football went in uh went and got deployed and so like you kind of almost feel like it's almost like a game a little bit and then the first time that there was like a major event while i was there uh somebody got killed and you then get to the situation like oh this is real

Starting point is 02:56:18 right it's like it changed the perspective uh but then coming back um i was there with a lot of older guys so i was 20 i turned 21 uh in iraq uh these guys probably the average age was like 27 28 and so uh many of them married kids had a house like just like life shit right i was worried about like what's the party on friday night you know like a couple weeks before these guys were worried about like how do i pay my mortgage how to take care of my kids like whatever so like you just like naturally mature in a weird way like apprenticeship right like you get exposed to certain things um and then when i came back like there was actually like a very barbell response so on one side you're a 21 year old kid who went to war and came back

Starting point is 02:57:01 like you are invincible right fucking do all kinds of crazy stuff on the other side you're like man like i should take school more seriously right like i'm gonna be here there's a real world after this and so like i became much more serious about like more like intellectual things or whatever and so like that's like a weird balance because you're like uh you know hey you came back and like you're i don't know i got a motorcycle and would fucking fly around and like act like an idiot right and like not from a sense of like i was doing anything that was uh endangering other people or whatever but like i would go fast on a motorcycle and all right and it's like because like you just felt you know uh implicitly like you know you can do anything at the same time

Starting point is 02:57:47 you become more serious about like hey i actually want to learn here right and so uh it was weird too because i also came back uh and i was only there for one semester with everyone i'd gone through college with then they graduated so now it's with myself and like a bunch of younger people right and they're not that much younger two years or whatever but now all of a sudden like you're the old person right and then like in a college environment the age bracket is like 18 to 22 yeah so if you are on the higher end of that and you're around you know 18 19 year olds like that's a pretty big yeah psychology gap like all this stuff and then the life experience and all that and so it was uh it was the first time in my life that i kind of was just like oh shit we're

Starting point is 02:58:28 all like we all die we all get old we all like do all this stuff and so it just added a layer of like seriousness I think of just like all right like you don't get to just party and act like an idiot in college forever you have to like go into the real world and so like to some degree like if more people got you know not go to war but like could understand that I bet you people would take it more seriously yeah how old were you when you got back uh I came back I was 21 so I went at 20 turned 21 overseas then came back yeah yeah no that's um but when you are in college like you notice the difference between somebody who is like a freshman and senior and then if you if you punctuate that with a super intense experience super life-orbit experience like going to the

Starting point is 02:59:11 military it just the the psychology like your discipline your motivation what you think is important i i can't imagine like the difference well just think 18 to 22 of like an average college student difference and then imagine a 24 year old who has two years of work experience yeah like the 18 to 22 was already crazy jump 22 24 is actually a pretty crazy jump with two years of life experience then go 18 to 24 it's like you know kid versus you know uh young adult right like it's completely different and so i think uh those years are like some of like the highest volatility years right and uh i don't actually know this is very interesting i don't know very many people who took we'll call it the like safe path out of college that reverted back

Starting point is 02:59:58 interesting to like high volatility that's super decisions later because that's that's really interesting and i'm curious why that is because in tech you'll notice a lot of people will say when they graduate college i'm going to work in google for a few years i'm going to start my own startup i'm only saving up enough money that i have a nest egg maybe i can like have a few months of runway and none of those people some of them well some of them start companies they just start the safe company they start the like hey i worked at google for five years and now i'm going to work on ad optimization startup like cool but none of them go and like i'm gonna build a nuclear power plant yeah right or very like you know there's always the exceptions the rule but like

Starting point is 03:00:35 there seems to be uh over time a diminishing return to the high volatility uh uh kind of path and so if you're not going to do it when you're young you almost never going to do when you're old except for external shock right some life event happens and you like get shaken out of one path and then you go on another one right and that i think is what we're like being in the military when you're young i don't have experience but like i can imagine how valuable that experience would be um because that's the time when you're like your brain is kind of still very plastic and you could like you could accumulate that world you could accumulate that experience in a way that like changes your personality which wouldn't be possible later on i wonder if there's a way you

Starting point is 03:01:21 can give more people a similar experience i guess maybe they can all just join the military but i don't know people talk about gap years i don't know how well they work at doing making you more serious maybe you just need to like work for a year out of high school just so you become a little more serious a little more motivated you have an understanding of how can i be successful and do good things in the world if you strip away uh obstacles around money and uh other obligations right that there's plenty of people who have to work whether in college support their families whatever but like just if you say hey we got a blank slate everyone's on the same uh kind of plane which is not how life is but let's just say it was uh and you said like

Starting point is 03:01:59 what are the options of people to go get the seriousness or go get the experience there is this like ascending level of severity so on one end maybe it's like go get a job then there's like travel to other cultures right for a week or two weeks or whatever and get exposed to a bunch of them then there's like go live in another culture and then maybe there's like you know go live in another culture during a time of war right or like like however like that arc is uh and ultimately i think one most people don't do it because like it's weird it breaks like the societal like just go to college like stop being weird right and like get your degree and go get a job um the highest end of the spectrum usually the people who are willing to do that are not the people who have

Starting point is 03:02:44 other opportunities it's like that's another thing is that most people who join the military when they're young they're not like should i go to harvard or should i join the infantry right like that's not like that that's not the uh the trade-off um and so what naturally happens is like they get pulled down on the severity curve. Harvard versus military is almost never an option. Maybe it's like Harvard versus West Point. I want to go be an officer or something, right? Harvard versus go get a job is almost,

Starting point is 03:03:15 maybe a tech company, but like for the most part, that's not a thing. Harvard versus like go live in another culture, again, not likely, but maybe I'll go to Harvard and I'll study abroad for a semester, right? And so like people will get some of that like weird experience but again it pulls in the tales of the comparison and gets it gets you

Starting point is 03:03:36 within that band i have this i know this guy who's he's a 19 year old just genius kid um he's he's done some really impressive like he helped me with the um spf interview but also he's like he's doing some really impressive things like the smartest 19 year old i i know and so he took a gap year he worked for uh bern hobart uh he's like his second in command there but the so now he's now he's considering what to do next and he's like i think i'm gonna go to college i'm like dude you have you could literally you have a better career now than somebody who goes to the even the most elite universities will have years after they graduate like the amount of people who know who you are and could like get you something but just um the the social aspect of college is it yes

Starting point is 03:04:21 because for somebody who's already mature um at that point at that age you're not your high school friends are just not gonna like have that level of ambition and maturity um but I was arguing you're not even gonna get that in college like my social life is much better now outside of college and it wasn't college just because the people I hang out with are like 26 30 kind of you know older people um and I said like I feel like you're probably gonna be similar and I feel like a lot of these people who are going to be at the tails um yeah i i think their social life even would be better outside of college if they can find the right groups yeah well it's a intentionality versus probability right like you can intentionally go create a social group or intentionally go try

Starting point is 03:05:01 to break into a social group uh versus college like uh you ever notice that in college everyone just hangs out with people from their dorm yeah like holy shit who they ran into at orientation how much of your lifetime like you know uh uh information like all these different things was determined by like i don't know like a random you know lottery as to like who you got put in is your college roommate and who lived down the hall yep yep yeah right and so like some of it's like hey it doesn't matter who it was you were going to become friends with people around you because you want to have a social life uh but a lot of it is like man if you think back like was that the highly optimized decision like probably not yeah and it takes a lot to be the

Starting point is 03:05:45 weirdo who doesn't hang out with the people you know it doesn't hang out with their college roommate or doesn't hang out with the people in their dorm uh and instead intentionally goes and seeks out a different group of you know friends that they want to spend time because they think they can learn from or whatever yeah yeah but that's all right it's just like that's what most people like oh that's a nerd right like it's just even the way people talk about it like has like a negative connotation to it but like it shouldn't be that way yeah yeah by the way i i heard somewhere that men mature much later than women so that when they finish you can ask my wife she will confirm that yeah um but when they finish their brain development and so you have this

Starting point is 03:06:26 period when like uh people are 18 or 19 or something and the women are already like their brain development is complete and the guys are just you know like idiots yeah exactly so it is like a strange time even that way where like the women uh are like as mature as like a guy's like when they're 25 or something right and part of that is the reason why they seek out like older people as well but yeah because the guys at that age are just idiots uh yeah if you think about uh again generalized but like if you think of the average like 18 to 22 year old male put into a social situation like a college party yeah there's like an insane increase of dumb shit that they are willing to do for to make people laugh to get social status to get approval like to do all this

Starting point is 03:07:15 stuff and then you're like all right well if you take that person out and you like put them in like the workforce they would be just like a normal person yeah right it's like some of it's just like social situation stuff but also like yeah you probably did a bunch of shit when you're 18 22 years old that you would never do 25 or later because your brain just was developed yeah risk is different right like all that stuff yeah yeah uh let me ask you a question all right go ahead so how does bitcoin increase the number i thought we were gonna get through the whole thing with no bitcoin all right go ahead well i'm curious about this how does it uh increase the amount of goods and services in the world so we talked to like google maps for example right it's like okay

Starting point is 03:07:51 they developed a virtual product it makes economic transition uh transactions that otherwise would have been impossible happened like saves his time he can use that time to do other things blah blah all kinds of other like benefits what is that for bitcoin well i think the single most important piece is bitcoin gives people back their time so if you think of money money is just time and uh you work to get economic value that you then want to hold the more economic value that you hold, the less that you have to rent out your time or spend your time to get more economic value. So think of it in terms of rich people. They have the freedom of time. They can go do what they want. They can travel. They can spend it however they want. They're not beholden

Starting point is 03:08:35 to, I have to go to my nine to five job and make economic value so I can pay my bills and do all this. So the more money or economic value that you hold, the more time that you have in terms of free time. The reason why that's important is because today the money loses value. So if I have a hundred dollars in 1990 and I hold it for 20 years, it buys me less goods and services. So there's this constant feeling of like, I can never get ahead. It's the rat race, right? Now, 50 plus percent, 55% of American citizens invest. They have some investable asset. And so the goal is for those investable assets to outpace the devaluation of the currency. And so stock market goes up, real estate goes up, commodities, bonds, whatever, right? So I get some ability to outpace

Starting point is 03:09:24 it. But 45% of Americans have no investments. They just have cash, the paycheck to paycheck, or they just have 100% of their wealth in cash. Those people have gotten worse off over the years. And then if you look in the last two and a half years, inflation is now at 8.5, 9.1%, but that's on top of the five to 7% inflation from last year. So we have this compounding effect. And so while the devaluation of the currency

Starting point is 03:09:53 has accelerated, wage growth hasn't kept up. So if you were getting paid $10 an hour in 2019, $10 an hour in 2020, $10 an hour in 2021, and $10 an hour in 2022, you're actually getting paid less money today than you were back in 2019 because your purchasing power's gone down right so what bitcoin does is bitcoin just simply says if you go to work and you earn money you can now save it and no one can devalue it right okay um but given the volatility in its price it sounds like you're saying um

Starting point is 03:10:25 correct me if i'm wrong but that it gives you like a stable way to store your uh like a low volatility way to like store your savings it's the single most important thing for a society right but given the recent volatility in the price there is no volatility okay people the only volatility is how many dollars people are willing to give you for it it's the exchange price that's volatile or is the dollar volatile less than bitcoin yeah but i would argue it's not because if I had, let's say $10 and I wanted to go buy goods and services in 2020, January of 2020,

Starting point is 03:11:03 and I showed up today and I wanted to buy $10 worth of goods and services, I could buy less, right? The dollar has devalued against those goods and services. But couldn't you say the same thing about Bitcoin? Like if you're using that as a way to, if you're comparing them to goods and services. Bitcoin in 2020,

Starting point is 03:11:19 if I have the one Bitcoin, right? And now I try to go buy something. I can buy more goods and services with that one Bitcoin. The purchasing power of Bitcoin appreciates over time. The purchasing power of the dollar depreciates. So it could be that it increases in value over time, but also that it's more volatile. But it's not volatile.

Starting point is 03:11:37 That's the key, is we think of volatility as an exchange rate, right? So for example, people look at the housing market. How many dollars will somebody give me for this house in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022? but the house is not volatile. The house is a fucking house. It's got four walls,

Starting point is 03:11:58 got a roof and people still live in it. The volatility is the exchange rate $2. Now that's how finance is based, right? So it's not like, oh, we shouldn't think about, you know, exchange rates or anything like that. But when you price the home,

Starting point is 03:12:13 you don't say like, it's worth one home. Now it's worth two homes, right? You say, no, it's worth, you know, $100,000 for the 125,000. It's worth 75,000. So there's an exchange back into a common unit of account.

Starting point is 03:12:24 okay but if you take dollars out of it it's just like how many apples could you buy with one bitcoin that amount again it's still an exchange rate but even even if you take the dollars out of it even compared to goods and services it seems over volatile then but it's volatile to the upside where the dollar is volatile to the downside yeah unless you bought at the peak well if you're trying to optimize on a single day-to-day basis like basically if you say hey i bought uh one Bitcoin today. And then I try to spend it in a week. You're a day trader. Yeah. Right. But nobody says, Oh, I got a dollar 12 months ago and now it's down 10% in purchasing power. Right. Like the dollar is horrible and no one should use dollars. But the 45% of people you mentioned who

Starting point is 03:13:07 don't have any investments, they're probably the kind of people who don't have, who are, um, who can't just hold for, uh, for a long time. Like there's the kind of people who need to be liquid it on a very regular basis. Like they get a paycheck, they need to use it. So for those kinds of people, how is Bitcoin a solution if you need to hold it for a long time to see that upside? Well, the first thing is Bitcoin is a technology solution. The actual solution to most people's problems is financial education, right? So if you think about it, like most people, the 45% of Americans, if they knew, hey, those dollars you're holding are eroding away and purchasing power and you literally are getting paid less money than you were two years ago, like they

Starting point is 03:13:44 probably would make changes right or the theory would be that if they had the education they would make changes the first problem is like they just don't know that and so like why don't we teach that in school right like that like better than teaching like all the bullshit like why don't we just teach people hey the currency is created in a way where it has to be devalued and therefore do not hold this for 100 of your wealth for very long periods of time right and so this also goes back to the whole thing of like i don't think there's very many people that say like hey bitcoin today is a superior means of payment and like you should go take a hundred percent of the money you want to spend tomorrow and go put it in bitcoin and like hope it doesn't go up or down yeah right

Starting point is 03:14:22 i think instead where you're seeing a lot of adoption is actually as a uh store of value so a lot of people are coming in and you see it in the data like 60 plus percent of bitcoin in circulation hasn't moved in a year right so people are for majority of the bitcoin that is held by uh folks they're buying it and holding it for long periods of time okay and so the theory and again takes time to see if this plays out is that you have as a currency you have to establish yourself as a store of value before you can ever become a means of exchange okay but so you you think eventually bitcoin will be a medium exchange or let me ask you this do you trust computers or people um for what i guess would be the question for well forget for a second what you think you

Starting point is 03:15:05 trust computers over people for majority of things in your life sure right like your music recommendations your search results your maps like all these different things right today billions of people around the world put faith in 12 people at the fomc to fucking guess the future yep talk about something that exists today that 100 years from now we're gonna look back and be like what happened like there are 12 people who are not elected by the people they're just appointed that go into a conference room and they periodically look at a bunch of data which usually is backwards looking data and there's a lot of problems with the data and they lick their finger put in the air and they say we think we should do x for the future and like you don't

Starting point is 03:15:54 have to look very probably just look over the last two years these people have no clue what's going on. Right. And one of my favorite examples is like, if you asked a five-year-old positive or negative talking about GDP for a quarter, it's a 50, 50 shot, like, like positive, negative in the last two quarters, the economist has said positive and it came in negative. Yeah. Right. So like, again, I don't expect people to be like, Oh, they have to always get, you know if it's 1.2 they have to get 1.2 right of course it's it's hard it's a complex machine there's moving parts there's tons of data that changes whatever and if they say 1.2 and it comes at 1.4 or 1 or 1.0 like okay sure they at least directionally got it right but when you start to

Starting point is 03:16:40 see like they think it's positive it comes in negative it's like why like who cares what they say next time right like they have no clue but it's not their fault like i don't think there's like some grand conspiracy where they like go in a room and they're like you know it'd be fucking our best strategy let's say positive even though we think it's going to be negative like i literally think they think it's going to be positive and then stuff goes wrong and so the reason why i say that is like if automation is a very non-controversial thing the single most important institution in your life that is human-led that fucks up your life is central banks not because they want to, but that is what happens. So why don't we automate it? Well, Bitcoin already did

Starting point is 03:17:22 that. The most disciplined monetary policy over the entire COVID inflation recession, all this shit has been Bitcoin. It's the only one that didn't change. Everyone else changed the fed. They pivoted. Then they went QE. Then they came back. Now they're doing QT. Uh, the ECB said, we're not going to do QT. Oh, now they're doing it. We're not going to take our interest rates from negative to zero like all these things they all change their minds but still relative to goods and services the exchange rate is less volatile for the given all this volatility and how people react so volatility uh not good or bad works in both directions yeah yeah right but it is bad in the sense if you just want to be able to you know if you want the liquidity it's not it's volatility

Starting point is 03:18:07 by itself is not bad if volatility to the upside like bitcoin sure right is actually a good thing if you're holding Bitcoin, right? Because everything around you gets cheaper. And so if you go back to January 2020 before everything happened and you said, knowing everything we know now, you can put your assets in one currency, you put in Bitcoin.

Starting point is 03:18:26 Do you still think that Bitcoin is a good inflation hedge or? I think that what we are learning, like Bitcoin served as a fantastic debasement hedge. And I think over time, like my views have evolved on this and I think the market is just getting smarter as we get more data,

Starting point is 03:18:45 which I think is a healthy thing. Inflation hedge assets are actually a very interesting thing. Inflation hedge assets move before the inflation comes, right? So like one of the things that people forget is like, if I think inflation is coming, I do not wait for the inflation to get here and then move my assets.

Starting point is 03:19:02 I move them in anticipation. So this is why in Q3 and Q4 of 2020, you saw Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, like all these like Wall Street legends talking about, we think inflation is going to be high. we're going to go and we're going to put our assets in inflation hedges. Paul Tudor Jones famously said, you know, Bitcoin is going to be the fastest horse in this bucket. Well, guess what Bitcoin did? It went from $10,000 to $64,000 in a matter of like five months,

Starting point is 03:19:25 right? Well, that tells me that there was a fixed supply asset, tons of demand coming in. Inflation was still like two, 3%. We didn't get the first 5% CPI print until June of 2021. so bitcoin moved before and then here came five plus percent for you know what is now over a year now bitcoin has also come down since november it peaked at 69 000 in november and uh it's now trading called 20 23 000 whatever it is why did it come down inflation's still high because markets are forward looking so just like why did the stock market come down it's because the fed said we are going to destroy demand. And the second they started to say that,

Starting point is 03:20:07 what did sophisticated investors do? Like, we're fucking out. Okay, so you think one of the reasons Bitcoin declined is the prospect for inflation went down. Not the prospect for inflation. It's that the Fed is signaling that they are going to do everything it can to create tighter financial conditions

Starting point is 03:20:25 and they're going to destroy demand. And so, again, it's pretty unique in that, like, Bitcoin hasn't been any different than other assets, right? in some way, when you have market intervention, like we have, especially over the last two and a half years, all asset correlations start to trend towards one. So Bitcoin up until 2020 was like a non-correlated asset, right? Correlations were, you know, 0.15 or whatever it was. It's a math equation. It's not up for debate. Like you just measure the math. In 2020 until today, correlations have gone through the roof. And now you just overlay, you know, S&P and Bitcoin or

Starting point is 03:20:59 S&P and NASDAQ or whatever, and they just trade like almost lockstep. But so do a lot of assets because what's happened is we have a manipulated market and sophisticated investors treat all of the assets in a similar fashion, right? In March of 2020, Bitcoin's correlation to other assets went through the roof. It was a liquidity crisis. People sold everything and they wanted dollars. So if you think of it today, the dollar's at a 20-year high against, you know, in the dollar index against other fiat currencies.

Starting point is 03:21:31 People want dollars. So if people want dollars, the dollar strengthens. Well, if all these other assets are priced in dollars, everything goes down, right? I guess if you're looking for a hedge, you probably want it to be not correlated to other assets you hold. The problem is that there is no asset right now, right?

Starting point is 03:21:48 In these situations, like basically what we're watching, So 2020, and this is like a unique, I think, thing that we're still in the middle of. So it's still a changing environment. 2020 was a very short recession. It's probably the shortest on record in that we got two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, but it was down and right back up. And that's because of the intervention by central banks and politicians with monetary fiscal policy. But correlations went to one, right? And so that was a liquidity crisis where people were scared.

Starting point is 03:22:23 They wanted dollars. They didn't want assets. They sold them off. Everything goes. If you go back to 2008, there was a six-month liquidity crisis where people were selling assets. Gold went down 30% in summer of 2008, right? Then government stepped in, and we went back up,

Starting point is 03:22:37 and by 2011, gold hit an all-time high. So liquidity crisis can be, like, super acute and short, like they were in March of 2020 into April of 2020, or they can be six months, you know, whatever. in some weird way, it's not like a, a acute liquidity crisis, but basically what we've been in since November, December of last year is a version of a liquidity crisis where people are saying, I don't want to have risk on because I, I hear the fed, the fed's in control. Don't fight the fed. They're going to destroy demand. And they only are going to get more and more and more bold

Starting point is 03:23:14 if inflation stays high and their actions aren't working, which is where we are. We're in this like stagflationary period. So in some weird way, everyone who is going to sell Bitcoin already has, right? Now, sure, there's day trading, there's, you know, whatever. But all of those hedge funds, they all were selling, right? You even see Tesla, like all of the people

Starting point is 03:23:35 who were looking at this as one of many assets, they sold it. They're like, hey, look, we need liquidity. We need this. We're scared. or whatever but like it's six at twenty thousand dollars you know or give or take a couple thousand dollars on either side it's because you have a holder base that like it doesn't bitcoin goes to a thousand bucks they're not selling right and so it's like this very weird asset because the more

Starting point is 03:24:02 that quantitative easing and like the debasement and all that stuff is talked about the higher bitcoin goes but bitcoin what it appears given now doesn't care so much about the actual inflation as much as the anticipation of the devaluation and the inflation okay so people move the assets before it happens and then once it happens like inflation's here now right everyone's like oh why isn't bitcoin going up well it's because they're looking forward and the fed saying we're going to crash everything right and so what ended up happening is they crashed everything okay but so So does it imply you're not so worried about inflation in the future because you see the price of Bitcoin moving or you see that it's moved down, I guess, anticipating and pricing in

Starting point is 03:24:47 the inflation in the future being brought down by the Fed. So are you less worried about inflation now than you were before? I don't think that my expectations of inflation change based on what happens to Bitcoin's price. I think Bitcoin's price changes because of the expectations of inflation right which is like a weird nuance but it's less about like oh i see bitcoin do x and therefore now i think something different about inflation it's depending on what i think is going to happen with inflation is why bitcoin's price uh moves but really it's not because of the inflation as much as it's what is the federal reserve's response to that inflation movement so a great example is uh we're recording this in august of 2022 and uh we just got the cpi print

Starting point is 03:25:28 this morning. It came in at 8.5%, which is lower than the 9.1% from June. There's a lot of people who are celebrating saying, oh my God, this is amazing. We now have inflation going down. That's not what happened. Month to month, inflation was flat. The month to month change, there was no change. It's that from June to July of last year, inflation moved upwards. And so now what we're seeing is base effect. So yes, year over year change in inflation appears to be lower, but it's not because the inflation from June to July changed. It's just because inflation was going from three to five and then eventually 7% in December of 2021. So now we're getting compounding effects. So if we get to, I'll make up numbers. Let's say that we get to December of 2022 and

Starting point is 03:26:19 inflation is at 7%. Well, she would say, well, we're at 8.5% in the July reading. If we get to seven that means we're heading the right direction yeah but that means we compounded at seven percent for two years yeah you're not getting back the value you lost like holy shit by the way like chipotle is not lowering their prices right like like no one none of the price increases are going back yeah and so you have this like really weird thing where at the end of the day does the number actually matter like i think that's like the important question is there a difference between 8.5 and 9 well like in the official measurements like it's all kind of manipulated data right and so if you even look at the cpi basket itself like this so this is the deeper you go into this the

Starting point is 03:27:02 more you're just like this is all yeah uh 33 of the cpi basket is made up of something called shelter which is estimated right now to be between five and a half and six percent year over year increase but rents and real estate are both up 12 or more percent year over year so what goes in the shelter bucket like how is it that you're counting in the cpi official measurement 50 or less of the value of the increase in rent in real estate like where else are people if they're not renting if they're not buying like what else are they doing right and so they created all kinds of bullshit metrics like uh owner equivalent rent and like all this like nonsense but if you actually go and you read it and probably one of the scariest things if you read the cpi methodology

Starting point is 03:27:51 the cpi rent index is determined based on 1980 census data and they just call people and there's like 30 or 60 000 homes that they've pre-identified based on the 1980 census data and they rotate through them right so they maybe call like 10 000 every time or whatever and they just say like hey what are you paying for rent which sounds like okay maybe that's the best they can do but we have zillow apartment.com square like they have real-time data and i think zillow says they have 100 million data points in real time well guess what their red index says in the teens right or apartment.com i think it's like 14 i think zillow was like 10 or something whatever the numbers are they're like way higher than what this is showing yeah and so it begs the

Starting point is 03:28:41 question like is it a data problem is it a methodology problem is it a presentation like it's probably all of it right but then it comes back to none of that matters because they're looking at the cpi metric and what they're saying is we have increased interest rates and we are conducting quantitative tightening and inflation is persistently high they're going to keep bringing the hammer until one of two things happens either inflation comes down or there is so much pain in the economy that they give up it's politically impossible yeah and i think that that's what's going to happen i think they're going to give up uh i'm not predicting what will happen but i think that they will do it sooner than people realize because it sounds

Starting point is 03:29:20 good to talk tough midterm elections it's going to be real hard to go into a midterm election with uh the current administration saying uh we know that there's high inflation and we know that we caused a recession vote for us yeah yeah yeah uh what do you think is gonna happen in the terms that because floodbath i i don't pay attention to like individual races you know or anything like that in terms of like oh who's gonna win this or this candidate or that candidate uh it's just not interesting to me um but i think that there's a pendulum swim uh swing in society where uh we went to one extreme with, uh, there's a bunch of different labels you could put on it, whether it's, uh, uh, kind of the, the woke stuff or like whatever, like it's just like, it's very

Starting point is 03:30:05 obvious, like the pendulum swung one direction and I think it's swinging back. Um, and so just naturally, like there's a lot of people who feel that sentiment shift. I think that's why you see Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, like starting to be talk a lot more about politics and they just, they sense it um that old would likely lead to you know kind of this like red wave or whatever in the midterm elections uh but i always go back on politics of like presidents really can't do that much like yes they are the most powerful person in the world but like people were really really scared of donald trump and then people on the other side of the aisle were really really scared of joe biden what have either one of them done like sure that yes you can point to specific

Starting point is 03:30:49 a piece of legislation or whatever but like what did they do that like fundamentally changed the course of you know america and sure the extremes of both sides will point to certain things like oh my god can you believe they did whatever but if you actually look at like structurally there's checks and balances although we forget like we we forget that we like to you know executive power it's like all this stuff whatever and so it's just really hard for politicians to like get shit done, which is also why then I think like the private market is so responsible for driving solutions is because like the bureaucrats, the system is designed for them not to be able to do shit. Right. So we need entrepreneurs to be able to solve the problems. Yeah. Yeah. So it's

Starting point is 03:31:31 really interesting if you think, you know, people say that the president is really powerful, but what interesting question to ask is what is the difference in outcomes between one person became president another person became president and if it's not that much then you then the question is well who is the person where if they didn't exist there would be a big difference uh where there's a big counterfactual difference i think we said elon musk is one of those people right like thousand years entrepreneurs exactly it's like that that is the biggest difference in society if jeff bezos didn't exist you wouldn't have amazon right if elon musk didn't exist right like and i don't know how many there are there are five people or there are 50 people or there

Starting point is 03:32:09 500 people there's some number but almost all of them are not politicians like i'll say private sector but like you could say they're scientists there's you know whatever but like they're not politicians and it goes back to how many of your smartest friends that want to be politicians they're not my friends you're just laughing right like nobody that i know or is like my smartest friends want to be politicians now it's not a knock against people who want to be politicians because actually i hope that they are somebody's smartest friend like actually that's what we would want um and if you think about in you know ancient rome and all like it was a very like aspirational uh thing but i think in some weird way like meme culture

Starting point is 03:32:53 has destroyed institutions and like politicians i mean like there's literally twitter accounts that are like tracking the day trades of a politician like it's like this is a joke like you're just like us like shut up yeah yeah and so in some weird way um you you why would you go do that if you're intelligent and you could solve real problems you could make money you could like do all this stuff like why would you do it and sure there's some people who are like oh i believe that this is the place for change but there's not very many people who are like yeah this is the place to create change yeah i think one of the things over history that matters a lot is what are the young talented people want to do and what are the options for them you always

Starting point is 03:33:36 have people in society that are really ambitious and smart and these are the kinds of people who are like founder types over but throughout most of history these people were like warlords or you know military and that that was bad for society obviously right because like being a warlord is a negative some game i mean if you think of somebody like napoleon the guy was insanely brilliant he was basically uh it was just today he would be like a great startup founder um just the ability to think about um micromanage the economy the military the strategy everything actually there's a funny example where he tells an austrian diplomat listen you're not gonna win i'm willing to lose 60 000 men a month right and i was thinking that's very similar to if like the

Starting point is 03:34:22 uber ceo to the lyft ceo you're not gonna win i'm willing to burn a billion dollars at vc capital a quarter well jeff jeff bezos did this with diaper.com and many others where he literally said i'm just going to lose money on every diaper i i sell until you sell me your business right oh what was that story with um um can you remember the name of the japanese investor again the my masayoshi masayoshi shun was was it youtube or i forget the name of the company but basically he asked them he was uber okay he was uh he was said i want to give you 100 million dollars and they're like we don't need 100 million dollars and he's like okay well who are your top five competitors and they're they give the names and he's like okay either you take my money or i'll

Starting point is 03:35:00 give them 100 million dollars you either want my bazooka pointed at you or behind you um yes so yeah but i hopefully over time people the smartest people will realize i can make a lot more impact on the world by pursuing like building businesses but building good services for people the problem is if none of yeah like you said if none of the smartest people are going into politics you have a problem where the biggest impact that politics can have is preventing people from building useful goods and services right so if you think about nuclear is a great example of this the fda is like um but it's my opinion that a lot of drugs that could have improved quality of life um have just basically been uh prevented by the fda's long and convoluted process

Starting point is 03:35:48 so yeah hopefully a few of those kinds of people actually just like make sure that things can pass through the bureaucratic filter but you want to hear a crazy idea go for it one of the fastest paths to being a celebrity in today's society is for a young person to become a politician like aoc or something yeah right like they're celebrity politicians now yeah and and look by the way i'm always very clear like donald trump was one aoc was one right and so just like if you have congressperson or senator in front of your name the press will write about you like you have a fast track to celebrity and so the like tiktok social media generation there's a lot of those people are gonna go try to be politicians yeah right because it is a path to doing it now it's

Starting point is 03:36:33 not all of them but like the incentives are weird yeah i do wonder if like i guess i don't talk to i don't have like a good sample of people my age but i do wonder how many of them are thinking of the world in terms of uh i want to go into politics and make like political change the thing is in public education the stories you're told are like who impacts stories you don't hear of borla or haber or you know all these great scientists who have like allowed billions of people to live you hear about you know like activist movements these movements have been important no doubt right but if that's your only conception of history that basically we give people more rights and that's the only thing that's changed our history that's our progress is

Starting point is 03:37:16 that's a very incomplete picture of history and obviously that reinforces um what people think is important to do with their careers right like if that's what you think you're going to want to become a politician or something yeah well and also uh why become a politician if you can affect more change in the private market right like like we celebratize bezos and musk and you know name all these people because they're actually the ones that create change yeah like elon musk and spacex did something that the u.s government could not do for way cheaper and with less time me up it's insane right and so like okay andrew is doing something that the u.s military could not do right yeah yeah and by the way like that's a good thing that we have people who are able to

Starting point is 03:37:57 get capital use their ideas and like provide these capabilities like it is a good thing that spacex can bring us to space it is a good thing that andrew can help protect the united states of america right and so like for the average american like we don't give a shit who does it i just need somebody to make sure that like things are good right but if the government can't do it then like we should be really fucking happy that there's other solutions out there yeah and and then the the positives uh like the white pill on this is you know if you look at the media they're always complaining about like people like musk or bezos but if you look at opinion polls like pure research uh polls about what do people think about amazon what do people think about musk

Starting point is 03:38:37 they're actually like pretty overwhelmingly positive which means that people understand that you use amazon every day right like you understand like this guy basically is getting you shit uh for very low cost very immediately uh i'm hoping that the narrative that the media narrative you know these people are actually just basically competitors if you think about like new york times a competitor to facebook it's a competitor to google so obviously they're gonna have a negative spin hopefully that that doesn't well they're also competitors to the entrepreneurs because the entrepreneurs, uh, are able to, uh, it basically exposed the bullshit. Like Jeff Bezos in the middle of the pandemic hired a hundred thousand people. Yep. Right. The average

Starting point is 03:39:17 pay of an Amazon worker is over $15 an hour. It's like $17 an hour. So how is it that Jeff Bezos was able to get it to $17 an hour when politicians can't even do it in their own States, let alone at the federal level. Right. Like I always joke, like, why are the politicians under shooting so much why do they only want 15 an hour amazon already pays 17 why don't you make it 17 yeah i mean over time the thing that drives up wages is higher worker productivity which is made possible by innovations that you know make you a more efficient worker it's like the people over hype you know there's also this narrative of oh like the reason we have better working conditions today than we did in the past or we work fewer days and fewer hours is because of labor market regulations

Starting point is 03:39:59 uh you know like people say like oh unions brought us weekends off or stuff i think the real story is just that like you're you're just workers are just so much more productive today that it makes sense for companies to hire them for more money if you get more money you're willing to work if you you know you're willing to bargain for weekends off or stuff like that um and yeah so i think labor market regulations have had very little to do with improvements in worker conditions over time i think it's basically been the free market has just made workers more efficient and therefore it's good for workers. Yeah. A hundred percent agree. Yeah. Um, let's wrap up. Yeah. Where, where can we send people to, uh, to find you on the internet? Yes. So I have

Starting point is 03:40:38 a podcast called the lunar society. I have intellectuals, scientists, founders come on, and I really like to learn a lot about their discipline, ask them, um, really nuanced, interesting, deep questions. I've had, uh, Sam McAfee, David Deutsch, Tyler Cowen, those kinds of people on a very wide variety of folks and also very kind of deep uh intelligent conversations with them yeah thank you uh and where can people find it yes it's called the lunar society it can be found everywhere a fine podcast are sold um no it's free uh and it's it you so apple podcast spotify youtube there's a video version on youtube so that you can find that there and we've been talking about some of my blog posts those you can find on my sub stack

Starting point is 03:41:22 DwarkeshPatel.com difficult name but if you look at the description you'll see what my I just spelled my name so just go to DwarkeshPatel.com

Starting point is 03:41:28 and yeah I am Dwarkesh underscore SP on Twitter but the Lunar Society podcast is my main thing so I'm just gonna speak slowly

Starting point is 03:41:36 because I tend to speak fast the Lunar Society yeah we'll link to it in the description I enjoy it so I appreciate you coming in

Starting point is 03:41:44 thank you and anyone who hasn't yet I highly suggest go check out the podcast or follow you on Twitter yeah man well dude

Starting point is 03:41:50 I really appreciate you having me on. I really enjoy your content. So I was super, super grateful to be able to come on. We only went for three hours or so. Yeah, it didn't feel that long at all. All right. We'll definitely do it again in the future. Yeah, man. Awesome. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been

Starting point is 03:42:20 working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends and I'll see you all for the next episode. Thank you.

The Pomp Podcast - #1075 Dwarkesh Patel On Why The Future Will Be Wild

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