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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast
Episode: #189 – Rachel Glennerster on how “market shaping” could help solve climate change, pandemics, and other global problems
Release date: 2024-05-29

"You can’t charge what something is worth during a pandemic. So we estimated that the value of one course of COVID vaccine in January 2021 was over $5,000. They were selling for between $6 and $40. So nothing like their social value. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that they should have charged $5,000 or $6,000. That’s not ethical. It’s also not economically efficient, because they didn’t cost $5,000 at the marginal cost. So you actually want low price, getting out to lots of people.

"But it shows you that the market is not going to reward people who do the investment in preparation for a pandemic — because when a pandemic hits, they’re not going to get the reward in line with the social value. They may even have to charge less than they would in a non-pandemic time. So prepping for a pandemic is not an efficient market strategy if I’m a firm, but it’s a very efficient strategy for society, and so we’ve got to bridge that gap." —Rachel Glennerster

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Rachel Glennerster — associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a pioneer in the field of development economics — about how her team’s new Market Shaping Accelerator aims to leverage market forces to drive innovations that can solve pressing world problems.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• How market failures and misaligned incentives stifle critical innovations for social goods like pandemic preparedness, climate change interventions, and vaccine development.
• How “pull mechanisms” like advance market commitments (AMCs) can help overcome these challenges — including concrete examples like how one AMC led to speeding up the development of three vaccines which saved around 700,000 lives in low-income countries.
• The challenges in designing effective pull mechanisms, from design to implementation.
• Why it’s important to tie innovation incentives to real-world impact and uptake, not just the invention of a new technology.
• The massive benefits of accelerating vaccine development, in some cases, even if it’s only by a few days or weeks.
• The case for a $6 billion advance market commitment to spur work on a universal COVID-19 vaccine.
• The shortlist of ideas from the Market Shaping Accelerator’s recent Innovation Challenge that use pull mechanisms to address market failures around improving indoor air quality, repurposing generic drugs for alternative uses, and developing eco-friendly air conditioners for a warming planet.
• “Best Buys” and “Bad Buys” for improving education systems in low- and middle-income countries, based on evidence from over 400 studies.
• Lessons from Rachel’s career at the forefront of global development, and how insights from economics can drive transformative change.
• And much more.

Chapters:

• The Market Shaping Accelerator (00:03:33)
• Pull mechanisms for innovation (00:13:10)
• Accelerating the pneumococcal and COVID vaccines (00:19:05)
• Advance market commitments (00:41:46)
• Is this uncertainty hard for funders to plan around? (00:49:17)
• The story of the malaria vaccine that wasn’t (00:57:15)
• Challenges with designing and implementing AMCs and other pull mechanisms (01:01:40)
• Universal COVID vaccine (01:18:14)
• Climate-resilient crops (01:34:09)
• The Market Shaping Accelerator’s Innovation Challenge (01:45:40)
• Indoor air quality to reduce respiratory infections (01:49:09)
• Repurposing generic drugs (01:55:50)
• Clean air conditioning units (02:02:41)
• Broad-spectrum antivirals for pandemic prevention (02:09:11)
• Improving education in low- and middle-income countries (02:15:53)
• What’s still weird for Rachel about living in the US? (02:45:06)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show
Episode: Salman Rushdie Is Not Who You Think He Is
Release date: 2024-04-26

Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses,” made him the target of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who denounced the book as blasphemous and issued a fatwa calling for his assassination. Rushdie spent years trying to escape the shadow the fatwa cast on him, and for some time, he thought he succeeded. But in 2022, an assailant attacked him onstage at a speaking engagement in western New York and nearly killed him.

“I think now I’ll never be able to escape it. No matter what I’ve already written or may now write, I’ll always be the guy who got knifed,” he writes in his new memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.”

In this conversation, I asked Rushdie to reflect on his desire to escape the fatwa; the gap between the reputation of his novels and their actual merits; how his “shadow selves” became more real to millions than he was; how many of us in the internet age also have to contend with our many shadow selves; what Rushdie lives for now; and more.

Mentioned:

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

Book Recommendations:

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Mrinalini Chakravorty.

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Podcast: Political Philosophy Podcast
Episode: THE POLITICAL RIGHT & EQUALITY With MattMcManus
Release date: 2024-04-28

What defines the modern American right? Matt McManus argues we should understand the movement as fundementally about hierarchy, we then get into a general conversation about the Biden administration and the direction of the US Left.

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Podcast: The Gradient: Perspectives on AI
Episode: David Thorstad: Bounded Rationality and the Case Against Longtermism
Release date: 2024-05-02

Episode 122

I spoke with Professor David Thorstad about:

• The practical difficulties of doing interdisciplinary work

• Why theories of human rationality should account for boundedness, heuristics, and other cognitive limitations

• why EA epistemics suck (ok, it’s a little more nuanced than that)

Professor Thorstad is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, a Senior Research Affiliate at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, and a Research Affiliate at the MINT Lab at Australian National University. One strand of his research asks how cognitively limited agents should decide what to do and believe. A second strand asks how altruists should use limited funds to do good effectively.

Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.

Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on Twitter

Outline:

• (00:00) Intro

• (01:15) David’s interest in rationality

• (02:45) David’s crisis of confidence, models abstracted from psychology

• (05:00) Blending formal models with studies of the mind

• (06:25) Interaction between academic communities

• (08:24) Recognition of and incentives for interdisciplinary work

• (09:40) Movement towards interdisciplinary work

• (12:10) The Standard Picture of rationality

• (14:11) Why the Standard Picture was attractive

• (16:30) Violations of and rebellion against the Standard Picture

• (19:32) Mistakes made by critics of the Standard Picture

• (22:35) Other competing programs vs Standard Picture

• (26:27) Characterizing Bounded Rationality

• (27:00) A worry: faculties criticizing themselves

• (29:28) Self-improving critique and longtermism

• (30:25) Central claims in bounded rationality and controversies

• (32:33) Heuristics and formal theorizing

• (35:02) Violations of Standard Picture, vindicatory epistemology

• (37:03) The Reason Responsive Consequentialist View (RRCV)

• (38:30) Objective and subjective pictures

• (41:35) Reason responsiveness

• (43:37) There are no epistemic norms for inquiry

• (44:00) Norms vs reasons

• (45:15) Arguments against epistemic nihilism for belief

• (47:30) Norms and self-delusion

• (49:55) Difficulty of holding beliefs for pragmatic reasons

• (50:50) The Gibbardian picture, inquiry as an action

• (52:15) Thinking how to act and thinking how to live — the power of inquiry

• (53:55) Overthinking and conducting inquiry

• (56:30) Is thinking how to inquire as an all-things-considered matter?

• (58:00) Arguments for the RRCV

• (1:00:40) Deciding on minimal criteria for the view, stereotyping

• (1:02:15) Eliminating stereotypes from the theory

• (1:04:20) Theory construction in epistemology and moral intuition

• (1:08:20) Refusing theories for moral reasons and disciplinary boundaries

• (1:10:30) The argument from minimal criteria, evaluating against competing views

• (1:13:45) Comparing to other theories

• (1:15:00) The explanatory argument

• (1:17:53) Parfit and Railton, norms of friendship vs utility

• (1:20:00) Should you call out your friend for being a womanizer

• (1:22:00) Vindicatory Epistemology

• (1:23:05) Panglossianism and meliorative epistemology

• (1:24:42) Heuristics and recognition-driven investigation

• (1:26:33) Rational inquiry leading to irrational beliefs — metacognitive processing

• (1:29:08) Stakes of inquiry and costs of metacognitive processing

• (1:30:00) When agents are incoherent, focuses on inquiry

• (1:32:05) Indirect normative assessment and its consequences

• (1:37:47) Against the Singularity Hypothesis

• (1:39:00) Superintelligence and the ontological argument

• (1:41:50) Hardware growth and general intelligence growth, AGI definitions

• (1:43:55) Difficulties in arguing for hyperbolic growth

• (1:46:07) Chalmers and the proportionality argument

• (1:47:53) Arguments for/against diminishing growth, research productivity, Moore’s Law

• (1:50:08) On progress studies

• (1:52:40) Improving research productivity and technology growth

• (1:54:00) Mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk, longtermist epistemics

• (1:55:30) Cumulative and per-unit risk

• (1:57:37) Back and forth with longtermists, time of perils

• (1:59:05) Background risk — risks we can and can’t intervene on, total existential risk

• (2:00:56) The case for longtermism is inflated

• (2:01:40) Epistemic humility and longtermism

• (2:03:15) Knowledge production — reliable sources, blog posts vs peer review

• (2:04:50) Compounding potential errors in knowledge

• (2:06:38) Group deliberation dynamics, academic consensus

• (2:08:30) The scope of longtermism

• (2:08:30) Money in effective altruism and processes of inquiry

• (2:10:15) Swamping longtermist options

• (2:12:00) Washing out arguments and justified belief

• (2:13:50) The difficulty of long-term forecasting and interventions

• (2:15:50) Theory of change in the bounded rationality program

• (2:18:45) Outro

Links:

• David’s homepage and Twitter and blog

• Papers mentioned/read

• Bounded rationality and inquiry

• Why bounded rationality (in epistemology)?

• Against the newer evidentialists

• The accuracy-coherence tradeoff in cognition

• There are no epistemic norms of inquiry

• Permissive metaepistemology

• Global priorities and effective altruism

• What David likes about EA

• Against the singularity hypothesis (+ blog posts

• Three mistakes in the moral mathematics of existential risk (+ blog posts

• The scope of longtermism

• Epistemics

Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe

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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler
Episode: Peter Thiel on Political Theology
Release date: 2024-04-17

In this conversation recorded live in Miami, Tyler and Peter Thiel dive deep into the complexities of political theology, including why it’s a concept we still need today, why Peter’s against Calvinism (and rationalism), whether the Old Testament should lead us to be woke, why Carl Schmitt is enjoying a resurgence, whether we’re entering a new age of millenarian thought, the one existential risk Peter thinks we’re overlooking, why everyone just muddling through leads to disaster, the role of the katechon, the political vision in Shakespeare, how AI will affect the influence of wordcels, Straussian messages in the Bible, what worries Peter about Miami, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded February 21st, 2024.

Other ways to connect

• Follow us on X and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on X
• Follow Peter on X
• Sign up for our newsletter
• Join our Discord
• Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
• Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

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Podcast: Making Sense with Sam Harris
Episode: #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism
Release date: 2024-04-01

Sam Harris speaks with William MacAskill about the implosion of FTX and the effect that it has had on the Effective Altruism movement. They discuss the logic of “earning to give,” the mind of SBF, his philanthropy, the character of the EA community, potential problems with focusing on long-term outcomes, AI risk, the effects of the FTX collapse on Will personally, and other topics.

If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast
Episode: Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken - How to Build & Understand GPT-7's Mind
Release date: 2024-03-28

Had so much fun chatting with my good friends Trenton Bricken and Sholto Douglas on the podcast.

No way to summarize it, except:

This is the best context dump out there on how LLMs are trained, what capabilities they're likely to soon have, and what exactly is going on inside them.

You would be shocked how much of what I know about this field, I've learned just from talking with them.

To the extent that you've enjoyed my other AI interviews, now you know why.

So excited to put this out. Enjoy! I certainly did :)

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.

There's a transcript with links to all the papers the boys were throwing down - may help you follow along.

Follow Trenton and Sholto on Twitter.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Long contexts

(00:16:12) - Intelligence is just associations

(00:32:35) - Intelligence explosion & great researchers

(01:06:52) - Superposition & secret communication

(01:22:34) - Agents & true reasoning

(01:34:40) - How Sholto & Trenton got into AI research

(02:07:16) - Are feature spaces the wrong way to think about intelligence?

(02:21:12) - Will interp actually work on superhuman models

(02:45:05) - Sholto’s technical challenge for the audience

(03:03:57) - Rapid fire

Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

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Podcast: Joe Carlsmith Audio
Episode: An even deeper atheism
Release date: 2024-01-11

Who isn't a paperclipper?

Text version here: https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/01/11/an-even-deeper-atheism

This essay is part of a series I'm calling "Otherness and control in the age of AGI." I'm hoping that individual essays can be read fairly well on their own, but see here for brief summaries of the essays that have been released thus far: https://joecarlsmith.com/2024/01/02/otherness-and-control-in-the-age-of-agi

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Podcast: a16z Podcast
Episode: Drones, Data, and Deterrence: Technology's Role in Public Safety
Release date: 2024-01-10

Flock is a public safety technology platform that operates in over 4,000 cities across the United States, and solves about 2,200 crimes daily. That’s 10 percent of reported crimes nationwide.

Taken from a16z’s recent LP Summit, a16z General Partner David Ulevitch joins forces with Flock Safety’s founder, Garrett Langley and Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Together, they cover the delicate balance between using technology to combat crime and respecting individual privacy, and explore the use of drones and facial recognition, building trust within communities, and the essence of objective policing.

Resources:

Find Garret on Twitter: https://twitter.com/glangley

Find Sheriff McMahill on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sheriff_LVMPD

Find David on Twitter:https://twitter.com/davidu

Learn more about Flock Safety: https://www.flocksafety.com

Stay Updated:

Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z

Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z

Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/

Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Podcast: "The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis
Episode: Biden's Executive Order and AI Safety with Flo Crivello, Founder of Lindy AI
Release date: 2023-11-03

In this episode, Flo Crivello, founder of Lindy AI, joins Nathan to chat about Biden’s executive order, and the state of AI safety. They discuss Flo’s thoughts on the executive order, building AGI kill switches, self driving cars, and more. If you need an ERP platform, check out our sponsor NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/cognitive.

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

SPONSORS: Netsuite | Omneky

Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive

NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.

Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.

RECOMMENDED PODCAST:

Every week investor and writer of the popular newsletter The Diff, Byrne Hobart, and co-host Erik Torenberg discuss today’s major inflection points in technology, business, and markets – and help listeners build a diversified portfolio of trends and ideas for the future. Subscribe to “The Riff” with Byrne Hobart and Erik Torenberg: https://link.chtbl.com/theriff

TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Episode Preview

(00:06:42) The natural order of technological progress

(00:07:00) Self driving cars

(00:10:57) Where is Flo accelerationist?

(00:12:34) Artificial intelligence as a new form of life

(00:17:08) - Sponsors: Oracle | Omneky

(00:18:05) Silicon-based intelligence vs carbon-based intelligence

(00:24:36) Executive Order

(00:29:32) How would a GPU kill switch work?

(00:31:24) “Let’s not regulate model development, but applications”

(00:32:08) - Sponsor: Netsuite

(00:36:00) GPT-4 is the most critical component for AGI

(00:38:00) AGI in 2-8 years

(00:39:26) Eureka moment from a general system

(00:48:00) AI research with China

(00:52:00) Does AI have subjective experience? The Mu response

The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you by the Turpentine Media network.

Producer: Vivian Meng

Executive Producers: Amelia Salyers, and Erik Torenberg

Editor: Graham Bessellieu

For inquiries about guests or sponsoring the podcast, please email vivian@turpentine.co

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Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast
Episode: Paul Christiano - Preventing an AI Takeover
Release date: 2023-10-31

Paul Christiano is the world’s leading AI safety researcher. My full episode with him is out!

We discuss:

• Does he regret inventing RLHF, and is alignment necessarily dual-use?

• Why he has relatively modest timelines (40% by 2040, 15% by 2030),

• What do we want post-AGI world to look like (do we want to keep gods enslaved forever)?

• Why he’s leading the push to get to labs develop responsible scaling policies, and what it would take to prevent an AI coup or bioweapon,

• His current research into a new proof system, and how this could solve alignment by explaining model's behavior

• and much more.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Open Philanthropy

Open Philanthropy is currently hiring for twenty-two different roles to reduce catastrophic risks from fast-moving advances in AI and biotechnology, including grantmaking, research, and operations.

For more information and to apply, please see the application: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/new-roles-on-our-gcr-team/

The deadline to apply is November 9th; make sure to check out those roles before they close.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - What do we want post-AGI world to look like?

(00:24:25) - Timelines

(00:45:28) - Evolution vs gradient descent

(00:54:53) - Misalignment and takeover

(01:17:23) - Is alignment dual-use?

(01:31:38) - Responsible scaling policies

(01:58:25) - Paul’s alignment research

(02:35:01) - Will this revolutionize theoretical CS and math?

(02:46:11) - How Paul invented RLHF

(02:55:10) - Disagreements with Carl Shulman

(03:01:53) - Long TSMC but not NVIDIA

Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

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Podcast: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin
Episode: Tyler Cowen: From Avant-Garde to Pop (Bonus DJ Episode)
Release date: 2023-10-18

Tyler Cowen has long nurtured an obsession with music. It’s one of the few addictions Tyler believes is actually conducive to a fulfilling intellectual life.

In this bonus episode, an addendum to Rick’s conversation with Tyler, Rick sits with Tyler as he plays and talks through the music that moves him: from the outer bounds of the avant-garde to contemporary pop music and all points in between.

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Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Episode: 233 | Hugo Mercier on Reasoning and Skepticism
Release date: 2023-04-17

Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea of not just doing things, but doing things for reasons? In this episode we talk with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier about these issues. He is the co-author (with Dan Sperber) of The Enigma of Reason, about how the notion of reason came to be, and more recently author of Not Born Yesterday, about who we trust and what we believe. He argues that our main shortcoming is not being insufficiently skeptical of radical claims, but of being too skeptical of claims that don't fit our views.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Hugo Mercier received a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He is currently a Permanent CNRS Research Scientist at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. Among his awards are the Prime d’excellence from the CNRS.

• Web site
• Google Scholar publications
• Amazon author page
• Twitter

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Podcast: The Book Club (LS 48 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Tom Holland: Dominion
Release date: 2019-12-04

In this week's Book Club, Sam's guest is the historian Tom Holland, author of the new book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity -- and an account of the myriad ways, many of them invisible to us, that it has shaped and continues to shape Western culture. It's a book and an argument that takes us from Ancient Babylon to Harvey Weinstein's hotel room, draws in the Beatles and the Nazis, and orbits around two giant figures: St Paul and Nietzsche. Is there a single discernible, distinctive Christian way of thinking? Is secularism Christianity by other means? And are our modern-day culture wars between alt-righters and woke progressives a post-Christian phenomenon or, as Tom argues, essentially a civil war between two Christian sects?

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Podcast: Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg (LS 45 · TOP 1% )
Episode: How quickly is AI advancing? And should you be working in the field? (with Danny Hernandez)
Release date: 2023-08-23

Read the full transcript here.

Along what axes and at what rates is the AI industry growing? What algorithmic developments have yielded the greatest efficiency boosts? When, if ever, will we hit the upper limits of the amount of computing power, data, money, etc., we can throw at AI development? Why do some people seemingly become fixated on particular tasks that particular AI models can't perform and draw the conclusion that AIs are still pretty dumb and won't be taking our jobs any time soon? What kinds of tasks are more or less easily automatable? Should more people work on AI? What does it mean to "take ownership" of our friendships? What sorts of thinking patterns employed by AI engineers can be beneficial in other areas of life? How can we make better decisions, especially about large things like careers and relationships?

Danny Hernandez was an early AI researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic. He's best known for measuring macro progress in AI. For example, he helped show that the compute of the largest training runs was growing at 10x per year between 2012 and 2017. He also helped show an algorithmic equivalent of Moore's Law that was faster, and he's done work on scaling laws and mechanistic interpretability of learning from repeated data. He is currently focused on alignment research.

[Read more]

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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339]
Release date: 2023-08-01

My guest today is Samo Burja. Samo is the founder of consulting firm, Bismark Analysis, and has dedicated his life’s work to understanding why there has never been an immortal society. His research focuses on institutions, the founders behind them, how they rise and why they always fall in the end. As you’ll hear, Samo has an encyclopedic grasp of history and his work has led him to some fascinating theories about human progress, the nature of exceptional founders, and the future of different societies across the world. Please enjoy my conversation with Samo Burja.

Listen to Founders Podcast

Founders Episode 311: James Cameron

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.

Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.

Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.

Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus

Show Notes

(00:02:52) - (First question) - The core thesis behind the Great Founder Theory

(00:06:40) - Great ideas inevitably being discovered at some point in history

(00:08:45) - The historic implications of a global adoption of the Great Founder Theory

(00:10:51) - The different possible directions of future trends

(00:17:08) - Distinctions between great founders versus live players

(00:22:15) - Common misconceptions about what qualifies one as a great founder

(00:24:38) - Noteworthy great founders in the United States

(00:28:34) - Recurring observable traits and common themes of great founders

(00:31:29) - Using caution when projecting a mythic lens onto great founders

(00:37:53) - Social technology as the upstream effects of prior material technology

(00:43:32) - Whether or not institutions play a role in propagating the work of great founders

(00:49:08) - The role of power and differences between owned and borrowed power

(00:56:51) - Additional ideas that play an outsized role in shaping the world

(01:01:09) - A differing worldview to his own that he finds interesting

(01:04:53) - Whether or not capital allocators can benefit from the Great Founder Theory

(01:07:37) - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

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Podcast: The Joe Walker Podcast (formerly Jolly Swagman) (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: #148: Constructing the Computational Paradigm — Stephen Wolfram
Release date: 2023-08-16

Stephen Wolfram is a physicist, computer scientist and businessman. He is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and the author of A New Kind of Science.

Full transcript available at: jnwpod.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Podcast: Dwarkesh Podcast (Lunar Society formerly) (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% )
Episode: Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) - $10 Billion Models, OpenAI, Scaling, & AGI in 2 years
Release date: 2023-08-08

Here is my conversation with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.

We discuss:

• why human level AI is 2-3 years away

• race dynamics with OpenAI and China

• $10 billion training runs, bioterrorism, alignment, cyberattacks, scaling, ...

Dario is hilarious and has fascinating takes on what these models are doing, why they scale so well, and what it will take to align them.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Pay whatever value you feel you’ve gotten

I’m running an experiment on this episode.

I’m not doing an ad.

Instead, I’m just going to ask you to pay for whatever value you feel you personally got out of this conversation.

Pay here: https://bit.ly/3ONINtp

Timestamps

(00:02:03) - Scaling

(00:16:49) - Language

(00:24:01) - Economic Usefulness

(00:39:08) - Bioterrorism

(00:44:38) - Cybersecurity

(00:48:22) - Alignment & mechanistic interpretability

(00:58:46) - Does alignment research require scale?

(01:06:33) - Misuse vs misalignment

(01:10:09) - What if AI goes well?

(01:12:08) - China

(01:16:14) - How to think about alignment

(01:30:21) - Manhattan Project

(01:32:34) - Is modern security good enough?

(01:37:12) - Inefficiencies in training

(01:46:56) - Anthropic’s Long Term Benefit Trust

(01:52:21) - Is Claude conscious?

(01:57:17) - Keeping a low profile

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

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Podcast: No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Technology | Startups (LS 38 · TOP 2% )
Episode: Will Everyone Have a Personal AI? With Mustafa Suleyman, Founder of DeepMind and Inflection
Release date: 2023-05-11

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI, joins Sarah and Elad to discuss how his interests in counseling, conflict resolution, and intelligence led him to start an AI lab that pioneered deep reinforcement learning, lead applied AI and policy efforts at Google, and more recently found Inflection and launch Pi.

Mustafa offers insights on the changing structure of the web, the pressure Google faces in the age of AI personalization, predictions for model architectures, how to measure emotional intelligence in AIs, and the thinking behind Pi: the AI companion that knows you, is aligned to your interests, and provides companionship.

Sarah and Elad also discuss Mustafa’s upcoming book, The Coming Wave (release September 12, 2023), which examines the political ramifications of AI and digital biology revolutions.

No Priors is now on YouTube! Subscribe to the channel on YouTube and like this episode.

Show Links:

• Forbes - Startup From Reid Hoffman and Mustafa Suleyman Debuts ChatBot
• Inflection.ai
• Mustafa-Suleyman.ai

Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com

Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @mustafasuleymn

Show Notes:

[00:06] - From Conflict Resolution to AI Pioneering

[10:36] - Defining Intelligence

[15:32] - DeepMind's Journey and Breakthroughs

[24:45] - The Future of Personal AI Companionship

[33:22] - AI and the Future of Personalized Content

[41:49] - The Launch of Pi

[51:12] - Mustafa’s New Book The Coming Wave

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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% )
Episode: Carl Shulman (Pt 2) - AI Takeover, Bio & Cyber Attacks, Detecting Deception, & Humanity's Far Future
Release date: 2023-06-26

The second half of my 7 hour conversation with Carl Shulman is out!

My favorite part! And the one that had the biggest impact on my worldview.

Here, Carl lays out how an AI takeover might happen:

• AI can threaten mutually assured destruction from bioweapons,

• use cyber attacks to take over physical infrastructure,

• build mechanical armies,

• spread seed AIs we can never exterminate,

• offer tech and other advantages to collaborating countries, etc

Plus we talk about a whole bunch of weird and interesting topics which Carl has thought about:

• what is the far future best case scenario for humanity

• what it would look like to have AI make thousands of years of intellectual progress in a month

• how do we detect deception in superhuman models

• does space warfare favor defense or offense

• is a Malthusian state inevitable in the long run

• why markets haven't priced in explosive economic growth

• & much more

Carl also explains how he developed such a rigorous, thoughtful, and interdisciplinary model of the biggest problems in the world.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Catch part 1 here

80,000 hours

This episode is sponsored by 80,000 hours. To get their free career guide (and to help out this podcast), please visit 80000hours.org/lunar.

80,000 hours is without any close second the best resource to learn about the world’s most pressing problems and how you can solve them.

If this conversation has got you concerned, and you want to get involved, then check out the excellent 80,000 hours guide on how to help with AI risk.

Timestamps

(00:02:50) - AI takeover via cyber or bio

(00:34:30) - Can we coordinate against AI?

(00:55:52) - Human vs AI colonizers

(01:06:58) - Probability of AI takeover

(01:23:59) - Can we detect deception?

(01:49:28) - Using AI to solve coordination problems

(01:58:04) - Partial alignment

(02:13:44) - AI far future

(02:25:07) - Markets & other evidence

(02:35:29) - Day in the life of Carl Shulman

(02:49:08) - Space warfare, Malthusian long run, & other rapid fireTranscript

Get full access to The Lunar Society at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

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Podcast: Joe Carlsmith Audio
Episode: Predictable updating about AI risk
Release date: 2023-05-08

How worried about AI risk will we feel in the future, when we can see advanced machine intelligence up close? We should worry accordingly now. Text version here: https://joecarlsmith.com/2023/05/08/predictable-updating-about-ai-risk 

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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% )
Episode: Carl Shulman - Intelligence Explosion, Primate Evolution, Robot Doublings, & Alignment
Release date: 2023-06-14

In terms of the depth and range of topics, this episode is the best I’ve done.

No part of my worldview is the same after talking with Carl Shulman. He's the most interesting intellectual you've never heard of.

We ended up talking for 8 hours, so I'm splitting this episode into 2 parts.

This part is about Carl’s model of an intelligence explosion, which integrates everything from:

• how fast algorithmic progress & hardware improvements in AI are happening,

• what primate evolution suggests about the scaling hypothesis,

• how soon before AIs could do large parts of AI research themselves, and whether there would be faster and faster doublings of AI researchers,

• how quickly robots produced from existing factories could take over the economy.

We also discuss the odds of a takeover based on whether the AI is aligned before the intelligence explosion happens, and Carl explains why he’s more optimistic than Eliezer.

The next part, which I’ll release next week, is about all the specific mechanisms of an AI takeover, plus a whole bunch of other galaxy brain stuff.

Maybe 3 people in the world have thought as rigorously as Carl about so many interesting topics. This was a huge pleasure.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:01:32) - Intelligence Explosion

(00:18:03) - Can AIs do AI research?

(00:39:00) - Primate evolution

(01:03:30) - Forecasting AI progress

(01:34:20) - After human-level AGI

(02:08:39) - AI takeover scenarios

Get full access to The Lunar Society at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Peter Singer on Utilitarianism, Influence, and Controversial Ideas
Release date: 2023-06-07

Peter Singer is one of the world’s most influential living philosophers, whose ideas have motivated millions of people to change how they eat, how they give, and how they interact with each other and the natural world.

Peter joined Tyler to discuss whether utilitarianism is only tractable at the margin, how Peter thinks about the meat-eater problem, why he might side with aliens over humans, at what margins he would police nature, the utilitarian approach to secularism and abortion, what he’s learned producing the Journal of Controversial Ideas, what he’d change about the current Effective Altruism movement, where Derek Parfit went wrong, to what extent we should respect the wishes of the dead, why professional philosophy is so boring, his advice on how to enjoy our lives, what he’ll be doing after retiring from teaching, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded May 25th, 2023

Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow Peter on Twitter
• Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
• Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

Photo credit: Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek

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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: #152 – Joe Carlsmith on navigating serious philosophical confusion
Release date: 2023-05-19

What is the nature of the universe? How do we make decisions correctly? What differentiates right actions from wrong ones?

Such fundamental questions have been the subject of philosophical and theological debates for millennia. But, as we all know, and surveys of expert opinion make clear, we are very far from agreement. So... with these most basic questions unresolved, what’s a species to do?

In today's episode, philosopher Joe Carlsmith — Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy — makes the case that many current debates in philosophy ought to leave us confused and humbled. These are themes he discusses in his PhD thesis, A stranger priority? Topics at the outer reaches of effective altruism.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

To help transmit the disorientation he thinks is appropriate, Joe presents three disconcerting theories — originating from him and his peers — that challenge humanity's self-assured understanding of the world.

The first idea is that we might be living in a computer simulation, because, in the classic formulation, if most civilisations go on to run many computer simulations of their past history, then most beings who perceive themselves as living in such a history must themselves be in computer simulations. Joe prefers a somewhat different way of making the point, but, having looked into it, he hasn't identified any particular rebuttal to this 'simulation argument.'

If true, it could revolutionise our comprehension of the universe and the way we ought to live...

Other two ideas cut for length — click here to read the full post.

These are just three particular instances of a much broader set of ideas that some have dubbed the "train to crazy town." Basically, if you commit to always take philosophy and arguments seriously, and try to act on them, it can lead to what seem like some pretty crazy and impractical places. So what should we do with this buffet of plausible-sounding but bewildering arguments?

Joe and Rob discuss to what extent this should prompt us to pay less attention to philosophy, and how we as individuals can cope psychologically with feeling out of our depth just trying to make the most basic sense of the world.

In today's challenging conversation, Joe and Rob discuss all of the above, as well as:

• What Joe doesn't like about the drowning child thought experiment
• An alternative thought experiment about helping a stranger that might better highlight our intrinsic desire to help others
• What Joe doesn't like about the expression “the train to crazy town”
• Whether Elon Musk should place a higher probability on living in a simulation than most other people
• Whether the deterministic twin prisoner’s dilemma, if fully appreciated, gives us an extra reason to keep promises
• To what extent learning to doubt our own judgement about difficult questions -- so-called “epistemic learned helplessness” -- is a good thing
• How strong the case is that advanced AI will engage in generalised power-seeking behaviour

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris

Audio mastering: Milo McGuire and Ben Cordell

Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Podcast: Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% )
Episode: #59 - Jeff Hawkins (Thousand Brains Theory)
Release date: 2021-09-03

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst

The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to learn how the human brain gives rise to human intelligence and what it means to be intelligent. Understanding how the brain works is considered one of humanity’s greatest challenges.

Jeff Hawkins thinks that the reality we perceive is a kind of simulation, a hallucination, a confabulation. He thinks that our brains are a model reality based on thousands of information streams originating from the sensors in our body. Critically - Hawkins doesn’t think there is just one model but rather; thousands.

Jeff has just released his new book, A thousand brains: a new theory of intelligence. It’s an inspiring and well-written book and I hope after watching this show; you will be inspired to read it too.

https://numenta.com/a-thousand-brains-by-jeff-hawkins/

https://numenta.com/blog/2019/01/16/the-thousand-brains-theory-of-intelligence/

Panel:

Dr. Keith Duggar https://twitter.com/DoctorDuggar

Connor Leahy https://twitter.com/npcollapse

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Podcast: Hear This Idea (LS 33 · TOP 5% )
Episode: #63 – Ben Garfinkel on AI Governance
Release date: 2023-05-13

Ben Garfinkel is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and Acting Director of the Centre for the Governance of AI.

In this episode we talk about:

• An overview of AI governance space, and disentangling concrete research questions that Ben would like to see more work on
• Seeing how existing arguments for the risks from transformative AI have held up and Ben’s personal motivations for working on global risks from AI
• GovAI’s own work and opportunities for listeners to get involved

Further reading and a transcript is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/garfinkel

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

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Podcast: Lex Fridman Podcast (LS 76 · TOP 0.01% )
Episode: #299 – Demis Hassabis: DeepMind
Release date: 2022-07-01

Demis Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
– Mailgun: https://lexfridman.com/mailgun
– InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off
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– Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex and use code LEX to get $5 off

EPISODE LINKS:
Demis’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/demishassabis
DeepMind’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/DeepMind
DeepMind’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/deepmind
DeepMind’s Website: https://deepmind.com
Plasma control paper: https://nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04301-9
Quantum simulation paper: https://science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj6511
The Emperor’s New Mind (book): https://amzn.to/3bx03lo
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PODCAST INFO:
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SUPPORT & CONNECT:
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– Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman

OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(07:17) – Turing Test
(14:43) – Video games
(36:18) – Simulation
(38:29) – Consciousness
(43:29) – AlphaFold
(57:09) – Solving intelligence
(1:09:28) – Open sourcing AlphaFold & MuJoCo
(1:19:34) – Nuclear fusion
(1:23:38) – Quantum simulation
(1:26:46) – Physics
(1:30:13) – Origin of life
(1:34:52) – Aliens
(1:42:59) – Intelligent life
(1:46:08) – Conscious AI
(1:59:23) – Power
(2:03:53) – Advice for young people
(2:11:59) – Meaning of life

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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: #150 – Tom Davidson on how quickly AI could transform the world
Release date: 2023-05-05

It’s easy to dismiss alarming AI-related predictions when you don’t know where the numbers came from.

For example: what if we told you that within 15 years, it’s likely that we’ll see a 1,000x improvement in AI capabilities in a single year? And what if we then told you that those improvements would lead to explosive economic growth unlike anything humanity has seen before?

You might think, “Congratulations, you said a big number — but this kind of stuff seems crazy, so I’m going to keep scrolling through Twitter.”

But this 1,000x yearly improvement is a prediction based on real economic models created by today’s guest Tom Davidson, Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy. By the end of the episode, you’ll either be able to point out specific flaws in his step-by-step reasoning, or have to at least consider the idea that the world is about to get — at a minimum — incredibly weird.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

As a teaser, consider the following:

Developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI that can do 100% of cognitive tasks at least as well as the best humans can — could very easily lead us to an unrecognisable world.

You might think having to train AI systems individually to do every conceivable cognitive task — one for diagnosing diseases, one for doing your taxes, one for teaching your kids, etc. — sounds implausible, or at least like it’ll take decades.

But Tom thinks we might not need to train AI to do every single job — we might just need to train it to do one: AI research.

And building AI capable of doing research and development might be a much easier task — especially given that the researchers training the AI are AI researchers themselves.

And once an AI system is as good at accelerating future AI progress as the best humans are today — and we can run billions of copies of it round the clock — it’s hard to make the case that we won’t achieve AGI very quickly.

To give you some perspective: 17 years ago we saw the launch of Twitter, the release of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and your first chance to play the Nintendo Wii.

Tom thinks that if we have AI that significantly accelerates AI R&D, then it’s hard to imagine not having AGI 17 years from now.

Wild.

Host Luisa Rodriguez gets Tom to walk us through his careful reports on the topic, and how he came up with these numbers, across a terrifying but fascinating three hours.

Luisa and Tom also discuss:

• How we might go from GPT-4 to AI disaster
• Tom’s journey from finding AI risk to be kind of scary to really scary
• Whether international cooperation or an anti-AI social movement can slow AI progress down
• Why it might take just a few years to go from pretty good AI to superhuman AI
• How quickly the number and quality of computer chips we’ve been using for AI have been increasing
• The pace of algorithmic progress
• What ants can teach us about AI
• And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Simon Monsour and Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Podcast: Bankless (LS 59 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: 168 - How to Solve AI Alignment with Paul Christiano
Release date: 2023-04-24

Paul Christiano runs the Alignment Research Center, a non-profit research organization whose mission is to align future machine learning systems with human interests. Paul previously ran the language model alignment team at OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.

Today, we’re hoping to explore the solution-landscape to the AI Alignment problem, and hoping Paul can guide us on that journey.

------ ✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-paul-christiano ------ ✨ COLLECTIBLES | Collect this episode: https://collectibles.bankless.com/mint

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------ In today’s episode, Paul answers many questions, but the overarching ones are: 1) How BIG is the AI Alignment problem? 2) How HARD is the AI Alighment problem? 3) How SOLVABLE is the AI Alignment problem?

Does humanity have a chance? Tune in to hear Paul’s thoughts.

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------ Topics Covered

0:00 Intro 9:20 Percentage Likelihood of Death by AI 11:24 Timing 19:15 Chimps to Human Jump 21:55 Thoughts on ChatGPT 27:51 LLMs & AGI 32:49 Time to React? 38:29 AI Takeover 41:51 AI Agency 49:35 Loopholes 51:14 Training AIs to Be Honest 58:00 Psychology 59:36 How Solvable Is the AI Alignment Problem? 1:03:48 The Technical Solutions (Scalable Oversight) 1:16:14 Training AIs to be Bad?! 1:18:22 More Solutions 1:21:36 Stabby AIs 1:26:03 Public vs. Private (Lab) AIs 1:28:31 Inside Neural Nets 1:32:11 4th Solution 1:35:00 Manpower & Funding 1:38:15 Pause AI? 1:43:29 Resources & Education on AI Safety 1:46:13 Talent 1:49:00 Paul’s Day Job 1:50:15 Nobel Prize 1:52:35 Treating AIs with Respect 1:53:41 Uptopia Scenario 1:55:50 Closing & Disclaimers

------ Resources:

Alignment Research Center https://www.alignment.org/

Paul Christiano’s Website https://paulfchristiano.com/ai/

----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.

Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 39 · TOP 2% )
Episode: Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) - Building AGI, Alignment, Future Models, Spies, Microsoft, Taiwan, & Enlightenment
Release date: 2023-03-27

I went over to the OpenAI offices in San Fransisco to ask the Chief Scientist and cofounder of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, about:

• time to AGI

• leaks and spies

• what's after generative models

• post AGI futures

• working with Microsoft and competing with Google

• difficulty of aligning superhuman AI

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

As always, the most helpful thing you can do is just to share the podcast - send it to friends, group chats, Twitter, Reddit, forums, and wherever else men and women of fine taste congregate.

If you have the means and have enjoyed my podcast, I would appreciate your support via a paid subscriptions on Substack.

Timestamps

(00:00) - Time to AGI

(05:57) - What’s after generative models?

(10:57) - Data, models, and research

(15:27) - Alignment

(20:53) - Post AGI Future

(26:56) - New ideas are overrated

(36:22) - Is progress inevitable?

(41:27) - Future Breakthroughs

Transcript

Time to AGI

Dwarkesh Patel

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Ilya Sutskever, who is the Co-founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI. Ilya, welcome to The Lunar Society.

Ilya Sutskever

Thank you, happy to be here.

Dwarkesh Patel

First question and no humility allowed. There are not that many scientists who will make a big breakthrough in their field, there are far fewer scientists who will make multiple independent breakthroughs that define their field throughout their career, what is the difference? What distinguishes you from other researchers? Why have you been able to make multiple breakthroughs in your field?

Ilya Sutskever

Thank you for the kind words. It's hard to answer that question. I try really hard, I give it everything I've got and that has worked so far. I think that's all there is to it.

Dwarkesh Patel

Got it. What's the explanation for why there aren't more illicit uses of GPT? Why aren't more foreign governments using it to spread propaganda or scam grandmothers?

Ilya Sutskever

Maybe they haven't really gotten to do it a lot. But it also wouldn't surprise me if some of it was going on right now. I can certainly imagine they would be taking some of the open source models and trying to use them for that purpose. For sure I would expect this to be something they'd be interested in the future.

Dwarkesh Patel

It's technically possible they just haven't thought about it enough?

Ilya Sutskever

Or haven't done it at scale using their technology. Or maybe it is happening, which is annoying.

Dwarkesh Patel

Would you be able to track it if it was happening?

Ilya Sutskever

I think large-scale tracking is possible, yes. It requires special operations but it's possible.

Dwarkesh Patel

Now there's some window in which AI is very economically valuable, let’s say on the scale of airplanes, but we haven't reached AGI yet. How big is that window?

Ilya Sutskever

It's hard to give a precise answer and it’s definitely going to be a good multi-year window. It's also a question of definition. Because AI, before it becomes AGI, is going to be increasingly more valuable year after year in an exponential way.

In hindsight, it may feel like there was only one year or two years because those two years were larger than the previous years. But I would say that already, last year, there has been a fair amount of economic value produced by AI. Next year is going to be larger and larger after that. So I think it's going to be a good multi-year chunk of time where that’s going to be true, from now till AGI pretty much.

Dwarkesh Patel

Okay. Because I'm curious if there's a startup that's using your model, at some point if you have AGI there's only one business in the world, it's OpenAI. How much window does any business have where they're actually producing something that AGI can’t produce?

Ilya Sutskever

It's the same question as asking how long until AGI. It's a hard question to answer. I hesitate to give you a number. Also because there is this effect where optimistic people who are working on the technology tend to underestimate the time it takes to get there. But the way I ground myself is by thinking about the self-driving car. In particular, there is an analogy where if you look at the size of a Tesla, and if you look at its self-driving behavior, it looks like it does everything. But it's also clear that there is still a long way to go in terms of reliability. And we might be in a similar place with respect to our models where it also looks like we can do everything, and at the same time, we will need to do some more work until we really iron out all the issues and make it really good and really reliable and robust and well behaved.

Dwarkesh Patel

By 2030, what percent of GDP is AI?

Ilya Sutskever

Oh gosh, very hard to answer that question.

Dwarkesh Patel

Give me an over-under.

Ilya Sutskever

The problem is that my error bars are in log scale. I could imagine a huge percentage, I could imagine a really disappointing small percentage at the same time.

Dwarkesh Patel

Okay, so let's take the counterfactual where it is a small percentage. Let's say it's 2030 and not that much economic value has been created by these LLMs. As unlikely as you think this might be, what would be your best explanation right now of why something like this might happen?

Ilya Sutskever

I really don't think that's a likely possibility, that's the preface to the comment. But if I were to take the premise of your question, why were things disappointing in terms of real-world impact? My answer would be reliability. If it somehow ends up being the case that you really want them to be reliable and they ended up not being reliable, or if reliability turned out to be harder than we expect.

I really don't think that will be the case. But if I had to pick one and you were telling me — hey, why didn't things work out? It would be reliability. That you still have to look over the answers and double-check everything. That just really puts a damper on the economic value that can be produced by those systems.

Dwarkesh Patel

Got it. They will be technologically mature, it’s just the question of whether they'll be reliable enough.

Ilya Sutskever

Well, in some sense, not reliable means not technologically mature.

What’s after generative models?

Dwarkesh Patel

Yeah, fair enough. What's after generative models? Before, you were working on reinforcement learning. Is this basically it? Is this the paradigm that gets us to AGI? Or is there something after this?

Ilya Sutskever

I think this paradigm is gonna go really, really far and I would not underestimate it. It's quite likely that this exact paradigm is not quite going to be the AGI form factor. I hesitate to say precisely what the next paradigm will be but it will probably involve integration of all the different ideas that came in the past.

Dwarkesh Patel

Is there some specific one you're referring to?

Ilya Sutskever

It's hard to be specific.

Dwarkesh Patel

So you could argue that next-token prediction can only help us match human performance and maybe not surpass it? What would it take to surpass human performance?

Ilya Sutskever

I challenge the claim that next-token prediction cannot surpass human performance. On the surface, it looks like it cannot. It looks like if you just learn to imitate, to predict what people do, it means that you can only copy people. But here is a counter argument for why it might not be quite so. If your base neural net is smart enough, you just ask it — What would a person with great insight, wisdom, and capability do? Maybe such a person doesn't exist, but there's a pretty good chance that the neural net will be able to extrapolate how such a person would behave. Do you see what I mean?

Dwarkesh Patel

Yes, although where would it get that sort of insight about what that person would do? If not from…

Ilya Sutskever

From the data of regular people. Because if you think about it, what does it mean to predict the next token well enough? It's actually a much deeper question than it seems. Predicting the next token well means that you understand the underlying reality that led to the creation of that token. It's not statistics. Like it is statistics but what is statistics? In order to understand those statistics to compress them, you need to understand what is it about the world that creates this set of statistics? And so then you say — Well, I have all those people. What is it about people that creates their behaviors? Well they have thoughts and their feelings, and they have ideas, and they do things in certain ways. All of those could be deduced from next-token prediction. And I'd argue that this should make it possible, not indefinitely but to a pretty decent degree to say — Well, can you guess what you'd do if you took a person with this characteristic and that characteristic? Like such a person doesn't exist but because you're so good at predicting the next token, you should still be able to guess what that person who would do. This hypothetical, imaginary person with far greater mental ability than the rest of us.

Dwarkesh Patel

When we're doing reinforcement learning on these models, how long before most of the data for the reinforcement learning is coming from AI and not humans?

Ilya Sutskever

Already most of the default enforcement learning is coming from AIs. The humans are being used to train the reward function. But then the reward function and its interaction with the model is automatic and all the data that's generated during the process of reinforcement learning is created by AI. If you look at the current technique/paradigm, which is getting some significant attention because of chatGPT, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). The human feedback has been used to train the reward function and then the reward function is being used to create the data which trains the model.

Dwarkesh Patel

Got it. And is there any hope of just removing a human from the loop and have it improve itself in some sort of AlphaGo way?

Ilya Sutskever

Yeah, definitely. The thing you really want is for the human teachers that teach the AI to collaborate with an AI. You might want to think of it as being in a world where the human teachers do 1% of the work and the AI does 99% of the work. You don't want it to be 100% AI. But you do want it to be a human-machine collaboration, which teaches the next machine.

Dwarkesh Patel

I've had a chance to play around these models and they seem bad at multi-step reasoning. While they have been getting better, what does it take to really surpass that barrier?

Ilya Sutskever

I think dedicated training will get us there. More and more improvements to the base models will get us there. But fundamentally I also don't feel like they're that bad at multi-step reasoning. I actually think that they are bad at mental multistep reasoning when they are not allowed to think out loud. But when they are allowed to think out loud, they're quite good. And I expect this to improve significantly, both with better models and with special training.

Data, models, and research

Dwarkesh Patel

Are you running out of reasoning tokens on the internet? Are there enough of them?

Ilya Sutskever

So for context on this question, there are claims that at some point we will run out of tokens, in general, to train those models. And yeah, I think this will happen one day and by the time that happens, we need to have other ways of training models, other ways of productively improving their capabilities and sharpening their behavior, making sure they're doing exactly, precisely what you want, without more data.

Dwarkesh Patel

You haven't run out of data yet? There's more?

Ilya Sutskever

Yeah, I would say the data situation is still quite good. There's still lots to go. But at some point the data will run out.

Dwarkesh Patel

What is the most valuable source of data? Is it Reddit, Twitter, books? Where would you train many other tokens of other varieties for?

Ilya Sutskever

Generally speaking, you'd like tokens which are speaking about smarter things, tokens which are more interesting. All the sources which you mentioned are valuable.

Dwarkesh Patel

So maybe not Twitter. But do we need to go multimodal to get more tokens? Or do we still have enough text tokens left?

Ilya Sutskever

I think that you can still go very far in text only but going multimodal seems like a very fruitful direction.

Dwarkesh Patel

If you're comfortable talking about this, where is the place where we haven't scraped the tokens yet?

Ilya Sutskever

Obviously I can't answer that question for us but I'm sure that for everyone there is a different answer to that question.

Dwarkesh Patel

How many orders of magnitude improvement can we get, not from scale or not from data, but just from algorithmic improvements?

Ilya Sutskever

Hard to answer but I'm sure there is some.

Dwarkesh Patel

Is some a lot or some a little?

Ilya Sutskever

There’s only one way to find out.

Dwarkesh Patel

Okay. Let me get your quickfire opinions about these different research directions. Retrieval transformers. So it’s just somehow storing the data outside of the model itself and retrieving it somehow.

Ilya Sutskever

Seems promising.

Dwarkesh Patel

But do you see that as a path forward?

Ilya Sutskever

It seems promising.

Dwarkesh Patel

Robotics. Was it the right step for Open AI to leave that behind?

Ilya Sutskever

Yeah, it was. Back then it really wasn't possible to continue working in robotics because there was so little data. Back then if you wanted to work on robotics, you needed to become a robotics company. You needed to have a really giant group of people working on building robots and maintaining them. And even then, if you’re gonna have 100 robots, it's a giant operation already, but you're not going to get that much data. So in a world where most of the progress comes from the combination of compute and data, there was no path to data on robotics. So back in the day, when we made a decision to stop working in robotics, there was no path forward.

Dwarkesh Patel

Is there one now?

Ilya Sutskever

I'd say that now it is possible to create a path forward. But one needs to really commit to the task of robotics. You really need to say — I'm going to build many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of robots, and somehow collect data from them and find a gradual path where the robots are doing something slightly more useful. And then the data that is obtained and used to train the models, and they do something that's slightly more useful. You could imagine it's this gradual path of improvement, where you build more robots, they do more things, you collect more data, and so on. But you really need to be committed to this path. If you say, I want to make robotics happen, that's what you need to do. I believe that there are companies who are doing exactly that. But you need to really love robots and need to be really willing to solve all the physical and logistical problems of dealing with them. It's not the same as software at all. I think one could make progress in robotics today, with enough motivation.

Dwarkesh Patel

What ideas are you excited to try but you can't because they don't work well on current hardware?

Ilya Sutskever

I don't think current hardware is a limitation. It's just not the case.

Dwarkesh Patel

Got it. But anything you want to try you can just spin it up?

Ilya Sutskever

Of course. You might wish that current hardware was cheaper or maybe it would be better if it had higher memory processing bandwidth let’s say. But by and large hardware is just not an issue.

Alignment

Dwarkesh Patel

Let's talk about alignment. Do you think we'll ever have a mathematical definition of alignment?

Ilya Sutskever

A mathematical definition is unlikely. Rather than achieving one mathematical definition, I think we will achieve multiple definitions that look at alignment from different aspects. And that this is how we will get the assurance that we want. By which I mean you can look at the behavior in various tests, congruence, in various adversarial stress situations, you can look at how the neural net operates from the inside. You have to look at several of these factors at the same time.

Dwarkesh Patel

And how sure do you have to be before you release a model in the wild? 100%? 95%?

Ilya Sutskever

Depends on how capable the model is. The more capable the model, the more confident we need to be.

Dwarkesh Patel

Alright, so let's say it's something that's almost AGI. Where is AGI?

Ilya Sutskever

Depends on what your AGI can do. Keep in mind that AGI is an ambiguous term. Your average college undergrad is an AGI, right? There's significant ambiguity in terms of what is meant by AGI. Depending on where you put this mark you need to be more or less confident.

Dwarkesh Patel

You mentioned a few of the paths toward alignment earlier, what is the one you think is most promising at this point?

Ilya Sutskever

I think that it will be a combination. I really think that you will not want to have just one approach. People want to have a combination of approaches. Where you spend a lot of compute adversarially to find any mismatch between the behavior you want it to teach and the behavior that it exhibits.We look into the neural net using another neural net to understand how it operates on the inside. All of them will be necessary. Every approach like this reduces the probability of misalignment. And you also want to be in a world where your degree of alignment keeps increasing faster than the capability of the models.

Dwarkesh Patel

Do you think that the approaches we’ve taken to understand the model today will be applicable to the actual super-powerful models? Or how applicable will they be? Is it the same kind of thing that will work on them as well or?

Ilya Sutskever

It's not guaranteed. I would say that right now, our understanding of our models is still quite rudimentary. We’ve made some progress but much more progress is possible. And so I would expect that ultimately, the thing that will really succeed is when we will have a small neural net that is well understood that’s been given the task to study the behavior of a large neural net that is not understood, to verify.

Dwarkesh Patel

By what point is most of the AI research being done by AI?

Ilya Sutskever

Today when you use Copilot, how do you divide it up? So I expect at some point you ask your descendant of ChatGPT, you say — Hey, I'm thinking about this and this. Can you suggest fruitful ideas I should try? And you would actually get fruitful ideas. I don't think that's gonna make it possible for you to solve problems you couldn't solve before.

Dwarkesh Patel

Got it. But it's somehow just telling the humans giving them ideas faster or something. It's not itself interacting with the research?

Ilya Sutskever

That was one example. You could slice it in a variety of ways. But the bottleneck there is good ideas, good insights and that's something that the neural nets could help us with.

Dwarkesh Patel

If you're designing a billion-dollar prize for some sort of alignment research result or product, what is the concrete criterion you would set for that billion-dollar prize? Is there something that makes sense for such a prize?

Ilya Sutskever

It's funny that you asked, I was actually thinking about this exact question. I haven't come up with the exact criterion yet. Maybe a prize where we could say that two years later, or three years or five years later, we look back and say like that was the main result. So rather than say that there is a prize committee that decides right away, you wait for five years and then award it retroactively.

Dwarkesh Patel

But there's no concrete thing we can identify as you solve this particular problem and you’ve made a lot of progress?

Ilya Sutskever

A lot of progress, yes. I wouldn't say that this would be the full thing.

Dwarkesh Patel

Do you think end-to-end training is the right architecture for bigger and bigger models? Or do we need better ways of just connecting things together?

Ilya Sutskever

End-to-end training is very promising. Connecting things together is very promising.

Dwarkesh Patel

Everything is promising.

Dwarkesh Patel

So Open AI is projecting revenues of a billion dollars in 2024. That might very well be correct but I'm just curious, when you're talking about a new general-purpose technology, how do you estimate how big a windfall it'll be? Why that particular number?

Ilya Sutskever

We've had a product for quite a while now, back from the GPT-3 days, from two years ago through the API and we've seen how it grew. We've seen how the response to DALL-E has grown as well and you see how the response to ChatGPT is, and all of this gives us information that allows us to make relatively sensible extrapolations of anything. Maybe that would be one answer. You need to have data, you can’t come up with those things out of thin air because otherwise, your error bars are going to be like 100x in each direction.

Dwarkesh Patel

But most exponentials don't stay exponential especially when they get into bigger and bigger quantities, right? So how do you determine in this case?

Ilya Sutskever

Would you bet against AI?

Post AGI future

Dwarkesh Patel

Not after talking with you. Let's talk about what a post-AGI future looks like. I'm guessing you're working 80-hour weeks towards this grand goal that you're really obsessed with. Are you going to be satisfied in a world where you're basically living in an AI retirement home? What are you personally doing after AGI comes?

Ilya Sutskever

The question of what I'll be doing or what people will be doing after AGI comes is a very tricky question. Where will people find meaning? But I think that that's something that AI could help us with. One thing I imagine is that we will be able to become more enlightened because we interact with an AGI which will help us see the world more correctly, and become better on the inside as a result of interacting. Imagine talking to the best meditation teacher in history, that will be a helpful thing. But I also think that because the world will change a lot, it will be very hard for people to understand what is happening precisely and how to really contribute. One thing that I think some people will choose to do is to become part AI. In order to really expand their minds and understanding and to really be able to solve the hardest problems that society will face then.

Dwarkesh Patel

Are you going to become part AI?

Ilya Sutskever

It is very tempting.

Dwarkesh Patel

Do you think there'll be physically embodied humans in the year 3000?

Ilya Sutskever

3000? How do I know what’s gonna happen in 3000?

Dwarkesh Patel

Like what does it look like? Are there still humans walking around on Earth? Or have you guys thought concretely about what you actually want this world to look like?

Ilya Sutskever

Let me describe to you what I think is not quite right about the question. It implies we get to decide how we want the world to look like. I don't think that picture is correct. Change is the only constant. And so of course, even after AGI is built, it doesn't mean that the world will be static. The world will continue to change, the world will continue to evolve. And it will go through all kinds of transformations. I don't think anyone has any idea of how the world will look like in 3000. But I do hope that there will be a lot of descendants of human beings who will live happy, fulfilled lives where they're free to do as they see fit. Or they are the ones who are solving their own problems. One world which I would find very unexciting is one where we build this powerful tool, and then the government said — Okay, so the AGI said that society should be run in such a way and now we should run society in such a way. I'd much rather have a world where people are still free to make their own mistakes and suffer their consequences and gradually evolve morally and progress forward on their own, with the AGI providing more like a base safety net.

Dwarkesh Patel

How much time do you spend thinking about these kinds of things versus just doing the research?

Ilya Sutskever

I do think about those things a fair bit. They are very interesting questions.

Dwarkesh Patel

The capabilities we have today, in what ways have they surpassed where we expected them to be in 2015? And in what ways are they still not where you'd expected them to be by this point?

Ilya Sutskever

In fairness, it's sort of what I expected in 2015. In 2015, my thinking was a lot more — I just don't want to bet against deep learning. I want to make the biggest possible bet on deep learning. I don't know how, but it will figure it out.

Dwarkesh Patel

But is there any specific way in which it's been more than you expected or less than you expected? Like some concrete prediction out of 2015 that's been bounced?

Ilya Sutskever

Unfortunately, I don't remember concrete predictions I made in 2015. But I definitely think that overall, in 2015, I just wanted to move to make the biggest bet possible on deep learning, but I didn't know exactly. I didn't have a specific idea of how far things will go in seven years.

Well, no in 2015, I did have all these best with people in 2016, maybe 2017, that things will go really far. But specifics. So it's like, it's both, it's both the case that it surprised me and I was making these aggressive predictions. But maybe I believed them only 50% on the inside.

Dwarkesh Patel

What do you believe now that even most people at OpenAI would find far fetched?

Ilya Sutskever

Because we communicate a lot at OpenAI people have a pretty good sense of what I think and we've really reached the point at OpenAI where we see eye to eye on all these questions.

Dwarkesh Patel

Google has its custom TPU hardware, it has all this data from all its users, Gmail, and so on. Does it give them an advantage in terms of training bigger models and better models than you?

Ilya Sutskever

At first, when the TPU came out I was really impressed and I thought — wow, this is amazing. But that's because I didn't quite understand hardware back then. What really turned out to be the case is that TPUs and GPUs are almost the same thing.

They are very, very similar. The GPU chip is a little bit bigger, the TPU chip is a little bit smaller, maybe a little bit cheaper. But then they make more GPUs and TPUs so the GPUs might be cheaper after all.

But fundamentally, you have a big processor, and you have a lot of memory and there is a bottleneck between those two. And the problem that both the TPU and the GPU are trying to solve is that the amount of time it takes you to move one floating point from the memory to the processor, you can do several hundred floating point operations on the processor, which means that you have to do some kind of batch processing. And in this sense, both of these architectures are the same. So I really feel like in some sense, the only thing that matters about hardware is cost per flop and overall systems cost.

Dwarkesh Patel

There isn't that much difference?

Ilya Sutskever

Actually, I don't know. I don't know what the TPU costs are but I would suspect that if anything, TPUs are probably more expensive because there are less of them.

New ideas are overrated

Dwarkesh Patel

When you are doing your work, how much of the time is spent configuring the right initializations? Making sure the training run goes well and getting the right hyperparameters, and how much is it just coming up with whole new ideas?

Ilya Sutskever

I would say it's a combination. Coming up with whole new ideas is a modest part of the work. Certainly coming up with new ideas is important but even more important is to understand the results, to understand the existing ideas, to understand what's going on.

A neural net is a very complicated system, right? And you ran it, and you get some behavior, which is hard to understand. What's going on? Understanding the results, figuring out what next experiment to run, a lot of the time is spent on that. Understanding what could be wrong, what could have caused the neural net to produce a result which was not expected.

I'd say a lot of time is spent coming up with new ideas as well. I don't like this framing as much. It's not that it's false but the main activity is actually understanding.

Dwarkesh Patel

What do you see as the difference between the two?

Ilya Sutskever

At least in my mind, when you say come up with new ideas, I'm like — Oh, what happens if it did such and such? Whereas understanding it's more like — What is this whole thing? What are the real underlying phenomena that are going on? What are the underlying effects? Why are we doing things this way and not another way? And of course, this is very adjacent to what can be described as coming up with ideas. But the understanding part is where the real action takes place.

Dwarkesh Patel

Does that describe your entire career? If you think back on something like ImageNet, was that more new idea or was that more understanding?

Ilya Sutskever

Well, that was definitely understanding. It was a new understanding of very old things.

Dwarkesh Patel

What has the experience of training on Azure been like?

Ilya Sutskever

Fantastic. Microsoft has been a very, very good partner for us. They've really helped take Azure and bring it to a point where it's really good for ML and we’re super happy with it.

Dwarkesh Patel

How vulnerable is the whole AI ecosystem to something that might happen in Taiwan? So let's say there's a tsunami in Taiwan or something, what happens to AI in general?

Ilya Sutskever

It's definitely going to be a significant setback. No one will be able to get more compute for a few years. But I expect compute will spring up. For example, I believe that Intel has fabs just like a few generations ago. So that means that if Intel wanted to they could produce something GPU-like from four years ago. But yeah, it's not the best,

I'm actually not sure if my statement about Intel is correct, but I do know that there are fabs outside of Taiwan, they're just not as good. But you can still use them and still go very far with them. It's just cost, it’s just a setback.

Cost of models

Dwarkesh Patel

Would inference get cost prohibitive as these models get bigger and bigger?

Ilya Sutskever

I have a different way of looking at this question. It's not that inference will become cost prohibitive. Inference of better models will indeed become more expensive. But is it prohibitive? That depends on how useful it is. If it is more useful than it is expensive then it is not prohibitive.

To give you an analogy, suppose you want to talk to a lawyer. You have some case or need some advice or something, you're perfectly happy to spend $400 an hour. Right? So if your neural net could give you really reliable legal advice, you'd say — I'm happy to spend $400 for that advice. And suddenly inference becomes very much non-prohibitive. The question is, can a neural net produce an answer good enough at this cost?

Dwarkesh Patel

Yes. And you will just have price discrimination in different models?

Ilya Sutskever

It's already the case today. On our product, the API serves multiple neural nets of different sizes and different customers use different neural nets of different sizes depending on their use case.

If someone can take a small model and fine-tune it and get something that's satisfactory for them, they'll use that. But if someone wants to do something more complicated and more interesting, they’ll use the biggest model.

Dwarkesh Patel

How do you prevent these models from just becoming commodities where these different companies just bid each other's prices down until it's basically the cost of the GPU run?

Ilya Sutskever

Yeah, there's without question a force that's trying to create that. And the answer is you got to keep on making progress. You got to keep improving the models, you gotta keep on coming up with new ideas and making our models better and more reliable, more trustworthy, so you can trust their answers. All those things.

Dwarkesh Patel

Yeah. But let's say it's 2025 and somebody is offering the model from 2024 at cost. And it's still pretty good. Why would people use a new one from 2025 if the one from just a year older is even better?

Ilya Sutskever

There are several answers there. For some use cases that may be true. There will be a new model for 2025, which will be driving the more interesting use cases. There is also going to be a question of inference cost. If you can do research to serve the same model at less cost. The same model will cost different amounts to serve for different companies. I can also imagine some degree of specialization where some companies may try to specialize in some area and be stronger compared to other companies. And to me that may be a response to commoditization to some degree.

Dwarkesh Patel

Over time do the research directions of these different companies converge or diverge? Are they doing similar and similar things over time? Or are they branching off into different areas?

Ilya Sutskever

I’d say in the near term, it looks like there is convergence. I expect there's going to be a convergence-divergence-convergence behavior, where there is a lot of convergence on the near term work, there's going to be some divergence on the longer term work. But then once the longer term work starts to fruit, there will be convergence again,

Dwarkesh Patel

Got it. When one of them finds the most promising area, everybody just…

Ilya Sutskever

That's right. There is obviously less publishing now so it will take longer before this promising direction gets rediscovered. But that's how I would imagine the thing is going to be. Convergence, divergence, convergence.

Dwarkesh Patel

Yeah. We talked about this a little bit at the beginning. But as foreign governments learn about how capable these models are, are you worried about spies or some sort of attack to get your weights or somehow abuse these models and learn about them?

Ilya Sutskever

Yeah, you absolutely can't discount that. Something that we try to guard against to the best of our ability, but it's going to be a problem for everyone who's building this.

Dwarkesh Patel

How do you prevent your weights from leaking?

Ilya Sutskever

You have really good security people.

Dwarkesh Patel

How many people have the ability to SSH into the machine with the weights?

Ilya Sutskever

The security people have done a really good job so I'm really not worried about the weights being leaked.

Dwarkesh Patel

What kinds of emergent properties are you expecting from these models at this scale? Is there something that just comes about de novo?

Ilya Sutskever

I'm sure really new surprising properties will come up, I would not be surprised. The thing which I'm really excited about, the things which I’d like to see is — reliability and controllability. I think that this will be a very, very important class of emergent properties. If you have reliability and controllability that helps you solve a lot of problems. Reliability means you can trust the model's output, controllability means you can control it. And we'll see but it will be very cool if those emergent properties did exist.

Dwarkesh Patel

Is there some way you can predict that in advance? What will happen in this parameter count, what will happen in that parameter count?

Ilya Sutskever

I think it's possible to make some predictions about specific capabilities though it's definitely not simple and you can’t do it in a super fine-grained way, at least today. But getting better at that is really important. And anyone who is interested and who has research ideas on how to do that, that can be a valuable contribution.

Dwarkesh Patel

How seriously do you take these scaling laws? There's a paper that says — You need this many orders of magnitude more to get all the reasoning out? Do you take that seriously or do you think it breaks down at some point?

Ilya Sutskever

The thing is that the scaling law tells you what happens to your log of your next word prediction accuracy, right? There is a whole separate challenge of linking next-word prediction accuracy to reasoning capability. I do believe that there is a link but this link is complicated. And we may find that there are other things that can give us more reasoning per unit effort. You mentioned reasoning tokens, I think they can be helpful. There can probably be some things that help.

Dwarkesh Patel

Are you considering just hiring humans to generate tokens for you? Or is it all going to come from stuff that already exists out there?

Ilya Sutskever

I think that relying on people to teach our models to do things, especially to make sure that they are well-behaved and they don't produce false things is an extremely sensible thing to do.

Is progress inevitable?

Dwarkesh Patel

Isn't it odd that we have the data we needed exactly at the same time as we have the transformer at the exact same time that we have these GPUs? Like is it odd to you that all these things happened at the same time or do you not see it that way?

Ilya Sutskever

It is definitely an interesting situation that is the case. I will say that it is odd and it is less odd on some level. Here's why it's less odd — what is the driving force behind the fact that the data exists, that the GPUs exist, and that the transformers exist? The data exists because computers became better and cheaper, we've got smaller and smaller transistors. And suddenly, at some point, it became economical for every person to have a personal computer. Once everyone has a personal computer, you really want to connect them to the network, you get the internet. Once you have the internet, you suddenly have data appearing in great quantities. The GPUs were improving concurrently because you have smaller and smaller transistors and you're looking for things to do with them.

Gaming turned out to be a thing that you could do. And then at some point, Nvidia said — the gaming GPU, I might turn it into a general purpose GPU computer, maybe someone will find it useful. It turns out it's good for neural nets. It could have been the case that maybe the GPU would have arrived five years later, ten years later. Let's suppose gaming wasn't the thing. It's kind of hard to imagine, what does it mean if gaming isn't a thing? But maybe there was a counterfactual world where GPUs arrived five years after the data or five years before the data, in which case maybe things wouldn’t have been as ready to go as they are now. But that's the picture which I imagine. All this progress in all these dimensions is very intertwined. It's not a coincidence. You don't get to pick and choose in which dimensions things improve.

Dwarkesh Patel

How inevitable is this kind of progress? Let's say you and Geoffrey Hinton and a few other pioneers were never born. Does the deep learning revolution happen around the same time? How much is it delayed?

Ilya Sutskever

Maybe there would have been some delay. Maybe like a year delayed?

Dwarkesh Patel

Really? That’s it?

Ilya Sutskever

It's really hard to tell. I hesitate to give a longer answer because — GPUs will keep on improving. I cannot see how someone would not have discovered it. Because here's the other thing. Let's suppose no one has done it, computers keep getting faster and better. It becomes easier and easier to train these neural nets because you have bigger GPUs, so it takes less engineering effort to train one. You don't need to optimize your code as much. When the ImageNet data set came out, it was huge and it was very, very difficult to use. Now imagine you wait for a few years, and it becomes very easy to download and people can just tinker. A modest number of years maximum would be my guess. I hesitate to give a lot longer answer though. You can’t re-run the world you don’t know.

Dwarkesh Patel

Let's go back to alignment for a second. As somebody who deeply understands these models, what is your intuition of how hard alignment will be?

Ilya Sutskever

At the current level of capabilities, we have a pretty good set of ideas for how to align them. But I would not underestimate the difficulty of alignment of models that are actually smarter than us, of models that are capable of misrepresenting their intentions. It's something to think about a lot and do research. Oftentimes academic researchers ask me what’s the best place where they can contribute. And alignment research is one place where academic researchers can make very meaningful contributions.

Dwarkesh Patel

Other than that, do you think academia will come up with important insights about actual capabilities or is that going to be just the companies at this point?

Ilya Sutskever

The companies will realize the capabilities. It's very possible for academic research to come up with those insights. It doesn't seem to happen that much for some reason but I don't think there's anything fundamental about academia. It's not like academia can't. Maybe they're just not thinking about the right problems or something because maybe it's just easier to see what needs to be done inside these companies.

Dwarkesh Patel

I see. But there's a possibility that somebody could just realize…

Ilya Sutskever

I totally think so. Why would I possibly rule this out?

Dwarkesh Patel

What are the concrete steps by which these language models start actually impacting the world of atoms and not just the world of bits?

Ilya Sutskever

I don't think that there is a clean distinction between the world of bits and the world of atoms. Suppose the neural net tells you — hey here's something that you should do, and it's going to improve your life. But you need to rearrange your apartment in a certain way. And then you go and rearrange your apartment as a result. The neural net impacted the world of atoms.

Future breakthroughs

Dwarkesh Patel

Fair enough. Do you think it'll take a couple of additional breakthroughs as important as the Transformer to get to superhuman AI? Or do you think we basically got the insights in the books somewhere, and we just need to implement them and connect them?

Ilya Sutskever

I don't really see such a big distinction between those two cases and let me explain why. One of the ways in which progress is taking place in the past is that we've understood that something had a desirable property all along but we didn't realize. Is that a breakthrough? You can say yes, it is. Is that an implementation of something in the books? Also, yes.

My feeling is that a few of those are quite likely to happen. But in hindsight, it will not feel like a breakthrough. Everybody's gonna say — Oh, well, of course. It's totally obvious that such and such a thing can work.

The reason the Transformer has been brought up as a specific advance is because it's the kind of thing that was not obvious for almost anyone. So people can say it's not something which they knew about. Let's consider the most fundamental advance of deep learning, that a big neural network trained in backpropagation can do a lot of things. Where's the novelty? Not in the neural network. It's not in the backpropagation. But it was most definitely a giant conceptual breakthrough because for the longest time, people just didn't see that. But then now that everyone sees, everyone’s gonna say — Well, of course, it's totally obvious. Big neural network. Everyone knows that they can do it.

Dwarkesh Patel

What is your opinion of your former advisor’s new forward forward algorithm?

Ilya Sutskever

I think that it's an attempt to train a neural network without backpropagation. And that this is especially interesting if you are motivated to try to understand how the brain might be learning its connections. The reason for that is that, as far as I know, neuroscientists are really convinced that the brain cannot implement backpropagation because the signals in the synapses only move in one direction.

And so if you have a neuroscience motivation, and you want to say — okay, how can I come up with something that tries to approximate the good properties of backpropagation without doing backpropagation? That's what the forward forward algorithm is trying to do. But if you are trying to just engineer a good system there is no reason to not use backpropagation. It's the only algorithm.

Dwarkesh Patel

I guess I've heard you in different contexts talk about using humans as the existing example case that AGI exists. At what point do you take the metaphor less seriously and don't feel the need to pursue it in terms of the research? Because it is important to you as a sort of existence case.

Ilya Sutskever

At what point do I stop caring about humans as an existence case of intelligence?

Dwarkesh Patel

Or as an example you want to follow in terms of pursuing intelligence in models.

Ilya Sutskever

I think it's good to be inspired by humans, it's good to be inspired by the brain. There is an art into being inspired by humans in the brain correctly, because it's very easy to latch on to a non-essential quality of humans or of the brain. And many people whose research is trying to be inspired by humans and by the brain often get a little bit specific. People get a little bit too — Okay, what cognitive science model should be followed? At the same time, consider the idea of the neural network itself, the idea of the artificial neuron. This too is inspired by the brain but it turned out to be extremely fruitful. So how do they do this? What behaviors of human beings are essential that you say this is something that proves to us that it's possible? What is an essential? No this is actually some emergent phenomenon of something more basic, and we just need to focus on getting our own basics right. One can and should be inspired by human intelligence with care.

Dwarkesh Patel

Final question. Why is there, in your case, such a strong correlation between being first to the deep learning revolution and still being one of the top researchers? You would think that these two things wouldn't be that correlated. But why is there that correlation?

Ilya Sutskever

I don't think those things are super correlated. Honestly, it's hard to answer the question. I just kept trying really hard and it turned out to have sufficed thus far.

Dwarkesh Patel

So it's perseverance.

Ilya Sutskever

It's a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Many things need to come together in order to really figure something out. You need to really go for it and also need to have the right way of looking at things. It's hard to give a really meaningful answer to this question.

Dwarkesh Patel

Ilya, it has been a true pleasure. Thank you so much for coming to The Lunar Society. I appreciate you bringing us to the offices. Thank you.

Ilya Sutskever

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

Get full access to The Lunar Society at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside
Release date: 2023-03-22

Historian Tom Holland joined Tyler to discuss in what ways his Christianity is influenced by Lord Byron, how the Book of Revelation precipitated a revolutionary tradition, which book of the Bible is most foundational for Western liberalism, the political differences between Paul and Jesus, why America is more pro-technology than Europe, why Herodotus is his favorite writer, why the Greeks and Persians didn’t industrialize despite having advanced technology, how he feels about devolution in the United Kingdom and the potential of Irish unification, what existential problem the Church of England faces, how the music of Ennio Morricone helps him write for a popular audience, why Jurassic Park is his favorite movie, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded February 1st, 2023

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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 71 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: My View on A.I.
Release date: 2023-03-19

This is something a bit different: Not an interview, but a commentary of my own.

We’ve done a lot of shows on A.I. of late, and there are more to come. On Tuesday, GPT-4 was released, and its capabilities are stunning, and in some cases, chilling. More on that in Tuesday’s episode. But I wanted to take a moment to talk through my own views on A.I. and how I’ve arrived at them. I’ve come to believe that we’re in a potentially brief interregnum before the pace of change accelerates to a rate that is far faster than is safe for society. Here’s why.

Column:

“This Changes Everything” by Ezra Klein

Episode Recommendations:

Sam Altman on the A.I. revolution

Brian Christian on the alignment problem

Gary Marcus on the case for A.I. skepticism

Ted Chiang on what humans really fear about A.I.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Rollin Hu. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Original music by Isaac Jones and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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Podcast: Philosophy For Our Times (LS 51 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: Is our search for an objective morality misguided? | Slavoj Žižek, Joanna Kavenna, Simon Blackburn
Release date: 2023-03-14

Should we think of morality in terms of objective truth or social consensus?

Looking for a link we mentioned? It's here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimes

Once the fashion of a postmodern age, moral relativism has always had its detractors, many of them religious. But now a new breed of atheist celebrity thinkers, from Sam Harris to Peter Singer, are making claims for the existence of absolute moral truths. Critics argue that like authoritarian moralists of the past, they use so-called 'objective' morality to shore up to their own prejudices and silence dissent.

Firebrand philosopher Slavoj Žižek, bestselling author of Zed Joanna Kavenna, and philosopher and author of Truth Simon Blackburn debate objective morality in a postmodern age. Hosted by Professor and Chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, Ruth Chang.

There are thousands of big ideas to discover at IAI.tv – videos, articles, and courses waiting for you to explore. Find out more: https://iai.tv/podcast-offers?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=[iai-tv-episode-title]

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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Yasheng Huang on the Development of the Chinese State
Release date: 2023-03-08

Yasheng Huang has written two of Tyler’s favorite books on China: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, which contrasts an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China, and The Rise and Fall of the EAST, which argues that Keju—China’s civil service exam system—played a key role in the growth and expanding power of the Chinese state.

Yasheng joined Tyler to discuss China’s lackluster of technological innovation, why declining foreign investment is more of a concern than a declining population, why Chinese literacy stagnated in the 19th century, how he believes the imperial exam system deprived China of a thriving civil society, why Chinese succession has been so stable, why the Six Dynasties is his favorite period in Chinese history, why there were so few female emperors, why Chinese and Chinese Americans have less well becoming top CEOs of American companies than Indians and Indian Americans, where he’d send someone on a two week trip to China, what he learned from János Kornai, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded January 17th, 2023

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Podcast: Moment of Zen (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% )
Episode: E12: Effective Accelerationism and the AI Safety Debate with Bayeslord, Beff Jezoz, and Nathan Labenz
Release date: 2023-03-11

Anonymous founders of the Effective Accelerations (e/acc) movement @Bayeslord and Beff Jezoz (@BasedBeff) join Erik Torenberg, Dan Romero, and Nathan Labenz to debate views on AI safety. We record our interviews with Riverside. Go to https://bit.ly/Riverside_MoZ + use code ZEN for 20%.

(3:00) Intro to effective accelerationism

(8:00) Differences between effective accelerationism and effective altruism

(23:00) Effective accelerationism is bottoms-up

(42:00) Transhumanism

(46:00) “Equanimity amidst the singularity”

(48:30) Why AI safety is the wrong frame

(56:00) Pushing back against effective accelerationism

(1:06:00) The case for AI safety

(1:24:00) Upgrading civilizational infrastructure

(1:33:00) Effective accelerationism is anti-fragile

(1:39:00) Will we botch AI like we botched nuclear?

(1:46:00) Hidden costs of emphasizing downsides

(2:00:00) Are we in the same position as neanderthals, before humans?

(2:09:00) “Doomerism has a unpriced opportunity cost of upside“

More shownotes and reading material released in our Substack: https://momentofzen.substack.com/

Thank you Secureframe for sponsoring (Use "Moment of Zen" for 20% discount) and Graham Bessellieu for production.

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Podcast: The Foresight Institute Podcast
Episode: Robin Hanson, George Mason University | Deflecting The Sacred
Release date: 2023-03-02

Robin Hanson, George Mason University
Deflecting The Sacred

This was recorded at the Foresight Crypto, Security & AI Workshop,
October 4-5 @50 Years in San Francisco.

Join us:
► Twitter: https://twitter.com/foresightinst
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Podcast: Hear This Idea (LS 32 · TOP 5% )
Episode: #59 – Chris Miller on the History of Semiconductors, TSMC, and the CHIPS Act
Release date: 2023-03-02

Chris Miller is an Associate Professor of International History at Tufts University and author of the book “Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology” (the Financial Times Business Book of the Year). He is also a Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Eurasia Director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Over the next few episodes we will be exploring the potential for catastrophe cause by advanced artificial intelligence. But before we look ahead, we wanted to give a primer on where we are today: on the history and trends behind the development of AI so far. In this episode, we discuss:

• How semiconductors have historically been related to US military strategy
• How the Taiwanese company TSMC became such an important player in this space — while other countries’ attempts have failed
• What the CHIPS Act signals about attitudes to compute governance in the decade ahead

Further reading is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/miller

If you have any feedback, you can get a free book for filling out our new feedback form. You can also get in touch through our website or on Twitter. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. Thanks for listening!

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Podcast: a16z Podcast (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: The 1000x Developer
Release date: 2023-02-16

A small minority – likely less than 1% – of the world can code. Yet also widely known that the skillset tends to yield outsized returns, with developers generating some of the highest paying salaries out there.

But the field is quickly shifting, especially with the advent of wide-scale AI. In this podcast, we get to chat with Amjad Masad, founder of Replit, about these foundational shifts.

We cover how Replit has integrated AI into its platform and the implications on both current and future developers. It’s easier than ever to learn to code, but is it still worthwhile? Listen in to find out.

Resources:

Replit: https://replit.com/

Replit Ghostwriter: https://replit.com/site/ghostwriter

Replit Bounties: https://replit.com/bounties

Find Amjad on Twitter: https://twitter.com/amasad

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Podcast: ROCKING OUR PRIORS (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% )
Episode: Why Are Most Humans Religious? Professor Robin Dunbar
Release date: 2023-01-17

Why are most humans religious?How much can be explained by evolutionary psychology?Why do we cooperate? Is it religious injunctions or more emotional?Is religiosity really about cooperation? What about legitimising hierarchy, control, and female self-sacrifice.Muslim women are less likely to go to Friday prayers, but they are still devout. So perhaps group rituals are not so essential? Why did all doctrinal religions emerge within a narrow latitudinal band?Are groups necessarily small? Don’t films and social media scale-up solidarity? What about online mobs viciously attacking their favoured celebrity’s boyfriend’s new girlfriend?Interview with Professor Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology and Anthropology at the University of Oxfordhttps://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/people/robin-dunbarRobin's latest book is on Religion. He has also published excellent books on the science of love and betrayal; the evolution of language; and friendships.

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Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Connor Leahy on AI Safety and Why the World is Fragile
Release date: 2023-01-26

Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast to discuss AI safety, the fragility of the world, slowing down AI development, regulating AI, and the optimal funding model for AI safety research. Learn more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.devTimestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:47 What is the best way to understand AI safety? 09:50 Why is the world relatively stable? 15:18 Is the main worry human misuse of AI? 22:47 Can humanity solve AI safety? 30:06 Can we slow down AI development? 37:13 How should governments regulate AI? 41:09 How do we avoid misallocating AI safety government grants? 51:02 Should AI safety research be done by for-profit companies?Social Media Links:➡️ WEBSITE: https://futureoflife.org➡️ TWITTER: https://twitter.com/FLIxrisk➡️ INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/futureoflifeinstitute/➡️ META: https://www.facebook.com/futureoflifeinstitute➡️ LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-of-life-institute/

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Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Connor Leahy on Aliens, Ethics, Economics, Memetics, and Education
Release date: 2023-02-02

Connor Leahy from Conjecture joins the podcast for a lightning round on a variety of topics ranging from aliens to education. Learn more about Connor's work at https://conjecture.devSocial Media Links:➡️ WEBSITE: https://futureoflife.org➡️ TWITTER: https://twitter.com/FLIxrisk➡️ INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/futureoflifeinstitute/➡️ META: https://www.facebook.com/futureoflifeinstitute➡️ LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-of-life-institute/

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Podcast: Uncommon Knowledge (LS 60 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: “Bibi: My Story,” Benjamin Netanyahu On His Life And Times | Peter Robinson | Hoover Institution
Release date: 2022-12-09

Benjamin Netanyahu is the past and soon to be again prime minister of Israel. In his new book, Bibi: My Story, Netanyahu describes how he went from an Israeli American high school student in Philadelphia to a member of the Israeli Defense Force, detouring along the way to study architecture and get a master’s degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1976. His studies were interrupted when his brother Yoni was killed in the raid on Entebbe, Uganda, which inspired Bibi to return to Israel and dedicate his life to protecting that state. This interview covers those events as well as his rise to the top of Israeli politics—multiple times.

Note to viewers: Be sure to watch to the end of the show after the end credits for some additional content that was shot after the interview concluded.

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Podcast: The Gray Area with Sean Illing (LS 73 · TOP 0.01% )
Episode: Can effective altruism be redeemed?
Release date: 2023-01-23

Guest host Sigal Samuel talks with Holden Karnofsky about effective altruism, a movement flung into public scrutiny with the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto exchange, FTX. They discuss EA’s approach to charitable giving, the relationship between effective altruism and the moral philosophy of utilitarianism, and what reforms might be needed for the future of the movement.

Note: In August 2022, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause.

Host: Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel), Senior Reporter, Vox

Guest: Holden Karnofsky, co-founder of GiveWell; CEO of Open Philanthropy

References:

• "Effective altruism gave rise to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now it's facing a moral reckoning" by Sigal Samuel (Vox; Nov. 16, 2022)
• "The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism" by Gideon Lewis-Kraus (New Yorker; Aug. 8, 2022)
• "Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself" by Kelsey Piper (Vox; Nov. 16, 2022)
• "EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous" by Holden Karnofsky (Effective Altruism Forum; Sept. 2, 2022)
• "Defending One-Dimensional Ethics" by Holden Karnofsky (Cold Takes blog; Feb. 15, 2022)
• "Future-proof ethics" by Holden Karnofsky (Cold Takes blog; Feb. 2, 2022)
• "Bayesian mindset" by Holden Karnofsky (Cold Takes blog; Dec. 21, 2021)
• "EA Structural Reform Ideas" by Carla Zoe Cremer (Nov. 12, 2022)
• "Democratising Risk: In Search of a Methodology to Study Existential Risk" by Carla Cremer and Luke Kemp (SSRN; Dec. 28, 2021)

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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: #143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
Release date: 2022-12-29

America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially.

As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control Wonk and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies — explains, in its official 'OPLANs' (military operation plans), the US is committed to 'dominating' in a nuclear war with Russia. How would they do that? "That is redacted."

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

We invited Jeffrey to come on the show to lay out what we and our listeners are most likely to be misunderstanding about nuclear weapons, the nuclear posture of major powers, and his field as a whole, and he did not disappoint.

As Jeffrey tells it, 'mutually assured destruction' was a slur used to criticise those who wanted to limit the 11960s arms buildup, and was never accepted as a matter of policy in any US administration. But isn't it still the de facto reality? Yes and no.

Jeffrey is a specialist on the nuts and bolts of bureaucratic and military decision-making in real-life situations. He suspects that at the start of their term presidents get a briefing about the US' plan to prevail in a nuclear war and conclude that "it's freaking madness." They say to themselves that whatever these silly plans may say, they know a nuclear war cannot be won, so they just won't use the weapons.

But Jeffrey thinks that's a big mistake. Yes, in a calm moment presidents can resist pressure from advisors and generals. But that idea of ‘winning’ a nuclear war is in all the plans. Staff have been hired because they believe in those plans. It's what the generals and admirals have all prepared for.

What matters is the 'not calm moment': the 3AM phone call to tell the president that ICBMs might hit the US in eight minutes — the same week Russia invades a neighbour or China invades Taiwan. Is it a false alarm? Should they retaliate before their land-based missile silos are hit? There's only minutes to decide.

Jeffrey points out that in emergencies, presidents have repeatedly found themselves railroaded into actions they didn't want to take because of how information and options were processed and presented to them. In the heat of the moment, it's natural to reach for the plan you've prepared — however mad it might sound.

In this spicy conversation, Jeffrey fields the most burning questions from Rob and the audience, in the process explaining:

• Why inter-service rivalry is one of the biggest constraints on US nuclear policy
• Two times the US sabotaged nuclear nonproliferation among great powers
• How his field uses jargon to exclude outsiders
• How the US could prevent the revival of mass nuclear testing by the great powers
• Why nuclear deterrence relies on the possibility that something might go wrong
• Whether 'salami tactics' render nuclear weapons ineffective
• The time the Navy and Air Force switched views on how to wage a nuclear war, just when it would allow them to have the most missiles
• The problems that arise when you won't talk to people you think are evil
• Why missile defences are politically popular despite being strategically foolish
• How open source intelligence can prevent arms races
• And much more.

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Podcast: Odd Lots (LS 59 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Ex-Logger Aims to Beat Elon Musk in Electric Trucks
Release date: 2023-01-16

While electric vehicle use is growing rapidly, the internal combustion engine remains completely dominant in the world of heavy trucks. At some point in the future, Tesla has a plan to commercialize an electric semi, but nobody really knows when. Meanwhile, other entities are looking to compete in the world of industrial vehicles. Chace Barber is a former trucker in the logging industry, which has some very different characteristics than the type of freight trucking you typically see on a highway. When you're driving over the Rocky Mountains, without easy proximity to mechanics, tow trucks or service stations, you need power and reliability. His company, Edison Motors, is building its own trucks with a hybrid diesel-electric approach that it sees as a better path forward. On this episode, we discuss the challenges of hauling logs, as well as how it's possible for a small entity to get in the game of building such large industrial equipment.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Release date: 2023-01-13

Notes from The Valmy:

Source: YouTube https://youtu.be/ZzV7ty1DW_c
Release date: 2022-12-15

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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: #141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well
Release date: 2022-12-13

Large language models like GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, are neural networks trained on a large fraction of all text available on the internet to do one thing: predict the next word in a passage. This simple technique has led to something extraordinary — black boxes able to write TV scripts, explain jokes, produce satirical poetry, answer common factual questions, argue sensibly for political positions, and more. Every month their capabilities grow.

But do they really 'understand' what they're saying, or do they just give the illusion of understanding?

Today's guest, Richard Ngo, thinks that in the most important sense they understand many things. Richard is a researcher at OpenAI — the company that created ChatGPT — who works to foresee where AI advances are going and develop strategies that will keep these models from 'acting out' as they become more powerful, are deployed and ultimately given power in society.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

One way to think about 'understanding' is as a subjective experience. Whether it feels like something to be a large language model is an important question, but one we currently have no way to answer.

However, as Richard explains, another way to think about 'understanding' is as a functional matter. If you really understand an idea you're able to use it to reason and draw inferences in new situations. And that kind of understanding is observable and testable.

One piece of evidence comes from the way models are prompted to give responses to questions. Researchers have found that telling models to talk through problems step by step often significantly improves their performance, which suggests that models are doing something useful with that extra "thinking time".

Richard argues that language models are developing sophisticated representations of the world which can be manipulated to draw sensible conclusions — maybe not so different from what happens in the human mind. And experiments have found that, as models get more parameters and are trained on more data, these types of capabilities consistently improve.

We might feel reluctant to say a computer understands something the way that we do. But if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, we should consider that maybe we have a duck, or at least something sufficiently close to a duck it doesn't matter.

In today's conversation we discuss the above, as well as:

• Could speeding up AI development be a bad thing?
• The balance between excitement and fear when it comes to AI advances
• What OpenAI focuses its efforts where it does
• Common misconceptions about machine learning
• How many computer chips it might require to be able to do most of the things humans do
• How Richard understands the 'alignment problem' differently than other people
• Why 'situational awareness' may be a key concept for understanding the behaviour of AI models
• What work to positively shape the development of AI Richard is and isn't excited about
• The AGI Safety Fundamentals course that Richard developed to help people learn more about this field

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Milo McGuire and Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% )
Episode: Nadia Asparouhova - Tech Elites, Democracy, Open Source, & Philanthropy
Release date: 2022-12-15

Nadia Asparouhova is currently researching what the new tech elite will look like at nadia.xyz. She is also the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software.

We talk about how:

• American philanthropy has changed from Rockefeller to Effective Altruism

• SBF represented the Davos elite rather than the Silicon Valley elite,

• Open source software reveals the limitations of democratic participation,

• & much more.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.

Timestamps

(0:00:00) - Intro

(0:00:26) - SBF was Davos elite

(0:09:38) - Gender sociology of philanthropy

(0:16:30) - Was Shakespeare an open source project?

(0:22:00) - Need for charismatic leaders

(0:33:55) - Political reform

(0:40:30) - Why didn’t previous wealth booms lead to new philanthropic movements?

(0:53:35) - Creating a 10,000 year endowment

(0:57:27) - Why do institutions become left wing?

(1:02:27) - Impact of billionaire intellectual funding

(1:04:12) - Value of intellectuals

(1:08:53) - Climate, AI, & Doomerism

(1:18:04) - Religious philanthropy

Transcript

This transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:00:00

You start with this idea that like democracy is green and like we should have tons of tons of people participating tons of people participate and then it turns out that like most participation is actually just noise and not that useful. That really squarely puts SPF into like the finance crowd much more so than startups or crypto. Founders will always talk about like building and like startups are like so important or whatever and like what are all of them doing in their spare time? They're like reading books. They're reading essays and like and then those like books and essays influence how they think about stuff.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:26

Okay, today I have the pleasure of talking with Nadia Asperova. She is previously the author of Working in Public, the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software and she is currently researching what the new tech elite will look like. Nadia, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, okay, so this is a perfect timing obviously given what's been happening with SPF. How much do you think SPF was motivated by effective altruism? Where do you place them in the whole dimensionality of idea machines and motivations?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:01:02

Yeah, I mean, I know there's sort of like conflicting accounts going around. Like, I mean, just from my sort of like character study or looking at SPF, it seems pretty clear to me that he is sort of inextricably tied to the concepts of utilitarianism that then motivate effective altruism. The difference for me in sort of like where I characterize effective altruism is I think it's much closer to sort of like finance Wall Street elite mindset than it is to startup mindset, even though a lot of people associate effective altruism with tech people. So yeah, to me, like that really squarely puts SPF in sort of like the finance crowd much more so than startups or crypto. And I think that's something that gets really misunderstood about him.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:01:44

Interesting. Yeah, I find that interesting because if you think of Jeff Bezos, when he started Amazon, he wasn't somebody like John Perry Barlow, who was just motivated by the free philosophy of the internet. You know, he saw a graph of internet usage going up into the right and he's like, I should build a business on top of this. And in a sort of loopholy way, try to figure out like, what is the thing that is that is the first thing you would want to put a SQL database on top of to ship and produce? And I think that's what books was the answer. So and obviously, he also came from a hedge fund, right? Would you play somebody like him also in the old finance crowd rather than as a startup founder?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:02:22

Yeah, it's kind of a weird one because he's both associated with the early computing revolution, but then also AWS was sort of like what kicked off all of the 2010s sort of startup. And I think in the way that he's started thinking about his public legacy and just from sort of his public behavior, I think he fits much more squarely now in that sort of tech startup elite mindset of the 2010s crowd more so than the Davos elite crowd of the 2000s.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:02:47

What in specific are you referring to?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:02:49

Well, he's come out and been like sort of openly critical about a lot of like Davos type institutions. He kind of pokes fun at mainstream media and for not believing in him not believing in AWS. And I think he's because he sort of like spans across like both of these generations, he's been able to see the evolution of like how maybe like his earlier peers function versus the sort of second cohort of peers that he came across. But to me, he seems much more like, much more of the sort of like startup elite mindset. And I can kind of back up a little bit there. But what I associate with the Davos Wall Street kind of crowd is much more of this focus on quantitative thinking, measuring efficiency. And then also this like globalist mindset, like I think that the vision that they want to ensure for the world is this idea of like a very interconnected world where we, you know, sort of like the United Nations kind of mindset. And that is really like literally what the Davos gathering is. Whereas Bezos from his actions today feels much closer to the startup, like Y Combinator post AWS kind of mindset of founders that were really made their money by taking these non-obvious bets on talented people. So they were much less focused on credentialism. They were much more into this idea of meritocracy. I think we sort of forget like how commonplace this trope is of like, you know, the young founder in a dorm room. And that was really popularized by the 2010s cohort of the startup elite of being someone that may have like absolutely no skills, no background in industry, but can somehow sort of like turn the entire industry over on its head. And I think that was sort of like the unique insight of the tech startup crowd. And yeah, when I think about just sort of like some of the things that Bezos is doing now, it feels like she identifies with that much more strongly of being this sort of like lone cowboy or having this like one talented person with really great ideas who can sort of change the world. I think about the, what is it called? The Altos Institute or the new like science initiative that he put out where he was recruiting these like scientists from academic institutions and paying them really high salaries just to attract like the very best top scientists around the world. That's much more of that kind of mindset than it is about like putting faith in sort of like existing institutions, which is what we would see from more of like a Davos kind of mindset.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:05:16

Interesting. Do you think that in the future, like the kids of today's tech billionaires will be future aristocrats? So effective altruism will be a sort of elite aristocratic philosophy. They'll be like tomorrow's Rockefellers.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:05:30

Yeah, I kind of worry about that actually. I think of there as being like within the US, we were kind of lucky in that we have these two different types of elites. We have the aristocratic elites and we have meritocratic elites. Most other countries I think basically just have aristocratic elites, especially comparing like the US to Britain in this way. And so in the aristocratic model, your wealth and your power is sort of like conferred to you by previous generations. You just kind of like inherit it from your parents or your family or whomever. And the upside of that, if there is an upside, is that you get really socialized into this idea of what does it mean to be a public steward? What does it mean to think of yourself and your responsibility to the rest of society as a privileged elite person? In the US, we have this really great thing where you can kind of just, you know, we have the American dream, right? So lots of people that didn't grow up with money can break into the elite ranks by doing something that makes them really successful. And that's like a really special thing about the US. So we have this whole class of meritocratic elites who may not have aristocratic backgrounds, but ended up doing something within their lifetimes that made them successful. And so, yeah, I think it's a really cool thing. The downside of that being that you don't really get like socialized into what does it mean to have this fortune and do something interesting with your money. You don't have this sort of generational benefit that the aristocratic elites have of presiding over your land or whatever you want to call it, where you're sort of learning how to think about yourself in relation to the rest of society. And so it's much easier to just kind of like hoard your wealth or whatever. And so when you think about sort of like what are the next generations, the children of the meritocratic elites going to look like or what are they going to do, it's very easy to imagine kind of just becoming aristocratic elites in the sense of like, yeah, they're just going to like inherit the money from their families. And they haven't also really been socialized into like how to think about their role in society. And so, yeah, all the meritocratic elites eventually turn into aristocratic elites, which is where I think you start seeing this trend now towards people wanting to sort of like spend down their fortunes within their lifetime or within a set number of decades after they die because they kind of see what happened in previous generations and are like, oh, I don't want to do that.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:07:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting. You mentioned that the aristocratic elites have the feel that they have the responsibility to give back, I guess, more so than the meritocratic elites. But I believe that in the U.S., the amount of people who give to philanthropy and the total amount they give is higher than in Europe, right, where they probably have a higher ratio of aristocratic elites. Wouldn't you expect the opposite if the aristocratic elites are the ones that are, you know, inculcated to give back?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:08:11

Well, I assume like most of the people that are the figures about sort of like Americans giving back is spread across like all Americans, not just the wealthiest.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:08:19

Yeah. So you would predict that among the top 10 percent of Americans, there's less philanthropy than the top 10 percent of Europeans? Uh, there's... Sorry, I'm not sure I understand the question. I guess, does the ratio of meritocratic to aristocratic elites change how much philanthropy there is among the elites?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:08:45

Yeah, I mean, like here we have much more of a culture of like even among aristocratic elites, this idea of like institution building or like large donations to like build institutions, whereas in Europe, a lot of the public institutions are created by government. And there's sort of this mentality of like private citizens don't experiment with public institutions. That's the government's job. And you see that sort of like pervasively throughout all of like European cultures. Like when we want something to change in public society, we look to government to like regulate or change it. Whereas in the U.S., it's kind of much more like choose your own adventure. And we don't really see the government as like the sole provider or shaper of public institutions. We also look at private citizens and like there's so many things that like public institutions that we have now that were not started by government, but were started by private philanthropists. And that's like a really unusual thing about the U.S.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:09:39

There's this common pattern in philanthropy where a guy will become a billionaire, and then his wife will be heavily involved with or even potentially in charge of, you know, the family's philanthropic efforts. And there's many examples of this, right? Like Bill and Melinda Gates, you know, Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Dustin Moskovitz. So what is the consequence of this? How is philanthropy, the causes and the foundations, how are they different because of this pattern?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:10:15

Well, I mean, I feel like we see that pattern, like the problem is that what even is philanthropy is changing very quickly. So we can say historically that, not even historically, in recent history, in recent decades, that has probably been true. That wasn't true in say like late 1800s, early 1900s. It was, you know, Carnegie and Rockefeller were the ones that were actually doing their own philanthropy, not their spouses. So I'd say it's a more recent trend. But now I think we're also seeing this thing where like a lot of wealthy people are not necessarily doing their philanthropic activities through foundations anymore. And that's true both within like traditional philanthropy sector and sort of like the looser definition of what we might consider to be philanthropy, depending on how you define it, which I kind of more broadly want to define as like the actions of elites that are sort of like, you know, public facing activities. But like even within sort of traditional philanthropy circles, we have like, you know, the 5.1c3 nonprofit, which is, you know, traditionally how people, you know, house all their money in a foundation and then they do their philanthropic activities out of that. But in more recent years, we've seen this trend towards like LLCs. So Emerson Collective, I think, might have been maybe the first one to do it. And that was Steve Jobs' Philanthropic Foundation. And then Mark Zuckerberg with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also used an LLC. And then since then, a lot of other, especially within sort of like tech wealth, we've seen that move towards people using LLCs instead of 5.1c3s because they, it just gives you a lot more flexibility in the kinds of things you can fund. You don't just have to fund other nonprofits. And they also see donor advised funds. So DAFs, which are sort of this like hacky workaround to foundations as well. So I guess point being that like this sort of mental model of like, you know, one person makes a ton of money and then their spouse kind of directs these like nice, feel good, like philanthropic activities, I think is like, may not be the model that we continue to move forward on. And I'm kind of hopeful or curious to see like, what does a return to like, because we've had so many new people making a ton of money in the last 10 years or so, we might see this return to sort of like the Gilded Age style of philanthropy where people are not necessarily just like forming a philanthropic foundation and looking for the nicest causes to fund, but are actually just like thinking a little bit more holistically about like, how do I help build and create like a movement around a thing that I really care about? How do I think more broadly around like funding companies and nonprofits and individuals and like doing lots of different, different kinds of activities? Because I think like the broader goal that like motivates at least like the new sort of elite classes to want to do any of this stuff at all. I don't really think philanthropy is about altruism. I just, I think like the term philanthropy is just totally fraud and like refers to too many different things and it's not very helpful. But I think like the part that I'm interested in at least is sort of like what motivates elites to go from just sort of like making a lot of money and then like thinking about themselves to them thinking about sort of like their place in broader public society. And I think that starts with thinking about how do I control like media, academia, government are sort of like the three like arms of the public sector. And we think of it in that way a little bit more broadly where it's really much more about sort of like maintaining control over your own power, more so than sort of like this like altruistic kind of, you know, whitewash.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:13:41

Yeah.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:13:42

Then it becomes like, you know, there's so many other like creative ways to think about like how that might happen.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:13:49

That's, that's, that's really interesting. That's a, yeah, that's a really interesting way of thinking about what it is you're doing with philanthropy. Isn't the word noble descended from a word that basically means to give alms to people like if you're in charge of them, you will give alms to them. And in a way, I mean, it might have been another word I'm thinking of, but in a way, yeah, a part of what motivates altruism, not obviously all of it, but part of it is that, yeah, you influence and power. Not even in a necessarily negative connotation, but that's definitely what motivates altruism. So having that put square front and center is refreshing and honest, actually.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:14:29

Yeah, I don't, I really don't see it as like a negative thing at all. And I think most of the like, you know, writing and journalism and academia that focuses on philanthropy tends to be very wealth critical. I'm not at all, like I personally don't feel wealth critical at all. I think like, again, sort of returning to this like mental model of like aristocratic and meritocratic elites, aristocratic elites are able to sort of like pass down, like encode what they're supposed to be doing in each generation because they have this kind of like familial ties. And I think like on the meritocratic side, like if you didn't have any sort of language around altruism or public stewardship, then like, it's like, you need to kind of create that narrative for the meritocratically or else, you know, there's just like nothing to hold on to. So I think like, it makes sense to talk in those terms. Andrew Carnegie being sort of the father of modern philanthropy in the US, like, wrote these series of essays about wealth that were like very influential and where he sort of talks about this like moral obligation. And I think like, really, it was kind of this like, a quiet way for him to, even though it was ostensibly about sort of like giving back or, you know, helping lift up the next generation of people, the next generation of entrepreneurs. Like, I think it really was much more of a protective stance of saying, like, if he doesn't frame it in this way, then people are just going to knock down the concept of wealth altogether.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:15:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's really interesting. And it's interesting, in which cases this kind of influence has been successful and worse not. When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, has there been any counterfactual impact on how the Washington Post has run as a result? I doubt it. But you know, when Musk takes over Twitter, I guess it's a much more expensive purchase. We'll see what the influence is negative or positive. But it's certainly different than what Twitter otherwise would have been. So control over media, it's, I guess it's a bigger meme now. Let me just take a digression and ask about open source for a second. So based on your experience studying these open source projects, do you find the theory that Homer and Shakespeare were basically container words for these open source repositories that stretched out through centuries? Do you find that more plausible now, rather than them being individuals, of course? Do you find that more plausible now, given your, given your study of open source? Sorry, what did?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:16:49

Less plausible. What did?

Dwarkesh Patel 0:16:51

Oh, okay. So the idea is that they weren't just one person. It was just like a whole bunch of people throughout a bunch of centuries who composed different parts of each story or composed different stories.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:17:02

The Nicholas Berbaki model, same concept of, you know, a single mathematician who's actually comprised of like lots of different. I think it's actually the opposite would be sort of my conclusion. We think of open source as this very like collective volunteer effort. And I think, use that as an excuse to not really contribute back to open source or not really think about like how open source projects are maintained. Because we were like, you know, you kind of have this bystander effect where you're like, well, you know, someone's taking care of it. It's volunteer oriented. Like, of course, there's someone out there taking care of it. But in reality, it actually turns out it is just one person. So maybe it's a little bit more like a Wizard of Oz type model. It's actually just like one person behind the curtain that's like, you know, doing everything. And you see this huge, you know, grandeur and you think there must be so many people that are behind it. It's one person. Yeah, and I think that's sort of undervalued. I think a lot of the rhetoric that we have about open source is rooted in sort of like early 2000s kind of starry eyed idea about like the power of the internet and the idea of like crowdsourcing and Wikipedia and all this stuff. And then like in reality, like we kind of see this convergence from like very broad based collaborative volunteer efforts to like narrowing down to kind of like single creators. And I think a lot of like, you know, single creators are the people that are really driving a lot of the internet today and a lot of cultural production.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:18:21

Oh, that's that's super fascinating. Does that in general make you more sympathetic towards the lone genius view of accomplishments in history? Not just in literature, I guess, but just like when you think back to how likely is it that, you know, Newton came up with all that stuff on his own versus how much was fed into him by, you know, the others around him?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:18:40

Yeah, I think so. I feel I've never been like a big, like, you know, great founder theory kind of person. I think I'm like, my true theory is, I guess that ideas are maybe some sort of like sentient, like, concept or virus that operates outside of us. And we are just sort of like the vessels through which like ideas flow. So in that sense, you know, it's not really about any one person, but I do think I think I tend to lean like in terms of sort of like, where does creative, like, creative effort come from? I do think a lot of it comes much more from like a single individual than it does from with some of the crowds. But everything just serves like different purposes, right? Like, because I think like, within open source, it's like, not all of open source maintenance work is creative. In fact, most of it is pretty boring and dredgerous. And that's the stuff that no one wants to do. And that, like, one person kind of got stuck with doing and that's really different from like, who created a certain open source projects, which is a little bit more of that, like, creative mindset.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:19:44

Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. Do you think more projects in open source, so just take a popular repository, on average, do you think that these repositories would be better off if, let's say a larger percentage of them where pull requests were closed and feature requests were closed? You can look at the code, but you can't interact with it or its creators anyway? Should more repositories have this model? Yeah, I definitely think so. I think a lot of people would be much happier that way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting to think about the implications of this for other areas outside of code, right? Which is where it gets really interesting. I mean, in general, there's like a discussion. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:20:25

Yeah, I mean, that's basically what's for the writing of my book, because I was like, okay, I feel like whatever's happening open source right now, you start with this idea that like democracy is green, and like, we should have tons and tons of people participating, tons of people participate, and then it turns out that like, most participation is actually just noise and not that useful. And then it ends up like scaring everyone away. And in the end, you just have like, you know, one or a small handful of people that are actually doing all the work while everyone else is kind of like screaming around them. And this becomes like a really great metaphor for what happens in social media. And the reason I wrote, after I wrote the book, I went and worked at Substack. And, you know, part of it was because I was like, I think the model is kind of converging from like, you know, Twitter being this big open space to like, suddenly everyone is retreating, like, the public space is so hostile that everyone must retreat into like, smaller private spaces. So then, you know, chats became a thing, Substack became a thing. And yeah, I just feel sort of like realistic, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:15

That's really fascinating. Yeah, the Straussian message in that book is very strong. But in general, there's, when you're thinking about something like corporate governance, right? There's a big question. And I guess even more interestingly, when you think if you think DAOs are going to be a thing, and you think that we will have to reinvent corporate governance from the ground up, there's a question of, should these be run like monarchy? Should they be sort of oligarchies where the board is in control? Should they be just complete democracies where everybody gets one vote on what you do at the next, you know, shareholder meeting or something? And this book and that analysis is actually pretty interesting to think about. Like, how should corporations be run differently, if at all? What does it inform how you think the average corporation should be run?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:21:59

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think we are seeing a little bit, I'm not a corporate governance expert, but I do feel like we're seeing a little of this like, backlash against, like, you know, shareholder activism and like, extreme focus on sort of like DEI and boards and things like that. And like, I think we're seeing a little bit of people starting to like take the reins and take control again, because they're like, ah, that doesn't really work so well, it turns out. I think DAOs are going to learn this hard lesson as well. It's still maybe just too early to say what is happening in DAOs right now. But at least the ones that I've looked at, it feels like there is a very common failure mode of people saying, you know, like, let's just have like, let's have this be super democratic and like, leave it to the crowd to kind of like run this thing and figure out how it works. And it turns out you actually do need a strong leader, even the beginning. And this, this is something I learned just from like, open source projects where it's like, you know, very rarely, or if at all, do you have a strong leader? If at all, do you have a project that starts sort of like leaderless and faceless? And then, you know, usually there is some strong creator, leader or influential figure that is like driving the project forward for a certain period of time. And then you can kind of get to the point when you have enough of an active community that maybe that leader takes a step back and lets other people take over. But it's not like you can do that off day one. And that's sort of this open question that I have for, for crypto as an industry more broadly, because I think like, if I think about sort of like, what is defining each of these generations of people that are, you know, pushing forward new technological paradigms, I mentioned that like Wall Street finance mindset is very focused on like globalism and on this sort of like efficiency quantitative mindset. You have the tech Silicon Valley Y company or kind of generation that is really focused on top talent. And the idea this sort of like, you know, founder mindset, the power of like individuals breaking institutions, and then you have like the crypto mindset, which is this sort of like faceless leaderless, like governed by protocol and by code mindset, which is like intriguing to me. But I have a really hard time squaring it with seeing like, in some sense, open source was the experiment that started playing out, you know, 20 years before then. And some things are obviously different in crypto, because tokenization completely changes the incentive system for contributing and maintaining crypto projects versus like traditional open source projects. But in the end, also like humans are humans. And like, I feel like there are a lot of lessons to be learned from open source of like, you know, they also started out early on as being very starry eyed about the power of like, hyper democratic regimes. And it turned out like, that just like doesn't work in practice. And so like, how is CryptoGhost or like Square that? I'm just, yeah, very curious to see what happened.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:24:41

Yeah, super fascinating. That raises an interesting question, by the way, you've written about idea machines, and you can explain that concept while you answer this question. But do you think that movements can survive without a charismatic founder who is both alive and engaged? So once Will McCaskill dies, would you be shorting effective altruism? Or if like Tyler Cowen dies, would you be short progress studies? Or do you think that, you know, once you get a movement off the ground, you're like, okay, I'm gonna be shorting altruism.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:25:08

Yeah, I think that's a good question. I mean, like, I don't think there's some perfect template, like each of these kind of has its own sort of unique quirks and characteristics in them. I guess, yeah, back up a little bit. Idea machines is this concept I have around what the transition from we were talking before about, so like traditional 5.1c3 foundations as vehicles for philanthropy, what does the modern version of that look like that is not necessarily encoded in institution? And so I had this term idea machines, which is sort of this different way of thinking about like, turning ideas into outcomes where you have a community that forms around a shared set of values and ideas. So yeah, you mentioned like progress studies is an example of that, or effective altruism example, eventually, that community gets capitalized by some funders, and then it starts to be able to develop an agenda and then like, actually start building like, you know, operational outcomes and like, turning those ideas into real world initiatives. And remind me of your question again.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:26:06

Yeah, so once the charismatic founder dies of a movement, is a movement basically handicapped in some way? Like, maybe it'll still be a thing, but it's never going to reach the heights it could have reached if that main guy had been around?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:26:20

I think there are just like different shapes and classifications of like different, different types of communities here. So like, and I'm just thinking back again to sort of like different types of open source projects where it's not like they're like one model that fits perfectly for all of them. So I think there are some communities where it's like, yeah, I mean, I think effective altruism is maybe a good example of that where, like, the community has grown so much that I like if all their leaders were to, you know, knock on wood, disappear tomorrow or something that like, I think the movement would still keep going. There are enough true believers, like even within the community. And I think that's the next order of that community that like, I think that would just continue to grow. Whereas you have like, yeah, maybe it's certain like smaller or more nascent communities that are like, or just like communities that are much more like oriented around, like, a charismatic founder that's just like a different type where if you lose that leader, then suddenly, you know, the whole thing falls apart because they're much more like these like cults or religions. And I don't think it makes one better, better or worse. It's like the right way to do is probably like Bitcoin, where you have a charismatic leader for life because that leader is more necessarily, can't go away, can't ever die. But you still have the like, you know, North Stars and like that.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:27:28

Yeah. It is funny. I mean, a lot of prophets have this property of you're not really sure what they believed in. So people with different temperaments can project their own preferences onto him. Somebody like Jesus, right? It's, you know, you can be like a super left winger and believe Jesus did for everything you believe in. You can be a super right winger and believe the same. Yeah. Go ahead.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:27:52

I think there's value in like writing cryptically more. Like I think about like, I think Curtis Yarvin has done a really good job of this where, you know, intentionally or not, but because like his writing is so cryptic and long winded. And like, it's like the Bible where you can just kind of like pour over endlessly being like, what does this mean? What does this mean? And in a weird, you know, you're always told to write very clearly, you're told to write succinctly, but like, it's actually in a weird way, you can be much more effective by being very long winded and not obvious in what you're saying.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:28:20

Yes, which actually raises an interesting question that I've been wondering about. There have been movements, I guess, if I did altruism is a good example that have been focused on community building in a sort of like explicit way. And then there's other movements where they have a charismatic founder. And moreover, this guy, he doesn't really try to recruit people. I'm thinking of somebody like Peter Thiel, for example, right? He goes on, like once every year or two, he'll go on a podcast and have this like really cryptic back and forth. And then just kind of go away in a hole for a few months or a few years. And I'm curious, which one you think is more effective, given the fact that you're not really competing for votes. So absolute number of people is not what you care about. It's not clear what you care about. But you do want to have more influence among the elites who matter in like politics and tech as well. So anyways, which just your thoughts on those kinds of strategies, explicitly trying to community build versus just kind of projecting out there in a sort of cryptic way?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:29:18

Yeah, I mean, I definitely being somewhat cryptic myself. I favor the cryptic methodology. But I mean, yeah, I mean, you mentioned Peter Thiel. I think like the Thielverse is probably like the most, like one of the most influential things. In fact, that is hard. It is partly so effective, because it is hard to even define what it is or wrap your head around that you just know that sort of like, every interesting person you meet somehow has some weird connection to, you know, Peter Thiel. And it's funny. But I think this is sort of that evolution from the, you know, 5163 Foundation to the like idea machine implicit. And that is this this switch from, you know, used to start the, you know, Nadia Asparova Foundation or whatever. And it was like, you know, had your name on it. And it was all about like, what do I as a funder want to do in the world, right? And you spend all this time doing this sort of like classical, you know, research, going out into the field, talking to people and you sit and you think, okay, like, here's a strategy I'm going to pursue. And like, ultimately, it's like, very, very donor centric in this very explicit way. And so within traditional philanthropy, you're seeing this sort of like, backlash against that. In like, you know, straight up like nonprofit land, where now you're seeing the locus of power moving from being very donor centric to being sort of like community centric and people saying like, well, we don't really want the donors telling us what to do, even though it's also their money. Like, you know, instead, let's have this be driven by the community from the ground up. That's maybe like one very literal reaction against that, like having the donor as sort of the central power figure. But I think idea machines are kind of like the like, maybe like the more realistic or effective answer in that like, the donor is still like without the presence of a funder, like, community is just a community. They're just sitting around and talking about ideas of like, what could possibly happen? Like, they don't have any money to make anything happen. But like, I think like really effective funders are good at being sort of like subtle and thoughtful about like, like, you know, no one wants to see like the Peter Thiel foundation necessarily. That's just like, it's so like, not the style of how it works. But you know, you meet so many people that are being funded by the same person, like just going out and sort of aggressively like arming the rebels is a more sort of like, yeah, just like distributed decentralized way of thinking about like spreading one's power, instead of just starting a fund. Instead of just starting a foundation.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:31:34

Yeah, yeah. I mean, even if you look at the life of influential politicians, somebody like LBJ, or Robert Moses, it's how much of it was like calculated and how much of it was just like decades of building up favors and building up connections in a way that had no definite and clear plan, but it just you're hoping that someday you can call upon them and sort of like Godfather way. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. And by the way, this is also where your work on open source comes in, right? Like, there's this idea that in the movement, you know, everybody will come in with their ideas, and you can community build your way towards, you know, what should be funded. And, yeah, I'm inclined to believe that it's probably like a few people who have these ideas about what should be funded. And the rest of it is either just a way of like building up engagement and building up hype. Or, or I don't know, or maybe just useless, but what are your thoughts on it?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:32:32

You know, I decided I was like, I am like, really very much a tech startup person and not a crypto person, even though I would very much like to be fun, because I'm like, ah, this is the future. And there's so many interesting things happening. And I'm like, for the record, not at all like down in crypto, I think it is like the next big sort of movement of things that are happening. But when I really come down to like the mindset, it's like I am so in that sort of like, top talent founder, like power of the individual to break institutions mindset, like that just resonates with me so much more than the like, leaderless, faceless, like, highly participatory kind of thing. And again, like I am very open to that being true, like I maybe I'm so wrong on that. I just like, I have not yet seen evidence that that works in the world. I see a lot of rhetoric about how that could work or should work. We have this sort of like implicit belief that like, direct democracy is somehow like the greatest thing to aspire towards. But like, over and over we see evidence that like that doesn't that just like doesn't really work. It doesn't mean we have to throw out the underlying principles or values behind that. Like I still really believe in meritocracy. I really believe in like access to opportunity. I really believe in like pursuit of happiness. Like to me, those are all like very like American values. But like, I think that where that breaks is the idea that like that has to happen through these like highly participatory methods. I just like, yeah, I haven't seen really great evidence of that being that working.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:33:56

What does that imply about how you think about politics or at least political structures? You think it would you you elect a mayor, but like, just forget no participation. He gets to do everything he wants to do for four years and you can get rid of in four years. But until then, no community meetings. Well, what does that imply about how you think cities and states and countries should be run?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:34:17

Um, that's a very complicated thoughts on that. I mean, I, I think it's also like, everyone has the fantasy of when it'd be so nice if there were just one person in charge. I hate all this squabbling. It would just be so great if we could just, you know, have one person just who has exactly the views that I have and put them in charge and let them run things. That would be very nice. I just, I do also think it's unrealistic. Like, I don't think I'm, you know, maybe like modernity sounds great in theory, but in practice just doesn't like I really embrace and I think like there is no perfect governance design either in the same way that there's no perfect open source project designer or whatever else we're talking about. Um, uh, like, yeah, it really just depends like what is like, what is your population comprised of? There are some very small homogenous populations that can be very easily governed by like, you know, a small government or one person or whatever, because there isn't that much dissent or difference. Everyone is sort of on the same page. America is the extreme opposite in that angle. And I'm always thinking about America because like, I'm American and I love America. But like, everyone is trying to solve the governance question for America. And I think like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, we're an extremely heterogeneous population. There are a lot of competing world views. I may not agree with all the views of everyone in America, but like I also, like, I don't want just one person that represents my personal views. I would focus more like effectiveness in governance than I would like having like, you know, just one person in charge or something that like, I don't mind if someone disagrees with my views as long as they're good at what they do, if that makes sense. So I think the questions are like, how do we improve the speed at which like our government works and the efficacy with which it works? Like, I think there's so much room to be made room for improvement there versus like, I don't know how much like I really care about like changing the actual structure of our government.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:36:27

Interesting. Going back to open source for a second. Why do these companies release so much stuff in open source for free? And it's probably literally worth trillions of dollars of value in total. And they just release it out and free and many of them are developer tools that other developers use to build competitors for these big tech companies that are releasing these open source tools. Why did they do it? What explains it?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:36:52

I mean, I think it depends on the specific project, but like a lot of times, these are projects that were developed internally. It's the same reason of like, I think code and writing are not that dissimilar in this way of like, why do people spend all this time writing, like long posts or papers or whatever, and then just release them for free? Like, why not put everything behind a paywall? And I think the answer is probably still in both cases where like mindshare is a lot more interesting than, you know, your literal IP. And so, you know, you put out, you write these like long reports or you tweet or whatever, like you spend all this time creating content for free and putting it out there because you're trying to capture mindshare. Same thing with companies releasing open source projects. Like a lot of times they really want like other developers to come in and contribute to them. They want to increase their status as like an open source friendly kind of company or company or show like, you know, here's the type of code that we write internally and showing that externally. They want to like recruiting is, you know, the hardest thing for any company, right? And so being able to attract the right kinds of developers or people that, you know, might fit really well into their developer culture just matters a lot more. And they're just doing that instead of with words or doing that with code.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:37:57

You've talked about the need for more idea machines. You're like dissatisfied with the fact that effective altruism is a big game in town. Is there some idea or nascent movement where I mean, other than progress ideas, but like something where you feel like this could be a thing, but it just needs some like charismatic founder to take it to the next level? Or even if it doesn't exist yet, it just like a set of ideas around this vein is like clearly something there is going to exist. You know what I mean? Is there anything like that that you notice?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:38:26

I only had a couple of different possibilities in that post. Yeah, I think like the progress sort of meme is probably the largest growing contender that I would see right now. I think there's another one right now around sort of like the new right. That's not even like the best term necessarily for it, but there's sort of like a shared set of values there that are maybe starting with like politics, but like ideally spreading to like other areas of public influence. So I think like those are a couple of like the bigger movements that I see right now. And then there's like smaller stuff too. Like I mentioned, like tools for thought in that post where like that's never going to be a huge idea machine. But it's one where you have a lot of like interesting, talented people that are thinking about sort of like future of computing. And until maybe more recently, like there just hasn't been a lot of funding available and the funding is always really uneven and unpredictable. And so that's to me an example of like, you know, a smaller community that like just needs that sort of like extra influx to turn a bunch of abstract ideas into practice. But yeah, I mean, I think like, yeah, there's some like the bigger ones that I see right now. I think there is just so much more potential to do more, but I wish people would just think a little bit more creatively because, yeah, I really do think like effective altruism kind of becomes like the default option for a lot of people. Then they're kind of vaguely dissatisfied with it and they don't like think about like, well, what do I actually really care about in the world and how do I want to put that forward?

Dwarkesh Patel 0:39:53

Yeah, there's also the fact that effective altruism has this like very fit memeplex in the sense that it's like a polytheistic religion where if you have a cause area, then you don't have your own movement. You just have a cause area within our broader movement, right? It just like adopts your gods into our movement.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:40:15

Yeah, that's the same thing I see like people trying to lobby for effective altruism to care about their cause area, but then it's like you could just start a separate. Like if you can't get EA to care about, then why not just like start another one somewhere else?

Dwarkesh Patel 0:40:28

Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting to me that the wealth boom in Silicon Valley and then tech spheres has led to the sound growth of philanthropy, but that hasn't always been the case. Even in America, like a lot of people became billionaires after energy markets were deregulated in the 80s and the 90s. And then there wasn't, and obviously the hub of that was like the Texas area or, you know, and as far as I'm aware, there wasn't like a boom of philanthropy motivated by the ideas that people in that region had. What's different about Silicon Valley? Why are they, or do you actually think that these other places have also had their own booms of philanthropic giving?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:41:11

I think you're right. Yeah, I would make the distinction between like being wealthy is not the same as being elite or whatever other term you want to use there. And so yeah, there are definitely like pockets of what's called like more like local markets of wealth, like, yeah, Texas oil or energy billionaires that tend to operate kind of just more in their own sphere. And a lot of, if you look at any philanthropic, like a lot of them will be philanthropically active, but they only really focus on their geographic area. But there's sort of this difference. And I think this is part of where it comes from the question of like, you know, like what forces someone to actually like do something more public facing with their power. And I think that comes from your power being sort of like threatened. That's like one aspect I would say of that. So like tech has only really become a lot more active in the public sphere outside of startups after the tech backlash of the mid 2010s. And you can say a similar thing kind of happened with the Davos elite as well. And also for the Gilded Age cohort of wealth. And so yeah, when you have sort of, you're kind of like, you know, building in your own little world. And like, you know, we had literally like Silicon Valley where everyone was kind of like sequestered off and just thinking about startups and thinking themselves of like, tech is essentially like an industry, just like any other sort of, you know, entertainment or whatever. And we're just kind of happy building over here. And then it was only when sort of like the Panopticon like turned its head towards tech and started and they had this sort of like onslaught of critiques coming from sort of like mainstream discourse where they went, oh, like what is my place in this world? And, you know, if I don't try to like defend that, then I'm going to just kind of, yeah, we're going to lose all that power. So I think that that need to sort of like defend one's power can kind of like prompt that sort of action. The other aspect I'd highlight is just like, I think a lot of elites are driven by these like technological paradigm shifts. So there's this scholar, Carlotta Perrins, who writes about technological revolutions and financial capital. And she identifies like a few different technological revolutions over the last, whatever, hundred plus years that like drove this cycle of, you know, a new technology is invented. It's people are kind of like working on it in this smaller industry sort of way. And then there is some kind of like crazy like public frenzy and then like a backlash. And then from after that, then you have this sort of like focus on public institution building. But she really points out that like not all technology fits into that. Like, not all technology is a paradigm shift. Sometimes technology is just technology. And so, yeah, I think like a lot of wealth might just fall into that category. My third example, by the way, is the Koch family because you had, you know, the Koch brothers, but then like their father was actually the one who like kind of initially made their wealth, but was like very localized in sort of like how he thought about philanthropy. He had his own like, you know, family foundation was just sort of like doing that sort of like, you know, Texas billionaire mindset that we're talking about of, you know, I made a bunch of money. I'm going to just sort of like, yeah, do my local funder activity. It was only the next generation of his children that then like took that wealth and started thinking about like how do we actually like move that onto like a more elite stage and thinking about like their influence in the media. But like you can see there's like two clear generations within the same family. Like one has this sort of like local wealth mindset and one of them has the more like elite wealth mindset. And yeah, you can kind of like ask yourself, why did that switch happen? But yeah, it's clearly about more than just money. It's also about intention.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:44:51

Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, it's interesting because there's, if you identify the current mainstream media as affiliated with like that Davos aristocratic elite, or maybe not aristocratic, but like the Davos groups. Yeah, exactly. There is a growing field of independent media, but you would not identify somebody like Joe Rogan as in the Silicon Valley sphere, right? So there is a new media. I just, I guess these startup people don't have that much influence over them yet. And they feel like, yeah.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:45:27

I think they're trying to like take that strategy, right? So you have like a bunch of founders like Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg and Brian Armstrong and whoever else that like will not really talk to mainstream media anymore. They will not get an interview to the New York Times, but they will go to like an individual influencer or an individual creator and they'll do an interview with them. So like when Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta, like he did not get grant interviews to mainstream publications, but he went and talked to like Ben Thompson at Strategory. And so I think there is like, it fits really well with that. Like probably mindset of like, we're not necessarily institution building. We're going to like focus on power of individuals who sort of like defy institutions. And that is kind of like an open question that I have about like, what will the long term influence of the tech elite look like? Because like, yeah, the human history tells us that eventually all individual behaviors kind of get codified into institutions, right? But we're obviously living in a very different time now. And I think like the way that the Davos elite managed to like really codify and extend their influence across all these different sectors was by taking that institutional mindset and, you know, like thinking about sort of like academic institutions and media institutions, all that stuff. If the startup mindset is really inherently like anti-institution and says like, we don't want to build the next Harvard necessarily. We just want to like blow apart the concept of universities whatsoever. Or, you know, we don't want to create a new CNN or a new Fox News. We want to just like fund like individual creators to do that same sort of work, but in this very decentralized way. Like, will that work long term? I don't know. Like, is that just sort of like a temporary state that we're in right now where no one really knows what the next institutions will look like? Or is that really like an important part of this generation where like, we shouldn't be asking the question of like, how do you build a new media network? We should just be saying like, the answer is there is no media network. We just go to like all these individuals instead.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:47:31

Yeah, that's interesting. What do you make of this idea that I think, let's say, that these idea machines might be limited by the fact that if you're going to start some sort of organization in them, you're very much depending on somebody who has made a lot of money independently to fund you and to grant you approval. And I just have a hard time seeing somebody who is like a Napoleon-like figure being willing long term to live under that arrangement. And that so there'll just be the people who are just have this desire to dominate and be recognized who are probably pretty important to any movement you want to create. They'll just want to go off and just like build a company or something that gives them an independent footing first. And they just won't fall under any umbrella. You know what I mean?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:48:27

Yeah, I mean, like Dustin Moskovitz, for example, has been funding EA for a really long time and hasn't hasn't walked away necessarily. Yeah. I mean, on the flip side, you can see like SPF carried a lot of a lot of risk because it's your point, I guess, like, you know, you end up relying on this one funder, the one funder disappears and everything else kind of falls apart. I mean, I think like, I don't have any sort of like preciousness attached to the idea of like communities, you know, lasting forever. I think this is like, again, if we're trying to solve for the problem of like what did not work well about 5.1c3 foundations for most of recent history, like part of it was that they're, you know, just meant to live on to perpetuity. Like, why do we still have like, you know, Rockefeller Foundation, there are now actually many different Rockefeller Foundations, but like, why does that even exist? Like, why did that money not just get spent down? And actually, when John D. Rockefeller was first proposing the idea of foundations, he wanted them to be like, to have like a finite end state. So he wanted them to last only like 50 years or 100 years when he was proposing this like federal charter, but that federal charter failed. And so now we have these like state charters and foundations can just exist forever. But like, I think if we want to like improve upon this idea of like, how do we prevent like meritocratic elites from turning into aristocratic elites? How do we like, yeah, how do we actually just like try to do a lot of really interesting stuff in our lifetimes? It's like a very, it's very counterintuitive, because you think about like, leaving a legacy must mean like creating institutions or creating a foundation that lasts forever. And, you know, 200 years from now, there's still like the Nadia Asparuva Foundation out there. But like, if I really think about it, it's like, I would almost rather just do really, really, really good, interesting work in like, 50 years or 20 years or 10 years, and have that be the legacy versus your name kind of getting, you know, submerged over a century of institutional decay and decline. So yeah, I don't like if you know, you have a community that lasts for maybe only last 10 years or something like that, and it's funded for that amount of time, and then it kind of elbows its usefulness and it winds down or becomes less relevant. Like, I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. Of course, like in practice, you know, nothing ever ends that that neatly and that quietly. But, but yeah, I don't think that's a bad thing.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:50:44

Yeah, yeah. Who are some ethnographers or sociologists from a previous era that have influenced your work? So was there somebody writing about, you know, what it was like to be in a Roman Legion? Or what it was like to work in a factory floor? And you're like, you know what, I want to do that for open source? Or I want to do that for the New Tech Elite?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:51:02

For open source, I was definitely really influenced by Jane Jacobs and Eleanor Ostrom. I think both had this quality of, so yeah, Eleanor Ostrom was looking at examples of common pool resources, like fisheries or forests or whatever. And just like, going and visiting them and spending a lot of time with them and then saying like, actually, I don't think tragedy of the commons is like a real thing, or it's not the only outcome that we can possibly have. And so sometimes commons can be managed, like perfectly sustainably. And it's not necessarily true that everyone just like treats them very extractively. And just like wrote about what she saw. And same with Jane Jacobs sort of looking at cities as someone who lives in one, right? Like she didn't have any fancy credentials or anything like that. She was just like, I live in the city and I'm looking around and this idea of like, top down urban planning, where you have like someone trying to design this perfect city that like, doesn't change and doesn't yield to its people. It just seems completely unrealistic. And the style that both of them take in their writing is very, it just it starts from them just like, observing what they see and then like, trying to write about it. And I just, yeah, that's, that's the style that I really want to emulate.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:52:12

Interesting.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:52:13

Yeah. I think for people to just be talking to like, I don't know, like Chris just like just talking to like open source developers, turns out you can learn a lot more from that than just sitting around like thinking about what open source developers might be thinking about. But...

Dwarkesh Patel 0:52:25

I have this, I have had this idea of not even for like writing it out loud, but just to understand how the world works. Just like shadowing people who are in just like a random position, they don't have to be a lead in any way, but just like a person who's the personal assistant to somebody influential, how to decide whose emails they forward, how they decide what's the priority, or somebody who's just like an accountant for a big company, right? It's just like, what is involved there? Like, what kinds of we're gonna, you know what I mean? Just like, random people, the line manager at the local factory. I just have no idea how these parts of the world work. And I just want to like, yeah, just shadow them for a day and see like, what happens there.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:53:05

This is really interesting, because everyone else focuses on sort of like, you know, the big name figure or whatever, but you know, who's the actual gatekeeper there? But yeah, I mean, I've definitely found like, if you just start cold emailing people and talking to them, people are often like, surprisingly, very, very open to being talked to because I don't know, like, most people do not get asked questions about what they do and how they think and stuff. So, you know, you want to realize that dream.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:53:33

So maybe I'm not like John Rockefeller, and that I only want my organization to last for 50 years. I'm sure you've come across these people who have this idea that, you know, I'll let my money compound for like 200 years. And if it just compounds at some reasonable rate, I'll be, it'll be like the most wealthy institution in the world, unless somebody else has the same exact idea. If somebody wanted to do that, but they wanted to hedge for the possibility that there's a war or there's a revolt, or there's some sort of change in law that draws down this wealth. How would you set up a thousand year endowment, basically, is what I'm asking, or like a 500 year endowment? Would you just put it in like a crypto wallet with us? And just, you know what I mean? Like, how would you go about that organizationally? How would you like, that's your goal? I want to have the most influence in 500 years.

Nadia Asparouhova 0:54:17

Well, I'd worry much less. The question for me is not about how do I make sure that there are assets available to distribute in a thousand years? Because I don't know, just put in stock marketers. You can do some pretty boring things to just like, you know, ensure your assets grow over time. The more difficult question is, how do you ensure that whoever is deciding how to distribute the funds, distributes them in a way that you personally want them to be spent? So Ford Foundation is a really interesting example of this, where Henry Ford created a Ford Foundation shortly before he died, and just pledged a lot of Ford stock to create this foundation and was doing it basically for tax reasons, had no philanthropic. It's just like, this is what we're doing to like, house this wealth over here. And then, you know, passed away, son passed away, and grandson ended up being on the board. But the board ended up being basically like, you know, a bunch of people that Henry Ford certainly would not have ever wanted to be on his board. And so, you know, and you end up seeing like, the Ford Foundation ended up becoming huge influential. I like, I have received money from them. So it's not at all an indictment of sort of like their views or anything like that. It's just much more of like, you know, you had the intent of the original donor, and then you had like, who are all these people that like, suddenly just ended up with a giant pool of capital and then like, decided to spend it however they felt like spending it and the grandson at the time sort of like, famously resigned because he was like, really frustrated and was just like, this is not at all what my family wanted and like, basically like, kicked off the board. So anyway, so that is the question that I would like figure out if I had a thousand year endowment is like, how do I make sure that whomever manages that endowment actually shares my views? One, shares my views, but then also like, how do I even know what we need to care about in a thousand years? Because like, I don't even know what the problems are in a thousand years. And this is why like, I think like, very long term thinking can be a little bit dangerous in this way, because you're sort of like, presuming that you know what even matters then. Whereas I think like, figure out the most impactful things to do is just like, so contextually dependent on like, what is going on at the time. So I can't, I don't know. And there are also foundations where you know, the donor like, writes in the charter like, this money can only be spent on you know, X cause or whatever, but then it just becomes really awkward over time because it's like, I don't know, they're spending money on like, lighthouse keepers or something like that. And it's like, you know, like, this is just like, not a thing that actually really like, you know, should be the main focus anymore. So yeah, I don't know. I think I would probably try to figure out a way to like, select for like, thoughtful, somehow select for like, thoughtful people. But like, how to determine, like, I wonder if there's like a committee that like, short appointment terms and then like, there's some committee that can like, run a contest or something to determine like, who gets to run this money or distribute this money every generation or something like that. I don't know. I'd have to call it something pretty crazy like that.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:57:17

But yeah, yeah, that that would be the biggest challenge I think. Yeah, I just started reading the foundation, the book about the Ford Foundation. I haven't got that far. It's so fascinating. But you know, that raises an interesting question. There is the problem of value drift in charities, but it's a very particular kind of value drift, right? So there's famously conquest second law, that any institution that is not constitutionally and explicitly a right wing becomes left wing over time. And this seems especially true of NGOs and charitable organizations. What's the explanation? Why is conquest second law seems true in this arena?

Nadia Asparouhova 0:57:52

I have to ask Curtis that. I mean, I don't I don't know that I have. I think we can observe that that is maybe what is happening. I don't think I have an amazing answer to that. I think. I mean, my best guess if I had to come to an answer is I think that the values of. Like democracy and peace and freedom and whatever, like there's a set of sort of like pacifying social values that are very hard to disagree with. And so there's always this sort of like natural drift towards that. I do find that like I think the most thoughtful people I know are often like there is a strong like intellectual conservative movement. But I think people that love nuance where, you know, where the there is no like there is no mindless playbook that you can use to just sort of like the answer is not always like direct democracy or peace or whatever. If that's not your like guiding star and you are actually interested in like a fair bit of nuance, like you're not going to really run institutions. And I say that as someone who is like I am much more on the nuance side. But like I like I think the trade off of that is like it just doesn't necessarily have mainstream appeal always because you don't have these really simplified messages. So, yeah, if you think about sort of like institutions are need to have like simplified messages that they pass on to people and those simplified messages work much better when they're things that make people feel good about themselves. And you're always going to have that kind of more or less word drift. Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:59:39

Yeah. Yeah. It raises a question of how you would set up. I mean, it's like the two monarchs problem of like, you know, like you need somebody who's like a good a good director, but then you also need him to be able to appoint somebody who's a good director. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting. Let's talk about like, I guess, what you and I do or no before that, actually. All right. I'm just gonna make a note from my editor right here. But it's the next question is, do you think this new funding for science and thinkers, is that going to lead to a resurgence of the gentleman's collar category? Or has the nature of science just become too different and science has just gotten much more specialized now that that's no longer possible?

Nadia Asparouhova 1:00:29

Yeah, I mean, I think within the realm of science specifically, the sort of gentleman scientist era, you know, the Charles Darwin type era, it feels a little bit bygone in the sense of, yeah, I don't know, it feels like there was a lot of low hanging fruit then that maybe like science is just so much bigger. It is funded in a completely different way that is sort of unrecognizable from where it was before. I think when people talk about problems in science, they like to romanticize the past, or that's probably true for any sort of institutional problem of just, you know, why can't we just have it the way that it was like 100 years ago or whatever? And, you know, there's usually good reasons why we don't, things don't run the way they did before. And like, I always try to think about, like, how do we actually take the conditions that we're in right now and like, come up with something new? That being said, like, even if we don't have sort of like a return to, you know, the literal gentleman scientist as default way of doing things in science, there's, you know, ton of room to go from the current model of how science is funded and the sort of like extremely constrained environments that people have to work in to like giving people a little bit more academic freedom, a little bit more creative freedom to experiment. So, but I think like, yeah, science doesn't really have any easy answers. I spent a bunch of time trying to understand it this summer. And yeah, it's I think because like, like government funding of science became a thing right around like the middle of the 20th century after sort of like World War II. And like the way that science ran before then where there was very little government funding and very little involvement to where now like the fact of the matter is that like a lot of it is government funded or most of it is government funded just means that it's like, yeah, completely different kind of ballgame.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:24

Yeah. But I guess then for public intellectuals, there's a change in, especially if you're making content that is tech adjacent or something, there's a change in funding from it's no longer, you know, Kevin Kelly's 10,000 true fans, but more like one tech billionaire who likes your work and will, you know, write you a check to investigate it for a year. What is the consequence of that kind of change? And you have much more concentrated sources of funding in terms of what areas one can focus on and one does focus on and like the ways in which they engage with their audience and publish their content. Yeah. What impact does that have?

Nadia Asparouhova 1:03:04

That I'm pretty excited about and like can only really speak within my relatively narrow sort of like tech and tech adjacent creator world, but I definitely have noticed as someone who's been sort of independently or weirdly funded in a lot of ways for a while now. Like it feels like that was extremely uncommon when I started and now I meet a lot of people that are like me. I don't know if that's just because I am meeting more people like me or if that's really a shift, but I thought like, yeah, you know, five years ago, even it was like hard to identify a lot of people with that kind of situation. And so, yeah, I think it's a really cool like people talk about like, you know, how do we bring back the Medici's? How do you bring back this like model of patronage? Like it's already happening, I think, in a lot of ways. It's just that people don't talk about it. People don't, you know, unless you're being funded on Patreon or you have sub-size subscriptions or there's something some very legible way to point out like how you're making money. Like, there's so many people that are just being quietly funded that just don't talk about it. I do actually think like the model of patronage is very alive and well right now. It's just not super obvious.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:12

Yeah, yeah. And how do you think about the value of like, I guess, what you and I, obviously we do different things, but in terms of like doing podcasts or writing essays and how do you think about the value of that? Like, should we just like be writing code and digging dishes and doing something else that is more legibly useful to society? Like, what is the, you know what I mean? Like, how do you think about what is the value of this?

Nadia Asparouhova 1:04:34

Yeah, you know, I'm like very, like, I only know how to do a handful of things in this world. And so like, I feel like I should be doing the thing that I cannot help myself, but I have to do all the time. Like, I don't really think, I don't have a very like, rosy relationship with writing, to be perfectly honest. I hate writing. Writing makes me crazy. Like, it's like, I don't find it to be enjoyable. It's always enjoyable once it's over, but like, that's a little miserable. But like, you know, you would think like, why do you do this thing that makes you miserable? But like, it's just like, it's the thing I know how to do. And I don't think there's anything glamorous about it. I don't think there's anything special. It might not be the best thing to do. Like, there's probably more impactful things I could be doing with my time. But like, it's the thing I like, have to do. And I think everyone should just be doing the thing that they like, absolutely have to do, whatever that is, that would make me happy in the world is if everyone was just like, yeah, leaning into their obsession. So that's my obsession. I do think like, when I think about my own impact, I don't know how you think about it. But like, I think about, I want to, I want my ideas to be heard by people that I think can do something about them. So in other words, like, I care much more about, like, quality than quantity. I don't, I'm not very active on Twitter. I don't really focus on like, needing to reach some kind of like, mass mainstream audience. When I published my book, like, I told myself, I really, like, the people that need to hear about how open source works are people that work at tech companies, software developers that use open source software. Like, it mattered less to me that there's like, this is not the kind of book that needs to be in like, an airport bookstore would print. And it's like essays and stuff. Like, I think it's much more important to me that people whose opinions I care about, read it. And hopefully, you know, and I make my essays public because I hope everyone reads them. But like, what I think about sort of how do I measure my impact? It's not like, how many page views that I get on an essay. It's more of like, who ended up talking about it? And are those people that I wanted to talk about it? Yeah. Yeah. And they're like, reading books, they're reading essays, and like, and then those like, books and essays influence how they think about stuff. And so it is very, like, indirect sort of influence or in Yeah, like, but like, you can't like, I just like, you know, you can't sort of have out of one mouth saying like, the only important thing in the world is like, starting startups and then at the same time, talk about like, the cool new book you read at a cocktail party, like both those things are important in different ways. Right?

Dwarkesh Patel 1:07:18

Yeah, no, I totally agree. And I don't want to repeat myself, because I talked about this on my burn episode. But one of the things we're talking about, you know, Carol's books, Robert Caro's books. And one, one interesting thing is, you know, this guy was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize before he wrote the power broker. So he was like a top tier investigative journalist. And can you imagine you crunching the numbers as a top tier investigative journalist at the peak of your career? And you're like, you know, what would be a good use of my time? I'm going to spend the next seven years in almost poverty, writing about this one guy who had a lot of influence in New York. And I'm going to talk to any person who had conceivably even been in the same room as him or had been indirectly affected by his policies in any way. I'm gonna do that obsessively for the next seven years. Yeah, there's no way the number crunching would get you there. But it's probably been one of the most influential books in terms of how urban governance is done. I mean, like presidents have praised and read the book and said it like changed how they think about politics. So you know, like, it is the kind of thing where you wouldn't have gone to that conclusion just from Yeah, yeah, thinking about it beforehand. And like, this is the most effective thing I could do. Yeah, totally. Yeah. But okay, you had this recent post about, you know, climate tribes. I was like, that was really interesting, especially the addendum. And by the way, I have noticed this, this tendency of writers to hide the most interesting thoughts, it footnotes and addendums. And I'm curious why that is what I think it might be because your most interesting thoughts are digressions that you feel like you have to take out the main text. But anyways, what I thought was interesting. You're comparing climate dumerism to other kinds of dumerisms that are yet to become fully mature. And I am wondering what is your predictions about the different tribes that will emerge when thinking about AI, as both capabilities grow and as public awareness of those capabilities grows?

Nadia Asparouhova 1:09:19

Oh, gosh, I think it's definitely just too early to say on and I know that sounds like a cut out, but I don't want to say things that I don't feel confident about. I think it's too early to say even within like AI, though, like, if you think about, say, I had these sort of like, different tribes that are influencing the climate discourse today. There's some parallel version of that for AI, for AI more broadly, I think, where, because right now, I feel like AI safety gets really constrained to sort of like, I don't know, like Miri or something like very, very specific. I imagine like as AI becomes more widespread and more people have experiences with it and have opinions on it, then that might sort of like, lead to other, you know, philosophies kind of forming around that. And then we'll kind of see this one very narrow view of like, I think the sort of like Miri mindset is equivalent to like the Dumer tribe that identified in climate where it's like, that is one specific tribe, but there are a lot of other people that are really interested in climate that like, don't feel Dumer-y at all, even though that's sort of like the most flashy, like media friendly kind of version of it. So yeah, I mean, other than saying, like, as more people interact with AI, I imagine there will be more philosophies emerging there. I think it's still too early to say what that will be. AI is still kind of like a big mystery box to me right now. So it's there, but I don't really know what's inside.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:10:49

Having studied these different sorts of Dumerisms, whether they're right or not, by the way, it's like a separate question, but just in terms of the sociology of them, has it always been true that smart, talented people tend to get a lot of meaning by working on things that are seen as existential catastrophes? Or is that a property of tech adjacent areas or modern tech adjacent areas? Like how unique is this sort of sociological phenomenon?

Nadia Asparouhova 1:11:21

Yeah, I think it is pretty new. And that's why it's kind of gnawing at my brain a little bit. Like, I think it's really new, like, last five years it's new. Yeah, well, and so I tried to sort of track this a little bit. And I'm not super high confidence, but like, there's this one, you know, sort of theory around, okay, we used to have sort of like shared, broader narratives that were actually Dumer-esque. So we had world wars, we had the Cold War, whatever. And so like, you know, super smart, talented people that need to be pointed in a direction somewhere, they're going to go work on those kinds of problems. And like, there's a shared understanding that like, we really are like, you know, saving our country or protecting our country or whatever, by working on these different things. And so yeah, I don't know, like stem talent in the Cold War or whatever. And then you see, okay, after the Cold War, now we're not so like, you know, we don't have these like deep existential threats anymore. So we have to find them somewhere else. And that's where like, environmentalism kind of became much more like alarmist, whereas in the past, it was kind of like this niche social cause, it became much more like we need to save the planet. And coming out of sort of like World War Two and, yeah, just sort of like manufacturing chemicals, like, whatever, suddenly, like, people are just grappling with the after effects of that. But like, that doesn't explain sort of like, in the last five years or so where it's like, it's not like a weird activist-y thing to work in climate, it can even be like a very boring thing for people to work in climate. But it's like all connected to this idea of like, this is the most important thing I need to be working on. And so I think like, maybe in the absence of having some like bigger narrative that is like, all consuming for everyone, you kind of have to make your own meaning somewhere. And, but it is funny to me that like, we don't just say, like, again, I mean, you go back to, you know, we talked about like writing, it's like, I have no defense as to like, why I write all day. Like, it's just like what I have to do. Like, I cannot defend it as like, the most like, you know, needle moving thing in the world or whatever. I don't really relate to this sort of need to have like, a like, doomer narrative. There is no doomer narrative attached to why I write, I just write because like, I think it's important. And I think I have like ideas that are like, questions I want to answer. And to me, that is how I define impact, though. Like to me, like that matches my model of like, what I think is most impactful thing in the world. If I didn't have that model, then yeah, maybe I would try to say, okay, like, what is the most impactful thing to be doing in the world that is like, sort of external to my own personal curiosity or whatever. And I think that's where those sort of like, doomer narratives come from. I am I did bury in another footnote at the end of this question about like, okay, like, if we think maybe like, early 2010s or something, I feel like there was, there's always like, there's this other grouping of industries that's not doomer-esque, but also attracts smart, talented people. So you have like advertising and trading and, and playing video games. I don't really know if that's like an industry, but like, there's that mindset of like, those people end up like, like, that some shared set of skills across all those different industries or practices that attracts like smart, talented people. Like, why do so many smart, talented people just go into like, trading? And I wonder if there's some other sort of similar gravity well effect there that is also attracting smart, talented people into like climate, maybe from like a different crowd or whatever. But so I wonder maybe if like, before the last five years or whatever, like, maybe there was maybe that was where everyone was dumping into? I don't really know.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:14:49

Yeah. Do you have some general theory of what these gravity wells for talent are? Like, what connects trading to climate?

Nadia Asparouhova 1:14:59

I don't know. And maybe they're different crowds. Like I, yeah, and that's why I just like stuck it in a footnote because I was lazy. And I was like, I don't know what to do. I need to put it somewhere. But it just seems like it like, yeah, I don't. There's just something about these, like all these sorts of industries where it's like, if they were starting with a blank slate, they could be doing like anything. And for some reason, they just all end up in these sort of like, non obvious places. Like, why is like, why are there so many people that work that end up in trading? Like, it's just like, so specific when you really think about it. And then like, same with like climate where, I mean, depending on how literally you take sort of like climate, do more predictions or whatever. But if you don't think the world is going to end in 30 years, like then why is everyone so focused on this one specific thing when they could be working on like lots of different things? And so in both cases, it feels like they kind of like flop in there somehow. I did put in that addendum and just sort of thinking about like, what is the shape of a doomer industry? Like, I think one of the under discussed aspects of it is that it is like adjacent to some kind of like commercial opportunity. So like, the reason why everyone doesn't just go off and work on like global poverty is because there's like, no money to be made and working on that. But like, if you think about like, misinformation and the threat of like deep fakes or something upending democracy, or you think about AI safety or climate or whatever, like they are adjacent to commercial industries where you can actually like, make a real salary and feel like you're like, you know, you're not getting paid. You can make a real salary and feel like, relevant to the business world or whatever, or to like all your peers, while still also working on the social cause area. So yeah, I don't know if that that helps at least somewhat. And that's probably the simplest, you know, like, sort of like non overthinking it answer for like, why it is like advertising and trading attracts people is just because you can make a lot of money in it. And that's that simple.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:16:47

I have one theory about trading and video games that connects them. Bernhobart, funny enough, another footnote, Bernhobart, it was actually like a blog post about SaaS products or something. And one of the footnotes was, you know, one of the positive things about finance might be that it gives a sort of venting for talented people who just like to play zero sum or negative sum games. And that otherwise, it would have been used up in a war. But this is a there's no wars, they would be doing something else destructive in our world. And if we can just put them in front of a trading screen and make them, you know, get the get the microsecond efficiency of some like equity market better, it's like better than anything else that could be doing with that mentality.

Nadia Asparouhova 1:17:31

I kind of like that. There's some parallel with this for like, content creators too. And I will cringingly put myself in that category. But it's just like, where it's also this grouping of people where it's like, I don't really know like what like, they are kind of just like bodies in a room again, myself included. That's what I'd be doing if not this at least there's a way to like kind of make money in this. But it's like a much more amorphous and yeah, non non coherent industry that like,

Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:00

trading, but different, different set of people. Yeah. One interesting area that is not included one, I guess, philosophy that is not in any of these influential IGM machines in Silicon Valley is religion. I mean, you know, they've been like some of the most important ideas in history. And yet somehow they're so far, they've had like very little influence in terms of what kinds of things the new elite is funding and paying attention to. Do you think that will change? Or have we just had a complete change in terms of what kinds of ideas get promoted?

Nadia Asparouhova 1:18:35

Yeah, TBD. I think like, the new right is bringing at least some of those underlying like Christian religious values back. Maybe they're not like literally funding churches or something. But like, how do we sort of like, yeah, bring Christian values back to public society? I think there's a lot there is a lot going on there, even if it's not explicitly called religion. And then so yeah, I mean, that's one question of like, among elites that are, you know, explicitly religious, how are they sort of like encoding those, those values into public institutions? I think that is sort of happening on that front. I also just think like, if we take a broader view of like, how does religion factor into our day to day life? I feel like it's a weirdly, like, people ask this question more than they need to ask it or something like, where like, you know, everyone just sort of says, oh, like, you know, people aren't religious anymore. They're not going to church. They need to find meaning. Like, how do we like create new religions today? And I just I feel like people are religious. They're just religious about different things. And that was sort of one of my conclusions with climate is like, in the early 2000s, you had Michael Crichton criticizing environmentalism as a religion and saying, saying that, you know, it's distracting people from the science and, and maybe we shouldn't treat environmentalism as religion, we should really get back to the science. Whereas I think like, you know, 20 years later, it's like, I think it just is a religion for a lot of people. And why not just lean into that and say, like, I don't like that is how people are finding meaning. That is how people are finding community. So I don't know, like, there it is, there's, there's a religion, like, we may not literally have like actively practicing Christians in America or something. And, you know, there's the question of what else is religion need to fulfill that it's not through something like climate. But I also think that religious practice is very, like, active and around us everywhere. And like, I don't think I don't think that's like sad or bad. I think that's just like, how it's evolved.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:20:41

Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Okay, final question. You have a great blog post about shamelessness as a strategy. What are you most shameless about in public? What is your most shameful strategy? Yeah.

Nadia Asparouhova 1:20:55

Oh, I don't know that I, oh, man, I wish I had a really good juicy answer. I'm, we have to ask someone else that knows me what am I most shameless about in public?

Dwarkesh Patel 1:21:09

I think it's on property of being shameless. It's like, you don't even realize it's shameful. You're so shameless. It's, you know, it's like, beyond you even keep track of it that way.

Nadia Asparouhova 1:21:17

Just the fact. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure I have something. I think I'm a very shameful person. I don't know that I have. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not the best at being shameless. Yeah, you're gonna have to ask your friend to tell them to tell you what I'm most shameless about.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:21:41

It sounds good. Sounds good. Okay, Nadia, thank you so much for being on the podcast. So tell people where they can find your, your blog, your Twitter, anywhere else that they should look for you.

Nadia Asparouhova 1:21:54

My blog is at Nadia, N-A-D-I-A dot xyz. And I'm on Twitter at N-I-F-I-A, N-A-Y-A-F-I-A.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:22:04

Awesome. Okay. Awesome, Nadia. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on. Yeah. Thanks, Chen.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

View Details

Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Anders Sandberg on the Value of the Future
Release date: 2022-12-29

Anders Sandberg joins the podcast to discuss various philosophical questions about the value of the future. Learn more about Anders' work: https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction00:54 Humanity as an immature teenager 04:24 How should we respond to our values changing over time?18:53 How quickly should we change our values? 24:58 Are there limits to what future morality could become? 29:45 Could the universe contain infinite value? 36:00 How do we balance weird philosophy with common sense? 41:36 Lightning round: mind uploading, aliens, interstellar travel, cryonics

View Details

Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% )
Episode: Bethany McLean - Enron, FTX, 2008, Musk, Frauds, & Visionaries
Release date: 2022-12-21

This was one of my favorite episodes ever.

Bethany McLean broke the Enron story & has written some of the best finance books out there.

We discuss:

• The astounding similarities between Enron & FTX,

• How visionaries are just frauds who succeed,

• What caused 2008, and whether we are headed for a new crisis,

• Why there’s too many venture capitalists and not enough short sellers,

• And why history keeps repeating itself.

McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (see her articles here) and the author of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World, Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants.

Follow McLean on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share. Helps out a ton.

Timestamps

(0:04:37) - Is Fraud Over?

(0:11:22) - Shortage of Shortsellers

(0:19:03) - Elon Musk - Fraud or Visionary?

(0:23:00) - Intelligence, Fake Deals, & Culture

(0:33:40) - Rewarding Leaders for Long Term Thinking

(0:37:00) - FTX Mafia?

(0:40:17) - Is Finance Too Big?

(0:44:09) - 2008 Collapse, Fannie & Freddie

(0:49:25) - The Big Picture

(1:00:12) - Frackers Vindicated?

(1:03:40) - Rating Agencies

(1:07:05) - Lawyers Getting Rich Off Fraud

(1:15:09) - Are Some People Fundamentally Deceptive?

(1:19:25) - Advice for Big Picture Thinkers

Transcript

This transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.

Dwarkesh Patel: the rapid implosion of a company worth tens of billions of dollars. Insider dealing and romantic entanglements between sister companies, a politically generous c e o, who is well connected in Washington, the use of a company's own stock as its collateral, the attempt, the short-lived attempt to get bought out by a previous competitor, and the fraudulent abuse of mark to market account.[00:01:00]

We are not talking about ftx, we are talking about Enron, which my guest today, Bethany McClean, uh, first broke the story of and has written an amazing and detailed book about, uh, called The Smartest Guys in the Room. And she has also written, uh, a book about the housing crisis. All the devils are here, a book about Fannie and Freddy Shaky Ground, and a book about fracking Saudi America, all of which we'll get into.

She's, in my opinion, the best finance nonfiction writer out there, and I'm really, really excited to have this conversation now. So, Bethany, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Bethany McLean: Thank you so much for the, for the probably Undeserved Conference, for having me on the show.

Dwarkesh Patel: My first question, what are the odds that Sbf read the smartest guys in the room and just followed it as a playbook, given the similarities there?

Bethany McLean: You, you know, I, I love that idea. I have to, I have to admit, I guess I love that idea. I don't know. That would make me responsible for what, for what happened, . So maybe I don't love that idea. L let me take that back . [00:02:00] Anyway, but I, I, I actually think that, that, that even if he had read the book, it would never have occurred to him that, that there was a similarity because self-delusion is such a, Strong component of all of these stories of business gone wrong.

It's very rare that you have one of the characters at the heart of this who actually understands what they're doing and understands that they're moving over into the dark side and thinks about the potential repercussions of this and chooses this path. Anyway, that's usually not the way these stories go.

So it's entirely possible that Sbf studied Enron, knew all about it, and never envisioned that there were any similarities between that and what he was doing.

Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, that's a fascinating, um, which I guess raises the question of what are we doing when we're documenting and trying to learn from books like yours?

If somebody who is a, about to commit the same exact kind of thing can read that book and not realize that he's doing the same exact thing, is there something that just [00:03:00] prevents us from learning the lessons of history that we, we can never just, uh, get the analogy right, and we're just guided by our own delusions.

Bethany McLean: Wasn't there a great quote that history rhymes, but it doesn't repeat. I'm Yeah. Relying on who it is who said that, but I think that's, that's absolutely true. Oh, I think it's important for all of us, those of us who are not gonna find ourselves at the center of, uh, giant fraud or, so, I hope, I think my time for that has passed.

Maybe not you, but, um, I think it's important for all of us to understand what went wrong. And I, I do think these, I do think just there, there's a great value and greater understanding of the world without necessarily a practical payoff for it. So I think when something goes wrong on a massive societal level, it's really important to try to, to try to explain it.

Human beings have needed narrative since the dawn of time, and we need narrative all, all, all the more now we need, we need to make sense of the world. So I like to believe. Process of making, trying to make sense of the world. , um, [00:04:00] has a value in, in and of itself. Maybe there is small, some small deterrence aspect to it in that I often think that if people understand more the process by which things go go wrong, that it isn't deliberate, that it's not bad people setting out to do bad things.

It's human beings, um, at first convincing themselves even that they're doing the right thing and then ending up in a situation that they, they never meant to be in. And maybe on the margin that does, maybe on the margin that does, that does help because maybe it has deterred some people who, who would've started down that path, but for the fact that they now see that that's the, that's the usual path.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. That actually raises the next question I wanted to ask you. Bern Hobart, uh, he's a finance writer as well. He wrote a blog post, um, about, uh, I mean this was before FTX obviously, and he was talking about Enron and he said in the end, it actually looks like we fixed the precise problem. Enron represented.

Nobody I know solely looks at gap [00:05:00] financials. Everybody ultimately models based on free cash flow, we're much more averse to companies that set up a deliberate conflict of interest between management and shareholders. And I guess there's a way in which you can read that and say, oh, it doesn't FTX prove I'm wrong.

But, you know, there's another way you can look at it is that FTX deliberately set up outside the us. So there's a story to be told that actually we learned the lessons of Enron and, you know, uh, so remains obviously worked. Uh, that's why, you know, they were in The Bahamas and we haven't seen the scale fraud of that scale in, you know, the continental United States.

Um, do, do you think that the FTX saga and I guess the absence of other frauds of that scale in America shows that. The regulations and this changed business and investment practices in the aftermath of Enron have actually.

Bethany McLean: Well, I think they've probably worked in narrowly, written in, in the way in which the writer you quoted articulated, I think it would be very hard for the cfo, F O of a publicly traded company to set up other private [00:06:00] equity firms that he ran, that did all their business with his company.

Because everybody would say That's Enron and it would be completely. On the nose. And so, and Sarbanes Oxley in the sense of, in the sense of helping to reign in corporate fraud of the sort that was practiced by Enron, which was this abuse of very specific accounting rules. Um, I think I, I, I think that worked.

But you know, you say there hasn't been fraud on a scale like Enron up until perhaps f ftx, but you're forgetting the global financial crisis. Yeah. And then the end, the line between what happened at Enron. and, and what happened in the global financial crisis. It's not a matter of black and white. It's not a matter of, one thing was clear cut fraud and one thing great.

We love these practices. Isn't this fantastic? This is the way we want business to operate. They're both somewhere in the murky middle. You know, a lot of what happened at Enron wasn't actually outright fraud. I've coined this phrase, legal fraud to describe, um, to describe what it is that, that, that, that happened at Enron.

And a lot of what [00:07:00] happened in the global financial crisis was legal, hence the lack of prosecutions. But it's also not behavior that that leads to a healthy market or mm-hmm. , for that matter, a a a a healthy society. And so there's a reason that you had Sarbanes Oxley and what was it, eight short, short years later you had Dodd-Frank and so Riri broadly.

I'm not sure Sarbanes actually did that much good. And what I mean by that is when President George Bush signed it into law in the Rose Garden, he gave this speech about how investors were now protected and everything was great and your, your ordinary investors could take comfort that the laws were meant to protect them from wrongdoing.

And you compare that to the speech that President Barack Obama gave eight years later when he signed Don Frank into law in the Rose Garden. And it's remarkably similar that now ordinary investors can count on the rules and regulations keeping themself from people who are prey on their financial wellbeing.

[00:08:00] And I don't think it was, it's, it's true in either case because our markets, particularly modern markets move and evolve so quickly that the thing that's coming out of left field to get you is never gonna be the thing you are protecting against. Mm. .

Dwarkesh Patel: , but given the fact that Enron, as you say, was committing legal fraud, is it possible that the government, um, when they prosecuted skilling and Fastow and lay, they in fact, We're not, uh, they, they prosecuted them to a greater extent than the law as written at the time would have warranted.

In other words, were, uh, was there something legally invalid in the, in this, in the quantity of sentence that they got? Is it possible?

Bethany McLean: So that's a really, it, it's, it's a, I I get what you're asking. I think it's a really tricky question because I think in absolute terms, um, Enron needed to be prosecuted and needed to be prosecuted aggressively.

And while I say it was legal fraud, that is for the most part, there was actually real fraud around, around, uh, but it's on the margin. It doesn't [00:09:00] entire, it doesn't explain the entirety of Enron's collapse. Much of what they did was using and abusing the accounting rules in order to create an appearance of economic reality.

Nothing to do with actual, with actual reality. But then there was actual fraud in the sense that Andy Fasta was stealing money from these partnerships to benefit himself. And they were, if you believe, the core tenant of the prosecution, which was their, this agreement called Global Galactic that was signed by, that was between Andy fau and Jeff Skilling, where Jeff agreed that Andy's partnerships would never lose money.

Then that invalidated all of the, all of the accounting, and that's the chief reason that that. That skilling was, was, was convicted, um, was that the jury believed the existence of this, of this, of this agreement that in, um, one set of insider stock sales, which, which we can talk about, which was also a really key moment relative to the, so in absolute terms, I don't know, it's, it's hard for me to, to say there was [00:10:00] such, Enron was such a, to a degree that is still surprising to me, such a, a watershed moment in our, in our country, far beyond business itself.

it, it, it caused so much insecurity that about our retirements, our retirement assets safe. Can you trust the company where you work? That I think the government did, did have to prosecute aggressively, but relative to the financial crisis where a lot of people made off with a lot of money and never had to give any of it back, does it seem fair that, that, that Jeff Skilling went to jail for over a decade and no one involved in a major way in the financial crisis paid any price whatsoever?

People didn't even really have to give up that much of the money they made then. Then it seems a little bit unfair. Yes, so I think it's, it's an absolute versus a relative

Dwarkesh Patel: question. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, who do you think made more money? Um, the investment banks, uh, like, uh, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, um, from doing, [00:11:00] providing their services to Enron as the stock was going up, or Jim Chanos from shorting the stock?

In absolute terms, who made more money?

Bethany McLean: Oh, I think the investment banks for sure. I mean, they made, they made so much money in investment banking fees from, from, from Enron. But, you know, it's a good question. . , it's a good question actually, because I think Jim made a lot of money too, so,

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, you've spoken about, I guess the usefulness and the shortage of short sellers des a sort of, uh, corrective on irrational exuberance.

And I'm curious why you think that shortage exists in the first place. Like, if you believe in the efficient market hypothesis, you should think that, you know, if some company has terrible financials and implausible numbers, then people would be lining up to short it. And then you would never have a phenomenon like Enron.

And so it's, it's, you know, it's so odd that you can. , you know, reporters who are basically ahead of the market in terms of predicting what's gonna happen. Uh, well, uh, how do you square that with like the efficient [00:12:00] market hypothesis? Well, do you

Bethany McLean: believe in the efficient market hypothesis, ?

Dwarkesh Patel: I, I, I'd like to, but I'm like trying to , trying to wrap my head around Enron.

Bethany McLean: I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure how you. Can, unless you, unless you adopt Warren Buffett's point of view, and I'm gonna mangle the quote because, uh, but, but it's that the market in the short term is a voting machine in the long term. It's a weighing machine, right? Mm-hmm. , or is it the other way around? . Anyway, but the idea is that the market may be very efficient for a long, very inefficient, for a long period of time.

But, but it does actually, rationality does actually work in, in, in the end. And I think I might believe that, but isn't it John Maynard Cas who said the market can remain irrational for a lot longer than you can remain solvent. And so I think that's true too. I think believing that the market is efficient and rational in the short term is just obviously wrong

Um, but back to your question about short sellers, which is, which is interesting, you know, I think part of it is that there is still this, um, there certainly was a couple of [00:13:00] decades ago, and I think it still exists, this idea that. Owning stocks is Mom, American, and apple pie in shorting stocks somehow is bad and evil and rooting, rooting against America.

And I remember going back to the Enron days, someone, people criticizing me, even other people in the press saying, but you took a tip from a short seller. They're biased. And I. , I would say. But, but, but wait, the analysts who have buy ratings on stocks and the portfolio managers who own those stocks, they're biased too.

They want the stocks to go up. Everybody's biased. So the trick as a journalist is getting information from all sides and figuring out who you think is right and what makes sense. But it's not avoiding anybody with any bias. But it was really interesting that people saw the bias on the part of short sellers and did not see it on the part of, of, of Longs.

And I think there is that preconception that exists broadly, that somehow you are doing something wrong and you're somehow rooting for a company's failure. And that this is, I don't know, anti-American if you, if, if you [00:14:00] short a stock. And so I think that's part of why there's, there's, there's a shortage of shortage of, of, of short sellers.

Um, I think also, I mean, we've had. Incredible, unprecedented bull market for the last four decades as a result of falling interest rates, and especially in the decade before the pandemic hit, it was very, very difficult to make money shorting anything because everything went to the moon. Didn't matter if its numbers were good, if it was eventually unmasked to be somewhat fraudulent, , it stocks just went to the moon anyway.

The riskier the better. And so it is only diehard short sellers that have managed to stick it out . Yeah, and I think, I think lastly, Jim Chano said this to me once, and I, I think it's true that he could find, dozens of people who were skilled enough to come, smart enough to come work for him.

There's no shortage of that. People who are technically skilled and really smart, but being able to be contrarian for a long period of time, especially when the market is going against you, is a different sort [00:15:00] of person. It that it requires a completely different mindset to have everybody in the world saying, you're wrong to be losing money because the stock is continuing to go up and to be able to hold fast to your conviction.

And I think that's another, uh, part of the explanation for why there are fewer short sellers.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, and that raised an interesting question about. Uh, venture capital, for example, where, or private markets in general? Um, at least in the public markets, there's shorting maybe in shortage, but it, it is a possible mechanism, whereas, uh, I'm a programmer.

So, you know, if, if like a one guy thinks the company's worth a hundred million dollars and everybody else thinks it's not, you know, the company will still be, uh, the price will still be said by the, you know, the person who's a believer. Um, does that increase the risk of some sort of bubble in venture capital and in technology?

Um, and I guess in private markets generally, if they're, they're not public, is that something you worry about that they're, they will be incredible bubbles built up if there's a lot of money that's floating around in these

Bethany McLean: circles. . Well, I think we're seeing that now, [00:16:00] right? And I don't think it's a coincidence that FTX and Theranos were not publicly traded companies, right?

Mm-hmm. . Um, there's a certain sort of, uh, black box quality to these companies because people aren't charting them and aren't, aren't, and aren't, you know, whispering to journalists about that. That there's something wrong here and there aren't publicly available financials for people to dig through and look, look, and look at the numbers.

So now I don't think that's a coincidence. And I do think this gigantic move into private assets has been, um, probably not great for the, for the, for the, for the. for the, for the safety of the system. And you'd say, well, it's just institutional investors who can afford to lose money who are losing money.

But it's really not because institutional investors are just pension fund money. Mm-hmm. and in some cases now mutual fund money. So that distinction that the people who are investing in this stuff can afford to lose it is not really true. Um, so I don't, I don't like that rationalization. I think we're gonna see how that plays out.

There was [00:17:00] just a really good piece in the Economist about private equity marks on their portfolio companies and how they are still looked to be much higher than what you would think they should be given the carnage in the market. And so all of what, what actually things are really worth in private markets, both for venture capital firms and for private equity firms, Is absent another, another bubble starting, starting in the markets.

I think we're gonna see how that plays out over, over the next year. And it might be a wake up call for, for a lot of people. Um, you know, all that, all that said, it's an interesting thing because investors have been very complicit in this, right? In the sense that a lot of investors are absolutely delighted to have prep, to have their, their private, um, their private investments marked at a high level.

They don't have to go to the committee overseeing the investments and say, look, I lost 20% of your money the way they might, um, if, if the numbers were public. And so that the ability of these of private investors to smooth as they call it, the, the, the returns is, is it's [00:18:00] been, it's been part of the appeal.

It hasn't been a negative, it's been a positive. And so I would say that investors who wanted this moving are. Art might be getting what they deserve except for the pointing made earlier that it isn't, it isn't their money. It's, it's the money of, of teachers and firefighters and individual investors a around the country, and that's, that's problematic.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Being in the world of technology and being around people in it has. made me, somewhat shocked when I read about these numbers from the past. For example, when I'm reading your books and they're detailing things that happened in the nineties or the two thousands, and then you realize that the salary that Hank Paulson made a c e o of Goldman, or that skilling made as, you know, um, c e o of Enron, you know, I, it's like I have friends who are my age, like 22 year olds who are raising seed rounds, , that are as big as like these people's salaries.

And so it just feels like the, these books were, you have $50 billion frauds or, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of collapse and the individuals there, um, it just feels like they, it's missing a few zeros, uh, [00:19:00] because of the delusion of the private markets. But, um, but speaking of short sellers and speaking of private equity, um, I think it'd be interesting to talk about sbf.

So, you know, your 2018 Vanity Fair article I thought was really interesting about, you know, sbf factory in Buffalo H How, how do you think back on Tesla and sbf now, given the fact that. The stock did continue to rise afterwards, and the factory, I believe, was completed and it's, I hired the 1500 or so people that had promised New York State, uh, is sbf just a fraud?

Who can pull it off? And so he's a visionary. How, how do you think about sbf in the aftermath?

Bethany McLean: So I don't think that's right about Buffalo and I have to look, but I don't think they ended up, I mean, the Solar City business that Tesla has pretty much collapsed. I don't think people haven't gotten their roofs.

There was just a piece about how they're canceling some of their roof installations. So sbf has repeatedly made grand visions about that business that haven't played out. And I will check this for you post the podcast, but I don't think [00:20:00] if there is employment at that factory in, in Buffalo, it's not because they're churn out solar, solar, solar products that are, that are, that are doing.

What was originally promised. So I guess I, I think about that story in a, in a couple of ways. It definitely, um, it was not meant to be a piece about Tesla. It was meant to be a piece that shown a little bit of light on how sbf operates and his willingness to flout the rules and his reliance on government subsidies, despite the fact that he, um, presents himself as this libertarian free, free, free market free marketeer, and his willingness to lie to, to, to, on some level enrich himself, which also runs counter to the Elon sbf narrative that he doesn't care about making money for, for himself.

Because the main reason for Teslas to by Solar City was that Solar City had the main reason, was it Tes, that was, that Solar City had, that, that sbf and his, and his and his relatives had extended the these loans to Solar City that were gonna go. [00:21:00] There were gonna be lo all the money was gonna be lost at Solar City when bankrupt.

And by having Tesla buy it, sbf was able to bail himself out, um, as, as as well. And I also think a good reason for the, for the, for, and it brings us to the present time, but a reason for the acquisition was that sbf knows that this image of himself as the invincible and vulnerable who can always raise money and whose companies always work out in the end, was really important.

And if Solar City had gone bankrupt, it would've cast a big question mark over over sbf, over over the sbf narrative. And so I think he literally couldn't afford to let Solar City go bankrupt. Um, all of that said, I have, I have been, and was I, I was quite skeptical of Tesla and I thought about it in, in, in, in.

And I always believed that the product was great. I just, mm-hmm. wasn't sure about the company's money making potential. And I think that, that, it's something I started thinking about, um, background, the Solar City time, maybe earlier, but this line, something I've talked about [00:22:00] before. But this line between a visionary and a fraudster.

You know, you think that they're on two opposite ends of the spectrum, but in reality they're where the ends of the circle meet. Characteristics of one. One has that many of the characteristics of the other. And sometimes I think the only thing that really separates the two is that the fraudster is able to keep getting mo raising money in order to get through the really difficult time where he or she isn't telling the truth.

And then they, that person goes down in history as a visionary. Um, but because no one ever looks back to the moment in time when they were lying, the fraudster gets caught in the middle. Um, so Enron's Lo lost access to to the capital markets lost AC access to funding as the market collapsed after the.com boom.

And people began to wonder whether skilling was telling the truth about Enron's broadband business. And then there were all the disclosures about Andy fasa partnerships if Enron had been able to continue raising money, Business of Enron's called Enron Broadband might well have been Netflix. It was Netflix ahead of its time.

So Enron just got caught in the middle and all [00:23:00] the fraud, all the fraud got exposed . Um, but that's not because Jeff Skilling wasn't a visionary who had really grand plans for, for, for, for the future. So I think sbf falls somewhere in that spectrum of, of, of fraudster and visionary. And what's gonna be really interesting why I said that this, we bring it to the present time about what happens to the mu narrative.

If something fails is what happens. Yeah. Is as the world watch watches Twitter implode, um, what does that mean then for the Elon sbf narrative overall?

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, going back to the Smartest Guys is the Room, the title obviously suggests something about. The, I guess in general, the ability and the likelihood of very smart people committing fraud or things of that sort.

Um, but you know, Begar Jones has this book called Hi Mind, where he talks about how the smarter people are more likely to cooperate in prisoners dilemma type situations. They have longer time preference. And one of the things you've written about is the problem in corporate America is people having shorter, [00:24:00] um, uh, you know, doing two too big time discounting.

So, uh, given that trend we see in general of greater Cooperativeness, um, and other kinds of traits of more intelligent people, do you think the reason we often find people like S B F and skilling running big frauds just by being very intelligent, is it just that on, on average smarter people, maybe less likely to commit fraud, but when they do commit fraud, they do it at such garat scales and they're able to do it at such gar scales that it just brings down entire empires?

How, how, how do you think about the relationship between intelligence and fraud? .

Bethany McLean: That's interesting. Um, I'm not sure I know a coherent answer to that. Um, smartest guys in the room as a title was a little bit tongue in cheek. It wasn't meant to say, these guys actually are the smartest guys in the room. It was, it, it was a little bit, it was a little bit ironic, but that doesn't take away from the really good question that you asked, which is what, what, what is that relationship?

I, I mean, I think if you look at the history of corporate fraud, you are not going to find unintelligent people having [00:25:00] been the masterminds behind this. You're gonna find really, really, really smart, even brilliant people having, having, having been, been behind it, maybe some at part of that is this linkage between the visionary and the fraud star that so many of these, of these corporate frauds are people who have qualities of the visionary and to.

The qualities of, of a visionary, you have to have a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty high intelligence. Um, and I do think so many of these stories are, are about then self delusion. So I don't think smart people are any less likely to suffer from self delusion than dumb people. And they're probably more likely to, because you can rationalize, you know, the smart person's ability to rationalize just about anything they wanna rational rationalize is pretty profound.

Whereas perhaps someone who doesn't have quite the same, the same brain power isn't gonna be able to create a narrative under which their actions are blameless and they're doing the right thing. So I think sometimes, so maybe there is some sort of relationship [00:26:00] there that somebody more qualified than I am would have to study between smart people's ability to, to, to rationalize just about anything as a way of, as part of the path to self delusion and part of the path by which these things happen.

Yeah, that's completely, that's completely , that's Bethany theory. There's absolutely nothing to back that . I'm just

Dwarkesh Patel: well clear. Let's do some more speculation. So, um, one of the things, uh, John Ray talked about in his testimony, um, was it two days ago where he said that, you know, FTX had done $5 billion of investments and deals in the last year, and most of those investments were worth a fraction of the value that FTX paid for them.

And we see this also in, obviously in Enron, right? With, uh, broadband and with, um, ul, or is that how pronounce it, but basically their international department. Yeah. Um, what is this, uh, this obsession with deal making for its own sake? Is that to appease investors and make them think a lot's going on, is that because of [00:27:00] the hubris of the founder, of just wanting to set up a big empire as fast as possible, even if you're getting a bad sticker price?

What, why do we see this pattern of just, you know, excessive deal making for its own sake?

Bethany McLean: That's an interesting question too. I'm not sure that that's, um, limited to companies that go splat dramatically. There's a lot of, a lot of deal making in, in corporate America has that same frenzied quality. Um, I haven't seen an updated study on, on this in a, in a long time, but, you know, I began my career working as an analyst in an m and a department at at at Goldman Sachs.

And. Definitely deals are done for the sake of doing deals. And I once joked that synergies are kind of like UFOs. A lot of people claim to have seen them, but there's no proof that they actually exist. , and again, I haven't seen an updated study on, on, on this, but there was one years back that showed that most m and a transactions don't result in increased value for shareholders.

And most synergies, most promised synergies never materialize. [00:28:00] Just getting bigger for the sake of getting bigger and doing deals for the short term value of showing Wall Street a projection. That earnings are gonna be so much higher even after the cost of the debt that you've taken on. And that they're these great synergies that are gonna come about from, from combining businesses.

So I don't know that either the frenzy deal doing or deal doing deals gone wrong is, um, solely limited to people who are committing fraud. , I think it's kinda across the spectrum. , .

Dwarkesh Patel: Um, um, well one, one thing I find interesting about your books is how you detail that. And correct me if this is the wrong way to read them, but that, uh, incentives are not the only thing that matter.

You know, there there's this perception that, you know, we've set up bad incentives for these actors and that's why they did bad things. But also, um, the power of one individual to shape a co co company's culture and the power of that culture to enable bad behavior, whether scaling at Enron or with Clarkson Right at Moody's.

Yeah. Um, is that a good, good way of reading your books or how, how do you think [00:29:00] about the relative importance of culture and incentive?

Bethany McLean: I think that's really fair. But incentives are part of culture, right? If, if you've set up a culture where, where how you're valued is what you get paid, I think it's a little, it's a little difficult to separate those two things out because, because the, the incentives do help make the culture, but for sure culture is incredibly, um, incredibly compelling.

I've often thought and said that if I had, when I was leaving my short lived career in investment banking, if I had, if I had gotten in some of the head hunters I was talking to, if one of them had said, there's this great, really energetic, interesting energy company down in Houston, , why don't interview there?

If I had gone there, would I have been a whistleblower or would I have been a believer? And I'd like to believe I would've been a whistleblower, but I think it's equally likely that I would've been a believer. Culture is so strong. It creates this. What's maybe a miasma that you can't see outside?

I remember a guy I talked to who's a trader at Enron, really smart guy, and he [00:30:00] was like, after the, after the bankruptcy, he said, of course, if we're all getting paid based on creating reported earnings and there's all this cash going out the door in order to do these deals that are creating reported earnings, and that's the culture of the entire firm, of course it's not gonna work economically.

He said, I never thought about it. . It just didn't, it didn't, it didn't occur to me. And I think the more compelling the CEO o the more likely you are to have that kind of mass delusion. I mean, there's a reason cult exist, right? . We, we are as human beings, remarkably susceptible to.

Visionary leaders. It's just, it's the way the human brain is wired. We, we wanna believe, and especially if somebody has the ability to put a vision forward, like Jeff Gilling did at Enron, like Elizabeth Holmes did it Theranos like SPF F did, where you feel like you are in the service of something greater by helping this, vision, , actualize then, then you're, particularly susceptible.

And I think that is the place where [00:31:00] incentives don't quite explain things. That is, there is this very human desire to matter, to do something important. Mm-hmm to be doing something that's gonna change the world. And when somebody can tap into that desire in people that feeling that what you're doing isn't just work in a paycheck and the incentives you have, but I mean, I guess it is part of the incentive, but that you're part of some greater good.

That's incredibly powerful. Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel: It's what we all speaking of. We all wanna matter. . Yeah. Speaking of peoples psychology, uh, crime and punishment, underrated or overrated as a way to analyze the psychology of people like scaling and S B F or maybe SBF specifically because of the utilitarian nature of SB F'S crime?

Um,

Bethany McLean: I think it's, I think it's underrated, overrated. I'm not sure anybody. , I'm not sure anybody has ever proven that jail sentences for white collar criminals do anything to deter subsequent white collar crime. Mm-hmm. , and I think one part of this is the self delusion that I've, that I talked about. Nobody thinks, [00:32:00] oh, I'm doing the same thing as Jeff Skilling did at Enron, and if I, and if I do this, then I too might end up in jail.

Therefore, I don't wanna do this. I just don't think that's the way the, the, the, the, the thought process works. I think Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, probably for the most part, convinced herself that this was going to work, and that if you just push forward and push hard enough and keep telling people what they wanna hear and keep being able to raise money, it's gonna work.

You know, if. . If, if you pause to think, well, what if it doesn't work and I've lied and I go to jail, then, then you'd stop right, right then and there. So I think that, I think that, that I'm, I'm not, I'm not sure it's much of a deterrent. I remember, and partly I'm, I'm biased because I remember a piece, my co-author Peter Alkin, and I wrote out right after Jess Gilling and Kenley were, were convicted and can lay, we're we're convicted.

And we wrote a piece for Fortune in which we said that the entire world has changed. Now that corporate executives are, um, are, are put on high alert that behavior in the gray area will no longer be tolerated and that it will be aggressively prosecuted. And this was spring of [00:33:00] 2006 and the events that caused the global financial crisis were pretty well underway.

It didn't. Do much to prevent the global financial crisis. Mm-hmm. , Enron's, Enron's jail time, didn't do anything to present, prevent, Elizabeth Holmes doesn't seem to have done anything to change what Sbf was doing. So I just, I, I just, I'm, I'm, I'm not sure, I'm sure a psychologist or somebody who specializes in studying white color crime could probably make a argument that refutes everything I said and that shows that has had a deterring effect.

But I just, I just don't think that people who get themselves into this situation, con, con, consciously think, this is what I'm doing.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, speaking of other incentives, stock options, uh, you've spoken about how that creates short-term incentives for the executives who are making decisions. If you wanted to set up an instrument that aligned an executive or a leader's compensation with the long-term performance of a company, what would that look like?

W would you have the options of less than 10 years instead of a [00:34:00] year? H how would you design it? How do you usually design a compensation scheme to award long-term thinking?

Bethany McLean: If I could do that, I should ru rule the world . I think that very sweet. I think that is one of the really tough, um, problems confronting boards or anybody who is determining anybody who's determining stock options and that almost anybody who's determining compensation and that most compensation schemes seem to have really terrible unintended consequences.

They look really good on paper. And then as they're implemented, it turns out that there was a way in which they accomplished exactly the opposite of, uh, thing the people who designing them wanted, wanted them to accomplish. I mean, if you think back to the advent of stock options, what could sound better?

Right. Giving management a share of the company such that if, if, if shareholders did well, that they'd do well, nobody envisioned the ways in which stock options could be repriced. The ways in which meeting earnings targets could lead to gaming the ways in which the incentive of stock-based [00:35:00] compensation could lead to people trying to get anything they could in order to get the stock price higher and cash out when they're, as soon as their stock options vested.

So, and even there was, there was, the whole valiant saga was fascinating on this front because the people who designed Mike Pearson's compensation package as ceo e o Valiant, they were convinced that this was absolutely the way to do it. And he got bigger and bigger, um, stock option incentives for hitting certain, for having the stock achieve certain levels.

But of course, that creates this incredible bias to just get the stock to go up no matter, no matter what else you do. Um, it does seem to me that vesting over the long term is. is, is a much better way to go about things. But then do you create incentives for people to play games in order to get the stock lower at, at various points where there's about to be a stock optional board so they have a better chance of having directions be, be worth, be worth something over the long term.

And do you, particularly on Wall Street there is this, or in firms where this sort of stuff matters the most? There [00:36:00] is this, there was this clearing out of dead wood that happened where people got paid and they got outta the way and made way for younger people. And I don't know, it was a harsh culture, but maybe it made sense on some level.

And now at least I've been told with much longer vesting periods, you have people who don't wanna let go. And so you have more of a problem with people who should have retired, stick sticking around instead of in, in, instead of clearing out. And then it also becomes a question, How much money is, is enough.

So if somebody is getting millions of dollars in short-term compensation and then they have a whole bunch more money tied up in long-term compensation, do the long-term numbers matter? At what point do they, do they, do they really matter? I mean, if you gave me $5 million today, I'm not so sure I'd really care if I were getting another $5 million in 10 years.

Right. ? Yeah. So, so I think all of that is, is it, it's, I'm not, I'm not sure there's a perfect compensation system. All things considered though, I think longer term is, is probably better, [00:37:00] but.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I didn't think about that downside of the long investing period. That's so interesting there. I guess there is no free lunch.

Uh, so with Enron, um, it, it was clear that there was a lot of talent at the firm and that you had these companies and these trading firms launch at the aftermath by people who left Enron, kinder Morgan and John Arnold's, um, uh, Sintas, uh, that were wildly profitable and did well. Do you think we'll see the same thing with FTX, that while Sbf himself and maybe the, his close cadre were frauds, there actually was a lot of great trading and engineering talent there that are gonna start these very successful firms in the aftermath.

Bethany McLean: That's, that's interesting. And just, just for the sake of clarification, kinder Morgan was actually started years before Enron's collapsed, when Rich Kinder, who was vying with Jeffs skilling in a sense, to become Chief Operating Officer. Um, Ken Lay, picked Jeffs skilling and Kinder left. Mm-hmm. and took a few assets and went to create Kinder, kinder Morgan.

But your overall point, I'm just clarifying your overall point holds, there were a lot of people who [00:38:00] left Enron and went on to do, to have pretty, pretty remarkable careers. I think the answer with ftx, I bet there will be some for sure. But whether they will be in the crypto space, I guess depends on your views on the long-term viability of, of, of the crypto space.

And I have never , it's funny is crypto exploded over the last couple of years. I was, I've been working on this book about the pandemic and it's been busy and difficult enough that I have not lifted my head to, to think about much else. And I always thought, I don't get it. I don't understand , I mean, I understand the whole argument about the blockchain being valuable for lots of transactions and I, I get that, but I never understood crypto itself and I thought, well, I just need to, as soon as this book is done, I just need to put a month into understanding this because it's obviously an important, important enough part of our world that I need to figure it out.

So now I think, oh, Okay, maybe I didn't understand it for a reason and maybe, um, maybe there isn't anything to understand and I've just saved myself a whole life of crime because it's all gone. And you have [00:39:00] people like Larry Fink at BlackRock saying, whole industry is gonna implode. It's done. And certainly with the news today, this morning of finances auditor basically saying We're out.

Um, I, I don't, I don't know how much of it was, how much of it was, is, was a Ponzi scheme. You might know better than I do. And so I don't know what's left after this whole thing implodes. It's a little bit like, there is an analogy here that when Enron imploded, yes, a lot of people went on to start other successful businesses, but the whole energy trading business is practiced by kind of under capitalized, um, um, energy firms went away and that never came back.

Yeah. And so I, I, I don't, I don't know, I'm, it'll be, I, I don't know. What do you. The

Dwarkesh Patel: time to be worried will be when Bethany McLean writes an article titled Is Bitcoin Overvalued for the Audience. My Moments on That ? Yeah, for the audience that, that was, I believe the first skeptical article about Enron's, um, stock price.

Yeah. Uh, and it was titled [00:40:00] Is Enron Overvalued. In aftermath understated, , title. But ,

Bethany McLean: , I joked that that story should have won, won, won awards for the NICU title and business journalism history. , given that the company was bankrupt six months later was overpriced

Dwarkesh Patel: Um, uh, well, let me ask a bigger question about finance in general. So finance is 9% of gdp, I believe. How much of that is the productive use and thinking and allocation of the, uh, the capital towards their most productive ends? And how much of that is just zero sum or negative sum games? Um, if, if you had to break that down, like, is 9% too high, do you think, or is it just.

I think it's

Bethany McLean: too high. I have no idea how to think about breaking it down to what the proper level should be. But I think there are other ways to think about how you can see that in past decades it hasn't been at the right level when you've had all sorts of smart kids. Um, Leaving, leaving business school and leaving college and heading into [00:41:00] finance and hedge funds and private equity is their career of choice.

I think that's a sign that that finance is too big when it's sucking up too much of, of, of the talent of the country. Um, and when the rewards for doing it are so disproportionate relative to the rewards of of, of doing other things. Um, the counter to that is that there've also been a lot of rewards for starting businesses.

And that's probably, I think, how you want it to be in a, in a product. In a productive economy. So I think the number is, is too high. I don't know how to think about what it should be other than what a, actually, a former Goldman Sachs partner said this to me when I was working on all the devils are here, and she said that finance is supposed to be like the, the substrata of our world.

It's supposed to be the thing that enables other things to happen. It's not supposed to be the world itself. So the, the role of a financial system is to enable businesses to get started, to provide capital. That's what it's supposed to be. It's the lubricant that enables business, but it's not supposed to be the thing itself.

Right. And it's become the thing itself. [00:42:00] You've, you've, you've, you've, you've got a problem. Um, um, and I think the other,

Dwarkesh Patel: there's your article about crypto , that paragraph right there. .

Bethany McLean: There you go. That's, that's a good, um, and I think, I think the other way, you, you, you can see, and perhaps this is way too simplistic, but the other way I've thought about it is that how can it be if you can run a hedge fund and make billions of dollars from, and have five people, 10 people, whatever it is, versus starting a company that employs people mm-hmm.

and changes a neighborhood and provides jobs and, you know, provides a product that, that, that, that, that improves people's lives. It, it is a shame that too much of the talent and such a huge share of the financial rewards are going to the former rather than the latter. And that just can't mean good things for the future.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, when people criticize technology, for example, for the idea that, you know, these people who would've been, I don't know, otherwise teachers or something, they're, you know, making half a million dollars at Google. [00:43:00] Um, and I think like when I was in India, people were using Google Maps to get through the streets in Mumbai, which is, which is unimaginable to me before going there that, you know, you would be able to do that with, um, a service built out of Silicon Valley.

And so, Yeah, I think that actually is a good allocation of capital and talent. I, I'm not, I'm not sure about finance. Um, yeah,

Bethany McLean: I think I, I, I agree with you. I think there are other problems with Google and with the, the social media giants, but, but they are real businesses that employ people, that make products that have had, uh, huge.

Um, impact on on, on people's, on people's lives. So in, in that sense, it's very different than a private equity firm, for instance, and especially private equity, even more so than hedge funds draws my ire. Mm-hmm. , because I think one of the reasons they, that it, they've been able to make part of the financialization of our economy has been due to super, super low interest rates and low interest rates that have enabled so many people to make so much money in finance are not, they're just a gift.

It wasn't because these people were uniquely smart, they just [00:44:00] found themselves in a great moment in time. And the fact that they now think they're really smart because money makes me crazy.

Dwarkesh Patel: Um, are Fanny and Freddy America special purpose entities? Are they our Alameda? It's just the way we hide our debt and uh, that's interesting.

Yeah.

Bethany McLean: Well, I guess we, you know what? I don't know anymore because, so I last wrote about them when was it in 2016 and I don't know now. No, you're right. Their, their debt is still off, off, off balance sheet. So Yeah, in a lot of ways they, they were. . I would argue though that the old Fanny and Freddy were structured more honestly than, than the new Fanny and Freddy, that it really is conservatorship that have made them, um, that have made them America's off balance sheet entities, because at least when they were their own independent entities.

Yes, there was this odd thing known as the implicit guarantee, which is when you think about, back to your point about efficient markets, how can you possibly believe there's an as such a thing as an efficient market when their [00:45:00] Fanny and Freddy had an implicit guarantee, meaning it wasn't real. There was no place where it was written down that the US government would bail Fanny and Freddie out in a crisis, and everybody denied that it existed and yet it did exist.

Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel: No, but we, I feel like that confirms the official market hypothesis, right? The, the market correctly, they thought that mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddy would have governments. Uh, okay, okay. You might be father

Bethany McLean: and they did . You might be right. I, I, I think what I was getting at you, you might be right.

I think what I was getting at is that it is such a screwed up concept. I mean, how can you possibly, when I first, when people were first explaining this to me, when I first read about Fanny and Freddie, I was like, no, no, wait. This is American capitalism . This is, no, wait. What? I don't, I don't understand . Um, um, so yeah, but I, I, I, I think that Fanny and Freddie, at least with shareholders that were forced to bear some level of, of the risks were actually a more honest way of going about this whole screwed up American way of financing mortgages than, than the current setup is.

Dwarkesh Patel: What [00:46:00] is the future of these firms? Or are they just gonna say in conservatorship forever? Or is there any developments there? Well, what's gonna happen to them?

Bethany McLean: The lawsuit, the latest lawsuit that could have answered that in some ways ended in a mistrial. Um, I don't think, I don't, I don't think unfortunately anybody in government sees any currency in, and I mean, currency in the broad sense, not in the literal sense of money in, in taking this on.

And unfortunately, what someone once said to me about it, I think remains true and it's really depressing, but is that various lawmakers get interested in Fannie and Freddy. They engage with it only to figure out it's really, really goddamn complicated. Mm-hmm. and that, and that any kind of solution is gonna involve angering people on one side of the aisle or another and potentially angering their constituent constituents.

And they slowly back away, um, from doing anything that could, that, that could affect change. So I think we have a really unhealthy situation. I don't think it's great for these two [00:47:00] entities to be in conservatorship, but at this point, I'm not sure it's gonna change.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yep. Speaking of debt and mortgages, um, so total household debt in the United States has been, uh, climbing recently after it's, it's like slightly d decline after 2008, but I think in quarter three alone it increased 350 billion and now it's at 16.5 trillion.

Uh, the total US household debt, should we worried about this? Are, are, are we gonna see another sort of collapse because of this? Or what, what should we think about this?

Bethany McLean: I don't know. I don't know how to think about that because it's too tied up in other things that no one knows. Are we going to have a recession?

How severe is the recession going to be? What is the max unemployment rate that we're gonna hit if we do, if we do have a recession? And all of those things dictate how to, how to think about that number. I. Think consumer debt is embedded in the bowels of the financial system in the same way mortgages were.

And in the end, the, the, the [00:48:00] problem with the financial crisis of 2008, it wasn't the losses on the mortgages themselves. It was the way in which they were embedded in the plumbing of the financial system. Mm-hmm. and ways that nobody understood. And then the resulting loss of confidence from the fact that nobody had understood that slash lies had been told about, about that.

And that's what caused, that's what caused everything to, to collapse. Consumer debt is a little more visible and seeable and I, I don't think that it has that same, um, that same opaque quality to it that, that mortgage backed securities did. I could be, I could be wrong. I haven't, I haven't, I haven't dug into it enough, enough to understand enough to understand that.

But you can see the delinquencies starting to climb. Um, I mean, I guess you could on, on, on mortgages as well, but there was this, there was this profound belief with mortgages that since home prices would never decline, there would never be losses on these instruments because you could always sell the underlying property for more than you had [00:49:00] paid for it, and therefore everything would be fine.

And that's what led to a lot of the bad practices in the industry is that lenders didn't think they had to care if they were screwing the home buyer because they always thought they could take the home back and, and, and, and, and make more money on it. And consumer debt is, is unsecured. And so it's, it's, it's different.

I think people think about it differently, but I'd have. I'd have to, I'd have to do some more homework to understand where consumer debt sits in the overall architecture of the financial industry.

Dwarkesh Patel: I, I, I'm really glad you brought up this theme about what does the overall big picture look like? I feel like this is the theme of all your books that people will be, So obsessed with their subsection of their job or, or that ar area that they won't notice that, um, broader trends like the ones you're talking about.

And in Enron it's like, why, why, why do we have all these special purpose entities? What is the total debt load of Enron? Um, or with the, you know, mortgage back securities a similar kind of thing, right? What, what, uh, maybe they weren't correlated in the past, [00:50:00] but what's that? Do we really think that there's really no correlation, um, uh, between, uh, delinquencies across the country?

Um, so that, that kind of big picture, think. Whose job is that today? Is it journalists? Is it short sellers? Is it people writing on ck? Who's doing that? Is it anybody's job? Is, is it just like, uh, an important role with nobody assigned to it?

Bethany McLean: I think it's the latter. I think it's an important role with nobody, with nobody assigned to it, and there there is a limit.

I mean, , I hate to say this, it is not, uh, um, it is not an accident that many of my books have been written. That's probably not fair. It's not true of my book un fracking, but that some of my books have been written after the calamity happened. So they weren't so much foretelling the calamity as they were unpacking the calamity after it happened, which is a different role.

And as I said at the start of our conversation, I think an important one to explain to people why this big, bad thing took, took place. But it's not prediction, I don't know, as people that were very good at, at prediction, um, they tried [00:51:00] to set up, what was it called? In the wake of the global financial crisis, they established this thing called fsoc, and now I'm forgetting what the acronym stands for.

Financial Security Oversight Committee. And it's supposed to be this, this body that does think about these big picture. That thinks about the ways, the ways an exam, for example, in which mortgage backed securities were, um, were, were, were, were, were, were, were repopulating through the entire financial system and ways that would be cause a loss to be much more than a loss.

That it wouldn't just be the loss of money and that security, it would echo and magnify. And so that there are people who are supposed to be thinking about it. But I think, I think it's, it's, it's really hard to see that and. In increasingly complex world, it's even, it's even harder than it was before, because the reverberations from things are really hard to map out in, in, in advance, and especially when some part of those reverberations are a loss of confidence, then all bets [00:52:00] are off because when confidence cracks, lots of things fall apart.

But how do you possibly analyze in any quantitative way the the risk that that confidence will collapse? Mm-hmm. . So I think it's, I think, I think, I think it's difficult. That said, and of course I am talking my own book here, I don't think that the lack of the, the increased financial problems of journalism really help matters in that respect, because in an ideal world, you want a lot of people out there writing and thinking about various pieces of this, and then maybe somebody can come along and see the.

Pieces and say, oh my God, there's this big picture thing here that we all need to be thinking about. But there's, there's a kind of serendipity in the ability to do that one, that one that the chances, I guess the best way to say that is the chances of that serendipity are dramatically increased by having a lot of people out there doing homework, um, on the various pieces of the puzzle.

And so I think in a world, particularly where local news has been decimated mm-hmm. , um, the [00:53:00] chances of that sort of serendipity are, are definitely lower. And people may think, oh, it doesn't matter. We still got national news. We've got the Washington Post, we've got the Wall Street Journal, we've got the New York Times.

Um, I would love to have somebody do a piece of analysis and go back through the New York Times stories and see how many were sparked by lp, a piece in the local paper that maybe you wouldn't even notice from reading the New York Times piece, because it'd be in like the sixth paragraph that, oh yeah, credit should go to this person at this local paper who started writing about this.

But if you no longer have the person at the local paper who started writing about this, You know, it's, it's, it's, it's less likely that the big national piece gets written. And I think that's a part of the implosion of local news, that people, a part of the cost of the implosion of local news that people don't really understand the idea that the national press functions at, at the same level, um, without local news is just not true.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. And, but even if you have the local news, and I, that's a really important point, but even if you have that local news, there still has to be somebody whose job it is to synthesize it all together. And [00:54:00] I'm curious, what is the training that requires? So you, I mean, your training is, you know, math and English major and then working at working in investment banking.

Um, is that the, uh, I mean, obviously the anecdotal experience then equals one, seems that that's great training for synthesizing all these pieces together. But what is the right sort of education for somebody who is thinking about the big picture?

Bethany McLean: I, I don't, I don't know.

And there may be, there may be, there are probably multiple answers to that question, right? There's probably no one, one right answer for me. In, in the end. My, my math major has proven to be pivotal. Even though , my mother dug up these, um, my, my parents were moving and so my mother was going through all her stuff and she dug up these, some my math work from, from college.

Literally, if it weren't for the fact that I recognized my own handwriting, I would not recognize these pages on pages of math formula and proofs. And they're like, get gibberish to me now. So , but I, but I still think that math has, so I do not wanna exaggerate my mathematical ability at this stage of [00:55:00] the game.

It's basically no. But I do think that doing math proofs any kind of formal, any kind of training and logic is really, really important because the more you've been formally trained in logic, the more you realize when there are piece is missing and when something isn't quite, isn't quite adding on, it just forces you to think in, in a way that is, that in a way that connects the dots.

Um, because you know, if you're moving from A to B and B doesn't follow a, you, you understand that B doesn't follow a And I think that that, that, that kind of training is, is really, really important. It's what's given. , whatever kind of backbone I have as a journalist is not because I like to create controversy and like to make people mad.

I actually don't. It's just because something doesn't make sense to me. And so maybe it doesn't make sense to me because I'm not getting it, or it doesn't make sense to me because B doesn't actually follow, follow away, and you're just being told that it does. And so I think that, I think that training is, is really, really important.

Um, I also have, have often thought [00:56:00] that another part of training is realizing that basic rule that you learned in kindergarten, which is, um, you know, believe your imagination or you know, your imagine follow your imagination. Because the truth is anything can happen. And I think if you look at business history over the last couple of decades, it will be the improbable becoming probable.

Truth over and over and over again. I mean, the idea that Enron could implode one of the biggest, supposedly most successful companies in corporate America could be bankrupt within six months. The, from its year, from its stock price high. The idea that the biggest, most successful, um, financial institutions on wall, on Wall Street could all be crumbling into bankruptcy without the aid of the US government.

The idea that a young woman with no college degree and no real experience in engineering could create, uh, uh, um, could create a machine that was going to revolutionize blood testing and land on the cover of every business magazine, and that this [00:57:00] whole thing could turn out to be pretty much a fraud. The entire idea of ftx, I mean, over and over again, these things have happened.

Forget Bernie Madoff if you had told people a year ago that FTX was gonna implode six months ago, three months ago, people would've been like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And so I think just that, that, that, that knowledge that the improbable happens over and over again is also a really fundamental, fundamentally important.

Dwarkesh Patel: If we're con continuing on the theme of ftx, I, I interviewed him about four or five months ago.

Wow. And this is one of these interviews that I'm really, I'm, I don't know if embarrass is the right word, but I knew things then that I could have like asked, poked harder about. But it's also the kind of thing where you look back in retrospect and you're. If it had turned out well, it's, it's not obvious what the red flags are.

Um, while you're in the moment, there's things you can look back at the story of Facebook and how, you know, Marcus Zuckerberg acted in the early days of Facebook and you could say, if the thing fell apart, that this is why, or, you know, this is a red flag. So [00:58:00] I have a hard time thinking about how I should have done that interview.

Bethany McLean: Cliches are often cliches for a reason. And the one about hindsight being 2020 is, is, is one of the best cliches ever. And I am so fundamentally annoyed by stories that say, here were all the red flags. Why didn't anybody see it?

Well, Oftentimes the person writing that story didn't see the red flags either. And it's really easy in retrospect to pick up all the signs that there wa that there was a problem. And it's really hard in the moment. And there's, there's a little bit of a, of a, of, I think in all of us, a subconscious sense that this doesn't sound quite right, but getting the subconscious suspicion to rise to the level of conscious thought is, is also really difficult.

So I think, I think again, there is, there is, it is one value of, and I hope we're coming back to a world that appreciates old people because I'm getting older . But, um, there is something, there is some value in having, having seen it before that I think the red flags do maybe tend to rise to the level of conscious, um, conscious thought.

That said, if I [00:59:00] had gotten interested in crypto a year ago, would I have seen the problems with Ft. Doubtful. I, I don't know. Mm-hmm. , you just, you just, you just can never know. Sometimes these things also depend on the way in which they're presented to you and by whom. And I think that shouldn't be, I think it's not, not intellectually honest,

but if somebody you really respect comes to you and tells you, this business is the next greatest thing, and this person is brilliant, chances are that preconception is gonna be lodged in your mind in a way that's gonna make it really hard for you to see the red flags. Whereas if first you heard of this company with somebody coming to you, somebody really smart, you like coming to you and saying, yeah, I don't, I don't think this makes sense.

These, these are my problems with this. You're gonna be far more apt to see the red flags. And I say, it's not, that's not the right way, not the right phrase. I say it's not intellectually honest or not smart, because really you kind of wanna strip that away. You wanna strip those biases away because even really smart people, Make mistakes all the time.

And so you want to the extent possible to think for yourself, but, [01:00:00] but of course, or it's, it goes back to math, right? Order of operations, , in some order. The order in which information is presented to you unfortunately is gonna have an effect on how you see that, how you see that in information. Mm-hmm.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Um, let's talk about fracking. So in this year, uh, I think quarter two, was it the first time that fracking and SHA shield finally became profitable? Um, were the fracking investors, right? That, that there would be an oil shock and now it is actually profitable? Or how do you think about Saudi America in the aftermath of the events?

Bethany McLean: Well, I, at least from my understanding of it, and again, because I have been, um, out to lunch on this difficult book I'm writing, I haven't actually, I'm not as up to date on this as I should be. So take what I'm saying with, with the grain of salt. Um, but I think actually it proves the underlying thesis because fracking is profitable, but at a much smaller scale than it was [01:01:00] when people were saying, this is, this is gonna change the world.

So it hasn't, the idea that us shale oil was the swing factor in world oil prices, I don't think anybody believes that anymore because it can't profitably produce the amount of oil required for it to be the major force that it was, that it was supposed to be. So I think what has happened actually proves the point instead of negating the point and for.

For how long it can be profitable. Um, um, and at what level of oil prices is also, was also part of the, under the, under the underlying thesis, which is how much oil is there actually that can be extracted at, at, at this price. And so the fact that that very high oil prices, there is a certain amount that can be extracted profitably.

Um, that's, that's not, that's not surprising. I think the way in which the book's thesis would be wrong is if it turned out US shale oil, oil could be the, the, the, the swing producer for the world. And we could be the world's largest oil producer and there could, the [01:02:00] Permian could continue to grow at whatever it was, 20% a year and grow profitably.

And then I would have to say I, yeah, the, the, the investors were right. Um, or the people who believed in this were right. So.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yep. Um, if you could have a Robert Carro like biography of anybody in finance in the last a hundred years, especially somebody who we feel hasn't been talked about or covered enough, who to be, who do we need?

A thousand pages?

Bethany McLean: About a thousand pages. I don't know that we need a thousand pages about anybody. , . Um, Um, who would I like to write about? Um, let me think about that. There are, there are some books I've been mulling over that I'd like to do, but I'm not sure I I think I might prefer to keep those to myself for, for, for a little while.

I don't know. I'm also always gonna be, at least I'm trying to change my orientation, but I'm always gonna be biased toward the, the thing that went badly wrong rather than the thing that, that, that worked out. I don't know, maybe that betrays some underlying darkness in my personality, but [01:03:00] I always find that more fun.

So I'm, I'm probably not the right person to ask about, uh, uh, a glowing biography. I don't, you know, I don't, I don't know. You could say, you could say Warren Buffet, but Pliny has been written about buffet. I dunno if there's anything to be. added to that. So let me, let me think. If I come up, if I come up with a great answer that I'm prepared to share, I will, I will tell you, I don't know that, maybe it goes back to your question about how big a role that finance should play in our economy overall, too.

Maybe. I just don't think that anybody in finances necessarily worthy of that, of mm-hmm. of that kind of, of that kind of, um, that kind of sustained focus.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, I wanna talk about the rating agencies because they have featured heavily in both the story about the housing crisis and Enron. And as a libertarian leading person, that's really been, um, that, that, that's been kind of devastating in the sense that, you know, there's a hope that you can maybe replace [01:04:00] things like the F D A or at least functions of it, um, with agencies, private agencies that are tasked with like, rating, how good is this food?

Or, uh, you know, how safe is this airplane? Things like that. And, I I'm curious if you think that there is any possibility of having any private agency that is being paid by the person they're evaluating, being able to give fair evaluations. And this even brings us, it doesn't even have to be, um, rating agencies.

It can be things like, you know, now we have the big four accounting firms. I'm curious how much trust you put in them in terms of being able to do evaluations fairly. Do we think, do, have you passed through the Art Arthur Anderson Anderson days? Um, how, how credible are

Bethany McLean: these institu. Look at EYs roll and Wirecard, right?

And then mm-hmm. I think you can, uh, and some of the scandals PWC has been involved in over the last bunch of years. I mm-hmm. . Yeah. Um, um, it is, it is a really good question. I thought you were gonna go somewhere different with the rating agencies, which is why in a supposedly free market you have so many investors Yeah.

Who rely [01:05:00] on credit ratings.

Dwarkesh Patel: That's a good

Bethany McLean: question. And I, and I do think that there's, uh, this is another perhaps counter to your efficient. Theory or maybe counter to a libertarian view of the world. But you know, a lot of big investors who complain about the rating agencies after there, there's been a disaster, really want the cover provided by the rating agencies because they can say, well, you told me this was aaa.

Mm-hmm. , I bought it, therefore I can't be blamed. And so once the crisis has passed, the appetite of big investors to reform the rating agencies or do away with them, meaning then they would have to do their own work and not just say, well, I bought a AAA rated security. It's really next to nil. And that's a good part of the reason why reform doesn't, doesn't happen.

I mean, remember the credit rating agencies were reformed in 2006. In the wake of interim, the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act was passed. And yet the rating agency sat at the center of the global financial crisis just a few years later. They, they, I, I'm not sure they, I'm not sure they really, they, they, they [01:06:00] can be reformed, but I'm also not sure there is a perfect, um, , maybe it goes back to your question about the ability to see the big picture and foresee a problem.

I'm not sure there is a perfect regulator who, mm-hmm. wasn't being paid by companies who could then do a better job. You'd like to believe that's true, that if they were a government agency in charge of credit rating and they weren't paid by the companies and the securities. They weren't, they weren't they, they, and they weren't paid by, by the companies that, that would lead to better ratings, would it?

Mm-hmm. . I, I don't, I dunno, right? , so I'm, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sure. There's, I guess another way of saying this is very easy to criticize the current system as really problematic. And it's certainly the fact that credit rating agencies were making so much money by rating subprime, mortgage backed securities for sure played an enormous role in, in, in what happened.

But then if you ask the next question, well, what's the alternative ? That's, that's [01:07:00] when it starts, that's when it starts to get to get pretty complicated.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, now that we're going to have this long proceeding on FTX in terms of compensating the people who are harmed, looking back at Enron, I mean, that was a long process.

And I think you said in the book that a billion dollars of the remaining sum that should have been doled out to the victims was actually spent in legal fees and the procedures. If, if I read about that number.

Bethany McLean: I think so. I'm not sure. I have to admit I don't remember, but it was some enormous side of it.

Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel: So what should be the procedure when an implosion like this happens because it seems suboptimal that so much. I mean, it goes back to their finance discussion, right? Like, so much of the capital that these people are supposed to be doling out is just going to themselves. Um, do we need something like the F FAA when the plane crashes, they have a body of experts that kind of figures out what happened?

Do we need a completely non legalistic or a different, uh, sort of procedure in these kinds of situations? How should the ftx, um, uh, [01:08:00] the, the, the dis disbursement of the remaining assets and so forth, how should that be done?

Bethany McLean: It's a really interesting question and a really interesting analogy and something people have brought up to me that I've never really dug into, which is the incredible success of the f a a in cutting down, on, , problems with planes because of the incredibly thorough job they do in investigating the cause of a CRA crash afterwards.

And so maybe somebody's written about this, but to really get inside that process and the incredibly powerful, profound role it's played might provide an interesting roadmap for, for corporate America and, and, and how to do this sort of thing and how to, how to prevent it in the future. Maybe, maybe the analogy doesn't hold up in some kind of, in some kind of subtle way, but for sure that's, that's, that's, that's a really, that's a really interesting question because you do, you, you need this to happen, right?

You need the bankruptcy. You, you need. You need the excavation and even if it costs a great deal of money to just, for all of us, the worst possible outcome would be for everybody to throw their hands up and say, [01:09:00] okay, it's done. , nobody, no, no work. Because, because the truth of the matter is even journalists who excavate, who try to excavate this stuff, we depend on the work done by by others.

I mean, I could not have written my Enron book if it weren't for the Justice Department investigating and their indictments for the role of Congress in getting all these documents from, from all these internal documents from Enron, including by the way, the list of executives and their cell phone numbers, which turned out to be incredibly valuable.

Um, um, um, but you can't, you the, the role of the bankruptcy examiner and getting in there and really uncovering, um, all of what Enron was doing in order to manipulate its, its earnings. There's no way that a journalist, you could do that without, without all of that data that's provided by all these entities that are doing their own investigation.

Because the journalist, you don't have subpoena power. You can't, you literally can't do this. And it becomes an incredibly important part of, of, of telling the overall story. So it's hard for me to say [01:10:00] when it's a calamity like this, that those dollars are wasted. But is there a better way to go about it?

Maybe.

Dwarkesh Patel: Maybe. Yeah. Uh, another similarity between Enron and FTX is that the bankruptcy is being overseen by John Ray, and this is a rather mysterious person. I, I believe I, the, one of the first times you see in a photo of him is when he appeared in front of Congress a few days ago. Um, and I checked the index of the smartest guys in the room.

Um, and I, I don't think he was mentioned in the book. Who is this guy? . What, what's his deal?

Bethany McLean: I don't actually really know. I feel like people have made a really big deal over the bankruptcy administrator being the same person. I'm not really sure how much that that matters.

Okay. I mean, the bankruptcy administrator, when people, it was all over the press, you know, he says this is a bigger disaster than, than whatever it was. I can't remember the exact quote, but that's his incentive to say that because then any money that he can recoup looks like, due to his genius in administrating this thing in [01:11:00] bankruptcy.

If you say, oh, this wasn't that big a deal, everybody's gonna get their money back, and then they don't, then you've got a huge problem. Right? , if you say, this is the, this is, this is terrible and it's awful, and there will be no money left because the the, then any money you get back, people are like, look, what a great job he did.

So I, yeah, I, I, I, I don't know, I don't know, I don't remember him being a really pivotal figure in the, in, in, in, in the un in the excavation of Enron.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, I, I, I wanna ask you a bit about your writing process. Do you go into the book with some sort of thesis about the actors? And if so, is it often that you realize that somebody you thought was a bad actor is actually one, one of the good guys and or the other way around?

Uh, or is basically the, your initial picture confirmed by further invest.

Bethany McLean: Well, I guess that's a tough question about the books I've done because the books I have done, especially the two big ones, were after the fact and it was pretty [01:12:00] clear, a, that something went badly wrong, and B, that the people who were in power had to be responsible for it because they weren't responsible.

Who else was the ways in which they were responsible and the degree to which they were responsible. Um, open questions that I don't think I had a, a view on going, going in. Uh, to that point on the financial crisis, I actually ended up changing my mind pretty, pretty radically. I wrote a piece in the early stages of the financial crisis saying that basically homeowners were equally, equally to blame because homeowners had cashed out, had had homeowners, took out risky mortgage mortgages, and without personal responsibility what were lost.

And homeowners had also cashed out and people had made a lot of money. So the idea that this was all the faults of the banks was, was absurd. . And I still think that's true to some extent because without personal responsibility mm-hmm.

we, we are lost. But I remember coming across this presentation that had been given by Washington Mutual, where they were, which was one of the big lenders at the time, um, no longer exists. And they were trying to get [01:13:00] people to take out, it was a whole internal presentation about how you got someone to take out a risky mortgage.

And what they really wanted was the same 30 year fixed rate mortgage that their, that their parents had had. And it was all the tactics and, and tips you could use to twist their arm to take out this, this riskier mortgage because those were the ones that were in demand to be packaged up into subprime mortgage backed securities.

And so Wamo could turn around and sell those mortgages for more money to Wall Street than they could the say 30 year fixed rate mortgages. And then I remember thinking there's just something wrong with a world where all of the responsibility is on consumers to understand and none of the responsibility is on the people selling the product.

Mm-hmm. To be honest mm-hmm. About, about what this thing is. So anyway, that was a case where I. Where I changed, I changed my mind over, over the course of reporting a book. I try to, I try not to work on for stories. I try not to work on stories where there has to be an answer. Because, because if you're working on a story where it has to be one way for it to be a good story, then if it's not that, then you're biased to wanna see it one way.

[01:14:00] And if it's not that way, you no longer have a story. So I always prefer to work on things where it's just really interesting and whatever you end up thinking or saying about it, it's still a really interesting story. So I can't say it's always been, so, I, I guess one of the last stories I did for Vanity Fair was when David Sackler of the, of the, uh, wanted to talk to me about what had of the Sacklers in Purdue and the opioid crisis, wanted to talk about his view of, of what had gone wrong and that in a way.

It was, it was a weird story for me because usually I'm working from the outside in. I don't get stories where people wanna cooperate with me for, I guess all these reasons, . But, um, but in a way it was my favorite type of story because it was really interesting that he was willing to speak publicly. And if I had ended up thinking the slackers were totally blameless and the whole opioid crisis, I could have written that because it was really interesting that he was speaking publicly.

And so I like, I like stories where that's where, where, where it's a [01:15:00] story no matter how you end up viewing the main characters and how you end up viewing the arc of the thing. Does that make sense?

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah, it does. And I guess it raises another question, is that the people you've studied, um, in your books and your journalism, ha, have you concluded afterwards that, you know, there's some people who are fundamentally deceptive and there's some people who are, you know, ethical and that there's sort of this line, or, uh, do you feel like if anybody was put into skilling shoes at the time or SVF shoes, There's a good chance they would've done the same kinds of things.

Bethany McLean: I think we all have the capacity to be deceptive. I think it's part of human nature. Some people are more inclined toward truth telling and transparency than other people. Maybe just by, by by nature, maybe by nurture.

And what's been rewarded in your career and your life, um, inclines you to either be open and honest or to try to try to hide things. And maybe that's, maybe that's more the experiences that you've had, but I think we are all capable of a fundamental level of [01:16:00] deception for, for CEOs. Whenever people look at a Jeff Skilling or an Angela Mozilla or any of these characters and say, I could never have done that.

I mean, there's a fundamental rationalization. Skilling by manipulating Enron's money was, and Enron's earnings was trying to keep the stock price, stock price high. So he didn't hurt investors by having the stock go down the way it would've been if he had been radically honest about all of Enron's problems.

And so we're all capable of that kind of rationalization, that what we're doing is really in the long-term interests of somebody else and really in their best interest, even if it's, even if it's not telling the truth. Um, and I think, I think to say that you're not capable of that. I, I mean, I don't know, I almost think that's more dangerous than admitting that you're capable of it because Yeah.

Yeah. Admit that if you admit that you're capable of it, then you can make a fundamental choice to either behave that way or, or, or not to behave that way. But there's also another component of, um, human nature that I think is more [01:17:00] prevalent in some people than others. And it's not, uh, I don't know if you'd characterize it as dishonesty, but it's very deeply believing something in the moment and convincing other people because you so deeply believe it, and a month later you don't believe it anymore because you're somebody who changes their mind.

So is what you told people a month earlier a lie, or was it a truth at its moment in time? And so there's, there's that too that makes it more difficult to label somebody fundamentally deceptive, right? And they look like a lie to the person who believed what that person was saying and acted on that person's advice and belief.

And a month later finds out that the person sold their stock or no longer believes that. But was was the person being dishonest in there in that moment?

Dwarkesh Patel: Not necessarily. Yeah. And it raises the interesting question of moral luck, I'm sure there were tons of CEOs and there are tons of CEOs today who are like Ken Le who are just basically disconnected from the business they started and are kind of hanging on.

And it just so happened that Ken Le was the [01:18:00] ceo e o of the one that was committing massive fraud. Uh, but it, it, it's kinda like texting in. Texting and driving. Yeah. Where lots of people do it. One guy crashes and obviously he should be punished, but he's no more culpable than the rest of us who do it,

Bethany McLean: I like that concept of moral luck. I think that's incredibly true. Yeah. Um, it goes with the concept of, you know, somebody who is an investor over the last 40 years. Sure. Probably most people did, did really, really well. Right? With the tailwind of declining interest rates. Does that mean that these people were brilliant or that they lucked into the right field?

And of course, some people didn't look into it. They saw what was going on and chose it and, and you know, so there, so there's that too. But, but. , maybe that trivializes your, your question because I think that's a very profound question, and I think there really is, um, there definitely is such a thing as moral luck, and the only way in which you can tip the scales is by trying to be aware of bad people and bad situations and keeping yourself clear of them.

Because back to your earlier question about culture, , [01:19:00] it's a trite cliche, but you are who you're, you surround yourself with either in a job or, or in your friendships. And so if you wanna have the best chance possible of, of, of steering clear of accidents, you do have to be careful about the situations you choose to put yourself into.

Um, because the, i the idea that you can remain an island in a, in a bad situation is, is not true of most of us.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yep. Yep. Uh, final question, or I guess second to final question. What advice would you give to people who. Want to do something similar to what you've done over your career, whether that's investigative journalism or some other role in maybe finance or technology that involves putting together the big picture.

What advice do you have for them

Bethany McLean: that's, that's an interesting question. I can't give advice for journalists anymore because the world in which I grew up no longer exists. Hmm. I once would've told anybody to go work on, and maybe that's, maybe, maybe that's leading me to the right answer, but the world in which I grew up in journalism no longer exists.

And so to [01:20:00] go off and be a writer, um, back when I did it, you know, you could get a job at a magazine and you could take home a paycheck that would enable you to cover your rent. And if you were like me and didn't have any family money, then you needed that . And so the idea now of telling somebody to go off and pursue a career as a writer, well, if you don't have any other source of, um, source of external support, that it's, it's a lot more difficult than it, than it, than it, than it once was, but, actually for me, I think that does lead to a better and deeper answer to your question, which is that right?

Don't allow yourself to be seduced by the quick ease of PowerPoints and putting together bullet points. Force yourself to when you're dealing with something complicated, force yourself to write it out. Um, and maybe that would be different for other people, but for me, writing forces a level of intellectual honesty and um, a clarity about the big picture that nothing else does.

It's really hard work. I've never understood people who say, I just love to write. It's so fun. I always like what? , it's [01:21:00] one of the most difficult things you can do because to write clearly requires thinking clearly and thinking clearly is really, really hard. , at least for me, but. , it is really only in writing that I realized that I didn't understand something that I was pretending to understand.

And so it's really easy to, to pretend to yourself that you understand something. And if you have to write it and write it clearly in a way that somebody else can understand it, that often forces you, um, to, that forces you to realize your own, your own lack of comprehension. And I think that exercise in terms of an understanding of the world and a chance of seeing the big picture is really, really critical.

Maybe there's something for somebody else that would work that isn't writing. Maybe it would be turn turning the world into a math proof, you know, , . But, um, but, but there is, I, for me, that's what it is.

Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Um, and final question, what is your next book about and when will be, have, when will we have the pleasure to read it?

Bethany McLean: Hope it's a pleasure. I'm not sure at this point. It's kinda a pleasure. Um, so I'm [01:22:00] writing it with Jon Oser again, who I wrote All the devils are here with, and we set out to write about the economic consequences of the pandemic, but it's really become a broad look at how. Capitalism is and isn't functioning, um, in our, in our modern society.

And then underneath that, a look at how government is and isn't setting the right rules for capitalism to function. Because back to your point about being a libertarian. . I do think there's this lovely idea that markets exist independently of the rules set for them by society, but I'm not really sure that that's true.

If you think about everything from the existence of a limited liability corporation to bankruptcy law, these are all rules laid down by society that dictate how the market. How the market functions. And so in the end, if the market isn't functioning the way we want it to, chances are it's the results of the improper, the improper conditions having, having been set.

So that's what the book is turned into as a, as a way of looking at [01:23:00] the flaws and capitalism even leading up to the pandemic, um, and how those were exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic

Dwarkesh Patel: yeah. Okay. Uh, I, I'm really, um, I'm really excited to read it. That's a, that's an exciting thesis. I'm , but, but do you know when it's gonna be out, by the way?

Bethany McLean: October, 2023?

Dwarkesh Patel: Yes. Okay. You'll have to come back on the podcast. And I, I would love that. Yeah. Yeah.

Bethany McLean: I would love that. Awesome.

[01:24:00]

[01:25:00]

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: #112 – Carl Shulman on the common-sense case for existential risk work and its practical implications
Release date: 2021-10-05

Preventing the apocalypse may sound like an idiosyncratic activity, and it sometimes is justified on exotic grounds, such as the potential for humanity to become a galaxy-spanning civilisation.

But the policy of US government agencies is already to spend up to $4 million to save the life of a citizen, making the death of all Americans a $1,300,000,000,000,000 disaster.

According to Carl Shulman, research associate at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, that means you don’t need any fancy philosophical arguments about the value or size of the future to justify working to reduce existential risk — it passes a mundane cost-benefit analysis whether or not you place any value on the long-term future.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

The key reason to make it a top priority is factual, not philosophical. That is, the risk of a disaster that kills billions of people alive today is alarmingly high, and it can be reduced at a reasonable cost. A back-of-the-envelope version of the argument runs:

• The US government is willing to pay up to $4 million (depending on the agency) to save the life of an American.
• So saving all US citizens at any given point in time would be worth $1,300 trillion.
• If you believe that the risk of human extinction over the next century is something like one in six (as Toby Ord suggests is a reasonable figure in his book The Precipice), then it would be worth the US government spending up to $2.2 trillion to reduce that risk by just 1%, in terms of American lives saved alone.
• Carl thinks it would cost a lot less than that to achieve a 1% risk reduction if the money were spent intelligently. So it easily passes a government cost-benefit test, with a very big benefit-to-cost ratio — likely over 1000:1 today.

This argument helped NASA get funding to scan the sky for any asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth, and it was directly promoted by famous economists like Richard Posner, Larry Summers, and Cass Sunstein.

If the case is clear enough, why hasn't it already motivated a lot more spending or regulations to limit existential risks — enough to drive down what any additional efforts would achieve?

Carl thinks that one key barrier is that infrequent disasters are rarely politically salient. Research indicates that extra money is spent on flood defences in the years immediately following a massive flood — but as memories fade, that spending quickly dries up. Of course the annual probability of a disaster was the same the whole time; all that changed is what voters had on their minds.

Carl expects that all the reasons we didn’t adequately prepare for or respond to COVID-19 — with excess mortality over 15 million and costs well over $10 trillion — bite even harder when it comes to threats we've never faced before, such as engineered pandemics, risks from advanced artificial intelligence, and so on.

Today’s episode is in part our way of trying to improve this situation. In today’s wide-ranging conversation, Carl and Rob also cover:

• A few reasons Carl isn't excited by 'strong longtermism'
• How x-risk reduction compares to GiveWell recommendations
• Solutions for asteroids, comets, supervolcanoes, nuclear war, pandemics, and climate change
• The history of bioweapons
• Whether gain-of-function research is justifiable
• Successes and failures around COVID-19
• The history of existential risk
• And much more

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% )
Episode: Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism
Release date: 2022-12-01

Perhaps the most interesting episode so far.

Byrne Hobart writes at thediff.co, analyzing inflections in finance and tech.

He explains:

• What happened at FTX

• How drugs have induced past financial bubbles

• How to be long AI while hedging Taiwan invasion

• Whether Musk’s Twitter takeover will succeed.

• where to find the next Napoleon and LBJ

• & ultimately how society can deal with those who seek domination

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.

Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

If you enjoy this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can’t exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.

A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast.

Timestamps:

(0:00:50) - What the hell happened at FTX?

(0:07:03) - How SBF Faked Being a Genius:

(0:12:23) - Drugs Explain Financial Bubbles

(0:17:12) - On Founder Physiognomy

(0:21:02) - Indexing Parental Involvement in Raising Talented Kids

(0:30:35) - Where are all the Caro-level Biographers?

(0:39:03) - Where are today's Great Founders?

(0:49:05) - Micro Writing -> Macro Understanding

(0:52:04) - Elon's Twitter Takeover

(1:01:28) - Does Big Tech & West Have Great People?

(1:12:10) - Philosophical Fanatics and Effective Altruism

(1:17:54) - What Great Founders Have In Common

(1:20:24) - Thinkers vs. Analyzers

(1:26:17) - Taiwan Invasion bets & AI Timelines

Thanks for reading The Lunar Society! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Johnathan Bi on Mimesis and René Girard
Release date: 2022-11-21

When the 20-year-old overachiever Johnathan Bi's first startup crashed and burned, he headed to a Zen retreat in the Catskills to "debug himself." He discovered René Girard and his mimetic theory--the idea that imitation is a key and often unconscious driver of human behavior. Listen as entrepreneur and philosopher Bi shares with EconTalk host Russ Roberts what he learned from Girard and Girard's insights into how we meet our primal need for money, fame, and power. The conversation includes the contrasts between economics and Girard's perspective.

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Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Robin Hanson on Predicting the Future of Artificial Intelligence
Release date: 2022-11-24

Robin Hanson joins the podcast to discuss AI forecasting methods and metrics.

Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:49 Robin's experience working with AI 06:04 Robin's views on AI development 10:41 Should we care about metrics for AI progress? 16:56 Is it useful to track AI progress? 22:02 When should we begin worrying about AI safety? 29:16 The history of AI development 39:52 AI progress that deviates from current trends 43:34 Is this AI boom different than past booms? 48:26 Different metrics for predicting AI

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Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Robin Hanson on Grabby Aliens and When Humanity Will Meet Them
Release date: 2022-11-17

Robin Hanson joins the podcast to explain his theory of grabby aliens and its implications for the future of humanity.

Learn more about the theory here: https://grabbyaliens.com

Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:49 Why should we care about aliens? 05:58 Loud alien civilizations and quiet alien civilizations 08:16 Why would some alien civilizations be quiet? 14:50 The moving parts of the grabby aliens model 23:57 Why is humanity early in the universe? 28:46 Could't we just be alone in the universe? 33:15 When will humanity expand into space? 46:05 Will humanity be more advanced than the aliens we meet? 49:32 What if we discovered aliens tomorrow? 53:44 Should the way we think about aliens change our actions? 57:48 Can we reasonably theorize about aliens? 53:39 The next episode

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Release date: 2022-11-20

Notes from The Valmy:

Source: YouTube (Stanford Academic Freedom Conference) https://www.youtube.com/@stanfordcli Release date: 2022-11-04

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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 35 · TOP 2.5% )
Episode: Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and Demagogues
Release date: 2022-10-20

It was a fantastic pleasure to welcome Bryan Caplan back for a third time on the podcast! His most recent book is Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice.

He explains why he thinks:

• Feminists are mostly wrong,

• We should have centi-billionaires,

• Decolonization should have emphasized human rights over democracy,

• Eastern Europe shows that we could accept millions of refugees.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.

Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

More really cool guests coming up; subscribe to find out about future episodes!

You may also enjoy my interviews with Tyler Cowen (about talent, collapse, & pessimism of sex), Charles Mann (about the Americas before Columbus & scientific wizardry), and Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection).

If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you share it, post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can’t exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.

A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.

Timestamps

(00:12) - Don’t Be a Feminist

(16:53) - Western Feminism Ignores Infanticide

(19:59) - Why The Universe Hates Women

(32:02) - Women's Tears Have Too Much Power

(46:37) - Bryan Performs Standup Comedy!

(51:09) - Affirmative Action is Philanthropic Propaganda

(54:12) - Peer-effects as the Only Real Education

(58:46) - The Idiocy of Student Loan Forgiveness

(1:08:49) - Why Society is Becoming Mentally Ill

(1:11:49) - Open Borders & the Ultra-long Term

(1:15:37) - Why Cowen’s Talent Scouting Strategy is Ludicrous

(1:22:11) - Surprising Immigration Victories

(1:37:26) - The Most Successful Revolutions

(1:55:34) - Anarcho-Capitalism is the Ultimate Government

(1:57:00) - Billionaires Deserve their Wealth

Transcript

Dwarkesh Patel

Today, I have the great honor of interviewing Bryan Caplan again for the third time. Bryan, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Bryan Caplan

I've got the great honor of being interviewed by you, Dwarkesh. You're one of my favorite people in the world!

Don’t Be a Feminist

Dwarkesh Patel

It's a greater pleasure every time (for me at least). So let's talk about your book, Don't Be a Feminist. Is there any margin of representation of women in leadership roles at which you think there should be introduced bias to make sure more women get in, even if the original ratio is not because of bias?

Bryan Caplan

No, I believe in meritocracy. I think it is a good system. It is one that almost everyone sees the intuitive appeal of, and it works. Just looking at a group and saying, “We need to get more members of Group X,” is the wrong way to approach it. Rather, you need to be focusing on, “Let's try to figure out the best way of getting the top quality people here.”

Dwarkesh Patel

If there's an astounding ratio of men in certain positions, could that potentially have an impact on the company's ability to do business well? Perhaps the company could just care about increasing the ratio for that reason alone.

Bryan Caplan

Right. I mean, one can imagine that! I think in our culture, it really goes the other way. People are more likely to be trying to get rid of men, despite the fact that the men are delivering value. If you really pushed me into starting to think, “Suppose you're running a bar, would you have ladies’ night?” well yeah, I would have ladies’ night in a bar because that actually works, and it's good business! However, if what you're doing is trying to actually get correct answers to things, if you're trying to go and make something run effectively, and if you're just trying to make progress and you're trying to learn new things, the thing to focus on is what actually leads to knowledge and not focusing on just trying to get demographic representation.

I think what we've seen is once you go down that route, it is a slippery slope. So besides defending meritocracy on its merits, I would actually also say that the slippery slope argument is not one that should be dismissed lightly. There's a lot of evidence that it does actually fit the facts. When you make an exception of that kind, it really does lead you to bad places.

Dwarkesh Patel

Okay. But changing topics a bit, I wonder if this gives you greater sympathy for immigration restrictionists because their argument is similar, that there's no natural shelling point for your keyhole solutions where you let tens of millions of people in, but you don't give them welfare or voting rights. There's a slippery slope when you let them in because, eventually, the civil rights argument is going to extend to them. There'll be adverse consequences that these keyhole solutions can't solve for.

Bryan Caplan

First of all, I would say maybe. That is one of the best arguments against keyhole solutions. I'm also guessing that a lot of your listeners have no idea what keyhole solutions are, Dwarkesh, so maybe we want to back up and explain that.

Dwarkesh Patel

Go for it. Sure.

Bryan Caplan

So I have a totally unrelated book called Open Borders, the Science and Ethics of Immigration. One of the chapters goes over ways of dealing with complaints about immigration that fall short of stopping people from actually excluding or kicking out people that are already there. So just to back up a little bit further, most of the book talks about complaints about immigration–– saying that they're either totally wrong or overstated. But then I have another chapter saying, “Alright, fine, maybe you don't agree with that, but isn't there another way that we could deal with this?” So, for example, if you're worried about immigrants voting poorly, you could say, “Fine, we won't extend voting rights to immigrants or make them wait for a longer time period.” That's one where I would just say that the focal point of citizen versus noncitizen is one of the strongest ones. So I think that it actually is one that has a lot of stability.

This line of, “Well, you're not a citizen, therefore…” really does have a lot of intuitive appeal. Although, yes, I do think that keyhole solutions would probably not work multi-generationally, so to go and say this is a keyhole solution where you're not a citizen, your kids are not citizens, and their kids after them are not citizens, that's one that I think would be hard to maintain. However, again, at the same time, the problems people are worried about, if they ever were severe, are also getting diluted over time. So I wouldn't worry about it so much. That is one of the very best objections to keyhole solutions that I know of.

Dwarkesh Patel

Okay, so going back to feminism. Over time, doesn’t feminism naturally become true? One of the things you can say is that the way that society is unfair to men includes how they fight in wars or do difficult and dangerous jobs, but society, over time, becomes more peaceful (or at least has in our timeline), and the difficult jobs get automated. At the same time, the gains for people who are at the very peak of any discipline keep going up fairly, but the implication still is that if men are overrepresented there, even for biological reasons, then the relative gains that they get go up, right? So over time, feminism just becomes more true, not because society necessarily discriminated against women, but just because of the trends in technology.

Bryan Caplan

Once again, I feel like we should just back up a little bit. What is feminism anyway, because if we don't know what that is, then it's very hard to talk about whether it's becoming more true over time. In my book, I begin with some popular dictionary definitions that just say feminism is the theory that women should be political, social, economic, and cultural equals of men. I say that this is a terrible definition, which violates normal usage. Why? Well, we actually have public opinion data on, first of all, whether people are or are not feminists, and second of all, what they believe about the political, social, economic, and cultural equality of women. And guess what? An overwhelming majority of people that say they are not feminists still agree with the equality of women in all those mentions, which really makes you realize that really can't be the definition of feminism. That would be like saying feminism is the theory that the sky is blue.

Well, feminists do believe the sky is blue, but that isn't what distinguishes feminists from other people. So what distinguishes them? What I say is that the really distinguishing view of feminism is that society treats women less fairly than men. The view is that society treats women less fairly than men or treats men more fairly than women. This definition fits actual usage. It would be very strange for someone to say, “I'm a feminist, but I think that men get terrible treatment in our society, and women are treated like goddesses.” Then you say, “Well, then you're not really a feminist, are you?” That doesn't make sense. On the other hand, for someone to say, “I am not a feminist, but God, we treat women so terribly, we're awful.” That, again, just would not fit. So I'm not saying this is the one true definition, but rather that it is much closer to what people actually mean by feminism than what dictionaries say. So to be fair, every now and then, there'll be a better definition. I think the Wikipedia definition in the second sentence adds that it also has the view that women are treated very unfairly.

Dwarkesh Patel

Is another way of defining feminism just that we should raise the status of women? That's slightly different from the fairness issue because if you think of a feminist historian, maybe their contention is not that women were treated unfairly in the past. Maybe they just want to raise the status of women in the past who are underrepresented. If you think of somebody today who wants to, let's say, raise the status of Asians in our society, and they want to acknowledge the great things that Asians are doing in our society, then maybe their contention is not even that Asians are treated unfairly. They just want to raise their status. So what would you think of that definition?

Bryan Caplan

So first of all, it could be, but I don't think so. Here's what I think. There could be a few people like that, but that's not what the word means in normal use. If someone were to say, “Women are treated absolutely fantastically, way better than men, and I want it to get even higher.” You say, hmm. Well, that's not what I think. Somebody might say, “Well, I can still be a feminist and think that,” okay, but that's not what the word actually means. It's not the typical view of people who call themselves feminists. The typical view is precisely that women are treated very unfairly. They want to raise that and alleviate that in a way that's almost by definition. If you think that someone's being treated unfairly, then to say, “I think they're being really unfair, but I think it’s great that it's unfair.” It's almost self-contradictory.

Dwarkesh Patel

I guess I was making a slightly different point, which is not even that these people don’t want to raise the status (the actual living standards of women) in some way. It's just that they want to raise the rhetorical status.

Bryan Caplan

Yes, but again, if someone were to say, “I think that women are treated absolutely fantastically in society, way better than men, who we treat like dogs. But I also want women's status to be even higher than it already is.” That would be something where you could argue that “Well, that person may still be a feminist, but that is not what the word means.” Because hardly anyone who calls themselves a feminist believes that weird thing that you're talking about.

Dwarkesh Patel

Let me make an analogy. Let's say you or I are libertarians, right? And then we think we should raise the status of billionaires. Now, it's not like we think society mistreats billionaires. They're pretty fine, but we think their status should be even higher.

Bryan Caplan

Yeah, I mean, this just goes to the definition. In order to find out whether a definition is correct, you just have to think, “Well, how is the word commonly used?” Logically speaking, it's possible to have a different view or two things that are compatible. The whole idea of a definition is that, ideally, you're trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions such that everybody who satisfies the conditions falls under the category and that everybody who doesn't satisfy the conditions doesn't. In ordinary language, of course, it's notoriously hard to really do that. Defining a table is actually quite difficult in a necessary and sufficient-condition sense, but we can still say, “Well, a table is not by definition something that people sit on, right?” Someone could say, “Well, I suppose you could sit on a table, but that's not the definition in ordinary use in any language of which I'm aware.”

But why don't we actually go back to your real question. Which was..

Dwarkesh Patel

Overall, the left tail of society is being compressed, and the right tail is being expanded. Does feminism become more true over time?

Bryan Caplan

The answer is that we really need to look at all of the main measures to get an idea of this. With some of the ones that you're talking about, it does make more sense. As jobs become less physically dangerous, then at least you might say that things are less unfair to men. Although in the book, what I say is that even that is a bit more superficially complicated, at least on the surface. The immediate reaction is that society's less fair to men because they do the most dangerous jobs. Although I also say, “Yeah, but they get monetary compensation for that.” So, all things considered, you probably shouldn't think of it as unfair. It's something where it's reasonable to say, “Hey, wait a second, how come men are the ones that are enduring 90 percent of the workplace deaths” and say, “Well, because they're getting 90 percent of the combat pay.” Broadly construed it’s not mostly actual for combat.

So anyway, that's one area where you should be careful. But I can see the possibility there. I do have a section in the book where I go over what's happening over time. What I'll say is, well, one big thing that's happened over time is that people have become very hyper-concerned with the mistreatment of women, which means that feminism is becoming less true as a result because when people are really hyper-concerned that they might be unfair to someone, they are even less likely to be unfair to them. So I think that's one thing where society where feminisms become less true over time. Another area that I talk about and which I think really does tip the scales, although again, you really need to go through the book because I do try to work through a lot of different margins…

I think the one that really does settle it against feminism in today's age is precisely the level of false feminist accusations about unfairness. When we go over all the objective measures, then you say, well, it's close to a wash in terms of which gender is treated more or less fairly overall. But then you realize, “Yes, but there's one gender that has to endure a whole lot of grossly exaggerated hyperbolic accusations and unfairness and another gender that gets to make those accusations.” The gender that has to endure the unfair accusations is men, and the gender that gets to make them is women. Obviously, not all women make them, and not all men receive them. But still, if we're talking about the average fairness of the treatment of men and women or society, I say that this climate of false accusation and intimidation is what really tips it. It didn't have to be this way, Dwarkesh! [laughs] We could have just had conditions change without a whole lot of flinging of wildly inaccurate accusations, but that's not the world we're in.

Dwarkesh Patel

When would you say was the flipping point? Was there a particular decade that you thought “unbalanced things are equal now?”

Bryan Caplan

Yeah. So one of the things I say in the book is that there are a bunch of ways where you can say that women were treated less fairly in earlier decades, but there are aspects that are probably more important overall where women are treated worse now. The main one is paternal support for children. In 1940, the odds that you could count on the biological father of your children to help you to raise them was maybe 90%. Now it's probably more like 60%, 70%. So that's one of the main ways that I say that women probably are treated less fairly than men. And the unfairness has gotten worse over time.

Again, just understand this is not the kind of book that most people are used to where someone argues like a lawyer and they just say, look, I've got 20 arguments for why I'm right. And everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and doesn't have a leg to stand on. This is the kind of book that I liked to write where I really say, let's just calm down and just go through every issue separately, weigh each one on its merits. There are a bunch of points where someone could say, “Why do you concede that? That makes your argument weaker.” Well, I concede it because it's true! Then in the end, I have my overall judgment. I will just say that there are a number of books that are written in this terrible modern style of lawyerly reasoning, where you basically have a thesis that you just try to defend in every possible way. I don't write books like that. I try to write books that are honest and self-reflective, and where if there's some weakness in what I'm saying, I don't just acknowledge it if someone points it out; I try to be the first person to reveal it so that people feel like they can trust me.

It's my own conscience. I don't feel right when I say something not really quite right. I feel like I should’ve always said the other thing. So I try to just write with candor.

Dwarkesh Patel

Now, would you say that feminism in the United States is overcorrected but that it's still true in the global sense? In the way that, on average, across the world, women are treated more unfairly than men. Because if that's the case, then if the US is at the center of global feminism, then, of course, they're going to overcorrect here, but overall they're making the world a better place.

Bryan Caplan

So that is a much better argument. I would say that if we think about most areas of Europe, then I think that it's very similar to what's going on in the US. In the book, I do go over this especially. I start with Saudi Arabia, where it's really obvious what's going on and how poorly women are treated. But then I go over to India and China and just think about plausible rates of female infanticide. I think it is very likely that overall the treatment of women in India and China is more unfair than that of men. In Saudi Arabia, I'm almost sure that it is. In terms of “Is the US providing a useful corrective for the world while messing up things in the US?” It's possible. I think the problem is that it does discredit a lot of the reasonable points because the US just doesn’t focus on the really big issues. The amount of time that American feminists spend on female infanticide in China and India… I don’t think it would even be 1% of the rhetoric. It's just not something that they care about.

So I would say that there's more harm being done by the sheer distraction of putting so much emphasis upon small, exaggerated, or reverse problems that bother feminists in the first world while ignoring and indirectly causing people to forget or neglect actual serious problems in some other countries.

Positively shifting the Overton Window

Western Feminism Ignores Infanticide

Dwarkesh Patel

But let me apply the argument you make in Open Borders that you can effect change by shifting the Overton window. So advocating for open borders just shifts immigration policy slightly towards the open end. Can American feminists make the same point that through making the crazy arguments they make in America, they're making Saudi Arabia more liberal for women?

Bryan Caplan

I would say that when the arguments are crazy, then it's not clear that shifting the Overton window actually happens. That may be where you discredit the other view. In particular, I think what I say in that part of the book is that people generally confuse being radical with being unfriendly. And most of the harm that is done to radical causes is due to the unfriendliness rather than the radicalism. So in that case, I would say that feminism has a definite friendliness problem. It is not a movement that goes out of its way to go and make other people feel like they are respected, where even if you disagree with me, I want to be your friend and listen to what you have to say, and maybe we could go and come to some understanding. I think it is a movement where the main emotional tenure of the elites is, “We are totally right, and anyone who disagrees had better watch out.” So I think that there is a discrediting of it.

The other thing is just that I think there's too much cultural separation between the feminist movement as we know it and places like China and India, where I just don't see the attitude of being really angry about exaggerated or false complaints about unfair treatment of women in the United States is going to do anything for infanticide in India. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dwarkesh. Do you see much influence of Western feminism on infanticide in India?

Dwarkesh Patel

I don’t know, but maybe yes. More generally, one of the common arguments that libertarians make about India and its elites is, “Oh, all of India's elites go study in Oxford or something, and they learn about the regulations the West is adopting that make no sense for a country with $2,000 GDP per capita.” I feel like some of the things could be true of feminism where all these Indian elites go to American universities and UK universities where they learn about radical feminism, and they go back, and they adopt some of these things.

Bryan Caplan

Yes, although you might remember what Alex Tabarrok says about these very things. You can go to India and have people pushing paper straws on you, and yet the streets are still totally covered in trash. In fact, the pushing of the paper straws probably actually distracts people from the much more serious problem of the horrible trash, right? Again, I don't know enough about India to speak with any confidence here, but if you go and learn radical feminism in Western universities, come back to India and start complaining about how we need to have more female CEOs in a country where you have millions of female infanticides per year, I think it probably is like the paper straws problem where you are so focused on a trivial problem that maybe is not only a problem, is not even a problem at all. At the same time, that anger really blinds you to an actual, really serious problem that's going on. But you know India better than me, I could be wrong.

Why The Universe Hates Women

Dwarkesh Patel

I believe rape within a marriage is still legal in India and is still not recognized. Maybe it was just recently changed. Let's say this is an interview, and a feminist says, “Oh my gosh, okay Bryan, maybe you're right that society as a whole doesn't mistreat women, but maybe the cosmos mistreats women.” So women are forced to have children. All of these things combined make women's lives worse on average than men's lives. It's not because society mistreats them, but in some sense, there's still unfairness geared toward women. What do you make of this argument?

Bryan Caplan

So unfairness, where there's no human being that does it, seems like a very strange idea to me. Just from the get-go, well, so who was unfair to you? “The universe is unfair.” Then I mean, the correct term there is unfortunate, not unfair. So that aside, I would say it's a really interesting question. Who actually has better lives just as a matter of biological endowments, men or women? I mean, in terms of demonstrated preference, I think the overwhelming result is that most people just want to remain in whatever gender they're born in. So this is not actually transgenderism. This is like a genie wish. If you could change your gender just with a wish, costlessly, perfectly, I think a very large majority of people would still want to stay with whatever gender they have because it's part of their identity. It's some kind of endowment effect, status quo bias, or whatever. But then if you say, “Okay, yeah, right, fine. Like you, like you just want to stay whatever you were because that's your identity, but if you could put that aside, what would you want to be?” It's a tough question.

You can say, “Well, women have a harder personality to deal with because of higher neuroticism, and they've also got higher agreeableness.” But that gives them some other advantages in terms of getting along with other people. For example, men's disagreeableness makes it hard for men to just bite their tongues and shut up when someone's saying something they don't like. I think that is easier for women to do. You may have noticed that having to shut up and bite your tongue while someone around you says something stupid you don't like is actually a big part of life. That is one thing. Now, in terms of things that I feel that I would get out of being a woman, just being able to have as many kids as I wanted would matter a lot to me. So I only have four kids right now. If it were totally up to me, I would have had more kids. I think, as a woman, it would have been easy to do. [laughs] So again, you know, there is the issue. How are you going to find a guy that wants to have a lot of kids?

This is one where I've looked at the data on family size and what determines it. While both men and women seem to have a say on family size, it just looks like women's traits have a much larger effect. Men are more likely to say, “OK, fine, whatever. We'll do what you want to do on family size.” Whereas women seem to have much more pronounced preferences, which they then tend to get. I think that if I were a woman, I could have had more kids, and it would have been easier for me to do it. That would be something that matters to me. It's not something that matters to everybody, but that's something there. Again, there is just the nice fact of people caring about your suffering. In the book, I do talk about the ethos of women and children first, which is very pronounced. It’s a modern society where we can simultaneously have something like “women and children first”, but then also have a lot of rhetoric about how people don't care about women. It's like, “Hmm, that’s not right.”

Dwarkesh Patel

What do you think of this theory that maybe society cares a lot more about women suffering, but it sympathizes a lot more with men's success? If you think of a default character in a movie or a novel, at least for me, then the default is a man. Then maybe there's some victim that defaults as a woman. But I'd rather be the sympathy of some sort of success than get it for suffering.

Bryan Caplan

I mean, do you need sympathy for success? Or do you want admiration? I mean, I guess what I would say is that everybody's got suffering, and only a small share of people have any notable success. If all that you knew was you're going to be a man or woman, I would say, “Well, gee, if I'm a woman, then people will sympathize with my suffering, which is almost definitely coming because that's the human condition.” Whereas to have admiration for your success is something where it just affects a much smaller number of people. I know that hanging out in Austin among hyper-successful people may be biasing your sample a bit, but I do think it's believable that men get more unmitigated admiration for their success. Of course, there are also differences in the mating opportunities that you get for being a successful man versus a successful woman. So that is there too, but again, this is something that really is only relevant for a very small share of the population.

But then the argument is, “Well, that small share of the population matters so much in terms of the story we tell ourselves about our civilization or just in terms of who controls more resources overall.” So if being a woman billionaire is harder, maybe for biological reasons, maybe for the reasons of our society, you can say, “Well, that only affects a small percentage of women in society.” But on the other hand, billionaires matter a lot.

In terms of what life is like for most people, the main way they matter is that billionaires just provide awesome stuff. In terms of the stories that people tell, it's true that if you go and look at most classic movies or novels, the main characters are male. Even in cartoons, actually, the main characters traditionally have been male. But on the other hand, that’s just fiction. In terms of daily life. I'd rather have people be really concerned about me in real life but have my perspective underrepresented stories than the other way around.

Dwarkesh Patel

So what do you make of the argument that employers hold defects in women's personalities much more against them than they hold defects in men's personalities? I think Tyler cited some of this research in his new book on talent that being too agreeable or being too aggressive harms women more than it harms men.

Bryan Caplan

I would say that it's complicated in terms of willingness to fire. I think employers are much more willing to fire men. For defects and for insubordination. Another thing on the list is a small one, but I think that it is indicative of a broader trend. For people working at workplaces with dress codes, men are much more likely to be dinged on dress code violations than women because for men, there's a definite thing men are supposed to do. If you're not doing it, you are in violation. For women, on the other hand, it's like, “Well, gee, I mean, it seems kind of like that's not what you should be wearing, but I don't want to be the person that says anything about it. And who knows? Who am I to judge what a woman ought to be wearing on the job?” But a man, on the other hand, needs to be wearing a suit in 110-degree weather. What was the high this summer over in Austin? [laughter]

Dwarkesh Patel

Why do you think that women have gotten less happy since the sixties in America?

Bryan Caplan

Right. So the main thing I know about this is Stevenson and Wolfer's research on this. The main thing to remember is the magnitude. If I remember correctly, they find that in the sixties, women had about a two percentage point advantage relative to men in terms of their odds of saying they're very happy. 25% of men said they were very happy, then 27% of women in the sixties said that they were very happy. Whereas now, it seems like women have a two percentage point deficit relative to men. So now, if 25% of men say they're very happy, then 23% of women say they're very happy. It's always important in these papers to look at those magnitudes because the media coverage is going to say, “Oh, women are miserable now.” It's not that women are miserable now! We're talking about a two-percentage point difference. It's a data set large enough for this to actually be meaningful, but we do want to keep it in perspective in terms of what's really going on.

The paper probably actually goes over a bunch of stories and says the obvious ones are all wrong. That would be what Justin Wolfersustin especially would normally do. I think he's usually right that simple stories about something like this are wrong. In terms of what I would pursue if I read through the paper and reminded myself of what they found and then said, “Okay, well, what will work?” I think I would, on one end, focus on single moms because they’ll become much more common, and their lives really are hard. A rise in single motherhood is coming. I would guess that’s one important part of it. Then, I would also be wondering how much of it is actual feminism telling women that they should be unhappy because the world is unfair and that causes unhappiness. Again, I'm not saying that these are right. It's plausible to me. The main thing I would say about feminism causing unhappiness in the adherents is that it probably doesn't matter most for most self-identified feminists because most people just are not that intellectual and they don't think about their ideas very often. So it's one thing to say, look, if you believe you're going to hell, you'll be unhappy. It's like, well, if you believe it once a year, does it make you unhappy? If you remember, “Oh yeah, once a year, I think I'm going to hell.” The rest of the time, you don't think it.

On the other hand, the person who is always thinking, “I'm going to hell, I'm going to hell,” probably will be unhappy. So I think feminism is very likely to reduce the happiness of people who are feminist elites and take it really seriously, where they're talking about it all the time. That is likely to cause unhappiness. I'd be amazed if it didn't. But on the other hand, for the vast majority of people who say, “Yeah, I am a feminist. Moving on…” I don't think it's too likely to be messing up their lives.

Dwarkesh Patel

That raises an interesting possibility. This is not my theory, but let's run with this. So feminism has actually gotten more true over time, but it's precisely because of feminism. Maybe it's made elite women more unhappy. As you said earlier, the amount of single mothers has gone up. Maybe part of that is the reason, and part of that is because of feminist trends in terms of family formation. Maybe women prefer to be at home caring for children on average more, but then feminism encourages them to have careers, which makes them less happy. So if you add all these things up, plus mentorship, which men are less likely to give because of #metoo. So add all these things up, maybe they're the result of feminism, but they still make feminism more right. Would you agree with that?

Bryan Caplan

Yeah. If we go back to this definition of feminism and this theory that our society treats women less fairly than men, then if the story is that women have made a lot of false accusations against men and then men have responded by changing their behavior, that would seem to be a strange example of saying the society is treating women less fairly than men. It would seem to be a case that society is treating men unfairly, and this is having some negative side effects for women as well. But it's one where if you really were trying to draw the line… Well actually, here's actually one of the weaknesses of the definition that I proposed. So foot binding in China. From my understanding, the main drivers of foot binding in China were women. So women are binding feet, and they're also telling their daughters they have to have their feet bound. Men seemed to care less, actually, it was more of an intra-female abuse. This is one where you could say that in China, women are treated less fairly than men, even though the perpetrators are women. I think that does actually make sense. I would just say that the definition that we use in our society isn't really calibrated to deal with that kind of thing.

When it comes to what the right way to describe it would be, it just gets a bit confusing. It's useful just to say, all right, well, if women are mistreating women and that's what's making women's lives hard, how do we count that? I think I would just say that we don't have any really good way of counting it, and might be useful to just come up with a new word to describe this kind of thing.

Women's Tears Have Too Much Power

Dwarkesh Patel

What do you make of Hanania’s argument that women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas?

Bryan Caplan

Yeah. So we might want to back up a little bit and explain what the argument is. So Richard Hanania on his substack has a very famous essay where he points out that in fiction, when there is a mob of angry college students, it's very demographically diverse. But when you look at actual footage, it seems like women are highly overrepresented. He generalizes this by saying that a lot of what's going on in terms of cancel culture and related problems is that women are the main ones that get angry about these things, and people don't know what to do about it. So he, if I remember correctly, says that a man can, in a way, actually enjoy an argument with another man. Even if you lose or even if it's a physical fight, he says, you can sort of feel invigorated by it. We got through this. We resolved something. Whereas no guy feels this way about an argument with his wife. “What do I need to do in order for this argument to end as soon as possible” would be a more normal reaction. This sort of generalizes to the majority of social arguments, specifically ones that involve someone being offended or angry, or hurt. He says a lot of what's going on is that it is mainly women that are presenting these complaints and that it's hard to deal with it because men don't want to argue with angry women. It just makes them feel bad. It's sort of a no-win situation. So anyway, that is Hanania's argument. Overall, it seemed pretty plausible to me. I haven't thought about it that much more, but it's one that does seem to make a fair bit of sense in terms of just what I'm writing about feminism.

You know, one really striking thing is just how one-sided this conversation is. It is a conversation where women have complaints, and men mostly just listen in silence. Ofcourse, men will sometimes complain amongst each other when women aren't around. It's not a real dialogue where women have complaints about men, and then men are very eager to say, “Oh, but I have something I would like to say in rebuttal to that.” A lot of it is what he calls “women's tears.” It's sadness, but mingled with or supported by intimidation: “If you don't give me what I want, if you don't pretend that you agree with me, I will be very angry, and I will be fairly sad.” So you should be afraid. I think a lot of what's probably going on with the rhetorical dominance of feminism, is that people are just afraid to argue against it because, in a way, it does sort of violate the women and children first ethos. If women complain about something, you aren't supposed to go and say, “I disagree. Your complaints are unjustified.” You're supposed to say, “Look, what can I do to make it better?”

Dwarkesh Patel

But that seems like a good description of race issues and class issues as well.

Bryan Caplan

I mean, the main difference there is that there are a lot of people who have a lot more firsthand experience of intergender relations, and they spend a lot more time in intergender relations than they spend in all of the other ones. So I mean, the dynamic is probably pretty similar, but in terms of the really negative firsthand experience that men have, Hanania probably is right about that. Then that generalizes to bigger issues.

Dwarkesh Patel

You have an essay about endogenous sexism. Could this just not be the cause of society being unfair to a woman? We start off with men being in power, they get sexist just because they're around other men and they like them more. So then, the starting position matters a lot, even if men aren't trying to be sexist.

Bryan Caplan

So let me just back up and explain the argument. The argument says to imagine that in reality, men and women are equally good in absolutely every way, but people are more likely to have close friends with their own gender, (which is totally true). So if I remember the essay, I think that for close male friends, the male-to-female ratio was 6:1, and for women, it was 4:1. So most people's close friends are of the same gender. When you meet these people, and they're your close friends, you know them really well. Furthermore, because you have handpicked them, you're going to think well of them. So then the question is, “What about people of the opposite gender? What will your interaction with them be like?” What I point out is that a lot of the opposite gender you hang out with will be the spouses and partners of your friends.

On average, you're going to think worse of them because you didn't pick them. Basically, there are two filters there: I like you because you're my friend, and I put up with your partner because that person is your partner. So this means that the women that men are around are going to be the partners of their friends. They're not going to like them less and think less of them than they think of their friends. On the other hand, the partners of women's friends will be men, and women will get to know them and say, “Wow, they're not that great. They're at least kind of disappointing relative to my same-gender friends.” So anyway, this is an argument about how the illusion of your own gender being superior could arise.

Now, as to whether this is actually the right story, I leave that open. This was just more of a thought experiment to understand what could happen here. Could this actually explain the unfair treatment of women in society? Especially if we start off with men being the gatekeepers for most of the business world? It's totally plausible that it could. That's why we really want to go to the data and see what we actually find. In the data I know of, the evidence of women earning less money than men while doing the same job is quite low. So there's very little gender disparity in earnings once you make the obvious statistical adjustments for being in the same occupation. Again, the main area that probably actually has gotten worse for women is mentoring. Mentoring is partly based on friendship. I like this person. I like working with them. So I will go and help them to go and acquire more human capital on the job. This is one that feminism has visibly messed up, and many feminists will, in a strange way, admit that they have done it while not taking responsibility for the harm. I've got an essay on that in the book as well.

Looking at the evidence, it is totally standard now for male managers to admit that they are reluctant to mentor female employees because they're so worried. When I go and track down a bunch of feminist reactions to this, they basically just say, “I can't believe how horrible these guys are.” But it’s like, look, you're asking them for a favor to get mentorship. They're scared. If someone's scared, do you really want to yell at them more and offer more mostly empty threats? It's really hard to scare someone into doing something this informal, so you really do need to win them over.

Dwarkesh Patel

Tactically, that might be correct, but it seems to just be a matter of “Is their argument justified?” I can see why they'd be frustrated. Obviously, you want to point out when there's a sexual harassment allegation, and that may have the effect of less mentorship.

Bryan Caplan

Well, is it obvious that you want to point that out? Part of what I’m saying is that there are different perceptions here. There are differences of opinion. If you want to get along with people, a lot of it is saying, “How does it seem from the other person's point of view?” Obviously, do not assume that the most hypersensitive person is correct. So much of the problem with mentorship comes down to hypersensitivity. I've got another piece in the book where I talk about misunderstandings and how we have so much lost sight of this very possibility. When there's a conflict between two people, who's right and who's wrong?

Ofcourse, it could be that one person is the conscious malefactor and the other person is an obvious victim that no one could deny. That does happen sometimes. But much more often in the real world, there's a misunderstanding where each person, because of the imperfection of the human mind, has the inability to go and get inside another person's head. To each person, it seems like they're in the right and the other person is in the wrong, and one of the most helpful ways for people to get along with each other is to realize that this is the norm.

Most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings, not by deliberate wrongdoing. This is the way the people who keep their friends keep their friends. If any time there's a conflict with a friend, you assume that you're right and your friend is in the wrong, and you demand an immediate abject apology, you're going to be losing friends left and right. It is a foolish person who does that. Friendship is more important than any particular issue. This is not only my personal view, it is the advice that I give to everyone listening. Keep your friends, bend over backward in order to keep your friends, and realize that most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings. It's not the other person is going out of their way to hurt you. They probably don't see it that way. If you just insist, “I'm right, I demand a full apology and admission of your wrongdoing,” you're probably going to be losing friends, and that’s a bad idea. The same thing I think is going on in workplaces where there is an ideology saying that we should take the side of the most hypersensitive person. This is not a good approach for human beings to get along with each other.

Dwarkesh Patel

Yeah. That's very wise. What do you make the argument that a lot of these professions that are dominated by men are not intrinsically things that must appeal to men, but the way that they are taught or advertised is very conducive to what males find interesting? So take computer science, for example; there are claims that you could teach that or economics in a way that focuses on the implications on people from those practices rather than just focusing on the abstractions or the “thing-focused stuff.” So the argument is these things shouldn't be inherently interesting to men. It's just in the way they are taught.

Bryan Caplan

The word inherently is so overused. It's one where you say, "Well, are you saying that inherently X?” Then someone says, “Well, not inherently X, just you'd have to bend over backward and move heaven and earth for it not to be. So I guess it's not really inherent.” That is a lot of what is worth pointing out. So if you're going to put the standard to that level, then it's going to be hard to find differences. You could say, “There's absolutely no way under the sun to go and teach math in a less male way.” On the other hand, maybe we should ask, “Is it reasonable to expect the whole world to revolve around making every subject equally appealing to men and women?” That's an unreasonable demand. If there's a subject like math that is male-dominated, the reasonable thing is to say, “Well, if you want to get in on that, you're going to need to go and become simpatico with the mindset of the people that are already there and then push the margin.” You can say that it’s “so unfair that male ways of doing math are dominant.” Or maybe you could say that it's unfair for someone who's just shown up to demand that an entire discipline change its way of doing things to make you feel better about it. Obviously, there are large areas that are very female-dominated, and there's no pressure on women to go and change the way that flower arranging is done, or cooking in order to make it more welcoming to men.

So this is one where if you had a really high bar for how things are fair, then unless the rigorous conditions are met, you're going to see a lot of unfairness in the world. Although even then, as long as you have an equally high bar for both men and women, I don't think it's going to make feminism any more true by my definition. I also just say, I think these really high bars are unreasonable. If a friend had these bars of standards saying, “Look, why is it that when we meet for food, we have to go and meet at standard hours of breakfast, lunch, and dinner? I actually like meeting in the middle of the night. Why can’t we have half of the time be my way?” You respond, “Well yeah, but you're only one person, so why should I change?” It depends upon what subfield you're in as well. There are actually groups of people really like hanging out in the middle of the night, so if you ask, “Why is it we always have to meet in the middle of the night? Why can't we do it my way?” You are entering into a subculture that works this way. You could demand that we totally change our way of being to accommodate you, but it just seems like an unreasonable imposition on the people who are already here.

Now, when you sort of go through the list of different things that people think of as making something a male or a not-male field, sometimes people will treat things like acting like there's an objectively correct answer as a male trait. If that's a male trait, then we need to keep that trait because that is vital to really any field where there are right and wrong answers. I mean, that's an area where I am very tempted rhetorically to say, “It's just so sexist to say that it's male to think that things are right and wrong. I think that is a trait of both genders”. In a way, I end the essay stating, “Yes, these are not male; not only do they not make a male monopoly, but they are also not uniquely male virtues. They are virtues that can and should be enjoyed by all human beings.” At the same time, you could ask whether virtues are equally represented by both genders and well, that's an empirical question. We have to look at that.

Bryan Performs Standup Comedy!

Dwarkesh Patel

We're shifting subjects. You recently performed at the Comedy Cellar. How was that experience?

Bryan Caplan

Yeah, that was super fun and a big challenge! I am a professional public speaker. Standup comedy is professional public speaking. I was curious about how much transfer of learning there would be. How many of the things that I know as a regular public speaker can I take with me to do standup comedy? I'm also just a big fan of standup comedy– if you know me personally, I just find life constantly funny.

Dwarkesh Patel

Yes, I can confirm that. You're a very pleasant person to be around.

Bryan Caplan

Life is funny to me. I like pointing out funny things. I like using my imagination. A lot of comedy is just imagination and saying, look, “Imagine that was the opposite way. What would that be like?” Well, actually, just to back up again: during COVID, I did just create a wiki of comedy ideas just on the idea that maybe one day I'll go and do standup comedy. Comedy Cellar actually has a podcast, kind of like Joe Rogan, where comedians go and talk about serious issues. I was invited to that, and as a result, I was able to talk my way into getting to perform on the actual live stage of the biggest comedy club in New York. The main thing I could say about my performance is that it was me and nine professional comedians, and I don't think I was obviously the worst person. So that felt pretty good.

Dwarkesh Patel

It was a pretty good performance.

Bryan Caplan

I felt good about it! There were some main differences that I realized between the kind of public speaking I was used to doing and what I actually did there. One is the importance of memorizing the script. It just looks a lot worse if you're reading off a note. Normally I have some basic notes, and then I ad-lib. I don't memorize. The only time I have a script is if I have a very time-constrained debate, then I’d normally write an opening statement, but otherwise, I don't. The thing with comedy is it depends so heavily upon exact word choice. You could go and put the same sentence into Google Translate and then back-translate it and get another sentence that is synonymous but isn't funny at all. That was something that I was very mindful of. Then obviously, there are things like timing and being able to read an audience (which I'm more used to). That was what was so hard during COVID–– not being able to look at the faces of a live audience. I can see their eyes, but I can't tell their emotions or reactions to their eyes. I don't know whether I should talk more or less about something. I don't know whether they're angry or annoyed or curious or bored. So these are all things that I would normally be adjusting my talk for in normal public speaking. But with comedy, it's a bit hard to do.

What successful comedians actually do is they try it in a bunch of different ways, and then they remember which ways work and which ones don't. Then they just keep tweaking it, so finally, when they do the Netflix special, they have basically done A/B testing on a hundred different audiences, and then it sounds great–– but the first time? Not that funny.

Dwarkesh Patel

It didn't occur to me until you mentioned it, but it makes a lot of sense that there are transfers of learning there in both disciplines. There are a lot of hypotheticals, non-extra events, and putting things in strange situations to see what the result is…

Bryan Caplan

A lot of it is just not having stage fright. So I probably had just a tiny bit of stage fright at the Comedy Cellar, which normally I would have basically zero, but there it was a little bit different because it's like, “Am I going to forget something?” I actually have a joke in the set about how nothing is scarier than staying silent while thousands of people stare at you. So that was a self-referential joke that I worked in there.

Dwarkesh Patel

I can't remember if it was Robin Hanson who said this, but didn't he have a theory about how the reason we have stage fright is because somehow, you're showing dominance or status, and you don't want to do that if you're not actually the most confident.

Bryan Caplan

You're making a bid for status. In the ancestral environment, we're in small groups of 20-40 people. If you go and want to speak, you're saying, “I'm one of the most important people in this band here.” If you're not, or if there are a lot of people voicing that that guy is not important, then who knows? They might shove you off the cliff the next time they get a chance. So yeah, watch out.

Affirmative Action is Philanthropic Propaganda

Dwarkesh Patel

I wonder if this explains the cringe emotion. When somebody makes a bid for status, and it's not deserved. Okay, I want to talk about discrimination. So as you know, there's a Supreme court case about Harvard and affirmative action. You might also know that a lot of companies have filed a brief in favor of Harvard, saying that affirmative action is necessary for them to hire diverse work for ourselves, including Apple, Lyft, General Motors. So what is the explanation for corporations wanting to extend affirmative action? Or are they just saying this, but they don't want it?

Bryan Caplan

If those individual corporations could press a button that would immunize them from all employment lawsuits, I think they would press it. When you look at their behavior, they don't just give in whenever they get sued. They have a normal team of lawyers that try to minimize the damage to the company and pay as little as possible to make the problem go away. So I think really what's going on is public relations. They are trying to be on that team. As to whether it's public relations vis a vis their consumers or public relations vis a vis other people in the executive boardroom is an interesting question. I think these days, it probably is more of the latter. Although even under Reagan, there were a bunch of major corporations that did make a similar statement saying that they wanted affirmative action to continue. I think that the real story is that they want to get the status of saying, “we are really in favor of this. We love this stuff.” But at the same time, if it just went away, they wouldn't voluntarily adopt a policy where they give you a right to go and sue them for mistreatment.

I think there would still be a lot of propaganda. I mean, here's the general thing. You think about this as a species of corporate philanthropy sticking your neck out in favor of a broad social cause. Some people disagree and say that it's self-interest. They say, “Look, the odds that even Apple is going to change the Supreme Court's mind is super low.” So I don't think it's that. Basically, what they're doing is a kind of philanthropy. What's the deal with corporate philanthropy? The deal with corporate philanthropy is you are trying to go and, first of all, make the public like you, but also, you're trying to look good and jockey for influence within your own company. One really striking thing about corporate philanthropy is when you look closer, normally, they spend way more resources marketing the philanthropy and letting everyone know, “Oh, we did all this philanthropy!” Then they actually spend on philanthropy.

So I had a friend who was a marketing person in charge of publicizing her company's philanthropy. They gave away about a thousand dollars a year to the Girl Scouts, and she had a hundred thousand dollars salary telling everyone about how great they were for giving this money to the Girl Scouts. So I think that's the real story. Get maximally cynical. I think without denying the fact that there are true believers now in corporate boardrooms who are pushing it past the point of profitability. The cost of philanthropy is just the production budget of the TV commercial. A rounding error. The donations are a rounding error, and then they go, “Hey, everyone, look at us. We're so freaking philanthropic!”

Peer effects as the Only Real Education

Dwarkesh Patel

Okay. So this question is one that Tyler actually suggested I ask you. So in The Myth of the Rational Voter, you say that education makes you more pro-free market. Now, this may have changed in the meantime, but let's just say that's still true. If you're not really learning anything, why is education making you more free market?

Bryan Caplan

It's particularly striking that even people who don't seem to take any economics classes are involved. I think that the best story is about peer effects. When you go to college, you're around other peers who though not pro-market, are less anti-market than the general population. The thing about peer effects is that they really are a double-edged sword from a social point of view. Think about this. Right now, if you are one of the 1% of non-Mormons that goes to Brigham Young University, what do you think the odds are that you'll convert to Mormonism?

Dwarkesh Patel

Higher than normal.

Bryan Caplan

Yeah. I don't know the numbers, but I think it's pretty high. But suppose that Brigham Young let in all the non-Mormons. What would Brigham Young do for conversion to Mormonism? Probably very little. Furthermore, you realize, “Huh, well, what if those Mormons at Brigham Young were dispersed among a bunch of other schools where they were that were a minority?” Seems quite plausible. They'd be making a lot more converts over there. So if you achieve your peer effects by segregation (which is literally what college does, it takes one part of society and segregates it from another part of society physically when you're in school, and then there's social segregation caused by the fact that people want to hang out with other people in their own social circles, your own education levels, etc.), in that case, in terms of whether or not education actually makes society overall pro-free market, I think it's totally unclear because, basically, when people go to college, they make each other more pro-free market. At the same time, they remove the possibility of influencing people of other social classes who don't go to college, who probably then influence each other and make each other less free market. I think that's the most plausible story.

Dwarkesh Patel

What about the argument that the people who go to elite universities are people who are going to control things? If you can engineer a situation in which the peer effects in some particular direction are very strong at Harvard (maybe because the upper class is very liberal or woke), they make the underclass even more woke, and then it’s a reinforcing cycle after every generation of people who come into college. Then that still matters a lot, even though presumably somebody becomes more right-wing once they don’t go to Harvard because there are no peers there. But it doesn't matter. They're not going to be an elite, or it doesn't matter as much.

Bryan Caplan

It could be, although what we've seen is that we now just have very big gaps between elite opinion and mass opinion. Of course, it is a democracy. If you want to run for office, that is a reason to go and say, “Yeah, what is the actual common view here? Not just the view that is common among elites.” However, I will say that this is a topic that deserves a lot more study. Now the other thing to question is, “Wouldn't there be peer effects even without college?” If elites didn't go to college and instead they went and did elite apprenticeships at top corporations instead, I think you'd still wind up getting a very similar elite subculture. I think that this kind of social segregation is very natural in every human society. Of course, you can see it under communism very strongly where it's like, “I don't want my kid going and playing with a kid whose parents aren't in the communist party.” So every society has this kind of thing.

Now, if you push the dynamics enough…. let's put it this way. If you were the prophet of the Mormon religion, what would be the very best thing for you to do to maximize the spread of Mormonism? It is not at all clear to me that trying to get all Mormons to go bring them young is a good strategy.

Dwarkesh Patel

I wonder if there are nonlinear dynamics to this.

Bryan Caplan

Yeah. Well, there's gotta be, right? But as soon as you're talking about nonlinear dynamics, those are truly hard to understand. So I would just say to keep a much more open mind about this, and if anyone is listening and wants to do research on this, that sounds cool, I'll read it.

Dwarkesh Patel

Right. I remember you saying that one of the things you're trying to do with your books is influence the common view of elite opinion. So in that sense, there are elite subcultures in every society, but they're not the same elite subcultures, and therefore you might care very much about which particular subculture it is.

Bryan Caplan

Notice that that's one where I'm taking it as a given that we have the current segregation, and I'm going to try to go and take advantage of it. But if it were a question of if I could change the dial of what kind of segregation we have, then it's much less clear.

The Idiocy of Student Loan Forgiveness

Dwarkesh Patel

Student loan forgiveness. What is your reaction?

Bryan Caplan

Oh, give me a freaking break. This is one subject where I think it's very hard to find almost any economist, no matter how left-wing and progressive, who really wants to stick their necks out and defend this garbage. Look, it's a regressive transfer. Why then? Why is it that someone who is left-wing or progressive would go and favor it? Maybe it’s because people who have a lot of education and colleges are on our team, and we just want to go and help our team. Obviously, the forgiveness really means, “We're going to go and transfer the cost of this debt from the elites that actually ran up the bill to the general population.” Which includes, of course, a whole lot of people who did not go to college and did not get whatever premium that you got out of it. So there's that. In terms of efficiency, since the people have already gotten the education, you're not even “increasing the amount of education” if you really think that's good. The only margin that is really increasing education is how it's making people think, “Well, maybe there'll be another round of debt forgiveness later on, so I'll rack up more debt. The actual true price of education is less than it seems to be.” Although even there, you have to say, “Huh, well, but could people knowing this and the great willingness to borrow actually wind up increasing the ban for college and raising tuition further?” There's good evidence for that. Not 100%, but still a substantial degree.

Again, just to back up–– that can be my catchphrase [laughter]. So I have a book called The Case Against Education, and my view is much more extreme than that of almost any normal economist who opposes student loan debt forgiveness. I think that the real problem with education is that we have way too much of it. Most of it is very socially wasteful. What we're doing with student loan forgiveness is we're basically going and transferring money to people who wasted a lot of social resources. The story that you are on the slippery slope to free college for all is, in a way, the best argument in favor of it. If you thought that free college for all was a good idea, then this puts us on that slippery slope.

It’s terrible because the real problem with education is that we just spend way too many years in school. It is generally not socially useful. The main reason why it's going on is that it’s a way of stamping people's foreheads, saying that they are better than their competitors, and to not throw their application in the trash. The more education we get, the more you need to not have your application thrown in the trash. Credential inflation. Since we're talking a lot about inflation these days, the central organizing idea of what's so wasteful about education in my book is credential inflation. When everyone has a college degree, nobody does, right? This analogy is very good. Can you make a country rich just by giving everybody a trillion dollars? You cannot. All that happens is you wind up raising prices, and you cause a lot of harm in the process. I say the same thing is going on with the multiplication of credentials.

Dwarkesh Patel

Let me ask you about that. Because I think for the last 10 years, the proportion of Americans who are getting college degrees hasn’t gone up, right? Doesn't the signaling theory imply that it should be going up as a credential gets diluted?

Bryan Caplan

So actually, if it doesn't go up, then it's not getting diluted. But here's the actual story and what's been going on during the last 10 years… I have a bunch of bets on this, actually, and I just won the first one. When you see that the share that's going to college is going down, that's counting community college, right? It's community college that has fallen a bit, which makes sense because the signal sent by community college is barely better than nothing, right? Except in a few disciplines like nursing, and a few occupations similar to that. But for four-year college attendance, it's actually continuing to rise. The bets that I have are all along the lines of “Attendance in traditional four-year brick and mortar colleges will fall no more than 10%.” I have a whole series of these bets, each with 10-year maturities. So I just won the first one, and I think I'm just going to win a whole bunch of other ones.

Dwarkesh Patel

Does your undefeated bet record make you more hesitant to take bets? Because getting the first loss and seeing 52-1 will just be a huge [Bryan interrupts]

Bryan Caplan

Yeah, I would be lying if I said it didn't change my emotions. I do have a record of 23 wins for 23 bets that have resolved. It is fun to be able to go and say that. To say I've got 29 out of 30 bets won wouldn't sound as good. At the same time, I still am totally willing to make bets. The thing about bets is that it's not like they just come fall into your lap. You really have to aggressively seek them out because hardly anyone wants to bet. At this point, you might think that some people would want to bet me just basically saying, “Well, if I beat him, I'll be the guy that beat him. And if I lose, then who's ever heard of me anyway? Who cares?” But even that doesn't really do very much. The bet that I'm likely to lose is a global warming bet with the standup economist, Yoram Bauman. So that's one where he gave me three to one odds initially. So I was expecting to lose. He very much enjoys running annual victory laps on Twitter without ever mentioning, “Yeah, well, you did give me odds because I wasn't saying that I was convinced. I was saying that I thought that other people were overconfident”. But that's his right to go and run his victory laps.

Dwarkesh Patel

You're like a UFC fighter who hasn't lost. I don't know if you know Khabib Nurmagomedov? He retired before he lost a single fight, I believe. I think he said his reason was, “Oh, my mother doesn't want me to fight anymore.” [laughs] But one wonders. Are you hopeful that right-wing governments are seeing education polarization and loan forgiveness as a transfer of wealth toward left-wing elites? Are you hopeful that they’ll implement education austerity?

Bryan Caplan

Barely. Just to back up, the big policy reform that I push in The Case Against Education is education austerity, which means spending less on education and making education less accessible. Making it less accessible, if I am correct, will be socially desirable, because it will basically mean that credential inflation will be reversed, and people will be able to get the jobs they were going to get anyway while spending fewer years of their lives in school learning stuff that is not very useful. The main reason that I'm skeptical about this is that even in states where the state government is very right-wing, it seems that the prestige of state university systems is sufficiently high that politicians generally don't want to challenge it.

In Texas, we both were hanging out around the University of Texas campus, and the state capitol is just a 20-minute walk away. It seems like the governor of Texas does not want to have a throwdown with the president of the University of Texas and say, “Hey, we're sick of this stuff.” Why not? Probably because the governor of Texas thinks that UT, with its great football team, is really popular and that he can't beat them. It’d be hard for him to say, “We're going to pass a bill saying that all the athletics of UT are fully funded, but we are going to go and get rid of the following departments.” It's hard to go and make that happen. The president of UT could probably get the football coach to say, “We stand arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder with our fat studies department,” or whatever. So that is the concern.

Florida is a little bit different. It does seem like DeSantis is trying to go and at least make some symbolic efforts against overwhelming left-wing bias at the University of Florida. But as far as I know, he isn’t doing anything about their budgets, which I think they really care about. You can pass all the laws you want, but if you don't actually mess with their money, then I don't think they're going to care that much. The main change that I could plausibly see is defunding the least popular departments while saying we're going to keep the total budget of the school the same. So say, “In the state budget, we are slashing the budgets of the English department, women's studies department, ethnic studies department, sociology,” basically any subject that a normal voter would laugh at when you set when you pronounce the name of the department, maybe they could get away with that. In a way, it just seems too strategic and requires just too much attention from politicians to make them realize this. But, that's the easiest thing to see.

Dwarkesh Patel

This could include making them cosign the loan for student loans that they had to pay out of their endowments, right?

Bryan Caplan

Right. Again, that's one that's just so easy to admit to, demagogue, and say, “Oh, so what about this poor student who couldn't do it? Now no school wants to accept him because they don't want to be responsible for it.” If you go and read Lyndon Johnson's original speech in favor of student loans, it just takes the social desirability bias dial and turns it up to the absolute deafening maximum. I can't remember Lyndon Johnson's accent, but let's give him this accent.“I believe that in America, no student should ever be denied full access to the maximum opportunities of education merely because they were born in a family that was too poor to afford it. There is no price too high, no sacrifice too great.” Oh, God. That's the kind of weaponized nuclear rhetoric that politicians will deploy to defend this stuff. Yeah, it's really what I'm up against. That stuff that is good doesn't sound good. I was turning Lyndon Johnson into Bill Clinton. I just realized they're the same Texan––

Why Society is Becoming Mentally Ill

Dwarkesh Patel

Yeah, I might be giving that speech from the bathroom every day, I don't even know if you’ve heard the story [laughs]. Why do you think young people are getting more anxious and have a higher incidence of neuroticism overall?

Bryan Caplan

My first pass on this is always that it's an artifact of measurement to the medicalization of society. It's basically just measurement. By modern measures, there was no neuroticism, and there were no psychiatric problems 200 years ago because there were no psychiatrists. If you went back 200 years ago and measured it, you say, “Well, the number of people in psychiatry offices is zero, so it doesn't exist here.” Then we go and expand it. We really went out of our way to make access super easy, to have a big center on every campus, to de-stigmatize, and at the same time to stigmatize the traditional subsidies for psychiatry like religion. Traditionally, when you have a problem, you go and talk to your priest. If you stigmatize that, that results in something like, “Well, I can't talk to a priest. They're scumbags now, I can't talk to them. So who can I talk to? I can go to the counseling center. I can do that.” However, there are some measures where the level of neuroticism is not just measuring people going to a psychiatrist's office. We actually see this in suicide rates. Although there… I have a piece where I go over the last 60 or 70 years of suicide rates. It's really complicated, Dwarkesh.

Dwarkesh Patel

Oh, really?

Bryan Caplan

Yeah. So basically, suicide rates were falling from 1970-2000 and then have had a big rebound since then. If I remember, I think suicide rates now are pretty similar to what they were in the fifties. I'd have to go back and double-check those numbers, but that's what I remember. You’d have to have a really complicated theory, or you could just have a bunch of ad hoc theories. Maybe it was World War II and the trauma of that while also being married to a veteran with trauma that could mess women up and make them kill themselves. Then that changed, and then something else happened.

So the Jonathan Haidt case of keeping kids from playing outside by infantilizing them or making them really anxious doesn't fit with anything from the fifties. You could argue, “Well, in the fifties, they were really good in terms of unsupervised play, but they were really bad in terms of something else.”I mean, when people talk about this stuff, what really strikes me is that I felt like I learned more from just going and looking at the time series as far back as it goes than from every person that pontificated about what's really going on. Just to realize the numbers are complicated; no obvious story fits. It would be really ideologically convenient for me to say feminism is leading women to kill themselves. But the numbers don't work. So that's wrong.

Immigration & the Ultra-long Term

Dwarkesh Patel

How persistent are the harms of immigration restriction? If the world is getting wealthier by itself anyways, does it really matter if it'll take a few more decades than it would have? You could transfer them here now, or you could just wait for economic growth to do its thing there.

Bryan Caplan

Does it really matter if we miss a hundred trillion dollars during the time that people are poorer than they're probably ever going to be again? Yeah, I think it really does matter, I’ll go with that. Just to back up, in Open Borders, I go over what I consider to be the most powerful argument in favor of immigration. It all just comes down to this. We know for a fact, undeniably, that if you go and take a very poor worker from a poor country and move them to a rich country, almost overnight, their pay multiplies many times. This is something that you cannot deny while looking at the facts. So the question is, why can we make a Haitian suddenly earn 20 times as much money just by moving into Miami? He hasn't even learned English yet, but he's still making 20 times as much money as he was back in Haiti.

The textbook economic explanation is we pay immigrants more in rich countries because their productivity is so much more than it was back home. Productivity is much higher in rich countries for everyone. Most of the reason why Haitians are poor is not that there's anything wrong with individual Haitians. Most of the reason is that there's something really wrong with Haiti. If we were to go and get deposited in Port de Prince, Dwarkesh, we'd be struggling to get out in existence as well. What's messed up is Haiti, not Haitians primarily. Now, this is basically undeniable. The part that is debatable is: is this scalable?

We can make one Haitian vastly better off just by going and moving them to the U.S., and it pays for itself because he's more productive. Could we go and move a million Haitians? Yeah. Ten million? This is where people might start saying that maybe it's not really scalable. In the book, a lot of the argument is that, really, it's totally scalable, and this is just a massive missed opportunity where we really could go and rescue hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, from poverty in a short amount of time. We can essentially just fast forward from right now to this future that you're talking about. How valuable is this? Well, if you're someone who thinks on million-year timescales, then not so valuable. If you're someone who thinks on the timescale of dramatically improving the lives of billions of people over the next hundred years, then yeah, it's fantastic. On top of this, it’s worth pointing out that it’s almost certain that right now, we are missing some of the greatest human talents. They’re trapped in some poor village in India or China, and we'll never find out what their accomplishment is. If you think that we are one day going to beat death, it is quite likely that the guy that could have beaten death 5 or 10 years earlier is in some poor village in India or China. So by not allowing immigration, that person is not going to get to beat death. If we're going to beat death, we'll beat it eventually. But just to shave 5 or 10 years off of that, this matters a lot to me. Those 5 or 10 years really make a difference. If the technology just freezes people at the age they're at, I want to get frozen really quick because I'm going downhill.

Dwarkesh, even for you, 5 or 10 years, it's a big difference. If you are an ultra-long-termist, then I guess that you could say Open Borders is not that big of a deal. But in terms of doable policy changes that will lead to the increase of human wealth of hundreds of trillions of dollars in this century, then it's the best I know of.

Why Cowen’s Talent Scouting Strategy is Ludicrous

Dwarkesh Patel

Speaking of talent, Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross have a new book about it. One of the implications the book makes is that if talent spotting is something that you can do pretty reliably with a 1500-word essay and a Zoom call, then doesn't that imply that college is not necessarily that much about signaling because you don't need four years of cognitively demanding pointless work? There's clearly a more convenient way to just get that signal for identifying talent.

Bryan Caplan

This goes back to a very long-running argument from Tyler. Tyler has a lot of objections to my book, The Case against Education, but his central one comes down to this: “Look, Bryan, I hire people; you don't.” It’s basically, “I hire people, you don't, and I will just tell you as a fact that I know after a couple of months whether a worker is good or not, and therefore signaling really cannot be very important. End of story.” Pulling rank. This is the argument that Tyler has right now. There are a few different responses to this. The one that is most pleasant and most flattering is to say, “All right, well look, Tyler, you are one employer in a million. You're fantastic. You have incredible capabilities. You can do this, but you're just one person. You're not involved in hiring most people, and most employers are nowhere near as good at you as spotting talent, so you're still wrong.” That is sthe easiest thing to say. In terms of more fundamental arguments, I would say that the idea that you can spot talent with a Zoom call and a 1500-word essay is ludicrous. The essay can be forged, obviously. You could put them in a testing center, and even then, if a dream job hangs in the balance, people will figure out a way to cheat on that. Then in terms of the Zoom call…. Yeah, no. I have been hiring artists who are admittedly nefarious and unreliable. What I found is that even work product is not that good of a predictor because someone who really wants to get a job can do five great pages in a timely manner, but then they keep you waiting for years for what you really want out of them. So it's just not that easy. Not even close.

I think the better argument is not saying that we can find talent with the Zoom call and the essay, but rather we can find talent by hiring people and watching them for a couple of months. That makes more sense. The problem with that is that it is incredibly expensive to go and hire people and watch them for a couple of months. You get a stack of applications, hundreds of people think, and what you are doing there is trying to figure out ways to say no as quickly as possible and narrow it down. You might do this knowing full well that there are three awesome people you've just thrown away. Because “Yeah, well, I threw 3 awesome people away, and I also threw away 294 terrible people, and I don't have any way of finding those other people.” So I call this the diamonds in the rough problem, and I say that this is a lot of the reason why signaling matters so much; it's a way of getting out of the undifferentiated mass of people who may be good (who knows?), and into this better pool. Now, I do also say that another big error in Tyler's “I just watched him for a couple of months story” is that there is very strong evidence that, for multiple reasons, hardly any employer does the strategy of hire, watch, and then fire if you're disappointing. The simplest reason is maybe you're at the 45th percentile of expectations, so then it's like, “Well, he's kind of disappointing, but it's not worth going back to the drawing board again.” There are also a lot of social and emotional problems with firing people. People do not like firing, and then on top of it, of course, there are legal problems, which should not be discounted.

Dwarkesh Patel

Isn't this just what an internship is, though?

Bryan Caplan

Well, remember, when you apply for an internship, does everybody get the internship?

Dwarkesh Patel

True, but you can have a lower bar for the internship, so then it's like a call option on being able to hire them.

Bryan Caplan

Yes. A lot of what people are signaling is not just intelligence, it's not even work ethic; it's just sheer conformity. Here's the issue: you might ask, why can't I just take my Harvard acceptance letter and get hired by Goldman Sachs and say, “Hey, look, Harvard said I was good enough. Harvard has a 98% five-year graduation rate. Come on, let's just start right now.” That is so weird in our society for someone who gets into Harvard to say, “I don't want to go to college at all, and show up with this odd offer.” Goldman very reasonably could react with, “Yeah, well, he got into Harvard, but this guy's a freak. We're worried about it.” So I think it's basically the same problem that you're talking about.

Dwarkesh Patel

Couldn't Goldman say, “Okay, well, maybe you don't want to hire him full-time out, but, let's see if we can give him an internship?” In fact, internships are very common.

Bryan Caplan

Yes. Although again, you want to give the internships to people that are checking all the boxes. The person who is doing the weird thing, you're nervous about him. Now, by the way, I've multiple times been on panels where there's some business leader, and he'll say, “In the business world today, we don't care about credentials. We only care about hard demonstrable skills.” Then I always ask the same question: how many uncredentialed people have you personally hired for high-skilled jobs? “Well, we haven't done any, but I read in the Wall Street Journal,” Aha, you're acting as if you've got some firsthand experience. You're just repeating what you read in the freaking newspaper, which writes stories about stuff that is atypical. Of course, you don't write a story about something everybody knows about because that's familiar to people. You go and dredge up some weird platypus and then show everybody and say, huh, platypuses are taking over the ecosystem.

Dwarkesh Patel

Didn’t this happen to your podcast with Andreessen, by the way?

Bryan Caplan

That would be plausible that it would happen. He said, “We only hire on demonstrable skills,” and I asked him who he’s hired without credentials. Then what did he say?

Dwarkesh Patel

I don't remember. I don't know if you asked him directly, but that was his claim. I don't know if you followed up that way.

Bryan Caplan

Here's a good way of thinking about it in Computer Science. I have heard that top firms like Google sometimes hire contest winners. But when I ask people there, how many standardly credentialed employees do you have in your programming and how many contest winners without credentials? The results are, yeah, you have three contest winners and thousands of regular credential workers. So basically, you have to walk on water to get hired by these firms without having the regular credentials.

Surprising Immigration Victories

Dwarkesh Patel

You recently traveled to Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Ukraine war.

Bryan Caplan

I took my 12-year-old son there too. A lot of people were saying, “You're crazy. What are you doing? Why would you go there?” I was super glad that I did; it was an incredibly exciting trip. What happened actually was that my book was translated into three Eastern European languages, Polish, Hungarian, and Czech, and then I also spoke in Slovakia, where I had gotten a few different versions but Slovakians said, “Yeah, we can read Czech. Totally no problem. It's basically the same language.” I got to give talks in all four of those countries.

Poland was especially exciting because you could see the pro-Ukrainian anti-Russian enthusiasm in the streets. I was by the train station in Krakow, and there was just a Polish guy just screaming, “Fk Putin, glory to Ukraine!” And I was saying, is that guy drunk? He's not drunk. He's just a Polish person speaking his mind here. When you went to the train stations, they were packed with refugees. What I did not realize was that the refugees were in fantastic spirits because of the warm welcome of the Polish people; it was so strong that the people there were actually feeling good about the situation. Look at their faces– just imagine the stress of fleeing a war zone with your kids. That's what was going on. I also got to learn some amazing things when I was there. Since I am the author of Open Borders, you can definitely predict that I would say, “Oh, well, letting in a lot of refugees won't be a big deal,” but Poland increased its population by 10% in a month, and the country looked fine. No one there was complaining, and I could see why.

Look, this is not ideology. This is me walking around and looking at stuff. Poland was able to go and do this. Why? Because where there's a will, there's a way. There can be a thousand refugees from a country you don't like. You put it on the news, and people say, oh, we just couldn't possibly absorb them. We're at our absolute breaking point. This is terrible. On the other hand, you can have millions of refugees come into your country, and if you like them and sympathize with them, then it's all hunky dory, and it's fine. Polish policy was also excellent. Ukrainians are allowed to work the day they show up. Normally what you do to refugees is say, “Well, you can come here because you'll be dead if you stay in your own country, but we don't want you getting a job,” because producing and contributing to society, as we all know, is a bad thing for human beings to do. Much better than we just keep you as a semi-prisoner on welfare for a few years. That sounds like a much better thing to do and is normal.

Poland was doing the best thing where the day you show up, you can get a job there. You're totally legal to work. So this is a path toward having them become productive members of society. I mean, just to emphasize how amazing what they're doing in Poland is, this would be like the US took 30 million refugees in a month, 33 million refugees in a month. Americans freak out over 10,000. So you just realize how phony and bogus the complaints are. It really is just a matter of believing and seeing. If you think that refugees are bad and immigrants are bad, you will see bad things happening. On the other hand, if you're supportive and have a can-do attitude, then you'll say, “Hey, this is completely doable.”

Dwarkesh Patel

I guess you're skeptical that Americans will have a can-do attitude about it.

Bryan Caplan

The can-do attitude mostly just comes down to: Are you going to get out of the way and let them do their thing? That's the real problem, right? It's not an argument against accepting them and letting them work. It's an argument that we're not going to do it and we'll do the wrong thing.

Dwarkesh Patel

In the Myth of the Rational Voter, you point out that a lot of times, what liberal economists do is they'll defend some policy based on the optimal implementation of it. But then, in effect, it’d be like arcane environmental regulations. I wonder if it's similar here.

Bryan Caplan

Well, that's why in Open Borders, I defend immigration as it really is. I don't go and say that we have to do a bunch of other things first. I say that it's fantastic right here, right now, in the real world. Of course, I do have that chapter on keyhole solutions where I try to meet people who disagree halfway. But really, what I learned in Poland is that my view of what's doable has expanded quite a bit. Previously, I think I would have said that maybe you can take in two or three percent repopulation a month without looking really bad. I'm also the kind of person who will say the train station is going to be full of human misery but still way better than trapping people in a war zone. I'm that kind of person. I'm someone who always asks, “Compared to what?”.

If someone’s here crying with their children in a train station, it's probably because back home, they would have been crying over a dead body instead. This is still a big improvement, and this is still actually what we should be doing. But in Poland, I didn't have to make any hard arguments. I could just walk through the train stations full of refugees, and they're happy, the kids are playing, and they’ve got their puppies, and there are dog feeding stations. It's like, “Wow, I don't have to go and convince myself through logic that this is the best thing that could happen or the least bad thing that can happen. I can just walk around and see people are happy and are adjusting to a new life.”

Dwarkesh Patel

How should decolonization have been done to increase the odds of a competent and free-market government?

Bryan Caplan

You’re also avoiding a total bloodbath. Let's not forget that.

Dwarkesh Patel

So what do you think? Are you of the opinion that it had to be done, or was it inevitable at some point? How could it have been done so that it had the optimal outcome?

Bryan Caplan

First of all, with really high credibility, this is where you say, “Look, here's the timetable. We are going to be partitioning India over the course of 20 years. We are staying there.” Even tying your hand saying, “Look, we are issuing a pile of government securities where you have to pay us money unless we go and just give up in the middle of the game.” Basically, you've got to pre-commit stating your goal: Our goal is going to be a peaceful, free rich India. We have a plan for how we're going to do this, and we're going to stick to it, and we are ready to lose a whole lot of our soldiers in order to do this, and then we are going to go and find people that we are going to very gradually transition power to. They have to be reasonable people. If these are people that are inciting pogroms, we are going to get rid of them. We are not going to tolerate that kind of thing here. This is going to be an orderly transition where all of her majesty's subjects can anticipate survival and a future where they are in peace.

Now, again, probably a lot of people don't realize how badly the partition of India was botched in decolonization. The chaos makes it hard to get accurate numbers, but there are a lot of people saying that millions of people died in pogroms in the end. So as some of you say, “Oh, maybe it was only 500 or 1000.” That was a complete disaster. It came down to the British saying they were never going to leave until they did (really quickly). That's not what you do.

Dwarkesh Patel

What made the denazification and the US occupation of Japan successful?

Bryan Caplan

Because they started off by completely crushing their enemies. [laughs] The key thing is that in those occupations, there were two things that they were pushing: democracy and human rights. They pushed for human rights a lot more than democracy. So basically, they said, “Yes, we're going to have elections.” As long as you are completely committed to the denazification of Germany, you can be elected, and you can have a little bit of power. Then we're going to very slowly devolve power on you while it remains completely clear that you have no Nazi sympathies, and none of this stuff is going to come back. So that is basically what happened: there was a complete crushing of what existed before, and then a rebuilding where democracy is a low priority.

Is democracy yielding good results? Then we can turn the democracy dial up a little bit. The same thing happened in Japan. Really bad war criminals wind up getting sentences that are quite light overall. If I remember correctly, under a thousand German war criminals got executed by the US. Just think about how many probably Otto have gotten executed. A hundred thousand, maybe. So people who really had blood on their hands, people who ordered the deaths of innocent people when they could have just not done it without.

There's a famous book called Hitler's Willing Executioners, saying that this was not primarily people murdering innocent people under duress where there's a gun at your head saying you shoot another person. What the author looked at was what happened to Germans who refused to participate, and hardly any of them did. It's called Hitler's willing executioners. Hardly any ethnic Germans refused to cooperate, even soldiers were punished. People who didn’t cooperate in the genocide were punished. Rather than saying, “Oh, well, you know, we're going to have to transfer you then if you won't go and murder innocent people, what a jerk you're being.” That's the kind of thing that should have been done. Here is the way that I think about it. You want to do it from a position of strength. You don't wait before the fanatics have the upper hand and there's blood in the streets and then say, Oh gee, what do we do now? You want to jump the gun when things are peaceful. This is where you say we have now, in this time of complete peace and harmony, worked out a plan for decolonization, and here's how it's going to work.

You never want to let it make it look like your hand is being forced. You never want to let fanatics and bloodthirsty people have their status raised by standing up to you successfully. You want it to all be happening over their heads so that they just look like losers and crazy people, and then you find some people that want to work for a decent, peaceful society. Of course, there are people who are not complete mushheads like Gandhi. Just to stick my neck out, Gandhi was an apostle of nonviolence. Good for him, but he was also someone who was so dominated by wishful thinking and just trying to pretend like a pogrom shouldn’t be expected after the transition (the pogroms were reasonably expected). It was a lot of pie-in-the-sky nonsense that he preached. He himself is not a mass murderer. He's just a very, touchy-feely person who should be nowhere near any important decision. He might have been a good therapist, something like that. He was someone who had a lot of sympathy for other people, but he was not a reasonable person.

Dwarkesh Patel

That's really interesting because in your book on political demagoguery, you make the point that if we were to judge political leaders by normal moral standards, we would think they're monsters. The interesting thing with the Gandhi example is that maybe the people who are moral heroes in an ordinary context would make the worst politicians. Do you think there's any correlation between how moral somebody is as a human and how moral the government they lead is?

Bryan Caplan

They’re definitely not the worst people. The very worst people are people who come to power self-consciously and want to commit mass murder. Those are the worst. Now, if you have a very conventional moral view where the only thing that you judge people by is how caring they are, then yeah, I think those people make bad leaders. If you have an effective altruism point of view, however, where it's not just feeling a lot of caring emotions, but being very committed to thinking clearly about the best way to get good results, then I'll say those people are more heroic people in my view. Those people, I think actually, if any of them ever got power, would generally be good leaders. Again, EAs need some experience too, but basically, that is the right profile for a good leader: someone who is very caring, but at the same time very logical.

Dwarkesh Patel

Is there a correlation between conventional virtues like honesty and being kind towards strangers and being good in an effective altruist sense? Or are those just completely unrelated?

Bryan Caplan

Let's see. If it’s the sort of kindness towards strangers you meet firsthand, like being willing to feed a homeless guy, then yeah, sure. My guess is that most effective altruists are people who would like to give to homeless people, but just realize that it's not a good use of money. They sort of have to suppress their desire to give to the homeless. Now about the honesty one: this is one where a lot of politicians say that you have to be dishonest to get things done. I would say that there's this whole literature on credibility saying, “No, what you really want is to be honest and in a very credible way such that when you say I'm going to do something in 20 years, people believe you.” Again, I think that's a lot of what you would have needed for effective decolonization. It would be to have people there of ironclad honesty. When they say, “Look, I am not leaving just because you look like there are terrorist attacks, I'm willing to give up 100,000 British soldiers to be able to carry our attacks before we walk out.” When I say it, I mean it, and I think that is actually an important trait for leadership.

Here's the interesting thing. I don't think Tyler will in any way see this as a negative. On one hand, he does like to impishly say, “Oh, well, you have to be dishonest to get things done,” and so on, yet his leadership style is ultra-honest, and it's based upon everyone believing that something was going to be good for them. Afterward, they come away saying, “Wow, that was real leadership.” People leave the deal years later feeling like things worked out. Traits like integrity and honesty; while we can easily come up with hypotheticals where they're bad in a leader, I think the real thing is in the old saying “underpromise and overdeliver,” right? Don't promise more than you're really willing to do and then try to exceed expectations. That, I would say, is a trait of a leader, but I'd say that's not dishonesty. If someone promises something and that they’ll do more for you, people say liar! So you can say “No, it's not a lie. I wasn't a liar. I did what I said, and I also did more.”

The Most Successful Revolution

Dwarkesh Patel

Now, I know, in general, you're not a fan of revolution, but if you had to choose: What is the best revolution, the most justified, or the one that had the best effects?

Bryan Caplan

So this is one where there's the cheesy thing of picking something that I don't really consider revolution and then saying other people do. So the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, you could call it a revolution. I don't think it really was because it was just way too peaceful to count. If you'll count that, then that is very likely the best example of a revolution. But again, what you really want is a bloodbath. In terms of wars, the Korean Wars had the best record; it basically saved two-thirds of a country and turned out great. We sort of have a reasonable counterfactual for how awful it would have been in North Korea. But again, North Korean propaganda might claim it was a revolution, but that’s a civil war, not a revolution in terms of what would be the best example. Of course, a lot of people want to do the American Revolution, but I'm not a fan of that.

You could argue that Britain abolished the slave trade earlier, but one interesting argument I've heard recently, not about this particular, but generally, is that the argument that the end of slavery was a lot more contingent; there really wasn't a strong reason for thinking that slavery had to end then. As you told me, it was pretty profitable at the time. So if you think it was just the combination of a bunch of random things at the time, one of which was the American Revolution, which led to the end of slavery, then that's not a strong argument.

Bryan Caplan

My view is that it was this British-based anti-slavery movement that was really key, which then spread to the colonies. It probably would have spread stronger and furthermore. The British have a much better record of getting rid of slavery peacefully. It would have cost so much more to do it in the US because there were so many slaves. So it's complicated. I'm still trying to come back to the question about the best revolutions. The other things you have are more coups than revolutions. The coup against the mother Muslim Brotherhood was not great, but still, it’s better than letting those fanatics take over. So let's see… There's the glorious revolution! My understanding is that it really was a real revolution and that people at the time tried to portray it as totally peaceful, but it actually really was not. The first Russian revolution against the Tsar in February, the one that replaced the Tsar with the first democratic government of Russia probably have worked out okay, if it hadn't been for Lenin. It didn't work out, but it had potential.

Dwarkesh Patel

How contingent do you think history is overall? Let's say that Lenin wasn't shipped back to Russia in World War One. Does the communist takeover not happen? Or was that kind of baked into the cake?

Bryan Caplan

I know the details really well for this question. I’ll bet that there’s a 99% chance that without Lenin, even with all the other Bolsheviks, it wouldn't have happened. Because I actually know the facts. So if you read Richard Pipes’ book about the Russian Revolution, the rest of the Bolshevik Party was planning on taking part of the provisional government. Then Lenin shows up and reads the riot act, and he has so much intellectual status. I don't know what he had, but the whole group was against him. He was reading the riot act, and they all said, Yes sir, ‘’Lenin, we're ready for ready for revolution.’ Without Lenin, that would just not have happened. You could say, “Well, maybe some years later, something similar would have happened.” If you know the facts, the whole revolution was based upon a tiny number of fanatics seizing power because they had 2000 guys following orders in a country where no one else was following orders. If you just waited a little while, whatever other forces would have rebuilt, and there would have been no hope for this tiny minority of lunatics to take over. So overall, I am a big believer in contingency.

Of course, it does vary. Were things like economic growth going to happen one way or another starting in 1800? That, I think, was not so contingent if it didn't happen in Britain, because there were just too many things going on. There were a bunch of different scientific breakthroughs with obvious economic applications. There are a bunch of countries where they have a business class that's interested in making more money and trying these ideas out. I think that was something that you can say was quite inevitable. On the other hand, for almost anything involving major wars, I’d say almost all major wars could be avoided by one side giving in.

Dwarkesh Patel

The worry, then, is that this inadvertently creates a greater list of grievances for the next war.

Bryan Caplan

Yeah, well, that's what the hawks on both sides are always saying. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're wrong. They're wrong about half the time. That's basically an argument that is true sometimes but is not at all reliable. Again, often what happens when you give in is people say, “Oh, well, I thought these people were completely unreasonable and that we could never make a deal with them, but it turns out they're not so bad. So we can now de-escalate and get back to peace.” That happens, too. Then people say, “You couldn't do that with Hitler.” Yeah, I know you couldn't do that with Hitler! Hitler was terrible. Just to say the most controversial thing on this podcast. Hitler was not a person that you could negotiate with any long-term success. But hardly any world leaders are Hitler; almost all of them actually can be negotiated with. Often what they want is so trivial because politics is so based upon demagoguery, which means that small symbolic concessions are often all they need to go and thump their chests and say, “Oh, I am a great leader.” I think about how Indonesia, for 30 years, refused to give up East Timor. It's one insignificant half of one insignificant island. But for all these decades, they're thumping their chests and saying, “We couldn't possibly do that. No, that will lead to total collapse.” It's endless nonsense. “All right, fine. We'll give it away. We'll give it away.” Now it wasn't good for East Timor, the whole thing was a disaster, but it still probably is pretty bad.

But there really is the case, as everybody knows in real life, that many conflicts can be avoided by giving another person what they want. If you say that “They'll just escalate their demands infinitely,” there are a few people like that. However, most people do not infinitely escalate their demands. Instead, most people will either say, “Oh, you gave me what I wanted, good! End of story.” Or maybe they'll go and periodically tax you with another demand, which is annoying but is still much better than losing a friend or a contact.

Dwarkesh Patel

Given the irrationality and demagoguery in the political system. Why is it the case that the society we live in is relatively free, peaceful, and prosperous? I mean, if the average person is a National Socialist (aka. Nazi)?

Bryan Caplan

I said moderate National Socialist Dwarkesh. That's what I said. So there are a few things going on. The first thing is just to remember, “Usually, we don't have this.” The norm is not peaceful and prosperous societies throughout human history. The norm is impoverished and war-prone societies. Always keep that in mind if you're saying, “Well, gee, but things are okay now.” I often think of this as the ‘Look out the window test’ as in, “Hey, Dwarkesh, is it on fire out there?” We're not going to turn the camera, but I think that listeners will believe that it is not on fire.

Dwarkesh Patel

How else do you think we're getting this nice lighting? [laughs] Yeah, it's not on fire. So there's that, but still, there is the interesting question: what's going on with the exceptions?

Bryan Caplan

So one is I think that rich, prosperous people and societies generally have less crazy electorates. The political ideology of the society is just not as terrible as in other places. Well, it seems pretty bad, but there are still not many people saying that we want to go and murder half the population. When you go to other societies, there are actually people like that. A friend of mine was in India, and he actually saw a pro ‘Nuke Pakistan’ rally. I assume this is not normal in India. Have you ever seen a pro ‘Nuke Pakistan’ rally?

Dwarkesh Patel

No, but the nationalists can get pretty crazy over there with the celebrating.

Bryan Caplan

Yes, but NUKE Pakistan. Preemptively nuke a nuclear power. What do you think is going to happen? We don’t have that kind of just true fanatical sociopathic bloodthirsty, horrible stuff. It's common in many societies, but it seems to be quite reduced in better-functioning societies. So that's one thing. In these better-functioning societies, people's political views are not terrible; if you propose something awful, even normal people will say, “No, I don't think it’s such a good idea to go and murder all the billionaires. Maybe we can tax them at 90%, but murder them? That's too far.” Whereas in most societies, you say that stuff, and they cackle with glee. “Let's strangle the last billionaire in the intestines of the last right-wing talk show radio host. Hahaha.” That is more of the human attitude… just think about how kids are. The way that the kids are shows us what adults are feeling, but hiding. Kids get angry, and they want blood. So more effective societies are ones where people are suppressing these atavistic desires to really just turn society into a total blood bath. So there's that.

I do think public opinion obviously matters a lot in democracies. Even in most dictatorships, public opinion matters a lot. Dictators demagogue, right? They try to go and win people over normally. It's easier because the people that would have been their rivals are dead or imprisoned or terrified. So that sort of lets you weaponize the demagoguery by saying, “I'm the only one that gets to say I'm anointed by God.” So there's that kind of thing, but even dictators generally want to be liked by their population. It makes ruling easier. Then you only have to terrify 10% of the population into obedience instead of 90%. Having a better leadership class probably matters too. There's probably a high correlation between the quality of leaders and the quality of the public, but not in every case. So that's another thing to look for. Something else is also just having constructive interest groups.

For example, I have a pet theory. I'm working on a book on housing regulation. My pet theory is that if we're not from lobbying from developers, basically zero things would be built in America because building things has almost no demagogic appeal. There's almost no one who emotionally gets a tear in their eye when they see a skyscraper go up or a new housing development. It’s very rare to be enthused about building stuff. Yet we need places to live. We need places to work. We need places to shop. On the other hand, there's a bunch of angry people whenever we try to build something, we call them nimbies who have an endless series of complaints. Traffic, parking, quality, the character of the neighborhood, pollution, and on and on, they make every possible complaint. So I think the main reason anything gets built is that there are developers who probably do not really sincerely believe that they're heroes, but just come and say, “Hey, well, we can make our money building stuff. We provide jobs and income through the community; let us build stuff. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please.” That is, I think, the main reason why. So all of you have constructive interest groups (economists mostly talk about interest groups as being bad), but lobbying has very positive effects overall for housing and for immigration. I think a lot of the main reason why we have as much immigration as we do is that there are a bunch of corporations pushing for it.

Dwarkesh Patel

As far as developers go, why is it the case that they're not more powerful than they are?

Bryan Caplan

I mean, they're typically like Mancur Olson’s concentrated interest, right? Because Mancer was mostly wrong.

Dwarkesh Patel

Oh, really? Say more.

Bryan Caplan

Public opinion is much more important for policy than interest groups. Contrary to what Mancer Olson said, if you really look at what interest groups do normally, they're trying to work in the fine print. Interest groups do not go and try to pass some overall changes in US tax law. They say, “Look, that's going to be determined by public opinion. That's not the kind of thing I can affect. Maybe I can go and get a sentence change somewhere on page 1037 of the tax code. Perhaps I could get that.” So I say that most of the policies we have are ones that are supported by the general public, and you really have to look at details to see cases where interest groups are getting something that is actually unpopular with the public. So even with things as seemingly straightforward as farm subsidies, economists say, “Oh well, obviously most people don't want to go and pay those, but farmers get it.” Yeah, think again. We look at public opinion, and farm subsidies are actually very popular. If you ask people that are not in farm states, why do you want farm subsidies? Usually, they just give very pro-social reasons like, I want to make sure there's enough food. So you say, “Well, that's stupid. We only subsidize a handful of agricultural products, but they're all available” But that's already one step deeper than most voters ever have done or ever will do.

Dwarkesh Patel

You know, Charles Mann, the author of The Wizard and the Prophet?

Bryan Caplan

Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel

I had him on recently, and we actually talked about this because he's concerned about water and food shortages. Especially when they're used in inefficient ways where they give it to cattle instead of consuming it directly. So I pointed out, “Isn't there an obvious free market solution? The prices will rise if you're using it in an inefficient way, and then it'll just go to people who need it the most.” His claim was that, ideally, this would be the case, but the reality is that if there's something that is physically necessary for people to survive, there's just not going to be a political will to put in actual pricing regulations for water usage, for example, which would solve a lot of water shortage problems.

Bryan Caplan

Yeah. It seems like a silly argument because we don't have to go and raise the price of water up to the level where a few people die of thirst. You could go and multiply the price by a factor of 10 or 100, and people will still be drinking all the water that they want. They'll just be taking quicker showers, or farming will be happening in different parts of the country… that kind of thing.

Dwarkesh Patel

Yeah. But some of the problems include how in some regions in China where they have done this, the cost of water is––

Bryan Caplan

Okay, I was thinking about the US.

Dwarkesh Patel

––a significant fraction of their income.

Bryan Caplan

Even there though, can it really be that there's somewhere in China so poor that the main use of water is for drinking? Or are these farmers?

Dwarkesh Patel

No, no. These are actual urban residents and a quarter or a tenth of their monthly income just goes towards paying for the water.

Bryan Caplan

But that's different from drinking water, right? No matter how poor you are, normally, only a very tiny fraction of the water that you use is drunk. Most of it would be for bathing or for washing clothes, a little bit for cooking, and probably even more for cooking than for actual drinking. I'm from California. I remember being a kid and being told, “Only three minutes in the shower. Come on, chop-chop!”

Dwarkesh Patel

Even in India, yeah. That's also a thing. Hanania had an essay recently where the titled was, Why I care more about pronouns than genocide.

Bryan Caplan

He writes good titles, I’ll give him that. [laughs]

Dwarkesh Patel

He talks about the irrational system of one part of his mind that cares about things that are objectively less important if you actually thought about them rationally. One of those things is pronouns in comparison to genocide. What is your irrational system’s equivalent of one thing that you recognize is not that important in the grand scheme of things, but just bothers you to no end?

Bryan Caplan

People often say, “Well, you shouldn't be talking to that guy. He's a terrible person. He said certain things,” and I'll say, “Yeah, but he was really nice to me.” [laughs] So, on the positive level, someone having good manners and being friendly with me goes a really long way. I mean, honestly, this isn't something that I'm trying to overcome. The thing I'm trying to overcome is being really friendly to people who are not friendly to me. So yeah, the main thing is when people are just very personally rude and unpleasant. I still think intellectually that the best thing to do is to turn the other cheek and try to, if not win them over, to at least win observers over with how much more reasonable and fair I am. But my instinctive reaction is just to yell back at them. I will say that that instinctive reaction just gets weaker and weaker over time because I am someone who is so uncomfortable with anger. Part of it is, it's not really my personality, but a lot of it is just the feeling of if I ever got angry, I just don't know where I would draw the line. I'm worried I would completely flip out. So I'm too concerned. If I started yelling at this person, I probably wouldn't just give him one or two cutting insults. I'd probably be screaming at him like a lunatic. So probably I better just keep on the sunny side of life and not even try to get angry because I'm just not good at it.

Dwarkesh Patel

You know that line from the Avengers where Captain America asks the Hulk...

Bryan Caplan

Oh yeah, yeah. Actually, I do. Yes. “I'm always angry.”

Dwarkesh Patel

Right.

Bryan Caplan

I'm not always angry, not even close. But I mean, honestly, I'll say there's almost only one thing that really makes me angry, and that's people being angry. So I do have secondary anger, but I have very little primary anger.

Anarcho-Capitalism is the Ultimate Government

Dwarkesh Patel

What kind of government would you implement if you had a zero discount rate? So if you're a strong longtermist?

Bryan Caplan

So since this is The Lunar Society, I'll stick my neck out for anarcho-capitalism and say that this is really the best system if we can figure out a way of doing it. There's no government like no government. I realize I may be completely blowing up all of my credibility, but you can just go and Google what I have to say about it. People sometimes ask, “Bryan, are you an anarchist?” And I'll say, “Well, not the crazy kind.” What I mean by this is I'm not someone who thinks that if you just pressed a button and got rid of the government, things will be good. I think it'd be a total disaster. Rather, what I think is that there is another equilibrium that is totally doable if people realize that it's totally doable. This equilibrium is one where we actually have competing police, competing legal systems, and competing court systems. It's one where if I had an hour, I could not convince anyone that disagrees. But I believe if you gave me an hour, I can convince you that it's not crazy. Which is what I actually do whenever I talk about this stuff. I say, “Look, I have a really radical idea. I couldn't possibly convince a reasonable person of it in an hour, so I'm not going to try. What I'm going to try to do is convince you in an hour that this view, though you still will think it's wrong, is not crazy.”

We don't have an hour to talk about it, but I think that this is the best alternative, especially for the long term. If we could get to this equilibrium, it's the best equilibrium to be in. It's one where it basically once and for all solves a whole lot of problems with international war. It diffuses nationalism. It's something that does a lot to take care of a lot of root causes of human problems. It is one where basically it dethrones demagogues, right? But there's always a place for people like that. They'll be running cults. They'll be involved in religion. They'll be pundits. But this will be a world where there's no longer any government you can get your hands on to go and cause horrible problems for the world. So it's one where the demagogues will sort of have lost their main line of employment and will have to get, if not exactly a real job, then at least a job that doesn't involve mass murder.

Billionaires Deserve their Wealth

Dwarkesh Patel

Scott Alexander had a post last night making the point that he's in favor of more taxes on billionaires because even though Jeff Bezos has created a lot of consumer surplus and he certainly hasn't absorbed all of it, it's not the case that the rewards have to be that high to get Amazon built. Somebody would have ended up building Amazon anyways, even if the rewards were slightly lower. So Jeff Bezos himself is not that counterfactually responsible for Amazon. What do you make of that argument?

Bryan Caplan

So two things. One is in economics, we have something called tournament theory, and this says that it can be extremely socially valuable to go and have seemingly unreasonably large rewards for people that do something useful because it doesn't just incentivize the winner, it incentivizes all the potential winners. So billionaires are not just an inspiration to each other. It's not just, “Oh, I can get to be a billionaire, I'll do this thing and make the money.” It is something that actually fosters a whole culture of entrepreneurship. I mean, again, we've been hanging out in Austin all over there. There's a whole bunch of people who are never going to be billionaires, Dwarkesh. I've told people, “Will Dwarkesh ever be a billionaire? Probably not, but like 2%. Dwarkesh is just a mover and a shaker!” Where in India was your family from?

Dwarkesh Patel

Gujarat.

Bryan Caplan

Is that a big city? Is it a small town, or what even was it?

Dwarkesh Patel

Yeah, it was a big city.

Bryan Caplan

Okay. So you probably would have gone to IIT or something like that. But imagine if…

Dwarkesh Patel

I don't know if I could have made it to IIT.

Bryan Caplan

Imagine if your family was out in some rural village, and it's the Indira Gandhi era, right? You don't hear about dot com billionaires or anything. In terms of inspiring a generation, I think the billionaires are inspiring a generation of movers and shakers. If they are, and if their earnings were greatly taxed, I think this would really put a dent in it. I think anytime people speak ill of them, that's putting a dent in it. If you want billionaires to make less money, praise them to the skies so that more people enter, and it drives down the rewards for doing what they do. So this tournament theory does make a lot of sense. This is a story about, “Why do you pay the CEO so much more than all the next level down? Is he really that much better than the second-best guy?” Look, this isn't just incentivizing the CEO; it's incentivizing everyone who's there. Who could plausibly tell themselves, “Maybe one day me.” So there's that. The other thing is actually going back to the historical contingency. I think business history is less historically contingent, but we actually do have a lot of evidence that the quality of entrepreneurship and management varies a lot from country to country, which I think does actually mean that for the really big businesses. It's not totally clear that it would have happened anyway.

Now, if you broaden it and just ask, “Well, would eCommerce have happened?” Yes, eCommerce would have happened. Would there be one store that was bigger than the others? Yeah, but is it possible that the second-best thing to Amazon would have been 1/10th as good? That actually is not crazy. I don't know. But to go and just say, “We know that that's not true,” seems pretty dogmatic to me. Again, what’s also striking is what is the second best thing to Amazon. You can say it's a natural monopoly, not true in any other retail that I know of.

So people talk about Alibaba, and I tried looking at that one. Isn’t this Chinese? Shouldn't they be catering to their market? It's the English language version of the site. Shouldn't they be trying to make me happy? So that is a case where it doesn't seem like it makes any economic sense; it's a natural monopoly based upon past experience. Think about cars. We got the big three (Germany, Japan, US). Why aren't there three things like Amazon? Maybe it really is the case that no one but Jeff Bezos knew how to do it, especially when you realize part of knowing how to do something is knowing how to assemble a team. It's so easy to say, “You didn't do it, and it was your team that did it.” I made my team. That's what a leader does! They take people that are good in themselves, and they fuse them together, and they make them great, and maybe it’s self-serving, but it's plausible.

Dwarkesh Patel

That makes a lot of sense. Well, Bryan, I want to thank you for giving me so much of your time. I especially want to thank you for being the first guest on my podcast. We've gone full circle with the third episode, but it would not have been possible at all without you.

Bryan Caplan Totally awesome. And yes, so the books that we've been talking about are both available on Amazon. So there is How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery. Then there is Don't Be a Feminist, Essays on Genuine Justice. By the time you get the podcast, both books will be available. They're really cheap, only 12 bucks, and I have not raised the price despite inflation! I've been thinking about why not and the economic theory behind that. The eBook is just $9.99. These books are both collections of my very best essays from 2005 to 2022, but Don't Be a Feminist has a totally all-new lead essay, one that, for years, I was too nervous to write. Then as I watched my daughter growing up, I felt something along the lines of “No, I've got to write this essay. I'm going to do it for her.” The actual first essay is called Don't Be a Feminist, A Letter to My Daughter. That is how I frame it. This is not an angry essay. As I said, I'm not an angry person. I'm not mad at feminists. Rather, I want to especially help my daughter, but anyone who's in the same boat as her, I would be thrilled to go and help them as well.

Bryan Caplan

So like I said, this is not a typical lawyerly book where all I do is try to come up with as many arguments in my favor as I can and ignore everything that goes against me. This is one where I'm really trying to grapple with the truth. I can honestly say this: my dream is not to upset any reader. In my dream world, everyone on earth would read my stuff, and everyone would be happy after reading it. Everyone would be smiling. Everyone would be feeling grateful. Look, I haven't really won until I have turned every enemy into a friend. That may seem quixotic, but that is what I am trying to do. That's what's on my mind. Of course, you've got to first admit that there's disagreement before you can begin trying to change someone's mind and make them feel good about it, but that really is my dream.

Dwarkesh Patel

Anybody who has read Bryan’s books or met him can confirm that the books and the arguments in them are very good, and they also obviously come from a place of kindness and understanding about the other person's position.

Bryan Caplan

Yeah. We all have problems, Dwarkesh. We are, we are all imperfect, flawed human beings, but we must rise above it.

Dwarkesh Patel

I highly recommend the books. Bryan, thanks so much for being on the Lunar Society.

Bryan Caplan

Thanks for coming out here. Now, this is the first time that I've actually had you right in my office during an interview. So as great as Dwarkesh is over zoom, he's even better in real life. All people must try to meet Dwarkesh, he’s a cool guy, a really positive person. Thank you, buddy.

Dwarkesh Patel

Thank you, Bryan.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

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Podcast: Analysis (LS 57 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: Can Effective Altruism really change the world?
Release date: 2022-10-24

If you want to do good in the world, should you be a doctor, or an aid worker? Or should you make a billion or two any way you can, and give it to good causes? Billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried argues this is the best use of his vast wealth. But philosophers argue charitable giving is often driven not by logic, but by a sense of personal attachment. David Edmonds traces the latest developments in the effective altruism movement, examining the questions they pose, and looking at the successes and limitations.

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Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Ajeya Cotra on how Artificial Intelligence Could Cause Catastrophe
Release date: 2022-11-03

Ajeya Cotra joins us to discuss how artificial intelligence could cause catastrophe.

Follow the work of Ajeya and her colleagues: https://www.openphilanthropy.org

Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:53 AI safety research in general 02:04 Realistic scenarios for AI catastrophes 06:51 A dangerous AI model developed in the near future 09:10 Assumptions behind dangerous AI development 14:45 Can AIs learn long-term planning? 18:09 Can AIs understand human psychology? 22:32 Training an AI model with naive safety features 24:06 Can AIs be deceptive? 31:07 What happens after deploying an unsafe AI system? 44:03 What can we do to prevent an AI catastrophe? 53:58 The next episode

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Podcast: Meeting of Minds Podcast (LS 31 · TOP 5% )
Episode: Peter Thiel on the Bible
Release date: 2021-05-17

Peter Thiel, the highly successful tech entrepreneur and author, discusses his mentor Rene Girard; the Bible, how we read it, and how it reads us; Jesus’ death and resurrection; atheism; and the limitless escalation of violence towards apocalypse.

Timestamps:

0:43 The Bible reads us
2:02 Cain and Abel vs. Romulus and Remus
6:05 Cross vs Resurrection
7:26 The Gospels are different from Death of Socrates
9:04 The Bible is discontinuous from pagan classics
11:30 "The idea that victims exist comes from Judeo-Christianity and nowhere else."
14:54 Was Nietzsche somehow extremely close to the truth of Christianity?
17:18 Pagan Pharmakoi, the ancient sacrificial medicine
19:48 Fascism and Communism
23:00 Girard on the Woes against the Pharisees
26:02 The cycle that leads to apocalypse
31:11 Steven Pinker and the story of progress
32:19 Is an apocalypse, such as a nuclear war, inevitable?
35:10 Being too sanguine about apocalypse makes it more likely
42:08 Is there an off-ramp? What would it look like? If we don't know, shouldn't we at least try to figure it out?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Podcast: Meeting of Minds Podcast (LS 31 · TOP 5% )
Episode: Peter Thiel: “The State Contains Violence”
Release date: 2022-09-29

Peter Thiel, arguably the most successful tech investor of modern times, also reads widely and thinks deeply about philosophy and theology. In a fascinating follow-up to his previous interview about his mentor, Rene Girard, Thiel discusses how modern ideologies such as fascism and communism "up the dose" from murder to genocide as Christianity weakened the power of human sacrifice. He also discusses how progressive ideologies are "stronger moves" than fascistic or reactionary ones because they weaponize Christianity's concern for victims. Thiel talks about how the state, with its origins in paganism, restrains violence by using violence and how Christians might navigate that dilemma by engaging politically but not becoming excessively entangled by it. Finally, Thiel points out how those who promise to protect us from Apocalypse can actually accelerate its coming.

Timestamps:

01:08 Girard, Scapegoating
04:00 Mimetic copies: Hitler and Stalin, Nazism and Communism, Fascism
05:30 Wokeism, Christianity, and Academia
10:40 Wokeism in cities, response to real estate costs. Structural Wokeism
14:27 Winning and losing postures towards wokeism
17:10 Wokeism is Christianity without the forgiveness
18:30 Acknowledging sin even when it enables critics
21:55 Holocaust as the ultimate test of forgiveness, destroying the concept of forgiveness
25:52 Ignorance and forgiveness
27:55 Gospels as deconstruction of philosophy
32:05 Getting tangled in politics. Government and violence
33:55 Can leaders behave like Christians?
35:37 The katechon and accelerationism. Preterism and futurism.
39:10 The Antichrist as a false katechon
41:14 The Precautionary Principle: technological Armageddon
45:15 Enabling Fascism to fight Communism
46:12 Reagan coalition
49:30 Christianity and mimetic entanglement, political atheism
54:30 How much can people change?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Release date: 2022-09-19

Notes from The Valmy:

Source: YouTube (National Conservatism Conference, Miami) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=balGGAd6ZrI Release date: 2022-09-13

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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 32 · TOP 5% )
Episode: Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha
Release date: 2022-09-08

Austin Vernon is an engineer working on a new method for carbon capture, and he has one of the most interesting blogs on the internet, where he writes about engineering, software, economics, and investing.

We discuss how energy superabundance will change the world, how Starship can be turned into a kinetic weapon, why nuclear is overrated, blockchains, batteries, flying cars, finding alpha, & much more!

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.

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Timestamps

(0:00:00) - Intro

(0:01:53) - Starship as a Weapon

(0:19:24) - Software Productivity

(0:41:40) - Car Manufacturing

(0:57:39) - Carbon Capture

(1:16:53) - Energy Superabundance

(1:25:09) - Storage for Cheap Energy

(1:31:25) - Travel in Future

(1:33:27) - Future Cities

(1:39:58) - Flying Cars

(1:43:26) - Carbon Shortage

(1:48:03) - Nuclear

(2:12:44) - Solar

(2:14:44) - Alpha & Efficient Markets

(2:22:51) - Conclusion

Transcript

Intro

Dwarkesh Patel (00:00:00):

Okay! Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Austin Vernon who writes about engineering, software, economics, and investing on the internet, though not that much else is known about him. So Austin, do you want to give us a bit of info about your background? I know that the only thing the internet knows about you is this one little JPEG that you had to upload with your recent paper. But what about an identity reveal or I guess a little bit of a background reveal? Just to the extent that you're comfortable sharing.

Austin Vernon (00:00:29):

My degree is in chemical engineering and I’ve had a lifelong love for engineering as well as things like the Toyota Production System. I've also worked as a chemical engineer in a large processing facility where I've done a lot of petroleum engineering. I taught myself how to write software and now I'm working on more research and the early commercialization of CO2 electrolysis.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:00:59):

Okay yeah. I'm really interested in talking about all those things. The first question I have is from Alex Berger, who's the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy. When I asked on Twitter what I should ask you, he suggested that I should ask “Why so shady?” Famously you have kind of an anonymous personality, pseudonymous thing going on the internet. What's up with that?

Austin Vernon (00:01:25):

Yeah. I think he posted a tweet that said “I don't know who this guy is or if he's credible at all, but his stuff sure is interesting”. That really made me laugh. I thought that was hilarious. Fame just doesn't seem necessary, I think I'm fine with my ideas being well known and communicating, but I have less desire to be personally famous.

Starship as a Weapon

Dwarkesh Patel (00:01:52):

Gotcha, gotcha. I wanted to start off with a sexy topic, let's talk about using Starship as a kinetic weapon. I thought that was one of the more amusing posts you wrote. Do you want to talk more about how this would be possible?

Austin Vernon (00:02:08):

Well, I think the main thing with Starship is that you're taking a technology and you're making it about 100 times cheaper for cargo and 1000 times cheaper for people. When things like that happen that drastically, you're just looking at huge changes and it’s really hard to anticipate what some of those can be when the change is that drastic. I think there's a lot of moon-based, Mars-based stuff that doesn't really catch the general public's eye. They also have trouble imagining some of the point-to-point travel that could be possible. But when you start talking about it as a weapon, then I think it lets people know they should be paying attention to this technology. And we certainly do not want to be second or third getting it. We should make sure that we're going to be first.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:03:05):

Yeah. I think you mentioned this in the post, but as recently as the '90s, the cost of sending one kilogram to space was around $20,000. More recently, SpaceX has brought it to $2,000. Lots of interesting questions pop up when you ask, “What will be possible once we get it down to $200 per kilogram to send into orbit?” One of them could be about how we might manufacture these weapons that are not conventional ballistics. Do you want to talk about why this might be an advancement over conventional ballistic weapons?

Austin Vernon (00:03:37):

Well, regular conventional ballistic weapons are extremely expensive. This is more like a bomb truck. But usually we think of B52 as the bomb truck and this could be even cheaper than the B52, delivering just mass on target. When you think about how expensive it is to fly a B52 from Barksdale in Louisiana all the way across the world.. you can do it from south Texas or Florida with the Starship and get more emissions per day and the fuel ends up being. When you go orbital, it takes a lot to get to orbit. But then once you're in orbit, your fuel consumption's pretty good. So over long distances, it has a lot of advantage. That's why the point-to-point works for longer distances.

Austin Vernon (00:04:27):

There's really a sweet spot with these weapons where you want it to be pretty accurate, but you also want it to be cheap. You're seeing that problem with Russia right now as they have some fancy parade style weapons that are really expensive, like multi-billion dollar cruise missiles, but they're missing that $5,000 guided artillery shell or that $20,000 JDM that you can just pit massive. Or the multiple launch rocket system, guided rockets. They're really short on all those because I think they had just had a limited amount of chips they could get from the US into Russia to make these advanced weapons.

Austin Vernon (00:05:07):

But yeah, so the Starship gives you just a platform to deliver. You could put JDMs in a shroud, or you could just have the iron unguided kinetic projectiles, and it just becomes impossible for a ship to launch missiles to intercept yours if your cost is so low, you can just overwhelm them.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:05:29):

Okay. There are a few terms there that neither I nor the audience might know. So what is JDM? What is shroud? And why are chips a bottleneck here? Why can't it just be any micro-controller?

Austin Vernon (00:05:42):

So JDM is Joint Direct Attack Munition. So what we did is we took all our Vietnam surplus bonds and we put this little fin-kit on it and it costs like $20,000, which is cheap for a weapon because the actual bond costs, I don't know, $3,000. And then it turns it into a guided weapon that, before you were probably lucky to get within 500 meters of a target, now you can get it in with two meters. So the number of missions you have to do with your planes and all that goes down by orders of magnitude. So it's an absolutely huge advantage in logistics and in just how much firepower you can put on a target. And we didn't even have to make new bombs, we just put these kits on all our old bombs.

Austin Vernon (00:06:33):

Let's see.. Yeah the chips are a problem. There's this organization called RUSI. I think they're in the UK, but they've been tearing down all these Russian weapons they found in Ukraine and they all have American chips in them. So technically, they're not supposed to be able to get these chips. And yet, Russia can't make a lot of its own chips. And especially not the specialized kinds you might want for guided weapons. So they've been somehow smuggling in chips from Americans to make their advanced weapons

Dwarkesh Patel (00:07:03):

What is special about these? As far as I'm aware, the trade with China is still going on and we get a lot of our chips manufactured from Taiwan or China. So why can't they do the same?

Austin Vernon (00:07:14):

It's the whole integration. It's not just the specific chip, but the board. They're more like PLCs where you almost have wired-in programming and they come with this ability to do the guidance and all that stuff. It all kind of has to work together. I think that's the way I understand it. I don't know. Maybe I don't have a really good answer for that one, but they're hard to replicate is what matters.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:07:43):

Okay that's interesting. Yeah, I guess that has a lot of interesting downstream effects, because for example, India buys a lot of its weapons from Russia. So if Russia doesn't have access to these, then other countries that buy from Russia won't have access to these either.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:07:58):

You had an interesting speculation in the post where you suggested that you could just keep these kinetic weapons in orbit, in a sort of Damocles state really, almost literally. That sounds like an incredibly scary and risky scenario where you could have orbital decay and you could have these kinetic weapons falling from the sky and destroying cities. Do you think this is what it will look like or could look like in 10 to 20 years?

Austin Vernon (00:08:26):

Well, yeah, so the advantage of having weapons on orbit is you can hit targets faster. So if you're launching the rocket from Florida, you're looking at maybe 30 minutes to get there and the target can move away in that time. Whereas if you're on orbit, you can have them spaced out to where you're hitting within a few minutes. So that's the advantage there.

Austin Vernon (00:08:46):

You really have to have a two stage system I think for most, because if you have a really aerodynamic rod that's going to give you really good performance in the low atmosphere, it’ll end up going too fast and just burn up before it gets there. Tungsten's maybe the only thing that you could have that could go all the way through which is why I like the original concept of using these big tungsten rods the size of a telephone pole. But tungsten's pretty expensive. And the rod concept kind of limits what you can do.

Austin Vernon (00:09:28):

So a lot of these weapons will have, that's what I was talking about with the shroud, something that actually slows you down in the upper atmosphere. And then once you're at the velocity where you're not just going to melt, then you open it up and let it go. So if you actually had it fall from the sky, some may make it to the ground, but a lot would burn up. So a lot of the stuff that makes it to the ground is actually pretty light. It's stuff that can float and has a large surface area. Yeah, that's the whole thing with Starship. Or not Starship, but Starlink. All those satellites are meant to completely fall apart on de-orbit.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:10:09):

I see. One of the implications of that is that these may be less powerful than we might fear, because since kinetic energy is mass times velocity squared and there's an upper bound on the velocity (velocity being the component that grows the kinetic energy faster), then it suggests that you can upper bound the power these things will have. You know what I mean?

Austin Vernon (00:10:32):

Yeah, so even the tungsten rods. Sometimes people, they're not very good at physics, so they don't do the math. They think it's going to be a nuclear weapon, but it's really not. I think even the tungsten rod is like 10 tons of T&T or something. It's a big bomb, but it's not a super weapon.

Austin Vernon (00:10:54):

So I think I said in the post, it's about using advanced missiles where they're almost more defensive weapons so I can keep you from pitting your ship somewhere. Yeah I could try to bombard your cities, but I can't take ground with it. I can't even police sea lanes with it really. I'd still have to use regular ships if I had this air cover to go enforce the rules of the sea and stuff like that.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:11:23):

Yeah. You speculated in the post, I think, that you could load this up with shrapnel and then it could explode next to an incoming missile or an incoming aircraft. Could these get that accurate? Because that was surprising speculation to me.

Austin Vernon (00:11:43):

I think for ships, it's pretty... I was watching videos of how fast a ship can turn and stuff. If you're going to do an initial target on a ship to try to kill their radars, you'd want to do it above the ceiling of their missiles. So it's like, how much are they going to move between your release where you stop steering and that? The answer’s maybe 1000 feet. So that's pretty simple because you just shrapnel the area.

Austin Vernon (00:12:12):

Targeting aircraft, you would be steering all the way in. I'd say it's doable, but it'd be pretty hard. You'd actually maybe want to even go slower than you would with the ship attack. You'd need a specialized package to attack the aircraft, but if you have enough synthetic aperture radar and stuff like that, you could see these aircraft using satellites and then guide the bomb in the whole way. You could even load heat seeking missiles into a package that unfurls right next to them and launch conventional missiles too, probably. It’d be pretty hard to do some of this stuff, but they’re just the things you might be able to do if you put some effort into it.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:12:57):

Yeah. The reason I find this kind of speculation really interesting is because when you look at the modern weaponry that's used in conflicts, it just seems directly descendant from something you would've seen in World War II or something. If you think about how much warfare changed between 1900 and 1940, it's like, yeah, they're not even the same class of weapons anymore. So it's interesting to think about possibilities like these where the entire category of weapons has changed.

Austin Vernon (00:13:33):

You’re right and that's because our physical technology hasn't changed that much. So it really has just made more sense to put better electronics in the same tanks. We haven't learned enough about tanks to build a new physical tank that's way better, so we just keep upgrading our existing tanks with better electronics. They're much more powerful, they're more accurate. A lot of times, they have longer range weapons and better sensors. So the tank looks the same, but it maybe has several times more killing power. But the Ukraine war right now, they're using a lot of 40, 50 year old weapons so that especially looks like that.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:14:20):

Yeah. Which kind of worries you if you think about the stockpiles our own military has. I'm not well educated on the topic, but I imagine that we don't have the newest of the new thing. We probably have maintained versions of decades old technology.

Austin Vernon (00:14:35):

We spend so much, we've got relatively... This kind of gets into debate about how ready our military is. For certain situations, it's more ready than others. I'd say in general, most people talking about it have the incentive to downplay our capabilities because they want more defense spending. There's lots of reasons. So I think we're probably more capable than what you might see from some editorial in The Hill or whatever. Us just sending a few weapons over to Ukraine and seeing how successful they've been at using them, I think, shows a little bit of that.

Austin Vernon (00:15:18):

There's so much uncertainty when it comes to fighting, especially when you're talking about a naval engagement, where we don't just don't have that many ships in general… you can have some bad luck. So I think you always want to be a little bit wary. You don't want to get overconfident.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:15:37):

Yeah. And if the offensive tech we sent to Ukraine is potentially better than the defensive tech, it's very possible that even a ballistic missile that China or Russia could launch would sink a battleship and then kill the 2,000 or 1,000 whatever soldiers that are on board. Or I guess, I don't know, you think this opens up avenues for defensive tech as well?

Austin Vernon (00:16:03):

Yeah––generally the consensus is that defensive technology has improved much more recently than offensive technology. This whole strategy China has is something they call anti-access/area denial, A2/AD. That's basically just how missiles have gotten better because the sensors on missiles have gotten better. So they can keep our ships from getting close to them but they can't really challenge us in Hawaii or something. And it really goes both ways, I think people forget that. So yeah, it's hard for us to get close to China, but Taiwan has a lot of missiles with these new sensors as well. So I think it's probably tougher for China to do it close to Taiwan than most people would say.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:16:55):

Oh, interesting. Yeah, can you talk more about that? Because every time I read about this, people are saying that if China wanted to, they could knock out Taiwan's defenses in a short amount of time and take it over. Yeah, so can you talk about why that's not possible?

Austin Vernon (00:17:10):

Well, it might be, but I think it's a guess of the uncertainty [inaudible 00:17:14]. Taiwan has actually one of the largest defense budgets in the world and they've recently been upping it. I think they spend, I don't know, $25 billion a year and they added an extra $5 billion. And they've been buying a lot of anti-ship missiles, a lot of air defense missiles.. Stuff that Ukraine could only dream of. I think Ukraine's military budget was $2 billion and they have a professional army. And then the other thing is Taiwan’s an island, whereas Russia could just roll over the land border into Ukraine.

Austin Vernon (00:17:44):
There's just been very few successful amphibious landings in history. The most recent ones were all the Americans in World War II and Korea. So the challenge there is just... It's kind of on China to execute perfectly and do that. So if they had perfect execution, then possibly it would be feasible. But if their air defenses on their ships aren't quite as good as we think they could possibly be, then they could also end up with half their fleet underwater within 10 hours.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:18:20):

Interesting. And how has your view of Taiwan's defensive capabilities changed... How has the Ukraine conflict updated your opinion on what might happen?

Austin Vernon (00:18:29):

I didn't really know how much about it. And then I started looking at Wikipedia and stuff and all this stuff they're doing. Taiwan just has a lot of modern platforms like F16s with our anti-ship missiles. They actually have a lot of their own. They have indigenous fighter bombers, indigenous anti-ship missiles because they're worried we might not always sell them to them.

Austin Vernon (00:18:54):

They've even recently gotten these long range cruise missiles that could possibly target leadership in Beijing. So I think that makes it uncomfortable for the Chinese leadership. If you attack them, you're going to have to go live in a bunker. But again, I'm not a full-time military analyst or something, so there's a lot of uncertainty around what I'm saying. It's not a given that China's just going to roll over them.

Software Productivity

Dwarkesh Patel (00:19:22):

Okay. That's comforting to hear. Let's talk about an area where I have a little bit of a point of contact. I thought your blog post about software and the inability of it to increase productivity numbers, I thought that was super fascinating. So before I ask you questions about it, do you want to lay out the thesis there?

Austin Vernon (00:19:43):

Yeah. So if there's one post I kind of felt like I caught lightning in a bottle on, it's that one. Everything I wanted to put in, it just fit together perfectly, which is usually not the case.

Austin Vernon (00:19:55):

I think the idea is that the world's so complex and we really underestimate that complexity. If you're going to digitize processes and automate them and stuff, you have to capture all that complexity basically at the bit level, and that's extremely difficult. And then you also have diminishing returns where the easily automatable stuff goes first and then it's increasing corner cases to get to the end, so you just have to go through more and more code basically. We don't see runaway productivity growth from software because we're fighting all this increasing complexity.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:20:39):

Yeah. Have you heard of the waterbed theory of complexity by the way?

Austin Vernon (00:20:42):

I don't think so.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:20:44):

Okay. It's something that comes up in compiler design: the idea is that there's a fixed amount of complexity in a system. If you try to reduce it, what you'll end up doing is just you'll end up migrating the complexity elsewhere. I think an example that's used of this is when they try to program languages that are not type safe, something like Python. You can say, “oh, it's a less complex language”, but really, you've added complexity when, I don't know, two different types of numbers are interacting like a float and an int. As your program grows, that complexity exponentially grows along with all the things that could go wrong when you're making two things interact in a way that you were expecting not to. So yeah, the idea is you can just choose where to have your complexity, but you can't get rid of that complexity.

Austin Vernon (00:21:38):

I think that’s kind of an interesting thing when you start pairing it with management theory... when you add up all the factors, the most complex thing you're doing is high volume car manufacturing. And so we got a lot of innovations and organization from car manufacturers like the assembly line. Then you had Sloan at GM basically creating the way the modern corporation is run, then you have the Toyota Production System.

Austin Vernon (00:22:11):

But arguably now, creating software is actually the most complex thing we do. So there's all these kinds of squishy concepts that underlie things like the Toyota Production System that softwares had to learn and reimagine and adopt and you see that with Agile where, “oh, we can't have long release times. We need to be releasing every day,” which means we're limiting inventory there.

Austin Vernon (00:22:42):

There's a whole thing especially that's showing up in software that existed in carbon manufacturing where you're talking about reducing communication. So Jeff Bezos kind of now famously said, "I want to reduce communication," which is counterintuitive to a lot of people. This is age-old in car manufacturing where Toyota has these cards that go between workstations and they tell you what to do. So people normally think of them as limiting inventory, but it also tells the worker exactly what they're supposed to be doing at what pace, at what time. The assembly line is like that too. You just know what to do because you're standing there and there's a part here and it needs to go on there, and it comes by at the pace you're supposed to work at.

Austin Vernon (00:23:29):

It's so extreme that there's this famous paper, by List, Syverson and Levitt. They went to a car factory and studied how defects propagated in cars and stuff. Once a car factory gets up and running, it doesn't matter what workers you put in there, if workers are sick or you get new workers, the defect rate is the same. So all the knowledge is built into the manufacturing line.

Austin Vernon (00:23:59):

There’s these concepts around idiot-proofing and everything that are very similar to what you'll see. You had Uncle Bob on here. So Uncle Bob says only put one input into a function and stuff like that because you'll mix them up otherwise. The Japanese call it poka-yoke. You make it where you can't mess it up. And that's another way to reduce communication, and then software, of course you have APIs.

Austin Vernon (00:24:28):

So I'm really interested in this overall concept of reducing communication, and reducing how much cooperation and everything we need to run the economy.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:24:41):

Right. Right. Speaking of the Toyota Production System, one thing they do to reduce that defect rate is if there's a problem, all the workers in that chain are forced to go to the place where the defect problem is and fix it before doing anything else. The idea there is that this will give them context to understand what the problem was and how to make sure it doesn't happen again. It also prevents a build up of inventory in a way that keeps making these defects happen or just keeps accumulating inventory before the place that can fix the defects is able to take care of them.

Austin Vernon (00:25:17):

Right. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:25:19):

Yeah. But I think one interesting thing about software and complexity is that software is a place where complexity is the highest in our world right now but software gives you the choice to interface with the complexity you want to interface with. I guess that's just part of specialization in general, but you could say for example that a machine learning model is really complex, but ideally, you get to a place where that's the only kind of complexity you have to deal with. You're not having to deal with the complexity of “How is this program compiled? How are the libraries that I'm using? How are they built?” You can fine tune and work on the complexity you need to work on.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:26:05):

It's similar to app development. Byrne Hobart has this blog post about Stripe as solid state. The basic idea is that Stripe hides all the complexity of the financial system: it charges a higher fee, but you can just treat it as an abstraction of a tithe you have to pay, and it'll just take care of that entire process so you can focus on your comparative advantage.

Austin Vernon (00:26:29):

It's really actually very similar in car manufacturing and the Toyota Production System if you really get into it. It's very much the same conceptual framework. There's this whole idea in Toyota Production System, everyone works at the same pace, which you kind of talked about. But also, your work content is the same. There's no room for not standardizing a way you're going to do things. So everyone gets together and they're like, “All right, we're going to do this certain part. We're going to put it together this certain way at this little micro station. And it's going to be the same way every time.” That's part of how they're reducing the defect rates. If your assembly process is longer than what your time allotment is to stay in touch with the rest of the process, then you just keep breaking it down into smaller pieces. So through this, each person only has to know a very small part of it.

Austin Vernon (00:27:33):

The overall engineering team has all sorts of strategies and all sorts of tools to help them break up all these processes into very small parts and make it all hold together. It's still very, very hard, but it's kind of a lot of the same ideas because you're taking away the complexity of making a $30,000 car or 30,000 part car where everyone's just focusing on their one little part and they don't care what someone else is doing.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:28:06):

Yeah. But the interesting thing is that it seems like you need one person who knows how everything fits together. Because from what I remember, one of the tenets of the Toyota Production System was you need to have a global view. So, in that book, was it the machine or the other one, the Toyota Production System book? But anyways, they were talking about examples where people would try to optimize for local efficiencies. I think they especially pointed to Ford and GM for trying to do this where they would try to make machines run all the time. And locally, you could say that, “oh this machine or process is super efficient. It's always outputting stuff.” But it ignores how that added inventory or that process had a bad consequence for the whole system.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:28:50):

And so it's interesting if you look at a company like Tesla that’s able to do this really well. Tesla is run like a monarchy and this one guy has this total global view of how the entire process is supposed to run and where you have these inefficiencies.. You had some great examples of this in the blog post. I think one of the examples is this guy (the author) goes to this factory and he asks, "Is this an efficient factory?" And the guy's like, "Yeah, this is totally efficient. There's nothing we can do, adopting the Toyota way, to make this more efficient."

Dwarkesh Patel (00:29:22):

And so then he's like, "Okay, let me look." And he finds that they're treating steel in some way, and the main process does only take a couple of seconds, but some local manager decided that it would be more efficient to ship their parts out, to get the next stage of the process done somewhere else. So this is locally cheaper, but the result is that it takes weeks to get these parts shipped out and get them back. Which means that the actual time that the parts spend getting processed is 0.1% of the time, making the whole process super inefficient. So I don't know, it seems like the implication is you need a very monarchical structure, with one person who has a total view, in order to run such a system. Or am I getting that wrong?

Austin Vernon (00:30:12):

Not necessarily. I mean, you do have to make sure you're not optimizing locally, but I think it's the same. You have that same constraint in software, but I think a lot of times people are just running over it because processing has been getting so much cheaper. People are expensive, so if you could save development time, it just ends up the trade offs are different when you're talking about the tyranny of physical items and stuff like that, the constraints get a little more severe. But I think you have the same overall. You still have to fight local optimization, but the level you have to is probably different with physical goods.

Austin Vernon (00:30:55):

I was thinking about the smart grid situation from a software perspective, and there's this problem where, okay, I'm putting my solar farm here and it's impacting somewhere far away, and that's then creating these really high upgrade costs, that cost two or three times more than my solar farm. Well, the obvious thing would be, if you're doing software, is like you're going to break all these up into smaller sections, and then you wouldn't be impacting each other and all that, and you could work and focus on your own little thing.

Austin Vernon (00:31:29):

But the problem with that is if you're going to disconnect these areas of the grid, the equipment to do that is extremely expensive. It's not like I'm just going to hit a new tab and open a new file and start writing a new function. And not only that, but you still have to actually coordinate how this equipment is going to operate. So if you just let the grid flow as it does, everyone knows what's going to happen because they could just calculate the physics. If you start adding in all these checkpoints where humans are doing stuff, then you have to actually interface with the humans, and the amount of things that can happen really starts going up. So it's actually a really bad idea to try to cart all this stuff off, just because of the reality of the physical laws and the equipment you need and everything like that.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:32:22):

Okay. Interesting. And then I think you have a similar Coasean argument in your software post about why vertically integrating software is beneficial. Do you want to explain that thesis?

Austin Vernon (00:32:34):

Yeah. I think it actually gets to what we're talking about here, where it allows you to avoid the local optimization. Because a lot of times you're trying to build a software MVP, and you're tying together a few services… they don't do quite what you need, so if you try to scale that, it would just break. But if you're going to take a really complex process, like car manufacturing or retail distribution, or the home buying process or something, you really have to vertically integrate it to be able to create a decent end-to-end experience and avoid that local optimization.

Austin Vernon (00:33:20):

And it's just very hard otherwise, because you just can't coordinate effectively if you have 10 different vendors trying to do all the same thing. You end up in just constant vendor meetings, where you're trying to decide what the specs are or something instead of giving someone the authority, or giving a team the authority to just start building stuff. Then if you look at these companies, they have to implement these somewhat decentralized processes when they get too complex, but at least they have control over how they're interfacing with each other. Walmart, as the vendors, control their own stock. They don't tell the vendor, "We need X parts." It's just like, it's on you to make sure your shelf is stocked.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:34:07):

Yeah. Yeah. So what was really interesting to me about this part of the post was, I don't know, I guess I had heard of this vision of we're software setting, where everybody will have a software as a service company, and they'll all be interfacing with each other in some sort of cycle where they're all just calling each other's APIs. And yeah, basically everybody and their mother would have a SAAS company. The implication here was, from your argument, that given the necessity of integrating all those complexity vertically in a coherent way, then the winners in software should end up being a few big companies, right? They compete with each other, but still...

Austin Vernon (00:34:49):

I think that's especially true when you're talking about combining bits and apps. Maybe less true for pure software. The physical world is just so much more complex, and so the constraints it creates are pretty extreme, compared to like... you could maybe get away with more of everyone and their mom having an API in a pure software world.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:35:14):

Right. Yeah. I guess, you might think that even in the physical world, given that people really need to focus on their comparative advantage, they would just try to outsource the software parts to these APIs. But is there any scenario where the learning curve for people who are not in the firm can be fast enough that they can keep up with the complexity? Because there's huge gains for specialization and competition that go away if this is the world we're forced to live in. And then I guess we have a lot of counter examples, or I guess we have a lot of examples of what you're talking about. Like Apple is the biggest market cap in the world, right? And famously they're super vertically integrated. And yeah, obviously their thing is combining hardware and software. But yeah, is there any world in which it can keep that kind of benefit, but have it be within multiple firms?

Austin Vernon (00:36:10):

This is a post I've got on my list I want to write. The blockchain application, which excites me personally the most, is reimagining enterprise software. Because the things you're talking about, like hard typing and APIs are just basically built into some of these protocols. So I think it just really has a lot of exciting implications for how much you can decentralize software development. But the thing is, you can still do that within the firm. So I think I mentioned this, if the government's going to place all these rules on the edge of the firm, it makes transactions with other firms expensive. So a few internal transactions can be cheaper, because they're avoiding the government reporting and taxes and all that kind of stuff. So I think you'd have to think about how these technologies can reduce transaction costs overall and decentralize that, but also what are the costs between firms?

Dwarkesh Patel (00:37:22):

Yeah, it's really interesting if the costs are logistic, or if they're based on the knowledge that is housed, as you were talking about, within a factory or something. Because if it is just logistical and stuff, like you had to report any outside transactions, then it does imply that those technology blockchain could help. But if it is just that you need to be in the same office, and if you're not, then you're going to have a hard time keeping up with what the new requirements for the API are, then maybe it's that, yeah, maybe the inevitability is that you'll have these big firms that are able to vertically integrate.

Austin Vernon (00:37:59):

Yeah, for these big firms to survive, they have to be somewhat decentralized within them. So I think you have... you're going to the same place as just how are we viewing it, what's our perception? So even if it's a giant corporation, it's going to have very independent business units as opposed to something like a 1950s corporation.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:38:29):

Yeah. Byrne Hobart, by the way, has this really interesting post that you might enjoy reading while you're writing that post. It's type safe communications, and it's about that Bezos thing, about his strict style for how to communicate and how little to communicate. There's many examples in Amazon protocols where you have to... the only way you can put in this report, is in this place you had to give a number. You can't just say, "This is very likely," you had to say like, "We project X percent increase," or whatever. So it has to be a percent. And there's many other cases where they're strict about what type definition you can have in written reports or something. It has kind of the same consequence that type strict languages have, which is that you can keep track of what the value is through the entire chain of the flow of control.

Austin Vernon (00:39:22):

You've got to keep work content standardized.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:39:26):

So we've been hinting at the Coasean analysis to this. I think we just talked about it indirectly, but for the people who might not know, Coase has this paper called The Theory of Firms, and he's trying to explain why we have firms at all. Why not just have everybody compete in the open market for employment, for anything? Why do we have jobs? Why not just have... you can just hire a secretary by the day or something.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:39:51):

And the conclusion he comes to is that by having a firm you're reducing the transaction cost. So people will have the same knowledge about what needs to get done, obviously you're reducing the transaction cost of contracting, finding labor, blah, blah, blah. And so the conclusion it comes to is the more the transaction costs are reduced within people in a firm, as compared to the transaction cost between different firms, the bigger firms will get. So I guess that's why the implication of your argument was that there should be bigger tech firms, right?

Austin Vernon (00:40:27):

Yes, yes, definitely. Because they can basically decrease the transaction costs faster within, and then even at the limit, if you have large transaction costs outside the firm, between other firms that are artificially imposed, then it will make firms bigger.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:40:45):

What does the world look like in that scenario? So would it just be these Japanese companies, these huge conglomerates who are just... you rise through the ranks, from the age of 20 until you die? Is that what software will turn into?

Austin Vernon (00:40:59):

It could be. I mean, I think it will be lots of very large companies, unless there's some kind of change in inner firm transaction costs. And again, that could possibly come from blockchain like technology, but you probably also need better regulation to make that cheaper, and then you would have smaller firms. But again, in the end, it doesn't really matter. You'd be working in your little unit of the big bank of corporate, or whatever. So I don't know what that would look like on a personal level.

Car Manufacturing

Dwarkesh Patel (00:41:40):

Yeah. Okay. So speaking of these Japanese companies, let's talk about car manufacturing and everything involved there. Yeah, so we kind of hinted at a few elements of the Toyota way and production earlier, but do you want to give a brief overview of what that is, so we can compare it to potentially other systems?

Austin Vernon (00:42:02):

I think all these kinds of lean Toyota process systems, they do have a lot of similarities, where mostly you want to even-out your production, so you're producing very consistently, and you want to break it into small steps and you want to limit the amount of inventory you have in your system. When you do this, it makes it easy to see how the process is running and limit defects. And the ultimate is you're really trying to reduce defects, because they're very expensive. It's a little bit hard to summarize. I think that's my best shot at it there, quickly off the top of my head.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:42:49):

Yeah. The interesting thing about the Toyota system, so at least when the machine was released, is they talk about... that book was released I think the nineties, and they went to the history of Toyota, and one of the interesting things they talked about was there was a brief time where the company ran... I think, was this after World War II? But anyways, the company ran into some troubles. They needed to layoff people to not go bankrupt. They had much more debt on books than they had assets. So yeah, they wanted to layoff people, but obviously the people were not happy about this, so there were violent protests about this. And in fact I think the US written constitution gave strong protections to labor that they hadn't had before, which gave labor an even stronger hand here.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:43:42):

So anyway, Toyota came to this agreement with the unions that they'd be allowed to do this one time layoff to get the company on the right track, but afterwards they could never lay somebody off. Which would mean that a person who works at Toyota works there from the time they graduate college or high school till they die. Right? I don't know, that's super intense in a culture. I mean, in software, where you have the average tenure in a company's one year, the difference is so much.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:44:13):

And there's so many potential benefits here, I guess a lot of drawbacks too. But one is, obviously if you're talking in a time scale of 50 years, rather than one year, the incentives are more aligned between the company and the person. Because anything you could do in one year is not going to have a huge impact on your stock options in that amount of time. But if this company's your retirement plan, then you have a much stronger incentive to make sure that things at this company run well, which means you're probably optimizing for the company's long term cash flow yourself. And also, there's obviously benefits to having that knowledge built up in the firm from people who have been there for a long time. But yeah, that was an interesting difference. One of the interesting differences, at least.

Austin Vernon (00:45:00):

I mean, I think there's diminishing returns to how long your tenure's going to be. Maybe one year's too short, but there's a certain extent to where, if you grow faster than your role at the company, then it's time to switch. It's going to depend on the person, but maybe five years is a good number. And so if you're not getting promoted within the firm, then your human capital's being wasted, because you could go somewhere else and have more responsibility and perform better for them. Another interesting thing about that story, is almost all lean turnarounds, where they're like, we're going to implement something like Toyota production system, they come with no layoff promises. Because if you're going to increase productivity, that's when everyone's like, "Oh gosh, I'm going to get laid off." So instead you have to increase output and take more market share, is what you do.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:46:00):

It's kind of like burning your bridges, right? So this is the only way.

Austin Vernon (00:46:05):

The process really requires complete buy-in, because a lot of your ideas for how you're going to standardize work content come from your line workers, because that's what they're doing every day. So if you don't have their buy-in, then it's going to fail. So that's why it's really necessary to have those kinds of clauses.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:46:22):

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. I think it was in your post where you said, if somebody makes their process more efficient, and therefore they're getting more work allotted to them, then obviously they're going to stop doing that. Right? Which means that, I don't know, do you ought to give more downtime to your best workers or something or the people who are most creative in your company?

Austin Vernon (00:46:48):

I was just going to say, if you're a worker at a plant, then a lot of times for that level of employee, actually small rewards work pretty well. A lot of people on drilling rigs used to give the guys that met certain targets $100 Walmart gift cards. So sometimes small, it's a reward, new ideas, stuff like that works.

Austin Vernon (00:47:15):

But because the whole system has to grow together, if you just improve one part of the process, it may not help you. You have to be improving all the right processes so normally it's much more collaborative. There's some engineer that's looking at it and like, "All right, this is where we're struggling," or "We have our defects here." And then you go get together with that supervisor and the workers in that area, then you all figure out what improvements could be together. Because usually the people already know. This is like, you see a problem at the top, and you're just now realizing it. Then you go talk to the people doing the work, and they're like, "Oh yeah, I tried to tell you about that two weeks ago, man." And then you figure out a better process from there.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:47:58):

Based on your recommendation, and Steven Malina's recommendation, I recently read The Goal. And after reading the book, I'm much more understanding of the value that consultants bring to companies, potentially. Because before you could think, “What does a 21 year old, who just graduated college, know about manufacturing? What are they going to tell this plant that they didn't already know? How could they possibly be adding value?” And afterwards, it occurred to me that there's so many abstract concepts that are necessary to understand in order to be able to increase your throughput. So now I guess I can see how somebody who's generically smart but doesn't have that much industry knowledge might be able to contribute to a plan and value consultants could be bringing.

Austin Vernon (00:48:43):

I think this applies to consultants or young engineers. A lot of times you put young engineers just right in the thick of it, working in production or process right on the line, where you're talking to the workers the most. And there's several advantages to that. One, the engineer learns faster, because they're actually seeing the real process, and the other is there's easy opportunities for them to still have a positive impact on the business, because there's $100 bills laying on the ground just from going up and talking to your workers and learning about stuff and figuring out problems they might be having and finding out things like that that could help you lower cost. I think there's a lot of consultants that... I don't know how the industry goes, but I would guess there's... I know Accenture has 600,000 employees. I don't know if that many, but it's just a large number, and a lot are doing more basic tasks and there are some people that are doing the more high level stuff, but it's probably a lot less.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:49:51):

Yeah. Yeah. There was a quote from one of those books that said, "At Toyota we don't consider you an engineer unless you need to wash your hands before you can have lunch." Yeah. Okay. So in your blog post about car manufacturing, you talk about Tesla. But what was really interesting is that in a footnote, I think you mentioned that you bought Tesla stocks in 2014, which also might be interesting to talk about again when we go to the market and alpha part. But anyways. Okay. And then you talk about Tesla using something called metal manufacturing. So first of all, how did you know in 2014 that Tesla was headed here? And what is metal manufacturing and how does it differ from the Toyota production system?

Austin Vernon (00:50:42):

Yeah. So yeah, I just was goofing around and made that up. Someone actually emailed me and they were like, "Hey, what is this metal manufacturing? I want to learn more about this." It's like, "Well, sorry, I just kind of made that up, because I thought it sounded funny." But yeah, I think it's really the idea that there's this guy, Dimming, and he found a lot of the same ideas that Toyota ended up implementing, and Toyota respected his ideas a lot. America never really got fully on board with this in manufacturing. Of course it's software people that are coming and implementing this and manufacturing now which is like the real American way of doing things.

Austin Vernon (00:51:32):

Because when you look at these manufacturing processes, the best place to save money and optimize is before you ever build the process or the plant. It's very early on. So I think if there's a criticism of Toyota, it's that they're optimizing too late and they're not creative enough in their production technology and stuff. They're very conservative, and that's why they have hydrogen cars and not battery cars, even though they came out with the Prius, which was the first large sales hybrid.

Austin Vernon (00:52:12):

So yeah, I think what Tesla's doing with really just making Dimming's ideas our own and really just Americanizing it with like, "Oh, well, we want to cast this, because that would be easier." Well, we can't, because we don't have an alloy. "We'll invent the alloy." I love it. It's great. Mostly, I love Tesla because they do such... I agree with their engineering principles. So I didn't know that the company would come to be so valuable. It's just, I was just always reading their stock reports and stuff so I was like, "Well, at least I need to buy some stock so that I have a justification for spending all this time reading their 10 Ks."

Dwarkesh Patel (00:52:53):

I want to get a little bit more in detail about the exact difference here. So lean production, I guess, is they're able to produce their cars without defects and with matching demand or whatever. But what is it about their system that prevents them from making the kinds of innovations that Tesla is able to make?

Austin Vernon (00:53:16):

It's just too incremental. It's so hard to get these processes working. So the faster you change things, it becomes very, very difficult to change the whole system. So one of the advantages Tesla has is, well, if you're making electric cars, you have just a lot less parts. So that makes it easier. And once you start doing the really hard work of basically digitizing stuff, like they don't have speed limit dials, you start just removing parts from the thing and you can actually then start increasing your rate of change even faster.

Austin Vernon (00:53:55):

It makes it harder to get behind if you have these old dinosaur processes. But I think there's a YouTube channel called The Limiting Factor, and he actually went into the detail of numbers on what it costs for Tesla to do their giga-casting, which saves tons of parts and deletes zillions of thousands of robots from their process. If you already have an existing stamping line and all that, where you're just changing the dyes based on your model, then it doesn't make sense to switch to the casting. But if you're building new factories, like Tesla is, well, then it makes sense to do the casting and you can build new factories very cheaply and comparatively and much easier. So there's a little bit of... they just have lots of technical data, I guess you could say, in a software sense.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:54:47):

Yeah. That's super interesting. The analogy is actually quite... it's like, Microsoft has probably tens of thousands of software engineers who are just basically servicing its technical debt and making sure that the old systems run properly, whereas a new company like Tesla doesn't have to deal with that. The thing that's super interesting about Tesla is like, Tesla's market cap is way over a trillion, right? And then Toyota's is 300 billion. And Tesla is such a new company. The fact that you have this Toyota, which is legendary for its production system, and this company that's less than two decades old is worth many times more, it's kind of funny.

Austin Vernon (00:55:32):

Yeah. I would say that, in that measure, I don't like market cap. You need to use enterprise value. These old car companies have so much debt, that if you look at enterprise value, it's not so jarring. Literally, I don't know, I can't remember what GM's worth, like 40 billion or something, and then they have $120 billion in debt. So their enterprise value is five times more than their market cap.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:56:02):

What is enterprise value?

Austin Vernon (00:56:03):

Enterprise value is basically what is the value of the actual company before you have any claims on it. It's the market cap plus your debt. But basically, if you're the equity holder and the company gets sold, you have to pay the debt first. So you only get the value of what's left over after the debt. So that's why market cap is... when Tesla has very little debt and a lot of market cap, and then these other guys have a lot of debt with less market cap, it skews the comparison.

Dwarkesh Patel (00:56:34):

Yeah, and one of the interesting things, it's similar to your post on software, is that it seems like one of the interesting themes across your work is automating processes often leads to decreased eventual throughput, because you're probably adding capacity in a place that you're deciding excess capacity, and you're also making the money part of your operation less efficient by have it interface with this automated part. It sounds like there's a similar story there with car manufacturing, right?

Austin Vernon (00:57:08):

Yeah. I think if we tie it back into what we were talking about earlier, automation promotes local optimization and premature optimization. So a lot of times it's better to figure out, instead of automating a process to make a really hard to make part, you should just figure out how to make that part easy to make. Then after you do that, then it may not even make sense to automate it anymore. Or get rid of it all together, then you just delete all those robots.

Austin’s Carbon Capture Project

Dwarkesh Patel (00:57:37):

Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay. So let's talk about the project that you're working on right now, the CO2 electrolysis. Do you want to explain what this is, and what your current approach is? What is going on here?

Austin Vernon (00:57:55):

Yeah, so I think just overall, electrofuels right now are super underrated, because you're about to get hopefully some very cheap electricity from solar, or it could be, maybe, some land. If we get really lucky, possibly some nuclear, geothermal. It’ll just make sense to create liquid fuels, or natural gas, or something just from electricity and air, essentially.

Austin Vernon (00:58:25):

There's a whole spectrum of ways to do this, so O2 electrolysis is one of those. Basically, you take water, electricity, and CO2, and a catalyst. And then, you make more complex molecules, like carbon monoxide, or formic acid, or ethylene, or ethanol, or methane or methine. Those are all options. But it's important to point out that, right now, I think if you added up all the CO2 electrolyzers in the world, you'd be measuring their output and kilograms per day. We make millions of tons per day off of the products I just mentioned. So there's a massive scale up if it's going to have a wider impact.

Austin Vernon (00:59:15):

So there's some debate. I think the debate for the whole electrofuels sector is: How much are you going to do in the electrolyzer? One company whose approach I really like is Terraform Industries. They want to make methane, which is the main natural gas. But they're just making hydrogen in their electrolyzer, and then they capture the CO2 and then put it into a methanation reaction. So everything they're doing is already world scale, basically.

Austin Vernon (00:59:47):

We've had hydrogen electrolyzers power fertilizer plants, providing them with the Hydrogen that they need. Methanation happens in all ammonia plants and several other examples. It's well known, very old. Methanation is hydrogen CO2 combined to make water and methane. So their approach is more conservative, but if you do more in the electrolyzer, like I'm going to make the methane actually in the electrolyzer instead of adding this other process, you could potentially have a much simpler process that has less CapEx and scales downward better. Traditional chemical engineering heavily favors scaling. With the more Terraform processes, they're playing as absolutely ginormous factories. These can take a long time to build.

Austin Vernon (01:00:42):

So one of the things they're doing is: they're having to fight the complexity that creeps into chemical engineering every step of the way. Because if they don't, they'll end up with a plant that takes 10 years to build, and that's not their goal. It takes 10 years to build a new refinery, because they're so complex. So yeah, that's where I am. I'm more on the speculative edge, and it's not clear yet which products will be favorable for which approaches.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:01:15):

Okay, yeah. And you're building this out of your garage, correct?

Austin Vernon (01:01:19):

Yeah. So that's where electrolyzers... Everything with electric chemistry is a flat plate instead of a vessel, so it scales down. So I can have a pretty good idea of what my 100 square centimeter electrolyzer is going to do, if I make it quite a bit bigger. I have to worry about how my flow might interact in the larger one and make sure the mixing's good, but it's pretty straightforward because you're just making your flat plate a larger area. Whereas the scale, it is different from scaling a traditional chemical process.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:01:56):

I'm curious how cheap energy has to be before this is efficient. If you're turning it into methane or something like that, presumably for fuel, is the entire process energy positive? Or how cheap would energy, electricity you need to get before that's the case?

Austin Vernon (01:02:18):

The different products and different methods have different crossovers. So Terraform Industries, they're shooting for $10 a megawatt hour for electricity. But again, their process is simpler, a little less efficient than a lot of the other products. They also have better premiums, just worth more per ton than methane. So your crossover happens somewhere in between $10 and $20 a megawatt hour, which is... I mean, that's pretty... Right now, solar, it's maybe like $25. Maybe it's a little higher because payment prices have gone up in the last year, but I think the expectation is they'll come back down. And so, getting down to $15 where you start having crossovers for some of these products like ethanol or ethylene or methanol, it's not science fiction.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:03:08):

I think in Texas where I live, that's where it's at right? The cost of energy is 20 or something dollars per megawatt hour.

Austin Vernon (01:03:16):

Well, not this summer! But yeah, a lot of times in Texas, the wholesale prices are around $25 to $30.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:03:26):

Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. So a lot of the actual details you said about how this works went over my head. So what is a flat plate? I guess before you answer that question, can you just generally describe the approach? What is it? What are you doing to convert CO2 into these other compounds?

Austin Vernon (01:03:45):

Well, yeah, it literally just looks like an electrolyzer. You have two sides and anode and a cathode and they're just smushed together like this because of the electrical resistance. If you put them far apart, it makes it... uses up a lot of energy. So you smush them together as close as you can. And then, you're basically just trading electrons back and forth. On one side, you're turning CO2 into a more complex molecule, and on the other side, you're taking apart water. And so, when you take apart the water, it balances out the equation, balances out your electrons and everything like that. I probably need to work on that elevator pitch there, huh?

Dwarkesh Patel (01:04:31):

I guess what the basic idea is, you need to put power in to convert CO2 into these other compounds.

Austin Vernon (01:04:38):

The inputs are electricity, water, and CO2, and the output is usually oxygen and whatever chemical you're trying to create is, along with some side reactions.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:04:49):

And then, these chemicals you mentioned, I think ethanol, methane, formic acid, are these all just fuels or what are the other uses for them?

Austin Vernon (01:04:58):

A lot of people are taking a hybrid approach with carbon monoxide. So this would be like Twelve Co… They've raised a lot of money to do this and 100 employees or something. You can take that carbon monoxide and make hydrogen, and then you have to send gas to make liquid fuels. So they want to make all sorts of chemicals, but one of the main volume ones would be like jet fuel.

Austin Vernon (01:05:22):

Let's see Formic acid is, it's the little fry of all these. It is an additive in a lot of things like preserving hay for animals and stuff like that. Then, ethanol there's people that want to... There's this company that makes ethylene, which goes into plastics that makes polyethylene, which is the most produced plastic. Or you can burn it in your car, although I think ethanol is a terrible vehicle fuel. But then you can also just make ethylene straight in the electrolyzer. So there's many paths. So which path wins is an interesting race to see.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:06:13):

The ability to produce jet fuel is really interesting, because in your energy superabundance paper, you talk about... You would think that even if we can electrify everything in solar and when it becomes super cheap, that's not going to have an impact on the prices to go to space for example. But I don't know. If a process like this is possible, then it's some way to in financial terms, add liquidity. And then turn, basically, this cheap solar and wind into jet fuel through this indirect process. So the price to send stuff to space or cheap plane flights or whatever––all of that goes down as well.

Austin Vernon (01:06:52):

It basically sets a price ceiling on the price of oil. Whatever you can produce this for is the ceiling now, which is maybe the way I think about it.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:07:06):

Yeah. So do you want to talk a little bit about how your background led into this project? This is your full-time thing, right? I don't know if I read about that, but where did you get this idea and how long have you been pursuing it? And what's the progress and so on.

Austin Vernon (01:07:20):

I've always loved chemical engineering, and I love working at the big processing plant because it's like being a kid in a candy store. If I had extra time, I'd just walk around and look at the plant, like it’s so cool. But the plant where I worked at, their up time was 99.7%. So if you wanted to change anything or do anything new, it terrified everyone. That's how they earned their bonuses: run the plant a 100% uptime all the time. So that just wasn't a good fit for me. And also, so I always wanted my own chemical plant, but it's billions of dollars to build plants so that was a pretty big step. So I think this new technology of... there's a window where you might be able to build smaller plants until it optimizes to be hard to enter again.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:08:21):

And then, why will it become hard to enter again? What will happen?

Austin Vernon (01:08:27):

If someone figures out how to build a really cheap electrolyzer, and they just keep it as intellectual property, then it would be hard to rediscover that and compete with them.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:08:38):

And so, how long have you been working on this?

Austin Vernon (01:08:42):

Oh, not quite a year. But yeah, I actually got this idea to work on it from writing my blog. So when I wrote the heating fuel post, I didn't really know much about... There's another company in the space, Prometheus Fuels and I'm like, "Oh, this is an interesting idea." And then, I got talking to a guy named Brian Heligman, and he's like, "You should do this, but not what Prometheus is doing." And so, then I started looking at it and I liked it, so I've been working on it since.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:09:08):

Yeah. It's interesting because if energy does become as cheap as you suspect it might. If this process works, then yeah, this is a trillion dollar company probably, right? If you're going to get the patents and everything.

Austin Vernon (01:09:22):

I mean, maybe. With chemical plants, there's a certain limitation where your physical limitation is. There's only so many places that are good places for chemical plants. You start getting hit by transportation and all that. So, you can't just produce all the chemical for the entire world in Texas and transport it all around. It wouldn't work. So you're talking about a full, globe-spanning thing. At that point, if you're building factories all over the world, someone's going to figure out what your intellectual property is and all that. You would have to keep innovating to stay ahead of the competitors. I think that would limit your... Ultimately, it's a commodity. You're making commodity, so you don't have the same kind of defensibility that other sectors do.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:10:18):

I see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. There's not network effects I guess?

Austin Vernon (01:10:22):

Yeah. This is not quite consistent with what I just said about harder to enter. But I think what happens is the scale starts increasing as you go on. Even though this is easier to scale down, there's certain elements that are very much hard to scale and then the organization as well. Basically, you'll end up with early on a few competitors that continue to grow against each other and limit the margins. It'd be hard to be the fifth 30 years down the line.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:11:05):

What is the state of this project right now? Are you guys planning on starting a company, and what are the milestones you guys are shooting for?

Austin Vernon (01:11:14):

Right now, it is just me, but I have a family of engineers. We're all engineers, so it's loosely supported by them right now, by other people in my family as well, they're participating some. But yeah, basically, I just have to get... I've already done a lot of the theoretical design work at just a very cursory level to make sure it makes sense, and the cost will be reasonable and stuff like that. So now, it's working on the electrolizer to, basically, meet the targets you need for reliability and product concentration and energy costs. Also then just, is it manufacturable? Because right now, a lot of electrolyzers they use in the labs, they're literally smaller than a postage stamp, and they're very difficult to make.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:12:10):

Okay. I see. So you started working on this before or after you had quit your job?

Austin Vernon (01:12:16):

Oh, yeah. After. I quit my job five years ago or something. I was doing software stuff in between.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:12:21):

Oh, yeah? What did you work on?

Austin Vernon (01:12:24):

I worked on several products. I have one that’s an oil and gas data service that's somewhat successful. I’ve kept paying customers, but it's still relatively small.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:12:37):

Okay. I see. Yeah. So it seems like your blog is pretty recent, right? You started that about a year ago. What encouraged you to do that?

Austin Vernon (01:12:48):

Well, let's see. I was curious about cryptography in general, but specifically for blockchains. I wanted to be able to read the Bitcoin white paper and understand some of this IPFS. So I figured the best way to do it was... people talked about like, "Oh yeah, you should write, blah, blah, blah." So I did, "Well, I'll create an IPFS blog." I did that and learned a lot. It was not the most reliable blog when I was running it on my own Droplet and everything. So thankfully, I migrated to a service that has much more up time than my own server. So then, I wrote several posts to basically learn about it. I wrote posts about hash functions and private key cryptography. So then I could understand the white papers and what they're doing with the math and the cryptography. Eventually, I had this blog–– so my first non-crypto topic was on how to build a cheaper house or why it's difficult to reduce home construction costs. That made it on Hacker News and all that. It's like, "Oh, maybe actually people want to read this stuff," so I've just been writing since then in my spare time.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:14:18):

I actually interned for Protocol Labs, which is a place that built IPFS.

Austin Vernon (01:14:25):

Oh, yeah?

Dwarkesh Patel (01:14:26):

Yeah. So I got a chance to learn a lot about it and... about how file coin exactly works. That part threw me into a world for a while. But yeah, it's really interesting. I actually had a blog on IPFS. I mean, it was just a toy thing, not the one that I actually ended up writing on. The thing is, obviously at the moment, being it's like... nobody else is going to seat it for you, so you got to use a centralized service anyways, like Piñata, but it is a fun exercise.

Austin Vernon (01:14:57):

I was just running it off of Droplet and on DigitalOcean. If you use the direct content hash, it works pretty well, even if you're linking through your ENS name. But the problem is, of course, when I was first doing this, the fees on Ethereum were so high that I didn't want to change that link all the time. So I tried to use the pinning feature with IPNS because CloudFlare does the e-thought link. And then, they look up whatever your IPNS name is. And then, they tried to go find it.

Austin Vernon (01:15:35):

So the breaking point for me was how CloudFlare couldn't always find my server using IPNS. Now, the service I'm using is called Fleek. They basically go directly to the content hash, but on DNS it's cheap to change. You can change it in one minute. If Ethereum fees got lower, I might switch back to that, but I don't want to... Eventually, and I think it will be. What if it's like 1 cent transactions? Then it would be no big deal to just change the content hash every time you update your website.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:16:17):

What is the reason for having it on Ethereum?

Austin Vernon (01:16:21):

Just for fun.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:16:23):

It is inconvenient, I guess, if your content hash is changing every time you update the website, so you got to keep re-updating the actual... where people can find the site or use some other service to take care of it.

Austin Vernon (01:16:34):

I mean, yeah, if transactions are cheap, then you just have... You could automate it all, and it just cost you a little bit of money each time, and it'd be fine. But it was like $50, and I'm not going to pay $50 to post a blog post.

Energy Superabundance

Dwarkesh Patel (01:16:47):

Yeah. Yeah. And then, you find a typo. It's like, "Oh, gosh, I can't fix that." So you have a paper that you recently released with Eli Dourado on energy superabundance, and you have lots and lots of interesting speculation in there for what might be possible if energy gets a lot cheaper. I think we should just jump into it. On the big picture, as I'm sure you're aware, per capita energy used since the 1970s has not gone up. Before that, there's this thing called the Henry Adams Curve, where per capita energy use would increase 2% a year.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:17:22):

After 1970, that was no longer the case. Ironically enough, right after, the Department of Energy was created. But nonetheless, we've still had economic growth since the 1970s. I mean, it's been slower, but even though per capita energy hasn't increased per capita, GDP has increased. I think in the paper's abstract or the introduction, you talk about why increasing energy use is necessary for increasing economic growth. But doesn't that pattern suggest that you can still have decent economic growth without having to use energy, or have we just not come across the constraints yet?

Austin Vernon (01:17:57):

Hey, I mean, you just have diminishing returns. There's physical limits to how efficient things could be, and as you get closer to that efficiency limit, it's harder and harder and takes more and more effort. There's some diminishing returns there, where if you can just... A perfect example of what we were just talking about is oil's quite expensive and natural gas is expensive too. Oil’s easy to transport, you can produce it anywhere in the world and get anywhere else pretty cheaply. Natural gas is extremely expensive transport, but it's very useful fuel and for also making fertilizer. Not everyone has natural gas or the economic capability to extract natural gas using traditional processes. So if you have independent energy because you can just build these natural gas factories, where you're just using sunshine and water and air, then all of a sudden everyone has access to natural gas even if you weren't blessed with easily obtainable, natural gas reserves.

Austin Vernon (01:19:00):

I think that there's this whole story about the tyranny of geography here when it comes to energy. Because there are some countries that have extreme electricities per capita, like Iceland and Norway, where they have crazy amounts of hydro-power and people build aluminum plants there and stuff like that. Then you have places in Africa, where they have no coal, very little gas. They're just energy starved. Their transportation system sucks. You can't transport coal in.

Austin Vernon (01:19:39):

The hydropower is... There's only so much of it. It may not be close to where their cities are. So if you start adding solar to the mix for them, and some of these other technologies, it could really be an incredible increase in energy availability for them. I think we talked about that in the paper. We're looking at doubling rich-world use of energy, but it would be more like 10x more if you live in Africa.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:20:08):

Yeah. Yeah. So I wonder, if that's the case, then as energy becomes that abundant, will it just be other resources that become the bottleneck in terms of what our civilization needs... ? For example the actual resources that are necessary to build the factories and the raw materials? To what extent can even that be...

Austin Vernon (01:20:34):

I would argue the ultimate limit is like.. it is really human capital. What more abundant energy does is it allows you to redeploy human capital away from trying to figure out how to use scarce energy sources. Here's an example I love about trucking. I love trucks, not as big a fan of freight trains, but freight trains are extremely efficient. They get like 10 times more efficient than a truck or something.

Austin Vernon (01:21:15):

They use just very little fuel, but the flip sde is that the train doesn't come by all the time and they may not hold to the schedule. You have to aggregate your product with the other stuff or your raw materials, and it adds a lot of cost to your production. Toyota production system runs on trucks, not trains. The reason is that trucks are just extremely flexible. They come when you need it. They go when you need it. And even then, people still complain about truck drivers not showing up when you want them.

Austin Vernon (01:21:51):

When you have cheaper energy, this electrification and automation of trucking, you are going to shift a huge amount of goods from trains to trucks. And it's going to just have huge knock on effects all across the economy. It's more specialization. There's a lot of products that you're just limited to your suppliers because transportation's expensive. It reduces working capital, because a lot of times it takes longer on trains, similar stuff like smaller ships, more air freight. One thing that shocked me as Eli was telling me about how the elasticity of demand for air freight is just insane. When you even decrease the cost a little bit, demand goes to the roof.

Austin Vernon (01:22:37):

So I'm pretty sure that there'll be some kind of... You always think, "Oh, we can't do this with batteries," and then someone comes up with a more clever idea. So even if you have a 500 mile rein limit for your freight plane. The freight doesn't care if you have to stop every 500 miles to refuel or recharge. You can go over land on almost all these routes. You could go up through Japan and the Aleutian Islands, or you could go overland from China to Europe, charging just wherever's convenient.

Austin Vernon (01:23:15):

If that electric plane has half the operating cost of the jet plane, the amount of freight you're moving on airplanes will go way up, and it'll go down on ships. And then, everyone will be better off. Because right now, if you're a shipping company, you have real working capital problems, because your stuff sits on a boat for a month, and you've got to finance that and do all this stuff. And then, what if things change in the meantime? Like, "Oh, I don't really want that product anymore," so the air freight is just an absolute economic, just booster. So if you could make that cheaper, it's really exciting because it uses way more energy.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:24:01):

An analogy that had just occurred to me is, you could imagine that with computational power, if Moore's Law had stopped in 2005, we would still have a lot of interesting applications using compute and the effects of the computer would still have permeated society. But obviously, a lot of things that are possible today with computers, they just wouldn't have been tried or been possible in that kind of world.

Austin Vernon (01:24:27):

Okay. Yeah. I mean, all your engineers would be working on optimization instead of building new products.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:24:34):

Yeah. I think in J. Storr Hall's new book on... "Where's My Flying Car?" One of the points he makes is that GDP growth has been probably overstated because a lot of what constituted the growth has just been increasing the efficiency of existing machines to make them use less energy. Which still doesn't result in more total resources or goods or services being produced. But yeah, instead of making the laundry machine more efficient, you can just create a new kind of machine that may need to use more energy. So for this vision to come to pass, do you need energy to... Is it just enough that energy becomes super cheap or do you need advances in the ability to store that energy as well? So for example, lithium batteries are the bottleneck, does it matter if you can get energy super cheap, if you can't put them in appliances or cars or planes or whatever?

Austin Vernon (01:25:33):

I think the important thing to think about here is that our current energy is so expensive, especially electricity. With our energy resources, which are basically thermal, it's quite difficult to make electricity comparatively. And so, what we use electricity for is stuff we really want to use electricity for. It's hard to imagine that... We're not going to turn our air conditioner off. We're going to run it. And so, we're willing to pay a lot of money for that electricity to run our air conditioner. Whereas, if you look at really closely at a lot of the use cases that use tons of extra energy, they're much more flexible in how they use the energy. There's not a whole lot of storage evolved. If you're looking at growing crops or making methane for rocket fuel or making chemicals, you can design these processes to run when the energy's available. And so, the batteries are really going to be for keeping air conditioner on.. where you're willing to pay a lot of money. So I don't really see the batteries and storage as a limit.

Storage for Cheap Energy

Dwarkesh Patel (01:26:47):

Okay. If you had something like air freight, right? If that's the thing we're concerned about. Wouldn't you need some way to store that electricity for air freight, or maybe you can just convert it to jet fuel? Is that what you're saying?

Austin Vernon (01:27:03):

Yeah. I was thinking of more grid storage, but yeah, transportation's going to dominate battery demand. Grid storage is tiny in comparison, but I think you're basically getting to the point where we're making batteries out of dirt because that's how you scale it. So, if you're making batteries out of carbon and iron and phosphate, it becomes about how many battery factories you want to build. There's plenty of lithium, it's just you have to build the lithium mines. I don't really see any hard limits there eventually. Once you build all the factories, then yeah, you're pretty much ready to go.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:27:44):

Is the point you're making with the alternative batteries that even if they're worse than lithium batteries we'll have just so much energy that it doesn't matter? As in even if we lose a lot of it, that's fine, we'll just use whatever we can take. Or are you saying that we'll produce batteries with other chemistries that are as good as lithium batteries or better?

Austin Vernon (01:28:06):

Right now the shortage is really nickel. So in the very short term, lithium's kind of starting to be a shortage, but there's plenty of lithium. It won't be a problem. With lithium iron phosphate or whatever, there's a huge amount of substitution right now because it's avoiding nickel. It's not quite as good as some of the nickel chemistries, but for a lot of applications, it just doesn't matter like for a lot of cars and everything like that. And you're going to have the aircraft and stuff paying the premium for the high energy density batteries. Eventually technologies could just use less and less materials because they're better batteries, like some of these concepts around solid state. I'm not sure if those will come to fruition and if they'll be really that much better when they do come, but I think there's lots of opportunities for substitution down the line.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:29:03):

What is solid state, by the way?

Austin Vernon (01:29:04):

Right now, all our batteries charge and discharge through the lithium ion going back and forth between the cathode and the anode. It travels through a liquid and the liquid is electrolyte, which means ions can travel through it. Solid electrolytes are a little more challenging so that's why we don't have them. You get rid of the liquid and it's just like the ion has to travel through a solid instead. The promise is it could be a much higher energy density and theoretically cheaper too, just because it weighs less and stuff, but there's all sorts of problems around how they degrade faster. Batteries have six different areas where you have to hit the requirements and if you miss one, then it's no good so they're kind of hard to improve in that sense.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:30:02):

I guess if the energy super abundance is going to come from solar and wind, obviously these are intermittent sources of energy, in that case, you would need there to be progress in the battery storage, that's contingent on that. Right?

Austin Vernon (01:30:16):

Yeah. I think that's what I mean, a lot of the extra energy uses that we talk about don't really require many batteries, if any batteries at all. The transportation, yes, you have batteries in them, but if you're going to have abundant nuclear electricity, or abundant geothermal electricity, you still have to build all those electric vehicles. You still need the batteries for that. So the extra batteries that solar and wind require over geothermal, I think could end up being pretty minimal. Maybe the way I think about it is if you can have solar, a farm that's going to give you $10 a megawatt of our electricity, you have to figure out how to utilize that. And if you do, then you'll be very rich and you'll beat the guy who's paying $40 a megawatt hour from the more expensive traditional generators.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:31:12):

Yeah. But before we get into which sources of energy are most promising, let's talk about some of the other applications of an energy support abundance. Obviously we talked a little bit about travel, but one thing that might be concerning with air travel, at least for passengers, is if the bottleneck step there is TSA and other regulations, to what extent will reducing the travel time or increasing flight speed or number of flights have an impact on how much time you're going to spend in an airport or in transit?

Austin Vernon (01:31:47):

Well, so right now, if you think about Airbus, they have this super jumbo thing. I can't remember what that plane’s number was, but none of the airlines really loved it because it's too big. It's too hard to get everyone loaded and unloaded and you really just hit this economies of scale. So the electric planes are likely to be just tiny in comparison, 10 passengers. It's easier to load and unload or you're going to fly out of smaller airports so you won't be going to this giant regional airport that just, has all the parking problems and all the security, you'll be driving to your neighborhood general aviation airport, where there's a small line to get through. And a lot of these small aircraft, under certain situations, even avoid some of the screening requirements, because they're just not as dangerous. If you have a small plane, there's only so much damage you can do with it.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:32:42):

I did not know that. I got to start booking planes from the smaller airports or something to avoid the TSA.

Austin Vernon (01:32:48):

It's very nascent, but there's some business models that are coming down from the net jet style to a little more commercial. I think that they're trying to hit a price point that's similar to first class, but you get to avoid all the airport craziness. And I think, I'm just kind of a believer in if that existed, people would get angry enough that they would loosen up a lot of the rules. It seems impossible to change those rules now, but I think for the average person, it just costs them no time because most people don't even fly very much.

Travel in the Future

Dwarkesh Patel (01:33:26):

Yeah. Do you want to talk about your vision for what a city could look like if energy got a lot cheaper? In the paper you have all kinds of interesting projections about drones and electric deliveries and just the entire congestion of the 3D space, and I guess with tunnels as well. Well, what does the city look like with energy superabundance?

Austin Vernon (01:33:48):

Basically disaggregate the car to a certain extent, inner city car trips are less because flying's going to be cheaper and it's going to be more convenient to have the bots deliver your stuff. I love the tunnels because I don't like taking people's land so with tunnels you can run new roads and everything without imminent domaining and taking people's land away from them when they don't want to lose their land. That process is so, it makes people so angry when you take their land that it's very expensive to imminent domain people, because they will fight you until literally the sheriff has to show up and haul them away. If you can go around that with tunnels existing right away it just makes that societal cost of doing some of this stuff significantly less expensive and it's then just the engineering challenge.

Future Cities

Austin Vernon (01:34:54):

I think there's really an opportunity now there. Boring Company is the most famous, but recently I think there's another company that wants to do tunnels for electricity. They have this plasma boring machine concept–– it seems pretty crazy right now, but it's just one of those solutions where you're going to reduce the coordination cost across the whole economy and improve property rights so people should really try to build it.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:35:26):

You mentioned one of these machines in your blog post on tunneling and it was DS, SpaceX1, I forgot the name of it, but it's like this insane thing.

Austin Vernon (01:35:34):

Prufrock?

Dwarkesh Patel (01:35:35):

Yeah, exactly. It's pretty big but apparently it's all electric, which is kind of insane, and it can just do it in one go. How is it getting the material out if you're just doing the tunneling in one step?

Austin Vernon (01:35:51):

The problem is that most of the tunneling is in soft soil and it's difficult to drill through soft soil because of the materials handling. When you first start drilling an oil well through this stuff, you actually have to limit your drilling speed and you don't even have to put any weight on the bit, just the pumping fluid around basically jets out the fluid. That's kind of what you're doing with the boring machine and the soft soil stuff. So managing the spoils, which is they have muck carts a lot of times, I think maybe it's basically like trying to do a conveyor belt, but you could also just make it a full liquid and pump it out. In the oil field we carry our cuttings in mud and we pump it.

Austin Vernon (01:36:36):

Then they have, the other big challenge is they have to keep the walls from caving in on them so that's... Current boring machines and soft soil spend enormous amounts of time erecting these tunnel supports that keep it from collapsing in themself. So it's kind of counterintuitive. It's actually dramatically faster to bore in hard rock than soft soil because in soft soil you spend so much non-productive time, whereas in hard rock, you're just blowing and going.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:37:09):

Interesting. Yeah. Okay. To get back to the cities, you mentioned something in the paper, Marchetti's constant, which is about how the amount of time people spend in transport per day is the same so if you just increase the amount of speed in which they can move with VTOLs (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) or other kinds of things, then they have a wider surface area in which they can explore. Right?

Austin Vernon (01:37:37):

Yeah. I don't know if physically the cities will look that much different, but their effective economic size will be much larger because you could live in Cedar Rapids and commute to Minneapolis with some of these technologies. Your city in Cedar Rapids still looks the same, but you don't have to work there. If you have a better job in Minneapolis, you could commute there three times a week or whatever it is, five days a week.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:38:11):

Yeah. It's super interesting. But does that imply, by the way, that if the commute time stays the same and people just get more spread out.. If energy becomes cheaper, then neighborhoods and cities kind of become this unwalkable mess out of a Jane Jacob's nightmare if the conglomeration goes away?

Austin Vernon (01:38:29):

I think it's actually the opposite. If you have tunnels and if you have some, these alternative methods to cars, then you use cars less. And I think in many cities, they never made sense for cars anyway, because they were built before cars. In New York city, you're never going to move everyone around on a car unless you build tunnels, you could then. But even then I think there's other technologies there that make a lot of sense. I think people like walkable so even though I live in a city that requires a car, some of the hottest neighborhoods are walkable neighborhoods where the neighborhood is walkable itself and then you just drive your car to wherever else you need. The car is hidden within the neighborhood.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:39:22):

Okay. It's interesting. I guess we'll see more segregation (not in the racial sense or anything) but in the sense that people will prefer to live in these walkable neighborhoods so they don't have any problem commuting to work using a VTOL or something. What you would end up seeing is these walkable neighborhoods and then industrial zones that are way far away, distance wise, but not that far away time wise.

Austin Vernon (01:39:46):

Right. And it's the same for if you want to live in a small town. Now it would be too far to commute to the city, but you could in the future.

Flying Cars

Dwarkesh Patel (01:39:56):

Yeah. More choice. I see. What is holding back VTOLs? VTOL, by the way, is Vertical Take Off and Landing. The reason you need to go to an airport is because you need a large landing pad to take off and land. The hope is that if you could just vertically take off, then you would be able to lift off from your roof or something. Obviously we've had prototypes of this kind of stuff since the thirties. Why don't we have these widely available? Is energy the constraint, or is it something else?

Austin Vernon (01:40:26):

Well, I think in the past, theoretically liquid fuels were dense enough, but they're too complex, too expensive because when you're turning heat energy into mechanical energy, it's just a lot of weight and complexity comes with that. Some of these old concepts, you have all these engines and all that. And so if you electrify them, it really changes the game. Because it's not just batteries, it's the motors, it's the inverters, that are now getting dense enough and small enough to make sense. It takes time to get this stuff through the FAA, for better or worse. The technology hasn't been good enough long enough to get stuff through the FAA.

Austin Vernon (01:41:14):

And there are some limitations I think right now. A lot of people wouldn't use batteries and the batteries are just on the edge of good enough. You're going to have a 50 mile VTOL, not a couple hundred mile VTOL, but eventually my dream VTOL application is a nuclear power quadcopter that carries a container. So you can take the container directly from the factory in Vietnam or wherever, directly to the people who are using it or the warehouse in Arkansas or whatever.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:41:50):

Yeah. That would be interesting. Theoretically, you could have these drones that are carrying these huge payloads, weight wise.

Austin Vernon (01:41:58):

But you wouldn't necessarily want a large payload. You just want whatever the customer wants, you want to size your vehicle to deliver that payload, and that's the most efficient.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:42:12):

Oh, I see. Right. Because it doesn't need to be a shipping container or a shipping vessel where you just have it be huge. And then what does this mean for computing? If energy gets a lot cheaper, I guess if Bitcoin mining becomes, well, it doesn't necessarily become more profitable because other people's energy's cheaper too, but what are the other consequences? Is spinning up an AWS server just become trivial now and then building a deep learning model costs nothing in terms of GPU time? What impact does this have on computing?

Austin Vernon (01:42:48):

Yeah, I think the limitation would probably still be just chips for a while until you figure out a better production process for that. I think it'd be a while before it becomes energy. I think smartphones really worry about energy. There could be some interesting things with smartphones if you have a very power dense betavoltaic battery which is a nuclear battery that you don't have to worry about running down. But outside of smartphones, I'm not sure that energy is the limit for a lot of those computing.

Carbon Shortage

Dwarkesh Patel (01:43:26):

And one of the interesting things that you speculate about at the end of the paper is about a potential carbon shortage. I think in an email to Tyler Cowen, he published on his blog, you said by the end of this century, we'll have a carbon shortage because of the process you talked about earlier, the thing you're working on, if you can take CO2 out of the atmosphere. What is the probability that this ends up happening? Do you think it's more than 50% by the end of the century or is it just speculation?

Austin Vernon (01:43:58):

I think it's extremely high that it happens and it's harder to put the timeline on it. By the end of the century might be a little, I think I ran some numbers in there and if you 10X current plastic production, and then you're just land filling it all, I think it was a little over a hundred years to get, and you're assuming you're out, the rest of your carbon output is zero in that scenario. But it's probably pretty hard to do it in a hundred, by the end of the century without a lot of growth, but it's kind of the exponential thing that can get you where... I think some large number of the carbon emissions have happened in the last 20 years, and it was very small before 1950. You could kind of get surprised at the back half, the last 10 years it goes crazy. It makes it hard to predict.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:44:53):

By the way, in Will Mcaskill’s new book on longtermism, one of the things he speculates about is if society collapses and we need to restart, one of the things we'll need is coal or some other sort of dense, easy-to use-fuel. And the problem is we've been burning up easily accessible coal, like coal in places where we could just dig up and find it, and so one of the things he's concerned about is making sure we leave some easily accessible coal silos around so that in case society collapses, we can restart and use these to power up a second industrial revolution. I wonder if you could use a process like this with carbon sequestration to actually just build up these kinds of reserves. I don't know if a long term, if somebody's really interested in making sure we have that kind of resource. They could just use this process to... Is that possible? Or

Austin Vernon (01:45:51):

Actually there's a company called Charm Industrial, and they're basically doing that because they take trees and they do a process called fast pyrolysis. It's where you burn biomass without oxygen, anoxic environment. And it makes this bio-oil and then they're injecting the oil down into wells and selling carbon credit. So it's already happening, you could say.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:46:15):

Oh wow. And that’s easy to burn and stuff?

Austin Vernon (01:46:21):

Yeah. If you just want to burn it for heat, it's okay, but it's hard to refine. There are a lot of people that tried to do bio-oil as an alternative for petroleum 20 years ago, Cleantech 1.0, and they all failed. So it makes me laugh that they're reimagining the process to sell what are right now very expensive carbon credits. But you could do something similar. Actually you could do something similar just to make straight carbon and stuff if you wanted to.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:46:50):

Okay. I see. The thing that I find interesting about this is that often in the case of global problems, people will early on identify that a thing is going to be a problem, but it often ends up being the case that they get the direction of the problem opposite. If you think about population, in the seventies, people were correct that global population was going to be a problem. The thing is, it seems like now the problem is going to be that the population might decline too fast, not that it's going to grow exponentially. And I think this is another example of this kind of thing where CO2 is going to be a problem either way. It just, I'm not sure if it's going to be a problem where we'll over reproduce it or we'll have shortages.

Austin Vernon (01:47:36):

Yeah. If you just think about the large scale, if you're going to be like Kardashev, whatever scale civilization, where you're using condensed amounts of energy, that's going to have side effects and you're going to have to figure out how to manage that one way or the other. One of those is eventually earth may just be a nature preserve and we all live in space or something.

Nuclear

Dwarkesh Patel (01:48:01):

Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about nuclear energy. It seems like you're much less optimistic about nuclear energy than you are about solar and wind. Do you want to explain why that's the case?

Austin Vernon (01:48:15):

Yeah. Well, especially solar more so than wind. Wind, I think it's limiting because it's transmission problems and again, if you want to build out huge amounts of wind like some of these zero carbon plans call for, you're going to have to take a lot of people's land to build transmission lines and stuff. Which really pisses people off and they fight hard and it becomes expensive. It's not like... The wind turbines are relatively easy to sight because you pay people and you'll actually see, they never put above ground power lines on the people's land, where they put the wind turbines. They're always underground so at least they get to the county right away. But when you get these giant transmission lines, like Grainbelt or something, they almost inevitably have to go across a lot of people's lands and you can't just stuff them all in county and state right aways because the pylons are so big.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:49:12):

Sorry, what is the pylon?

Austin Vernon (01:49:13):

The pylon is what holds the wire up, the tall tower. Yeah, solar is, it's much more flexible where it can go. I think when it comes to solar getting cheaper, the obstacles are just pretty simple. It's like, "Well gosh, it's expensive to put all this racking. Why don't we just lay the panels on the ground?” “Gosh, this glass we're encasing with is getting expensive and we don't need it to last 80 years or 50 years. We can just put some plastic on it instead." We've gotten these, the actual materials and stuff so cheap and all the other labor and stuff is getting more expensive. Well, why don't we just add another layer and make more energy? Those are your solar solutions to get down to $10 a megawatt hour, and they're pretty straightforward.

Austin Vernon (01:49:57):

Whereas nuclear is like, "Well the light water reactor can't get us there. Let's instead cool our reactor with sodium, which catches fire when it, it explodes when it reacts with water and catches fire when it reacts with air." Or there's, you could cool it with liquid lead. That's an option. Helium, which leaks a lot. Or you could do molten salts that corrode everything. We don't really have anything like that, and so I think when you start looking at, this is for large reactors. So I think those solutions for very large reactors are pretty hard. It's pretty difficult. And there's a lot of reasons why. Why did we make these weird choices? Well, a lot of stuff just reacts poorly when you expose it to neutrons and stuff. They each have their own features that make them possibly good candidates.

Austin Vernon (01:50:57):

I actually think regulation is actually, it's oversold a little bit. And I think actually to the extent that if people were internally consistent, then they would see NRC as a regulatory success story because, the background on this is my wife's mom and step father are nuclear engineers that have worked at all levels of the nuclear power industry so I get to ask them the general questions and learn a lot about it, which is nice. It's very helpful for learning about it.

Austin Vernon (01:51:33):

But there's, back in the eighties, the nuclear power industry was in real trouble because their competitors in coal and natural gas got deregulated. Most of the cost of coal is the rail getting there, and the rail industry got deregulated and then the national gas industry got deregulated. So the cost of their alternatives was falling and they had to build more safety into their plants because of all these, it wasn't just three miles out. It was Browns Ferry. It was Rancho Heco, all these things that could have been really scary and, to a certain extent, we got a little bit lucky that we didn't have a worse disaster. They were just relatively limited accidents at their sites.

Austin Vernon (01:52:25):

There was actually a time where nuclear power plants were selling for less than what their fuel was worth in their plant, around there. What the industry did and what NRC did is they moved to probabilistic risk assessment, which is usually the gold standard. People are really happy that we use probabilistic risk assessment for commercial crew, with NASA and SpaceX. And they want the FDA to use more probability, more expected value. What this allowed was it's basically you're rolling up some of the rules and moving it into the risk assessment. Around 1980 nuclear power plants only ran about 60% of the time. They weren't very reliable. They had all sorts of unplanned outages, stuff like that. The safest mode of operation is just running as designed. The more consistent nuclear power is, the safer it is. The probabilistic risk assessment allows you to do repairs while you're running, which was kind of discouraged before. It'll be like if your main cooling pump is leaking, before you'd be like, "Oh, gosh, I hope we can make it," and then eventually it just fails and you shut down the reactor. And now it's like, "All right. Well, we have backups. The safest thing to do is actually repair it now while the plant's still running and then get it repaired and put it back online." Not only, to give you the idea of the safety standards that NRC has, I think for the nuclear plant taking damage is one time in 10,000 reactor years. And then for a large release it's one in 100,000 reactor years, and there's 93 operating reactors that––less than 93 sites. We should only see a three mile island under the current standards once every hundred years or so. A large release, like a Fukushima type situation, should only happen once every thousand years.

Austin Vernon (01:54:37):

But they had, just in a few years in the 1970s, the industry had three or four of these damage events at least. I don't know how many officially count, but probably at least three. The safety is incredible. And now the operating capacity is up to over 90% so the plants are just extremely reliable and it lowers their costs because their costs are so fixed. When you compare it to a country like France? They've had a lot of reliability problems with their nuclear fleet in the last couple years. This year, their capacity factor I think is barely over 60%. We have 90 gigawatts of nuclear. They have 60 gigawatts. That makes a huge difference for Europe that those plants aren't running full out. And it is really, you see a lot of charts about, "If Germany didn't shut down its reactors, what would the energy balance be?" But you don't see as many, "If the French could run their reactors like American reactors, what would the energy balance be?" I could go on about how that integrates into new plants, if you want to know about that.

Dwarkesh Patel (01:55:46):

Yeah, I do. Because the line I've always heard on this from my bubble is like, "Oh, they haven't approved a new plant. The NRC has not approved a new thing since, a new plant, since it was created." I guess they just approved the design for the new, small modular reactors, which I guess I'd love to hear your opinion on as well. I'm very curious to hear this perspective.

Austin Vernon (01:56:07):

Well, okay. So think about it, you're in the 1980s, you had new sources of fuel, you had new competitors, you also, by the end of the decade, increased the amount your nuclear power plants ran by a lot. So a lot of these new power plants that people were thinking about building were at existing sites, like an extra reactor at Watts Bar or whatever. And well, you basically just got like a buy two, get one free, by running your plant better. So you don't really need them as much. So all those contributed to just not making sense to build new nuclear power plants, because the existing fleet ran better, and more competitors, and electricity demand slowed down.

Austin Vernon (01:56:50):

Is it hard to get through NRC approval? Yes. That last one, the mini reactor you're talking about took 10 years or something. But when you think about a probabilistic risk assessment, no one ever says, "Well, gosh, NRC's current standards of a large release, which would basically happen one every thousand years... We're not arguing over that. We're just talking past each other, I guess, instead.

Austin Vernon (01:57:19):

So to me, that's a pretty reasonable risk level. If you're going to 10x your reactors, that means almost certainly you'd have a Fukushima within your lifetime if you go with NRC standards. But it actually turns out that it's pretty cheap to do way better. A lot of the reason why the plants weren't built may not necessarily have been because of regulation, but because the market conditions changed. You had more competitors, and the coal with the gas, being deregulated. And then you also had increased production from the existing nuclear plant. So if you're going to build an extra nuclear plant or an extra reactor at an existing site, then you might not have needed to anymore because you got so much more production out of your existing plants. Stuff like shortening the fueling time and all-around improvements, paired with electricity demand flattening is what really made new plants not economic or not necessary.

Austin Vernon (01:58:27):

When we really think about the probabilistic risk assessment, it just takes a lot of engineering time to get it through. If you look at how hard it was for SpaceX to get Falcon 9 and Dragon through NASA's loss of crew risk calculations… it took years, it took hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's kind of funny that people see that as a success. Especially when the stakes were only a few lives for people that volunteered for danger. And then you have a nuclear power plant, where we're going through the same problematic risk assessment, and it could impact many more people's lives. That's not good enough. So I think it would make more sense to argue about the risk factor, how much risk we should take with the actual numbers, as opposed to just like, "Oh, I'm mad that we're not building nuclear power plants."

Austin Vernon (01:59:28):

Actually it becomes very inexpensive to improve the risk probabilities, because the old plants that we're running now have active safety systems, which means you have to maintain them and they have to work. So if you want to move the control rods back into the reactor, well, there's like a mechanism and a motor that does that that can fail. So when you're calculating your risk, you have to calculate, "Oh gosh, what if this motor fails? Or what if my control fails? Or what if I don't have a properly trained operator to do it?" And it's the same for the cooling systems. But this new generation of plants, they have passive safety systems where natural convection can cool a reactor in an emergency, or... The rods are more like a dead man switch, where if something happens, they just drop in from gravity. And so the new power plants, like this one that just got approved, or the one they're building down in Georgia, can be orders of magnitude safer than the running plants.

Austin Vernon (02:00:29):

It's not really a huge cost increase. You're just changing how you do these things. In fact, if you look at all the literature, they're actually supposed to be less complex and easier to build. But you're talking about a project that is so complicated, it takes thousands of workers, years and years to build, working every day. And it's like, if you're going to go through and do the engineering in great detail to prove that you're playing it safe under the problem risk assessment, it's going to take hundreds of thousands of hours of engineering time. That's why you see... I mean, why are investors willing to pay that at this point, after you build it because of the rank and cycle and all that, like is it going to generate economic power? The fact is it's not necessarily going to. I think one way to think about this is my father-in-law.

Austin Vernon (02:01:27):

He always says, when people ask him about why we're not doing more nuclear, he says, "Well, you have to think about the politics first, and economics second." Those are the important ones. So people are submitting designs to build plants that are big enough to impact lots of people's lives, even if that risk is very low.

Austin Vernon (02:01:47):

Some people still are bothered by that. But also, they're selling an easily substitutable commodity in most cases. I think a lot of times on the political side, if you can substitute nuclear power, people will. Even if it's coal or whatever, people don't really care that much about the emissions. They just care about their electricity turning on. And I think you see the opinion change very fast when nuclear power is no longer the substitute. All of a sudden Germany's like, "Well, we could turn our reactors back on." Or Japan, same way. They've had these reactors off for years, but now that there's an energy crunch, they're like, "Well, let's turn em back on."

Austin Vernon (02:02:25):

So I think the future for nuclear power, which would be a better future, is you create products that impact less people's lives, or have the potential to impact less people's lives, and also are not substitutable. I think that means small reactors. If you have a battery that can power your phone or have a little battery out in your garage that can power your house, these are hard to make. There's a lot of problems, especially in power density–– nuclear is very energy dense, but not necessarily power dense. So you have to do a lot of work on that to get there. But one of the most exciting examples of recent nuclear technology is these people at some national labs and NASA got together and created this KRUSTY reactor, and only to, it's only one kilowatt. So it's small. I think the thing weighs 400 kilograms. It fits in the room. But they got the whole project done in a couple years for less than $20 million. And it worked great. It's very safe, just because, partly because it's so small, but it has almost no moving parts. The whole thing has a Sterling engine on top, and that's the only moving part.

Austin Vernon (02:03:19):

So it's really... And there's several startups now that are working on improving that technology and commercializing it. So that's the kind of nuclear stuff that when I talk about small nuclear, micro nuclear, is really exciting to me because it has so much potential. And when you start putting nuclear in that small form factor, there's no other energy source that can compete with it on energy density. So you can do things you could never do before, whereas selling to the grid in a large power plant is like, "Well, I can do that in lots of ways." And if you think through this lens, then you see the entire nuclear debate is the nuclear proponents trying to claim that nuclear is not substitutable, and that we should pay more, accept the risk, or whatever. And maybe we should, but it makes it hard to promote that technology. If you could have a phone that you never tried to charge, people would love that. It'd be like, "I don't care if that's nuclear. I just have a phone that never goes dead."

Dwarkesh Patel (02:04:41):

I guess the question is: is the lengthy and expensive process necessary for the probabilistic risk assessment? If there's a way you could just have the process not be more streamlined, and be as effective in evaluating the harm. I guess another thing is if we haven't seen... Zero people, or very few people have directly died from nuclear, right? So is it just that we've gotten lucky or you're saying that could have been way more, and we're just in a lucky timeline?

Austin Vernon (02:05:14):

I guess I'll go backwards a little bit here, on answering those questions. I think what people are responding to is even if Fukushima didn't have airborne radiation (that was very dangerous) people still got removed from their home. And there's a lot of costs for associated with that. It's hard for me to believe that if we had a similar thing in the US, there wouldn't be some type of mandatory evacuations that were really unpleasant. If you could get your power from coal or natural gas, without that risk, I mean, a lot of people would make that trade off.

Austin Vernon (02:05:54):

And I think the other thing with Fukushima is, as I understand it, because it was on the ocean with fast currents, they were able to use a lot of seawater to keep the reactor from getting too out of control. But they were just dumping a lot of the radioactive stuff into the ocean, but it was dispersing quickly, it wasn't a big deal. So if you're on a freshwater reservoir like most US power plants are, your risk equation might have been different there. I don't know enough about it to know if that really matters. But I think the main thing is because of the precautionary principle, people are still going to get removed from their homes and people don't like that.

Austin Vernon (02:06:39):

Let's see. I'm making it... I mean, you can always streamline processes, but the thing is, people are submitting designs that are extremely complex. So whether your design is ultra safe, or not safe at all, to do all the engineering to prove that costs about the same either way. So that's part of why these new plants are so much safer than the NRC standards. It's just not that hard to make them that much safer. And you're going to spend the same engineering resources no matter what, based on your plant complexity. So that's the difference why KRUSTY was able to go through so fast. Their thing is very simple. They don't have very many moving parts. There's only so many things that can go wrong with it. I think that's what's exciting to me about these other startups is they have the potential to get through faster, with less money, and then there's real markets and remote power space, military, where people are willing to pay the premium for these initial models.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:07:43):

Okay, I see. Okay. So you're not bearish on nuclear in the future, given the new designs with passive cooling and stuff like that. It was more like the old designs that you're pessimistic about, is that correct?

Austin Vernon (02:07:56):

Yeah. I mean, if you look at what the cost of electricity is going to be from that, if they ever build the reactors that just got proven or just got approved, it's quite expensive. I think usually it's around like $40 - $50 a megawatt hour, best case, but more likely it could be up to like $80 a megawatt hour. So they're not building it in deregulated power markets, because you lose money. But there are places where it could make sense. Some places, like in Europe, have very expensive electricity.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:08:31):

And Japan and Singapore, and there's a lot of other places that are...

Austin Vernon (02:08:34):

Yeah, yeah. So there could be some markets in there, but that technology then still has to compete with those places building solar panels or all these other technologies that you could do. Then there's the whole argument, well, nuclear can do this and that, but I think the people building the reactors clearly don't want to build them in deregulated power markets because it's not economic. That's why I'm excited about the small, because there's alternative markets other than selling this substitutable commodity that's very cheap.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:09:08):

Have you talked to Eli about this? What is his opinion?

Austin Vernon (02:09:12):

Yeah. So Eli finds out about these new startups that fit this bill and sends me the information on them because he knows I'm excited about it. His specialty is governmental affairs. So I'm sure there's still lots of opportunity to improve the process at NRC. Recently INPO, which is the industry group that's very much a German style industry group, it's very powerful, their goal with NRC was to reduce the nuclear rules by one third. And then you also have NRC writing new standards for gen-four reactors that's supposed to be done in a couple years, but Congress instructed them to do it. So there's lots of opportunity to try to improve the process, but it's very complex. I'll give one example, the Browns Ferry accident. The main thing that came out of that was, you can't have control cables for safety systems on, redundant safety systems on the same cable tray, because that cable tray catches on fire you lose both systems.

Austin Vernon (02:10:14):

So it's very, very expensive to run extra cable trays and all this cable separation. That's actually one of the problems that's delaying Vogtle and Georgia right now–– they had 500 issues of safety systems sharing the same cable tray. So they have to build all new cable trays and clean out the mess of the stuff they already built and redo it. Super expensive. So the NRC tried a pilot program where they did a performance base safety as opposed to just the strict cable separation rule, and I think Oconee was one of the power plants that tried it. It ended up being more expensive than just the simple rule. So the reality is often very complex. I think when you have these complex plants, it's just hard to do. So it can always be improved, but I think the small could end up greatly out competing the large because they have less complexity.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:11:18):

You had a small section in that piece about fusion where you were especially pessimistic about fusion. Well, what is your take on fusion?

Austin Vernon (02:11:28):

Well, it's kind of the same thing. I'm not pessimistic about fusion, I'm pessimistic about fusion technologies that heat up water to make steam, and run it through a steam turbine.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:11:37):

Because they're not efficient?

Austin Vernon (02:11:38):

It's just so expensive. Literally just pitting in the steam turbine and the condenser and all that kind of stuff you need for that, basically makes you uncompetitive on most deregular power markets.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:11:53):

Yeah. So I mean there's startups who have plans to do direct energy conversion. I don't know how feasible those plans are, but yeah, presumably you think those are... In those cases, do you think fusion could have a big future?

Austin Vernon (02:12:06):

Yeah, yeah. Again, I don't know too much about... The same as you, I don't know too much about their specific technology, but if you're pursuing a direct conversion technology, you actually have a chance of success. I think a lot of people I've talked to in the fusion space, they're like, "Well, I can make electricity for $50 a megawatt hour. And because I'm fusion, people should pay me $50." And it's like, well, not everyone may want to pay you $50.

Solar

Dwarkesh Patel (02:12:34):

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it might involve an initial period of large subsidies that we had to give electric vehicles, and even solar, we had to give huge subsidies to solar in the beginning when we were at the beginning of the learning curve, so... That might be necessary though.

Austin Vernon (02:12:50):

Yeah. I mean, I really disagree with the subsidy solars had, actually. And I think it, just like if you actually look at the numbers, it proves the point. People say like, "Oh, because Germany did the feed in tariffs, it made solar cheap." So if you had a country that's 1% of the population, they spent a tiny portion of their GDP and that was enough to scale the technology, well, you should just let some other fool do that, and reap the benefits. So I would be supportive of taking away most of the subsidies for energy in general.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:13:21):

Just to make sure I understood that argument, you're saying that it's unlikely that the small subsidies that Germany gave were enough to actually make the difference? Is that what...

Austin Vernon (02:13:29):

Well, I'm just saying, if it took such a small amount of subsidy to do it, someone will be foolish enough to do that. In this case, it was Germany. They spent a lot of money doing that. They're not reaping the benefit from.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:13:43):

Yeah. It's not compatible with their environment, so... And their climate I mean, yeah.

Austin Vernon (02:13:48):

We benefited from them doing that. We still do spend some subsidies on solar. And I think they're very poorly designed. So it would be better just to get rid of them. But the thing with fusion, if you're just heating up water to make steam, it's that technology, there's no learning curve anymore for steam engines basically, because that technology's so mature. So that's why some people are looking at super critical CO2 cycles, because, well, maybe this could be a little cheaper than doing steam turbines. That's some possibility there. And there's some other technologies that, maybe someday you have thermoelectric generators and stuff like that. But I think the direct conversion technologies have just a massive advantage. Not only an initial cost, but in ongoing operating cost.

Alpha and Efficient Markets

Dwarkesh Patel (02:14:39):

Okay. Okay. There's one more topic I really want to talk about, which was... Yeah, you have an interesting post on where you can actually expect to find alpha, given that at least public markets are efficient? Do you want to explain the basic thesis of that post before I ask you specific questions about it?

Austin Vernon (02:14:58):

Yeah. If I was going to dumb that post down, I love Fama’s original paper where he lays out this efficient market hypothesis thesis and he is like, "There's multiple types of information." And so the first is, if you just have pricing data for stocks or whatever securities, you can be the smartest person in the world, and you're not going to make any money doing that, because it's just random.

Austin Vernon (02:15:22):

But if you start incorporating more information, what's in 10Ks and all that, if you're super, super smart, you might be able to make a little bit of money there. We see that with Renaissance Technologies, and you can debate about Warren Buffet and all that. But then there's the third category, which is the strong type information. And it's basically you have legally acquired private information, and you can make money that way and be significantly less smart. So if you want to just take Fama's paper, how do I make money? It's like, "Okay, well I should find legal ways to acquire this information, and then I don't have to be super genius to make money on it."

Dwarkesh Patel (02:16:11):

What I thought was really interesting in your post was you had this point about how one of the ways you can actually earn excess returns is through labor, right? Buffet, in the earliers at least, he would go into these factories and interrogate every single piece of operations and whatever. I thought it was an interesting twist on Piketty's thesis. So I don't know if you've seen his stuff, but he has this claim that, well, not only does capital earn more than... The gains to capital are higher than the gains to labor, but the more capital you have, the higher returns you can earn.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:16:49):

I guess Harvard has access to hedge funds that may be able to earn excess returns. Basically if you take this view, it's basically the inversion of Piketty, because over time as Buffet has gotten wealthier, his returns have gone down, because it's harder to invest the marginal dollar more effectively. As you said, with the medallion fund, yeah, they no longer accept outside money. Then the interesting thing about labor is, the reason that Buffet was able to earn those excess returns in the beginning, was because of the labor he put in. So the interesting thing is, capital is just fungible with other capital. So capital doesn't enjoy as high returns as really good labor, really smart labor, which is the opposite of the Piketty thesis.

Austin Vernon (02:17:33):

And I think, there was actually a paper, I think it was on marginal revolution a couple years back. So I'm pulling from my memory here, so I could be missing a little bit, but basically it studied all these businesses and what happened to the business after a founder unexpectedly died and the profit just... It looks like these are capital returns so many people would see them, but then the earnings just drop like a rock, because they lost some irreplaceable human capital there, and they didn't spend any time training them because they died unexpectedly.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:18:10):

Right, which also has an interesting implication for CEO pay, which is just that... Actually, okay. In the Marxist sense, what is pay? It's like, your pay is what it costs to replace you right? And if Steve Jobs was so irreplaceable that if he goes away, earnings are going to drop like a rock, and stock prices are going to drop like a rock. Actually, that means that he should get paid... That's how expensive it is to replace him. He may be irreplaceable. So it's actually worth whatever dozens of millions of dollars you're paying him.

Austin Vernon (02:18:43):

Yeah. Yeah. I'm generally a proponent for letting the market decide that.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:18:49):

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, and then another way you suggested was that firms could earn excess returns by developing a unique brand. So YCombinator is probably able to earn excess returns through normal venture capitalism because of their unique brand. Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. Do you want to talk to me more about that?

Austin Vernon (02:19:06):

I think it's just a lot of this intangible capital and labor are complements for regular capital, and I think you can see it too. If you build a brand around that, you're a good investor. You can raise money from other people and charge the money on it, more so than if you're just a no name. So I think there's lots of examples of that where building a brand or building relationships is extremely valuable, just like specific knowledge can conduct your returns. I mean it's a type of specific knowledge.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:19:45):

Well, what do you mean a specific knowledge?

Austin Vernon (02:19:48):

Well, I mean to build a brand like YCombinator, you have to understand what tech founders want. So they use that knowledge to create a place that's great to go do your startup.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:20:02):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Is the market for blogging efficient? So now there's actually financial rewards to blogging. The Effective Ideas blog prize, there's other kinds of grants like this. Recently they opened a contest where you can win many prizes where it seems like if you're really good at blogging, you could earn six figures, it seems. Given the regularity in size of these prizes, is this a market that we should expect to be efficient?

Austin Vernon (02:20:34):

I think it would be hard to measure. Given my own experience, I'm blogging for free, but the benefits I've gotten from learning about what I'm blogging about, and then the few connections I've made that have helped me with my projects I'm working on. There's huge returns. If my project's successful, these returns could be just almost immeasurable. So yeah, I would guess it's very hard to measure and probably inefficient in that more people could blog, because it's hard to predict the returns to what your blogging might have. But I guess if you're going to do these blog prizes, I don't know if the blog prize... Because the blog prizes are about specific topics, I don't know how much that helps the efficiency there.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:21:20):

Yeah. Yeah. Let's take that part of it out. Let's just talk about the factor you mentioned.. This is a regular thing you hear from people who write online, which is that the gains they get are huge and that's also the case in my case. So it's kind of interesting. Efficient Markets don’t.. just because the stock market is efficient, that doesn't mean that everybody will put their money into the stock market. That's not the implication. But the question is, given that you're writing something that's high quality, will it get noticed by the market? Will it get the attention and broadcasting that it deserves? And in my experience, actually, I guess this was the case. You mentioned that when some of your first posts ended up on Hacker News. So in that sense that market was efficient. But yeah, it seems to me that when somebody finds a good blogger, it's not hard for their initial post, or at least their subsequent post as they get better to gain an audience.

Austin Vernon (02:22:18):

Yeah, I do think that. And I don't know what the counterfactual is. We don't know about the people that didn't have posts go to Hacker News, so it could've easily been... I mean, I think that what the alternative for me is, I just would've blogged way less, if one of those early posts hadn't gotten more attention. So yeah. It's hard to know what the counterfactual is.. how many people have just abandoned blogs after writing three posts. They would've written one more. Maybe it would've been better.

Conclusion

Dwarkesh Patel (02:22:49):

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. This has been a lot of fun. I think we're two hours over at this point, so thank you so much for your time!

Austin Vernon (02:22:59):

All right. Thank you.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:23:00):

I don't know if you have any other final thoughts or any other subjects that we should hit on or...

Austin Vernon (02:23:06):

No, I think we covered everything.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:23:09):

Okay, cool. Awesome. And then just people can find you at Austin Vernon dot...

Austin Vernon (02:23:15):

Dot site.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:23:16):

Okay. AustinVernon.site. And then your Twitter is?

Austin Vernon (02:23:20):

I think it's Vernon3Austin.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:23:22):

Okay. And it'll also be in the story description, but yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on, man. This was a lot of fun.

Austin Vernon (02:23:28):

All right. Thank you.

Dwarkesh Patel (02:23:31):

All right. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Austin Vernon. This one was a lot of fun. If you did like it, I would really appreciate it if you could share the podcast. Put the episode in your group chats, put it on Twitter, share it to friends who you think might enjoy it. That kind of stuff helps out more than you would imagine. I want to give a special shout out to Sonya Gupta for her help in prepping me for this episode. Austin is, as you can tell, really smart and technical, so I would not have been able to prepare for this episode without Sonya's help. She's got an amazing technical mind, and did a ton to help me out with preparing questions and doing research into the topics we talked about. I also want to thank my amazing editor and producer Graham Besolou for the work he puts into this podcast. All right. See you on the next one.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

View Details

Podcast: Babbage from The Economist (LS 56 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: Babbage: Could artificial intelligence become sentient?
Release date: 2022-08-16

A debate has been raging in technology circles, after an engineer at Google claimed in June that the company’s chatbot was sentient. Host Kenneth Cukier explores how to define “sentience” and whether it could be attained by AI. If machines can exhibit consciousness, it presents myriad ethical and legal considerations. Is society equipped to deal with the implications of conscious AI?

Find The Economist’s list of the five best books to read on artificial intelligence here.

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Podcast: 80k After Hours (LS 24 · TOP 10% )
Episode: Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla on the Shrimp Welfare Project
Release date: 2022-09-05

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Rob Wiblin interviews Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla about the Shrimp Welfare Project, which he cofounded in 2021. It's the first project in the world focused on shrimp welfare specifically and now has six full-time staff.

Links to learn more, highlights and full transcript.

They cover:

• The evidence for shrimp sentience
• How farmers and the public feel about shrimp
• The scale of the problem
• What shrimp farming looks like
• The killing process, and other welfare issues
• Shrimp Welfare Project’s strategy
• History of shrimp welfare work
• What it’s like working in India and Vietnam
• How to help

Who this episode is for:

• People who care about animal welfare
• People interested in new and unusual problems
• People open to shrimp sentience

Who this episode isn’t for:

• People who think shrimp couldn’t possibly be sentient
• People who got called ‘shrimp’ a lot in high school and get anxious when they hear the word over and over again

Get this episode by subscribing to our more experimental podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80k After Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ben Cordell and Ryan Kessler
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

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Podcast: An Introduction to Nick Bostrom
Episode: 4. The Fable of The Dragon Tyrant (2005)
Release date: 2022-08-25

By Nick Bostrom.

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Podcast: Radio Bostrom
Episode: How Vulnerable is the World? (2021)
Release date: 2022-08-25

By Nick Bostrom and Matthew van der Merwe.

Abstract:
Sooner or later a technology capable of wiping out human civilisation might be invented. How far would we go to stop it?

Read the full paper:https://aeon.co/essays/none-of-our-technologies-has-managed-to-destroy-humanity-yet

Links:- The Vulnerable World Hypothesis (2019) (original academic paper)
- The Vulnerable World Hypothesis (2019) (narration by Radio Bostrom)

Notes:
This article is an adaption of Bostrom's academic paper "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis (2019)".

The article was first published in Aeon Magazine. The narration was provided by Curio. We are grateful to Aeon and Curio for granting us permission to re-use the audio. Curio are offering Radio Bostrom listeners a 25% discount on their annual subscription.

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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Three Sentences That Could Change the World — and Your Life
Release date: 2022-08-09

Today’s show is built around three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. And we can make their lives better.” Those sentences form the foundation of an ethical framework known as “longtermism.” They might sound obvious, but to take them seriously is a truly radical endeavor — one with the power to change the world and even your life.

That second sentence is where things start to get wild. It’s possible that there could be tens of trillions of future people, that future people could outnumber current people by a ratio of something like a million to one. And if that’s the case, then suddenly most of the things we spend most of our time arguing about shrink in importance compared with the things that will affect humanity’s long-term future.

William MacAskill is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, the director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and the author of the forthcoming book, “What We Owe the Future,” which is the best distillation of the longtermist worldview I’ve read. So this is a conversation about what it means to take the moral weight of the future seriously and the way that everything — from our political priorities to career choices to definitions of heroism — changes when you do.

We also cover the host of questions that longtermism raises: How should we weigh the concerns of future generations against those of living people? What are we doing today that future generations will view in the same way we look back on moral atrocities like slavery? Who are the “moral weirdos” of our time we should be paying more attention to? What are the areas we should focus on, the policies we should push, the careers we should choose if we want to guarantee a better future for our posterity?

And much more.

Mentioned:

"Is A.I. the Problem? Or Are We?" by The Ezra Klein Show

"How to Do The Most Good" by The Ezra Klein Show

"This Conversation With Richard Powers Is a Gift" by The Ezra Klein Show

Book Recommendations:

“Moral Capital” by Christopher Leslie Brown

“The Precipice” by Toby Ord

“The Scout Mindset” by Julia Galef

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

​​“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: William MacAskill on Effective Altruism, Moral Progress, and Cultural Innovation
Release date: 2022-08-10

When Tyler is reviewing grants for Emergent Ventures, he is struck by how the ideas of effective altruism have so clearly influenced many of the smartest applicants, particularly the younger ones. And William MacAskill, whom Tyler considers one of the world’s most influential philosophers, is a leading light of the community.

William joined Tyler to discuss why the movement has gained so much traction and more, including his favorite inefficient charity, what form of utilitarianism should apply to the care of animals, the limits of expected value, whether effective altruists should be anti-abortion, whether he would side with aliens over humans, whether he should give up having kids, why donating to a university isn’t so bad, whether we are living in “hingey” times, why buildering is overrated, the sociology of the effective altruism movement, why cultural innovation matters, and whether starting a new university might be next on his slate.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded July 7th, 2022 Other ways to connect

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• Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 29 · TOP 5% )
Episode: 36: Will MacAskill - Longtermism, Altruism, History, & Technology
Release date: 2022-08-09

Will MacAskill is one of the founders of the Effective Altruist movement and the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future.

We talk about improving the future, risk of extinction & collapse, technological & moral change, problems of academia, who changes history, and much more.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.

Subscribe to find out about future episodes!

Read the full transcript here.

Follow Will on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.

Please share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton!

Timestamps

(00:23) -Effective Altruism and Western values

(07:47) -The contingency of technology

(12:02) -Who changes history?

(18:00) -Longtermist institutional reform

(25:56) -Are companies longtermist?

(28:57) -Living in an era of plasticity

(34:52) -How good can the future be?

(39:18) -Contra Tyler Cowen on what’s most important

(45:36) -AI and the centralization of power

(51:34) -The problems with academia

Transcript

Dwarkesh Patel 0:06

Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing William McCaskill. Will is one of the founders of the Effective Altruism movement, and most recently, the author of the upcoming book, What We Owe The Future. Will, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Will MacAskill 0:20

Thanks so much for having me on.

Effective Altruism and Western values

Dwarkesh Patel 0:23

My first question is: What is the high-level explanation for the success of the Effective Altruism movement? Is it itself an example of the contingencies you talk about in the book?

Will MacAskill 0:32

Yeah, I think it is contingent. Maybe not on the order of, “this would never have happened,” but at least on the order of decades. Evidence that Effective Altruism is somewhat contingent is that similar ideas have been promoted many times during history, and not taken on.

We can go back to ancient China, the Mohists defended an impartial view of morality, and took very strategic actions to help all people. In particular, providing defensive assistance to cities under siege. Then, there were early utilitarians. Effective Altruism is broader than utilitarianism, but has some similarities. Even Peter Singer in the 70s had been promoting the idea that we should be giving most of our income to help the very poor — and didn’t get a lot of traction until early 2010 after GiveWell and Giving What We Can launched.

What explains the rise of it? I think it was a good idea waiting to happen. At some point, the internet helped to gather together a lot of like-minded people which wasn’t possible otherwise. There were some particularly lucky events like Alex meeting Holden and me meeting Toby that helped catalyze it at the particular time it did.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:49

If it's true, as you say, in the book, that moral values are very contingent, then shouldn't that make us suspect that modern Western values aren't that good? They're mediocre, or worse, because ex ante, you would expect to end up with a median of all the values we could have had at this point. Obviously, we'd be biased in favor of whatever values we were brought up in.

Will MacAskill 2:09

Absolutely. Taking history seriously and appreciating the contingency of values, appreciating that if the Nazis had won the World War, we would all be thinking, “wow, I'm so glad that moral progress happened the way it did, and we don't have Jewish people around anymore. What huge moral progress we had then!” That's a terrifying thought. I think it should make us take seriously the fact that we're very far away from the moral truth.

One of the lessons I draw in the book is that we should not think we're at the end of moral progress. We should not think, “Oh, we should lock in the Western values we have.” Instead, we should spend a lot of time trying to figure out what's actually morally right, so that the future is guided by the right values, rather than whichever happened to win out.

Dwarkesh Patel 2:56

So that makes a lot of sense. But I'm asking a slightly separate question—not only are there possible values that could be better than ours, but should we expect our values - we have the sense that we've made moral progress (things are better than they were before or better than most possible other worlds in 2100 or 2200)- should we not expect that to be the case? Should our priors be that these are ‘meh’ values?

Will MacAskill 3:19

Our priors should be that our values are as good as expected on average. Then you can make an assessment like, “Are other values of today going particularly well?” There are some arguments you could make for saying no. Perhaps if the Industrial Revolution happened in India, rather than in Western Europe, then perhaps we wouldn't have wide-scale factory farming—which I think is a moral atrocity. Having said that, my view is to think that we're doing better than average.

If civilization were just a redraw, then things would look worse in terms of our moral beliefs and attitudes. The abolition of slavery, the feminist movement, liberalism itself, democracy—these are all things that we could have lost and are huge gains.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:14

If that's true, does that make the prospect of a long reflection dangerous? If moral progress is a random walk, and we've ended up with a lucky lottery, then you're possibly reversing. Maybe you're risking regression to the mean if you just have 1,000 years of progress.

Will MacAskill 4:30

Moral progress isn't a random walk in general. There are many forces that act on culture and on what people believe. One of them is, “What’s right, morally speaking? What's their best arguments support?” I think it's a weak force, unfortunately.

The idea of lumbar flexion is getting society into a state that before we take any drastic actions that might lock in a particular set of values, we allow this force of reason and empathy and debate and goodhearted model inquiry to guide which values we end up with.

Are we unwise?

Dwarkesh Patel 5:05

In the book, you make this interesting analogy where humans at this point in history are like teenagers. But another common impression that people have of teenagers is that they disregard wisdom and tradition and the opinions of adults too early and too often. And so, do you think it makes sense to extend the analogy this way, and suggest that we should be Burkean Longtermists and reject these inside-view esoteric threats?

Will MacAskill 5:32

My view goes the opposite of the Burkean view. We are cultural creatures in our nature, and are very inclined to agree with what other people think even if we don't understand the underlying mechanisms. It works well in a low-change environment. The environment we evolved towards didn't change very much. We were hunter-gatherers for hundreds of years.

Now, we're in this period of enormous change, where the economy is doubling every 20 years, new technologies arrive every single year. That's unprecedented. It means that we should be trying to figure things out from first principles.

Dwarkesh Patel 6:34

But at current margins, do you think that's still the case? If a lot of EA and longtermist thought is first principles, do you think that more history would be better than the marginal first-principles thinker?

Will MacAskill 6:47

Two things. If it's about an understanding of history, then I'd love EA to have a better historical understanding. The most important subject if you want to do good in the world is philosophy of economics. But we've got that in abundance compared to there being very little historical knowledge in the EA community.

Should there be even more first-principles thinking? First-principles thinking paid off pretty well in the course of the Coronavirus pandemic. From January 2020, my Facebook wall was completely saturated with people freaking out, or taking it very seriously in a way that the existing institutions weren't. The existing institutions weren't properly updating to a new environment and new evidence.

The contingency of technology

Dwarkesh Patel 7:47

In your book, you point out several examples of societies that went through hardship. Hiroshima after the bombings, Europe after the Black Death—they seem to have rebounded relatively quickly. Does this make you think that perhaps the role of contingency in history, especially economic history is not that large? And it implies a Solow model of growth? That even if bad things happen, you can rebound and it really didn't matter?

Will MacAskill 8:17

In economic terms, that's the big difference between economic or technological progress and moral progress. In the long run, economic or technological progress is very non-contingent. The Egyptians had an early version of the steam engine, semaphore was only developed very late yet could have been invented thousands of years in the past.

But in the long run, the instrumental benefits of tech progress, and the incentives towards tech progress and economic growth are so strong, that we get there in a wide array of circumstances. Imagine there're thousands of different societies, and none are growing except for one. In the long run, that one becomes the whole economy.

Dwarkesh Patel 9:10

It seems that particular example you gave of the Egyptians having some ancient form of a steam engine points towards there being more contingency? Perhaps because the steam engine comes up in many societies, but it only gets turned into an industrial revolution in one?

Will MacAskill 9:22

In that particular case, there's a big debate about whether quality of metalwork made it actually possible to build a proper steam engine at that time. I mentioned those to share some amazing examples of contingency prior to the Industrial Revolution.

It's still contingency on the order of centuries to thousands of years. Post industrial-revolution world, there's much less contingency. It's much harder to see technologies that wouldn't have happened within decades if they hadn't been developed when they were.

Dwarkesh Patel 9:57

The model here is, “These general-purpose changes in the state of technology are contingent, and it'd be very important to try to engineer one of those. But other than that, it's going to get done by some guy creating a start-up anyways?”

Will MacAskill 10:11

Even in the case of the steam engine that seemed contingent, it gets developed in the long run. If the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened in Britain in the 18th century, would it have happened at some point? Would similar technologies that were vital to the industrial revolution developed? Yes, there are very strong incentives for doing so.

If there’s a culture that's into making textiles in an automated way as opposed to England in the 18th century, then that economy will take over the world. There's a structural reason why economic growth is much less contingent than moral progress.

Dwarkesh Patel 11:06

When people think of somebody like Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. It's like, “If you could have done something that, you'd be the greatest person in the 20th century.” Obviously, he's still a very good man, but would that not be our view? Do you think the green revolution would have happened anyways?

Will MacAskill 11:22

Yes. Norman Borlaug is sometimes credited with saving a billion lives. He was huge. He was a good force for the world. Had Norman Borlaug not existed, I don’t think a billion people would have died. Rather, similar developments would have happened shortly afterwards.

Perhaps he saved tens of millions of lives—and that's a lot of lives for a person to save. But, it's not as many as simply saying, “Oh, this tech was used by a billion people who would have otherwise been at risk of starvation.” In fact, not long afterwards, there were similar kinds of agricultural development.

Who changes history?

Dwarkesh Patel 12:02

What kind of profession or career choice tends to lead to the highest counterfactual impact? Is it moral philosophers?

Will MacAskill 12:12

Not quite moral philosophers, although there are some examples. Sticking on science technology, if you look at Einstein, theory of special relativity would have been developed shortly afterwards. However, theory of general relativity was plausibly decades in advance. Sometimes, you get surprising leaps. But, we're still only talking about decades rather than millennia. Moral philosophers could make long-term difference. Marx and Engels made an enormous, long-run difference. Religious leaders like Mohammed, Jesus, and Confucius made enormous and contingent, long-run difference. Moral activists as well.

Dwarkesh Patel 13:04

If you think that the changeover in the landscape of ideas is very quick today, would you still think that somebody like Marx will be considered very influential in the long future? Communism lasted less than a century, right?

Will MacAskill 13:20

As things turned out, Marx will not be influential over the long term future. But that could have gone another way. It's not such a wildly different history. Rather than liberalism emerging dominant in the 20th century, it was communism. The better technology gets, the better the ruling ideology is to cement its ideology and persist for a long time. You can get a set of knock-on effects where communism wins the war of ideas in the 20th century.

Let’s say a world-government is based around those ideas, then, via anti-aging technology, genetic-enhancement technology, cloning, or artificial intelligence, it's able to build a society that possesses forever in accordance with that ideology.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:20

The death of dictators is especially interesting when you're thinking about contingency because there are huge changes in the regime. It makes me think the actual individual there was very important and who they happened to be was contingent and persistent in some interesting ways.

Will MacAskill 14:37

If you've got a dictatorship, then you've got single person ruling the society. That means it's heavily contingent on the views, values, beliefs, and personality of that person.

Scientific talent

Dwarkesh Patel 14:48

Going back to the second nation, in the book, you're very concerned about fertility. It seems your model about scientific and technological progress happens is number of people times average researcher productivity. If resource productivity is declining and the number of people isn't growing that fast, then that's concerning.

Will MacAskill 15:07

Yes, number of people times fraction of the population devoted to R&D.

Dwarkesh Patel 15:11

Thanks for the clarification. It seems that there have been a lot of intense concentrations of talent and progress in history. Venice, Athens, or even something like FTX, right? There are 20 developers making this a multibillion dollar company—do these examples suggest that organization and congregation of researchers matter more than the total amount?

Will MacAskill 15:36

The model works reasonably well. Throughout history, you start from a very low technological baseline compared to today. Most people aren't even trying to innovate. One argument for why Baghdad lost its Scientific Golden Age is because the political landscape changed such that what was incentivized was theological investigation rather than scientific investigation in the 10th/11th century AD.

Similarly, one argument for why Britain had a scientific and industrial revolution rather than Germany was because all of the intellectual talent in Germany was focused on making amazing music. That doesn't compound in the way that making textiles does. If you look at like Sparta versus Athens, what was the difference? They had different cultures and intellectual inquiry was more rewarded in Athens.

Because they're starting from a lower base, people trying to do something that looks like what we now think of as intellectual inquiry have an enormous impact.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:58

If you take an example like Bell Labs, the low-hanging fruit is gone by the late 20th century. You have this one small organization that has six Nobel Prizes. Is this a coincidence?

Will MacAskill 17:14

I wouldn't say that at all. The model we’re working with is the size of the population times the fraction of the population doing R&D. It's the simplest model you can have. Bell Labs is punching above its weight. You can create amazing things from a certain environment with the most productive people and putting them in an environment where they're ten times more productive than they would otherwise be.

However, when you're looking at the grand sweep of history, those effects are comparatively small compared to the broader culture of a society or the sheer size of a population.

Longtermist institutional reform

Dwarkesh Patel 18:00

I want to talk about your paper on longtermist institutional reform. One of the things you advocate in this paper is that we should have one of the houses be dedicated towards longtermist priorities. Can you name some specific performance metrics you would use to judge or incentivize the group of people who make up this body?

Will MacAskill 18:23

The thing I'll caveat with longtermist institutions is that I’m pessimistic about them. If you're trying to represent or even give consideration to future people, you have to face the fact that they're not around and they can't lobby for themselves. However, you could have an assembly of people who have some legal regulatory power. How would you constitute that? My best guess is you have a random selection from the population? How would you ensure that incentives are aligned?

In 30-years time, their performance will be assessed by a panel of people who look back and assess the policies’ effectiveness. Perhaps the people who are part of this assembly have their pensions paid on the basis of that assessment. Secondly, the people in 30-years time, both their policies and their assessment of the previous 30-years previous assembly get assessed by another assembly, 30-years after that, and so on. Can you get that to work? Maybe in theory—I’m skeptical in practice, but I would love some country to try it and see what happens.

There is some evidence that you can get people to take the interests of future generations more seriously by just telling them their role. There was one study that got people to put on ceremonial robes, and act as trustees of the future. And they did make different policy recommendations than when they were just acting on the basis of their own beliefs and self-interest.

Dwarkesh Patel 20:30

If you are on that board that is judging these people, is there a metric like GDP growth that would be good heuristics for assessing past policy decisions?

Will MacAskill 20:48

There are some things you could do: GDP growth, homelessness, technological progress. I would absolutely want there to be an expert assessment of the risk of catastrophe. We don't have this yet, but imagine a panel of super forecasters predicting the chance of a war between great powers occurring in the next ten years that gets aggregated into a war index.

That would be a lot more important than the stock market index. Risk of catastrophe would be helpful to feed into because you wouldn't want something only incentivizing economic growth at the expense of tail risks.

Dwarkesh Patel 21:42

Would that be your objection to a scheme like Robin Hanson’s about maximizing the expected future GDP using prediction markets and making decisions that way?

Will MacAskill 21:50

Maximizing future GDP is an idea I associate with Tyler Cowen. With Robin Hanson’s idea of voting on values but betting on beliefs, if people can vote on what collection of goods they want, GDP and unemployment might be good metrics. Beyond that, it's pure prediction markets. It's something I'd love to see tried. It’s an idea of speculative political philosophy about how a society could be extraordinarily different in structure that is incredibly neglected.

Do I think it'll work in practice? Probably not. Most of these ideas wouldn't work. Prediction markets can be gamed or are simply not liquid enough. There hasn’t been a lot of success in prediction markets compared to forecasting. Perhaps you can solve these things. You have laws about what things can be voted on or predicted in the prediction market, you could have government subsidies to ensure there's enough liquidity. Overall, it's likely promising and I'd love to see it tried out on a city-level or something.

Dwarkesh Patel 23:13

Let’s take a scenario where the government starts taking the impact on the long-term seriously and institutes some reforms to integrate that perspective. As an example, you can take a look at the environmental movement. There're environmental review boards that will try to assess the environmental impact of new projects and repeal any proposals based on certain metrics.

The impact here, at least in some cases, has been that groups that have no strong, plausible interest in the environment are able to game these mechanisms in order to prevent projects that would actually help the environment. With longtermism, it takes a long time to assess the actual impact of something, but policymakers are tasked with evaluating the long term impacts of something. Are you worried that it'd be a system that'd be easy to game by malicious actors? And they'd ask, “What do you think went wrong with the way that environmentalism was codified into law?”

Will MacAskill 24:09

It's potentially a devastating worry. You create something to represent future people, but they're not allowed to lobby themselves (it can just be co-opted). My understanding of environmental impact statements has been similar. Similarly, it's not like the environment can represent itself—it can't say what its interests are. What is the right answer there? Maybe there are speculative proposals about having a representative body that assesses these things and elect jobs by people in 30-years time. That's the best we've got at the moment, but we need a lot more thought to see if any of these proposals would be robust for the long term rather than things that are narrowly-focused.

Regulation to have liability insurance for dangerous bio labs is not about trying to represent the interests of future generations. But, it's very good for the long-term. At the moment, if longtermists are trying to change the government, let's focus on a narrow set of institutional changes that are very good for the long-term even if they're not in the game of representing the future. That's not to say I'm opposed to all such things. But, there are major problems with implementation for any of them.

Dwarkesh Patel 25:35

If we don't know how we would do it correctly, did you have an idea of how environmentalism could have been codified better? Why was that not a success in some cases?

Will MacAskill 25:46

Honestly, I don't have a good understanding of that. I don't know if it's intrinsic to the matter or if you could’ve had some system that wouldn't have been co-opted in the long-term.

Are companies longtermist?

Dwarkesh Patel 25:56

Theoretically, the incentives of our most long-term U.S. institutions is to maximize future cash flow. Explicitly and theoretically, they should have an incentive to do the most good they can for their own company—which implies that the company can’t be around if there’s an existential risk…

Will MacAskill 26:18

I don't think so. Different institutions have different rates of decay associated with them. So, a corporation that is in the top 200 biggest companies has a half-life of only ten years. It’s surprisingly short-lived. Whereas, if you look at universities Oxford and Cambridge are 800 years old. University of Bologna is even older. These are very long-lived institutions.

For example, Corpus Christi at Oxford was making a decision about having a new tradition that would occur only every 400 years. It makes that kind of decision because it is such a long-lived institution. Similarly, the legends can be even longer-lived again. That type of natural half-life really affects the decisions a company would make versus a university versus a religious institution.

Dwarkesh Patel 27:16

Does that suggest that there's something fragile and dangerous about trying to make your institution last for a long time—if companies try to do that and are not able to?

Will MacAskill 27:24

Companies are composed of people. Is it in the interest of a company to last for a long time? Is it in the interests of the people who constitute the company (like the CEO and the board and the shareholders) for that company to last a long time? No, they don't particularly care. Some of them do, but most don't. Whereas other institutions go both ways. This is the issue of lock-in that I talked about at length in What We Owe The future: you get moments of plasticity during the formation of a new institution.

Whether that’s the Christian church or the Constitution of the United States, you lock-in a certain set of norms. That can be really good. Looking back, the U.S. Constitution seems miraculous as the first democratic constitution. As I understand it, it was created over a period of four months seems to have stood the test of time. Alternatively, lock-in norms could be extremely dangerous. There were horrible things in the U.S. Constitution like the legal right to slavery proposed as a constitutional amendment. If that had locked in, it would have been horrible. It's hard to answer in the abstract because it depends on the thing that's persisting for a long time.

Living in an era of plasticity

Dwarkesh Patel 28:57

You say in the book that you expect our current era to be a moment of plasticity. Why do you think that is?

Will MacAskill 29:04

There are specific types of ‘moments of plasticity’ for two reasons. One is a world completely unified in a way that's historically unusual. You can communicate with anyone instantaneously and there's a great diversity of moral views. We can have arguments, like people coming on your podcast can debate what's morally correct. It's plausible to me that one of many different sets of moral views become the most popular ultimately.

Secondly, we're at this period where things can really change. But, it's a moment of plasticity because it could plausibly come to an end — and the moral change that we're used to could end in the coming decades. If there was a single global culture or world government that preferred ideological conformity, combined with technology, it becomes unclear why that would end over the long-term? The key technology here is Artificial Intelligence. The point in time (which may be sooner than we think) where the rulers of the world are digital rather than biological, that [ideological conformity] could persist.

Once you've got that and a global hegemony of a single ideology, there's not much reason for that set of values to change over time. You've got immortal leaders and no competition. What are the other kind of sources of value-change over time? I think they can be accounted for too.

Dwarkesh Patel 30:46

Isn't the fact that we are in a time of interconnectedness that won't last if we settle space — isn't that bit of reason for thinking that lock-in is not especially likely? If your overlords are millions of light years away, how well can they control you?

Will MacAskill 31:01

The “whether” you have is whether the control will happen before the point of space settlement. If we took to space one day, and there're many different settlements and different solar systems pursuing different visions of the good, then you're going to maintain diversity for a very long time (given the physics of the matter).

Once a solar system has been settled, it's very hard for other civilizations to come along and conquer you—at least if we're at a period of technological maturity where there aren't groundbreaking technologies to be discovered. But, I'm worried that the control will happen earlier. I'm worried the control might happen this century, within our lifetimes. I don't think it’s very likely, but it's seriously on the table - 10% or something?

Dwarkesh Patel 31:53

Hm, right. Going back to the long-term of the longtermism movement, there are many instructive foundations that were set up about a century ago like the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation. But, they don't seem to be especially creative or impactful today. What do you think went wrong? Why was there, if not value drift, some decay of competence and leadership and insight?

Will MacAskill 32:18

I don't have strong views about those particular examples, but I have two natural thoughts. For organizations that want to persist a long time and keep having an influence for a long time, they’ve historically specified their goals in far too narrow terms. One fun example is Benjamin Franklin. He invested a thousand pounds for each of the cities of Philadelphia and Boston to pay out after 100 years and then 200 years for different fractions of the amount invested. But, he specified it to help blacksmith apprentices. You might think this doesn't make much sense when you’re in the year 2000. He could have invested more generally: for the prosperity of people in Philadelphia and Boston. It would have had plausibly more impact.

The second is a ‘regression to the mean’ argument. You have some new foundation and it's doing an extraordinary amount of good as the Rockefeller Foundation did. Over time, if it's exceptional in some dimension, it's probably going to get closer to average on that dimension. This is because you’re changing the people involved. If you've picked exceptionally competent and farsighted people, the next generation are statistically going to be less so.

Dwarkesh Patel 33:40

Going back to that hand problem: if you specify your mission too narrowly and it doesn't make sense in the future—is there a trade off? If you're too broad, you make space for future actors—malicious or uncreative—to take the movement in ways that you would not approve of? With regards to doing good for Philadelphia, what if it turns into something that Ben Franklin would not have thought is good for Philadelphia?

Will MacAskill 34:11

It depends on what your values and views are. If Benjamin Franklin only cared about blacksmith's apprentices, then he was correct to specify it. But my own values tend to be quite a bit more broad than that. Secondly, I expect people in the future to be smarter and more capable. It’s certainly the trend over time. In which case, if we’re sharing similar broad goals, and they're implementing it in a different way, then they have it.

How good can the future be?

Dwarkesh Patel 34:52

Let's talk about how good we should expect the future to be. Have you come across Robin Hanson’s argument that we’ll end up being subsistence-level ems because there'll be a lot of competition and minimizing compute per digital person will create a barely-worth-living experience for every entity?

Will MacAskill 35:11

Yeah, I'm familiar with the argument. But, we should distinguish the idea that ems are at subsistence level from the idea that we would have bad lives. So subsistence means that you get a balance of income per capita and population growth such that being poorer would cause deaths to outweigh additional births.

That doesn't tell you about their well-being. You could be very poor as an emulated being but be in bliss all the time. That's perfectly consistent with the Malthusian theory. It might seem far away from the best possible future, but it could still be very good. At subsistence, those ems could still have lives that are thousands of times better than ours.

Dwarkesh Patel 36:02

Speaking of being poor and happy, there was a very interesting section in the chapter where you mentioned the study you had commissioned: you were trying to find out if people in the developing world find life worth living. It turns out that 19% of Indians would not want to relive their life every moment. But, 31% of Americans said that they would not want to relive their life at every moment? So, why are Indians seemingly much happier at less than a tenth of the GDP per capita?

Will MacAskill 36:29

I think the numbers are lower than that from memory, at least. From memory, it’s something more like 9% of Indians wouldn't want to live their lives again if they had the option, and 13% of Americans said they wouldn’t. You are right on the happiness metric, though. The Indians we surveyed were more optimistic about their lives, happier with their lives than people in the US were. Honestly, I don't want to generalize too far from that because we were sampling comparatively poor Americans to comparatively well-off Indians. Perhaps it's just a sample effect.

There are also weird interactions with Hinduism and the belief in reincarnation that could mess up the generalizability of this. On one hand, I don't want to draw any strong conclusion from that. But, it is pretty striking as a piece of information, given that you find people's well-being in richer countries considerably happier than poorer countries, on average.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:41

I guess you do generalize in a sense that you use it as evidence that most lives today are living, right?

Will MacAskill 37:50

Exactly. So, I put together various bits of evidence, where approximately 10% of people in the United States and 10% of people in India seem to think that their lives are net negative. They think they contain more suffering than happiness and wouldn't want to be reborn and live the same life if they could.

There's another scripture study that looks at people in United States/other wealthy countries, and asks them how much of their conscious life they'd want to skip if they could. Skipping here means that blinking would reach you to the end of whatever activity you're engaging with. For example, perhaps I hate this podcast so much that I would rather be unconscious than be talking to you. In which case, I'd have the option of skipping, and it would be over after 30 minutes.

If you look at that, and then also asked people about the trade offs they would be willing to make as a measure of intensity of how much they're enjoying a certain experience, you reach the conclusion that a little over 10% of people regarded their life that day as being surveyed worse than if they'd been unconscious the entire day.

Contra Tyler Cowen on what’s most important

Dwarkesh Patel 39:18

Jumping topics here a little bit, on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, you said that you expect scientists who are explicitly trying to maximize their impact might have an adverse impact because they might be ignoring the foundational research that wouldn't be obvious in this way of thinking, but might be more important.

Do you think this could be a general problem with longtermism? If you were trying to find the most important things that are important long-term, you might be missing things that wouldn't be obvious thinking this way?

Will MacAskill 39:48

Yeah, I think that's a risk. Among the ways that people could argue against my general set of views, I argue that we should be doing fairly specific and targeted things like trying to make AI safe, well-govern the rise of AI, reduce worst-case pandemics that can kill us all, prevent a Third World War, ensure that good values are promoted, and avoid value lock-in. But, some people could argue (and people like Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison do), that it's very hard to predict the future impact of your actions.

It's a mug's game to even try. Instead, you should look at the things that have done loads of good consistently in the past, and try to do the same things. In particular, they might argue that means technological progress or boosting economic growth. I dispute that. It's not something I can give a completely knock-down argument to because we don’t know when we will find out who's right. Maybe in thousand-years time. But one piece of evidence is the success of forecasters in general. This also was true for Tyler Cowen, but people in Effective Altruism were realizing that the Coronavirus pandemic was going to be a big deal for them. At an early stage, they were worrying about pandemics far in advance. There are some things that are actually quite predictable.

For example, Moore's Law has held up for over 70 years. The idea that AI systems are gonna get much larger and leading models are going to get more powerful are on trend. Similarly, the idea that we will be soon be able to develop viruses of unprecedented destructive power doesn’t feel too controversial. Even though it’s hard to predict loads of things, there are going to be tons of surprises. There are some things, especially when it comes to fairly long-standing technological trends, that we can make reasonable predictions — at least about the range of possibilities that are on the table.

Dwarkesh Patel 42:19

It sounds like you're saying that the things we know are important now. But, if something didn't turn out, a thousand years ago, looking back to be very important, it wouldn't be salient to us now?

Will MacAskill 42:31

What I was saying with me versus Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen, who is correct? We will only get that information in a thousand-years time because we're talking about impactful strategies for the long-term. We might get suggestive evidence earlier. If me and others engaging in longtermism are making specific, measurable forecasts about what is going to happen with AI, or advances in biotechnology, and then are able to take action such that we are clearly reducing certain risks, that's pretty good evidence in favor of our strategy.

Whereas, they're doing all sorts of stuff, but not make firm predictions about what's going to happen, but then things pop out of that that are good for the long-term (say we measure this in ten-years time), that would be good evidence for their view.

Dwarkesh Patel 43:38

You were saying earlier about the contingency in technology implies that given their worldview, even if you're trying to maximize what in the past is at the most impact, if what's had the most impact in the past is changing values, then economic growth might be the most important thing? Or trying to change the rate of economic growth?

Will MacAskill 43:57

I really do take the argument seriously of how people have acted in the past, especially for people trying to make a long-lasting impact. What things that they do that made sense and whatnot. So, towards the end of the 19th century, John Stuart Mill and the other early utilitarians had this longtermist wave where they started taking the interests of future generations very seriously. Their main concern was Britain running out of coal, and therefore, future generations would be impoverished. It's pretty striking because they had a very bad understanding of how the economy works. They hadn't predicted that we would be able to transition away from coal with continued innovation.

Secondly, they had enormously wrong views about how much coal and fossil fuels there were in the world. So, that particular action didn't make any sense given what we know now. In fact, that particular action of trying to keep coal in the ground, given Britain at the time where we're talking about much lower amounts of coal—so small that the climate change effect is negligible at that level—probably would have been harmful.

But, we could look at other things that John Stuart Mill could have done such promoting better values. He campaigned for women's suffrage. He was the first British MP. In fact, even the first politician in the world to promote women's suffrage - that seems to be pretty good. That seems to have stood the test of time. That's one historical data point. But potentially, we can learn a more general lesson there.

AI and the centralization of power

Dwarkesh Patel 45:36

Do you think the ability of your global policymakers to come to a consensus is on net, a good or a bad thing? On the positive, maybe it helps around some dangerous tech from taking off, but on the negative side, prevent human challenge trials that cause some lock-in in the future. On net, what do you think about that trend?

Will MacAskill 45:54

The question of global integration, you're absolutely right, it's double-sided. One hand, it can help us reduce global catastrophic risks. The fact that the world was able to come come together and ban Chlorofluorocarbons was one of the great events of the last 50 years, allowing the hole in the ozone layer to to repair itself. But on the other hand, if it means we all converge to one monoculture and lose out on diversity, that's potentially bad. We could lose out on the most possible value that way.

The solution is doing the good bits and not having the bad bits. For example, in a liberal constitution, you can have a country that is bound in certain ways by its constitution and by certain laws yet still enables a flourishing diversity of moral thought and different ways of life. Similarly, in the world, you can have very strong regulation and treaties that only deal with certain global public goods like mitigation of climate change, prevention of development of the next generation of weapons of mass destruction without having some very strong-arm global government that implements a particular vision of the world. Which way are we going at the moment? It seems to me we've been going in a pretty good and not too worrying direction. But, that could change.

Dwarkesh Patel 47:34

Yeah, it seems the historical trend is when you have a federated political body that even if constitutionally, the Central Powers constrain over time, they tend to gain more power. You can look at the U.S., you can look at the European Union. But yeah, that seems to be the trend.

Will MacAskill 47:52

Depending on the culture that's embodied there, it's potentially a worry. It might not be if the culture itself is liberal and promoting of moral diversity and moral change and moral progress. But, that needn't be the case.

Dwarkesh Patel 48:06

Your theory of moral change implies that after a small group starts advocating for a specific idea, it may take a century or more before that idea reaches common purchase. To the extent that you think this is a very important century (I know you have disagreements about that with with others), does that mean that there isn't enough time for longtermism to gain by changing moral values?

Will MacAskill 48:32

There are lots of people I know and respect fairly well who think that Artificial General Intelligence will likely lead to singularity-level technological progress and extremely rapid rate of technological progress within the next 10-20 years. If so, you’re right. Value changes are something that pay off slowly over time.

I talk about moral change taking centuries historically, but it can be much faster today. The growth of the Effective Altruism movement is something I know well. If that's growing at something like 30% per year, compound returns mean that it's not that long. That's not growth. That's not change that happens on the order of centuries.

If you look at other moral movements like gay rights movement, very fast moral change by historical standards. If you're thinking that we've got ten years till the end of history, then don't broadly try and promote better values. But, we should have a very significant probability mass on the idea that we will not hit some historical end of this century. In those worlds, promoting better values could pay off like very well.

Dwarkesh Patel 49:59

Have you heard of Slime Mold Time Mold Potato Diet?

Will MacAskill 50:03

I have indeed heard of Slime Mold Time Mold Potato Diet, and I was tempted as a gimmick to try it. As I'm sure you know, potato is close to a superfood, and you could survive indefinitely on butter mashed potatoes if you occasionally supplement with something like lentils and oats.

Dwarkesh Patel 50:25

Hm, interesting. Question about your career: why are you still a professor? Does it still allow you to the things that you would otherwise have been doing like converting more SBF’s and making moral philosophy arguments for EA? Curious about that.

Will MacAskill 50:41

It's fairly open to me what I should do, but I do spend significant amounts of time co-founding organizations or being on the board of those organizations I've helped to set up. More recently, working closely with the Future Fund, SBF’s new foundation, and helping them do as much good as possible. That being said, if there's a single best guess for what I want to do longer term, and certainly something that plays to my strengths better, it's developing ideas, trying to get the big picture roughly right, and then communicating them in a way that's understandable and gets more people to get off their seats and start to do a lot of good for the long-term. I’ve had a lot of impact that way. From that perspective, having an Oxford professorship is pretty helpful.

The problems with academia

Dwarkesh Patel 51:34

You mentioned in the book and elsewhere that there's a scarcity of people thinking about big picture questions—How contingent is history? How are people happy generally?—Are these questions that are too hard for other people? Or they don't care enough? What's going on? Why are there so few people talking about this?

Will MacAskill 51:54

I just think there are many issues that are enormously important but are just not incentivized anywhere in the world. Companies don't incentivize work on them because they’re too big picture. Some of these questions are, “Is the future good, rather than bad? If there was a global civilizational collapse, would we recover? How likely is a long stagnation?” There’s almost no work done on any of these topics. Companies aren't interested too grand in scale.

Academia has developed a culture where you don't tackle such problems. Partly, that's because they fall through the cracks of different disciplines. Partly because they seem too grand or too speculative. Academia is much more in the mode of making incremental gains in our understanding. It didn't always used to be that way.

If you look back before the institutionalization of academic research, you weren't a real philosopher unless you had some grand unifying theory of ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and epistemology. Probably the natural sciences too and economics. I'm not saying that all of academic inquiry should be like that. But should there be some people whose role is to really think about the big picture? Yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:20

Will I be able to send my kids to MacAskill University? What's the status on that project?

Will MacAskill 53:25

I'm pretty interested in the idea of creating a new university. There is a project that I've been in discussion about with another person who's fairly excited about making it happen. Will it go ahead? Time will tell. I think you can do both research and education far better than it currently exists. It's extremely hard to break in or creating something that's very prestigious because the leading universities are hundreds of years old. But maybe it's possible. I think it would could generate enormous amounts of value if we were able to pull it off.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:10

Excellent, alright. So the book is What We Owe The Future. I understand pre-orders help a lot, right? It was such an interesting read. How often does somebody write a book about the questions they consider to be the most important even if they're not the most important questions? Big picture thinking, but also looking at very specific questions and issues that come up. Super interesting read.

Will MacAskill 54:34

Great. Well, thank you so much!

Dwarkesh Patel 54:38

Anywhere else they can find you? Or any other information they might need to know?

Will MacAskill 54:39

Yeah, sure. What We Owe The Future is out on August 16 in the US and first of September in the United Kingdom. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm @WillMcCaskill. If you want to try and use your time or money to do good, Giving What We Can is an organization that encourages people to take a pledge to give a significant fraction of the income (10% or more) to the charities that do the most good. It has a list of recommended charities. 80,000 Hours—if you want to use your career to do good—is a place to go for advice on what careers have the biggest impact at all. They provide one-on-one coaching too.

If you're feeling inspired and want to do good in the world, you care about future people and I want to help make their lives go better, then, as well as reading What We Owe The Future, Giving What We Can, and 80,000 hours are the sources you can go to and get involved.

Dwarkesh Patel 55:33

Awesome, thanks so much for coming on the podcast! It was a lot of fun.

Will MacAskill 54:39

Thanks so much, I loved it.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

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Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 29 · TOP 5% )
Episode: 35: Joseph Carlsmith - Utopia, AI, & Infinite Ethics
Release date: 2022-08-03

Joseph Carlsmith is a senior research analyst at Open Philanthropy and a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Oxford.

We discuss utopia, artificial intelligence, computational power of the brain, infinite ethics, learning from the fact that you exist, futurism, and blogging.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.

Follow Joseph on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter.

Subscribe to find out about future episodes!

Timestamps

(0:00:06) - Introduction

(0:02:53) - How to Define a Better Future?

(0:09:19) - Utopia

(0:25:12) - Robin Hanson’s EMs

(0:27:35) - Human Computational Capacity

(0:34:15) - FLOPS to Emulate Human Cognition?

(0:40:15) - Infinite Ethics

(1:00:51) - SIA vs SSA

(1:17:53) - Futurism & Unreality

(1:23:36) - Blogging & Productivity

(1:28:43) - Book Recommendations

(1:30:04) - Conclusion

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkeshpatel.com

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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: #134 – Ian Morris on what big picture history teaches us
Release date: 2022-07-22

Wind back 1,000 years and the moral landscape looks very different to today. Most farming societies thought slavery was natural and unobjectionable, premarital sex was an abomination, women should obey their husbands, and commoners should obey their monarchs.

Wind back 10,000 years and things look very different again. Most hunter-gatherer groups thought men who got too big for their britches needed to be put in their place rather than obeyed, and lifelong monogamy could hardly be expected of men or women.

Why such big systematic changes — and why these changes specifically?

That's the question best-selling historian Ian Morris takes up in his book, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve. Ian has spent his academic life studying long-term history, trying to explain the big-picture changes that play out over hundreds or thousands of years.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

There are a number of possible explanations one could offer for the wide-ranging shifts in opinion on the 'right' way to live. Maybe the natural sciences progressed and people realised their previous ideas were mistaken? Perhaps a few persuasive advocates turned the course of history with their revolutionary arguments? Maybe everyone just got nicer?

In Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels Ian presents a provocative alternative: human culture gradually evolves towards whatever system of organisation allows a society to harvest the most energy, and we then conclude that system is the most virtuous one. Egalitarian values helped hunter-gatherers hunt and gather effectively. Once farming was developed, hierarchy proved to be the social structure that produced the most grain (and best repelled nomadic raiders). And in the modern era, democracy and individuality have proven to be more productive ways to collect and exploit fossil fuels.

On this theory, it's technology that drives moral values much more than moral philosophy. Individuals can try to persist with deeply held values that limit economic growth, but they risk being rendered irrelevant as more productive peers in their own society accrue wealth and power. And societies that fail to move with the times risk being conquered by more pragmatic neighbours that adapt to new technologies and grow in population and military strength.

There are many objections one could raise to this theory, many of which we put to Ian in this interview. But the question is a highly consequential one: if we want to guess what goals our descendants will pursue hundreds of years from now, it would be helpful to have a theory for why our ancestors mostly thought one thing, while we mostly think another.

Big though it is, the driver of human values is only one of several major questions Ian has tackled through his career.

In today's episode, we discuss all of Ian's major books, taking on topics such as:

• Why the Industrial Revolution happened in England rather than China

• Whether or not wars can lead to less violence

• Whether the evidence base in history — from document archives to archaeology — is strong enough to persuasively answer any of these questions

• Why Ian thinks the way we live in the 21st century is probably a short-lived aberration • Whether the grand sweep of history is driven more by “very important people” or “vast impersonal forces”

• Why Chinese ships never crossed the Pacific or rounded the southern tip of Africa

• In what sense Ian thinks Brexit was “10,000 years in the making”

• The most common misconceptions about macrohistory

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app.

*Producer: Keiran Harris

Audio mastering: Ben Cordell

Transcriptions: Katy Moore*

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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Kenneth Stanley - Greatness Without Goals - [Invest Like the Best, EP.283]
Release date: 2022-06-28

My guest today is Ken Stanley. Ken is a Professor in Computer Science and a pioneer in the field of neuroevolution. He is also the co-author of a book called, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, which details a provocative idea that setting big, audacious goals can reduce the odds of achieving something great. We discuss that revelation in detail and how to apply it in our day-to-day lives. Please enjoy this great discussion with Ken Stanley.

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard-to-get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BamSEC, and helps you set up customized expert calls. It’s all done on a single, modern SaaS platform that offers 360-degree insight into any public or private company. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. And until 2023 every Tegus license comes with complimentary access to BamSec by Tegus.

Today's episode is brought to you by Brex, the integrated financial platform trusted by the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and fastest-growing companies. With Brex, you can move money fast for instant impact with high-limit corporate cards, payments, venture debt, and spend management software all in one place. Ready to accelerate your business? Learn more at brex.com/best.

Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.

Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.

Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.

Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus

Show Notes

[00:02:36] - [First question] - The best way to change the world is to stop trying to change it

[00:06:26] - The kinds of goals his work addresses and the ones it doesn’t

[00:08:46] - Almost no prerequisite to any major invention was invented with that major invention in mind

[00:14:04] - Picbreeder

[00:17:21] - How looking for specific results often makes arriving at them a longer process

[00:24:00] - The importance of the individual in a web of invention and disruption

[00:28:30] - How generations progressed in Picbreeder when consensus mechanisms were inserted into the process

[00:31:24] - Examples of stepping stones that were invented that became something even greater

[00:36:02] - What his research means for how we should conduct ourselves writ large

[00:44:17] - Thoughts on necessity being the mother of all invention

[00:50:08] - The ways that society is arranged is psychologically toxic

[00:55:14] - The role that constraints play in creative output and outcomes in general; Brett Victor - Inventing on Principle

[01:01:10] - What the constraints are that he sets for himself in AI development

[01:04:44] - To know what’s new you need to know what’s not new

[01:06:47] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

[01:08:28] - How he would allocate resources to create more innovation in the world

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Release date: 2022-02-11

Notes from The Valmy:

Source: YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Fr8v2cAIw&
Release date: 2021-10-21

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Podcast: Socrates in the City (LS 47 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Peter Thiel: Zero to One
Release date: 2020-02-28

Eric Metaxas interviews entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel on his bestselling book ZERO TO ONE. Using Apollo 11 and Woodstock as reference points, Thiel and Metaxas explore the idea that we live in an age of technological stagnation, and cover a range of topics — globalization, Greta Thunberg, academia, the worst of the cardinal sins, communion, and more. The interview took place in New York City, in January 2020.

The post Peter Thiel: Zero to One first appeared on Socrates in the City.

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Podcast: Village Global's Venture Stories (LS 47 · TOP 1% )
Episode: What Tyler Cowen Thinks About Basically Everything
Release date: 2018-11-30

In this extended episode of Venture Stories, Erik interviews Tyler Cowen (@tylercowen), professor of economics at George Mason University. They discuss about a wide range of topics, including Tyler’s book Stubborn Attachments, the value of watching sports, travel, Bitcoin, the Knicks, and Effective Altruism — among many, many others.

Tyler explains why he has only two “stubborn attachments” — human rights and economic growth. He takes us through his argument that there’s a moral imperative for economic growth. He talks about why economic growth is the greatest force for good in the world, why redistribution isn’t as effective as Effective Altruists would like, and why we dramatically underestimate the effects of compounding. He discusses some of the reactions to the book and why he says he’s “poked the left in the eye and poked the right in the eye” with Stubborn Attachments.

They discuss the reasons for the extraordinary economic growth of East Asian countries and what kinds of lessons the West could take from those examples. Tyler talks about whether religion has an impact on economic growth and why inequality isn’t as big a deal as it’s made out to be.

Erik asks Tyler what he would do if he could wave a magic wand and change a number of entities, including the US healthcare system, the Knicks, and the Department of Education. Tyler tells Erik whether he would buy Bitcoin and gives his thoughts on central banking and Austrian economics. He also explains why travel is so valuable and why “at the margins people should be more like anthropologists.”

Erik asks Tyler where his views diverge from those of a number of prominent intellectuals, including Thomas Piketty, Russ Roberts, Ayn Rand, and Glen Weyl. Tyler explains why he suspects the environment in which someone grew up influences their thinking style.

Tyler’s own podcast Conversations with Tyler has been a big inspiration to Erik and Venture Stories, so Erik concludes with an homage with a round of overrated vs. underrated and by asking Tyler what his production function is for the podcast.

Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.

Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.

Venture Stories is brought to you by Village Global, is hosted by co-founder and partner, Erik Torenberg and is produced by Brett Bolkowy.

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Podcast: Philosophize This! (LS 78 · TOP 0.01% )
Episode: Episode #158 ... The Creation of Meaning - Nietzsche - The Ascetic Ideal
Release date: 2021-10-05

Today we look at the creation of meaning through the work of Nietzsche. 

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Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: How to Do the Most Good
Release date: 2021-10-05

Do we actually know how much good our charitable donations do?

This is the question that jump-started Holden Karnofsky’s current career. He was working at a hedge fund and wanted to figure out how to give his money away with the certainty that it would save as many lives as possible. But he couldn’t find a service that would help him do that, so he and his co-worker Elie Hassenfeld decided to quit their jobs to build one. The result was GiveWell, a nonprofit that measures the effectiveness of different charities and recommends the ones it is most confident can save lives with the least cost. Things like providing bed nets to prevent malaria and treatments to deworm schoolchildren in low-income countries.

But in recent years, Karnofsky has taken a different approach. He is currently the co-C.E.O. of Open Philanthropy, which operates under the same basic principle — how can we do the most good possible? — but with a very different theory of how to do so. Open Phil’s areas of funding range from farm animal welfare campaigns and criminal justice reform to pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety. And Karnofsky has recently written a series of blog posts centered around the idea that, ethically speaking, we’re living through the most important century in human history: The decisions we make in the coming decades about transformational technologies will determine the fate of trillions of future humans.

In all of this, Karnofsky represents the twin poles of a movement that’s come to deeply influence my thinking: effective altruism. The hallmark of that approach is following fundamental questions about how to do good through to their conclusions, no matter how simple or fantastical the answers. And so this is a conversation, at a meta-level, about how to think like an effective altruist. Along the way, we discuss everything from climate change to animal welfare to evaluating charities to artificial intelligence to the hard limits of economic growth to trying to view the world as if you were a billion years old.

You probably won’t agree with every prediction in here, but that is, in a way, the point: We live in a weird world that’s only getting weirder, and we need to be able to entertain both the obvious and the outlandish implications. What Karnofksy’s career reveals is how hard that is to actually do.

Mentioned:

The "Most Important Century" Blog Post Series on Holden Karnofsky’s blog, Cold Takes

GiveWell

More on Open Philanthropy’s approach to worldview diversification

“What Charity Navigator Gets Wrong About Effective Altruism” by William MacAskill

“The Past and Future of Economic Growth: A Semi-Endogenous Perspective” by Charles I. Jones

Book recommendations:

Due Diligence by David Roodman

The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers by Robert L. Kelly

The Precipice by Toby Ord

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

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Release date: 2021-08-27

Notes from The Valmy:

Source: University of Oxford (The Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics) https://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/uehiro-lectures-2015 Release date: 2015-01-01

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Podcast: Philosophy Bites (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Roger Crisp on Virtue
Release date: 2008-10-12

Roger Crisp discusses the nature of virtue in this interview with Nigel Warburton for  the Philosophy Bites podcast.

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Podcast: Philosophy Bites (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Roger Crisp on Utilitarianism
Release date: 2007-07-16

How should we live? John Stuart Mill, one of the great thinkers of the nineteenth century thought that we should maximise happiness. Here Roger Crisp, author of an acclaimed book on Mill, explains Mill's utilitarian ethical theory.

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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: #102 – Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all
Release date: 2021-06-11

It can be tough to get people to truly care about reducing existential risks today. But spare a thought for the longtermist of the 17th century: they were surrounded by people who thought extinction was literally impossible.

Today’s guest Tom Moynihan, intellectual historian and author of the book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction, says that until the 18th century, almost everyone — including early atheists — couldn’t imagine that humanity or life could simply disappear because of an act of nature.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

This is largely because of the prevalence of the ‘principle of plenitude’, which Tom defines as saying:

“Whatever can happen will happen. In its stronger form it says whatever can happen will happen reliably and recurrently. And in its strongest form it says that all that can happen is happening right now. And that's the way things will be forever.”

This has the implication that if humanity ever disappeared for some reason, then it would have to reappear. So why would you ever worry about extinction?

Here are 4 more commonly held beliefs from generations past that Tom shares in the interview:

• All regions of matter that can be populated will be populated: In other words, there are aliens on every planet, because it would be a massive waste of real estate if all of them were just inorganic masses, where nothing interesting was going on. This also led to the idea that if you dug deep into the Earth, you’d potentially find thriving societies.

• Aliens were human-like, and shared the same values as us: they would have the same moral beliefs, and the same aesthetic beliefs. The idea that aliens might be very different from us only arrived in the 20th century.

• Fossils were rocks that had gotten a bit too big for their britches and were trying to act like animals: they couldn’t actually move, so becoming an imprint of an animal was the next best thing.

• All future generations were contained in miniature form, Russian-doll style, in the sperm of the first man: preformation was the idea that within the ovule or the sperm of an animal is contained its offspring in miniature form, and the French philosopher Malebranche said, well, if one is contained in the other one, then surely that goes on forever.

And here are another three that weren’t held widely, but were proposed by scholars and taken seriously:

• Life preceded the existence of rocks: Living things, like clams and mollusks, came first, and they extruded the earth.

• No idea can be wrong: Nothing we can say about the world is wrong in a strong sense, because at some point in the future or the past, it has been true.

• Maybe we were living before the Trojan War: Aristotle said that we might actually be living before Troy, because it — like every other event — will repeat at some future date. And he said that actually, the set of possibilities might be so narrow that it might be safer to say that we actually live before Troy.

But Tom tries to be magnanimous when faced with these incredibly misguided worldviews.

In this nearly four-hour long interview, Tom and Rob cover all of these ideas, as well as:

• How we know people really believed such things

• How we moved on from these theories

• How future intellectual historians might view our beliefs today

• The distinction between ‘apocalypse’ and ‘extinction’

• Utopias and dystopias

• Big ideas that haven’t flowed through into all relevant fields yet

• Intellectual history as a possible high-impact career

• And much more

*Producer: Keiran Harris.

Audio mastering: Ben Cordell.

Transcriptions: Sofia Davis-Fogel.*

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Podcast: Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Shklar on Hypocrisy
Release date: 2021-04-20

Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (1984) made the case that the worst of all the vices is cruelty. But that meant we needed to be more tolerant of some other common human failings, including snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy. David explores what she had to say about some of the other authors in this series – including Bentham and Nietzsche – and asks what price we should be willing to pay for putting cruelty first among the vices.

Recommended version to buy

Going Deeper:

• David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy (2008)
• Katrina Forrester, ‘Hope and Memory in the thought of Judith Shklar’, Modern Intellectual History (2011)
• Samantha Ashenden and Andreas Hess, 'The Theorist of Belonging', Aeon (2020)
• [Audio]: 'The Moral Philosophy of the Good Place,' Vox

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Podcast: Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg (LS 41 · TOP 1.5% )
Episode: Utilitarianism and Its Flavors with Nick Beckstead
Release date: 2021-05-16

​What is utilitarianism? And what are the different flavors of utilitarianism? What are some alternatives to utilitarianism for people that find it generally plausible but who can't stomach some of its counterintuitive conclusions? For the times when people do use utilitarianism to make moral decisions, when is it appropriate to perform actual calculations (as opposed to making estimations or even just going with one's "gut")? And what is "utility" anyway?

Nick Beckstead is a Program Officer for the Open Philanthropy Project, which he joined in 2014. He works on global catastrophic risk reduction. Previously, he led the creation of Open Phil’s grantmaking program in scientific research. Prior to that, he was a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rutgers University, where he wrote a dissertation on the importance of shaping the distant future. You can find out more about him on his website.

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Podcast: Utilitarian
Episode: The Feeling of Value - Sharon Hewitt Rawlette
Release date: 2020-08-29

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette and I discuss the metaethical thesis of her book The Feeling of Value, which centers around normative qualia. We touch upon perspectival bias, pain and pleasure, how to construct a robust moral realism, the is-ought distinction, the open question argument, evolutionary debunking arguments, the experience machine, the repugnant conclusion, the best argument against utilitarianism and whether we have made moral progress all things considered.

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Podcast: Access to Excellence Podcast (LS 24 · TOP 10% )
Episode: With Emergent Ventures, Tyler Cowen puts money where his mind is
Release date: 2021-05-04

Emergent Ventures, which looks for big and unique ideas, has raised $60 million and funded 200 projects. Mason economist and co-founder Tyler Cowen says the grants are “something you can win that’s not about connections.” Push ideas, he said. “Make the world tell you no.” Cowen also talks about how the Fast Grants program is helping fight Covid-19, why having children can help fight climate change and why he is bullish on the U.S. economy.

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Release date: 2021-04-29

Notes from The Valmy:

Source: YouTube (Stripe Press) https://d37ugbyn3rpeym.cloudfront.net/stripe-press/TAODSAE_zine_press.pdf Release date: 1996-06-06

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Podcast: Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Rawls on Justice
Release date: 2021-04-06

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) changed the face of modern political philosophy by reinventing the question of what constitutes fairness. From ‘the veil of ignorance’ to ‘reflective equilibrium’ it introduced new ways of thinking about the problem of justice along with new problems for thinking about politics. David discusses Rawls’s influence on what happened next.

Recommended version to buy

• Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982, 1998)
• Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989)
• Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019)
• [Audio]: 'John Rawls' A Theory of Justice,' BBC Radio 3, Arts & Ideas

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Podcast: The TED Interview (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: David Deutsch on the infinite reach of knowledge
Release date: 2018-10-23

It can be easy to believe that humans are insignificant. We’re specks of dust on a random planet in a vast universe. Less powerful than elephants. Fewer than ants. But David Deutsch believes that’s all beside the point, because humans possess one unique skill: attaining knowledge. David Deutsch – Oxford professor, father of quantum computing, recluse – convinced Chris years ago to take over leadership of TED with his ideas about knowledge. In this mind-bending conversation, the two dive into his theory that the potential reach of knowledge is infinite. They explore how knowledge first developed, why it sets us apart and what all of these heady concepts really mean for our present and future. To find out more about TED, please visit TED.com.

Find the transcript at:go.ted.com/interviewdeutsch

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Podcast: Hear This Idea (LS 32 · TOP 5% )
Episode: #26 – Thomas Moynihan on the History of Existential Risk
Release date: 2021-03-22

Thomas Moynihan is a writer and researcher interested in the history of ideas surrounding existential risk and human flourishing. He completed a PhD on the history of human extinction, and currently works with Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. His most recent book is called X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction.

You can read much more about the topics we cover in this episode in our accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/thomas. It's not a transcript!

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free get in touch through our website or by using the star rating form on each episode page. Please also consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this. If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip.

Thanks for listening!

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Podcast: Subversive w/Alex Kaschuta (LS 45 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Patrick Deneen - Liberalism & The Meaning of Freedom
Release date: 2021-03-17

You can support this podcast at https://www.patreon.com/aksubversive

​Or check out my writing on Substack at https://alexkaschuta.substack.com/

I talk with Patrick Deneen about why Liberalism failed, about the frictionless society, being alone, technology and supernormal stimuli, why Libertarianism failed and keeps failing, the problems of scale, the West strip-mining the world for intelligence, fertility traps, and much more.

We also cover what could come next, which will be the topic of Prof. Deneen's next book.

Patrick Deneen is a Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame and the author of "Why Liberalism Failed."

Music: Discovery by Scott Buckley https://soundcloud.com/scottbuckley

Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/aksubversive/message

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Podcast: Many Minds (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% )
Episode: Culture, innovation, and the collective brain
Release date: 2021-02-03

Greetings friends and happy February! Today’s episode is a conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna, an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics.

Michael’s research takes on a suite of topics that all start from a single big question: Why are we so different from other animals? Part of the answer has to do with our neural hardware. There’s no question we’ve got big brains—and Michael has some cool things to say about why they may have gotten so big. But Michael is just as focused on our cultural software—the tools and ideas we develop, tweak, share, and accumulate over time. You might say he’s more impressed by our collective brains than by our individual brains. To study all this, Michael builds formal theories and computational models; he runs experiments; and he constructs and analyzes huge databases.

We cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about the finding that the size and interconnectedness of a social group affects the cultural skills that group can develop and maintain. We consider what actually powers innovation (hint: it’s not lone geniuses). We discuss how diversity is a bit double-edged and why psychology needs to become a historical science. And that, my friends, is hardly all—we also touch on cetaceans, religious history, and spinning plates.

I’ve been hoping to have Michael on the show for months now. His work is deeply theoretical, advancing the basic science of what it means to be human. But it’s also engaged with important practical issues—issues like corruption and cultural diversity. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dr. Michael Muthukrishna. Enjoy!

A transcript of this show is available here.

Notes and links

4:30 - An introduction to “dual inheritance theory.”

11:00 - A 2013 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues about the relationship between sociality and cultural complexity.

12:15 - A paper on the loss of cultural tools and traditions in the Tasmanian case.

21:20 – A 2016 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and Joseph Henrich on innovation and the collective brain.

28:30 - The original paper on the notion of cultural “tightness” and “looseness.”

30:20 - A recent short piece by Dr. Muthukrishna on the paradox of diversity.

34:50 - A 2019 popular piece of mine on the phenomenon of “global WEIRDing.”

40:27 - The so-called Flynn Effect refers to the puzzling rise of IQ scores over time. It is named after James Flynn, who died only weeks ago.

42:30 - A paper about the significance of Luria’s work on abstract reasoning in Uzbekistan.

50:26 - A paper on the “cultural brain hypothesis,” the subject of Dr. Muthukrishna’s dissertation.

51:00 - A paper on brains as fundamentally “expensive.”

58:00 - Boyd & Richardson, mentioned here, have authored a number of highly influential books. The first of these was Culture and the Evolutionary Process.

59:35 - A 2015 paper on head size and emergency birth interventions.

1:01:20 - The stylized model we mention here is discussed and illustrated in this lecture from the 2020 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute.

1:03:15 – The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues on cetacean brains and culture.

1:11:38 - The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues on ‘Psychology as a Historical Science.’

1:14:00 - The 2020 paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and colleagues introducing a tool for the measurement of cultural distance.

1:20:20 – Dr. Muthukrishna is part of the team behind the Database of Religious History.

1:24:25 - The paper by Dr. Muthukrishna and Joe Henrich on ‘The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation.’

Dr. Muthukrishna’s end-of-show reading recommendations:

Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success & The WEIRDest People in the World

Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works

Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas

You can keep up with Dr. Muthukrishna’s work at his personal website and on Twitter (@mmuthukrishna).

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster, and Associate Director Hilda Loury. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/).

You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts.

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com.

For updates about the show, follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

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Podcast: Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Bentham on Pleasure
Release date: 2021-02-09

Jeremy Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is a definitive early statement of the basis of utilitarianism: how do we achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number? David looks at Bentham’s rationale for this approach and the many criticisms it has faced. Bentham has often been accused of reducing politics to mechanical calculation and missing what really matters. But given the time in which he was writing, wasn’t the prioritisation of pleasure the most radical idea of all?

Free online version of text

Recommended version to purchase

Going deeper…

• Philip Lucas and Anne Sheeran, ‘Asperger’s Syndrome and the Eccentricity and Genius of Jeremy Bentham’ (2006)
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975)
• Thomas McMullan, ‘What does the panopticon mean in the age of digital surveillance?’, The Guardian (2015)
• (Audio) In Our Time, Utilitarianism

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Podcast: Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Butler on Machines
Release date: 2021-02-23

Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) is a strange and unsettling book about a world turned upside down. Usually classified as utopian or dystopian fiction, it also contains an eerie prophecy about the coming of intelligent machines. David explores the origins of Butler’s ideas and asks what they have to teach us about the oddity of how we choose to organise our societies, both then and now.

Free version of the text

Recommended version to buy

Going Deeper:

• Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh (1903)
• Virginia Woolf, 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' (1924)
• George Dyson, Darwin Among the Machines (1997)
• (Video) James Paradis, 'Naturalism and Utopia: Samuel Butler's Erewhon'

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Podcast: Hear This Idea (LS 32 · TOP 5% )
Episode: #16 – SJ Beard on Parfit, Climate Change, and Existential Risk
Release date: 2020-09-30

Dr S. J. Beard is a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. With a background in philosophy, he works on ethical problems relating to the long-term future of humanity, as well as evaluating extreme technological risks.

In this episode we discuss:

• [2:00] Existential risks defined in brief;
• [4:45] SJ's background;
• [12:30] What made philosopher Derek Parfit so influential;
• [17:30] What is the repugnant conclusion?
• [22:12] What is the non-identity problem?
• [28:40] Meeting Parfit;
• [34:20] Why SJ chose a career in existial risk research;
• [36:43] What existential risk research looks like;
• [45:58] How can we estimate the probability of catastrophes with no strict precedents?
• [56:52] Under what circumstances could climate change cause a collapse of global civilization?
• [1:07:52] Why SJ ran as an MP for the Liberal Democrats;
• [1:17:25] Is academia broken? How can we fix it?
• [1:23:23] Why SJ changed his mind about whether COVID is a potential global catastrophe

You can read much more on this episode's accompanying write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/Simon.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, please get in touch through our website. Please also consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this.

If you want to support the show more directly and help us keep hosting these episodes online, consider leaving a tip at https://www.tips.pinecast.com/jar/hear-this-idea. Thanks for listening!

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Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Kelly Wanser on Marine Cloud Brightening for Mitigating Climate Change
Release date: 2020-09-30

Kelly Wanser from SilverLining joins us to discuss techniques for climate intervention to mitigate the impacts of human induced climate change.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

• The risks of climate change in the short-term
• Tipping points and tipping cascades
• Climate intervention via marine cloud brightening and releasing particles in the stratosphere
• The benefits and risks of climate intervention techniques
• The international politics of climate change and weather modification

You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2020/09/30/kelly-wanser-on-marine-cloud-brightening-for-mitigating-climate-change/

Video recording of this podcast here:

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro 2:30 What is SilverLining’s mission? 4:27 Why is climate change thought to be very risky in the next 10-30 years? 8:40 Tipping points and tipping cascades 13:25 Is climate change an existential risk? 17:39 Earth systems that help to stabilize the climate 21:23 Days where it will be unsafe to work outside 25:03 Marine cloud brightening, stratospheric sunlight reflection, and other climate interventions SilverLining is interested in 41:46 What experiments are happening to understand tropospheric and stratospheric climate interventions? 50:20 International politics of weather modification 53:52 How do efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fit into the project of reflecting sunlight? 57:35 How would you respond to someone who views climate intervention by marine cloud brightening as too dangerous? 59:33 What are the main points of persons skeptical of climate intervention approaches 01:13:21 The international problem of coordinating on climate change 01:24:50 Is climate change a global catastrophic or existential risk, and how does it relate to other large risks? 01:33:20 Should effective altruists spend more time on the issue of climate change and climate intervention? 01:37:48 What can listeners do to help with this issue? 01:40:00 Climate change and mars colonization 01:44:55 Where to find and follow Kelly

This podcast is possible because of the support of listeners like you. If you found this conversation to be meaningful or valuable, consider supporting it directly by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. Contributions like yours make these conversations possible.

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Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Iason Gabriel on Foundational Philosophical Questions in AI Alignment
Release date: 2020-09-03

In the contemporary practice of many scientific disciplines, questions of values, norms, and political thought rarely explicitly enter the picture. In the realm of AI alignment, however, the normative and technical come together in an important and inseparable way. How do we decide on an appropriate procedure for aligning AI systems to human values when there is disagreement over what constitutes a moral alignment procedure? Choosing any procedure or set of values with which to align AI brings its own normative and metaethical beliefs that will require close examination and reflection if we hope to succeed at alignment. Iason Gabriel, Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind, joins us on this episode of the AI Alignment Podcast to explore the interdependence of the normative and technical in AI alignment and to discuss his recent paper Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-How moral philosophy and political theory are deeply related to AI alignment -The problem of dealing with a plurality of preferences and philosophical views in AI alignment -How the is-ought problem and metaethics fits into alignment -What we should be aligning AI systems to -The importance of democratic solutions to questions of AI alignment -The long reflection

You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2020/09/03/iason-gabriel-on-foundational-philosophical-questions-in-ai-alignment/

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro 2:10 Why Iason wrote Artificial Intelligence, Values and Alignment 3:12 What AI alignment is 6:07 The technical and normative aspects of AI alignment 9:11 The normative being dependent on the technical 14:30 Coming up with an appropriate alignment procedure given the is-ought problem 31:15 What systems are subject to an alignment procedure? 39:55 What is it that we're trying to align AI systems to? 01:02:30 Single agent and multi agent alignment scenarios 01:27:00 What is the procedure for choosing which evaluative model(s) will be used to judge different alignment proposals 01:30:28 The long reflection 01:53:55 Where to follow and contact Iason

This podcast is possible because of the support of listeners like you. If you found this conversation to be meaningful or valuable, consider supporting it directly by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. Contributions like yours make these conversations possible.

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Podcast: In Our Time (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% )
Episode: Utilitarianism
Release date: 2015-06-11

A moral theory that emphasises ends over means, Utilitarianism holds that a good act is one that increases pleasure in the world and decreases pain. The tradition flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and has antecedents in ancient philosophy. According to Bentham, happiness is the means for assessing the utility of an act, declaring "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." Mill and others went on to refine and challenge Bentham's views and to defend them from critics such as Thomas Carlyle, who termed Utilitarianism a "doctrine worthy only of swine."

With

Melissa Lane The Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University

Janet Radcliffe Richards Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford

and

Brad Hooker A Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

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Podcast: a16z Podcast (LS 62 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: GPT-3: What's Hype, What's Real on the Latest in AI
Release date: 2020-07-30

In this episode -- cross posted from our 16 Minutes show feed -- we cover all the buzz around GPT-3, the pre-trained machine learning model from OpenAI that’s optimized to do a variety of natural-language processing tasks.

It’s a commercial product, built on research; so what does this mean for both startups AND incumbents… and the future of “AI as a service”? And given that we’re seeing all kinds of (cherrypicked!) examples of output from OpenAI’s beta API being shared — how do we know how good it really is or isn’t? How do we know the difference between “looks like” a toy and “is” a toy when it comes to new innovations?

And where are we, really, in terms of natural language processing and progress towards artificial general intelligence? Is it intelligent, does that matter, and how do we know (if not with a Turing Test)? Finally, what are the broader questions, considerations, and implications for jobs and more? Frank Chen explains what “it” actually is and isn’t and more in conversation with host Sonal Chokshi. The two help tease apart what’s hype/ what’s real here… as is the theme of 16 Minutes.

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Podcast: TALKING POLITICS (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Helen's History of Ideas
Release date: 2020-07-09

David talks with Helen to get her take on the history of ideas - both what's there and what's missing. Why start with Hobbes? What can we learn from the Federalist Papers? Where's Nietzsche? Plus we talk about whether understanding where political ideas come from is

liberating or limiting and we ask how many of them were just rationalisations for power.

Talking Points:

Should we start the story of modern politics with Hobbes?

• Hobbes poses a stark question: what is the worst thing that can happen in politics? Civil war or tyranny?
• Is Hobbes’ answer utopian?
• What are the consequences of the breakdown of political authority—and how do they compare to the consequences of empowering the state to do terrible things?

Who has the authority to decide is a fundamental question in politics.

• But there are lots of ways of thinking about politics that avoid this question.
• If you accept the notion that political authority is essential, what form should that authority take and how can it be made as bearable as possible for as many people as possible?

Constant says that the worst thing that can happen isn’t civil war; it’s the tyranny of the state.

• To him, the French Revolution showed that when people who hold the coercive power of the state also hold certain beliefs, the damage can be much worse.
• Constant wants to say that the beliefs people have in the modern world are a constraint on political possibilities.
• What does the pluralism of beliefs mean for politics?
• Constant is also more direct about the importance of debt and money.

From the French revolution onwards, nationalism became the dominant idea by which the authority of states was justified to those over whom it exercised power.

• Sieyès equated the state with its people.

The idea of federalism as enshrined in the US constitution is also important: Hobbes did not think sovereignty could be divided.

• How do you reconcile constitutional ideals with the horrors they justified?

Nietzsche forces a reckoning with the religion question.

• This blows up the distinction between pre-modern and modern.
• He presents a genealogy not just of morality, but civilization, ideas of justice, religion.
• For Nietzsche, Christianity is the manifestation of the will to power of the powerless.
• Nietzsche tells us how we became the way we are—it didn’t have to go that way.
• In exposing contingency, he forces us to engage with political questions we don’t really want to think about.

What do ideas explain about human motivation in politics, and to what extent are they rationalizations of other motives?

• Helen thinks that the history of ideas can make political action seem too straightforward.
• How should we think about the relationship between ideas and material constraints (or opportunities)?
• Studying history more generally leads to at least some degree of cynicism about the relationship between ideas and power.

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Talking Politics: the History of Ideas
• The Federalist Papers
• The Genealogy of Morality
• Our episode on Weber’s ‘Politics as a Vocation’

Further Learning:

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/talkingpolitics.

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Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Peter Railton on Moral Learning and Metaethics in AI Systems
Release date: 2020-08-18

From a young age, humans are capable of developing moral competency and autonomy through experience. We begin life by constructing sophisticated moral representations of the world that allow for us to successfully navigate our way through complex social situations with sensitivity to morally relevant information and variables. This capacity for moral learning allows us to solve open-ended problems with other persons who may hold complex beliefs and preferences. As AI systems become increasingly autonomous and active in social situations involving human and non-human agents, AI moral competency via the capacity for moral learning will become more and more critical. On this episode of the AI Alignment Podcast, Peter Railton joins us to discuss the potential role of moral learning and moral epistemology in AI systems, as well as his views on metaethics.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Moral epistemology -The potential relevance of metaethics to AI alignment -The importance of moral learning in AI systems -Peter Railton's, Derek Parfit's, and Peter Singer's metaethical views

You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2020/08/18/peter-railton-on-moral-learning-and-metaethics-in-ai-systems/

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro 3:05 Does metaethics matter for AI alignment? 22:49 Long-reflection considerations 26:05 Moral learning in humans 35:07 The need for moral learning in artificial intelligence 53:57 Peter Railton's views on metaethics and his discussions with Derek Parfit 1:38:50 The need for engagement between philosophers and the AI alignment community 1:40:37 Where to find Peter's work

This podcast is possible because of the support of listeners like you. If you found this conversation to be meaningful or valuable, consider supporting it directly by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. Contributions like yours make these conversations possible.

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Podcast: New Books in Philosophy (LS 42 · TOP 1.5% )
Episode: Elijah Millgram, "John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Release date: 2019-11-01

According to an intuitive view, lives are meaningful when they manifest a directedness or instantiate a project such that the disparate events and endeavors “add up to” a life. John Stuart Mill’s life certainly was devoted to a project in that sense. Yet Mill’s life was in many respects unsatisfying – riven with anxiety and trauma. What does Mill’s life teach us about meaningful lives?

In John Stuart Mill and the Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press 2019), Elijah Millgram weaves intellectual biography together with philosophical analysis in the service of a distinctive style of moral philosophizing.

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Podcast: Philosophy Bites (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Aaron Ridley on Nietzsche on Art and Truth
Release date: 2008-08-16

Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas about art and truth run through much of his philosophical writing, but are most apparent in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. In this episode of Philosophy Bites Nigel Warburton interviews Aaron Ridley about this topic.

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Podcast: Philosophy Bites (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Christopher Janaway on Nietzsche on Morality
Release date: 2008-09-28

Friedrich Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morality provides a radical view of the origins of our values. Nigel Warburton interviews Christopher Janaway about this important book in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

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Podcast: Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: The Spreadsheet of Life and Death
Release date: 2020-06-26

Clive had a deadly form of cancer, but fortunately there was a new drug to treat it. Imagine his anger when he was told the treatment was too expensive. He’d entered a world where unique human lives are given a value in a mathematical formula. So how much should we spend to extend or save a life? And are some lives worth more than others?

Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/

Tim's latest books 'Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy' and 'The Next Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy' are available now.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Podcast: Philosophize This! (LS 78 · TOP 0.01% )
Episode: Episode #142 ... Richard Rorty
Release date: 2020-04-15

Today we begin our discussion of the work of Richard Rorty. 

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Podcast: TALKING POLITICS (LS 66 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Democracy For Young People
Release date: 2018-12-06

As a follow-up to last year's How Democracy Ends lecture, David talks about how divisions between young and old are threatening representative democracy. He traces the story from Ancient Greece to Brexit and beyond, and asks how the age divide connects to the education divide in contemporary politics. Plus he offers some radical suggestions for what we might do about it.

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Podcast: The Portal (LS 72 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: 23: Agnes Callard - Courage, Meta-cognitive detachment and their limits
Release date: 2020-02-24

Philosopher and University of Chicago Professor Agnes Callard sits down with Eric on this episode of the portal. Agnes is a champion of the philosophical tradition of attempting to detach the capacity for inquiry and reason from the fog of feelings and societal taboos that often keep us from delving deeper into the questions that animate our lives.

Agnes began this unusual back and forth by writing an article about status negotiation in first meetings shortly after the pair first met. Eric and Agnes then use the opportunity of this episode to continue this line of thought by exploring the limits of courage and meta-cognition within the examined life of a modern Philosopher. This results in a real-time exploration by two people who mutually respect each other as to whether they can actually negotiate a detached discussion in real time on the very issues of status, feeling, and taboo that may divide them and/or arise between them.

As Agnes has written thoughtfully about the many layers of anger, the conversation culminates by exploring dyadic feelings of hurt and indignation with which we all struggle and suffer in our relationships. Ultimately the two finish this experimental conversation with good cheer, together with a wish to continue the discussion at a later date under continuing mutual fondness and admiration.

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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Agnes Callard on Philosophy, Progress, and Wisdom
Release date: 2020-06-22

Philosopher and author Agnes Callard talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the state of philosophy, the power of philosophy, and the search for wisdom and truth. This is a wide-ranging conversation related to the question of how we learn, how to behave ethically, and the role of religion and philosophy in encouraging good behavior.

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Release date: 2020-06-19

Notes from The Valmy:

Source: YouTube (The Torch of Progress) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rxS6kj5Zt0
Release date: 2020-06-17

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Podcast: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: John Collison – Growing the Internet Economy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.178]
Release date: 2020-06-16

My guest today is John Collison, the Co-Founder of the digital payments company Stripe. Stripe’s mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, a lofty and deeply interesting pursuit. John is clearly a voracious learner across business and investing, which you’ll hear instantly. He started Stripe with his brother Patrick when he was just 19 years old, and has grown it to, at last valuation, a $36B business. In our conversation, we discuss conglomerates, the internet economy, the power of writing, and why board members are like Pokémon characters, each with different powers. It’s a lively and wide-ranging conversation with one of the entrepreneurs I’ve most enjoyed speaking with. Please enjoy.

For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.

Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub.

Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

Show Notes

(1:30) – (First question) – Interest in industrial conglomerates

(9:10) – Their thinking on acquisitions vs starting new companies

(11:42) – How the payment landscape looked when Stripe was started

(15:55) – View on the internet economy

(20:09) – Exciting possibilities for the future of the internet economy

(22:11) – The forces of size vs speed among startups

(26:53) – Driving reasons why employees choose Stripe starting with clear communication

(28:55) – Tips for better internal communications

(30:09) – The importance of rigor in Stripe’s corporate culture

(32:15) – Investors and investing styles that are most intriguing to him

(36:02) – Teaching vs experiencing business lessons

(37:56) – Lessons from going to market with new ideas

(50:58) – Allowing teams to explore new ideas at Stripe

(44:11) – Best startup companies to study to understand the history of this space

(44:52) – Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle

(48:18) – Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business

(48:43) – Infrastructures of internet businesses that are missing

(52:03) – Does general accounting practices need to change to capture the true value of a company like Stripe

(1:01:53) – Shared playbooks in Silicon Valley

(1:02:02) – The transition to the no code movement

(1:08:22) – Other businesses that pique his interest outside of software

(1:10:21) – Future trends that excite him

(1:11:10) – First memory when he felt like he was participating in the tech economy

(1:12:46 – The role of board members

(1:15:48) – Kindest thing anyone has done for him

(1:18:49) – Advice for young people

Learn More

For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.

Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub

Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag

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Podcast: Rationally Speaking Podcast (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: Rationally Speaking #141 - Dan Sperber on "The Argumentative Theory of reason"
Release date: 2015-08-23

The traditional story about reason is that it evolved to help humans see the world more clearly and (thereby) make better decisions. But on that view, some mysteries remain: why is the human brain so biased? Why are we so much better at defending our pre-existing views than at evaluating new ideas objectively?

In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Julia talks with guest Dan Sperber, professor of cognitive and social sciences, who is famous for advancing an alternate view of reason: that it evolved to help us argue with our fellow humans and convince them that we're right.

Dan Sperber is a social and cognitive scientist. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics. Sperber currently holds the positions of Directeur de Recherche émérite at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute.

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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Rory Sutherland on Alchemy
Release date: 2019-11-11

Author and Advertising Executive Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy talks about his book Alchemy with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Sutherland makes the case for the magic (yes, magic!) of advertising and branding in helping markets work well. This is a wide-ranging conversation on consumer choice, public policy, travel, real estate, and corporate decision-making using insights from behavioral economics and decades of experience in the world of advertising.

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Release date: 2020-06-14

Notes from The Valmy:

Source: YouTube (Stanford Ethics in Society) https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/essays/economic-growth-moral-imperative
Release date: 2019-11-05

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Podcast: FT Alphachat (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: Tyler Cowen's stubborn attachments
Release date: 2017-04-28

Economist and polymathic author Tyler Cowen talks to Cardiff about his essay, "Stubborn Attachments", in which he shares his vision for a free and prosperous society - and the philosophical foundations necessary to build it. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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Release date: 2020-06-14

Notes from The Valmy:

Source: YouTube (University of California, Berkeley) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szgMiqbR57s
Release date: 2002-10-15

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Podcast: Philosophy Bites (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Adrian Moore on Bernard Williams on Ethics
Release date: 2013-11-23

Bernard Williams was one of the most brilliant philosophers of his generation. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Adrian Moore discusses his ideas about Ethics.  

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Podcast: Robert Wright's Nonzero (LS 50 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: Robert Wright & Galen Strawson
Release date: 2018-02-24

Why scientific materialism is harder to define than you think … Galen explains panpsychism … What does “mind is all there is to reality” mean? … Is human consciousness epiphenomenal? … Do physical laws come from somewhere? … Is it like something to be a rock? (And is Galen saying it is?) … Galen: Discussion of the mind-body problem was better 100 years ago …

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Podcast: Elucidations (LS 46 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Episode 118: Tyler Cowen discusses Stubborn Attachments
Release date: 2019-09-12

In this episode, Tyler Cowen lays out an interesting normative ethical theory according to which we should be utilitarians, but with a twist: we should be utilitarians who care just as much about the humans of the future as we care about people now. Re-emphasizing our commitment to future people, he argues, has the effect of allowing us to embrace utilitarianism wholeheartedly without having to feel like we aren't doing enough. Why? The best way to make life better for future generations is to help bring about economic growth, and we have good reason to think that a lot of what we're already doing is pretty good for economic growth.

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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Rob Wiblin interviews Tyler on Stubborn Attachments
Release date: 2018-10-16

In this special episode, Rob Wiblin of 80,000 Hours has the super-sized conversation he wants to have with Tyler about Stubborn Attachments. In addition to a deep examination of the ideas in the book, the conversation ranges far and wide across Tyler's thinking, including why we won't leave the galaxy, the unresolvable clash between the claims of culture and nature, and what Tyrone would have to say about the book, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded September 21st, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow 80,000 Hours on Twitter
• Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

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Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: FLI Podcast: On Global Priorities, Existential Risk, and What Matters Most with Sam Harris
Release date: 2020-06-01

Human civilization increasingly has the potential both to improve the lives of everyone and to completely destroy everything. The proliferation of emerging technologies calls our attention to this never-before-seen power — and the need to cultivate the wisdom with which to steer it towards beneficial outcomes. If we're serious both as individuals and as a species about improving the world, it's crucial that we converge around the reality of our situation and what matters most. What are the most important problems in the world today and why? In this episode of the Future of Life Institute Podcast, Sam Harris joins us to discuss some of these global priorities, the ethics surrounding them, and what we can do to address them.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The problem of communication -Global priorities -Existential risk -Animal suffering in both wild animals and factory farmed animals -Global poverty -Artificial general intelligence risk and AI alignment -Ethics -Sam’s book, The Moral Landscape

You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2020/06/01/on-global-priorities-existential-risk-and-what-matters-most-with-sam-harris/

You can take a survey about the podcast here: www.surveymonkey.com/r/W8YLYD3

You can submit a nominee for the Future of Life Award here: https://futureoflife.org/future-of-life-award-unsung-hero-search/

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro 3:52 What are the most important problems in the world? 13:14 Global priorities: existential risk 20:15 Why global catastrophic risks are more likely than existential risks 25:09 Longtermist philosophy 31:36 Making existential and global catastrophic risk more emotionally salient 34:41 How analyzing the self makes longtermism more attractive 40:28 Global priorities & effective altruism: animal suffering and global poverty 56:03 Is machine suffering the next global moral catastrophe? 59:36 AI alignment and artificial general intelligence/superintelligence risk 01:11:25 Expanding our moral circle of compassion 01:13:00 The Moral Landscape, consciousness, and moral realism 01:30:14 Can bliss and wellbeing be mathematically defined? 01:31:03 Where to follow Sam and concluding thoughts

This podcast is possible because of the support of listeners like you. If you found this conversation to be meaningful or valuable consider supporting it directly by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. Contributions like yours make these conversations possible.

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Podcast: Philosophy Bites (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Cheryl Misak on Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein
Release date: 2020-05-30

Cheryl Misak has recently published a biography of F.P. Ramsey, the great Cambridge thinker who died at the age of only 26, but who nevertheless made a significant impact in several different fields including philosophy, mathematics, and economics. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast she discusses Ramsey's interactions with Wittgenstein. The two thinkers had very different personal styles and their philosophies reflect this.

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Podcast: Philosophy Bites (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Dan Sperber on the Enigma of Reason
Release date: 2011-09-25

Our reasoning capacity sets us apart from other animals. But reason is frequently prone to error. Why then did we evolve with a capacity for reason at all?  This is a question that has vexed Dan Sperber - with Hugo Mercier he has been researching the topic. Dan Sperber discusses their research and conclusions with Nigel Warburton for this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. Philosophy Bites is made in assocation with the Institute of Philosophy.

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Podcast: The Audio Long Read (LS 64 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Why we need worst-case thinking to prevent pandemics
Release date: 2020-03-23

Threats to humanity, and how we address them, define our time. Why are we still so complacent about facing up to existential risk? By Toby Ord. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

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Podcast: Rationally Speaking Podcast (LS 58 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: Rationally Speaking #232 - Tyler Cowen on "Defending big business against its critics"
Release date: 2019-04-30

Economist Tyler Cowen discusses his latest book, "Big Business: A love-letter to an American anti-hero." Why has anti-capitalist sentiment increased recently, and to what extent is it justified? How much are corporations to blame for wage stagnation, climbing cost of living, or the slow response to climate change? Tyler and Julia also explore their various disagreements: on how to communicate, whether people should bet on their beliefs, and whether we should increase public optimism about technology.

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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Jerry Muller on the Tyranny of Metrics
Release date: 2018-04-16

Historian and author Jerry Muller of Catholic University talks about his latest book, The Tyranny of Metrics, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Muller argues that public policy and management are overly focused on measurable outcomes as a measure of success. This leads to organizations and agencies over-focusing on metrics rather than their broader mission. The conversation includes applications to education, crime, and health care.

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Podcast: EconTalk (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Joshua Greene on Moral Tribes, Moral Dilemmas, and Utilitarianism
Release date: 2015-01-05

Joshua Greene, of Harvard University and author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about morality and the challenges we face when our morality conflicts with that of others. Topics discussed include the difference between what Greene calls automatic thinking and manual thinking, the moral dilemma known as "the trolley problem," and the difficulties of identifying and solving problems in a society that has a plurality of values. Greene defends utilitarianism as a way of adjudicating moral differences.

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Podcast: EdgeCast (LS 33 · TOP 5% )
Episode: Toby Ord - We Have the Power to Destroy Ourselves Without the Wisdom to Ensure That We Don't
Release date: 2020-04-06

TOBY ORD is a senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford University and author of _The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. _The Conversation: https://www.edge.org/conversation/toby_ord-we-have-the-power-to-destroy-ourselves-without-the-wisdom-to-ensure-that-we

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Podcast: Astral Codex Ten Podcast (LS 44 · TOP 1% )
Episode: Book Review: Hoover
Release date: 2020-03-21

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/

You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Burma. Or as the heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Or as a dashing pirate-philanthropist, gallivanting around the world, saving millions of lives wherever he went. Or as the temporary dictator of Europe. Or as a geologist, or a bank tycoon, or author of the premier 1900s textbook on metallurgy.

How did a backwards orphan son of a blacksmith, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Midwest, grow up to be a captain of industry and a US President? How did he become such a towering figure in the history of philanthropy that biographer Kenneth Whyte claims “the number of lives Hoover saved through his various humanitarian campaigns might exceed 100 million, a record of benevolence unlike anything in human history”? To find out, I picked up Whyte’s Hoover: An Extraordinary Life In Extraordinary Times.

Herbert Hoover was born in 1874 to poor parents in the tiny Quaker farming community of West Branch, Iowa. His father was a blacksmith, his mother a schoolteacher. His childhood was strict. Magazines and novels were banned; acceptable reading material included the Bible and Prohibitionist pamphlets. His hobby was collecting oddly shaped sticks.

His father dies when he is 6, his mother when he is 10. The orphaned Hoover and his two siblings are shuttled from relative to relative. He spends one summer on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, living with an uncle who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs. Another year passes on a pig farm with his Uncle Allen. In 1885, he is more permanently adopted by his Uncle John, a doctor and businessman helping found a Quaker colony in Oregon. Hoover’s various guardians are dutiful but distant; they never abuse or neglect him, but treat him more as an extra pair of hands around the house than as someone to be loved and cherished. Hoover reciprocates in kind, doing what is expected of him but excelling neither in school nor anywhere else.

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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: #78 - Danny Hernandez on forecasting and the drivers of AI progress
Release date: 2020-05-22

Companies use about 300,000 times more computation training the best AI systems today than they did in 2012 and algorithmic innovations have also made them 25 times more efficient at the same tasks.

These are the headline results of two recent papers — AI and Compute and AI and Efficiency — from the Foresight Team at OpenAI. In today's episode I spoke with one of the authors, Danny Hernandez, who joined OpenAI after helping develop better forecasting methods at Twitch and Open Philanthropy.

Danny and I talk about how to understand his team's results and what they mean (and don't mean) for how we should think about progress in AI going forward.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

Debates around the future of AI can sometimes be pretty abstract and theoretical. Danny hopes that providing rigorous measurements of some of the inputs to AI progress so far can help us better understand what causes that progress, as well as ground debates about the future of AI in a better shared understanding of the field.

If this research sounds appealing, you might be interested in applying to join OpenAI's Foresight team — they're currently hiring research engineers.

In the interview, Danny and I (Arden Koehler) also discuss a range of other topics, including:

• The question of which experts to believe

• Danny's journey to working at OpenAI

• The usefulness of "decision boundaries"

• The importance of Moore's law for people who care about the long-term future

• What OpenAI's Foresight Team's findings might imply for policy

• The question whether progress in the performance of AI systems is linear

• The safety teams at OpenAI and who they're looking to hire

• One idea for finding someone to guide your learning

• The importance of hardware expertise for making a positive impact

Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type 80,000 Hours into your podcasting app. Or read the linked transcript.

*Producer: Keiran Harris.

Audio mastering: Ben Cordell.

Transcriptions: Zakee Ulhaq.*

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Podcast: Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Wollstonecraft on Sexual Politics
Release date: 2020-04-28

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is one of the most remarkable books in the history of ideas. A classic of early feminism, it uses what’s wrong with the relationship between men and women to illustrate what’s gone wrong with politics. It’s a story of lust and power, education and revolution. David explores how Wollstonecraft’s radical challenge to the basic ideas of modern politics continues to resonate today.

Free online version of the text:

• http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3420

Recommended version to purchase:

• https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/texts-political-thought/wollstonecraft-vindication-rights-men-and-vindication-rights-woman-and-hints?format=PB

Going Deeper:

• In Our Time on Mary Wollstonecraft
• Wollstonecraft in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Sylvana Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020)
• Virginia Woolf on Mary Wollstonecraft
• Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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Podcast: Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS (LS 61 · TOP 0.1% )
Episode: Hobbes on the State
Release date: 2020-04-27

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) reimagined how we could do politics. It redefined many of the ideas that continue to shape modern politics: representation, sovereignty, the state. But in Leviathan these ideas have a strange and puzzling power. David explores what Hobbes was trying to achieve and how a vision of politics that came out of the English civil war, can still illuminate the world we live in.

Free online version of the text:

• https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm

Recommended version to purchase:

• https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/texts-political-thought/hobbes-leviathan-revised-student-edition?format=PB

Going Deeper:

• David Runciman, ‘The sovereign’ in The Oxford handbook of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Richard Tuck, Hobbes a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
• (Video) Quentin Skinner, ‘What is the state? The question that will not go away’
• (Video) Sophie Smith, ‘The nature of politics’, the 2017 Quentin Skinner lecture.
• Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
• David for The Guardian on Hobbes and the coronavirus

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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Podcast: Conversations with Tyler (LS 63 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox
Release date: 2020-04-22

Accuracy is only one of the things we want from forecasters, says Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. People also look to forecasters for ideological assurance, entertainment, and to minimize regret–such as that caused by not taking a global pandemic seriously enough. The best forecasters aren’t just intelligent, but fox-like integrative thinkers capable of navigating values that are conflicting or in tension.

He joined Tyler to discuss whether the world as a whole is becoming harder to predict, whether Goldman Sachs traders can beat forecasters, what inferences we can draw from analyzing the speech of politicians, the importance of interdisciplinary teams, the qualities he looks for in leaders, the reasons he’s skeptical machine learning will outcompete his research team, the year he thinks the ascent of the West became inevitable, how research on counterfactuals can be applied to modern debates, why people with second cultures tend to make better forecasters, how to become more fox-like, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded March 26th, 2020 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
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Podcast: The Portal (LS 72 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: 30: Ross Douthat - The Rave Before the Fall
Release date: 2020-04-16

Just before the great indooring due to the Pandemic of 2020, Eric sat down with conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat to discuss his book "The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success." Over champagne flutes filled with bubbly, the two discussed the various ways that the success and excesses of American Capitalism were now distorting the American Dream into a dystopian fever vision, making it far harder to wake up from this stasis in time to avoid the previous fates of fallen empires.

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Podcast: The Portal (LS 72 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: 27: Daniel Schmachtenberger - On Avoiding Apocalypses
Release date: 2020-03-27

In this second episode of the Portal to be released during shelter-in-place restrictions during the Corona Virus Pandemic, we release an older discussion with Daniel Shmachtenberger on whether there is any plausible long term scenario for human flourishing confined to a single shared planet.

Daniel is seen as a leader of the growing Game B subculture of the human potential movement. This group bets that there is a second evolutionary stable strategy for cohabiting not based on conflict or rivalry, even for life raised in Game A (i.e. standard evolutionary and economic environments based on scarcity and rivalrous goods. Eric asks Daniel about where the bright spots and progress might be in this movement which refuses to accept the fate that that Eric has elsewhere put forward as the Twin Nuclei Problem of having unlocked the power of both Cell and Atom in the early 1950s without the wisdom to use it.

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Podcast: Vox Conversations (LS 74 · TOP 0.01% )
Episode: An enlightening, frustrating conversation on liberalism (with Adam Gopnik)
Release date: 2019-06-27

“Liberalism is as distinct a tradition as exists in political history, but it suffers from being a practice before it is an ideology, a temperament and a tone and a way of managing the world more than a fixed set of beliefs.”

That’s from Adam Gopnik’s new book A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. It is, by turns, a bracing, charming, insightful, irksome defense of the most successful political movement of our age. Liberalism is so successful, in fact, that its achievements are taken for granted while its shortcomings throb through our politics.

What caught my eye about Gopnik’s book is his argument that liberalism is a temperament more than an ideology, an approach more than a prescription. As I read his argument, it felt to me that he had identified something essential and often missed in discussions of agendas and plans. But he was also developing a definition of little use in settling the core debates of our age, a liberalism that could be seen as too flexible to mean anything in particular.

And so, as liberals do, we argued it out. This conversation has something to thrill and frustrate every listener. In that way, it’s like liberalism itself.

Book recommendations:

Life of Johnsonby James Boswell

The Open Society and Its Enemiesby Karl R. Popper

No Other Book: Selected Essays by Randall Jarrell

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Podcast: 13 Minutes to the Moon (LS 73 · TOP 0.05% )
Episode: Ep.01 ‘We choose to go’
Release date: 2019-05-12

With no idea how to get there, the race to the moon begins – "we intend to win". To understand how the story ends, we need to start at the very beginning. With Kevin Fong. Starring: Michael Collins Steve Bales Margaret Hamilton Jim Lovell Charlie Duke Theme music by Hans Zimmer for Bleeding Fingers Music

13MinutestotheMoon

www.bbcworldservice.com/13minutes This episode was updated on 14 May 2019.

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Podcast: Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking (LS 48 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: Niall Ferguson: Networks and Power
Release date: 2018-12-13

“This time is different.”

Historians: “Ha.”

“The Net is net beneficial.”

Historian Niall Ferguson: “Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. Technology meanwhile marches inexorably ahead, threatening to render most human beings redundant or immortal or both. How do we make sense of all this?”

Ferguson analyzes the structure and prospects of “Cyberia” as yet another round in the endless battle between hierarchy and networks that has wrought spasms of innovation and chaos throughout history. He examines those previous rounds (including all that was set in motion by the printing press) in light of the current paradoxes of radical networking enabled by digital technology being the engine of massive hierarchical companies (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and their equivalents in China) and exploited by populists and authoritarians around the world.

He puts the fundamental question this way: “Is our age likely to repeat the experience of the period after 1500, when the printing revolution unleashed wave after wave of revolution? Will the new networks liberate us from the shackles of the administrative state as the revolutionary networks of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries freed our ancestors from the shackles of spiritual and temporal hierarchy? Or will the established hierarchies of our time succeed more quickly than their imperial predecessors in co-opting the networks, and enlist them in their ancient vice of waging war?”

Niall Ferguson is currently a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities. His books include The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (2018); Civilization: The West and the Rest (2012); and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2009).

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Podcast: Future of Life Institute Podcast (LS 43 · TOP 1% )
Episode: AIAP: On Becoming a Moral Realist with Peter Singer
Release date: 2018-10-18

Are there such things as moral facts? If so, how might we be able to access them? Peter Singer started his career as a preference utilitarian and a moral anti-realist, and then over time became a hedonic utilitarian and a moral realist. How does such a transition occur, and which positions are more defensible? How might objectivism in ethics affect AI alignment? What does this all mean for the future of AI?

On Becoming a Moral Realist with Peter Singer is the sixth podcast in the AI Alignment series, hosted by Lucas Perry. For those of you that are new, this series will be covering and exploring the AI alignment problem across a large variety of domains, reflecting the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment. Broadly, we will be having discussions with technical and non-technical researchers across areas such as machine learning, AI safety, governance, coordination, ethics, philosophy, and psychology as they pertain to the project of creating beneficial AI. If this sounds interesting to you, we hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, or your preferred podcast site/application.

In this podcast, Lucas spoke with Peter Singer. Peter is a world-renowned moral philosopher known for his work on animal ethics, utilitarianism, global poverty, and altruism. He's a leading bioethicist, the founder of The Life You Can Save, and currently holds positions at both Princeton University and The University of Melbourne.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Peter's transition from moral anti-realism to moral realism -Why emotivism ultimately fails -Parallels between mathematical/logical truth and moral truth -Reason's role in accessing logical spaces, and its limits -Why Peter moved from preference utilitarianism to hedonic utilitarianism -How objectivity in ethics might affect AI alignment

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Podcast: 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin (LS 52 · TOP 0.5% )
Episode: #46 - Prof Hilary Greaves on moral cluelessness & tackling crucial questions in academia
Release date: 2018-10-23

The barista gives you your coffee and change, and you walk away from the busy line. But you suddenly realise she gave you $1 less than she should have. Do you brush your way past the people now waiting, or just accept this as a dollar you’re never getting back? According to philosophy Professor Hilary Greaves - Director of Oxford University's Global Priorities Institute, which is hiring - this simple decision will completely change the long-term future by altering the identities of almost all future generations.

How? Because by rushing back to the counter, you slightly change the timing of everything else people in line do during that day - including changing the timing of the interactions they have with everyone else. Eventually these causal links will reach someone who was going to conceive a child.

By causing a child to be conceived a few fractions of a second earlier or later, you change the sperm that fertilizes their egg, resulting in a totally different person. So asking for that $1 has now made the difference between all the things that this actual child will do in their life, and all the things that the merely possible child - who didn't exist because of what you did - would have done if you decided not to worry about it.

As that child's actions ripple out to everyone else who conceives down the generations, ultimately the entire human population will become different, all for the sake of your dollar. Will your choice cause a future Hitler to be born, or not to be born? Probably both!

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

Some find this concerning. The actual long term effects of your decisions are so unpredictable, it looks like you’re totally clueless about what's going to lead to the best outcomes. It might lead to decision paralysis - you won’t be able to take any action at all.

Prof Greaves doesn’t share this concern for most real life decisions. If there’s no reasonable way to assign probabilities to far-future outcomes, then the possibility that you might make things better in completely unpredictable ways is more or less canceled out by equally likely opposite possibility.

But, if instead we’re talking about a decision that involves highly-structured, systematic reasons for thinking there might be a general tendency of your action to make things better or worse -- for example if we increase economic growth -- Prof Greaves says that we don’t get to just ignore the unforeseeable effects.

When there are complex arguments on both sides, it's unclear what probabilities you should assign to this or that claim. Yet, given its importance, whether you should take the action in question actually does depend on figuring out these numbers. So, what do we do?

Today’s episode blends philosophy with an exploration of the mission and research agenda of the Global Priorities Institute: to develop the effective altruism movement within academia. We cover:

• How controversial is the multiverse interpretation of quantum physics?

• Given moral uncertainty, how should population ethics affect our real life decisions?

• How should we think about archetypal decision theory problems?

• What are the consequences of cluelessness for those who based their donation advice on GiveWell style recommendations?

• How could reducing extinction risk be a good cause for risk-averse people?

Get this episode by subscribing: type '80,000 Hours' into your podcasting app.

The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced by Keiran Harris.