Erik Torenberg: Upstream of the Revolution

 When I was getting started in tech, you know, 12 years ago, you didn't really see 20-year-olds,
22-year-olds coming out of nowhere and being able to build audience, you know, social credibility
from people who matter. You kind of had to get attention in different ways and you'd often it was by
by building something really interesting. One thing I think to really appreciate about dating for
men is that it gets a lot better as you get older and I think it's hard to fully appreciate that.
You asked me about SF politics and I said to mostly, you know, so I'm interested to the extent that
there is a platform where I want to describe it a little bit. It's something like it's okay to be an
elite. It's okay to want to be elite. It's okay to want your children to be an elite. Hi, hi,
welcome. Welcome. This is The From the New World Podcast. Today is an episode I've been hoping to
bring to you for a long time. I'm speaking with Eric Torrenberg, the founder of Ondeck Village
Global and as we'll discuss in the episode, first employee at Product Hunt. He's also started three
new podcasts, upstream, cognitive revolution and moment of zen on which I've appeared as a guest. We
discuss a variety of topics. Really, you'll see why I see Eric as one of the most insightful public
commentators as also someone who and also someone who gives good advice on many of the topic areas
that both me and hopefully all of you are interested in. We discuss this early career, venture
capital. Silicon Valley is a growing media power, particularly the all-in-podcast, the ideas of
Curtis Yarvin, investing for public impact, social desire ability bias, elite theory, his idea of
talk left and act right, and egalitarianism, artificial intelligence, and dating and advice for
young people. Really, we've hit almost all of the from New World bullet points that you're familiar
with. So, it's a great episode. It's almost four hours and I really enjoyed all of it. So, without
further ado, here's Eric Torrenberg. So, you told me you were just coming in from another podcast.
What was the most interesting thing you talked about there? I recorded two podcasts, so I will give
you two different bullet points. So, one I did with someone in the creator space, in name is Steph
Smith, and we were talking about how the Mr. Beastification of creators were basically creators are
treating themselves as entrepreneurs in the sense that they're not just focused on how do they build
the biggest content machine, but they're focused on how do they build their content as a wedge to
get distribution, to then build products, to then sell to their audience. So, Mr. Beast has his
company Feastables, which made 100 million in revenue already, where he's just selling. I believe
it's burgers, maybe it's chocolates. So, it's kind of like more basic products, but Mr. Beast just
raised money from investors that over a billion dollar valuation. And so, the question is, in order
to do that, investors need to believe they can have potential to 100x their money. So, can Mr. Beast
build or partner with people who build software products? And it kind of turns the sort of venture
creation model on its head, where people typically focused on building products first, and then
finding distribution. But now, in partnership with creators, companies can get distribution first,
and then build products on top of. So, that was one conversation. And then the second conversation
that I paused was with Mike Solana for a moment of Zen, and we were comparing the response to AI
with the response to crypto. Because, for the past few years, the response to crypto, the mainstream
response is, hey, this doesn't really do anything. What's the use case? This is a all hype, et
cetera, or worse fraud. And the response to AI is kind of the opposite. Like, this does too much.
This is going to take over. This is way too powerful. And another difference is that a lot of the
critics in AI are technologists. So, the call is coming from inside the house, so to speak, where
there's kind of an intra-tech debate as to whether we should be accelerators or pausers or doomers,
whatever you want to call them. So, those were two conversations. Right. It's interesting, because I
have, I mean, especially now, I'm trying to really circulate through the beltway through DC. And
that's not the picture I get about AI policy there. You know, like AI policy on one hand, there are
some people who are worried about really just fitting it into the same old political shoe boxes. You
know, what if the AI says, you know, racist facts? And then there are people who are, once again,
fitting it in their old shoe boxes, like, oh, what does this mean for great power competition? And
actually, that I'm a little bit more amenable to both in terms of their kind of people who I find
more respectable. And I think it's a much more serious issue. Like China is a big deal, but is it,
you know, is it the entirety of the deal when it comes to AI? Is it really the kind of showing point
that everyone should be focusing on? I don't think so either. So I think it's the case where it
might be true that among the people who are building the technology, this is the kind of mainstream
discussion. It's like, oh, is AI going to create an apocalypse? Are we going to get run out of
control, misaligned intelligence? But I think like when it comes to the question of whether AI is,
or whether and how AI is regulated, there'll be much more of an influence from the kind of like
academic, you know, quote-unquote, woke types, more so probably at the FTC. And then you'll get, you
know, I'm not sure if they're still considered right-wing anymore, but at least people who you would
use to consider right-wing national security hawks at, yeah, at Department of Defense. Where have
you netted out in terms of your interests with AI? Because, you know, early on, you were, you know,
writing about kind of the excess of chat, you know, the woke access of chat GPT, etc. And you
haven't been as vocal about it since. I'm curious how you've evolved your thinking or as sort of the
chessboard is evolved to. Yeah, it's kind of been focused around what I just said, right? I can, and
I do say like I do like talking to the people who listen to the podcast or who read my writing. I'm
very good friends with them, but at the end of the day, there's kind of like two things that I could
do, right? I could spend more time doing basically public conversations or public writing or like
private conversations and private writing. And at least from my current point of view, I think the
latter is just, you know, thousands of times more effective, like literally, you know, one second
spence, you know, talking to say like a national security contact, right? Is more likely to have
influence than like one hour writing a blog post. And, you know, there's like a there's like a mean,
right? I'm going to still be working on the newsletter and working on a very long article about
actually specifically about the kind of AGI effective altruist concern and my skepticism on why
machine learning progress is not going to be kind of continually exponential is not going to
continue at the rate that it is for much longer because of many specific technical factors. We can
talk about this a bit if you'd like, but I really like to dive into actually some of the stuff that
you've been working on as well. Sure. Yeah, I'll let you go. Right, yeah, I just want to make sure I
just want to make sure because some people are really interested in the AGI arguments and then some
people aren't, right? So you've been a very successful investor already. You have multiple companies
as well. And now you started a podcast. It seems like it seems like to me the opposite trajectory of
a lot of people might where they will start a podcast will gather some kind of social media
following and use that to leverage and use that kind of contact. But like you said earlier, a bit
like you said earlier, get the distribution first and then try to build a startup afterwards. So why
do you think, why do you think, you know, like the best use of your time is doing a startup. Do you
think that or sorry, not a startup doing media starting three podcasts? Do you think that? And if
so, why? Yeah, it's interesting. When I was getting started in tech, you know, 12 years ago, you
didn't really see 20 year olds, 22 year olds coming out of nowhere and being able to build audience
and, you know, social credibility from people who matter the way that, you know, you're able to
today, the way that DoorCache is able to today, the way that a number of people are able to today.
And so you kind of had to get attention in different ways. And often it was by by building something
really interesting. And the thing that I got a little bit of attention for and I was, you know, the
first employee founding team, not the CEO, was product time. And so that's what put me on the map in
the sense that you've gotten on the map via via your podcast and via your writing. And I used
product hunt to, you know, be able to help entrepreneurs, basically, because we could help them get
customers from, you know, product time is a discovery platform for startups. It's almost the
equivalent of being a journalist in that you get to give people traffic, but without any of the kind
of, you know, emotional loading of or connotations and negative connotations of being journalists,
only the positive parts. And I would say it's closer to something like Expedia, right? We're like
Expedia ranks hotels and flights, product hunt ranks, you know, software startups. Yes, yes, and
highlights them. And the, I used that to build a network of entrepreneurs. I then started investing
in those in entrepreneurs that we're doing well on product time and using that as a, as a way to get
on cap tables. And that's, you know, you know, when startups raise money from investors, the
collection of investors is known as the cap table. Right. So you basically get in the door, you're
investing early in some tech startups. Yes, if you're, if you're in the music world, it's like ANR
for record label, you know, you're discovering artists, you're discovering startups. And some
investment firms would give me money on their behalf to invest because I had the access and because
I had the relationship. And so my, my advice to anyone who wants to be an investor is to find a way
to build a deal flow machine that makes them money. Because if they can build a deal flow machine
that makes them money, they can sustain themselves. I either make money part. I paid them a salary.
And they can get access to deals, which they can use the money to invest. It used to be that you had
to work your way up the totem pole of a busy firm, which could take 10, 20 years. But because of
their, these new ways of building media, whether it's a newsletter, where you're an expert on a
different category or a podcast or a, or kind of a, you know, community ranking. You started for a
rating site like we built a product on. It's easier to get in the door and connect directly to
entrepreneurs and investors will really respect that. And so what I'm doing now is basically
realizing how helpful it was to have built product on for my investing career, how helpful it was to
have built on deck for my investing career. And you can think of on deck as a, for people who don't
know, it helps people find co-founders. So if product on helped startups find customers, it gets a
distribution, get traffic, on deck help them find early hires and co-founders. And so I'm interested
in building more tools like on deck and product on to have an investing advantage as we will get
into venture capital in a bit. But in, you know, money is green and money is a commodity. And
there's thousands of investors out there all competing for the best entrepreneurs. And venture is
different than other asset classes in that the entrepreneur picks the investor. And so you have to
be, you have to bring something to the table. And so if you don't bring, you know, 20 years, 30
years of operating experience at the highest level, which I didn't, when I started, I have a little
bit now, but certainly not to what I just described, you need to have actual products or service
that make and help entrepreneurs at a meaningful scale. And it was, I don't want to ramble too much
about VC. And but one thing. Don't worry, this is a pro rant podcast. Yes. I'm sure I'm sure a lot
of people in my audience want the insight about VC. Yeah. So I am building a podcast network and
also a newsletter network because I think it's basically this trend that that I mentioned, people
are starting to, you know, companies are built audience first. And so I want to build different
media properties in different categories for different positions. And I want them to be able to
access these distribution, you know, these customers that are previously hard to reach or otherwise
hard to reach and then invest in companies that sell to them or build companies that sell to those
customers. So right now I'm starting kind of more, you know, general interest, more, more high level
to build the, build the audience. But I'm going to launch a series of more dedicated, specific,
vertical specific podcasts. My first one is an AI one, but also a position based podcast that, you
know, we've seen this in the sports world. There are these like media conglomerates, like the ringer
or bar stool or the athletic. And tech media hasn't really innovated much. There've been a few
individuals. Lenny Vichitsky who's got a product management newsletter. Harry Stebings has a VC
podcast and he's only like 25 years old and he's got $400 million of their management just because
he's built an amazing VC podcast. Pachy McCormick is another example. And so I want to, I believe
that there are more of these people out there who are practitioners, who are experts, who can make
more money doing what Lenny, Pachy and Harry do it, then they do at their sales job, or their
engineer job, or whatever job they currently have, and have a more interesting life. And so I wanted
to aggregate those people, help fund them, get them off the ground and build a collective of them.
And in some way, it also intermediates the journalists, too, because these people are actual
experts. And it's expert to expert sort of, you know, content where as opposed to just a, you know,
general middleman who's not an expert at all. And it is often, you know, in a different class and
has counter incentives in some ways. And so it's, it's very funny. I remember talking about this
with Jonathan Rouse. She kind of describes journalists. And I think like this is actually accurate
to some degree. He compares kind of like journalism and social media and like journalism as being
between a more kind of like, he doesn't use this word, but this is how I interpret it, kind of
elite, basically elite consumers of news who have basically norms around, basically like filtering
out a lot of, I think like this is, in fact, the filter of low status, but I think like correctly
filters out a lot of incorrect information with some biases, of course, of information that they
failed to filter out. But like when I was speaking with him, I actually had, you know, I had the
same understanding of kind of tech media, right? That a lot of tech media is kind of like insular.
And it's insular in a similar way, I think, to how, how kind of legacy media is insular. And that
you have these concentric circles you have with you have the general public. They have certain
predispositions that lead to bad media patterns. And then New York Times comes up and they, and like
Richard and Ania kind of convinced me of this, right, or mutual friend. And he's convinced me that,
you know, there are a lot of virtues in New York Times, Jonathan Rauch as well. There are a lot of
virtues that kind of circumscribing this smaller circle in which you have to observe these norms.
And then like tech media, I think like does kind of the same thing in creating an even smaller
circle, like a lot, not a lot of people, I think, can really listen to like a group podcast with
Nathan Lebenz, cognitive revolution, and really get everything, right? Maybe some people can listen
to it and still enjoy it and get a lot of things. But to me, it feels like very inside of me in a
way that I think is like generally positive in terms of its effect on the content there. But like
the reason I'm saying this is I all lead to like this one one big trade off, right, which is kind of
private power or leap power versus public power, right? You want to, on one hand, create, you know,
if you're going for Mr. Beast, then you're creating this kind of public really like any man appeal,
or if you're going like cognitive revolution, or if you're going even further than that, I don't
know. Actually, I'm not completely sure on like a tech example or like a tech example actually, like
a machine learning example is just like papers, right? Like like like you're building like neurics
or something, right? Where would you put your project around that? Like is it closer to the elite
end or is it closer to like the public end? I would say most of it is closer to the elite end if
we're talking about like, you know, how technical versus versus accessible. But I mean, the best
things, you know, all in, for example, is appreciated. The tech podcast is appreciated by insiders
and it's broad, meaning and it's like deeply popular. It's one of the most popular tech podcasts in
the world. I think it's the one or two. And so I think, I mean, that in some sense, like, you know,
I wonder if it's a false trade off. If all in and others are able to achieve both, like, is that
really what the, what the, like Lex is another example, right? Like, I mean, all in is truly
insideery and that they get in the weeds and stuff Lex is more like what's the meaning of life and
stuff. Yeah. All in, I think it's like a better example because, right, I listened to it and I see
it as, you know, like I often have to follow up a lot, especially with a lot of the financial stuff,
I'm less experienced with that and just almost everything that Friedberg mentions with like the
biotech. I'm always, you know, having follow up Google searches. To me, it feels like a very, yeah,
that, that I think is actually a spectacular example. What do you think is the secret of their
success? Because I do feel it as like a, it definitely gives very strong kind of elite vibes to me
and to like not just to me, but to a lot of other people who I know. But it also, like you said, it
has like just empirically, it has kind of mass market appeal, right? I think there's a few things
going on there. First off, they're undoubtedly successful and they're undoubtedly, like they're more
successful and more intelligent than other people doing tech podcasts or tech journalism. And then
they're also good friends slash have good banter. And that's entertaining. And you get a window into
their, you know, their personal lives a bit, which are also very entertaining. The personal kind of
like, you know, how they spend their wealth. So it's always interesting. Like hearing, you know,
sentient millionaires talk to each other, kind of candidly is not something that most people hear
about. But then they're also, you know, quite good at describing current events in ways that are
easy, easy-ish to understand. So you feel like you're getting smarter listening to it. You're
enjoying it. But then also, and I think one big thing is they've introduced basically like, they
have moved the over to window pretty significantly. And they're not like a right wing like podcast
or anything. But they like to give you an example of the rest of tech media tech crunches main
podcast is called equity. Like that just gives you a sense. Is that a pando, you know, like raising
equity? I think they mean it in the reducing disparities. That is the number one interview question.
I'm not half teasing, but you know to ask people like, what does equity mean? It's either reducing
disparity or upsetting companies. And that kind of tells you what the emphasize tells you what you
need to know. And like, Chimoff, you know, like a year ago or something said like, you know, equity
is problematic or whatever. Like I don't believe in equity or whatever. Like, and that like, you
know, it's interesting because you came into this world in the last few years. But relatively
recently, like, it would have been interesting for you to come in like 2014 or 2015, like every
podcast episode you have would have gotten you canceled. I'm teasing, but I say that to say that the
Overton window was just so different. There was just such a strident, like narrow window of what was
acceptable. And to question equity would have been insane. And I think a lot of tech people, there
was just this wave of massive preference falsification because people saw what was happening in
their companies either were getting kind of like destroyed by activists or, you know, and they saw
what was happening in San Francisco if they lived in San Francisco. And like, okay, that's getting
destroyed. And they wanted to push back. But anytime they did push back, they were met with, oh, are
you a Trump supporter? Like, and faced between the option of like, you know, on their knees, you
know, like apologizing to leftists or being seen as a, you know, normy, you know, rude Trump
sympathizer, they would rather do the, be on their knees. And once that kind of went away in terms
of the inspector of Trump went away, basically it became okay. There was just this wave of massive
preference falsification that all in helped kind of pierce where they were just saying common sense
things. And a number of people were like, I actually believe them. And so it just gave them a new
voice. I think mixelana has done a fantastic job of this as well of not being like overtly right
wing, but just being common sense. You have a common sense being funny, being smarter, like, just
better on every dimension. And I think that's why both salon and partwires and all in have just
blown up because they offer an alternative perspective that just resonates more with tech people
than the one that journalists has because they are tech people. Right. What do you think of the
market, a marketplace of ideas hypothesis, right? The ideas that is that, you know, if you just let
people discuss the best ideas will ultimately win out. It does not seem that the best ideas or it
does not seem that the truest ideas win out. You had Curtis on your show and he has written and
talked a lot about that. I mean, there are a lot of untrue ideas that, you know, seem to pass on for
many, many generations. So I think the marketplace of ideas maybe makes sense for like fit ideas,
ideas that just like have some sort of, you know, unfair advantage. But it seems like, and this is
what I would say, you know, the Jonathan Roush's of the world, you know, he wrote kindly inquisitors
in 1992. And I think that was like a really seminal book. That's like the best case for like free
speech, best case for classical liberals and best case for marketplace of ideas. But it feels like
it's turned out that, you know, when you're advocating for free speech, you're not going to censor
anyone, you're kind of putting a hand behind your back. And when you're, when someone sees that you
play by those rules, they will, you know, leverage those rules against you. They will, you know,
censor, they will encourage free speech when it supports their aims. But when they are using speech
that, you know, when they're using a liberal methods and you know, the only way to fight them is to
use a liberal methods back. They will say they will use your liberalism against you. So I mean,
there's a couple of different responses to it. I don't think true ideas when I think fit ideas win.
And you know, if someone plays behind with a hand behind their back, they're often going to lose.
And that's what happens to be a classical liberalos or happens to libertarians. It's what happens to
many people in the in the gray tribe who are not willing to, not really willing to fight. Yeah, it's
interesting to me because at least my interpretation of the past few years is that as kind of the
limits of censorship have really been reached by, you know, like vaguely left, like I didn't even, I
wouldn't really even call them left wing at this point. But you know, like people concerned with
quote unquote disinformation. As the limits have been reached, they kind of like actually improved
their arguments. Like, for example, just Bidenism over Clintonism, right? Bidenism is like a genuine
innovation, both in terms of affect, like a lot of right wingers to listen to this podcast underrate
this. No, but a lot of normal people, normally even like center right people, you know, really, you
know, like the Biden vibe, they like the Biden kind of, almost like appeasement, right? That's what
it kind of seems like, right? Not in terms of foreign policy, but in terms of like, you know, I hear
you guys, like really, like maybe still disagreeing with right wing voters who might meet on the
streets, but basically saying, you know, like he wants to live in the same country as people who
disagrees with him. Now, like you might argue, like it's fair to argue that that's not actually
reflected in these policies, but as a kind of like political figure, right? I think like people,
people under analyzed Bidenism, right? People are still analyzing like Trumpism. Like, I think
there's a reason Biden won. And I do think Biden won. And like it's actually like pretty obvious, at
least like the places to get started in thinking about Bidenism. And so like to return to the root
topic, like the reason why I bring this up is like, there's this quote from the last psychiatrist,
another kind of online blogger, who says, who said knowledge is a defense against not having power.
So like people who don't have power, they make like logical arguments because that's basically the
only thing that they have. And I think this is like a very good description of EA of effective
altruism. But yeah, I do think that's like a better predictor of kind of what's where good arguments
will emerge from than just the mainstream like marketplace of ideas hypothesis. So where will they
emerge from? They'll emerge from the places that that have reached basically what they can do with
power, right? Basically, if I've done all I can with hard power, I'll do what I can with soft power.
This is the idea. Yeah, it's a few responses. So one, I think right when people have to be surprised
with Biden on a few, not just vibe, you know, topics, but also actual policies like in terms of his
hard line against China and some other things. It's funny, right? Like people who are more right
wing than me, they want to be, you know, tough on China. Actually, I think that the trade war stuff
is probably self-destructive and has worsened inflation. But it's interesting. Yeah, like people who
are, you know, right enough to support, like, or like people who support basically with the Trump
policy in China, like Biden has emulated a lot of that. Yeah, I remember Curtis said before Trump,
before 2020 that he wanted Biden to win because, you know, the way he evaluates candidates is
whether they help their friends or my friends and punish their enemies. And he saw Trump as helping
his enemies and hurting his friends, which is to say that even on, if you had Trump's goals and aims
or sympathized with them, you'd prefer Biden. And at the time, people, you know, people were very
skeptical of Curtis's claim, like, oh, it sounds clever and cute, but, you know, winning by losing
doesn't seem to make much sense. But if you're, you know, anti-woke or right wing to some degree,
you have to admit that the culture has radically shifted in your favor since Trump got out. And so
it is interesting. Like, if you think that the, if you think as Curtis does, that the president has
very little power and, you know, a fraction of the power that they should have, then maybe Curtis,
you know, maybe that view keeps making the argument that, hey, let's get more Biden's people who are
effectively, you know, ineffectual, but don't present the same boogie man to the left that enabled
kind of excess leftism to expand significantly as we saw in 2016, 2020. Here's a question I want to
ask. So, so how much of the post, you know, post-Trump new right, do you think is like downstream of
Curtis? Do you think like agrees with him one is like major precepts? I think, you know, there's the
quote Anne-Ran has like all of, I'm sorry, about Anne-Ran where her heroes are fake, but her
villains are real. I think similarly, like it's like Curtis's solutions are fake, but his like
identification of the problems are real, like his analyses are real. Like, I think he's convinced a
lot of libertarians to be more like, like, of why they're losing. Doing more right wing. I think
he's given people a mental model for governance, for how governments work that makes sense. I mean,
I think he's been very influential in helping tech people just understand politics and power and the
kind of, you know, the combination of corporate and public power combined as it terms of like
crowning winners and cementing, you know, incumbents. And I think Twitter is this kind of great
culmination of it where it's a thing that Curtis has, has, you know, wanted for a long time, which
is someone to take over an existing entity. In his case, he wants the Curtis wants a government. In
Elon's case was Twitter. And just say, hey, you know, there's a new sheriff in town. And actually,
you're not verified in New York Times. And actually, Dogecoin is going to be the, like, just
basically, like, shit all over the symbols that they hold dear. And, you know, I think to some
degrees, he's done the playbook to some degrees. He's probably bashed it significantly. But, you
know, does that happen in an era without Curtis? I don't think so. You know, I think that, you know,
does Elon know who Curtis is? I don't even know. I don't, he certainly hasn't read Curtis probably.
But I think it's been filtered through a number of people. So, yeah, I do think Curtis is pretty
influential. I do think he's not getting credit for that, probably for reasons that people don't
want to publicly associate with him. But I think that, now Curtis has drastically cleaned up his
image. And I think he's done a fantastic job in the past, like, a couple of years. So he's changed
things for himself. He's not courting controversy in the same way that he was perhaps in the past
decade. But I think, I think you see, you do see a new tech right. It doesn't use the words right.
And it shouldn't. And it doesn't, it truly is not, you know, there, it's not right-wing in a sense
that it's pro choice. It's pro gay marriage. It's probably pro immigration. So I think on
meaningful, you know, policy decisions differ significantly. Is libertarians who care about power a
good, a good label? It's, it's, it's not a bad label. I'd first say gray tribe or something, because
it's not libertarian. Like, they're not, they're actually want to use the state. You know, it's
like, even Tyler Cowan, like, he's not a libertarian. He's a state capacity. What's the difference
between state capacity libertarianism and populist nationalism? I think it's, it's like two things.
I mean, like, I'm not, you know, I don't want to speak for Tyler, but I will do so anyway. I don't
know, like, this is not necessarily representative of what he actually thinks, but is my best guess
at what he thinks. I'll say that, right? Like, he would distance himself from, from kind of like the
new right or from kind of nationalist populism by kind of, he basically thinks that's the populists
are far too skeptical and are far too antagonistic towards people who are left-wing. He will use
much more and compromise. I mean, Tyler does. And I would think that's the main difference. Yeah. I,
I think it's mostly a brand, like, you know, conservatives have a bad brand. Popular nationalism has
a bad brand. It has a low IQ brand. It has a kind of reactionary brand. I mean, just look at Richard
and Ania's discussed towards, towards them. And, and so, but so it's, it's great. It's trying to be
something that's different. It's a little bit, you know, like one way of putting it, it's the midwit
meme. And they're on the other side of the, the, the, the high IQ side that kind of has some similar
conclusions to the common sense lower IQ side, but just doesn't want to be associated with them. So
they, they needed new word. And it, I think this is where libertarians used to be, but I, I think
the main difference here is that they realize just kind of like how infeasible, you know, and
unlikely libertarianism is, and how we actually do need a function in government. We need state
capacity. We need a government to get out of the way in a bunch of different places, but we also
need it to do the things that it does well, like, you know, handle crime. So yeah, I would say more,
more great tribe that, that understands power. Right. I would say that like a big, um, a thing that
libertarians don't get credit for is that they kind of had the political theory, right? Like this is
just like public choice theory, right? Yeah, a concentrating benefits dispersing costs. It's very
much, that's actually quite similar to the Burnham, to the Burnham understanding of political
theory, right? James Burnham, someone who's quoted a lot nowadays, especially in those kind of like
great tribe circles. But what's what's most interesting, I think, is that like, this is this is a
central question to, yeah, this I think is actually the central question to like what should the
strategy be? And like the thing that actually separates kind of like, you know, new rights and
libertarians is like, Democrat exceptionalism versus Republican exceptionalism, right? Like, like,
the libertarian view is that, you know, Democrats are just much better at creating people who would
actually be willing to work for the state. They're much more, basically like, predisposed for
geographic and psychological reasons. And, you know, the Republican equivalent of Lena Khan is not
going to spend a decade toiling away to be, you know, FTC chair. He's going to become a very
successful entrepreneur and maybe that's better for society even, right? But it means that they're
not going to have as much power and the best thing you can do is just destroy the federal
bureaucracies and defund them. Or like the new, or like the new right view is that actually this is
due to specific strategic decisions, the reason why the right loses in bureaucracies is because it
does not have basically a talent pipeline for creating, for creating people who would actually take
these perceptions or for, you know, finding them, recruiting them, helping them along their journey.
And yeah, to me, like, it's not, it's not one or the other, right? Both of these things matter to
some extent. But what do you think? Where do you fall on the kind of spectrum there? Well, firstly,
let me just say we were, you know, you mentioned effective altruism earlier and effective altruism
is getting bashed a lot these days. It's punching bag and Antonio and my podcast. You're seeing what
the regime press is doing to Eliza Yukowsky is just so sad. Like, you know, like, I am one of the
people who makes very strong arguments against the kind of A.I. Doom things. And like, man, it still
feels, it almost feels like a false victory, you know, to see really, like, basically, it's
slandered coming from, you know, Vox and from time and whatever, right? Or not time. Time actually
published Yukowsky, but like a lot of mainstream press or, you know, regime press are really just, I
think on this issue in particular, it just like hits their sweet spot of like, oh, we're just going
to like drop all pretenses of being intellectually honest and caring about the facts. Like, they
could have written in like an intelligent, like, I'm going to write an article, very long article,
like specifically because this is a difficult problem to argue for, you know, putting a lot of time
into writing a clean article. Like, if you're the New York Times, if you're like, supposedly like an
educated, intelligent person, like, that's what you would do. And instead, no, they're just writing
really, like, I think this is, this is the affect of this podcast that I think makes it special. Is
that like, Richard Nonia, like, has like this, he describes like left-wing ideology as kind of like
a disgust at like right-wing, right-wing aesthetics or right-wing preferences. Yeah. And like, I
think like this podcast is kind of like the nested version of this, right, where it's like, and not
just like, not just simply disgust, right? But that is the vibe, or like, contempt, contempt at like
this, this like, not quite egalitarian, but like, status-oriented way of approaching things that
like, is I think like closer to like, if you think of like truth and whatever we're comparing it to,
there's maybe, you know, like a 10% correlation of like, whatever the, you know, whatever the
conservatives are doing, like, like, really like the, like, the normie comment, like the boomer cons
are doing. And then like, maybe there's like 20% correlation with whatever the New York Times doing.
And, you know, looking at this, it's just like 20%, really, and you guys, like, dare to call
yourself, you guys really dare to like, want to censor, it's just, it's just so childish and lacking
in foresight. What did it go you off? No, go ahead. Let me say a couple of things. So first, and we
can return to this, I just want to say, it's, you know, effective altruism has been a punching bag,
but there's another universe where the markets didn't tank, and SBF was still, you know, worth $30
billion, or whatever, FDX was worth, and EA had tens of billions of dollars under its direction, and
could actually accumulate some real political power. Let's say, you know, Biden wins the next
election, and SBF's the biggest donor, and he's, you know, he's where Tiel was in 2016, he's putting
all EA people in government, although, you know, Tiel probably could have done a lot more of that,
but it probably weren't that many people to put in. And so EA is actually an interesting example,
because it's both a punching bag, but it's also like, they got close to something. They got close to
something closer to something than I think libertarians have ever gotten close. Like EA, no, no, go
for it. I don't, I don't see any picture of DC where you can, like, like, I'm honestly, like, do
you, like, my first instinct was like, do you actually believe this? Like, I don't, no, especially
like democratic policy is so inert, and like, well, I guess EA was basically democratic policy.
Like, like, I guess what I'm saying is, I see EA the movement getting power in that world. I don't
see like, um, EA pushing back on any core, you know, democratic principles, or, or, you know, DNC
principles, but I see them getting their pet causes in their, you know, animal rights. I don't know,
like, things that the DNC doesn't really care about, or is, sure, have this. Mike, this is a
hypothetical, but I mean, we can also bet on the current case, right? I would bet, you know, pretty
insane odds that, you know, that the next democratic, whenever the Democrats want to do some kind of
enforcement regulation on AI, it will be on, like, quote unquote, like equity grounds instead of on,
um, EA grounds, right? Like, they're like, for every, for every staffer who's kind of convinced by
the AI doom arguments, there are at least 10 who are convinced by like the disinformation argument,
and like another 10 who are convinced by like the, the equity are like, I don't, like, just on an
empirical level, I just don't believe this is true. We're saying different things. I agree with you,
and everything you just said, I don't think you, Lazar Yutowsky, although we'll go, it's got to him
in a minute, would be like, you know, having some role, you know, like, yeah, it's just too smart,
like, like, this is the main thing, right? Like, when, like, when Hananiah calls, like, the
Republican party, like, the stupid party, like, like, here's the thing, the democratic party is
like, impermeable to smart people, like, it is, like, it's, it's entire kind of like,
credentialization, and routinization system is like, a system specifically filtering out, like,
people who would actually be kind of like, people, people exactly like, like, Lazar Yutowsky,
actually, this is the thing, like, the, the, the regime press specifically, as like a mechanism, if
we were to construct like an archetype of the person that the regime press is meant to politically
assassinate, it would be, Lazar Yutowsky, this kind of like, extremely smart, obviously, like, I
disagree with him on technical issues, but like, passionate, you know, focused, and honestly, like,
somewhat autistic, you know, like, the democratic party is kind of anti-intelligence in that way,
and the Republican party is like, maybe, you know, like, I kind of agree with, or like, I think this
is empirical evidence that, you know, like, the average, like, the median Republican voter is like,
slightly lower IQ, and that's fine, but like, the elite levels of the Republican party, both
contain, you know, many people, even in our, like, mutual circles, right, contain many people who
are, you know, these exceptional people, and are, is just so much more permeable, like, this is the
reason why I just like, completely disagree with this characterization, like, the democratic party
is a party that cannot be smart, well, the Republican party is like, a party of, like, high
variants, and to me, like, like, you're familiar with, you know, like, the, like, the founder
theory, you know, like, sound more various stuff, right? Like, to me, like, if you are a smart
person who, who wants, like, some kind of career, like, let's say you just have, like, no, kind of,
like, aesthetic preference, right? I think it would be, like, abundantly clear that the Republican
party is kind of like the home for where you would, where you would go for that. A couple of
responses there. One is the, I think, EA would end up looking more like, like, think more Bill Gates
than Elijah Kowski, right? Like, Bill Gates, he's very smart. Sure. You know, I've been in rooms
with Bill Gates, and he's talking to founders with different, in different industries, and he knows
the industry is better than the founders. Like, so, it would be this corporatized, you know, DNC's,
sanitized version. I think what EA had, meaning EA, in my opinion, had transcended Elijah, like, in
a bad way, had to transcended Yudkowski. I mean, Richard Hennie wrote about this, right? He said EA
is, like, in a fork in the road, and they could, you know, go woke. I, you know, they, they must be
anti-woke or die, right? Yes. And I think they had already, I think, Richard Hennie was, you know,
posting that, like, hopefully, but I think that decision had already been made. And I think, you
know, short of SBF, having, you know, an Enron plus made off level, you know, extinction. I think EA
was on the path to kind of DNC establishment level politics. There's nothing to do with you.
Yudkowski, EA name only. It's like, you know, you know, talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. I was, although I
think it actually does go deeper than that. Like, I was arguing about this with Rocco, like, EA is
fundamentally based on the harm principle. It's, it's fundamentally based on like, JS Mill, you
know, like, how do we stop people from being harmed? And I think that kind of, like, neurotic affect
is intrinsically left-wing. Like, like, maybe it's smarter, right? Like, I agree, or like, I
definitely would agree that it's like much less dumb and not subject to kind of, like, the specific,
you know, conspiracy theories that the left-wing establishment believes. Yep. But I still think it's
intrinsically left-wing. In the same way, that kind of like, you know, like, I don't know, it's hard
coming up with a version on this with the right, because like, a lot of the right is also kind of
intrinsically left-wing. Like, Christianity is sort of intrinsically left-wing. But, um, yeah, in
the same way that like Nietzsche, this is a good example. Like Nietzsche, you know, like, would not
necessarily, you know, support either party. I think I talked with Brett Anderson about this. We're
not necessarily support either party today, but I think, like, by that kind of affect is
intrinsically right-wing. But, sorry, go on. One thing we have to wrestle with, or any person has to
wrestle with is that, you know, most competent people, whether they're running big corporations, if
they're, you know, technical engineers, if they are, you know, running hedge funds or very
successful in finance, um, most of them are like, left-wing. There are some that are disagreeable
and just seeking truth above all else, but most people at that level tend to be, tend to be left-
wing. And not just, like, in the last five years, although it's obviously been, like, all of them
were less, like, there's been such a polarization. But in general, they tend to, to be more left.
And so, to your point earlier about it filtering out smart people, I think it filters out, like,
disagreeable, truth-seeking above all else. But that is separate from, like, deep competence and
even, like, technical competence. And so, um, those things... I think you can filter... No, I don't
mean that, like, the Democratic Party says, you know, like, if you're a smart person, don't vote for
us. But you, if you want to have, like, the maximum impact as, like, a smart person, if you want to
enter and change the direction of the Democratic Party versus the Republican Party, it's
overwhelmingly a Republican Party. Like, like, for example, it's just, like, hair trade, like, Peter
Teele versus, like, Bill Gates. Right, like, Peter Teele, I, I, from... Oh, and where is
significantly less wealthy than, uh, Bill Gates. Yep. And I think, like, this is true intro to
Democratic Party, too, right? The Democratic Party is much more, uh, amenable to, kind of, cultural
shifts in Bill Gates. Like, like, just look at, like, how much, like, Bill Gates really wanted to
talk about, like, basically, like, the global poverty stuff, right? He was, yeah, he was kind of,
like, a proto-eA, um, or in the same direction, or, like, some of the pandemic preparedness stuff.
And we can look at the results for themselves, how much, you know, pandemic preparedness stuff did,
uh, Bill Gates actually do, right? Like, next to none. Yep. Right? Like, like, in practice, that,
like, that amounted to, like, next to no impact, in fact, maybe even negative impact on the US's
pandemic policy. Um, which I mean, like, I don't, you know, I'm not one of those people who are
angry at Bill Gates for trying. But, like, you know, maybe, maybe donate to Republicans next time,
you know? The things that get you power aren't necessarily the things that, you know, make you be
successful once you have that power. Um, and so. Yes, exactly. This is exactly what I mean. This is
the way that, like, the way to win within, like, the democratic party. And like, this is true within
the Republican Party elections specifically as well, right? In both parties, the way to win in
elections is to be like, dumber than you actually are. But like, in, like, the way to win, like,
marginally, in like, democratic policy is also to be dumber than, than you actually are, right? In
terms of the race stuff, cert, for sure, in terms of being anti-market. Um, and this isn't to say
that, like, there aren't some people who can win despite their kind of intelligence and despite the
fact that their policy preferences are intelligent, right? Like Tyler Cowan, um, as we're clients,
been one of the best faith actors, he's been more amenable to basically, like, oh, a lot of the
Yimbi stuff is a great example, right? I'm not saying that it's like completely futile. I'm just
saying, like, just do the pair trade here, right? It's not, it's not that you can't accomplish
anything within the democratic party. That's the much stronger position than I actually believe.
It's that just like, basically, like, the impact ratio is just going to be so much higher in the
Republican party. Like, like, the Republican party is so much more open to, like, good, new and
unique ideas. It's, um, there's a greenfield there, for sure. And that is, we did bring two things
on the table. One is, you can compare Tyler Cowan and Richard Hennania and their relative impact at
the moment as a, it's part of a broader conversation of how truthful one should be, because, I mean,
Tyler is a, you know, epic intellectual. He's also much more straw-seeing and much more careful. Or
at least, that's my read as someone who's admired of him and also, you know, he's been great to me
and his friend. And then Richard Hennania is much more truthful, almost to the point of, you know,
is he seeking controversy sometimes? Like, I can, I can rely on Tyler to maybe hold back and, and
Richard to maybe lean in, like, a bit more. I mean, Richard has said this publicly, right? He said
this on Twitter that he kind of has, like, a reaction to audience capture. Like, like, like, the
more his audience is, like, made up of a certain group of people, the more he notices, like, the
stupid things that they believe. Right. Yeah. The, um, and then, in terms of the Republican thing, I
mean, it's interesting because Vivek, who's now running for president, I just had him on my podcast
and I'm going to release it soon. And it's going to blow my audience's mind in a, in, meaning
they're going to be like, wow, who is this guy? He's really controversial. Vivek is really
interesting because he is, you know, certainly an elite. He's been a very successful entrepreneur.
He went to Harvard, Yale. He's very smart. Um, he's, um, an Indian guy. Um, and he is almost like
running, he's trying to like, up level Maca stuff, basically. I mean, he's not saying the election
was stolen, but he is like going on all their issues, he's pro-life. He's like anti-climate. I mean,
he's leaning into culture war issues and taking the right wing side, like to the end degree. And,
and it's interesting to see how he's going to be perceived because Trump did that. But Trump was,
was way more of them. And, and of course, people would say, oh, Trump's a billionaire or whatever,
you know, or he's not a billionaire. But like, how was he, you know, speaking to mainstream America?
Well, he had their affect. He had their like, uh, craftness. He had their, like, he was a man of the
people in vibe and style. And it just happens when you're like a real estate, you know, person, you
do actually communicate with, um, and work with, you know, normal people. And you build up a, uh,
you know, ability to connect with them. And you do your point about Biden. Like Biden has done that
too in his way. And so, but Vivek has not done that, right? Vivek has been on an elite track, um,
for his entire life. Now, he's from Ohio and, and, you know, I don't know, I'm super well. So maybe
I'm underwriting something. But he, Vivek comes across as slick, um, whereas Trump came off as like
much more smooth. And, you know, where people might resonate with Vivek on a policy issue, or
they're glad that he's fighting for them. I wonder if there's going to be enough emotional
resonance. But last thing I'll say about Vivek is he's just so interesting because he didn't need to
do this. Like, he could have just been a successful entrepreneur and investor. Like, you see Joe
Lonsdale, you see Peter Teele, right? Like, you know, these people don't get into politics directly.
They just, they get it into indirectly, right? They start companies that sell to the government and
solve the problems. They, they get their friends in office. You know, people they think are
credible, um, in, you know, in the case of Peter Teele and JD Vance. Um, and they start like policy
orgs in the case of Joe Lonsdale. Vivek could have done that. But Vivek instead decided to be a
culture warrior himself. Now, he's so wealthy. He doesn't need to like make more money. But it's
interesting to see in the next few years, which path is going to have the most success? And it did
bring a full circle. Like, Vivek is optimizing for distribution first. Like, he's trying to build
almost like a Tucker Carlson level audience. And then what's he going to do with that? Like, mate,
you know, so I don't think he wants to like, this is what's interesting, right? Like, I don't think
Vivek, like, I don't, I don't know him personally. Um, but like, you can kind of see Vivek. You as
like the Andrew Yang of 2024. Right? Like, someone who's obviously way too smart for his party is
way less is way too like nonpartisan for his party. Um, and this isn't to say that Vivek isn't, you
know, like not a real Republican or something like that. I think he's like Republican, but he's
nowhere near. Like, he said, he's not that ex, like, he, he doesn't want to lean into kind of like
the culture war fights. I think he's much more technocratic than that, just from like what he said
publicly, right? And on podcasts and stuff like that. Um, no, I think, I think Vivek is upping his
tone. So he, I mean, when it was main points, so I think there's some ways in which he overlaps with
Andrew Yang, both, uh, you know, very, very smart, both, I think it's actually key that they're
Asian, you know, they're not working on back. Um, that was West Yang's like, uh, you know, reason
why Andrew Yang could win because he could be a unifier. Um, I, I think there's some, and they're
both entrepreneurs and, you know, respected by entrepreneurs. I think there is a, um, key
difference. I think Andrew Yang did have more of a man of the people vibe and Andrew Yang to your
point was, was non, nonpartisan. I mean, Vivek is, you know, he's trying to like, end affirmative
action. He's trying, you know, end the climate religion. Like, Vivek is becoming very aggressive in
his tone on certain issues that are even to the right of other, um, you know, right wing. Um,
people, now he's not going to say the election was stolen. He's not going to say, you know, like ban
all immigration. Like he's too smart for certain dumb issues. But where, where the midwit meme like
makes sense, you know, and, and maybe it's not affirmative action, maybe it's on some other things.
Like, Vivek is going all in. So, um, in some ways, it seems like a key difference. Right. Like, I
don't think, you know, practically, if this isn't done by law, because there's a chance that, or
sorry, this will, if it's not done by like Supreme Court ruling, because I think there's a non zero
chance that it's done by the Supreme Court ruling. But I think like that there's, there's, there's
just so much energy. Whoever is elected in the next candidate, even Trump as, as kind of like, you
know, incompetent as I think that Trump is. I think that kind of like, here's the funny thing,
right? Like the Republicans to talk about, you know, like the deep state, like the Republican
version of the deep state, whatever that is, is actually like, I think kind of a hero in the
circumstance that they're just in enough, like there's a critical mass of think tankers and staffers
on the Republican side that like, Republican, or that affirmative action is going to get severely
curtailed. Like, it's not like, literally inevitable, but you know, it's like very, you know, I
would put it very high in the probability distribution that, so yeah, like the vector is kind of
like, it's interesting, because I think he has, I think he like, first of all, I think he's like,
Red Garvin and he's Red Burnham almost certainly, right? I think he's actually like reference
Burnham and like some podcast interview, although I might be misremembering that. Yeah, he knows,
you know, he knows it's not really a democracy. So like, why are you running for president if you
know, it's not really a democracy, because there are people in think tanks, because there are
people, policy staffers, congressmen, senators who who'll notice me, because I'm running for
president, and I'm, you know, actually having some, some rise in polling, I think like that's the
answer. Maybe I'm projecting a little too much, once again, I don't know Vivek personally, but like
that's my best guess. Well, the, the, the, the, I don't think he's actually trying to win, win the
presidency. Sorry, go on. Well, yeah, it's interesting, because Andrew Yang, it's like, okay, you
run for president, and then, you know, you lose, and then you're a media entrepreneur, or, you know,
a media person, and that's a pretty nice life. But I mean, you know, Andrew Yang was an accomplished
entrepreneur in his own right, but Vivek was on another level of accomplishment. And so like, you
know, Joe Lonzail or Peter Teo, I put it, you know, like Vivek is very smart and accomplished. I put
in maybe a similar camp if Vivek kept on the tech path for another two decades. Like, they don't
want to be media people. So meaning like if Vivek loses, like having Andrew Yang's career is, is
probably not what he wants. And so I think he thinks he's going to, well, I think he thinks he wants
to win. And I think he thinks he's maybe going to win at some point in the future. You know, not
now, but maybe, you know, eight years from now, 12 years from now, I don't know. But I think he's
going for it. And to your point, I mean, it's an example of a really brilliant person saying, hey,
I'm just going to like take a chance at reforming, reforming this party. And I mean, I tend to
sympathize with the critique that even if you, it's kind of a horseshoe theory of like why no one
should want Trump in office. Because if you hate him, you certainly don't, if you hate what he
stands for, you certainly don't want it in office. And if you actually like are sympathetic with
what he stands for, well, it seems like if there's any repeat of 2016-2020, you're just going to
like lose on all the issues that you care about. And so to the extent that there's like some grand
unification in, you know, not wanting Trump to win, then, you know, the more smart people who
challenge him, the better. I think like, I think a bet on Trump is like him. Or like, this is not
originally my argument. I'm not sure if the people who made this argument to me would want me to
give their names. But like, yeah, some pretty like some pretty like new right people basically said
like a bet on Trump is, you know, basically a bet on like the new right deep state, right? It's
basically a bet that, you know, like, uh, Trump knows whose friends are that those people are going
to be the people who actually care about political power. Um, where were they in 2016 or 2018? Yeah.
Yeah. Like, like, this whole movement escalated after that. Like, like, I don't actually believe
this, right? I think the best predictor of future action is past action. But like, you know, the,
the probability of the, the, I call this, you know, like the, this time we'll get it argument. I
don't think it's like zero. I think it's low, but I don't think it's zero. But at least, you know,
that's the, that's the consideration that those people would, um, would make at least. Yeah. It is
interesting. I mean, to, to support Trump, you have to be like in the most charitable view, like,
there's such a, um, sacrifice in terms of status, in terms of being seen in good standing with
employed. Like, have you ever read the flight 93 election by Michael Anton? I have a long time ago.
It was basically the punchline that, like, California is dying and like, this is all the marbles.
Like, if, if Republicans don't win, it's just so over, as they say. Right, right. The idea is that
with, yeah, basically with, um, the left wing kind of racial, um, scapegoating that they are
basically planning to take. Yeah. And I think like this is actually like a pretty, like, I was
skeptical of the take then, but I think it's actually kind of aged better. But the idea that, you
know, like, if they don't stop Trump, then the, uh, many out previously neutral elements of
government of private life of, um, I mean, certainly academia at this point, right, that, that part
I think is undeniable will be reckoned, will be weaponized permanently against conservatives. Um, I
think life for conservatives has gotten better from 2020 to 2023 than it has been from 2016 to 2020.
Now, not in all areas, like what they're trying to do in K through 12 or with the China, like, you
know, the, the, the left had a ton of soft power, um, and like hidden hard power. And now they're
losing a lot of soft power and they have a, you know, more hard power, but it's constrained. Um,
and, um, yeah, I mean, they've been losing a lot of the, the cultural, um, sort of momentum that
certain, certain movements had. And the lack of a boogeyman on the right has given, has allowed the
more moderate left people to have more power, hence like Bidenism. Um, so, I mean, that's not me.
Yeah. Yeah. Like my counter argument to like the Michael Anton thing is that like Trump won and it
still happened. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Like it happened even more, like, you can't do
counterfactuals, but like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like, like, like, there, there was a kind of,
there was a flight nine or like, there, there was a like, uh, like a flight, but like, you know,
Trump did not successfully storm the cockpit. It didn't work. It was not a solution. Yeah. That
would be, I still think that's the kind of best counter argument, but that was not like the argument
back then. Right. Yeah. Or like, some people for sure believe that, I don't know. But most people
were saying, you know, like, this wouldn't actually happen. Like, like, that was the line of attack
on Anton. And I think in hindsight, like, it's funny. Like, I think in hindsight, you know, like,
Trump was both much more incompetent than we expected. Um, and Anton was like, more right than we
expected on, at least on the half that was like, you know, this is going to happen. Not not
necessarily that Trump would, uh, Trump would succeed in stopping it. But, but you know, like, to
his credit, he, he, he, he like says that, right? That that's like a crucial point of the, of, of
the essay is like, we don't know who would work. Um, and it didn't. Um, yeah. I'm intrigued by your,
your, your question that you've been asking, which is like, how do you get really talented people
into government? How do you redirect a lot of talent, um, you know, uh, to, to serve? And I, you
know, you have to make it high status for them to, for it to, to, to, to, no, not, not, not high
status, not, not high status, high, um, high, like work environment. Like, like, like, here's the
thing, like, like I have this quote, um, that I have not, uh, I've, I've sat on Twitter a few times,
but I don't think I've, I've sat in my podcast world, which is like, the free market selects against
the free market. Um, because when you have a free market, uh, it creates just like such awesome
talent, uh, or such awesome opportunities for talent, that like, I know, you know, like, the, the
most brilliant, I was, I had a, uh, mouse Olympiad computer science Olympiad background, like all
the most brilliant people are, you know, working in tech now, right? They're, they're working
technical jobs. Yep. They're not involved in politics. They're not gaining any sort of power or
connection or network. They're, they're working on important technical problems. You know, many of
them, you know, there's, there's an exceptional number of them at open AI specifically, you know,
um, on the technical teams. Um, and in fact, you, you can even argue that they've contributed a lot
more to society by doing so. Um, but it means that those are exactly the people who are not buying
for power. Yep. Um, like, and of course, you know, in order to keep this prosperous system that
allows them to work so happily running, you have to not, you know, like, I'm sure there were a lot
of brilliant nuclear engineers that upon, upon, you know, like the, the, the construction of the
nuclear regulatory commission were condemned to like basically being an irrelevant or basically
working in like purely theoretical physics and never replying it, right? Like, that is a possible
path for machine learning today, right? And so, like, like me specifically, like I've had to make
this decision, right? Like do I want to make money, do I want to, um, or do I want, like, like this
specific fact, like, like the fact that I just talked about about the free market selecting against
the free market is like specifically the reason why I'm at least like mostly convinced that I do
want to, uh, that I do want to do something involving policy in the future. Well, I'll sort of stand
it a bit, you know, crudely or simplified, which is if you have two options, and one of them is work
at open AI, work at big tech, whatever, like, you know, um, or the other one is kind of work, you
know, to user words, like against the regime. Like one option gives you, you know, can help make you
rich and is like seen as, you know, more noble or something by a number of, you know, college grads,
which a lot of people care about, and, um, and kind of more people in, at least society. The other
path has probably less economic upside or certainly less economic upside. And it's depending on
which circles they're in, certainly, um, you know, perhaps less approval from like a certain
mainstream, early person, but what it does have is, um, it's, you know, a certain like, um, a
certain integrity, intellectual integrity to it, to the extent that they are truth seeking, um, and
so, I think open AI engineers are really truth seeking though. I don't think that's an advantage,
but they're selectively truth seeking, right? Sure. Now, like, they can be honest with their
political beliefs a lot of the time too. Like, I don't know, like, maybe if they were like very,
very based, you know, they wouldn't. Yeah. I mean, most of them have like, normy, apolitical, you
know, like a lot of them support Andrew Yang. Yeah. Um, all of them support, you know, like Nikki
Haley or whatever, right? Like Shama supports Nikki Haley, right? Like all of them are kind of like
apolitical or like, centuries or like, center libertarians. I guess what I'm saying is that in order
to get people on this path, because it's not going to be as economically competitive, you have to
compete on some other axis. And I think it, like, let's just say, for example, that Elon Musk said,
Hey, you know, I Elon Musk said that we need a balanced, you know, government. I tweeted by that.
That's why I said you should vote Republican in the last election. And I, I Elon acknowledged that
the Republican party is totally broken. Hey, Democrats, we grew with that too. And we need to fix
it. And so I am Elon, I'm going to have like a teal fellowship for policy. Um, and it's going to be
the Elon fellowship. And it's going to be 20 people are going to get selected. 2000 are going to
apply and, you know, I'll pay you a decent salary. It's not open AI, you know, level salary and
equity. But, you know, you'll, you'll be fine. Um, and it'll be a two year thing, a three year
thing. And then I'm going to help you start a company or something. A program like that would get
people flooding and droves because they're not sacrificing their like career upside. And that's like
long term status upside. In fact, maybe they're accelerating it. Um, and so they get to, and then
you would get people applying who aren't even truth see like they're actually just like career hums,
you know, like climbing and maybe they're so competent, um, that you actually want them there. Um,
and so I feel like that's the kind of direction, um, that you, you know, you need to move, what
needs to move in if you want to like shape where people go. And I think the same thing applies in
higher ed too. I know you wanted to shout about that, which is like, you can have something like
UATX, which I know you are, you know, went to and I really admire, uh, or you know, you attended
some summer class or something. And I really admire, um, in terms, you know, I'm friends with, with
Joe and Barry and, and, and these people, but like, I think, you know, you're not going to get
people who are, you know, avoiding Harvard or Stanford and picking UATX over them because it's
sacrificing career upside. And the best people aren't going to do that or don't want to do that.
There would be some who are so, you know, intellectually pure that they're willing to sacrifice some
upside. And, and you know, UATX, I talked to Joe about this. He said he's gonna, he's going to, um,
you know, make it such that they're not sacrificing by getting companies like Tesla and SpaceX to,
you know, guarantee jobs and stuff like that. So you can, you can measure with that, but like an
organization that has a much bigger chance of competing with Harvard and Stanford is the teal
fellowship. Because that is more prestige. One, because it borrows teals name and it's just
extremely selective and they advertise how selective they are in the same way that Harvard does. Um,
and then two, um, because they have, um, a track record or it like the people who've gone through
are, are incredible. Um, now, if Elon tomorrow also similarly said, hey, we're starting to Elon, um,
you know, degree and it's, it's competing with Harvard and Stanford. We have 2000 people and we, um,
you know, we have signed up with all these companies that have promised to hire from here. I think
he too could compete, but you need to borrow some level of prestige, um, either from individuals or
from corporations, um, and use that to create a very selective program that gets the best people,
um, and it most importantly excludes everybody else, um, so that people are making the Pareto
optimal, you know, decision, non-ideological when they're choosing between Harvard and, and whatever
competitor and until you're creating something that is just long term better for them on a, on the,
you know, career and status prestige access access. You're, you're not gonna compete for the, for
the most, um, for the most prestigious, um, sort of, you know, for the students that are chasing the
most prestige, I eat the, the most, um, status seeking and, and, and often most competent and, and,
and tell them. Right. Yeah, it has to be kind of philanthropic, but that's how the kind of, uh,
incentive problem gets squared. Yeah, I think that makes sense. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't,
it doesn't, philanthropic. Like, Elon could be doing it as a for-profit venture, like he could
charge $40,000, like he could charge the same price. It just, it has to be extremely selective and
has to be associated with some level of prestige, right? Like, we have university competitors, UATX,
Minerva, which I think Minerva is, is trying to do this to some degree that you have benchmark fund
of them. They, they have some Silicon Valley pedigree. You know, there's the, the university. Is
that a Austin Allard thing? No, he's doing Lambda. Um, okay. Which, which is interesting. I mean,
he's, he's, he's not going after the most brilliant students. He's going after people who are trying
to learn how to code. Yeah, like the marginal software engineer. Yeah. Yeah. But, but he did a good
job of borrowing prestige in order to become the definitive bootcamp. Um, but, I mean, I think we're
doing such a bad job in general. If we care about getting the top students, or even like,
directionally, the top students out of Harvard or Stanford over the next 10 years, like, it doesn't
seem like we're making any real progress to doing that. And you ask Silicon Valley, like, what are
they doing about that? They're like, well, we think the education model is broken. So we're just
going to wait until the next innovation, you know, happens. And the next like platform shift or
something, because we don't want to do all the dirty work of creating a new universe. And this is
why actually, like, Tiel looked into this. He looked into, I want, you know, creating a university,
like a real university that offered degrees and that, you know, like competed head to head. And he,
he said it would just become a copy. It's, it's just too much, whatever you didn't want to compete
in the same way. And I think that's, that's a shame because Tiel Fellowship has had a tremendous
impact for the people that went through it. It had a tremendous impact in terms of shifting the
conversation. Like, when I was in college in 2010, 2008, like, saying that college was, um, sort of
like a joke or a cartel or all these things was pretty controversial. Like Tiel's fellowship was
extremely controversial. And now it's like fact. It's like, you know, even people like who
previously would have thought it was a joke or, or, or, you know, beyond the pale, now agree with
it. And, and yet, there's like zero change. And so, um, he's definitely shifted the conversation.
But I think we need people to really like understand how, um, these institutions are competed with.
And it's not just through, like, a better product via, like, meaning a better education, um, or a
better network, necessarily, it's, it's by the whole, the whole package. And that whole package
includes a more prestigious, um, option. Right. I think like a big problem here, honestly, like,
with, with university specifically is that like, if you're, if you're trying to basically convince
people to, like, locate their resources inefficiently, right? You either have to do two things,
right? You have to either pay them the requisite amount, right? So that they're not actually, that
they're being compensated for allocating their resources. And then it becomes actually optimal. Or,
you know, you have to convince them to dislike the market for some reason. Or, you know, not
actually to dislike it, but say, like, okay, here, I'm going to do this instead. And like, I am
still, you know, I am still pro market in almost all areas. It's just that you need some people, you
know, you need some people to exit the market or at least not, for that not to be the main thing
that they're working on in order to actually defend it in the first place, right? Like, you know, we
could have taken, you know, like, even just like 20% of the top nuclear engineering talent. And if
we could have taken them and gotten them to basically work in VC and make sure that they stop
banning nuclear technologies, then we would have a not, we would have a much more thriving nuclear
engineering sector. Um, so like, yeah, this is the problem, you know, if the free market does not
select for the free market existing, um, let me give an interesting example. And like, the biggest
problem is that like in in the policy space, right, because of a selection effect, left wingers have
an intrinsic advantage like people who hate markets just have an intrinsic advantage because you
hate markets where you're going to go work. I'm sorry going. There was a famous conversation that
happened with a very ambitious, um, very smart person and someone high up in effective altruism
where he said, hey, I'm really interested in effective altruism. How can I have the biggest impact
on effective altruism? And the person high up might have been Wilma Gaskar, I don't know who it was,
said, get rich and come back and give some money and make a big and back that way. And that person
very famously was San Franklin freed. And he he followed the formula and it worked short of, you
know, massive unparalleled global fraud, but he transformed the the EA community for a few years and
the community, their prospects of making a difference. And so, you know, if you're thinking about,
hey, how do you maximize the impact over the next 20 years, or, you know, you know, period of time
that you want to optimize your impact, you're probably asking yourself the question, yeah, like, do
I go into policy or do I get rich first? I'd be successful first. And it seems that unfortunately,
the way the world works is like, once you're really successful, once you have a successful startup
or your stressful investor or whatever it is that you can do, you not only have money that can then,
you know, direct other people's times and start organization and stuff like that, but you also have
a level of credibility and prestige that can even further shape where, you know, labor and capital
goes. And so, now, I don't know how you think about it for yourself, but that's one framework of
thinking about it. Yeah, I think that makes sense. The counterpoint to psychology has this quote
right there, there are like, there are like personal billionaires and then there are like, I forget
what it was, like, like, manager billionaires or something like that, right? Like, like, the idea is
like, the city of San Francisco has like billions of dollars being managed. Obviously, states, those
states have more than billion dollars being managed. And that is all being directed. And a lot of it
is just under the discretion of look whoever is the executive, right? Like, just what can be done
with executive orders, right? Obviously, becoming president is quite difficult. But you have all
these positions which are, you know, in effect billionaires, people who control billions of dollars,
and in fact, maybe have even more discretion or at least are not punished in the same way that you
would be punished, for example, for selling stock, you know, the stock price would drop. In spending
that money. So, like, this is true in some cases. I'm sure of that, right? It might have been true,
you know, if San Bank Madrid was running, you know, an actual profitable company that might have
been the case that you would have done more by doing that instead of, instead of by, you know,
influencing some kind of policy. I think it's definitely true if you want to influence the
Democratic Party because of, once again, how just anti-intelligence they are. Both in terms of,
like, also, denying that, like, I think, like, this is the reason, right? Like, I think, you know,
like, there is an actual kind of virtual ethics here where, like, the lack of valuing intelligence
philosophically leads to, like, lack of valuing intelligence practically. Yeah. Let me encounter to
what I just said, which is every movement, and I do believe this, every, you know, EA needed Will
and the gas kill, and it needed, and I might be pronouncing Will's name wrong, but it needed a Will,
and it needed a Justin Moskovitz and San Bank Madrid. Like, you need the actual capital, and you
need kind of moral or intellectual capital. And Will was an idea entrepreneur, and he was an amazing
aggregator of talent and capital, and Will could only do that by having spent, you know, a decade or
more, you know, really immersed in ideas, and also, really immersed in kind of, you know, local
community organizing, so to speak, or some of this political work, even. So Will had, you know, he
was very successful in terms of his, like, movement impact, and more so than he would have been if
he had tried to be an entrepreneur, because it's so hard to be an SBF or a, or a Justin Moskovitz,
there's a lot of luck involved. At the same time, you know, it's hard to be a, a, a Will too, but
if, if, if, if people have that kind of, you know, unique prowess of ideas, and I remember having a
conversation with Bology, as he was thinking about his, his next thing, because Bology is both an
idea entrepreneur and an actual entrepreneur, but I think one thing he said to me, which I don't
think reveals anything in confidence is, you know, I'm a competent entrepreneur, Ibology, I've
helped start a council which sold for $300 million, it was CTO of Coinbase, but there are lots of
companies and entrepreneurs out there, and Ibology, you know, I'm not Elon Musk, but in terms of
idea entrepreneurship within technology, it's actually not that many. And so, yes, it is
interesting, and Bology moved to Singapore, well, I'll take that out, sorry, Bology, you know, wait,
I think you said that public. Okay, so maybe we could leave it in that, but Bology left the country.
I say that to say that he hasn't seen most people in person since COVID, and yet he's become way
more influential than he has prior, and that's just, that's based on ideas, that's based on, you
know, publishing that we're state, that's based on, you know, waiting into the discourse. And so, if
you're good at ideas, there's a lot of power in that, so I don't mean to undermine that, but one has
to go all in, and one has to, you know, put their time in. Now, when you talk about doing policy
stuff, you just have to find the right medium that, that, and maybe it is podcasting and, and
newsletters plus, like some version of community organizing or movement building, but, you know,
those are a couple examples of people who've, who've done that well, which, which put, and a dark
action in the same position, right, like he's also brilliant. He came in your podcast for, for
podcast, doesn't know as they checked that out. And he can start a company, or he can keep pursuing
his intellectual work, which, like yours, seems to be really resonating, and seems to be pretty
differentiated and pretty novel. I mean, you guys are both in your early 20s, and some of the best
idea entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley already, which just shows the, the, the opportunity. Right,
that, that's interesting, because I think like that, that phrase is really good, because, yeah, I
was actually, like, okay, maybe I shouldn't, I won't mention who I was, was, was talking to, but I
was talking to someone, and I basically said, like, I consider myself to be like a very poor writer,
and like, not like, amazing of a podcast, or either. In terms of like, charisma, and in terms of
like, really creating a kind of feeling of like, relatability of interest, I think I just like have,
I've kind of like, speculated, I've kind of like, bet on ideas that have become, have much bigger.
Right, like, and that's been, that's been the lane of like, okay, if you come to, you know, if
you're listening to the From New World podcast, if you're subscribed to the newsletter, you will,
you know, you won't get like, the most compelling paragraph about a new idea that, that will matter
a lot to you in like, five years, right, or at least it will matter a lot to a lot of people in five
years, but you will get that idea, right? You, you will get, you will get that idea in some form,
and I think that's like, that, that is the draw, I think, for a lot of people, including people who
have talked to you about it. Um, right. I mean, just to spend another minute on that, I mean, if you
look at Richard and Annie's work, like, what is he most known for, what is a great intellectual
contribution? From my perspective, it's, it's a few, and you know, he's got books and stuff, so I
don't mean to undermine them, but it's a few blog posts. It's, you know, wokeness is civil rights
law. It's, um, the, uh, the, you know, the liberals conservative analysis. Red liberals read
conservative watch TV. Yeah, it's classic. It's some of the stuff on, on, on, on gender in terms of
free speech. Um, you know, uh, like, and how gender impacts organizations are being, you know, a
little, a little vague, but he can go read it. Um, I think, and then also, yeah, I think that the
headline on that was something like, uh, the free marketplace of ideas, favors women's tears. Yes.
Um, and then also, like, and then, you know, separate from that is just kind of his, his sense of
humor on Twitter, which, um, you know, or his antics on, on Twitter, as some might say. Um, and, you
know, I think one question I have for you is like, are you also someone who's going to write kind of
seminal, like, you know, um, blog posts that, that will explain a concept that people didn't know
how to understand. I mean, I think you were the only one on the wokeness and AI front for, for
example, you know, like this woman, Renee, for the last name, Dresda, is built a whole career on
kind of like writing the, you know, misinformation wave. You know, she's from the other side, of
course, um, on the left via the social media stuff. But do they send that AI and, um, censorship is
going to be on a major issue. It's going to require someone really technical to figure that out, who
also understands some of the politics stuff. So that, I mean, that's an interesting angle. Um, yeah,
I think it's interesting just to think about, we don't spend too much time on it. But if you, um,
you know, really take the public intellectual path, just like what is the way to break out in a way
that, you know, Richard and, and a couple of these others have not done, you know, yeah, I think
like, I don't know that that's been like a different, that's been an interesting thing for me. Um,
because, you know, I really am kind of a true believer in elite theory, um, or public choice, you
know, like, like, this is a point that I made, made a lot, right? It's, it's pretty similar. It's
almost the same thing. But like, yeah, um, a real believer in elite theory, a real believer that it
matters kind of to, like, like, you, you found out about me by listening to this podcast, right?
Like, and, like, I think there are many such cases where, um, they're, they're, they're like, once
again, like, to go back to the beginning, I do think they're trade-offs. I think they're pretty
strong trade-offs, um, between public and, and private appeal, like, public and elite appeal, right?
I think that, you know, if I had basically, like, a clickbait, thumbnail, and headline on every
single one of my episodes, right? Like, this was something that I actually discussed with a
different podcaster. He suggested, you know, like, putting in clips of, like, news articles or
whatever, right? Um, and like, I think, like, from pure kind of growth perspective, like, that's,
that makes sense. That's true, right? But, and it would make sense, you know, not to do, like, four
hour podcasts. But on the other hand, I think that it's actually crucial that you have some of these
signals that basically say, like, actually, you know, this is not a norm, this is not a normal
podcast. Yeah. Right? Like, I think that, that kind of, like, counter-signalling actually really
matters. Um, mate, like, I think it kind of matters, or I think it matters a lot, that, like, the
from the new world podcast does not, like, rarely touches on kind of, like, first order, um, culture
war issues, and touches, and like, preferentially touches on, like, second order, um, uh, cultural
issues, cultural war issues, right? Like, a good example of, like, the second order cultural issue
is, like, Richard Hennami is writing on, like, affirmative action, right? Like, like, not, not just
saying, you know, like, oh, they're going after your kids or whatever, right? But saying, like,
okay, maybe, you know, like, and this doesn't even, like, necessarily mean you have, like,
underlying policy disagreement, right? Like, it's like, here is, here is why, you know, affirmative
action is so influential in each of these companies, it is due to these laws in specific, you
should, or you should repeat all these laws in specific, right? Like, I think that that, that,
that's like, both proper context in terms of, like, what I actually want to do, right? Like, in
terms of what I actually care about and want to focus on, but it's also like, the proper context
for, for a kind of like recruiting, or like, yeah, we can go with recruiting, right? Like, like,
attracting, that's a better word, attracting a kind of very interested audience, who's just much
more likely to actually do things in the future. Yeah, it isn't, it's interesting. I think they're
trade-offs everything. Um, and I think that, that path that you just outlined, um, it's kind of
like, you know, the, in different way, but like, the Curtis path, right? Like, he is, um, you know,
sort of undesirable to, uh, to ignore me audience, and that attracts a certain level of die-hard,
um, followership, and he's, you know, he's not the person named, but his ideas of influence, you
know, someone like him, and back, or someone like a teal, even if, or even Elon, even indirectly,
and that is impact, and that is power, um, at the same time, um, there, you know, there's always a
question of, did this person succeed, um, in because of their, um, you know, the decisions they
made, or in spite of certain decisions they made, and, you know, um, someone like, biology, maybe,
is, um, is a bit of both in that, you know, like, um, he's both an idea entrepreneur and kind of
like, good actual entrepreneur slash, like, community organizer, or like, he's able to, yeah, he was
elite much more before he was like, publicly well known. Yes, and, um, I guess what I'm saying is,
it's easy, it's a potential cope, this idea that, you know, I can't have my ideas, my ideas spread
widely because it would sacrifice some, you know, some of the main points of why I even do this,
because like we were talking about with all in before, like, some things are able to be mainstream,
and also appeal to elites. Now, you know, it's certainly watered down. It's certainly, um, although
in their case, actually don't think they're, they're watering down, but it's watered down relative
to, like, a purist or, or someone, you know, someone who spends all their time thinking about
certain things. Um, and, you know, some people, like, because they don't want to be seen with the
normies, you know, sort of snuff their, their, you know, some of their nose at it, but it's
certainly has a bigger impact. I mean, I think you need everything, but I was saying, yeah, I
wouldn't rule out having a more excess, like, I don't think Richard Hanania has sacrificed a ton by,
you know, growing his audience, you know, 10X in the past, you know, a couple of years, and, you
know, if Richard Hanania grows his audience 10X again, the next, like, I don't think, now he might
be audience captured to your point earlier and kind of a different kind of way, and he starts to,
instead of cater to his audience, like, you know, uh, hate his audience, um, but I just want to rule
that out, is what I'm saying. I think there could be successful models in, in, in both, you know,
deliberately niche ways and also in ways that, um, you know, transcend that need. Yeah, I think the
trade-off is kind of a lot more simple than, like, this might have been my fault that, that like, I
was miscommunicating it, right? But like, the practical trade-off is like, you know, I can go to the
DC meetup, or I can write another article, right? And maybe the time scales on that aren't quite
right, but it's like, literally, like, a time trade-off in terms of elite versus public influence.
Yeah. Right? Like, like, like, they're like, literally, you know, like, the same, the same time
slot. Yeah. So, like, I'm, I'm wondering, like, do you, do you think that, like, where do you think
the most value is generated? Red, I know you talked about earlier, already, that, like, it's kind of
saturation dependence, right? We have a lot of idea entrepreneurs, or like, their idea entrepreneurs
are actual entrepreneurs. Like, to me, like, this is actually something, like, like, I think about
this a lot, actually, in terms of just, like, speculating on the kind of, like, talent metagame,
right? Like, something that pushed me, like, people don't know, the people in my audience don't know
this, right? I was like, really interested in machine learning in, like, 2018, 2019, right? And so
was, like, the rest of the entire, you know, computer science, Olympiad scene. And, and like, I just
saw so many people, especially like so many people who I like personally respect. And you already
were like, new personally, we're like, just, just extraordinary people going to machine learning and
like, man, do I want to really want to be, like, the n plus one's machine learning engineer, like,
like, how, how impactful, how much will that actually matter as opposed to, like, doing literally
anything else, right? It's, and, you know, like, I've kind of returned to that indirectly over over
the past year or so. But I think that philosophy still kind of applies, right? Yes. Now, like, like,
there are a lot of, like, like, applying that to, to hear their, I think there are a lot of, like,
maybe this is a controversial take. But I think like, the current environment of public
intellectuals is very good. Like, there are a lot of very good public intellectuals, like, like,
biology, like Richard, like, Scott Alexander, and, like, Curtis, like, of all kinds of differing
ideologies. And, like, in my experience, the quality of, like, a well-known public intellectual is,
like, higher than the quality of, like, a DC lobbyist. I'll put it in Ezra Klein and Noah Smith just
to get some more diversity. Sure, yeah. But the, I endorse that. Here's the way I would look at it.
I mean, there's a few different dimensions of the question. Because in some ways, yeah, there are a
lot of great entrepreneurs. There are a lot of great idea entrepreneurs. And yet, at the same time,
there's, you know, there's a shortage, like, there's only one Elon Musk, or, you know, there's only,
like, a few, right, people on that level. And there's only a few, you know, sort of tower accounts
of Richard and Ania's, like, and so at the top level, you know, you could always have more. So a
question I'd ask. There are a few questions. And one is, like, wherever there's more interest,
there's just going to be more, like, desire to put in the work to get really great. I think what you
are in, and many really talk to people are in, are they're, like, you know, they have the struggle
of having choice. It's not obvious to them what they should do, because you, if you said, hey, I'm
going to focus on making as much money as possible, and you applied your brain to that, you'd
probably be pretty successful. You might be extremely successful. And similarly, if you said, hey, I
am going to apply myself 100% to idea innovation, or, you know, public intellectual life. You know,
you yourself could, could become a Richard within a few years, right? Like, Richard came out of
nowhere. Like, Richard before COVID was not on anyone's radar, right? Like, Richard, Richard really,
you know, rose up pretty fast relative to someone like a Tyler Cowan or something. And so, you're
cursed by that, by the optionality, but the problem there is if you don't go all in on one, you
might not have success in either, right? Because they require intense focus. Now, so if you assumed,
so interest matters because it's going to determine how hard you work. But if you assumed for
intensive purposes, interest was equal. And you just said, hey, let's say there's two universes, two
worlds. One is which I then expand the next five years. And even after five years, you'd, you know,
be in your late 20s or whatever, like you'd still plenty of time. But next five years, either
focused on entrepreneurship, or, you know, getting wealthy or on idea work. And you just kind of
like sketched out what that could look like. And, you know, you know, your skills and opportunities
better, better than I do. And if, if either of them looks like you can make more progress, you, you
cannot add the other. Like, let's say, let's say, for example, you in the next five years have the
level of success that Richard has today. Your scene is like one of the great public intellect, or
maybe biology has, but like, you know, putting aside his entrepreneurial accomplishments or
something. Your, your scene is like a leading voice on issues that, that, that matter. And you have
an audience and you have distribution and you have respect and brilliant people follow you. Well, at
that point, you can do a number of things. Certainly you can, you know, start a media organization
or have a successful career via media. But just as I was saying earlier, this conversation, like,
distribution is a wedge into other things. Like, if you're also technical and you recruit, recruit
technical people, well, you know, then you can co-found something or invest in, like, there's a lot
of people who use media to become investors. And they, you do use your distribution, you know, ruin
is an example, right? Like, someone who built an audience on Twitter and has leveraged that to get
some influence such that some people, and I don't know, it's an exaggeration. But he's just, yeah.
And for the audience, you might, you might not know who ruin is. We did an episode with him, the
fourth episode in this entire podcast. And that will be, that will be linked as well. That's all
right. Keep going. Sure. So I think, and I would say the same things are cash. It's like, where can
you make the kind of quickest traction? Like, what is, what is the quickest path to, and and for,
let's say I'm talking to our cash, it's like, hey, podcast is, you know, taking off. Like, what if
you went all in on the, like, how far could you go with, with the podcast? And then it's like, okay,
what are adjacent things you could do from there? It's like, I mean, Tyler Cowan, if, if Tyler was
more kind of, you know, if he was younger in his career and more ambitious, he could start, or more
commercially ambitious, he could start a fund as well. He could start, I mean, like, he could be a
big time investor. He is the deep respect of, of the value and people who matter. He could certain,
like, he's, I mean, here he does it with his grants. He's a proven talent, a tractor and selector.
You know, VCs do get rich if they're successful, and he could be a very successful VC. Because of
his ideas, he's just choosing not to. And so I think it's really like the combination of where you
most interested, and where do you think you can make the most traction? And if you're, and the thing
with you is you already have some momentum in the idea space. So if you're like, hey, I could really
like go all out on this for the next few years. And, and really make some traction, whereas if you
evaluate to get wealthy path, and it's like, I don't really see a path, or it's not obvious. Like,
I'd have to, you know, scrounge for a while. You know, that said, I could have said the same thing
to us, let's say SBF, you know, before he started FTX or whatever, had a blog, and that blog was
doing pretty well. I could have been saying, hey, why don't you like take this blog forward? And he,
you know, kind of clinically identified, you know, a few opportunities to make money, like Miss
allocations, you know, or just like arbitrage opportunities. And now, if we had given, if SBF had
been given that advice in 2004, or some other time period, like maybe we would never be talking
about SBF because he would have tried some, you know, other internet thing in which he had no
strategic advantage, and it wasn't a way to get $30 billion in three years, because there were,
before crypto, there was no way. So, timing really matters, too, in terms of, like, road is the,
what really is the arbitrage opportunity. And so, I mean, the, the, the, the comforting, but also,
you know, somewhat challenging, you know, TLDR on this is like, it seems like you can be successful
in either path. And it seems like either path could lead to the other. And so, it's really just a
combination of, like, your assessment of your, your skills, in terms of where you think you could
have the highest leverage, where you're most distinct. And that, that's on a more granular level,
because you, I haven't worked with you, but you know, like, on the surface, you, you, you seem like
you could do both. So, your assessment, your own interests, your own talents, your own interests,
and then, you know, your assessment of the, of the market opportunities, and timing, in
correspondence with those. Right. How do you react to that? I think I just believe in base rates too
much, right? Like, like, like, here's the case for it, right? Like, so, yeah, technical, technical
development, kind of, or like, yeah, I kind of separate that off a little bit, right? Basically,
like, frontier tech research, some other kind of entrepreneurship, media, or kind of like insider
politics. Like, like, what is the, what is the correct ratio of allocation of, like, top level
talent between those, right? And to me, just kind of, like, at the population level, there is a lot
of tech, or there's a lot of allocation into technical development and entrepreneurship. And, yeah,
like, once again, going back to the quote, right? Like, the potential, it's, it's kind of strange as
well. Like, like, it's a, the things that you would do on the policy side. Maybe this is also
another thing that makes it kind of, like, easier to motivate, it's leveling people, right? If you
think that government is intrinsically or like, on average, right? If you think like, government is
on average bad, then you eat, then you know that you're playing a defensive game, right? Like, my
goal with like, the future, you know, like machine learning policy think tank is like, if, if
literally nothing happens, right? I would, we would be like, celebrating. If like, no AI regulation
happens in the next five years, we will, like, be partying. We will be, you know, we'll be like,
this is extraordinary, extraordinarily successful. We have accomplished everything we wanted to do.
Right? And in terms of like, in terms of motivation, I have to admit that like, that is, you know,
it's a difficult motivator. I've been going through this right now. I've been looking for people to
recruit. And it's, you know, especially if you're someone who has the ability to kind of either do
frontier level research or to do, or to be an entrepreneur, right? Like, it's not, it's not too
appealing, right? I don't think it's necessarily like, it's less a status thing than like, it is
just intrinsically not appealing, right? Like, like, yeah. So, so the question is, right? Like, or
sorry, to finish up on that last point, this just makes it to me at least. This just makes my
assessment of like talent allocation, that the base rate is just, of like, people who could do both,
is just like, significantly misallocated towards the kind of, like, making money, making money side.
Yeah, like, if only, you know, like, there's the case that, you know, you want, like, more
corruption and more, basically, like, bribery and government because it, like, allows this to flow
more efficiently. I'm not sure, like, the normal, you know, like, the normal version of corruption
would be actually successful in incentivizing that, right? But, like, for example, like, prediction
markets is one way that, like, maybe this becomes better. Yeah, I think that, like, in the long run,
I really want to find some way of kind of optimizing the kind of meta-level allocation of talent
between these two areas. But yeah, I just don't, like, on the individual level, I think, like, the
base rates just make it much more likely that doing something in kind of entrepreneurship or tech is
oversaturated. And, yeah, just looking at, I don't know, because, like, even before I had any
interest in politics, I was thinking, you know, like, I'd much rather be a kind of CTO, and I can
have CEO, right? I'd much rather be someone who works on the base level of technology. But at the
same time, yeah, at the same time, I am fairly, yeah, like, like, the thing to rate is like the
ratio of what I want to be doing and have what motivated to do combined with talents to, like, that
kind of base rate misallocation, right? Yeah, I am, like, the thing is that I'm, like, 75%
confidence, or sorry, confidence, that some kind of policy work is the right idea, and then, but
that's still only 75%. I still think, like, thinking about this more would be very valuable, like,
literally thinking, you know, like, what am I going to do for the next five to 10 years? Right,
right. Even, let's go with, hypothetically, let's say you're taking the policy work path, and then
let's just brainstorm how to do that. I mean, I want to work that as interesting. Are you familiar
with Teach for America? I think I remember, like, Andrew Yang talking about it as a long time ago.
So, Andrew Yang actually started an offshoot, or an organization inspired by Teach for America. It
was called venture for America. Right. Yeah. Teach for America. I'm not surprised that, you don't
know about it. It used to be much more relevant, like a decade ago. Like, when I was, it's kind of
lost its lustre for whatever reason, but when I was in college, like, I applied Teach for America,
got in, and I was planning on being a teacher for these, for two years. Interesting. Now, and I
would have been a special ed teacher in the Bronx. I have, no patience for even amazing people who
are underperforming or something. I would have been terrible. And so, the question you ask is, how
did Teach for America convince me to apply, get in, and almost do it? And they convinced a lot of
people at top schools to do it. It's a combination of, like, talk left, act right. They made it so
prestigious. In turn, it was super selective. So it was a top signal. So the idea was, like, you
would go do TFA for two years and then go to, like, Goldman Sachs or whatever, Bane, or, like, it
was a career accelerator. And they had all these partnerships and they got these brilliant people.
And then they made them look like heroes. They were like, hey, education's broken. You need to save
education. And they're marketing or propaganda, whatever you want to call it, was amazing. And so,
like, if you want to do, if you want to shift talent into policy work, like, what's your, what's
your propaganda, right? Or what, what is this org's propaganda? Like, it needs, and I think that's
where, you know, this biologist rate, like, talk left, act right in terms of, like, it needs to be
seen as, like, more moral and noble and important. And I, you know, you can obviously create that
argument. But then also needs to be seen, in my opinion, as something that will, like, just be net
better for their lives, even if they were non ideologically motivated or non morally motivated. And
so, that's where partnerships with companies or partnerships with, um, people, you know, who are,
like, if I was aiming to do what you wanted to do, I would try to find someone like a biology or
someone who's, who's got credibility and saying, hey, can we create this fellowship together? Can we
create, you know, X, Y, and like, if you, let's say your cause was network states or charter cities,
like, biology would definitely fund like a fellowship or grant program for people. And he's, he's
actually doing that, right? And he's, he's, right, right. I'm familiar with CCI. Yeah, he shipped
it. CCI is great. Yeah. Yeah. And, and we're glad to run CCI, like, network state charter city move.
I mean, it's still super early. But there are like, hundreds of really talented people working on
that didn't exist prior. So like, that's, that's pretty big accomplishment. So like, um, if you want
hundreds of it that didn't exist prior, yeah, I feel like there's a package, there's a bundle of
things that, that people need. And, um, you know, being able to explain to their parents and people,
people they went to college with and high school with, like, or even like, have it on their LinkedIn
profile needs to be seen as, as prestigious. And I think that's something that people, people who
are entering things from a place of truth seeking and integrity and mission driven sometimes because
they themselves are impervious to some of these procedure status games relative to others. They
don't realize that others aren't as impervious. Right. Right. I think like the biggest, the biggest
motivator that I've come across so far, both for myself and for like, other like-minded people, I've
just been workshopping how to tell this story exactly. But, uh, have you ever seen the movie, uh,
20th century boys? No, I haven't seen it. Okay. So like, the plot of the movie is like a cult takes
over Japan and then eventually the world. And, um, there's a scene in the movie where the cult
leader fakes his death in resurrection, or like, well, technically some other guy who helps being
the cult leader is shot instead, but like, he fakes his resurrection. And, um, what happens is that
like, they're already very famous of the ruling political party of Japan. And like, the, the
citizenry of Japan are like packed into the stadium and, you know, like tens of thousands of people.
They're all cheering. They put up like their, their hand signs, like the cult sign. You know, all
the people in the streets are stopping and they're putting up the cult sign. Right. Um, it's just
like this feeling of utter doom of like, just complete sentiment in that like, is the world insane.
Right. I remember like Eric Weinstein talking about a similar, uh, similar experience as well. He
had the, uh, I forget. I'm blanking on the author's name, but he had the author, um, Tim Koran, uh,
Tim, the prep. No, no, no, no, uh, of the, of the essay in the New York Times about, uh, not Agnes
Keller. Yeah. No, no, uh, this, this was when he read the essay. He read like this essay that was
written a long time ago about the kind of like, did not, it was like on the denial of, um, on the
denial of atrocities or something like that. Right. And he had this quote, right, which was
something like, um, right there, you've got their attention. Hold them and blow them before, before
they shake off, you know, before they shake off, uh, their confusion like a puppy, uh, like a wet
puppy or something like that. Right. I'm forgetting the quote right now, but like, I think that it's
both true and incredibly powerful to emphasize that that's like, that is the world we live in to
some degree. Right. And we're going to talk about this later with egalitarianism, but like, it is
like, it is just true that it's genetically encoded in many people, um, or like, it's an evolved
pattern of behavior to deny reality in very specific ways that are responsible directly for, you
know, some of the greatest missteps, the banning of innovative technologies. You can look at
NewClear as like the key example here of just creating of like voluntarily creating this poverty and
creating this like completely unnecessary, um, struggle. And of course, even more in the past,
right, with, with communism, um, with, uh, really like a long record of these kind of of anti-
prosperity, anti-innovative movements. And to me, like, one really striking example of this was
GDPR. GDPR is, you know, I tweet this out fairly often, you know, I tweet one of two versions,
either, you know, the European Union is China with lower IQ, or the European Union is China with
lower IQ and far worse food. Um, you know, depending on how many people I want to piss off. Um, but
it is the case. You know, like, controversy about the second part aside, it is the case that the
European Union is just the less competent version of the Chinese government. The same motivations
are there. The same motivation for kind of total control, the fear of anything disruptive. It's,
it's exactly the same kind of psychological pattern. And they are, they have less power specifically
because they are less competent, um, which, which, you know, might be a good thing in the end, might
be a good thing, um, especially compared to the circumstances that China had, you know, two or three
years ago. But it is striking just a special, returning to GDPR. How many people like China, how
many like normies, you know, like people who just don't pay attention to politics, how they thought
this was like a good thing. And not realizing that it just crushed, you know, thousands, if not
millions of small businesses, of people who are really on the way up, who are going to have
fundamental improvements, and not even just small businesses, right? This was the grounds for Italy
banning chat GPT, like literally like Chinese state behavior. Um, and that this is just, you know,
this was cheered on, this was celebrated. It's exactly the kind of 20th century boy's moments, I
think. The big idea is that like, essentially, you're not living in a world where like the safety of
your industry is guaranteed. And like empirically, that's been the case, right? It's not like, you
know, it's not 100% of time the industry gets regulated out of existence. But it is like pre-common,
right? If you're a nuclear engineer, you know, in like the 50s or 60s, you've seen that like real
time. And I think that has happened to a few tech people. And that is why, you know, like, as Peter
Tiel said, you know, liberty and democracy, it was like democracy and freedom are no longer
compatible. I don't think that's quite the case. But I do think that incentive is, is you basically
need a lot of people, quite frankly, like people like me, um, who are acting not in their self
interest in order for freedom and democracy to be compatible? How so? Say that more. Say more about
that. Because like, right now, acting in my self interest is like starting a tech company and
becoming, you know, extremely wealthy, right? Certainly, there's a higher chance of becoming
extremely wealthy doing, even though like, you know, it's not guaranteed, I might fail for sure. You
know, I'm keeping that in mind. I'm for sure not like 100% confident that that'll happen. But
certainly it's a much, much more likely path to wealth than, than, you know, doing machine learning
policy, right? Like that the incentive is like, the people who hate the market will like go to areas
outside of the market. And in fact, it will work very hard to crush the market. The people who like
the market will go into the market and succeed in the market. And so like, like, that's the core
case, you know, of the free market selecting against the free market. Yes. Yes. So your marketing is
basically tech needs a defense budget. Tech needs a defense team. Yeah, that's a brilliant way to
put it. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think that's strong marketing. I think it's interesting
to look at this in the arc of how Silicon Valley, you know, said broadly, like tech has approached
politics and kind of its defense in the past. And mostly how it hasn't had to. So let me give a
brief overview. I mean, basically Silicon Valley in the, you know, late 2000s, you know, with Obama
and the Arab spring was the darling of the left. Like social media had ushered in, you know, all
this freedom of speech, which was at the time, you know, corresponded with with left wing causes,
Arab Spring being one of the biggest ones. And then of course, you know, Jack, you know, Dorsese
famously, you know, said stay woke, you know, was was a big supporter of Black Lives Matter and
Durey and what was happening in Ferguson in 2014. So I mean, Silicon Valley was it was a darling for
leftism in the late 2000s, early 2010s. And I saw this transition because I was, you know, my
company products on is, you know, hyping technology startups, coming technology startups, and we
were at Darling. And I saw the mood start to change. And they would use contradictory arguments.
Like they would say, hey, everything that's on product time is just a silly app. Like, all these
tech people are working on all these silly things that are not important, not serious. And we need
to, you know, they need to have a bigger impact. But then they would also say at the same time, hey,
tech is taken over the world. It's, it's, you know, having a bad impact. It's way too powerful. And
then, you know, and Trump really, like, you know, the perception in many technicals minds that many
people's minds, elite's minds is that in the same way social media had elected Obama, it had elected
Trump. Now, there were things before Trump that created this rift between Silicon Valley and the
DNC, let's just say. I mean, that are worth emphasizing because it wasn't just Trump. It would have
likely happened regardless. Silicon Valley started to attack traditional American left power
centers, near times, Hollywood started to go after academia too. First, it was enabling it. And then
it started to replace it, like Netflix is a very obvious example. It started to undercut their
precision influence. It pulled away a lot of their top talent. You'd people like Larry Summers, Eric
Holder, David Ploof, all working for tech companies. It became a more powerful global culture
exporter, like Stanford taking over as number one school from Harvard, YC becoming like a top
school. And, you know, Silicon Valley no longer needed the DNC. They built a network of super
wealthy people with an alternate social network and path to power. Rather than working government,
you know, become CEO. And so we had this tech lash. And it was, and what tech did is they responded
by apologizing to it, by apologizing to it, giving money to left and causes. They thought that it
would go away. It, in fact, the critiques got worse and worse. And what happened around, I'm fast
forwarding a bunch, but what happened around COVID was you had a contingent of people who said, I'm
not apologizing anymore. Actually, I'm like directly fighting back. And those were people, to have
some examples, like biology and like Mike Salana, who early on were saying, hey, like tech and
journalists, while they used to be aligned, they are now like two different classes of people with,
I mean, they compete economically, you know, they compete for the same advertising dollars or they
compete for intention. And then two, they're just adults. And so they were very aggressive. There
was this very famous biology, Taylor Renn's feud, which was very controversial. Mark, was it Mark
and Jason? Yeah, he was defending Mark's reputation. And the many people within tech were either
critical of people like biology or Salana, or were uncertain. But the idea that you would fight back
seemed either wrong or uncouth, that the people that were attacking tech were doing so in good faith
and kind of deserved respect and that actually tech needed to be held accountable by this separate
class. And so the idea that tech needed a defense was, didn't resonate with them. They would say,
oh, we're so powerful. Like we actually, we're too powerful. We need accountability less so than
that defense. We need people to attack us. We need people to critique us. It's not attack. It's
critique. And they're doing so from a place of love as Kara Swisher would say or something. And that
started to change once a number of CEOs got fired, once a number of regulations started to pass or
threaten to pass. And once San Francisco started to like materially deteriorate in a way that was no
longer deniable. And you started to see the ratio significantly change where when people were
uncertain about supporting someone like Mike Salana, who around COVID maybe had like 5,000 Twitter
followers. Now he's got like 220,000. Now fighting back against journalists against policymakers who
are attacking, the famous example was Zuck donating 80 million dollars or whatever amount of million
dollars he donated to the hospital and then being vilified for it. And people like Mike Salana would
go around and say, actually, he's good. Actually, like it's good they donate 80 million dollars. And
also it's good that he invented Facebook. And so you started to have this class of tech defenders.
And they did it via media and they didn't do it. They weren't making a ton of money off it. To your
point, they did it outside of the market, but it did support their efforts. I mean, they built an
audience off it. You know, biology was an investor, Salana had worked for a founders fund. Now he's
starting a media company that has raised money. So I think tech appreciates or some elements of tech
appreciate defense in a way they didn't, you know, 2017, 2016. So I think it's good timing because
they thought at the time it was uncouth or morally incorrect or something. So it's so interesting.
I'm sorry, gone, gone. Oh, I would say is I think, so I think that's a strong marking push. But then
I think it's like you then get into the details of like defense from who and in what area. And if
it's on the AI front, you know, I think people need to be more more persuaded, I would say, that,
you know, Woke AI is a big threat relative to just, you know, AI from like safety in terms of my
lies are you Kowski concerns. I think Woke AI is like less of a threat than like I'm just like going
after hardware. It's actually pretty similar to like what biology said, right? It's the pivot from,
it's the pivot from what was it? Woke is them to stateism. Yeah. Yeah, like like that to me, you
know, like the quote unquote, you know, like this information crowd, of course, pervades of the
worst disinformation out there. They're the ones who are pushing for essentially, you know,
essential as control of machine learning hardware of essentially TPUs, GPUs and the like. And there
I think is the main venue of attack as well as kind of financial attacks from the FTC. I don't think
I think I don't think it's quite a distraction, but it's definitely a smaller venue. Wokeness sign
is definitely a smaller venue than these kind of like, you know, these kind of like status as you
know, boom, we're conservatism as it sounds, it's a correct description of what the threat actually
is. But sorry, go on. And the, what's interesting there is that the group of people that might be
most empathetic to that, those concerns is actually the crypto slash web three world because they've
operated since the beginning from a existential fear that the state is going to come down on them.
And they are, you know, in many ways competing with with state power. So, you know, they know they
need a defense. And, you know, to some degree, they they've invested in defense both on the media
and on the kind of think tank front. So, I think there are other groups too, but I think it's a
strong positioning and one would just need to get more specific in terms of which, you know, which
causes which segments and then which methods, right? Because there are there are media methods like
Mike Salana does, you just like fight fire with fire and like whoever wins the Twitter war, like
wins the elites, basically, like just be better on Twitter, like win the game. And then there and
some people do it on Twitter, some people do it, substack, whatever. And then there are you know,
more policy, you know, ways of making changes as you know and as you're exploring as well. And then
yeah. Right. I mean, like I said, so you had this term top left act right for the audience. What do
you mean by that? Yeah. Yeah. The one second. To describe talk left act right, you first have to
talk about what is left and what is right. And there are a few different ways of defining it. If you
define it, ideologically, you know, you could use Brian Kaplan's definition that you've used as
well, like the left hates the markets, the right hates the left. Or, you know, Mike Amalas has this
quote, ask a right wing person, if people are equal, they'll say no, ask a left wing person, if
people are equal, they'll give you a speech. So it's this idea that, you know, left wing people are
favor more equality and they're right wing people favor more hierarchy or we'll recognize that. And
so there are other ways of, you know, slicing it ideologically. You could say the left is all about
universalism and all about, you know, universalizing. It's ideology and the right is more narrow-
minded, more tribalizing. You could say the left is more about more utopian and that they believe a
better world is possible. And thus it's one's duty to make that happen. And the right, as perhaps
more, you know, constrained, that's used Thomas Sol's, like, constrained for some constrained vision
about what's possible and thus accepting the limitations of what we can actually do. And there's a
number of ways of slicing it ideologically. But then you say, is it actually an ideology? Because if
you were to say, you know, what does left believe? And what is the right belief? Like, you know,
even as recent as 30 years ago, you might say, oh, you know, the left was anti-immigration, anti-
trade, anti-war. And today they seem to be pro all those things. Are these more in terms of the
sense of Ukraine? Like the idea is flip-flop. You know, and the party's flip-flop on ideas. And so
you can say, okay, maybe it's a group of people, the sort of the, and these left right is more about
tribal loyalty to that group of people than it is to a certain set of ideas. That's another way of
looking at it. I think this truth is all these ways of looking at it. But the last way of looking at
it, which relates to talk left act right, is this idea of maybe it's a, well, and before I get to
that, like the cleanest way of thinking about, you know, the group of people is what we saw around
with coat with masks, and basically, or in COVID in general, how the left flip-flopped so quickly
on, you know, whether they're four masks or against masks, et cetera. And this idea of, you know,
first, it was racist to think that COVID was happening. And then it was, you know, you were a rub if
you didn't think that we had to go and lock down. And so maybe the third way of thinking about it
is, is, like, maybe it's a series of tactics, actually. Like, maybe leftism is a way to sort of rise
up within an organization or make change, basically. It's a way of calling for more, you know,
respect to the downtrodden, either genuinely or, you know, unwittingly cynically. But, you know,
there's this phrase, of course, if you are in a liberal, when you're young, you have no heart, but
if you aren't a conservative, when you're older, you have no brain. And part of this can be
explained by, when you're older, you have more status. You've developed more capital, like actual
capital, and then career capital, reputation capital, and you have more of a stake in society. But
when you're young, you don't have that much. And so you want more. And, you know, maybe leftism is
like a status acquisition tactic, and rightism is a status retention tactic. And so then one has to
ask the question, like, and so when the cynical way of saying talk left act right is basically like
Harvard, right? Like Harvard is one of the, you know, most fervent proponents of some, you know,
diversity equated inclusion, I just say, or, you know, kind of wokeness or, and I'm using Harvard as
a metaphor for universities, elite universities. And at the same time, Harvard is the most exclusive
place, you know, university in the world, in the sense that anyone of the world who would go to
university would pick Harvard as their first university, and Harvard rejects, you know, has like the
lowest acceptance rate. And they advertise their lowest acceptance rate. So there's certainly
exclusive. And also Harvard, like in my university, has extreme lack of diversity as it relates to,
you know, certain intellectual topics, right? So the talk left that right is talk about sort of, in
this case, ever seen inclusion, but then act in a, you know, non-deverse, you know, politically
uniform and exclusive way. And, you know, like Harvard both has sort of the moral, like you would
think from their language, and like New York Times too, New York Times advertises itself as a little
truth. Harvard, you know, advertises itself as like a beacon of knowledge, you know, all these
amazing things. And, you know, and for the good of itself, and yet it's sitting on like a $40
billion, you know, and down, I mean, there's so many, like, you know, capitalist things about what
Harvard is doing. And capitalism in the bad way, like chronic capitalism. And this, there are more
examples, I shared in my post called the hypocrisy of elites, where the people that were, you know,
advocating for defund the police more often than not were white people who did not live in high
crime areas. And so defund the police served as a way for them to signal that they were, you know,
left-wing and thus, you know, more moral and more noble and more caring, but acting right, in the
sense that, you know, they have, you know, live behind gates or don't live in high crime areas. And
you see this actually like in many, many different issues, whether it's about, you know, gifted
programs in schools or body positivity or, you know, relationships, polyamory, like, or the
environment, right? Like the people who are spreading the most left-wing, egalitarian messages are
the wealthiest people who in their own private lives, you know, do send their kids to private
school. Do work out a ton. Do end up getting married and in monogamous relationships. Do inflict the
largest carbon footprint. And so that is kind of the the talk left act right on an individual level.
And on an organizational level, it's this idea that you need a mission, you know, the left is, you
know, one way of saying it is the left is optics, the right is substance. And, you know, if you
don't have optics that itself is like a lack of substance, like, you need both, right? Like, you
need a mission that is going to inspire people in a democratic way. And when I say democratic, I
mean, like, you need mass coordination, right? Certainly to win elections, you need masses to vote.
And they're likely going to vote for the thing that promises them more stuff or, you know, something
better. But then also on a corporate level, like, you want to appeal to customers, you want to
appeal to recruits. And those people need to tell the rest of the world a story about how they are
making the world a better place. And, you know, saying we're going to make a more efficient
hierarchy, you know, is not as inspiring as we're going to have, you know, a quality of opportunity,
which of course is a weasel word, because no such thing exists. But it's actually a good example of,
you know, that is a left optically type thing. But, you know, when done right is actually a, you
know, a right wing concept. So that's what I mean when talk left act right is basically appeal to
the more reasonable sides of egalitarianism, ones that everyone would get behind. But then also
ensure that you are acting in a way that is, you know, going to be lead to most success for your
organization. Right. I think some of that, I think some of that really does kind of show how deep of
a hole for it. Like I, do you know who parisia is? Who parisia? Eve's part. No, was that at least
that's the name he goes by on the internet. I don't know if that's his actual name. Yeah, he writes
his newsletter called Parisia. He's kind of in similar circles as Richard Hanonia and I and like, I
deasleefully, this kind of crowd. And he, he like calls this circle like right wing rationalism.
Right. And his idea, this is kind of inspired by something like Richard Hanonia said on my podcast
is that like, the right wing just needs to focus on like factual things that it knows are true. Like
genetic differences and like, and like market efficiency. And like basically, like, basically just
like read statistics and like, and like, evolutionary psychology. Right. Basically, just like,
pointed facts that are like, that like the left wing denies. Right. To me, like, this is like
saying, you know, we're going to build an entire movement. That's like, you know, like, like, just
imagine the left wing version of this. Right. The left wing equivalent of this is like, the only
thing that we are going to run on is that like, vaccines reduce mortality. Higher carbon emissions
is correlated with higher average global temperature. Like, like, a left wing that is like, that
inert, right, just would not exist. Right. It needs to have the kind of like, it needs to tell you
what to think. It can't like, it can't just like provide evidence. Like, like, it just would not
function. That, that to me is like, I mean, like the, the black pill, like, the pessimistic take is
that like, right wing rationalism wouldn't work either. Right. It's the right wing rationalism, you
know, like, but at the same time, you know, you know, I'm a con. So like, there's this broad
question as to whether if you're going to compete with the left, do you do so on leftist terms or
tactics, or do you reject the premise entirely? And the leftist tactics here. So, but what I mean by
let's take math, for example, like, you know, there some schools were banning algebra or whatever it
is or, you know, like, restricting people, like, you know, gifted programs, stuff like that. The
left wing tactic would be to say, no, we need gifting programs. We need to teach kids algebra
because that is the way that people from low income backgrounds are going to get ahead. And by
restricting that, you are getting rid of, what's it called? Like a quality of opportunity. You're
reducing, you know, social mobility. That's a left wing tactic. The right wing tactic would be to
say, actually, like, hierarchy is good. And yeah, people are genetically different. And we should
let the, you know, the most brilliant people rise to the top and let the chips fall where they may.
It's focusing more on the accelerating the top than, you know, bringing up the bottom. Oh, this was
like completely different than what I thought you'd meant. We'll put on a pin on that, but we can
talk about this right now. I think it's a very context dependent. I think a lot of the time as well.
It's like salient space, right? Like, if you're running an election, you should just draw as much
attention to the, to the math topic as possible because it's a classic wide issue, right? It unites
Republicans, split Democrats, you know, like, there's not a single Republican who's going to be
like, you know, actually, we don't like math, right? But there are actually a lot of Democrats that,
you know, like, we mentioned René de Resta, right? René de Resta supports teaching kids math, right?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And she does a lot on leftist grounds, but the Richard's idea around, like,
recognizing genetic differences, I don't think that's going to be very effective. Well, it depends
on what your goals are, but like, that is, you know, the benefit from a pure tactical perspective, I
guess you're playing in places where the other side won't play. But that is such a controversial
issue for, like, it's so anti-leftist. And, you know, we swim in a leftist water, we swim in a
liberal water. And it's, it's, you know, one of our foundational myths is around kind of, you know,
moral equality, equality of opportunity, social mobility, American dream, and genetic differences
just has so much implications. Now, I certainly think that, you know, everything should be able to
be studied. And we should, like, you know, we shouldn't restrict knowledge that would be, you know,
beyond the pale, in a way that is happening now. But in terms of an actual, like, platform that is
going to move people in either the private sector, unless it's, you know, a genetic company, or the
public sector, I don't see it. Do you see it? What's the argument? Right. Like, as motivation, I
mean, like, I think to, like, talk about this properly, we kind of have to talk about, like, why
egalitarianism is motivational. I'll ask you first, like, why do you think egalitarianism motivates
people? We used to live in societies that were very stratified, and they were deliberately
stratified. There was very little social mobility. And as a result of that, there was very little
status anxiety because you knew where you stood. And if you were at a high place, that was because
you were ordained for that. And if you were at a low place, it wasn't like you failed. And then we
introduced a much more socially mobile society. And as a result, where you ended up in society was
up to you and your effort. And so at that point, things became much more high stakes. And so
people's entire concept of self-worth ended up, it would be where they were in society. And so in
order to, I'm greatly simplifying, obviously, but in order to make sense of this or kind of reduce
the anxiety that comes with everything being up to you, certain environmental factors were
introduced. So that or emphasize, I should say, so that it's not really up to you, it's up to it's
up to the environment. That's just easier to take. And so if you're a successful person, you are
effectively a threat to people who are not successful because your success implies that they didn't
try hard enough. And so you could say, okay, what we're going to do instead is we're going to
introduce genetic or environmental reasons, right? I mentioned the environmental reasons, but like
if you introduced genetic reasons, well, the problem with that is then how much social mobility
really is there. And then you're back into a stratified society back where you started, you want to
do that. So regression to the mean, right? It's not completely, it's not intelligence is not 100%
heritable, nor is most trace. Yeah, most people can't really understand the nuance. Most people
think that moral equality should equate with other kinds of equality as well. And the truth is, we
do bestow moral significance to people who have been more successful, like we just celebrate them.
We boost our status on to that. So the, right, but that's because of the genetic knot, right? That's
because they believe that like that first, it's like, this is something that I'm personally very
annoyed by, right? Like the conservative, you know, like pull yourself up by the reboot straps
argument, right? Like that is the form of genetic knot. That is a form of kind of like
egalitarianism that like people believe, they believe that like people are literally created equal.
Yeah, at the same time, there is a, you know, there are things that are optimal for the individual
and there are things that are optimal for the group, right? And so for the for society and for
society, it might be optimal. Or I'll tell you some reasons not in optimal, but it might be more
constructive to, to like not have it super obvious what everyone's IQ is, right? Because let's say
like there are people who don't have super high IQ who've achieved a lot of things, who've been very
accomplished. And if there was a world in which they were known with their IQ was, maybe they just
wouldn't have gone for them. And like a much more provoquial example is entrepreneurship, right? If,
you know, people, there's this joke, I didn't try to do this because I thought it, because it was
easy, I tried to do it because I thought it would be easy, right? And so like people, entrepreneurs
are acting irrationally in many ways. They don't know that the likelihood, or if they knew that the
likelihood of the success was what it actually was, they might not pursue entrepreneurship. And
that's what happened when people become more knowledgeable of, of probabilities, they tend to index
more, right? Because on individual level, you'd rather, you know, cap your upside, if you'd cap your
downside, you know, on average. Now from a societal level, like we benefit from thousands of people
trying to be the next Elon Musk, even if it only means a handful of Elon Musk, because the outliers
outweigh everything else. And so within entrepreneurship, at least I think there's a benefit to
certain irrationality, or it's just a lack of understanding of probabilities because, you know, the
outlier benefits outweigh the costs of people trying. When everyone becomes a rational automaton who
understands probability, they just become much more, you know, much less dynamic, right? Much less
willing to take the risks that society needs. And I think you can extrapolate out. I mean, certainly
there are a ton of costs with the kind of denialism that you're discussing. I'm also elucidating
that there might be some costs with the opposite of the denialism, with really coming to terms with
what ones odds in society are. And in some ways it cuts against the, you know, some of the
simplifications or myths that tie our fabric together, because this idea of the American dream, of
social mobility, do we still want that narrative? I think in some ways we do. And how would you
react to that? Right. When it comes to entrepreneurship, I don't think it's like, it's like somewhat
g-loaded, but it's not completely g-loaded, right? Like I study mentioned in Tyler Cowan's book,
talent, is that. So I think like, I think it was Sweden that like the average IQ is only 130 rate of
entrepreneurs. And of course, you'll have people on the sides of that. So I think like, would it be,
would it be disentivizing or would it be incentivizing? I'm not sure. I think like, you know, like
the rough, the rough approximation people have of like the average entrepreneurs IQ is probably
higher than that. Let me give you an example. I mean, I think there sometimes there's tension
between truth and social cohesion. And you know, there are people like Sam Harris, who I, you know,
I really like despite his recent efforts, but like he, you know, his book lying, like never lie,
like, you know, like truth always. And all of that. Like, what a really interesting example, you
know, IQ is interesting. Another example is like dating apps, right? Like imagine if dating apps
released all their data. If all the day it was public around, I'm sure they have like, you know,
people get ratings in the system. And let's just say like, you know, someone is a nine out of 10 and
all the matches they get and someone is a one out of 10, not someone like a third of the country or
whatever, it just gets like zero. Like, imagine the type of inequality that exists on dating apps
and imagine knowing how hopeless it really is. Like, I mean, there's already a ton of insult
hopelessness to begin with. Like, don't you think that that like information would further
disempower people? Like, wait, so people knew the correct or like knew the ratio of activity on
dating apps. They would be less incentivized to what, like, to use dating apps. Like, I don't really
put themselves out. Like, to put themselves out there. Like, because we're like entrepreneurship. I
mean, like, in dating, you have to, you know, you need, well, you only need one success, you know,
to make a marriage, but you might need to try a lot. And some people might say, oh, you know, my
odds are really stacked against me. I need to, you know, work that much harder. And other people
might say, oh, it's totally hopeless. I mean, this is the same thing the left actually does on race,
right? Like, in the right, we'll criticize them for it. They'll say, hey, certain groups have it so
stacked against them that there's this actual privilege, you know, the other groups have. And people
on the other side will say, hey, by doing this, you are disempowering them. And so there's a
question of like, should we pick the narratives that are most empowering? You know, David Brooks
once said something like when you went on a macro level, everything is is environmental or you
should, you should, you know, overweight environment. On a micro level, you should overweight
individual, you know, nurture, like you should individual opportunity to change one circumstances.
Now, maybe the cost is, hey, you overweighted that and they couldn't change your circumstances. And
now they, you know, are upset because of that. But the positive is you've got a bunch of people
trying to change your circumstances. And some of them actually do. Right. Like the bias of optimism,
I'm, I'm fine with. Right. Like this kind of like, I don't know, like I don't know if I like
specifically myself would kind of engage in the bias towards optimism. Right. But like that again, I
don't think that egalitarian narrative is a bias towards optimism. If anything, like, maybe like in
a vacuum or maybe like the boomer conservative version is a bias towards optimism and then it's
fine. Right. But like in practice, that is not the egalitarian narrative. Right. Like you already
mentioned this a little bit, but the egalitarian narrative is like, oh, it's all because of racism.
It's all because of like capitalist oppression. Right. It's, it's not, you know, like yeah, maybe
maybe you in the ideal world, right. We, we do like the boomer conservatism thing of like, yeah,
everyone, everyone needs to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. Like, I don't know, if they, you
know, censor genetics research based on that or whatever, but that's not really what the right does,
at least not now. Right. Sorry. And yeah, like I would not be like completely opposed to, you know,
making like the bootstraps narrative the kind of like national mythology. Right. But that is just as
long as it stays there, but it just has not stayed there. It just is so vulnerable. You know, like
when you, when you, when you have, you know, like when you have that, it is kind of like if you
start with that assumption and people are like, oh, if, you know, if everyone is born equal, if
everyone has an equal chance of succeeding, you know, then why are there group differences? Right.
Like when you start with that, it's, it's kind of like a, like a principle of explosion, right. And
Matthew, you start with any false claim, you can get to anywhere. You, you can get to, you know, the
claim that like one equals two very easily. And right, like if there is some kind of stable state
where, you know, everyone is a kind of like bootstraps conservative libertarian forever, like that
would be kind of understandable, you know, like from a deontological perspective, maybe I'd still
oppose it, but you know, I think that we'd have like bigger problems to worry about. But like that
just isn't reality. That just isn't the world we live in. Yeah. Have we lived in society that was,
you know, in accordance with all, like all things true, like has every society had its own, its own
myths that have helped create, you know, some sort of harmony. And yeah, they are, you know, liable
to be warped for nefarious self-seeking ends, but this is the state of society. Like, yeah, for
sure, for sure. It's always, you know, it's always incremental, right? It's always marginal. It's
always, you know, like we're not fighting to kind of as much as Darwin would like to, you know,
we're not fighting to turn into like a kind of startup government. I'm just fighting to like have
the ML band, have the machine learning band, be at least postponed if not averted, right? Hopefully
averted. But it's all, yeah, yeah, I agree with you that like in practice, you know, it's all
marginal. It's all about making things slightly better than they used to be. And that's, that's like
the approach I have to things too. So like, yeah, I don't think we're ever going to, you know, like
fully or at least in the short term, I don't think we're going to solve the egalitarian problem at
all. Yeah. And there's a level of egalitarianism that seems to be just a fit strategy for people who
are trying to pursue, you call it making difference, you could call it status seeking. It seems to
be a way for them to do that. And, you know, it's kind of like a like a sorting mechanism though,
right? Like when you do that, you're kind of attracting in some cases the wrong people. Like if I
were right or like, yeah, like if I were trying to attract people to government policy, right? I
would prefer, you know, like all attractors of people, all pipelines of government policy kind of
actively selected against the egalitarianism. Right. Like I think that would lead to better
outcomes. But yeah. And like certainly there are circumstances where I think that that's true. Yeah.
Well, most people tend to optimize for themselves. Yeah. And more so, and this is like the malloc
idea, like everyone just acting on their own, you know, accordance, you know, own self-interest
could lead to some great negative things. But I think you're actually very skeptical of that. I
think that like, people are not really rational. And in a lot of circumstances, the thing that is
leading to people to the, in many cases, like the problem is like people who have power and who are
rational kind of not going to their full extent of how they could use that power. Right. Like like I
think that like people who have power and kind of abide by basic rationality norms should wield that
power more. Do you think that they are optimizing for, like if they were optimizing for self-
preservation, would they be doing, you know, and self-interest self-benefit, would they be doing
something different? Like are they poorly optimizing even for like selfish gains? In many cases,
yes. Right. Of course, this is a case by case basis. But for example, like, yeah, for example, you
know, like many governors pre-descented, like it would have benefited both kind of electorally and
kind of long-term politically for like more governors to advance the RT. Right. Yeah. Like it is
both a kind of like politically successful move. And it is also like a like a strategically
successful move. Um, in that you're kind of denying, denying resources from left-wing patronage
networks. Yeah. Like like a lot of the time, right. This is this is a lot of the kind of like new
right thing is that like, yeah, in terms of like efficiency, right. I'm not sure, you know, some of
them also think they're skeptical of kind of like trade, right. But a lot of the time it's just like
there is an obvious opportunity for kind of for a politician to like gain power for like the vague
right or like not even right, right. Like banning CRT is that really against, you know, kind of like
Matt Iglesias thought or whatever, right. Like not the ban, but like the action itself, right. Like
so it's like beneficial to like 70, 80% of the country. And it's like, and simultaneously, it's it
is in their self interest, right. It actually does help them politically. And they just don't do it.
It is kind of what you're talking about about risk aversion. I think like, yeah, a lot of right-wing
politicians are pretty risk averse. I think there's a broader question as to like, you know, should
you talk left act right or should you talk right act right. I mean, um, I mean, we're kind of
defining right as the kind of like right-wing rationalist thing that I was talking about earlier
where you just say true things that are inconvenient. There are also like real right-wing
ideologies, right. Like populism and traditionalism, right. Like this is this kind of why like a lot
of people don't consider me right-wing, right. Like it's kind of like the Nietzsche unbelievable
critique, right. My life is just structured in such a way that it's so difficult to believe in
traditionalism. My life is structured in such a way where like, you know, every day I'm walking
around this like, I'm walking around this like, honestly, all things considered pretty nice city,
but I'm talking to like so many people. Many of them are, you know, like my fundamental behaviors,
like most of my behaviors are not oriented towards like any kind of rooted tradition, right. Like
this is kind of a reason why I don't necessarily consider myself right-wing because like there are
right-wing moral appeals. Those are like an actual thing. It's just that they've been kind of erased
from a large portion of people's like historical memory, like people who don't like actively, you
know, research think about this stuff or aren't involved and say some kind of religious tradition in
some way, right. Like there's a thing of like actual, like there's a thing of like actual, there's
like an actual right-wing and it's like not just rationalists. I agree, I agree. And in some ways
those are big threats to the actual right-wing. Like I'll give an example, like some like biology is
very, although he, you know, is very good at optics. He is he is not egalitarian. He really believes
in, you know, merit and hierarchy and he's also, you know, he's a family man, got a bunch of kids,
like there's certain sympathies that, you know, the right-wing would have with him and he would have
with right, but he's also a transhumanist and he's also like radically pro-tech. Let's pursue, you
know, life extension, infinite frontier, you know, break up in America. I don't always be foreign in
that regard, but like in ways that many right-wing people would think of him as like a bigger threat
to the right that they know, or the things that they hold dear, you know, a god country than even,
you know, some mainstream or normy Democrats. So yeah, there are certainly, you know, big fishers
within the right as there always have been. Yeah, like I don't know, I myself would definitely not
consider biology right-wing. I'm not sure if he would consider himself right-wing. No, I don't think
so. I don't consider myself right-wing. Yeah, like I think, you know, many people certainly in tech
are, you know, politically almost, right? Yeah, in many cases, right? Like I don't know, like this
is very funny, like the thing is that like my revealed preferences are right-wing, right? Like I
don't, like I don't I want to get married early, I don't want to have sex before marriage. Like my
revealed preferences are pretty socially conservative, but I also, I'm pretty convinced by like
pulling data and like the conclusion that I've drawn from pulling data is that, you know, there's no
public morality, people won't vote for thing, people won't vote for basically like societal parental
controls, right? And with some of the abuses that that could end up with, like that, that's probably
a good thing, right? Like that people in general will not hold themselves to a higher standard of
kind of social morality. And so like you generally, like this kind, this is like not quite the
courtesy of intake, but this is somewhat similar to it in that like most pursuits of social
conservatism, and I mean like social conservatism as in like the traditional version, not not
necessarily like banning CRT, right? But like, you know, like abortion, right? Roe v. Wade is kind
of like a great example of this, right? That that's just going to piss people off, and that that's
not really going to actually make the country more socially conservative in any kind of meaningful
way. Like the way I differ from Yarpin is that like he thinks that this means that you should like,
you know, he wrote the entire like Hobbits and Dark Elves thing. He thinks that you should really
like basically like defer to elites. While I think that it's more of a, I'm more of a kind of like
biology, I'm more sympathetic to biology's idea of like moral, basically like morality first network
states, right? I think, you know, there should be very socially conservative, you know, charter city
in like Utah or something where, you know, you're just not allowed to have abortion. And you know,
if, you know, birth rates continue, right? We'll end up with the entire U.S. like mostly not having
abortion because everyone's, you know, every, you know, with generational selection. Most of the
people in the future who are having kids will be people will kind of fight definition. You will have
will be people who have not reported their kids. I kind of see like that vision as like a vision of
social conservatism that I can get behind. But like in terms of like short-term social conservatism,
it does seem like, it does seem like a misevaluation of like how fucked we are in the present. The
Curtis biology kind of access is interesting as a way of, you know, showing the different points. I
mean, Curtis used biology and, you know, any other kind of, you know, non-left wing, sort of, ide
entrepreneur, as I just say, as further empowering the left. And so he sees the Rufo types and, but
even, even biology. And so they'd be better off doing nothing, like, you know, winning by losing and
waiting for, you know, as Lenin said, like the conditions for the revolution are not yet present or
something. And so whereas biology thinks that Curtis is just giving up and biology doesn't want to
wait like 30 years, you know, and watch the country turn into Brazil or whatever the concern is,
biology thinks that actually like impact can be done, you know, things can be fought. And, you know,
Twitter can be taken over. And maybe other things as well. And so I think that's another thing
that's interesting is because like people will differ on what should be. And they will also differ
on the tactics in terms of how to, how to get there. Right. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. I think like
what's really interesting about these political theories of change is that they're like, they're
almost inverted in that the libertarians, I think, are more passive. And the populists actually
believe that something can be done. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I remember I saw Saurav Trauma, a friend of
the show, like, there was like some kind of new right figure saying something like, would you rather
have the New York Times or would you rather have controlled the New York Times or control the
Senate? And then I think like, I don't remember the exact tweet tweet, but Saurav Trauma, who is I
think the president of American Moments, which is this vaguely new right aligned policy pipeline
for, yeah, vaguely new right aligned policy pipeline, he said, definitely the Senate, this isn't
2016, right? So like, they have this idea, or at least he has this idea, but I think the sentiment
is pretty widely shared that like, actually, the right wing knows how to use power now, or at least
has a better idea of how to use power now. And then actually governments, or like being in charge of
government does matter. And that it is, it is impactful and that there can be policy steps that can
be done. We already talked about Richard Nania, right? He's sort of, although I'm sure he disagrees
with some of Saurav's policy preferences that there is definitely policy that can be done, policy
that can be implemented. Once Republicans have control again to actually do something about these
problems. So I think, actually, it's interesting, there were moments of despair, but I think, within
the new right, I would say that despair is kind of trending downward. So there's increasingly a lot
of white pills being sold. I agree. I think SF is actually an interesting microcosm there, because
the situation was pretty dire, and it is still dire in many ways, but people were saying, hey, tech
is this evil or giant monster taking over the world, and yet it couldn't even sway local elections
that require a few thousand votes that directly affect its interests. And so there's this great
contradiction there. And I think, at some point during COVID, it just became too much, and people,
like all in people, just said, hey, we can actually get Chesa the DA recalled. We can actually get
the school board recall. We can actually like using our influence, like make a difference. And we're
previously, we thought, we were too good for it, or we didn't want to do it. Now it's just
encroached in our lives, in enough material ways, I you see all the people who are moving out of San
Francisco, that like this effort is needed, and it will impact our bottom line. And also it became
like high status thanks to people like Mike Solana, who are fighting the fight of ideas. So I think
SF is just an example of a situation where people got involved locally and are continued to get
involved and made a difference. And now there's kind of a, you know, whole ecosystem there. And I
think you're seeing that sprout sprout up in other places as well. Yeah, at the end, like actually,
you know, you know this better than I do, right? What is the sentiment among, is actually like the
area founders and investors? Like what is their orientation towards politics in the year 2023? Well,
most of them are not political thinkers. I mean, most of them are trying to you know, run their
company and do their job and do it well and have a nice private life. And what happened was sort of
the, you know, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interesting you. Yeah. And
politics started investing all these companies. And it was kind of, you know, ironic and tragic,
like you have these, you know, Indian and Chinese CEOs, like learning the, like, you know, who don't
know the intricacies of US race relations or US, you know, politics now having to defend against all
sorts of accusations of prejudice or things that hold back that if they were to, you know, it's easy
to would hold back their company, especially. And so Silicon Valley is primarily involved in
politics to the effect that it impacts Silicon Valley. It's like one one voter issue. Now that is
both in terms of like their ability to run companies, but also in terms of their ability to like be
seen as good and not get regulated. And for many, you know, people and companies, their approach to
not getting regulated is to comply with the regime. That's like, you know, or quote unquote regime.
Like if you, I didn't know, you know, the lines eating faces party would eat my face. Yeah. Yes.
Yeah. And so I think that's like predominantly, you know, the method of operating. I think, you
know, there is a intellectual class as well within Silicon Valley, even if it's a small minority
that cares, you know, that I think is trying to, in an emergent way, sort of create this culture of
something that is not, you know, that is not woke, but that is not, you know, boomer or Trump
either. And so, you know, it doesn't have a name yet. I think Pirate Wires embodies most of it or a
lot of it. And I think that's why he's built such a strong audience. I think there's a real question
as to like, there's like electoral politics, like, will, you know, will they support Trump?
Certainly not. No way. Decentis. I think I think it's to be decided. I think, you know, David Sacks
has gone on. But I think people are still unsure. I mean, Decentis is not as distasteful, but he's
certainly leaning into aggressive culture, and it's not like he's like the techie or, you know,
really like understands or appreciates tech. So I think it's, I think it's unclear, but I think, I
mean, Silicon Valley, like many fields that have, you know, attracted, like, a lot of really amazing
talent because of all their wealth, you know, attracts a lot of agreeable people. Like, most in
order for companies to scale and get big and have impact, you need a lot of agreeable people. I
mean, you need like, disagreeable people as founders and as like, you know, builders without the
org, you need some balance, basically, between disagreeability and agreeability. But like, on a
large dimension, certainly like morally, Silicon Valley is like very agreeable, it wants to be seen
in good standing. I mean, it's your point about ESG. Like, they want to be seen as doing well and
doing good at like making money. And so, and the left is just better, egalitarian is just often a
better narrative. Like, one that seems more palatable than like pursuing excellence, you know,
excellent. That's like not as much in vote. Like, people who are from an excellence haven't done a
great marketing job relative to people voting egalitarianism. And so, yeah, because like chasing
after the real thing involves like efforts and involves being after like, like being excellent is
just like a much more difficult thing than being egalitarian, right? Like, especially in an
environment like SF, right? Or especially in an environment in certain companies where, you know,
the baseline is already really high. You know, like, it's one thing to be, you can be a egalitarian
with anyone, but it's like, you know, it's one thing to be excellent at like, you know, some random,
some random public college. It's another thing to be excellent at like, open AI, right? Like, you
really have to be, you know, if that's your legitimating narrative, right? You really have to be,
you know, like on a completely other level, like maybe Elon can do that, right? Like, but yeah, like
kind of like the higher, you know, like the higher the bar is, the higher, you know, the higher
relative to it, you have to be, right? It is, it is pretty interesting though. Like, here is an
interesting case where I think like immigration maybe marginally solves this problem, right? It
might make others worse like lockdowns, anti-market science events. But in, I think like in a very
noticeable way, immigrants kind of understand intuitively, like both meritocracy and genetic
differences much more. Yeah, I do think like, this is a very strange one because it's like, it's
coded exactly the opposite way, right? Like left wingers supposedly like immigrants, right wingers,
right wingers supposedly dislike immigrants. I don't know. Well, right wingers say, you know, like
we like legal immigrants, we dislike illegal immigrants. Yeah, but in general, it's kind of coded as
left wing, but I think the, in terms of like within the tech ecosystem, within like what works in
tech, I think it's almost, you know, 180 degrees the opposite way. Like the white people like the
egalitarianism, the immigrants like the meritocracy. I think that is generally how it is, like, I
think that is generally like the intro tech scene, right? Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. Like
maybe at the same time, like, you know, a lot of companies now have Indian CEOs and like, you know,
I'm thinking about this on the fly, but like those companies are often like peacetime companies. I
mean, you could say Saudi air right now is wartime. And you know, there's anecdotes, but like a lot
of these immigrants, well, I'm not even sure if they're immigrants, if they're Indian, just like
have grown up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, even born America or went to like American inspired universities. I
mean, there's certainly like, like there is something to the idea that West Yang said about Andrew
Yang, which is he, because he is neither white nor black, he is not like a threat, or he's not part
like there is something. And one thing that's interesting about Asian people that like go to Ivy
League schools and like are smart enough to understand that they're like being systemically
discriminated against. And yet in many scenarios, I'm sure you've seen this, like actually support
it. And you're just misunderstanding the selection effect here, right? Like Asians, like Asians who
are good at school mostly are just like apolitical, right? Like the selection effect here,
especially for like egalitarian ideologies, is like Asians who are not good at school and whose
parents are disappointed in them. Like that is the constituency, that constituency specifically,
right? Like if, like here is like the thing, like I disagree with a lot of like the mandatory voting
things, right? But if you had like mandatory voting, the Asians as a demographic would seem would go
in a very different way. And like even in countries like Canada, right? Asians are much more of a
swing vote. Yeah, that makes sense. And certainly in SF, they've had a huge impact. I mean, I think
one thing about like more broadly in this conversation is, is Elon Musk is, you know, literally like
as talented as it gets. Like as credible and as talented as it gets. And even he in his most recent
turn to be more, well, you could call it more right. I mean, there's a number of things you could
say about him. But like, it seems like he's, or it's unclear that he's better off for it. Like I
hear he's having a harder time, attract talent than when he was more politically neutral. He
certainly I'm sure is upgrading, you know, introducing new talent to the right, I would say, or to
anti left or anti woke ideas. Yeah, like Elon Musk is kind of like peak right wing ration list,
right? Like he's, you know, he's had like IVF children, like how many now 11, you know, he's got a
choice. Like like how far apart are like Elon Musk and Richard and I, yeah, ideologically, right?
Like probably not that far. Right. And but the question is like, is he taking a sacrifice for doing
so? And, you know, if yes, basically like if you want more people to shift ideologically, like it's
hard to rely on people to make sacrifices, because that how's that going to happen at scale, right?
So, yeah, that's fair. At the end of the day, you know, like there are things, there are things that
cannot be accomplished without like a shift in the state religion, you know, like I did say, I did
say that I don't reasonably expect to kind of like overturn, you know, the egalitarian conspiracy
theory that is, you know, like the state religion of the United States. But would be nice, right?
Yeah, like I do think, yeah, I do think what you're saying is like, right, we don't have too much
time, but I can kind of give the brief version of this. I know I did send you this in a in a write
up, but I actually think that like a lot of social traditions are kind of like are not like
restricting egalitarianism, or sorry, are not like in favor of egalitarianism, but are rather
restricting egalitarianism, right? Like this is kind of based on a book, hierarchy, and in the
forest by Christopher Bohm, I talked about it with Mark Kent, or say, what did I say Mark? Rob
Henderson earlier in this, in, or like not earlier, but like, yeah, in an earlier episode, sorry,
I'm getting a bit tired. And the thesis of the book is that we had egalitarian societies for much of
hunter gatherer history, and the way that those egalitarian societies came about is by brutal
murder. So someone was significantly more talented, attracted significantly more, more mates, right?
You kind of had like the long arc of history was like basically like in cell crime, right? It was
basically like egalitarian in cell crime, you know, killing the guy who was taking the most mates.
And this eventually developed into social norms that were like a quote unquote moderate version of
this, and that's egalitarianism, where people would mock, they would try to attack the social status
of more successful hunters in order to, you know, decrease the likelihood of having to compete with
them. And that, basically, this leads to, this is like basically the earliest manifestation of like
egalitarian social norms, right? We're going to pretend everyone's equal because, you know, this was
actually, you know, Malthusian times, pre-industrial times, it was mostly actually a zero sum
resource conflict. And so, you know, the, you know, the installs get mates and the more successful
hunters, they don't get, you know, brutally murdered. And this, this has happened for basically like
most of human evolutionary time, right? Most of especially pre-civilizational human history. And
that, you know, introduced these kind of egalitarian essentially like biological instincts. The
moral of the story is, you know, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. Okay, yeah. The moral of the story,
you know, is that if we really want to undo the problem, we will need at the very least gene
editing. So, or, you know, another million years of selection, which have many people who don't
think we will have. I'm not sure if we want to get into that rabbit hole. Well, the intersection of
software eating the world and egalitarianism is the world is very interesting because what software
does is it exacerbates, you know, disparities because... Yeah, yeah. This is my favorite biology
quote, right? Like freedom and inequality are, and inequality are synonyms. Yeah. Right? Like the
more options you give people, the more abilities, the more capacity you give people, the more
they're going to be chosen in different ways. Yep. And at the same time, so it exacerbates
disparities, it codifies those disparities in like, legible ways. Right, measures. Yeah, okay. But
then it also presents ways to maybe fix them because it creates like control mechanism. You can see
like, you know, D.I. in some degree is like, it's this in the labor market, right? Like, you know,
more efficient labor markets mean more inequality, you know, like the fact that we have labor
marketplaces, you know, can like allows us to measure the disparity in really efficient ways. And
because, you know, those same companies, you know, like can be captured by the government in all
sorts of different ways, like they have to, or they get to depending on your perspective, enable
mechanisms to redistribute or make it more egalitarian at scale. And so software is both a naveler
of the inequality, but also a naveler of the thing that can jump in to help fix the inequality. It's
kind of like a, you know, whack them all type, type situation. And, you know, people say that, you
know, transgenderism leads to transhumanism, or could be like, because, you know, and like gene
editing is something that the left would be a pariah of the left. But if it's, if once it's in the
hands of, hey, we can actually like make people equal. Well, hey, that's a pretty exciting idea for
certain, certain, you know, egalitarians. Right. Like a Harrison Virgeron. Yes. That would be really
a dystopia. Actually, it'd be fine. In that case, we just let China win. China gets to inherit the
earth. Well, it wouldn't be fine, but like, it would not be a dystopia. Like, you know, like if a
regime wants to use gene editing to make people equal instead of better, then like China is the less
evil power there. Yeah. The, I'm going to zoom out because this is the fundamental question to me,
at least at the intersection of, you know, egalitarianism and meritocracy. And this is actually
Agnes Callard's question where she says, you know, morality requires we maintain a safety net at the
bottom that catches everyone. But we also need an aspirational target at the top. So as to inspire
us to excellence, creativity, accomplishment. So moral worth needs to be for free, but also
acquired, required, as to inspire people to do it. And so, like, how do we reconcile those
contradictions is the task for how we reconcile, you know, egalitarianism and meritocracy or get the
best. I think Christianity is pretty good. Like, I don't know. Like some people on the right think,
you know, like Christianity is slave morality and it's leading to the level of egalitarianism we
have now, you know, it's like a slippery slope argument. Given like my kind of argument to that is
like the stuff we talked about earlier, right, hierarchy in the forest, it kind of always has been
egalitarian. In that view, right, like Christianity was upstream of the enlightenment, it was
upstream of the industrial revolution, right? Like the, the argument for Christianity is like no
one, you know, basically that you have to go through merit or you have to go through it in order to
reach merit, right? Like, and I still don't think it's that bad of the system for kind of aligning
the moral value at the end of the day, right? Like I think, you know, it's been it's been around for
2000 and 23 years. I think it could go for 2023 more, you know, I believe, you know, we'll go on for
and turn B until, you know, we're all, uh, we'll let it happen. But like, I think just from like an
empirical perspective as well, you know, like Christianity does a good job of doing this. Um, yeah,
I do think it's ironic that the thing that replaced, you know, the slave morality of Christianity
was like more slave morality. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've checks and balances and, and it was
kind of like a bastardized version of the slave morality parts of Christianity and, and maybe
there'll be a bastardized version of, um, kind of the, the more master morality part of Christianity
or the less slave morality part because- Right, right. This is why I think Nietzsche's historical
retelling is just wrong, right? Like he's kind of comparing, you know, modern, modern mass morality,
or like not modernism, like literally now, but like modernism, his contemporary mass morality to
like the elite morality of days ago, right? Like, like, like, if Nietzsche, you know, like, like I
would wonder what he would think of like simultaneously having, you know, the worst slave morality,
um, but also having like at many elite levels, right? In many elite, elite circles, um, especially
like the capitalist elite, not necessarily the kind of, you know, not necessarily the social or the
politically, but like capitalist elite where I think his morality or like what his kind of like
integrated morality is much better adopted than like almost anywhere else in history. So yeah, I
think I see like, I'd love to have, you know, and you're like Simone and Malcolm Collins, they've
been on this show. They want to create a new religion. Uh, good, good luck with that. Um, well,
anything that is a new religion can't call itself a new religion, I think that gives it an attack
vector, like to the extent that you think, yeah, um, and also we have separation of church and
state. And so if you're a religion, you know, like the most effective religions take over this day,
right? Or, or, you know, penetrate state. So that's, that's a person's state. Right. We have a
little less than 30 minutes left, uh, which, which topic do you want to cover? Do you want to cover,
uh, AI? Do you want to cover crypto? Do you want to cover, um, interest rates? Um, I think crypto
would be cool. But first I want to expand on my answer. You asked me about SF politics and I said
they're mostly, you know, self-interested and, and, you know, um, not super electorally focused. But
to the extent that there is a, is a platform, I want to describe it a little bit, um, on both the
macro and microwave in terms of how I see it anyway, I, I think it's this, like, I was just a riff
for, for, for maybe it would be something like it's, it's, it's okay to be an elite. It's okay to
want to be elite. It's okay to want your children to be an elite. Uh, you know, we're not racist.
We're not sexist. Uh, you know, capitalism is good actually. Tech is good actually. Crime is bad
actually. Uh, we shouldn't be forced to hire people who are not qualified. Um, you know, some taxes
are fine, but government is a disaster zone and we shouldn't be keeping feeding it more money. Uh,
the schools should teach real topics, you know, like math and not indoctrinate kids. Pro math, yeah.
Um, and, you know, we need politics out of our companies, like stat, um, of any kind. Um, and at the
same time, let's not like relitigate things like abortion or gay marriage or immigration, things
that make us seem like bad people to the people that we care about. Um, and, and I'm on a mic, more
micro way, I think there's like, you know, you can look at the, you know, philosophies and practices
of caring and empathy that dissolve into kind of veneration of victimhood and, in fact, everyone
with resentment and, and misery and, and see that it's a straight downward spiral of, you know,
bitterness and the, and you could say, like, you don't need to live like this. Um, I think like, you
know, we don't, we don't need to feel like this, you know, you don't need to feel miserable at
yourself all the time. You don't, you, this is kind of like the George St. Peterson's look of value,
like, like, like, you can be normal and happy and non-judgmental and productive and satisfied. You
can treat people in business as individuals and not feel the need to obsessively keep, you know,
demographic scores or treat people like tokens. Uh, you're not racist. You don't need to think about
race. You can make money. Um, it should, in fact, making money shows you're doing something that
other people value. You can donate some of it to help the last portion or as much as you want and
you can, you know, spend whatever you want to knowing that spending is helping other people provide
for their families. You can say what you think and if other people don't like it, they can go home
and be upset, but you don't have to be. Other people can say things that offend you and you can
shrug and move on with your life. It, you can make mistakes. They can be your fault. You can fix
them. You can enjoy the spoils of your work. You can work hard and outcompete others and, and, and
achieve great heights and not feel guilty about it. You can also choose to live a calmer life if you
want to. I mean, the most ironic thing is that the, uh, you know, one of the most controversial
topics in tech Twitter is, you know, how hard should you work? Um, which just shows like the core of
the, the effort to divide. Anyways, I'm kind of rambling a bit, but those are some of the both, I
think macro like political takes and also some of the micro like, you know, how one should live
one's life or how, how, how we should approach one's life that I think comes out of a, you know,
sort of technologist builder mindset. Right. It's interesting that you use that term because I
actually had a, I had a conversation with, uh, with a friend about builder versus founder. To me,
like, I kind of have a negative taste in my mouth when I think of like the people who call
themselves builders. Like, like, I'm thinking of basically like the 2018-ish hackathon scene, which
I was pretty skeptical. I actually think like this maybe is also a controversial take, but I think
like monetization and like, bounties and, uh, crypto have been a net, like, extremely net positive
influence on the hackathon scene. Um, like pre-crip, people don't remember that, like the pre-crypto
hackathon scene was just like enormously busy work. And, you know, even if like the crypto stuff,
like, is like infrastructure that's not all that technically complex and, you know, not like
scientifically revolutionary in any way or form, at least it's like worth something to someone,
right? Instead of literally being, you know, like, side projects that are actually not functional in
doing anything, then make someone's resume looks slightly more impressive. Yeah. You know a lot more
than me on the, uh, on the hackathon front. I do think, okay, I did not expect that. I do think
builders, well, hackathon is more of a younger man's game and more. That's fair, so that's fair. Um,
I think the, what builder enables is just a wider, like, if you're, if you haven't started a
company, what do you call yourself? Okay, that's fair. Yeah, that's fair. People use the term
operator, but that's like not that compelay. So the more charitable view of builder is just that
it's more comprehensive to include people who do great work, but haven't really founded the
companies. Sure. Yeah. Um, so one of the, one of the topics on this list reads crypto as ESG for
libertarians. Uh, I'm sure, uh, we have not, you know, we, we have not pissed off all groups
equally. So, uh, for the sake of equity, let's talk about crypto for the sake of intellectual
diversity in being annoyed at the tapes in this podcast. Let's talk about, let's, let's talk about
crypto. Uh, first of all, how much of crypto was a zero interest rate than all none? Um, the, well,
it seems like, um, a lot of crypto was, um, you know, accelerated by easy money. Um, and so, you
know, the industry has, um, you know, contracted, um, but, um, you know, we're not going to have
high interest rates forever and, um, good times we'll, we'll come back. So I certainly a lot of the
speculation was funneled by, by zero interest rates, um, but also, you know, this woman, Carlota
Perez has a great, um, you know, uh, study of how different technological revolutions, um, go
through cycles. And one of those cycles happens with initial mania and a bubble that leads a ton of,
you know, people to spend all this money on all these projects, some of which go nowhere, but others
of which become like the critical infrastructure for, um, the next hype cycle. And so right now,
there's a crypto winter in terms of, um, you know, capital invested and in terms of certain projects
that relied on zero interest rates or, you know, high yields. At the same time, there, um, there's,
you know, a lot more purists, and there's a lot more developer activity, um, prior. So, um, that's
how I'd, uh, how I'd respond there. Yeah, the cynical take is that like, AI was right there, right?
It was lying there. It was, you know, um, and it just didn't have one like very effective proof of,
proof of concept yet. And then like, like, the main difference between kind of like, AI state of the
art, um, you know, like, what was it? What, you know, like 20, like summer 2022, and AI state of the
art now is like pretty negligible, but it was mostly just like really, first of all, releasing stuff
to the public. And second of all, like having a really nice clean proof of concept in chat GPT.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, seeing, you know, there were countless people who switched from Web3 to
AI, you know, just like that. Um, so certainly, um, it was, it was right under a nose and the
combination of, you know, the markets, tanking, and thus, you know, financial, like FinTech, tanking
alongside of it, including inclusive crypto, also enabled, um, or, you know, accelerated AI's, you
know, mind share. But I think the ESG, um, analogy is, uh, doesn't hold as much for me because ESG
to me sounds like a way for finance people to seem moral or pure, um, but it's not really rigorous,
whereas they're not true believers. Um, or, or, or the true believers, they're not like, like ESG is
not built on, you know, interesting intellectual capital, whereas I think crypto, um, does have a
much richer intellectual, substrate to it. And it's also worth, you know, calling out that there are
like many different substrates, right? Like the Bitcoin community, um, you know, builds off of the,
the, you know, the Austrian economics tradition, you know, some libertarianism, and it's all about
kind of de-politicizing finance from, from governments. They're, you know, separating all, you know,
state money, right? Whereas the Ethereum tribe is, um, trying to, um, instead of focusing on de-
politicizing from the government, they're de-politicizing from big corporations, right? And so, um,
you know, the Facebook's and the, you know, the other centralized, um, you know, powers of the world
that are in the private sector. And that's like a cursory reading. But they are true ideological
believers who are trying to manifest the world. It's like a much more practical EA, I think, or like
much more technical, much more practical, an experimental, um, version of, of, of having impact. So,
um, I see it as, as, as Julia, you know, ideological people are trying to make, make, make a
difference. The technology is not nearly there to the same degree that AI is, um, certainly. AI is
like major, you know, technological breakthroughs have been. Right. Like, Peter Thiel famously said,
you know, like, crypto is communist, or, no, AI is communist. Crypto is libertarian. If crypto were
not libertarian, right? If the main, you know, like, marketing around cryptos, like CBDCs or
whatever, central bank digital currencies or whatever, right, and not like the Bitcoin intellectual
tradition, what do you think that would have, affected in terms of investment in crypto? Yeah, I
mean, it's a good example of talking left acting, right? Like, in terms of like, you know, it's a
way of making a lot of money and it's a way of, um, you know, trying to do good at the same time.
And, you know, uh, Daniel Gross said on a podcast recently is like, uh, you know, fire can be used
for arson, and it can be used for cooking. And so, you know, crypto can be used for libertarian
ends, and certainly the people who are working on it are trying to do it, but it can also be used
for state, you know, state control ends. And, um, and, you know, same with AI there, right? And so
it wouldn't be hilariously ironic if, um, if crypto was largely used for, um, you know,
authoritarian ends, and maybe the opposite with, uh, with AI. Yeah, that's what Sam, Sam Hammond
thinks will happen. Um, yeah. Uh, I think that what's, what's very interesting is that like, the
narrative of profitability around crypto became like the actual narrative, like, the narrative of
like making things that were not profitable before, like NFTs were kind of based on this, right?
We're going to like finally make art profitable, right? We're going to, we're going to supercharge
monetization, right? The narrative for making things profitable became what was profitable, right?
Like, so, so when you have these kind of like true believers, when you have like libertarian true
believers, they induce kind of like a market shift in the same way that like political true
believers induce like a, like a political shift, right? Like, that sounded like, in my head, that
sounded like an awfully biology like sentence, and I tried to make it less biology like, and it only
became more biology like of a sentence. Man, I think, I mean, crypto that's non ideological, maybe
just looks like fintech, like fintech, right? Yeah, is, you know, there's a lot of capital in
fintech, but they're just non-autological about it. I mean, there's some, you know, types of
companies that are trying to expand access and have, you know, strong optics and strong kind of a
more egalitarian mission, but most of it is just like really practical people being like, hey, we're
just going to focus on like making as much money as possible. And so, yeah, maybe that's what it'll
look like. Yeah, and I should say, you know, like, I went to East Denver, I respect the crypto
people. I think I had a tweet that was something like, crypto is the most trusty and, or like
movement I've ever seen. Everyone loves being low trust, but really I could leave my laptop
anywhere, and it would be there in a day. Yeah, very high trust community, and I am pearl high trust
communities, so it's definitely great. Okay, we'll return a little bit to some of the earlier, some
of the earlier topic and ask for some advice for young people. This has been a very fun, I think,
topic for like revealing how people think in, I think, at least a less ideological way, but what do
you think are good steps for young people in terms of dating? Good question. Well, I think I'm only
going to speak to men here, because I don't I don't know the women side as well. I think one thing I
think to really appreciate about dating for men is that it gets a lot better as you get older, and I
think it's hard to fully appreciate that, and you know, you can accelerate that, but basically like
the more you have to offer to the world, the more successful you are, the more you're going to be an
attractive person, and so you can try to sort of like, you know, product and marketing, like you
could try to focus on marketing, like your clothes and, you know, sort of like certain ticks and
stuff like that, and that's important, like you should do that, like marketing is really important,
but like, you know, what you have to offer the world, I either like the product, and that's not just
your career, but career is really important, it's also like your sense of integrity, like, you know,
your values, like that is, you know, marketing bad products and never going to work, and you know,
the challenge of a lot of like, dating advice is it's really like short-term, it's really like
marketing focus, so I mean, I think it's like, you know, Naval even has this line, it's like, you
know, if you want to marry an incredible person, be an incredible person, like, you know, and so I
think, you know, dating, but it's one it's worth often, like, recognizing what is the long-term
goal, long-term goal is presumably a amazing partnership, you know, like marriage, that could happen
early on if you find the right person, it doesn't have to happen, like, right away, and the more
that you, like, work on yourself, the easier it will be, and I guess I'm implicitly talking to
someone early on, because you're saying asking for advice and flying, like, maybe it's not coming
super easily, and so, you know, like, keep working yourself, be patient, and great things will come,
at the same time, like, I think friendship is a great way for a relationship to form, like, even
knowing that you're looking for a long-term partnership, I think separates you from a lot of other
men who are not looking for that, and so getting to a place where you are looking for that I think
is more likely to lead you to happiness than kind of engaging in fuckery, so I would probably get
more serious early on, I would surround yourself with the men that you want to be, and so I would
look at your, I would encourage you to look at your circle of people, and look at the influences
that you have, you know, online as well, and say, like, are these the men that I want to be, like,
do they have great partners, do they have great, you know, relationships, and, you know, it's much
easier to change your environment than your insides, we tend to become the things that shape us that
that are surround us, so I would focus on that as well as the personal growth, any reactions to
that? Right, I think, I'm worried that, like, how much do you think, like, becoming more valuable,
or like, some people, I think that's definitely the case, right? Like, like, like, young person with
a startup versus like, young person with a, you know, multi-million dollar company, definitely,
definitely huge change in value, right? I'm not sure if that's true for like most, I'm not sure if
like the relative advantage in dating markets for most men is because of increases in their value
versus just like relative and like true relative decreases in women's value, just in terms of like
fertility, right? Like, like, that's a cynical take on it, is that like, the market dynamics are
just true, or like, the market dynamics reflect something real, but like, the thing that is real is
that like, for example, if you want to have kids, right, your prospect are just worse, right? I
agree. I mean, I'm in support of, you know, finding someone early if you can. I think just a reality
that people that may, men may not understand is that like, women are less likely to date down, so,
and date down on all areas. So like, the women who has a more successful career than you do, and not
limited to career, but that's one big element to it, is, is, is not going to date you, probably. And
so, the more successful you are, the wider your pool is, basically. And that's why, like, younger
men are disadvantaged relative to older men, among other reasons. So, but I do agree with you that
relative that, yeah, the woman change is more significant, and of course, that impacts, you know,
male options. Right, and the second thing is like, finding someone at all, right? I think like,
especially people like similar, or are mutual circles, you know, like share, like, like, either idea
space or like, startup space, right? There's a pretty big, you know, there's a pretty big, sex ratio
there. Yeah, I mean, I know it's super generic, it doesn't work for everybody. Like, I do think
dating your best friend, or dating someone who could be a best friend, I think is pretty good
advice. Like, you know, no individual person is going to be everything to everyone, and there's
going to be, you know, as unromantic as it sounds, like sacrifices on some dimension. But if you
have a best, like, someone's truly, you know, you would be super close with, even if you weren't
dating, because you just respect them so much, you appreciate them so much, you could handle the
highs and lows with them. You know, that, that feels like a pretty good thing to optimize for, and
if you have the opposite feeling, like, I don't know how sustainable that dynamic is, you know,
going through the, like, thinking about who I can have a fun weekend with, or who you can have a fun
year with, is very different from who you can have, you know, a family with, and, you know, build a
life with. And I think we don't really fully appreciate that, like, you know, when were you on?
Right. Good advice. Last question of the show, always the last question of the show. I'm sure you're
prepared to some very good answers to this. What is something that is too much chaos and needs more
order and something that's too much order and needs more chaos? It's a shame that I, given how much
I enjoy the show, I, I should have answered for it. Let me think for a minute. Yeah, yeah, it's hard
because we talked about so much. Yeah, usually I want something that we haven't talked about yet.
I'm sure there are many examples that we have talked about. I think I really like you're saying
about in order to protect the market, you need to like exit the market, or like, directly where
you're going with that. And I would love to see much more experimentation on that, on that access.
So I would love to see tech get more engaged with politics, with policy, with culture, with
education, things that don't, like, make them rich right away necessarily, but, you know, protect
the broader ecosystem and hopefully will present, you know, more options for them down the road. And
so I would love to see more, kind of chaos is the right word, but certainly experimentation. Like, I
love that, you know, Barry Weiss and Joe Lawson, I just said, hey, screw it, looks like making a new
university. And the team there that did that, like, I'd love to see much more of that. And I think
when something seems too ordered, or too regulatory, or too whatever, blah, not worth our time,
like, that's where we need to to see more experimentation because, you know, otherwise that order,
that bureaucracy will just become even more cemented. And then in terms of effective libertarianism.
Yes. And then in terms of what has chaos and needs more order, I actually think, you know, one
challenge in the tech community is that they're all these companies are competing with each other,
like Facebook and Apple and Google and, you know, Microsoft and now OpenAI, like, it's actually hard
to have, like, tech as a class act together because those companies are trying to kill each other.
And so I think we need a better job, you know, biology starts about like a NATO for CEOs before,
like, I think we need more organization around, like, collective tech lobbying, so to speak, in a
product. Some class solidarity. Yes, exactly. I'm sure this is wonderful. That's a pretty good note
to end on. Anything else you'd like to add before the end of the show? Of these four hours? I
enjoyed this conversation. I'm excited to see what you decide to do. To do next, I appreciate that
you, you know, shared the conversation that we had with your audience, and I hope you continue to do
so. People who've made it this way have a strong, made it this long, have a strong connection to
you, and I think there will be a number of people who you'll be able to recruit for whatever you do
because of it. So excited to see you continue to follow your path. Yeah, I'll be awesome. And I'll
just leave this as a note for the ending. This was my final one of the most enjoyable episodes so
far. I had a few podcasts that I think were still like very informative and very interesting, but
for me, we're personally, like, pretty rough and pretty, like, I felt like I made some mistakes. But
for this one, it was, it was just very thoroughly enjoyable the entire way through. So yeah, thanks
for, thanks for coming on. It was great. Awesome. Thanks, Brian. I hope you enjoyed my conversation
with Eric Torenberg. If you'd like to help us out, the number one thing you can do is to let a
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