Nadia Asparouhova - Tech Elites, Democracy, Open Source, & Philanthropy

you start with this idea that like democracy is green and like we should have tons and tons of people participating tons of people participate and then it turns out that like most participation is actually just noise and not that useful that really squarely puts spf into like the finance crowd much more so than um startups or or crypto founders will always talk about like building and like startups is like so important or whatever and like what are all of them doing in their spare time they're like reading books they're reading essays and, and then those like books and essays influence how they think about stuff. Okay.
Today, I have the pleasure of talking with Nadia Asparova. She is previously the author of Working in Public, The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software.
And she is currently researching what the new tech elite will look like. Nadia, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me. Yeah, okay.
So this is perfect timing, obviously, given what's been happening with SPF. How much do you think SPF was motivated by effective altruism? Where do you place them in the whole dimensionality of idea machines and motivations? Yeah, I mean, I know there's sort of like conflicting accounts going around.
Like, I mean, just from my sort of like character study or looking at SBF, it seems pretty clear to me that he is sort of inextricably tied to the concepts of utilitarianism that then motivate effective altruism. The difference for me in sort of like where I characterize effective altruism is I think it's much closer to sort of like finance Wall Street elite mindset than it is to startup mindset, even though a lot of people associate effective altruism with tech people.
So, yeah, to me, like that really squarely puts SPF in sort of like the finance crowd much more so than startups or crypto. And I think that's something that gets really misunderstood about him.
Interesting. Yeah, I find that interesting because if you think of Jeff Bezos when he started Amazon, he wasn't somebody like John Perry Barlow who was just motivated by the free philosophy of the internet.
You know, he saw a graph of internet usage going up into the right and he's like, I should build a business on top of this. And in a sort of loophole-y way, try to figure out like, what is the thing that is the first thing you would want to put a SQL database on top of to ship and produce? And books was the answer.
And obviously he also came from a hedge fund, right? Would you play somebody like him also in the old finance crowd rather than as a startup founder? Yeah, it's kind of a weird one because he's both associated with the early computing revolution,

but then also AWS was sort of like

what kicked off all of the 2010s

sort of startup.

And I think in the way that he's

started thinking about his public legacy

and just from sort of his public behavior,

I think he fits much more squarely now

in that sort of tech startup elite mindset

of the 2010s crowd,

more so than the Davos elite crowd of the 2000s. What in specific are you referring to? Well, he's come out and been like sort of openly critical about a lot of like Davos type institutions.
He kind of pokes fun at mainstream media and for not believing in him, not believing in AWS. And I think he's because he like spans across like both of these generations, he's been able to see the evolution of like how maybe like his earlier peers function versus the sort of second cohort of peers that he came across.
But to me, he seems much more like, much more of the sort of like startup elite mindset. And I can kind of back up a little bit there.
But what I associate with the Davos Wall Street kind of crowd is much more of this focus on quantitative thinking, measuring efficiency, and then also this like globalist mindset. Like I think the vision that they want to ensure for the world is this idea of like a very interconnected world where we, you know, sort of like the United Nations kind of mindset.
And that is really like literally what the DevOps gathering is. Whereas Bezos from his actions today feels much closer to the startup like Y Combinator post AWS kind of mindset of founders that were really made their money by taking these non-obvious bets on talented people.
So they were much less focused on credentialism. They were much more into this idea of meritocracy.
I think we sort of forget like how commonplace this trope is of like, you know, the young founder in a dorm room. And that was really popularized by the 2010s cohort of the startup elite of being someone that may have like absolutely no skills, no background in industry, but can somehow sort of like turn the entire industry over on its head.
And I think that was sort of like the unique insight of the tech startup crowd. And yeah, when I think about just sort of like some of the things that Bezos is doing now, it feels like she identifies with that much more strongly of being this sort of like lone cowboy or having this like one talented person with really great ideas who can sort of change the world.
I think about the, what is it called, the Altos Institute or the new like science initiative that he put out where he was recruiting these like scientists from academic institutions and paying them really high salaries just to attract like the very best top scientists around the world. That's much more of that kind of mindset than it is about like putting faith in sort of like existing institutions, which is what we would see from more of like a Davos kind of mindset.
Interesting. Do you think that in the future, like the kids of today's tech billionaires will be future aristocrats.
So effective altruism

will be a sort of elite aristocratic philosophy. They'll be like tomorrow's Rockefellers.

Yeah, I kind of worry about that, actually. I think of there as being like within the U.S.,

we're kind of lucky in that we have these two different types of elites. We have the aristocratic

elites and we have meritocratic elites. Most other countries, I think, basically just have

aristocratic elites, especially comparing like the U.S. to Britain in this way.
And so in

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

I guess, more so than the meritocratic elites.

But I believe that in the U.S.,

the amount of people who give to philanthropy

and the total amount they give

is higher than in Europe, right?

Where they probably have a higher ratio

of aristocratic elites.

Wouldn't you expect the opposite

if the aristocratic elites are the ones that are you know inculcated to give back uh well i assume like most of the people that are um the figures about sort of like americans giving back is spread across like all americans not just the wealthiest yeah yeah so you you would predict that among the the top 10 percent of americans there's less philanthropy than the top 10 percent of europeans uh uh there's sorry i'm not sure i understand the question at the i guess does the ratio of meritocratic to aristocratic elites change how much philanthropy there is among the elites

um yeah i mean like here we have much more of a culture of like even among aristocratic

elites this idea of like institution building or like large donations to like build institutions whereas in europe a lot of the public institutions are created by a government and and there's sort of this mentality of like like private citizens don't experiment with public institutions that's the government's job and they're like you see that sort of like pervasively throughout all of like european culture is like um when we want when we want something to change in public society we look to government to like regulate or change it whereas in the u.s it's kind of much more like choose your own adventure and you um and we don't really see the government as like the sole provider or shaper of public institutions.

We also look at private citizens and like there's so many things that like public institutions that we have now that were not started by government, but were started by private philanthropists. And that's like a really unusual thing about about the U.S.
So there's this common pattern in philanthropy where a guy will become a billionaire and then his wife will be heavily involved with or even potentially in charge of, you know, the family's philanthropic efforts. And there's many examples of this, right? Like Bill and Melinda Gates, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and yeah, yeah, exactly.
And Dustin Moskovitz. And yeah.
So what is the consequence of this? How is philanthropy, the causes and the foundations, how are they different because of this pattern? Well, I mean, I feel like we see that pattern. Like the problem is that what even is philanthropy is changing very very quickly so we can say historically that not even historically in in recent history in recent decades that has probably been true that wasn't true in say like um late 1800s early 1900s it was you know carnegie and rockefeller were the ones that were actually doing their own philanthropy not their spouses um so i'd say it's a more recent trend.
But now I think we're also seeing this thing where like a lot of wealthy people are not necessarily doing their philanthropic activities through foundations anymore. And that's true both within like traditional philanthropy sector and sort of like the looser definition of what we might consider to be philanthropy, depending on how you define it, which I kind of more broadly want to define as like the actions of elites that are sort of like, you know, public facing activities.
But like even within sort of traditional philanthropy circles, we have like, you know, the 5.1c3 nonprofit, which is, you know, traditionally how people, you know, house all their money in a foundation and then they do their philanthropic activities out of that. But in more recent years, we've seen this trend towards LLCs.
So Emerson Collective, I think, might have been maybe the first one to do it. That was Steve Jobs' Fund by Foundation.
And then Mark Zuckerberg with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also used an LLC. And then since then, a lot of other, especially within tech of like tech wealth, we've seen that move towards people using LLCs instead of 5.1c3s because they, it just gives you a lot more flexibility in the kinds of things you can fund.
You don't just have to fund other nonprofits. And then you also see donor advised funds.
So DAFs, which are sort of this like hacky workaround to foundations as well. So I guess point being that like this sort of mental model of like, you know of one person makes a ton of money and then their spouse kind of directs these nice, feel-good philanthropic activities, I think may not be the model that we continue to move forward on.
And I'm kind of hopeful or curious to see what does a return to, because we've had so many new people making a ton of money in the last 10 years or so we might see this return to sort of like the gilded age style philanthropy where people are not necessarily just like forming a philanthropic foundation and looking for the nicest causes to fund but are actually just like thinking a little bit more holistically about like how do i help build and create like a movement around a thing that i really care about um how do i think more broadly around like funding companies and non-profits and individuals and like doing lots of different different kinds of activities because I think like the broader goal that like motivates at least um like the new sort of elite classes to want to do any of this stuff at all like I don't really think philanthropy is about altruism I just I think like the term philanthropy is just totally fraught and like refers to too many different things and it's not very helpful um but I think like the part that I'm interested at least is sort of like what motivates elites to go from just sort of like making a lot of money and then like thinking about themselves to them thinking about sort of like their place in broader public society and I think that starts with thinking about how do I control uh like media academia government are sort of like the three like arms of the public sector um and we think of it in that way a little bit more broadly where it's it's really much more about sort of like maintaining control over your own power um more so than sort of like this like altruistic kind of you know whitewash yeah uh then it becomes like you know there's so many other like creative ways to think about um like how that might happen um that's that's that's really interesting that's a yeah that's a really interesting way of thinking about uh what it is you're doing with philanthropy um isn't the word noble descended from a word that basically means to give alms to uh people like if you're in charge of them you give alms to them and in a way i mean it might have been another word i'm thinking of but um in a way yeah a part of what motivates altruism not obviously all of it but part of it is that uh yeah you influence and uh power not even in a necessarily negative connotation but uh that's definitely what motivates altruism so having that put square front and center is refreshing and honest actually yeah i don't i really don't see it as like a negative thing at all and i think most of the like you know writing and journalism and acting um that focuses on philanthropy tends to be very wealth critical i'm not at all like i personally don't feel wealth critical at all. I think, like, again, sort of returning to this, like, mental model of, like, aristocratic and meritocratic elites.
Aristocratic elites are able to, like, pass down, like, encode what they're supposed to be doing in each generation because they have this kind of, like, familial ties. And I think, like, on the meritocratic side, like, if you didn't have any sort of language around altruism or public stewardship, then like it's like you need to kind of create that narrative for the meritocratically or else, you know, there's just like nothing to hold on to.
So I think like it makes sense to talk in those terms. Andrew Carnegie being sort of the father of modern philanthropy in the U.S., like wrote these series of essays about wealth that were were very influential and where he sort of talks about this moral obligation.
And I think really, it was kind of this quiet way for him to, even though it was ostensibly about giving back or helping lift up the next generation of people, the next generation of entrepreneurs, I think it really was much more of a protective stance saying like, if he doesn't frame it in this way, then people are just going to knock down the concept of wealth altogether. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, that's really interesting. And it's interesting in which cases this kind of influence has been successful and where it's not.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, has there been any counterfactual impact on how the Washington Post is run as a result? I doubt it. But when Musk takes over Twitter, I guess it's a much more expensive purchase.
We'll see what the influence is, negative or positive, but it's certainly different than what Twitter otherwise would have been. So control over media, I guess it's a bigger meme now.
Let me just take a digression and ask about open source for a second. So based on your experience studying these open source projects, do you find the theory that Homer and Shakespeare were basically container words for these open source repositories that stretched out through our centuries? Do you find that more plausible now, rather than them being individuals, of course you find that more plausible now given your uh given your study of open source sorry or less plausible what's it okay so the idea is that they weren't just one person it was just like a whole bunch of people throughout a bunch of centuries who composed different parts of each story or who composed different stories the nicholas probaki model same concept that you know it's a single mathematician who's actually comprised of like lots of different yeah yeah um i think it's actually the opposite would be this sort of my conclusion of we think of open source as this very like collective volunteer effort and i think um use that as an excuse to not really contribute back to open source or not really think about like how open source projects are maintained because we were like you know you kind of have this buy sooner effect where you're like well you know someone's taking care of it it's volunteer oriented like of course there's someone out there taking care of it um but in reality it actually turns out it is just one person so maybe it's a little bit more like a wizard of oz model it's actually just like one person behind the curtain that's like you know doing everything and you see this huge you know grandeur and you think there must be so many people that are behind it just one person um yeah and i think that's sort of undervalued i think a lot of the rhetoric that we have about open source is rooted in sort of like early 2000s kind of starry-eyed idea about like the power of the internet and the idea of like crowdsourcing and wikipedia and all this stuff and then like in reality like we kind of see this convergence from um like very broad-based collaborative volunteer efforts to like narrowing down to kind of like single creators and i think a lot of like you know single creators are the people that are really driving a lot of the internet today and a lot of cultural production oh that's that's super fascinating does that in general make you more sympathetic to whether it's the lone genius view of accomplishments in history? Not just in literature, I guess, but just like when you think back to how likely is it that, you know, Newton came up with all that stuff on his own versus how much was fed into him by, you know, the others around him? Yeah, I think so.
I feel I've never been like a big, like, you know, great founder theory kind of person. I think I'm like, my true theory is I guess that ideas are maybe some sort of like sentient, like concept or virus that operates outside of us.
And we are just sort of like the vessels through which like ideas flow. in that sense you know it's not really about any one person but i do think um i think i tend to lean like in terms of sort of like where does creative like creative effort come from i do think a lot of it comes much more from like a single individual than it does from wisdom of the crowds but everything just turns like different purposes right like because i think like within open source it's like not all of open source maintenance work is creative in fact most of it is pretty boring and dredgerous and that's the stuff that no one wants to do and that like one person kind of got stuck with doing um and that's really different from like who created a certain open source project um which is a little bit more of that like creative mindset yeah yeah that's that's really interesting.
Do you think more projects in OpenTour, so just take a popular repository, on average, do you think that these repositories would be better off if, let's say a larger percentage of them where pull requests were closed and feature requests were closed? You can look at the code, but you can interact with it or its creators anyway should more repositories have this model yeah i definitely think so they go a lot much happier that way yeah yeah i mean it's interesting to think about the implications of this for other uh areas outside of code right which is where it gets really interesting i mean in general there's like a discussion sorry go ahead yeah oh that's just good i mean that's basically what's for the writing of my book because i was like okay i feel like whatever's happening open source right now you start with this idea that like democracy is green and like we should have tons and tons of people participating tons of people participate and then it turns out that like most participation is actually just noise and not that useful and then it ends up like scaring everyone away and in the end you just have like you know one or a small handful of people that are actually doing all the work while everyone else is kind of like screaming around them. This becomes like a really great metaphor for what happens in social media.
And the reason I went after I wrote the book, I went and worked at Substack. And, you know, part of it was because I was like, I think the model is kind of converging from like, you know, Twitter being this big open space to like suddenly everyone is retreating.
Like the public space is so hostile that everyone must retreat into like smaller private spaces so then you know chats became a thing sub stack became a thing and um yeah i just feel sort of like realistic right yeah i know that's really fascinating uh yeah the strawsian message in that book is very strong um but in general there's uh when you're thinking about something like corporate governance right there's a big a big question. And I guess even more interestingly, when you think if you think DAOs are going to be a thing and you think that we will have to reinvent corporate governance from the ground up.
There's a question of should these be run like monarchy? Should they be sort of oligarchies where the board is in control? Should they be just complete democracies where everybody gets one vote on what you do at the next shareholder meeting or something?

And this book and that analysis is actually pretty interesting to think about.

Like, how should corporations be run differently, if at all?

Does it inform how you think the average corporation should be run?

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, I think we are seeing a little bit.

I'm not a corporate governance expert, but I do feel like we're seeing a little bit of this like backlash against like, you know,

shareholder activism and like extreme focus on sort of like DEI on boards and things like that.

And like, I think we're seeing a little bit of people starting to like take the reins and take

control again because they're like, ah, that doesn't really work so well, it turns out.

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

that see what happens. Yeah, that's super fascinating.
That raises an interesting question, by the way. You've written about idea machines, and you can explain that concept while you answer this

question. But do you think that movements can survive without a charismatic founder who is

both alive and engaged? So once Will McCaskill dies, would you be shorting effective altruism?

Or if like Tyler Cowen dies, would you be short progress studies? Or do you think that you know once you get a movement off the ground it can survive on its own that's a good question i mean like i don't think there's some perfect template like each of these kind of has its own sort of unique quirks and characteristics in them um i guess yeah back up a little bit um idea machines is this concept i have around um what the transition from we were talking before about of like traditional 5.1c3 foundations as vehicles philanthropy what does the modern version of that look like that is not necessarily encoded in an institution and so I had this term idea machines which is sort of this different way of thinking about like turning ideas into outcomes where you have a community that forms around a shared set of values and ideas so yeah you mentioned you mentioned like progress studies is an example of that, or effective altruism example. Eventually that community gets capitalized by some funders and then starts to be able to develop an agenda and then like actually start building like, you know, operational outcomes and like turning those ideas into real world initiatives.
And remind me of your question again is yeah so once once the charismatic founder dies of a movement can the move is a movement basically handicapped in some way like maybe it'll still be a thing but it's never going to reach the heights it could have reached if that main guy had been around i think there are just like different shapes and classifications of like different different types of communities here. So like and I'm just thinking back again to sort of like different types of open source projects where it's not like they're like one model that fits perfectly for all of them.
So I think there are some communities where it's like yeah I mean I think Effective Altruism is maybe a good example of that where like the community has grown so much that I like if all their leaders were to you know knock on wood disappear tomorrow or something like um like I think the movement would still keep going there are enough true believers like even within the you know next order of of that community that like I think that would just continue to grow um whereas you have like yeah maybe certain like smaller or more nascent communities that are like or just like communities that are much more like oriented around um like a charismatic charismatic founder that's just like a different type where if you lose that leader then suddenly um you know the whole thing falls apart because they're much more like these like cults or religions um and i don't think it makes one better better or worse um it's like the right way to do it is probably like bitcoin where you have a charismatic leader for life because that leader is literally can't go away can't ever die but you still have the like you know north stars all like that yeah it is funny i mean a lot of prophets have this property of you're not really sure what they believed in so people with different temperaments can project their own preferences onto him um somebody like jesus right it's uh you know you can be like a super left winger and believe jesus stood for everything you believe in you can be a super right winger and believe the same um yeah go ahead i i think there's value in like writing cryptically more broadly as a like i think about like i think curtis jarvin has done a really good job of this for you know intentionally or not but um because like his writing is so cryptic and long-winded and like it's like the Bible where you can just kind of like pour over endlessly being like, what did this mean? What did this mean? And in a weird, you know, you're always told to write very clearly. You're told to write succinctly, but like, it's actually in a weird way, you can be much more effective by being very long winded and not obvious in what you're saying.
Yes, which actually raises an interesting question that I've been wondering about. There have been movements, I guess, effective altruism is a good example that have been focused on community building in a sort of like explicit way.
And then there's other movements where they have a charismatic founder. And moreover, this guy, he doesn't really try to recruit people.
I'm thinking of somebody like Peter Thiel, for example, right? he goes on like once every year or two, he'll go on a podcast and have this like really cryptic back and forth.

And then just kind of go away in a hole for a few months or a few years. And I'm curious which one you think is more effective given the fact that you're not really competing for votes.
So absolute number of people is not what you care about. It's not clear what you care about, but you do want to have more influence among the elites who matter um in like politics and tech as well so anyways which just your thoughts on those kinds of strategies explicitly trying to come into build versus just kind of projecting out there in a sort of cryptic way yeah i mean i definitely being somewhat cryptic myself i favorite one is the cryptic methodology by me

you mentioned Peter Thiel I think like the Thiel verse

is probably like the most

like one of the most influential things in fact that is

hard it is partly so

effective because it is hard to even define what

it is or wrap your head around but you just know that

sort of like every interesting person you

meet somehow has some weird connection to

you know Peter Thiel

and it's more funny

but I think this is sort of that evolution from

the 5.1c3 foundation to

Thank you. somehow has some weird connection to you know Peter Thiel um and it's more funny um uh but I think this is sort of that evolution from the you know 5.1c3 foundation to the like idea machine um implicit and that is this this switch from you know you used to start the you know Nadia Asparovou foundation or whatever and it was like you know had your name on it and it was all about like what do I as a funder want to do world? Right.
And you spend all this time doing this sort of like classical, you know, research, going out into the field, talking to people and you sit and you think, OK, like here is a strategy I'm going to pursue. But like ultimately, it's like very, very donor centric in this very explicit way.
And so within traditional philanthropy, you're seeing this sort of like backlash against that in like, you know, straight up like nonprofit land where now you're seeing the locus of power moving from being very donor centric to being sort of like community centric and people saying like, well, we don't really want the donors telling us what to do, even though it's also their money. And like, you know, instead, let's have this be driven by the community from the ground up.
That's maybe like one very literal reaction against that, like having the donor is sort of the central power figure but i think idea machines are kind of like the like maybe like the more realistic or effective answer um in that like the donor is still like without the presence of a funder like the community is just a community they're just sitting around and talking about ideas of like what could possibly happen um like they don't have any money to make anything happen but like i think like really effective funders are good at being sort of like subtle and thoughtful about like like you know no one wants to see like the peter thiel foundation necessarily that's just like it's so like not the style of how it works but you know you meet so many people that are being funded by the same person like just going out and sort of aggressively, like arming the rebels is a more sort of like, yeah, just like distributed, decentralized way of thinking about like spreading one's power instead of just starting a foundation. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, even if you look at the life of influential politicians, somebody like LBJ or Robert Moses, it's how much of it was like calculated and how much of it was just like decades of building up favors and building up connections in a way that had no definite and clear plan but it just you're hoping that someday you can call upon them and sort of like godfather way um yeah that's interesting um and by the way this is also where your work on open source comes in? Like there's this idea that in the movement, you know, everybody will come in with their ideas and you can community build your way towards, you know, what should be funded. And yeah, I'm inclined to believe that it's probably like a few people who have these ideas about what should be funded.
And the rest of it is either just a way of like building up engagement and building up hype or, I don't know, or maybe just useless. But what are your thoughts on that? So I decided I was like, I am like really very much a tech startup person and not a crypto person, even though I would very much like to be fun because I'm like, ah, this is the future.
And there are so many interesting things happening. And I'm like, for the record the record not at all like down in crypto I think it is like the next big sort of movement of things that are happening but when I really come down to like the mindset it's like I am so in that sort of like top talent founder like power of the individual to break institutions mindset like that just resonates with me so much more than the like leaderless faceless like highly participatory kind of thing and again like i i am very open to that being true like i maybe i'm so wrong on that i just like i have not yet seen evidence that that works in the world i see a lot of rhetoric about how that could work or should work we have this sort of like implicit belief that like direct democracy is somehow like the greatest thing to aspire towards um but like over and over we see evidence that like that doesn't that just like doesn't really work it doesn't even have to throw out the underlying principles or values behind that like i still really believe in meritocracy i really believe in like access to opportunity i really believe in like pursuit of happiness like to me those are all like very like American values.
But like, I think the where that breaks is the idea that like that has to happen through these like highly participatory methods. I just like, yeah, I haven't seen really great evidence of that being that working.
What does that imply about how you think about politics or at least political structures? You think it would, you elect a mayor,

but like just forget,

no participation.

He gets to do everything he wants to do for four years

and you can get rid of him in four years,

but until then,

no community meetings.

What does that imply about how you think

cities and states and countries should be run?

That was very complicated thoughts on that.

I mean, I think it's also like everyone has the fantasy of wouldn't it be so nice if there were just one person in charge i hate all this squabbling it would just be so great if we could just you know have one person just who has exactly the views that i have and just put them in charge and let them run things.

That would be very nice.

I just, I do also think it's unrealistic. Like, I don't think I'm, you know, maybe like monarchy sounds great in theory, but

in practice just doesn't.

Like, I really embrace and I think like there is no perfect governance design either in the same way that there's no perfect open source project design or whatever else we're talking about. Like, yeah, it really just depends, like, what is your population comprised of? there are some very small homogenous populations that can be very easily governed by like,

you know, a small government or one person or whatever, because there isn't that much dissent or difference um everyone is sort of on the same page america is the extreme opposite in that angle and i'm always thinking about america because like i'm american and i love america uh but like you know everyone is trying to solve the governance question for america and i think like yeah i don't know i mean we're an extremely heterogeneous population there a lot of competing worldviews. I may not agree with all the views of everyone in America, but like I also like I don't want just one person that represents my personal views.
I think like I would focus more like effectiveness in governments than I would like having like, you know, just one person in charge or something like that. Like, I don't mind if someone disagrees with my views as long as they're good at what they do if that makes sense um and so i think the questions are like how do we improve the speed at which um like our government works and the yeah efficacy with which it works like i think there's so much room to be made for improvement there um versus like i don't know how much like i really care about like changing the actual structure of our government.
Interesting. Going back to open source for a second.
Why do these companies release so much stuff in open source for free? And it's probably literally worth trillions of dollars of value in total. And they just released it out in free.
And many of them are developer tools that other developers use to build competitors for these big tech companies that are releasing these open source tools uh why did they do it what explains it um i mean i think it depends on the project but like a lot of times these are projects that were developed internally it's the same reason of like like i think code and writing are not that dissimilar in this of like, why do people spend all this time writing like long posts or papers or whatever and then just release them for free? Like, why not put everything behind a paywall? And I think the answer is probably still in both cases where like Mindshare is a lot more interesting than, you know, your literal IP. And so, you know, you put out, you write these like long reports or you tweet or whatever.
Like you spend all this time creating content for free and putting it out there because you're trying to capture Mindshare. Same thing with companies releasing open source projects.
Like a lot of times they really want like other developers to come in and contribute to them. They want to increase their status as like an open source friendly kind of company or company or show like, you know, here's the type of code that we write internally and showing that externally they want to like recruiting is, you the hardest thing for any company right and so being able to attract the right kinds of developers

or people that you know might fit really well into their developer culture just matters a lot more

and they're just doing that instead of with words they're doing that with code uh you've talked about

the need for more idea machines you're like dissatisfied with the fact that effective

altruism is a big game in town um uh is there some idea or nascent movement where i mean other

I'm not sure. idea machines you're like dissatisfied with the fact that effective altruism is a big game in town um uh is there some idea or nascent movement where i mean other than progress ideas but like something where you feel like this could be a thing but it just needs some like charismatic founder to take it to the next level or even if it doesn't exist yet it just like a set of ideas around this vein is like clearly something there is going to exist you know what i mean is there anything like that that you notice um i only had a couple of different possibilities in that post yeah i think like the progress sort of meme is probably the

largest growing contender that i would see right now i think there's another one right now around

sort of like the new right if that's not even like the best term necessarily for it but there's

sort of like a shared set of values there that are maybe starting with like politics but like

Thank you. sort of like the new right if that's not even like the best term necessarily for it but there's sort of like a shared set of values there that are maybe starting with like politics but like ideally yeah spreading to like other areas of public influence um so i think like those are a couple like the bigger movements that i see right now but there's like smaller stuff too like i mentioned um like tools for thought in that post where like that's a that's never going to be a huge idea machine um but it's one where you have a lot of like interesting talented people that are thinking about sort of like future computing and um but like until maybe more recently like there just hasn't been a lot of funding available and the funding is always really uneven and unpredictable and so that's to me an example like you know a smaller community that like just needs that sort of like extra influx to turn a bunch of abstract ideas into practice um but yeah i mean i think like yeah those are some like the bigger ones that i see right now i think there is just so much more potential to do more but i wish people would just think a little bit more creatively because yeah i really do think like effective interest kind of becomes like the default option for a lot people.
Then they're kind of vaguely dissatisfied with it and they don't like think about like, well, what do I actually really care about in the world and how do I want to put that forward? Yeah, there's also the fact that effective altruism has this like very fit memeplex in the sense that it's like a polytheistic religion where if you have a cause area, then you don't have your own movement you just have a cause area within our our broader movement right it just like adopts your gods into our uh um our movement yeah that's interesting i see like people trying to lobby for effective algism to care about their cause area but then it's like you could just start a separate like if you can't get ea to care about then why not just like start another one somewhere else yeah yeah um um so you know it's interesting

to me that the wealth boom in silicon valley and then tech spheres has led to the sour growth of

philanthropy but that hasn't always been the case um even in america like a lot of people became

billionaires after energy markets were deregulated in the 80s and the 90s. And then there wasn't, and obviously, the hub of that was like the Texas area or, you know.
And there, as far as I'm aware, there wasn't like a boom of philanthropy motivated by the ideas that people in that region had. What's different about Silicon Valley? Why are, or do you actually think that these other places have also had their own booms of philanthropic giving? No, I think you're right.
Yeah, I would make a distinction between like being wealthy is not the same as being elite or whatever other term you want to use there. And so, yeah, there are definitely like pockets of what's called like more like local markets of wealth like yeah texas texas oil or energy billionaires um that tend to operate kind of just more in their own sphere um and a lot of if you look at any philanthropic like a lot of them will be philanthropic philanthropically active but they only really focus on their geographic area um but there's sort of this difference in and i think this is part of where it comes from the question of like, you know, like what forces someone to actually like do something more public facing with their power.
And I think that comes from your power being sort of like threatened. That's like one aspect I would say of that.
So like tech has only really become a lot more active in the

public sphere outside of startups after the tech backlash of the mid-2010s um and you can say a

similar thing kind of happened with the Davos elite as well uh and and also for the Gilded Age

uh cohort of of both um and so yeah when you have sort of you're kind of like you know building in

your own little world and like you know we had literally like Silicon Valley where everyone was kind of like sequestered off and just thinking about startups and thinking themselves of like tech is essentially like an industry just like any other sort of you know entertainment or whatever um and we're just kind of happy building over here and then it was only when sort of like the panopticon like turned its head towards tech and started and and they had this sort of like onslaught of of um uh critiques coming from sort of like mainstream discourse where they went oh like what what is my place in this world and uh you know if i don't try to like defend that then i'm gonna just kind of yeah we're gonna lose all that power so i think that that need to sort of like defend one's power can kind of like prompt that sort of action. The other aspect I'd highlight is just like I think a lot of elites are driven by these like technological paradigm shifts.

so there's this scholar who writes about technological

revolutions and financial capital

and she identifies like a few different

technological revolutions over the last

whatever 100 plus

years that

like drove this cycle of

you know new technologies a few different technological revolutions over the last, whatever, 100 plus years

that, like, drove this cycle of, you know, a new technology is invented.

It's people are kind of like working on it in this smaller industry sort of way.

There is some kind of like crazy, like public frenzy and then like a backlash.

And then from after that, then you have this sort of like focus on public institution building.

But she really points out that like not all technology fits into that like not all technology is a paradigm shift sometimes technology is just technology um and and uh and so yeah i think like a lot of wealth might just fall into that category um my third example is by the way is um the coke family because you had you know the the coke brothers but then like their father was actually the one who like kind of initially made um made their wealth but was like very localized in sort of like how he thought about philanthropy he had his own like you know family foundation was just sort of like doing that sort of like you know texas billionaire mindset that we're talking about of you know i made a bunch of money i'm gonna just sort of like yeah do my local funder activity it was only the next generation of of um his children that then like took that wealth and started thinking about like how do we actually like move that on to like a more elite stage and thinking about like their in the media um but like you can see there's like two clear generations within the same family like one has this sort of like local wealth mindset or one of them has the more like elite wealth mindset and yeah you can kind of like ask yourself why did that switch happen but um yeah it's clearly about more than just money it's also about intention yeah that's really interesting um well it's interesting because there's if you identify the current mainstream media as affiliated with like that davos uh aristocratic elite or maybe not aristocratic, but like the Davos group. Yeah, exactly.
There is a growing field of independent media, but you would not identify somebody like Joe Rogan as in the Silicon Valley sphere, right? So there is a new media. I just, I guess these startup people don't have that much influence over them yet uh and they feel like yeah i think they're trying to like take that strategy right so you have like a bunch of founders um like paul murlecky and mark zuckerberg and brian armstrong and whoever else that like will not really talk to mainstream anymore they will not get an interview to the new york times but they will go to like an individual um influencer or an individual creator and they'll do an interview with them so like when um mark zuckerberg announced meta like he did not get grant interviews to mainstream publications but he went and talked to like ben thompson at strategery um and so i think there is like it fits really well with that like probably mindset of like we're not necessarily institution building we're going to like focus on power of individuals who sort of like defy institutions um and that is kind of like an open question that i have about like what will the long-term influence of the tech elite look like because like you know the the like human history tells us that eventually all individual behaviors kind of get codified into institutions right um but we're obviously living in a very different time now um and i think like the way that the davos elite managed to uh like really codify and extend their influence across all these different sectors was by taking that institutional mindset and and um and you know like thinking about sort of like academic institutions and media institutions, all that stuff.
If the startup mindset is really inherently like anti-institution and says like, we don't want to build the next Harvard necessarily. We just want to like blow apart the concept of universities whatsoever.
Or, you know, we don't want to create a new CNN or a new Fox news. We want to just like, like fund like individual creators to do that same sort of work, but in this very decentralized way.
Um, like, will that work long-term? I don't know. Like, is that just sort of like a temporary state that we're in right now where no one really knows what the next institutions will look like? Um, or is that really like an important part of this generation where like, we shouldn't be asked this question of like, how do you build a new media network?

We should just be saying like, the answer is there is no media network.

We just go to like all these individuals instead.

Yeah, that's interesting.

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

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I mean, like Dustin Moskovitz, for example, has been funding EA for a really long time

and hasn't walked away necessarily.

Yeah.

I mean, on the flip side, you can see like SPF carried a lot of a lot of risk because

it's your point, I guess, like, you know, you end up relying on on this one funder the one funder disappears and everything else kind of falls apart um i mean i think like i don't have any sort of like preciousness attached to the idea of like communities you know lasting forever i think this is like again if we're trying to solve for the problem of like what did not work well about 51c3 foundations for most of uh recent history like part of it was that they're you know just meant to live on to perpetuity like why why do we still have like uh you know rockefeller foundation there are now actually many different rockefeller foundations but like why does that even exist like why did that money not just get spent down um and actually when uh john d rockefeller was first proposing the idea of foundations he wanted them to be uh like um to have like a finite end state so he wanted them to last only like 50 years or 100 years when he was proposing this like federal charter but that federal charter failed and so now we have these like state charters and and foundations can just exist forever but like i think if we want to like improve upon this idea of like how do we prevent like meritocratic elites from turning into or sarcastic elites how do we like um yeah how do we actually just like try to do a lot of really interesting stuff in our lifetimes it's like a very it's very counterintuitive because you think about like leaving a legacy must mean like creating institutions or creating a foundation that lasts forever and you know 200 years from now there's still like the nadia aspera foundation out there but like if i really think about it's like i would almost rather just do really really really good interesting work in like 50 years or 20 years or 10 years and have that be the legacy versus your name kind of getting you know besmirched over over a century of institutional decay and decline uh so yeah i don't like if you know you have a community that lasts for maybe only last 10 years or something like that and it's funded for that amount of time and then it kind of elbows its usefulness and it winds down or it becomes less relevant like i don't necessarily see it as a bad thing of course like in practice you know nothing ever ends that that neatly and that's quietly but um but yeah i don't think that's a bad thing to us yeah yeah um who are some ethnographers or sociologists from a previous era that have influenced your work so was there somebody writing about you know what it was like to be in a roman legion or what it was like to work in a factory floor and you're like you know what i want to do that for open source or i want to do that for the new tech elite um for open source i was definitely really influenced by Jane Jacobs and Eleanor Ostrom, who I think both had this quality of... So, yeah, Eleanor Ostrom was looking at examples of common pool resources like fisheries or forests or whatever, and just going and visiting them and spending a lot of time with them and then saying, like, actually, I don't think tragedyons is like a real thing or it's it's not the only outcome that we can possibly have um sometimes comments can be managed like perfectly sustainably and it's not necessarily true that everyone just like treats them very extractively um and just like wrote about what she saw and same with jane jacobs sort of um uh looking at cities as someone who lives in one right like she didn't have any fancy credentials or anything.
She was just like, I live in the city and I'm looking around and this idea of like top-down urban planning where you have like someone trying to design this perfect city that like doesn't change and doesn't yield to its people just seems completely unrealistic. And the style that both of them take in their writing is very um it just it starts from them just like observing

what they see and then like trying to write about it and i i just yeah that's that's the style that i really want to emulate um interesting yeah i think for people to just be talking to like i don't know like kriz just like just talking to like open source devolvers turns out you can learn a lot more from that than just sitting around like thinking about what open source devolvers might be thinking about but i have this i have had this idea of not even for like writing it out loud but just to understand how the world works just like shadowing people who are in just like random positions they don't have to be a lead in any way but just like a person who's the personal assistant to somebody influential how to decide whose emails they forward how they decide what's the priority or somebody who's just like an accountant for a big company right it just like what is involved there uh like what kinds of we're gonna you know what i mean just like random people the line manager at the local factory um i just have no idea how these parts of the world work and i just want to like yeah just shadow them for a day and see like what happens there. This is really interesting because everyone always focuses on sort of like, you know, the, the, the, the big name figure or whatever, but you know, who's the actual gatekeeper there.
But yeah, I mean, I, I've definitely found like if you just start cold emailing people and talking to them, people are often like surprisingly very, very open to, to being talked to because I don't know, like most people do not get asked questions about what they do and how they think and stuff so you know you want to realize that dream um so maybe i'm not like john reckefeller in that i only want my organization to last for 50 years um i'm sure you come across these people who have this idea that you know i'll let my money compound for like 200 years and if it just compounds reasonable rate, I'll be, it'll be like the most wealthy institution in the world, unless somebody else has the same exact idea. If somebody wanted to do that, but they wanted to hedge for the possibility that there's a war or there's a revolt, or there's some sort of change in law that draws down this wealth.
How would you set up a thousand year endowment basically is what I'm I'm asking, or like a 500-year endowment? Would you just put it in like a crypto wallet with us and just, you know what I mean? Like, how would you go about that organizationally? How would you, like, that's your goal. I want to have the most influence in a 500 years.
Well, I'd worry much less. The question for me is not about how do I make sure that there are assets available to distribute in a thousand years because then I just put in stock market or something like it is like pretty boring things to just like you know ensure your assets go over time um the more difficult question is how do you ensure that uh whoever is deciding how to distribute the funds distributes them in a way that you personally want them to be spent um so ford foundation is a really interesting example of this um where henry ford like created a ford foundation like shortly before he died um and just uh pledged a lot of ford stock to create this foundation and was doing it basically for tax reasons had no philanthropic it's just like this is what we're doing to like house this wealth over here.
And then, you know, passed away, son passed away and grandson ended up being on the board. But the board ended up being basically like, you know, a bunch of people that Henry Ford certainly would not have ever wanted to be on his board.
And so, you know, and you end up seeing like the Ford Foundation ended up becoming huge influential. Um, I, like I have received money from them.
Um, so it's not at all, uh, an indictment of, of sort of like their, their views or anything like that. It's just much more of like, you know, you had the intent of the original donor and then you had like, who are all these people that like suddenly just ended up with a giant pool of capital and then like decided to spend it however they felt like spending it and the grandson at the time sort of like famously resigned because he was like really frustrated and was just like this is not at all my family wanted and like basically like kicked off the board and um so anyway so that that is the question that I would like figure out if I had a thousand year endowment is like how do I make sure that whomever manages that endowment actually shares my views? One, shares my views.
But then also, like, how do I even know what we need to care about in a thousand years? Because, like, I don't even know what the problems are in a thousand years. And this is why, like, I think, like, very long-term thinking can be a little bit dangerous in this way, because you're sort of, like, presuming that you know what even matters then.
Whereas I think, like, figuring out the most impactful things to do is just, like contextually dependent on like what is going on at the time so i can't um i don't know and there are also foundations where you know the donor like writes in the charter like this money can only be spent on you know x cause or whatever but then it just becomes really awkward over time because it's like i don't know they're spending money on like lighthouse keepers or something like that and it's like like, you know, like this is just like not a thing that actually really like, you know, should be the main focus anymore. So, yeah, I don't know.
I think I would probably try to figure out a way to like select for like thoughtful, somehow select for like thoughtful people. But like how to determine, like I wonder if there's like a committee that like short appointment terms

and then like there's some committee

that can like run a contest or something

to determine like who gets to run this money

or distribute this money every generation

or something like that.

I don't know.

I'd have to quote something pretty crazy like that,

but yeah, that would be the biggest challenge, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just started reading the foundation,

the book about the Ford Foundation.

I haven't got that far.

It's so fascinating.

But you know, that raises an interesting question. There is the problem of value drift in charities, but it's a very particular kind of value drift, right? So there's famously conquest second law that any institution that is not constitutionally and explicitly a right wing becomes left wing over time.
And this seems especially true of NGOs and general organizations. What's the explanation? Why does conquest second law seem true in this arena? I have to ask Curtis that.
I mean, I don't know that I have. I think we can observe that that is maybe what is happening.
I don think i have an amazing answer to that i think i mean my best guess if i had to come to answer is i think that the values of like democracy and peace and freedom and whatever like there's a set of sort of like pacifying social values that are very hard

to disagree with um and so there's always this sort of like natural drift towards that um i do find that like i think the most thoughtful people i know are often concerned like there's a strong like intellectual conservative movement.

But I think people that love nuance where you know where the there is no like there is no mindless playbook that you can use to just sort of like the answer is not always like direct democracy or peace or whatever if that's not your like guiding star and you are actually interested in like a fair bit of nuance, like you're not going to really run institutions. And I say that as someone who is like, I'm much more on the like nuanced side.
But like I like I think the trade off of that is like it just doesn't necessarily have mainstream appeal always because you don't have these really simplified messages. So, yeah, if you think about sort of like institutions are need to have like simplified messages that they pass on to people and those simplified messages um work much better when they're things that make people feel good about themselves and you're always going to have that kind of more or less word word drift um yeah yeah yeah it raises a question of how you would set up um i mean it's like the two monarchs problem of like, you know, like you need somebody who's like a good director, but then you also need him to be able to appoint somebody who's a good director.
Yeah. Yeah, it's really interesting.
Let's talk about like, I guess what you and I do, or no, before that, actually. All right, I'm just gonna make a note from my editor right here but all right so the next question is do you think this new funding for science and thinkers is that going to lead to a resurgence of the gentleman's color category or has the nature of science just become too different and science has just gotten much more specialized now that that's no longer possible oh um yeah i mean i think within within the realm of science specifically uh the sort of gentleman scientist era you know the charles darwin type era it feels a little bit bygone in the sense of yeah i don't know it feels like there was a lot of low-hanging fruit than the maybe like science is just so much bigger it is funded in a completely different way that is sort of unrecognizable from where it was before um i think when people talk about problems in science they like to romanticize the past or that's probably true for any sort of institutional problem um of just you know why can't we just have it the way that it was like 100 years ago or whatever and you know there's usually good reasons why we don't things don't run the way they did before um and like i always try to think about like how do we actually take the conditions that we're in right now and like come up with something new um that being said like even if we don't have sort of like a return to you know the the literal general gentleman scientist as default way of doing things in science um there's you know a ton of room to go from the current model of how science is funded and the sort of like extremely constrained environments that people have to work in to like giving people a little bit more academic freedom, a little bit more creative freedom to, to experiment.
So, but I think like, yeah, science doesn't really have any, any easy answers. I spent a bunch of time trying to understand it this summer.
And yeah, it's, I think because like, like government funding of science became a thing right around like the middle of the of um the the 20th century uh after sort of like world war ii and um like the way that science ran before then where there was very little government funding and very little involvement to where now like the fact of the matter is that like a lot of it is government funded or most of it is government funded just means that it's like yeah completely different kind of ballgame yeah um but i guess uh then for public intellectuals there's a change in especially if you're making content that is tech adjacent or something there's a change in funding from it's no longer you know kevin kelly's 10 000 um true fans but more like one tech billionaire who likes your work and will you know write you a check to investigate it for a year. What is the consequence of that kind of change? And you have much more concentrated sources of funding in terms of what areas one can focus on and one does focus on and like the ways in which they engage with their audience and publish their content.
Yeah. What impact does that have? That I'm pretty excited about and like can only really speak within my relatively narrow sort of like tech and tech adjacent creator world but i definitely have noticed as someone who's been sort of independently or weirdly funded in a lot of ways for a while now um like it feels like that was extremely uncommon uh when i started and now i meet a lot of people that are like me I don't know if that's just because I am meeting more people like me or if that's really a shift but I thought like yeah you know five years ago even it was like hard to identify a lot of people with that kind of situation and so yeah I think it's a really cool like people talk about like you know how do we bring back the meditries how do we bring back this like model of patient age, like it's already happening, I think it's a really cool like people talk about like, you know, how do we bring back the Medici's? How do you bring back this like model of patient age? Like it's already happening, I think, in a lot of ways.
It's just that people don't talk about it. They don't people don't, you know, unless you're being funded on Patreon or you have subside subscriptions or there's something some very legible way to point out like how you're making money.
like there are so many people that are just being quietly funded that just don't talk about it um

well i do actually think like the model of patient is very alive and well right now it's just not super obvious um yeah yeah and how do you think about the value of like i guess what you and i obviously we do different things but um in terms of like doing podcasts or writing essays and how do you think about the value of that like should we just like be writing code and digging dishes and doing something that else that is more more legibly useful to society like what what is the you know what i mean like what how do you think about what is the value of this yeah you know i i'm like very um like i only know how to do a handful of things in this world and or like i i feel like i should be doing the thing that i I help myself but i have to do all the time like i don't really think i don't have a very like rosy relationship with writing to be perfectly honest i hate writing writing makes me crazy like it's like i i don't find it to be enjoyable it's it's always enjoyable once it's over but like the act of class is a little miserable um but like you know i you would think like why do you do this thing that makes you miserable but like it's just like it's the thing i know how to do and i don't think there's anything glamorous about it i don't think there's anything special it might not be the best thing to do like there's probably more impactful things i could be doing with my time but like it's the thing i like have to do and i think everyone should just be doing the thing that they like absolutely have to do whatever that is that that would make me happy in the world as if everyone was just like yeah leaning into their obsession so that's my obsession um I do think like um when I think about my own impact I don't know how you think about it but um like I think about I want to I want my ideas to be heard by people that I think can do something about them. So in other words, like I care much more about like quality than quantity.
I don't, I'm not very active on Twitter. I don't really focus on like needing to reach some kind of like mass mainstream audience.
When I published my book, like I told myself, I really like the people that need to hear about how open source works are people that work at tech companies software developers that use open source software like it mattered less to me that there's like this is not the kind of book that needs to be in like an airport bookstore would pick um and it seems like essays and stuff like i think it's much more important to me that um people whose opinions i care about read it and and hopefully you know and i i make my essays public because i hope everyone reads them but like when i think about sort of how do i measure my impact it's not like how many page views that i get on an essay it's more of like yeah who ended up talking about it and are those people that i wanted to talk about it yeah yeah yeah i think there's value in that i think like people really undervalue like this like my my my sort of like personal pet peeve is like founders will always talk about like building and like startups is like so important or whatever and like what are all them doing in their spare time they're like reading books they're reading essays and like and then those like books and essays influence how they think about stuff and so it is very like indirect sort of influence or in yeah like but like you can't like i i just feel like you know you can't sort of have out of one mouth saying like the only important thing in the world is like starting startups and and then at the same time talk about like the cool new book you read at a cocktail party like both those things are important in different ways right yeah no i totally agree and i i don't want to repeat myself because i i i talked about this on my burn episode but one other thing we were talking about, you know, Caro's books, Robert Caro's books. And one interesting thing is, you know, this guy was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize before he wrote The Power Broker.
So he was like a top tier investigative journalist. And can you imagine you crunching the numbers as a top tier investigative journalist at the peak of your career? And you're like, you know what would be a good use of my time? I'm going to spend the next seven years in almost poverty writing about this one guy who had a lot of influence in New York.
And I'm going to talk to any person who had conceivably even been in the same room as him or had been indirectly affected by his policies in any way. I'm going to do that obsessively for the next seven years.

Yeah, there's no way the number crunching would get you there, but it's probably been

one of the most influential books in terms of how urban governance is done.

I mean, like presidents have praised and read the book and said it like changed how they

think about politics.

So, you know, like it is the kind of thing where you wouldn't have gone to that conclusion

just from, yeah, yeah, thinking about it beforehand.

And like, this is the most effective thing I could do. Yeah, totally.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, okay, you had this recent post about, you know, climate tribes.
I thought it was really interesting, especially the addendum. And by the way, I have noticed this tendency of writers to hide the most interesting thoughts at footnotes and addendums.
And I'm curious why that is, but I think it might be because your most interesting thoughts are digressions that you feel like you have to take out the main text. But anyways, what I thought was interesting, you're comparing climate dummarism to other kinds of dummarisms that are yet to become fully mature.
And I am wondering, what is your predictions about the different tribes that will emerge when thinking about AI as both capabilities grow and as public awareness of those capabilities grows? Oh, gosh, I think it's definitely just too early to say on. And I know that sounds like cop out but I don't want to say things that I don't feel confident about um I think it's definitely just too early to say on and i know that sounds like a cop-out but

i don't want to say things that i don't feel confident about um i think it's too early to say even within like ai though like if you think about say i had these sort of like different tribes that are influencing the climate discourse today um uh there's there's some parallel version of that for AI, for AI more i think where um because right now i feel like ai safety gets really constrained to sort of like i don't know like miri or something like very very specific um i imagine like as ai becomes more widespread and more like more people have experiences with it and have opinions on it then that might sort of like lead to other, you know, philosophies kind of forming around that. And then we'll kind of see this one very narrow view of like, I think the sort of like Miriam I said is equivalent to like the Dumer tribe that I identified in climate where it's like, that is one specific tribe, but there are a lot of other people that are really interested in climate that like don't feel doomery at all um even though that's sort of like the most flashy like media friendly kind of version of it um so yeah i mean other than saying like as more people interact with ai i imagine there will be more flaws because emerging there um i think it's still too early to say what what that will be ai is still kind of like a big mystery box to me right now so it's there but i don't really know what's inside um having studied these different sorts of um dumerisms uh whether they're right or not by the way it's like a separate question but just in terms of the sociology of them uh has it always been true that smart talented people tend to get a lot of meaning by working on things that are seen as existential catastrophes? Or is that a property of, you know, tech adjacent areas or modern tech adjacent areas? Like, how unique is this sort of sociological phenomenon? Yeah, I think it is pretty new.
And that's why it's kind of gnawing at my brain a little bit like i think it's really new like last five years it's new um yeah well and and so i tried to sort of track this a little bit um and i'm not super high confidence dollars but like there's this one you know sort of theory around okay we used to have sort of like shared broader narratives that were actually Doomer-esque. So we had world wars, we had the Cold War, whatever.
And so like, you know, super smart, talented people that need to be pointed in a direction somewhere, they're going to go work on those kinds of problems. And like, there's a shared understanding that like, we really are like, you know, saving our country or protecting our country or whatever by working on these, these different things.
And so, yeah, I don't know, like stem talent in the Cold War or whatever. And then you see, OK, after the Cold War, now we're not so like, you know, we don't have these like deep existential threats anymore.
So we have to find them somewhere else. And that's where like environmentalism kind of became much more like alarmist, whereas in the past it was kind of like this niche social cause.
It became more like we need to save the planet um uh and and coming out of sort of like world war ii and um and and uh yeah just sort of like manufacturing chemicals like whatever suddenly like people are just grappling with the after effects of that um but like that doesn't explain sort of like in the last five years or so where it's like it's not like a weird activist thing to work in climate. It can even be like a very boring thing for people in working in climate.
But it's like all connected to this idea of like this is the most important thing I need to be working on. And so I think like maybe in the absence of having some like bigger narrative that is like all consuming for everyone, you kind of have to make your own meaning somewhere.
and but it is funny to me that like we don't just say like again i mean you go back to you know we talked about like writing it's like i have no defense as to like why i write all day like it's just like what i have to do like i cannot defend it as like the most like you know needle moving thing in the world or whatever um i don't really relate to this sort of need to have like a like doom or narrative. There is no doom or narrative attached to why I write.
I just write because like I think it's important and I think I have like ideas that are like questions I want to answer. And to me, that is that is how I define impact, though.
Like to me, like that matches my model of like what I think is the most impactful thing in the world. If I didn't have that model, then yeah, maybe I would try to say, okay, like what is the most impactful thing to be doing in the world that is like sort of external to my own personal curiosity or whatever.
And I think that's where those sort of like Doomer narratives come from. I did bury in another footnote at the end of that post, this question about like, okay, like if we think maybe like early 2010s or something, I feel like there was um there's always like there's this other

grouping of industries that's not doomer-esque but also attracts smart talented people so you

have like advertising and trading and uh and playing video games i don't really know if that's

like an industry but like there's that mindset of like those people end up like like that's some

shared set of skills across all those different industries or practices um that attracts like

smart talented people like why do so many smart talented people just go into like trading um

Thank you. That's some shared set of skills across all those different industries or practices that attracts like smart, talented people.
Like, why do so many smart, talented people just go into like trading? And I wonder if there's some other sort of similar gravity well effect there that is also attracting smart, talented people into like climate, maybe from like a different crowd or whatever. But so I wonder maybe if like before the last five years or whatever, like maybe there was maybe that was where everyone was dumping into.
I don't really know. Yeah.
Did you have some general theory of what these gravity walls for Thailand are like or what connects trading to climate? I don't know. And maybe they're different crowds.
Like I yeah. And that's why I just like stuck it in a footnote because i was lazy and i was like i don't know what to do with this not what i need to put it somewhere um uh but it just seems like it like yeah i don't there's just something about these like all these sorts of industries where it's like if they were starting with a blank slate they could be doing like anything and for some reason they just all end up in these sort of like non-obvious places like why is like why are there so many people that work that end up in treating like it's just like so specific when you really think about it um and then like same with like climate where i mean depending on how literally you take sort of like climate do more predictions or whatever but if you don't think the world is going to end in 30 years, like why is everyone so focused on this one specific thing when they could be working on like lots of different things? And so, yeah, in both cases, it feels like they kind of like flop in there somehow.
I did put in that addendum and just sort of thinking about like what is the shape of a doomer industry? Like I think one of the under discussed aspects of it is that it is like adjacent to some kind of like commercial opportunity so like the reason why everyone doesn't just go off and work on like global poverty is because there's like no money to be made and working on that but like if you think about like misinformation and the threat of like deep fakes or something upending democracy or you think about ai safety or climate or whatever like they are adjacent to commercial industries where you can actually like make a real salary and feel like relevant to the business world or whatever or to like all your peers while still also working on this social cause area. So, yeah, I don't know if that that helps at least somewhat.
And that's probably the simplest, you know, like sort of like non-overthinking answer for like why it is like advertising and trading attracts many people is just because you can make make a lot of money in it and that's that simple oh i have one theory about trading and video games that connects them um bernobart funny enough another footnote um bern hobart uh he was actually a like a blog post about sas products or something and one of the footnotes was you know one of the positive things about finance might be that it gives a sort of venting for talented people who just like to play zero-sum or negative-sum games. And that otherwise they would have been used up in a war, but since there's no war, they would be doing something else destructive in our world.
And if we can just put them in front of a trading screen and make them you know get the get the microsecond efficiency of some like equity market uh better it's like better than anything else i could be doing with that mentality um i kind of like that yeah there's some parallels with this for like content creators too and i will cringingly put myself in that category but we're just like where's also this grouping of people it's like i don't really know like what like they are kind of just like bodies in a room again myself included like that was what i'm doing if not this at least there's a way to like kind of make money in this but it's like a much more amorphous and yeah non non-coherent industry than like trading but yeah constantly different different set of people yeah um one interesting area that is not included one i guess philosophy that is not in any of these influential iga machines in silicon valley is religion i mean you know they've been like some of the most important ideas in history and yet somehow they're um so far they've had like very little influence in terms of what kinds of things the new elite is funding and paying attention to. Do you think that will change or have you just had a complete change in terms of what kinds of ideas get promoted? Yeah, TBD.
I think like the new right is bringing at least some of those underlying like christian religious values back maybe they're not like literally funding churches or something um but like how do we sort of like

yeah bring christian values back to to public society i think there's a lot there is a lot

going on there um even if it's not explicitly called religion um and then so yeah i mean that's

one question of like among elites that are um you know explicitly religious how are they sort of

Thank you. explicitly call it religion um and then so yeah i mean that's one question of like among elites that are um you know explicitly religious how are they sort of like encoding those um those values into public institutions i think that is sort of happening on that front um i also just think like like if we take a broader view of like how does religion factor into our daily life um i feel like it's a weirdly like people ask this question more than they need to ask it or something like where like you know everyone just sort of says oh like you know people aren't religious anymore they're not going to church so need to find meaning like how do we like create new religions today and i i just i feel like people are religious they're just religious about different things and that was sort of one of my conclusions with climate is like in the early 2000s you had michael creighton um criticizing uh environmentalism as a religion and saying um saying that you know it's distracting people from the science and uh and maybe we shouldn't treat environmentalism as religion we should really get back to the science um whereas i think like you know 20 years later it's like i think it just is a religion for a lot of people and why not just lean into that and say like i don't like that is how people are finding meaning that is how people are finding community um so i don't know like there it is there's there's a religion like we may not literally have like actively practicing christians in america or something and know, there's the question of what else does religion need to fulfill that it's not through something like climate.
But I also think that religious practice is very like active and around us everywhere. And like, I don't think I don't think that's like sad or bad.
I think that's just like how it's evolved. Yeah.
Yeah. Interesting.
All right. Final question.
You have a great blog post about shamelessness as a strategy what are you most shameless about in public what is your most shameful strategy yeah i don't know that i um oh man i wish i had a really good juicy answer i'm maybe you have to ask someone else that knows me. What am I most shameless about in publishing? It's one property of being shameless.
It's like you don't even realize it's shameful. You're so shameless.
It's, you know, it's like beyond you to even keep track of it that way. Just a fact.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm sure I have something. I think I'm a very shameful person i don't know that i have um yeah i'm not i'm not the best at being shameless uh yeah you're gonna have to ask you have this friend to tell them to tell you what i'm most about it sounds good sounds good um okay nadia thank you so much for being on the podcast um so uh tell people where they can find your um your blog your twitter anywhere else that they should look for you uh blog is at um nadia n-a-d-i-a dot x-y-z and i'm on twitter at nayafia n-a-Y-A-F-I-A.
Awesome.

Okay.

Awesome, Nadia.

This was a lot of fun.

Thanks for coming on.

Yeah.