--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You start with this idea that democracy is great and we should have tons and tons of people participating. Tons of people participate. And then it turns out that most participation is actually just noise and not that useful.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That really squarely puts SBF in the finance crowd much more so than startups or crypto. Founders will always talk about building and startups being so important. And what are all of them doing in their spare time? They're reading books, they're reading essays. And then those books and essays influence how they think about stuff.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, today I have the pleasure of talking with Nadia Asparouhova. 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.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: This is perfect timing, obviously, given what's been happening with SBF. How much do you think SBF was motivated by effective altruism? Where do you place them in the whole dimensionality of idea machines and motivations?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I know there are sort of conflicting accounts going around. From my character study or looking at SBF, it seems pretty clear to me that he is inextricably tied to the concepts of totalitarianism that then motivate effective altruism. The difference for me in where I characterize effective altruism is I think it's much closer to the finance Wall Street elite mindset than it is to the startup mindset, even though a lot of people associate effective altruism with tech people. So to me, that really squarely puts SBF in the finance crowd much more so than startups or crypto. I think that's something that gets really misunderstood about him.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. 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. He saw a graph of internet usage going up and to the right, and he thought, "I should build a business on top of this." In a sort of loophole way, he tried to figure out what is the first thing you would want to put a SQL database on top of to ship and produce. Books was the answer. And obviously he also came from a hedge fund. Would you place somebody like him also in the old finance crowd rather than as a startup founder?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: It's a weird one because he's both associated with the early complete computing revolution, but then also AWS kicked off all of the 2010s startup era. In the way he's started thinking about his public legacy and from his public behavior, I think he fits much more squarely now in that tech startup elite mindset of the 2010s crowd more so than the Davos elite crowd of the 2000s.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What in specific are you referring to?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: He's come out and been openly critical about a lot of Davos-type institutions. He pokes fun at mainstream media for not believing in him, for not believing in AWS. Because he spans across both of these generations, he's been able to see the evolution of how his earlier peers function versus the second cohort of peers he came across. But to me, he seems much more of the startup elite mindset.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Let me back up a little bit. What I associate with the Davos Wall Street crowd is much more this focus on quantitative thinking, measuring efficiency, and also this globalist mindset. The vision they want to ensure for the world is this idea of a very interconnected world, a United Nations kind of mindset. That is literally what the Davos gathering is.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Whereas Bezos from his actions today feels much closer to the startup, Y Combinator, post-AWS kind of mindset of founders who made their money by taking these non-obvious bets on talented people. They were much less focused on credentialism, much more into this idea of meritocracy. I think we forget how commonplace this trope is of the young founder in a dorm room. That was popularized by the 2010s cohort of the startup elite: someone who may have absolutely no skills, no background in industry, but can somehow turn the entire industry on its head. That was the unique insight of the tech startup crowd.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: When I think about some of the things Bezos is doing now, it feels like he identifies with that much more strongly: being this lone cowboy, having one talented person with really great ideas who can change the world. I think about the Altos Institute or the new science initiative he put out, where he was recruiting scientists from academic institutions and paying them really high salaries just to attract the very best top scientists around the world. That's much more of that kind of mindset than putting faith in existing institutions, which is what we would see from more of a Davos mindset.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Do you think that in the future, the kids of today's tech billionaires will be future aristocrats? So effective altruism will be a sort of elite aristocratic philosophy. They'll be like tomorrow's Rockefellers.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I kind of worry about that, actually. I think of there as being, within the U.S., we're lucky in that we have these two different types of elites: the aristocratic elites and the meritocratic elites. Most other countries, I think, basically just have aristocratic elites, especially comparing the U.S. to Britain in this way.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: In the aristocratic model, your wealth and your power is conferred to you by previous generations. You just inherit it from your parents or your family. The upside of that, if there is an upside, is you get socialized into this idea of what it means to be a public steward, what it means to think of yourself and your responsibility to the rest of society as a privileged elite person.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: In the U.S., we have this really great thing where you can just have the American Dream. Lots of people who didn't grow up with money can break into the elite ranks by doing something that makes them really successful. That's a really special thing about the U.S. So we have this whole class of meritocratic elites who may not have aristocratic backgrounds, but ended up doing something within their lifetimes that made them successful. I think it's a really cool thing.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: The downside is that you don't get socialized into what it means to have this fortune and do something interesting with your money. You don't have this generational benefit that the aristocratic elites have of presiding over your land, where you learn how to think about yourself in relation to the rest of society. So it's much easier to just hoard your wealth.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: When you think about what the next generations, the children of the meritocratic elites, are going to look like or do, it's very easy to imagine them just becoming aristocratic elites in the sense that they'll just inherit the money from their families. And they haven't been socialized into how to think about their role in society. So all the meritocratic elites eventually turn into aristocratic elites. That's where I think you start seeing this trend now towards people wanting to 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 think, "I don't want to do that."
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: 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, 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 inculcated to give back?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I assume most of the figures about Americans giving back is spread across all Americans, not just the wealthiest.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So you would predict that among the top 10 percent of Americans, there's less philanthropy than the top 10 percent of Europeans? I'm not sure I understand the question. Does the ratio of meritocratic to aristocratic elites change how much philanthropy there is among the elites?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Here we have much more of a culture of, even among aristocratic elites, this idea of institution building or large donations to build institutions. Whereas in Europe, a lot of the public institutions are created by government. There's this mentality that private citizens don't experiment with public institutions; that's the government's job. You see that pervasively throughout European culture: when they want something to change in public society, they look to government to regulate or change it. In the U.S., it's much more choose your own adventure. We don't really see the government as the sole provider or shaper of public institutions. We also look at private citizens. There are so many public institutions we have now that were not started by government, but by private philanthropists. That's a really unusual thing about the U.S.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: 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 the family's philanthropic efforts. There are many examples of this: Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Dustin Moskowitz and Cari Tuna. So what is the consequence of this? How is philanthropy, the causes and the foundations, how are they different because of this pattern?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: The problem is that what even is philanthropy is changing very quickly. We can say historically, in recent decades, that has probably been true. That wasn't true in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Carnegie and Rockefeller were the ones actually doing their own philanthropy, not their spouses. So it's a more recent trend. But now I think we're also seeing this thing where a lot of wealthy people are not necessarily doing their philanthropic activities through foundations anymore. That's true both within the traditional philanthropy sector and the looser definition of what we might consider philanthropy, which I want to define more broadly as the actions of elites that are public-facing activities.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Even within traditional philanthropy circles, we have the 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which is traditionally how people house all their money in a foundation and do their full-time activities out of that. But in more recent years, we've seen this trend towards LLCs. Emerson Collective might have been the first to do it, and that was Steve Jobs' foundation. Then Mark Zuckerberg with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also used an LLC. Since then, a lot of other tech wealth has moved towards people using LLCs instead of 501(c)(3)s because it gives you a lot more flexibility in the kinds of things you can fund. You don't just have to fund other nonprofits. Then you also see donor advised funds, DAFs, which are a hacky workaround to foundations as well.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: The point is that this mental model of one person making a ton of money and then their spouse directing nice, feel-good philanthropic activities may not be the model we continue to move forward on. I'm curious to see what a return to Gilded Age style philanthropy looks like. Because we've had so many new people making a ton of money in the last 10 years, we might see this return where people are not just forming a philanthropic foundation and looking for the nicest causes to fund, but are actually thinking more holistically about how to help build and create a movement around a thing they really care about. How do I think more broadly about funding companies, nonprofits, and individuals, and doing lots of different kinds of activities?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: The broader goal that motivates the new elite classes to want to do any of this stuff at all... I don't really think philanthropy is about altruism. I think the term philanthropy is just totally fraught and refers to too many different things. It's not very helpful. But the part I'm interested in is what motivates elites to go from just making a lot of money and thinking about themselves, to then thinking about their place in broader public society. I think that starts with thinking about how do I control media, academia, and government, which are the three arms of the public sector. We think of it in that way a little bit more broadly, where it's really much more about maintaining control over your own power, more so than this altruistic, whitewashed kind of thing.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Isn't the word "noble" descended from a word that basically means to give alms to people? If you're in charge of them, you give alms to them. In a way, part of what motivates altruism, not all of it, but part of it is that you influence and have power. Not even in a necessarily negative connotation, but that's definitely what motivates altruism. So having that put square front and center is refreshing and honest, actually.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I really don't see it as a negative thing at all. Most of the writing, journalism, and academia that focuses on philanthropy tends to be very wealth critical. I'm not at all wealth critical personally. Returning to this mental model of aristocratic and meritocratic elites: aristocratic elites are able to pass down and encode what they're supposed to be doing in each generation because they have these familial ties. On the meritocratic side, if you didn't have any language around altruism or public stewardship, you need to create that narrative for the meritocratically, or else there's nothing to hold on to. So it makes sense to talk in those terms.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Andrew Carnegie, being the father of modern philanthropy in the U.S., wrote these series of essays about wealth that were very influential, where he talks about this moral obligation. I think it was really a quiet way for him, even though it was ostensibly about giving back or helping lift up the next generation of entrepreneurs, to take a protective stance. He was saying that if he doesn't frame it in this way, then people are just going to knock down the concept of wealth altogether.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: 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 has run as a result? I doubt it. But when Musk takes over Twitter, 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. Control over media is a bigger meme now.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let me take a digression and ask about open source for a second. Based on your experience studying these open source projects, do you find the theory that Homer and Shakespeare were basically container words for these open source repositories that stretched out through centuries more plausible now, rather than them being individuals? Do you find that more plausible now given your study of open source, or less plausible?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: The idea is that they weren't just one person, but a whole bunch of people throughout centuries who composed different parts of each story. The Nicholas Bourbaki model, same concept: a single mathematician who is actually comprised of lots of different people.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I think the opposite would be my conclusion. We think of open source as this very collective volunteer effort, and we use that as an excuse to not really contribute back to open source or think about how open source projects are maintained. There's a bystander effect where you think, "Someone's taking care of it. It's volunteer oriented. Of course there's someone out there taking care of it." But in reality, it actually turns out it is just one person. So maybe it's a little bit more like a Wizard of Oz type model. It's actually just one person behind the curtain doing everything. You see this huge grandeur and think there must be so many people behind this one person.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I think that's undervalued. A lot of the rhetoric we have about open source is rooted in early 2000s starry-eyed ideas about the power of the internet, crowdsourcing, and Wikipedia. In reality, we see this convergence from very broad-based collaborative volunteer efforts to narrowing down to single creators. I think a lot of single creators are the people really driving a lot of the internet today and a lot of cultural production.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's super fascinating. Does that in general make you more sympathetic towards the lone genius view of accomplishments in history? Not just in literature, but when you think back to how likely is it that Newton came up with all that stuff on his own versus how much was fed into him by others around him.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I think so. I've never been a big great founder theory kind of person. My true theory is that ideas are maybe some sort of sentient concept or virus that operates outside of us, and we are just the vessels through which ideas flow. In that sense, it's not really about any one person. But I do think, in terms of where creative effort comes from, a lot of it comes much more from a single individual than from wisdom of the crowds. Everything just serves different purposes.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Within open source, not all of open source maintenance work is creative. In fact, most of it is pretty boring and drudgerous. That's the stuff no one wants to do, and one person kind of got stuck with doing it. That's really different from who created a certain open source project, which is a little bit more of that creative mindset.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Do you think more projects in open source, just take a popular repository, on average would be better off if a larger percentage of them had pull requests closed and feature requests closed? You can look at the code, but you can't interact with it or its creators. Should more repositories have this model?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I definitely think so. They would be much happier that way.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It's interesting to think about the implications of this for other areas outside of code, which is where it gets really interesting.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: That was basically the framing for my book. I thought, "Okay, I feel like whatever is happening in open source right now..." You start with this idea that democracy is great and we should have tons and tons of people participating. Tons of people participate. And then it turns out that most participation is actually just noise and not that useful. It ends up scaring everyone away, and in the end you just have one or a small handful of people actually doing all the work while everyone else is screaming around them. This becomes a really great metaphor for what happens in social media.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: The reason I wrote the book, and then went to work at Substack, was partly because I thought the model is converging from Twitter being this big open space to everyone retreating. The public space is so hostile that everyone must retreat into smaller private spaces. So chats became a thing, Substack became a thing. I just feel realistic about it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The Straussian message in that book is very strong. When you're thinking about something like corporate governance, there's a big question. Even more interestingly, when you think if DAOs are going to be a thing and 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 oligarchies where the board is in control, or should they be complete democracies where everybody gets one vote on what you do at the next shareholder meeting? That analysis is pretty interesting to think about how corporations should be run differently, if at all. What does it inform how you think the average corporation should be run?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Definitely. I'm not a corporate governance expert, but I do feel we're seeing a little bit of a backlash against shareholder activism and extreme focus on DEI and boards. I think we're seeing people just starting to take the reins and take control again because they realize that doesn't really work so well.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I think DAOs are going to learn this hard lesson as well. It's still maybe too early to say what is happening in DAOs right now, but at least the ones I have looked at, there is a very common failure mode of people saying, "Let's have this be super democratic and leave it to the crowd to run this thing and figure out how it works." And it turns out you actually do need a strong leader, even in the beginning. This is something I learned from open source projects. Very rarely, if at all, do you have a project that starts leaderless and faceless. Usually there is some strong creator, leader, or influential figure driving the project forward for a certain period of time. Then you can 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 you can't do that off day one.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: That's an open question I have for crypto as an industry more broadly. If I think about what is defining each of these generations of people pushing forward new technological paradigms: the Wall Street finance mindset is very focused on globalism and this efficiency, quantitative mindset. The tech Silicon Valley Y Combinator generation is really focused on top talent and this founder mindset, the power of individuals breaking institutions. Then you have the crypto mindset, which is this faceless, leaderless, governed by protocol and by code mindset. That is intriguing to me, but I have a really hard time squaring it with what I've seen.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: In some sense, open source was the experiment that started playing out 20 years before. Some things are obviously different in crypto because tokenization completely changes the incentive system for contributing and maintaining crypto projects versus traditional open source projects. But in the end, humans are humans. I feel like there are a lot of lessons to be learned from open source. They also started out early on being very starry-eyed about the power of hyper-democratic regimes, and it turned out that just doesn't work in practice. So how does crypto square that? I'm very curious to see what happens.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's super fascinating. That raises an interesting question. 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 MacAskill dies, would you be shorting effective altruism? Or if Tyler Cowen dies, would you be shorting progress studies? Or do you think that once you get a movement off the ground, it can survive on its own?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: That's a good question. I don't think there's some perfect template. Each of these has its own unique quirks and characteristics.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Let me back up a little bit. "Idea machines" is this concept I have around the transition from traditional 501(c)(3) foundations as vehicles for philanthropy. What does the modern version of that look like that is not necessarily encoded in institution? I had this term "idea machines," which is a different way of thinking about turning ideas into outcomes, where you have a community that forms around a shared set of values and ideas. You mentioned progress studies as an example, or effective altruism. Eventually that community gets capitalized by some funders, starts to be able to develop an agenda, and then actually starts building operational outcomes and turning those ideas into real-world initiatives.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So once the charismatic founder dies of a movement, is the movement basically handicapped in some way? 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?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I think there are just different shapes and classifications of different types of communities here. So, thinking back to different types of open source projects, it's not like there's one model that fits perfectly for all of them.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: There are some communities where, if all their leaders were to disappear tomorrow, the movement would still keep going. There are enough true believers, even within the next order of that community, that it would continue to grow. Whereas you have smaller or more nascent communities, or communities that are much more oriented around a charismatic founder, where if you lose that leader, the whole thing falls apart because they're more like cults or religions. I don't think it makes one better or worse.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The right way to do it is probably like Bitcoin, where you have a charismatic leader for life, but that leader can't go away, can't ever die, yet you still have the north stars.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: It is funny. A lot of prophets have this property where you're not really sure what they believed in, so people with different temperaments can project their own preferences onto them. Somebody like Jesus, right? You can be a super left-winger and believe Jesus stood for everything you believe in, and you can be a super right-winger and believe the same.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, go ahead.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I think there's value in writing cryptically. I think Curtis Yarvin has done a really good job of this, where intentionally or not, because his writing is so cryptic and long-winded, it's like the Bible where you can just pore over it endlessly, asking what did this mean? You're always told to write very clearly and succinctly, but in a weird way, you can be much more effective by being very long-winded and not obvious about what you're saying.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes, which actually raises an interesting question. There have been movements, like effective altruism, that have been focused on community building in an explicit way. And then there are other movements where they have a charismatic founder who doesn't really try to recruit people. I'm thinking of somebody like Peter Thiel, for example. He goes on once every year or two, has this really cryptic back and forth on a podcast, and then just goes away in a hole for a few months or a few years.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I'm curious which one you think is more effective, given that you're not really competing for votes. The absolute number of people is not what you care about. It's not clear what you care about, but you do want to have more influence among the elites who matter in politics and tech. So, your thoughts on those strategies—actually trying to community build versus just kind of projecting out there in a cryptic way.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, I mean, I definitely favor the cryptic methodology, being somewhat cryptic myself. But with Peter, I think the Thielverse is probably one of the most influential things in tech. It is partly so effective because it is hard to even define what it is or wrap your head around. You just know that every interesting person you meet somehow has some weird connection to Peter Thiel.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: This is sort of that evolution from the 501(c)(3) foundation to the idea machine. Implicit in that is a switch from starting the "Nadia Asparouhova Foundation" or whatever, where it had your name on it and it was all about what I as a funder want to do in the world. You spend all this time doing classical research, going into the field, talking to people, and you sit and think, "Here is a strategy I'm going to pursue." But ultimately, it's very donor-centric in a very explicit way.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Within traditional philanthropy, you're seeing a backlash against that in straight-up non-profit land. Now the locus of power is moving from being very donor-centric to being community-centric. People are saying, "We don't really want the donors telling us what to do, even though it's also their money. Let's have this be driven by the community from the ground up." That's one very literal reaction against having the donor as the central power figure.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: But I think idea machines are the more realistic or effective answer. The donor is still there—without the presence of a funder, the community is just a community, sitting around talking about ideas of what could happen, with no money to make anything happen. Really effective funders are good at being subtle and thoughtful. No one wants to see the "Peter Thiel Foundation" necessarily, that's just not the style. But you meet so many people that are being funded by the same person, just going out and aggressively arming the rebels. It's a more distributed, decentralized way of spreading one's power instead of just starting a foundation.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, even if you look at the life of influential politicians like LBJ or Robert Moses, how much of it was calculated and how much of it was just decades of building up favors and connections in a way that had no definite, clear plan, but you're hoping that someday you can call upon them in a sort of Godfather way.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: That's interesting. And by the way, this is also where your work on open source comes in. There's this idea that in the movement, everybody will come in with their ideas and you can community-build your way towards what should be funded.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I'm inclined to believe that it's probably a few people who have these ideas about what should be funded, and the rest of it is either a way of building up engagement and hype, or maybe just useless.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I am really very much a tech startup person and not a crypto person, even though I would very much like to be one because I think it's the future and there are so many interesting things happening. For the record, I am not at all down on crypto—I think it is the next big movement. But when I really come down to the mindset, I am so in that sort of "top talent founder, power of the individual to break institutions" mindset. That just resonates with me so much more than the leaderless, faceless, highly participatory kind of thing.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I am very open to being wrong on that. I just have not yet seen evidence that the participatory model works in the world. I see a lot of rhetoric about how it could work or should work. We have this implicit belief that direct democracy is somehow the greatest thing to aspire towards, but over and over we see evidence that it just doesn't really work. I don't even have to throw out the underlying principles or values behind it. I still really believe in meritocracy, access to opportunity, and the pursuit of happiness. To me, those are all very American values. But where that breaks is the idea that it has to happen through these highly participatory methods. I just haven't seen really great evidence of that working.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What does that imply about how you think about politics or political structures? Do you elect a mayor, but then forget it—no participation? He gets to do everything he wants 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, states, and countries should be run?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: That's very complicated. I think 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 be so great if we could just have one person who has exactly the views that I have, put them in charge, and let them run things." That would be very nice. I just think it's unrealistic. Maybe monarchy sounds great in theory, but in practice, it doesn't work.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I embrace the idea that there is no perfect governance design, in the same way that there's no perfect open source project design. It really just depends on what your population is comprised of. There are some very small, homogenous populations that can be very easily governed by a small government or one person because there just isn't that much dissent or difference. Everyone is sort of on the same page. America is the extreme opposite.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I'm always thinking about America because I'm American and I love America. But everyone is trying to solve the governance question for America. We're an extremely heterogeneous population with a lot of competing worldviews. I may not agree with all the views of everyone in America, but I also don't want just one person that represents my personal views. I would focus more on effectiveness in government than on having just one person in charge. I don't mind if someone disagrees with my views as long as they're good at what they do, if that makes sense.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: So the questions are: how do we improve the speed at which our government works, and the efficacy of it? I think there's so much room for improvement there, versus how much I really care about changing the actual structure of our government.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. Going back to open source for a second, why do these companies release so much stuff in open source for free? It's probably literally worth trillions of dollars of value in total, and they just release it for free. Many of them are developer tools that other developers use to build competitors for these big tech companies. Why do they do it? What explains it?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I think it depends on the specific project, but a lot of times these are projects that were developed internally. It's the same reason why people spend all this time writing long posts or papers and then just release them for free. Why not put everything behind a paywall? I think the answer is that mindshare is a lot more interesting than your literal IP.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: You put out these long reports or you tweet, you spend all this time creating content for free because you're trying to capture mindshare. Same thing with companies releasing open source projects. A lot of times they really want other developers to come in and contribute. They want to increase their status as an open-source-friendly company, or show the type of code they write internally. Recruiting is the hardest thing for any company, so being able to attract the right kinds of developers who fit well into their developer culture matters a lot more. They're just doing that with code instead of with words.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You've talked about the need for more idea machines. You're dissatisfied with the fact that effective altruism is the big game in town. Is there some idea or nascent movement—other than progress studies—where you feel like this could be a thing but it just needs a charismatic founder to take it to the next level? Or even if it doesn't exist yet, a set of ideas that clearly has something there? Is there anything like that you notice?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I only had a couple of different possibilities in that post. I think the progress meme is probably the largest growing contender that I would see right now. I think there's another one around the "new right," if that's even the best term for it. There's a shared set of values there that are maybe starting with politics but ideally spreading to other areas of public influence.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: There's smaller stuff too. I mentioned "tools for thought" in that post. That's never going to be a huge idea machine, but it's one where you have a lot of interesting, talented people thinking about the future of computing. Until more recently, there just hasn't been a lot of funding available, and the funding is always really uneven and unpredictable. That's an example of a smaller community that just needs that extra influx to turn a bunch of abstract ideas into practice.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I think there is just so much more potential to do more. I wish people would think a little bit more creatively, because I really do think effective altruism becomes the default option for a lot of people. They're vaguely dissatisfied with it, but they don't think about what they actually really care about in the world and how they want to put that forward.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: There's also the fact that effective altruism has this very fit meme-plex in the sense that it's like a polytheistic religion. If you have a cause area, you don't have your own movement, you just have it within our broader movement. It just adopts your gods into our movement. I see people trying to lobby for effective altruism to care about their cause area, but you could just start a separate one somewhere else.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So it's interesting to me that the wealth boom in Silicon Valley and tech spheres has led to the growth of philanthropy, but that hasn't always been the case in America. A lot of people became billionaires after energy markets were deregulated in the 80s and 90s, and the hub of that was the Texas area. As far as I'm aware, there wasn't a boom of philanthropy motivated by the ideas that people in that region had. What's different about Silicon Valley? Or do you think these other places have also had their own booms of philanthropic giving?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: No, I think you're right. I would make a distinction between being wealthy and being elite. There are definitely pockets of more local markets of wealth, like Texas oil or energy billionaires, that tend to operate more in their own sphere. A lot of them are philanthropically active, but they only really focus on their geographic area.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: There's a difference, and I think part of it comes from the question of what forces someone to actually do something more public-facing with their power. I think that comes from your power being threatened. Tech has only become a lot more active in the public sphere outside of startups after the tech backlash of the mid-2010s. A similar thing happened with the Davos elite, and also with the Gilded Age cohort.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: When you're building in your own little world, like Silicon Valley where everyone was sequestered off just thinking about startups, tech was essentially an industry like any other—entertainment or whatever. We were just happy building over here. It was only once the panopticon turned its head towards tech and they had this onslaught of critiques from mainstream discourse that they went, "Oh, what is my place in this world? If I don't try to defend that, I'm going to lose all that power." So that need to defend one's power can prompt that sort of action.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: The other aspect is that a lot of elites are driven by technological paradigm shifts. There's a scholar, Carlota Perez, who writes about technological revolutions and financial capital. She identifies a few different technological revolutions over the last 100-plus years that drove this cycle: a new technology is invented, people work on it in a smaller industry way, there's some crazy public frenzy, then a backlash, and then a focus on public institution building. She points out that not all technology fits into that—not all technology is a paradigm shift. Sometimes technology is just technology. So I think a lot of wealth might just fall into that category.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: My third example is the Koch family. The Koch brothers' father was the one who initially made their wealth, but he was very localized in how he thought about philanthropy. He had his own family foundation, just doing that sort of Texas billionaire mindset of "I made a bunch of money, I'm going to do my local funder activity." It was only the next generation, his children, who took that wealth and started thinking about how to move it onto a more elite stage and think about their input in the media. You can see two clear generations within the same family—one with a local wealth mindset and one with a more elite wealth mindset. You can ask yourself why that switch happened. It's clearly about more than just money. It's also about intention.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's really interesting. If you identify the current mainstream media as affiliated with the Davos aristocratic elite, there is a growing field of independent media, but you would not identify somebody like Joe Rogan in the Silicon Valley sphere. There is a new media, but I guess these startup people don't have that much influence over them yet.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I think they're trying to take that strategy. You have a bunch of founders like Palmer Luckey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Brian Armstrong who will not really talk to mainstream media anymore. They will not get an interview with the New York Times, but they will go to an individual influencer or creator and do an interview with them. When Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta, he didn't grant interviews to mainstream publications, but he went and talked to Ben Thompson at Stratechery.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: It fits really well with that mindset of not necessarily institution-building, but focusing on the power of individuals who defy institutions. That is an open question I have about what the long-term influence of the tech elite will look like. Human history tells us that eventually all individual behaviors get codified into institutions, but we're obviously living in a very different time now.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: The way the Davos elite managed to really codify and extend their influence across all these different sectors was by taking that institutional mindset and thinking about academic institutions and media institutions. If the startup mindset is really inherently anti-institution—we don't want to build the next Harvard, we want to blow apart the concept of universities; we don't want to create a new CNN or Fox News, we want to fund individual creators to do that same work in a very decentralized way—will that work long term? I don't know. Is that just a temporary state where no one really knows what the next institutions will look like? Or is it really an important part of this generation where we shouldn't be asking "how do you build a new media network?" and should just be saying the answer is there is no media network, we just go to all these individuals instead.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's interesting. What do you make of this idea 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 grant you approval? I have a hard time seeing somebody who is a Napoleon-like figure being willing long-term to live under that arrangement. The people who have this desire to dominate and be recognized, who are probably pretty important to any movement you want to create, will just want to go off and build a company that gives them an independent footing first. They just won't fall under any umbrella.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Dustin Moskovitz, for example, has been funding EA for a really long time and hasn't walked away. On the flip side, you can see a lot of risk with something like FTX, because you end up relying on one funder, and if that funder disappears, everything else falls apart.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I don't have any preciousness attached to the idea of communities lasting forever. If we're trying to solve for what did not work well about 501(c)(3) foundations for most of recent history, part of it was that they were meant to live on in perpetuity. Why do we still have the Rockefeller Foundation? There are now many different Rockefeller foundations, but why does that even exist? Why did that money not just get spent down?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: When John D. Rockefeller was first proposing the idea of foundations, he wanted them to have a finite lifespan. He wanted them to last only 50 years or 100 years when he was proposing this federal charter, but that federal charter failed. Now we have state charters and foundations can just exist forever. If we want to improve upon this idea of how to prevent meritocratic elites from turning into aristocratic elites, and how to actually just try to do a lot of really interesting stuff in our lifetimes, that's the question.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: It's very counterintuitive, because you think about leaving a legacy as creating institutions or a foundation that lasts forever. Two hundred years from now, there's still the Nadia Asparouhova Foundation out there. But if I really think about it, I would almost rather just do really, really good, interesting work in 50 years, or 20 years, or 10 years, and have that be the legacy, versus your name getting besmirched over a century of institutional decay and decline.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: If you have a community that lasts for maybe only 10 years, and it's funded for that amount of time, and then it outlives its usefulness and winds down or becomes less relevant, I don't necessarily say that's a bad thing. Of course, in practice, nothing ever ends that neatly and quietly. But yeah, I don't think that's a bad thing.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Who are some ethnographers or sociologists from a previous era that have influenced your work? Was there somebody writing about what it was like to be in a Roman legion, or what it was like to work on a factory floor, and you thought, "I want to do that for open source" or "I want to do that for the new tech elite"?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: For open source, I was definitely really influenced by Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom. I think they both had this quality of... Elinor Ostrom was looking at examples of common pool resources, like fisheries or forests, and just going and visiting them and spending a lot of time with them. She said, "Actually, I don't think the tragedy of the commons is a real thing, or it's not the only outcome we can possibly have." Sometimes commons can be managed perfectly sustainably, and it's not necessarily true that everyone treats them very extractively. She just wrote about what she saw.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Same with Jane Jacobs, looking at cities as someone who lives in one. She didn't have any fancy credentials or anything like that. She was just like, "I live in the city and I'm looking around, and this idea of top-down urban planning, where you have someone trying to design this perfect city that doesn't change and doesn't yield to its people, seems completely unrealistic." The style that both of them take in their writing starts from them just observing what they see and trying to write about it. That's the style I really want to emulate.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. I think for people to just be talking to... I don't know, Chris, just talking to open source developers. Turns out you can learn a lot more from that than just sitting around thinking about what open source developers might be thinking about. I have had this idea, not even for writing it out loud, but just to understand how the world works: shadowing people who are in a random position. They don't have to be a lead in any way. Just a person who's the personal assistant to somebody influential. How do they decide whose emails to forward? How do they decide what's the priority? Or somebody who's just an accountant for a big company. What is involved there? Or the line manager at the local factory. I just have no idea how these parts of the world work, and I want to shadow them for a day and see what happens there.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: This is really interesting because everyone else focuses on the big name figure, but who's the actual gatekeeper there?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. I've definitely found that if you just start cold emailing people and talking to them, people are often surprisingly very, very open to being talked to. Most people do not get asked questions about what they do and how they think. So, you want to realize that dream.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Maybe I'm not like John Rockefeller in that I only want my organization to last for 50 years. I'm sure you come across these people who have this idea that, "I'll let my money compound for 200 years, and if it just compounds at some reasonable rate, it'll be 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, a revolt, or some sort of change in law that draws down this wealth, how would you set up a thousand-year endowment? Or a 500-year endowment? Would you just put it in a crypto wallet? How would you go about that organizationally? That's your goal: I want to have the most influence in 500 years.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Well, I'd worry much less about the assets. The question for me is not about how do I make sure there are assets available to distribute in a thousand years, because then I just put it in the stock market. You do some pretty boring things to ensure your assets grow over time. The more difficult question is: how do you ensure that whoever is deciding how to distribute the funds distributes them in a way that you personally want them to be spent?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: The Ford Foundation is a really interesting example. Henry Ford created the Ford Foundation shortly before he died and pledged a lot of Ford stock to create this foundation. He was doing it basically for tax reasons; he had no philanthropic interest in it. He passed away, his son passed away, and his grandson ended up being on the board. But the board ended up being a bunch of people that Henry Ford certainly would not have ever wanted on his board. The Ford Foundation ended up becoming huge and influential—I have received money from them, so this is not an indictment of their views or anything like that. It's just that you had the intent of the original donor, and then you had all these people who suddenly ended up with a giant pool of capital and decided to spend it however they felt like spending it. The grandson at the time famously resigned because he was really frustrated and said, "This is not at all what my family wanted," and he basically got kicked off the board.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: So, that is the question I would need to figure out if I had a thousand-year endowment. How do I make sure that whomever manages that endowment actually shares my views? And also, how do I even know what we need to care about in a thousand years? I don't even know what the problems are in a thousand years. This is why I think very long-term thinking can be a little bit dangerous in this way. You're presuming that you know what even matters then. Figuring out the most impactful things to do is so contextually dependent on what is going on at the time.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: There are also conditions where the donor writes in the charter, "This money can only be spent on X cause or whatever." But then it just becomes really awkward over time because they're spending money on lighthouse keepers or something, and that's just not a thing that should be the main focus anymore. So, I don't know. I think I would probably try to figure out a way to select for thoughtful people. But how to determine that? I wonder if there's a committee with short appointment terms, and then some committee that can run a contest to determine who gets to run this money or distribute this money every generation or something like that. I'd have to come up with something pretty crazy like that. But yeah, that would be the biggest challenge.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I just started reading the book about the Ford Foundation. I haven't got that far. It's so fascinating. But that raises an interesting question. There is the problem of value drift in charities, but it's a very particular kind of value drift. There's famously Conquest's Second Law: any institution that is not constitutionally and explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing over time. This seems especially true of NGOs and charitable organizations. What's the explanation? Why does Conquest's Second Law seem true in this arena?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I have to ask Curtis that. I don't know that I have an amazing answer. I think we can observe that that is maybe what is happening. My best guess is that the values of democracy, peace, and freedom—there's a set of pacifying social values that are very hard to disagree with. So there's always this natural drift towards that.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I do find that the most thoughtful people I know are often part of a strong intellectual conservative movement. But I think people that love nuance, where there is no mindless playbook you can use, where the answer is not always direct democracy or peace or whatever—if that's not your guiding star and you are actually interested in a fair bit of nuance, you're not going to really run institutions. I say that as someone who is much more on the nuanced side. I think the trade-off of that is it just doesn't necessarily have mainstream appeal always, because you don't have these really simplified messages. If institutions need to have simplified messages that they pass on to people, those simplified messages work much better when they're things that make people feel good about themselves. You're always going to have that kind of drift.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, it raises the question of how you would set up... It's like the two monarchs problem. You need somebody who's a good director, but then you also need him to be able to appoint somebody who's a good director.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah. It's really interesting.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let's talk about what you and I do. Or no, before that, actually. [makes a note] All right. The next question is: do you think this new funding for science and thinkers is going to lead to a resurgence of the gentleman scholar category? Or has the nature of science just become too different, and science has gotten much more specialized, so that's no longer possible?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Within the realm of science specifically, the gentleman scientist era—the Charles Darwin type era—feels a little bit bygone. There was a lot of low-hanging fruit then. Science is just so much bigger now, and it is funded in a completely different way that is sort of unrecognizable from where it was before. When people talk about problems in science, they like to romanticize the past. That's probably true for any sort of institutional problem: "Why can't we just have it the way it was 100 years ago?" There are usually good reasons why we don't. Things don't run the way they did before. I always try to think about how we actually take the conditions we're in right now and come up with something new.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: That being said, even if we don't have a return to the literal gentleman scientist as the default way of doing things in science, there is tons of room to go from the current model of how science is funded—the extremely constrained environments that people have to work in—to giving people a little bit more academic freedom, a little bit more creative freedom to experiment. But I think science doesn't really have any easy answers. I spent a bunch of time trying to understand it this summer. Government funding of science became a thing right around the middle of the 20th century after World War Two. The way science ran before then, with very little government funding and very little involvement, is completely different from now, where most of it is government funded. It's a completely different kind of ballgame.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But for public intellectuals, especially if you're making content that is tech-adjacent, there's a change in funding. It's no longer Kevin Kelly's 10,000 true fans, but more like one tech billionaire who likes your work and will write you a check to investigate it for a year. What is the consequence of that kind of change? Having much more concentrated sources of funding in terms of what areas one can focus on, and the ways in which they engage with their audience and publish their content. What impact does that have?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I'm pretty excited about it. I can only really speak within my relatively narrow tech and tech-adjacent creator world. I definitely have noticed, as someone who's been sort of independently or weirdly funded in various ways for a while now, that it feels like that was extremely uncommon when I started. 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. Five years ago, it was hard to identify a lot of people with that kind of situation.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I think it's really cool. People talk about, "How do we bring back the Medicis? How do we bring back this model of patronage?" It's already happening in a lot of ways. People just don't talk about it. Unless you're being funded on Patreon or you have Substack subscriptions, or there's some very legible way to point out how you're making money, there are so many people that are just being quietly funded that don't talk about it. I do actually think the model of patronage is very alive and well right now. It's just not super obvious.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How do you think about the value of what you and I do? Obviously we do different things, but in terms of doing podcasts or writing essays, how do you think about the value of that? Should we just be writing code and digging ditches and doing something else that is more legibly productive for society? What is the value of this?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I only know how to do a handful of things in this world. I feel like I should be doing the thing that I cannot help myself from doing all the time. I don't have a very rosy relationship with writing, to be perfectly honest. I hate writing. Writing makes me crazy. I don't find it to be enjoyable. It's always enjoyable once it's over, but the process is a little miserable. You would think, "Why do you do this thing that makes you miserable?" But it's just the thing I know how to do. 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. There are probably more impactful things I could be doing with my time, but it's the thing I have to do. I think everyone should just be doing the thing that they absolutely have to do, whatever that is. What would make me happy in the world is if everyone was just leaning into their obsession. So that's my obsession.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: When I think about my own impact, I want my ideas to be heard by people that I think can do something about them. I care much more about quality than quantity. I'm not very active on Twitter. I don't really focus on needing to reach some kind of mass mainstream audience. When I published my book, I told myself, "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." It mattered less to me that this is not the kind of book that needs to be in an airport bookstore. With my essays, it's much more important to me that people whose opinions I care about read it. I make my essays public because I hope everyone reads them, but when I think about how to measure my impact, it's not how many page views I get on an essay. It's more about who ended up talking about it, and are those the people I wanted to talk about it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I think there's value in that. People really undervalue this. My personal type is, founders will always talk about building and startups as being so important. But what are they all doing in their spare time? They're reading books, they're reading essays. Those books and essays influence how they think about stuff. It's a very indirect sort of influence. You can't have out of one mouth saying, "The only important thing in the world is starting startups," and then at the same time talk about the cool new book you read at a cocktail party. Both those things are important in different ways.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I totally agree. I don't want to repeat myself because I talked about this on my Burn episode. One of the things we were talking about was Robert Caro's books. This guy was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize before he wrote *The Power Broker*. He was a top-tier investigative journalist. Can you imagine crunching the numbers as a top-tier investigative journalist at the peak of your career, and you think, "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. 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." There's no way 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. Presidents have praised and read the book and said it changed how they think about politics. It's the kind of thing where you wouldn't have gone to that conclusion just from thinking about it beforehand and saying, "This is the most effective thing I could do."
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Totally. You had this recent post about climate tribes. I thought that was really interesting, especially the addendum. By the way, I have noticed this tendency of writers to hide their most interesting thoughts in footnotes and addendums. I'm curious why that is. I think it might be because your most interesting thoughts are digressions that you feel like you have to take out of the main text. But what I thought was interesting was you comparing climate doomerism to other kinds of doomerisms that are yet to become fully mature. I'm wondering what your predictions are about the different tribes that will emerge when thinking about AI, as both capabilities grow and as public awareness of those capabilities grows.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Oh, gosh. I think it's definitely just too early to say. I know that sounds like a cop-out, but I don't want to say things that I don't feel confident about. I think it's too early to say. Even within AI, though, if I think about the different tribes that are influencing the climate discourse today, there is some parallel version of that for AI more broadly. Right now, AI safety feels really constrained to something like MIRI, something very specific. I imagine as AI becomes more widespread and more people have experiences with it and have opinions on it, that might lead to other philosophies forming around that. We'll see this one very narrow view—the MIRI set is equivalent to the doomer tribe I identified in climate, where that is one specific tribe. But there are a lot of other people that are really interested in climate that don't feel doomer-y at all, even though that's the most flashy, media-friendly version of it. So, other than saying as more people interact with AI, I imagine there will be more factions emerging there. I think it's still too early to say what that will be. AI is still kind of a big mystery box to me right now. I don't really know what's inside.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Having studied these different sorts of doomerisms—whether they're right or not is a separate question, but just in terms of the sociology of them—has it always been true that smart, talented people tend to get a lot of meaning by working on things that are seen as existential catastrophes? Or is that a property of tech-adjacent areas or modern tech-adjacent areas? How unique is this sociological phenomenon?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, I think it is pretty new. And that's why it's kind of gnawing at my brain a little bit. I think it's really new, like last five years it's new.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, well, and so I tried to sort of track this a little bit, and I'm not super high confidence, but there's this one theory around how we used to have shared broader narratives that were actually doomer-esque. We had world wars, we had the Cold War, whatever. So super smart, talented people that need to be pointed in a direction somewhere, they're going to go work on those kinds of problems. There's a shared understanding that we are saving our country or protecting our country by working on these different things.
--:-- So you had STEM talent in the Cold War. And then after the Cold War, we don't have these deep existential threats anymore, so we have to find them somewhere else. That's where environmentalism became much more alarmist, whereas in the past it was a niche social cause. It became much more like "we need to save the planet," coming out of World War II and the manufacturing of chemicals. Suddenly people are grappling with the after effects of that.
--:-- But that doesn't explain the last five years or so, where it's not a weird activist thing to work in climate. It can even be a very boring thing for people in American climate. But it's all connected to this idea of "this is the most important thing I need to be working on." So I think maybe in the absence of having some bigger narrative that is all-consuming for everyone, you kind of have to make your own meaning somewhere.
--:-- But it is funny to me that we don't just say—again, going back to writing—I have no defense as to why I write all day. It's just what I do. I cannot defend it as the most needle-moving thing in the world. I don't really relate to this need to have a doomer narrative. There is no doomer narrative attached to why I write. I just write because I think it's important and I have ideas, questions I want to answer. To me, that is how I define impact. That matches my model of 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, "What is the most impactful thing to be doing in the world that is external to my own personal curiosity?" And I think that's where those doomer narratives come from.
--:-- I did bury in another footnote at the end of that post this question about the early 2010s. I feel like there's this other grouping of industries that's not doomer-esque but also attracts smart, talented people. You have advertising, trading, and playing video games—I don't really know if that's an industry, but there's that mindset. Those people end up with some shared set of skills across all those different industries or practices. Why do so many smart, talented people go into trading? I wonder if there's some other similar gravity well effect there that is also attracting smart, talented people into climate, maybe from a different crowd.
--:-- I wonder if before the last five years, maybe that was where everyone was dumping into. I don't really know.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Do you have some general theory of what these gravity wells for talent are? What connects trading to climate?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I don't know, and maybe they're different crowds. That's why I stuck it in a footnote because I was lazy and I didn't know what to do with the thought but needed to put it somewhere. But it just seems like there's something about all these sorts of industries where if they were starting with a blank slate they could be doing anything, and for some reason they all end up in these non-obvious places.
--:-- Why are there so many people that end up in trading? It's just so specific when you really think about it. And then same with climate. Depending on how literally you take climate doomer predictions, if you don't think the world is going to end in 30 years, then why is everyone so focused on this one specific thing when they could be working on lots of different things? In both cases, it feels like they kind of flop in there somehow.
--:-- I did put in that addendum, thinking about what is the shape of a doomer industry. I think one of the under-discussed aspects of it is that it is adjacent to some kind of commercial opportunity. The reason why everyone doesn't just go off and work on global poverty is because there's no money to be made working on that. But if you think about misinformation and the threat of deep fakes upending democracy, or AI safety, or climate, they are adjacent to commercial industries where you can actually make a real salary and feel relevant to the business world or to all your peers, while still working on a social cause area.
--:-- That's probably the simplest, non-overthinking answer for why advertising and trading attract many people: you can make a lot of money in it. That simple.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, I have one theory about trading and video games that connects them. Burn Hobart, funny enough, another footnote. Burn Hobart had a blog post about SaaS products or something, and one of the footnotes was that one of the positive things about finance might be that it gives a venting for talented people who just like to play zero-sum or negative-sum games. Otherwise they would have been used up in a war, but since there's no wars, they would be doing something else destructive in our world. If we can just put them in front of a trading screen and make them get the microsecond efficiency of some equity market better, it's better than anything else they could be doing with that mentality.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I kind of like that. There's some parallel with that for content creators too, and I will cringingly put myself in that category. It's also this grouping of people where I don't really know why they are kind of just bodies in a room—myself included. That's what I'd be doing if not this. At least there's a way to make money in it, but it's a much more amorphous and non-coherent industry than trading. Different set of people.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: One interesting area that is not included in any of these influential idea machines in Silicon Valley is religion. I mean, they've been some of the most important ideas in history, and yet somehow they've had very little influence in terms of what kinds of things the new elite is funding and paying attention to. Do you think that will change, or have we just had a complete change in terms of what kinds of ideas get promoted?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: TBD. I think the new right is bringing at least some of those underlying Christian religious values back. Maybe they're not literally funding churches, but how do we bring Christian values back to public society? There is a lot going on there, even if it's not explicitly called religion. So among elites that are explicitly religious, how are they encoding those values into public institutions? I think that is happening on that front.
--:-- I also just think, if we take a broader view of how religion factors into our day-to-day life, I feel like people ask this question more than they need to. Everyone says, "Oh, people aren't religious anymore. They're not going to church. So they need to find meaning. How do we create new religions today?" And I just feel like people are religious. They're just religious about different things.
--:-- That was one of my conclusions with climate. In the early 2000s, you had Michael Crichton criticizing environmentalism as a religion, saying it's distracting people from the science and we should get back to the science. Whereas 20 years later, I think it just is a religion for a lot of people. Why not just lean into that and say, that is how people are finding meaning. That is how people are finding community.
--:-- There it is. There's a religion. We may not literally have actively practicing Christians in America, and there's the question of what else religion needs to fulfill that it's not through something like climate. But I also think that religious practice is very active and around us everywhere. I don't think that's sad or bad. I think that's just how it's evolved.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: 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?
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: I don't know that I—oh man, I wish I had a really good juicy answer. Maybe you have to ask someone else that knows me. What am I most shameless about in public? It's one property of being shameless: you don't even realize it's shameful. You're so shameless you don't even keep track of it that way.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Just a fact.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, yeah. I'm sure I have something. I think I'm a very shameful person. I don't know that I have—yeah, I'm not the best at being shameless. You're going to have to ask a friend to tell you what I'm most shameless about.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Sounds good. Sounds good. Okay, Nadia, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Tell people where they can find your blog, your Twitter, anywhere else that they should look for you.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Blog is at nadia.xyz, and I'm on Twitter at n-a-y-a-f-i-a.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Awesome. Okay, awesome. Nadia, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on.
--:-- Nadia Asparouhova: Yeah, thanks, Chen.
