Now looking back at my childhood and going to the church I feel a quiet wistfulness that I hadn’t people that showed me how much richness there is in following God. I didn’t had people that taught me what it means to pray, or that taught me why I should pray, or that didn’t made me go to the church when I didn’t want to (I think this is a big one, I don’t think you should ever force your child to go to the church because that backfires with a kid and instead of drawing the child near to God which is the initial intent of the parents, it does the very opposite). And I don’t blame those people, they just didn’t knew any better. In part because I believe that they never actually realized the depth of Christianity and they never had people like I now have that led me to realize how much richness there is in the bible and in following God. But even if I had people that knew, I’m not sure what’s better, knowing better and not doing anything about it or not knowing. Because calling yourself a Christian comes with a lot of responsibilities, and most Christians totally fail to meet these responsibilities. And I’m not talking about things like praying or going to the church. I don’t think going to the church is the obligation or responsibility of any Christian (although, I do think that you will naturally want to go to the church as a result of following God). You could be the best Christian in the world and don’t even go to the church. What I mean is living in the mirror of Jesus. And the bible itself talks about this, “people are known by their fruits” (their actions, attitudes, how they love, etc) and you can have a pretty looking tree but the fruit is terrible, meaning you can say you’re a follower of Jesus with your words but say the opposite with your actions. People do notice whether your faith is real or simply words and a sunday thing. But the people that I am the most sorry for aren’t the people that don’t know God but the people that pretend to know him. The “Christians” that don’t really believe and don’t live like they believe. Because people that don’t know god have an excuse, the ones that pretend to know him don’t, they have more responsibility than anyone else. They already have a rough idea of who God is and what Christianity is, they already have access to the written word of God so what’s their excuse to not to follow him?

One of the things that I now realize why Catholicism doesn’t resonate with me at all is that the Catholic Church is very good at telling you what to do. Plus, they are not based solely on the bible, they have their own rules that go behind the bible. Nowhere in the bible it says priests can’t marry or have kids, or be women, or they need to go through a seminary degree, or that needs to exist a hierarchy on the way to God (you, priests, cardinals, pope, and so on), etc. And I think this might be a reason why I’m standing in a place where it just feels suspiciously easy that “all” I need to do to be saved is call on the name of Jesus and have the right heart, because I’ve been taught that to some extent I need to “earn” my salvation. I was taught that I needed to do, do, do, do, do and then I’m saved and then I do, do, do to keep my salvation. But no, actually I just need to believe it’s already done, and because I’m saved now I naturally want to do, do, do, do, not because the Catholic church tells me but because it’s a natural consequence of following God (because once you decide to follow God he fills you with the Holy Spirit that guides you). Salvation is not about what you do, it’s about what Jesus did for all of us. He meets us where we are not only despite we being broken and sinful, but because we are broken and sinful, Jesus came from the broken, the poor, the sick, the hopeless, the ones far away from him.

One of the questions I sometimes ask saved Christians is if they are saved, then they must be eager to die and eager to go to heaven close to God. But as I am reading more and more the bible I am starting to realize that it’s not really about eternity on heaven, it’s about bringing heaven to earth. The idea that what you do matters, that your actions matter, that you’re here for a reason, that who you are and who you choose to be matters, and you’re on this planet to honor the name of God and have a positive sum life. And above all, the idea that you are the one who makes heaven possible on earth, this is your responsibility, you actually play a role here. So every single follower of God is called to make this happen (love your neighbor as yourself, repay evil with good, etc) that’s why you’re a lottery ticket when it comes to the destiny of those around you.

The people living now have more responsibility than those in the past. That is one way I think it explains why there were so many miracles in the past relative to nowadays. Because in the past (especially for people who lived before Jesus) people did not have any book they could read, or they didn’t know how to seek God more effectively. Therefore, God performed miracles so they could know that he existed and was present. But nowadays (and the time after Jesus went down to earth), virtually everyone in the world has heard about Jesus. So we don’t need a miracle to know that God is here, we already have all the tools to truly believe in God, we have the written word of God (bible), churches, etc but we need faith. So I think nowadays we don’t have miracles like in the past, where you would literally see bread multiplied from nothing. Instead, what God might do now is answer a prayer for more bread by having a random guy knocking at your door offering leftovers from their dinner, it’s much tougher to recognize that it actually is God’s work.

I was talking with a pastor the other day and he was telling me that it’s such a gift that I ask so many questions and really try to understand what’s going on. But I am not sure whether this is a gift or a curse. On one hand, I know that if I ever consider myself a Christian I will really be all in and this will be the most important thing in my life. Once I go after this mountain and see the other side I think I’ll find a much deeper faith than the common Christian, as pastor Craig says it “doubt isn’t the enemy of faith, it often is a pathway to a deeper, more meaningful relationship with God”. Someone that asks questions is someone that is seeking God, just like when we want to know a person better we ask questions. I worry that a lot of Christians don’t ask questions and don’t really try to understand more about God and what they “believe” in. And a lot of times when I ask questions to some Christians they just say “that’s not for me to answer”, they let go of the questions. I don’t think there’s any problem with asking questions but I do think there’s a problem of being attached to the answers though, to earthly answers. Because the more questions I ask to people the more I realize that most questions don’t have an answer and the ones (most of them) that do have an answer you’ll find them in the Bible or while praying.

I think, however, the Christians have gotten some things wrong, but there is one central thing that is good about Christianity. That is that their God is a God of love. Not, like the gods in greek mythology, a god of thunder, or power, or the sun, but of love. To serve God is to serve love.

I like David Deutsch. Reading Deutsch is eye opening because he doesn’t just explain the world, he explains why (and how) we can keep improving it forever. Reading David’s work gave me the big picture of where humanity stands: we are in the pinnacle of progress relative to our ancestors and previous civilizations, but forever at the beginning of infinity when it comes to potential progress (as we shall always be).

I have learned a lot from grappling with his work (check this blogpost). David’s work taught me that we should care about the content of ideas rather than their source. Good explanations and arguments stand on their own, no matter who says them. The real purpose of science therefore is to explain the world, to generate explanations about the world, to answer “why’s”. This cuts through some tribal nonsense and is in part why I don’t like politics. Politics often feels to me the most religion like sphere outside of religion itself, full of irrationality and group loyalty. A lot of political discussions seem to rely on appeals to authority or tradition instead of judging arguments and ideas on their own, it seems to be more about who says it other than what is actually said (whatever the democrats say is garbage for republicans, and the other way around). This is why Tyler Cowen says that choosing one box over the other makes you stupider.

You understand why we, people, are cosmically significant and unlike any other species that has ever lived. And in this anti humanist era that we’re living where some argue that we should have less people, that people are harmful to nature, we should “degrow” the economy, etc, David’s work provides an antidote to those evils. You also understand that people, although individually special, are alike with each other in their ability to create knowledge and explain the world (we’re all universal explainers, meaning any person with the right conditions can in principle create explanatory knowledge about anything in the universe). None of us is inherently constrained from solving problems and making progress in our own lives. None of us is inherently constrained from understanding the world or transforming the world. We all have the same ability to conjecture, criticize bad ideas, create better ideas, explain those ideas and act on those explanations with basically unlimited reach. No one’s born with some magical extra capacity that others lack forever. All (and any) of us can create new explanations and solve problems, knowledge creation indeed is the most egalitarian enterprise in nature. This is what makes agency real, none of us is doomed to be limited, we all have the tools to keep improving things forever (both in society and in our own personal lives). And agency is such an important idea because the more agency an individual or society has, the more problems they can solve.

I asked some critical rationalists for their answer to the question “Why should anyone read David Deutsch? What makes his philosophy so special?” But don’t take mine or these guys’s word for it, go find out for yourself!

• Brett Hall - “The most profound progress in our understanding of reality comes from discoveries - often in the form of unifications - in fundamental fields.

  So it was that the field of quantum computation was spawned not by directly attacking the problem of “how to make better technology” but by investigating how quantum theory (physics) might be tested (epistemology) by taking seriously the Turing principle (mathematics). It takes an intensely curious mind to explore such connections and make that kind of fundamental progress. One such beautiful mind is that of David Deutsch. But this is not the only reason to consume his books, papers, lectures and podcast appearances. David’s work inspires and challenges “what everyone already knows” by frequently presenting something new in philosophy, science and reason broadly. I often compare reading Deutsch to riding a roller coaster. It’s the thrill. The unique view from “the top”. The unexpected twists. The sense of vertigo. The desire to repeat the experience and go searching for something similar. But there is nothing quite like it. Everyone should read Deutsch because, all of the knowledge, insight and wisdom aside: it’s simply fun. Coming to understand Deutsch’s worldview as it appears in his books constitutes perhaps the most pristine instance of eudaemonia one might ever hope to get from a text.”

• Sarah Fitz-Claridge - “David Deutsch’s ideas are life changing. His writing doesn’t just tell you about his unified view of reality, it changes the psychological environment in which you solve problems, create knowledge, and relate to others in your life. Once you internalise his statement that “problems are inevitable, but they are soluble”, problems start seeming fun and fascinating to solve. When you approach problem solving in that spirit, your creativity is not being impeded by pessimism. Just think what a difference it makes to how you navigate disagreements: in place of the usual fighting attitude, you relish the opportunity to resolve the disagreement in a way that delights that both of you.”

• Aaron Stupple - “David Deutsch explains why people are cosmically significant. He explains what our unique characteristics are, the ones that separate us from other animals and the rest of it. And his answer, that we create explanations, can reshuffle everything in one’s life. Creating explanations is the key, because that’s what enable us to understand, and to improve our understanding, to the point where we can do things like go to the moon. No non-human animal is even making progress in this area, because no non-human animal is creating and improving an understanding of the world. If creating explanations is the magic sauce, then creativity is not just some frivolous quality that some people develop in their spare time. It’s not just a cutesy trait that some people have. It is instead the engine that all of us use to live our lives. Everything requires figuring out, from the moment we wake up. The most mundane and profound questions we face require us to create an understanding and to improve our understanding. Perhaps the most delightful consequence of all of this is that one’s interests take on a central role. Interests are not a side project, they are almost like the fuel that creativity runs on. If you want to unleash your creativity, you need to allow yourself the freedom to pursue your interests. This makes life more productive, more meaningful, and more fun.”

• Tom Hyde - “In one word: universality. I have often remarked that the best way to know that people are capable of anything is to sit back and watch them accomplish everything. Deutsch’s books are the literary proof of this radical generalism: with just four strands (quantum theory, computation, epistemology, evolution), he weaves the fundamental theory of people in science; and with just one thesis (that all progress is the result of “the quest for good explanations”), he explains art, beauty, the philosophy of mind, the reality of abstractions, ethics, politics, our foremost origins, and our utmost futures. There is something for everyone because, as Deutsch alone explains, everyone really *is* everything. Everyone really *is* special.”

• Reid Nicewonder - “He gives one the ability to take seriously the idea that it’s possible to make progress in any domain. Not only in science, but in philosophy, including both morality and aesthetics. By his ability to explain this in such a way that cuts through the bad philosophical baggage that permeates our current culture. With this, he also brings a cure to a certain kind of nihilism regarding the status of human beings and their capabilities. We’re universal explainers - and what that entails is all we need to know that we’re very special indeed.”

• Anders K - “No books have done what David’s did for me: a complete worldview change. Of all the perspective shifts, two stand out. First: humans. I used to see us as smart apes, limited by genes and IQ, in a time where progress had gone too far. Now I know that we are the most important entity in the universe, that we’re only at the beginning of what can be, and we have unbounded potential to create a better world. Second: problems. The word used to feel negative. Now I see problems as blessings, the source of the unlimited progress we can bring about. These two perspectives entwine into a remarkable truth: that each of us has a lead role to play in the cosmos...if we step forward into the problems that excite us.”

• Bart Vanderhaegen - “Reading David Deutsch has impacted me profoundly, delivering a number of intellectual jolts across multiple domains that reshaped how I see reality, knowledge, and humanity itself. The first real “blow” came from his clear and direct account of the multiverse in The Fabric of Reality. I remember my days in university being annoyed at not finding answers to what could actually be happening in the quantum world, beyond the mathematics that gives us accurate predictions. All of my questions about this were consistently ignored or met with vague deflections, and many-worlds was never even mentioned. Then finding actual answers in Deutsch’s work was really amazing: he cut through the evasion with the most careful argumentation, showing how the equations describe a vast structure of parallel realities that subtly influence one another, turning the multiverse from a speculative notion into the clearest, most powerful explanation of what could actually be happening. The next blows came from his account of Popper’s Critical Rationalism. He carefully mounts the most powerful counters against the prevailing ideas about knowledge and how it grows: empiricism, induction, instrumentalism, justificationism, and relativism. The most enlightening impact, though, was his perspective on human significance. We aren’t just passive observers in a vast universe; we are unusual creatures able to create new knowledge, grasp deep features of reality, and keep solving problems without any fixed limit.”

• Tomas Geerkens - “For me, reading David Deutsch matters because he makes optimism a duty, not a mood. His work shows that problems are inevitable, but so is progress, if we allow ourselves to create better explanations. That alone, is mentally liberating. He also gives you tools to distinguish good philosophy from bad philosophy, which is surprisingly important for mental health in a world full of fashionable pessimism and empty relativism. Deutsch puts humans back at the center of the worldview without slipping into arrogance, grounding that central role in a strong moral compass. Most importantly, he helped bridge something I felt was missing: a coherent link between morality, epistemology, and science, building on Popper to show how knowledge, ethics, and progress genuinely fit together.”

• Zakery Mizell - “David Deutsch’s unique contribution to philosophy is following the implications of our deepest known theories. Surprisingly, this is not a common practice! He shows that the theory of knowledge, the theory of universal computation, the theory of the multiverse, and the theory of replicators, each have consequences that affect all fields. For me this unlocked new ways to appreciate beauty, and revealed that our capacity to appreciate beauty is unbounded. This philosophy will change how you think, it will transform your view of the world. And it will enable you to make deep progress for humanity.”

• Erik Polakiewiez - “Gravitas would be the single word I would use to describe Deutsch’s book. And I don’t think I’ve ever used it before. His book is based on “simple” concepts such as the power knowledge, problem solving, and rational and critical thinking, but they are explored profoundly. So much that his ideas can be applied on the smallest things in life and on the largest. It describes a framework that can alter the way you think about science, philosophy, morality, sociology, economy, education, art, and even our own reality. Well, actually not just or own reality, but every single reality, real or unreal, imagined or not.”

• Logan Chipkin - “Anyone who’s interested in fundamental ideas would benefit from grappling with David Deutsch’s work.”

• Edwin de Wit - “Reading David Deutsch gives you a clear criterion for what counts as a good explanation and, just as importantly, how to spot bad explanations of reality. That unlocks a more rational way to think about minds, values, progress, and our role in the universe.”

I think most christians aren’t really christians. Until recently, I don’t think I had ever met what I would call a real christian (someone that really lives christianity, by which I mean: behaves like believes in christianity). Most people who identify as christians seem rather to be the so called cultural christians (for example Jordan Peterson), where they kind of vibe with christianity and identify with its values but they don’t really have faith on it, they defend it culturally but not religiously. I never liked religious extremists but now I can see that you should either be non religious or religious extremist. It seems that if christianity is true, then extremism is the only coherent and possible way to live it. If you genuinely believe in christianity and god, how could that not be the single most important thing in your life? I’m not saying everyone should become a priest or a pastor, I’m just saying that genuine belief should (and indeed does) radically reorder your priorities (if it doesn’t it’s because it’s not genuine belief). You would naturally want to read the bible regularly, attend services or masses, pray, and orient your life towards god. The fact that many christians don’t even go to church regularly makes me doubt that they actually believe what they claim to believe. If you truly thought your eternity depended on christianity, causal belief wouldn’t make sense at all. I think most “believers” have more of a quasi belief rather than genuine belief. In that sense, I think you’re either all in or out (either you believe, or you don’t). The wrong position is the middle one, pretending to believe, or saying you believe while living as if you don’t. Someone who claims to be a christian but doesn’t live like one is no more christian than an atheist. That’s why I was so surprised and shocked when I went to Life Church for the first time, I saw people that actually lived christianity and acted like they believed, they didn’t merely believed in it. Their belief shows up in how they treat others. The way people relate with one another (especially strangers) is a very good measure to know whether someone truly lives christianity. How you view god determines how you live your life. If you truly believe that god forgave all your sins and loved you despite your many imperfections, then that love should overflow into how you treat others. And one very interesting thing about Life Church is that everyone feels special (it’s hard to describe), it seems that loving god allows them to love themselves more deeply. Again, if there’s this good that forgave you in all your imperfections and embraced who you are despite your sins, then you truly feel like you’re loved in this world just as you are. And this is something very rare, especially because a lot of love in this world seems to be conditional. “I will love you if you have a good grade in your exam”, “I will love you if you start behaving better”, “I will love you if you do what I expect you to do”, etc. Another interesting thing I noticed is that for some people at Life Church, it seems belief is unavoidable, not optional. If they weren’t believers, their lives would just be completely different. That’s another good rule of thumb to know whether someone truly lives their religion: if it feels like they could live the same life without belief, then they probably don’t truly live their religion. And if you truly believe and live christianity, one of your priorities should be spreading the word of god so that you can maximize the number of people that are saved. Yet, this strikes me as something that is not very common at all, most priests or pastors seem to be rather focused on their community of already religious people other than focused on going to the non religious communities in order to persuade them to become religious.

Scott Adams, who died very recently, wrote in his goodbye letter: “I’m not a believer, but I have to admit the risk reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go: I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won’t need any more convincing than that.” I don’t think this works (or worked, given that he’s now dead). If belief in god were primarily about a risk reward calculation, then no one would genuinely believe and everyone would “believe”. Christianity would turn into a kind of insurance policy, with infinite upside rather than an act of true faith. It would become about self interest (and a very utilitarian and useful belief), and valuing your own life (and survival) more than the life of god, or in other words, loving yourself more than loving god. Faith is the thing that will get you to heaven, it’s not enough to act as if christianity is true. So even if you truly believe in god and live your life accordingly, but somehow you don’t believe you’re saved, then you are not saved. You have to genuinely believe that god saved you and forgave your sins. If you truly believe you are saved, then you are saved, if you truly believe you are not saved, then you are not. And one question that arises is: how sure can someone be that they’ll go to heaven? Most people I met at Life Church are fairly sure, but not absolutely certain. They still seem to admit occasionally that they could be wrong. A good analogy is driving a car. You can be fairly confident you won’t get into an accident, while still knowing there’s a small chance you might. That small probability of getting into an accident doesn’t make you afraid of driving though (just like they aren’t allegedly afraid of dying). Also, I don’t think you can really believe in christianity if you’ve never read the bible. The bible is the content of the religion, the book of god. If someone has never read it but claims to believe in christianity, then what they really believe in is whatever their local church tells them. As Lyndon Johnson said, “If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking”. At that point, belief isn’t grounded in scripture but outsourced entirely to the authority of their church. The fact that most christians (at least in Portugal, in the US seems to be very different) have never read the Bible makes me automatically suspicious of their faith.

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Timestamps

0:00 - We’re discovering talent quicker than ever

5:14 - Being in San Francisco is more important than ever

8:01 - There is such a thing like a winning organization

11:43 - Talent and conformity on startup and big businesses

19:17 - Giving money to poor people vs talented people

22:18 - EA is fragmenting

25:44 - Longtermism and existential risks

33:24 - Religious conformity is weaker than secular conformity

36:38 - GMU Econ professors religious beliefs

39:34 - The west would be better off with more religion

43:05 - What makes you a philosopher

45:25 - CEOs are becoming more generalists

49:06 - Traveling and eating

53:25 - Technology drives the growth of government?

56:08 - Blogging and writing

58:18 - Takes on Aella, Scott Alexander, Noah Smith and more

1:02:51 - The future of Portugal

1:06:27 - New aesthetics program with Patrick Collison

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Transcript

Salvador 0:00

Okay, Tyler, thank you for doing this.

Tyler 0:01

Very happy to be here.

Salvador 0:04

Okay, first question. Do you think the rate of meta innovation, how we find talent, has been accelerating faster than technological innovation itself?

Tyler 0:12

I think the rate at which we are finding talent has accelerated a great deal in the last 10 years. So the internet truly becoming the thing, even though we’ve had the internet for a while, I think that’s fairly recent. And younger people truly mastering the internet also is fairly recent, I would say last 10 to 15 years. So those two developments together, I think, have meant a teenage talent we’re discovering a lot more quickly than we used to. You’re an example of that. You’re age 17, right? And here we are doing this podcast. Could this have happened without the internet?

Salvador 0:46

Not at all.

Tyler 0:49

But I even think like the internet of 20 years ago, it could not have happened. So I think it’s going to keep on going. You see it in chess, all these great young chess players. Goukash is world champion at age 18. So I’m very bullish on that development.

Salvador 1:03

And how have you discovered talent on Twitter? Because according to you, all you need to spot a highly talented person is an essay of 1,500 words and a Zoom call, so I guess if you have access to thousands of tweets of someone, you can kind of have a sense whether or not they would be talented?

Tyler 1:19

When it’s on Twitter, I think my formula is to have them discover me rather than me discover them. So I’m not very famous, but I’m somewhat well known. And people I might be interested in, I think they’ll come across me. And then it’s up to them to come forward. And I will meet them, discover them, chat with them, read something they did. But usually the initiative comes from them. They’ll send me a link, something they wrote or whatever. And that works pretty well.

Salvador 1:48

And do you think overall staying anonymous on Twitter, do your favorite accounts are anonymous or do they come with more benefits?

Tyler 1:54

I don’t like anonymous accounts. So I like the context of knowing who it is. Also the people who stay anonymous, there’s some reason for that, right? So a lot of them will self-destruct intellectually because they feel they’re not accountable for their views and they become crazier and crazier. Others are people who have a real job, but they’re afraid to let on who they are. It just feels like an unstable mental equilibrium to me, so I don’t know. The accounts I really like, I know who they are, the world knows too. It might be a pretext of anonymity. So like Roon, he’s anonymous. But everyone, not everyone, but people know who he is. I’m not going to say. He’s open about working at OpenAI and if you want to find out, there he is.

Salvador 2:47
Yeah, like Gwern.

Have you met any anonymous account that his tweets were super good but in real life they were just very dumb or it didn’t seem to match?

Tyler 2:55

No, I think if you can be smart on Twitter, you’re just flat out smart and you will seem smart. I’ve never met such a person where they seemed dumb. Can’t think of that.

Salvador 3:08

Okay, why do you think the labor market is so bad at spotting talent?

Tyler 3:12

Well, when you say the market’s bad at it, you have to ask compared to what. But part of the problem is this: if you spot talent, you have to invest resources, and the talent probably won’t work for you. So the profit incentive to spot that talent can be fairly weak, especially younger talent. You spot a brilliant 16 year old and say you’re a company, that person’s unlikely to work for you, maybe in a few areas like AI, there’s only a few major companies. You develop a relationship with them or some of the VC companies. But for the most part, you’re relying on what you might call volunteers. And it takes time, energy, effort, and attention, and a lot of it doesn’t happen. I think that’s the market failure, the difficulty of internalizing the gains.

Salvador 3:56

But do you think the market even cares about spotting talent? Because it seems like at one point, you’re just hiring a worker and you don’t really care if they have that much insights or if they have original work of their own. You just want them to do the work you’re assigning them.

Tyler 4:12

I think the market cares a lot. Now it depends on the type of job, so if it’s cashier in a supermarket, you want someone first of all who shows up, which you cannot take for granted, someone who won’t steal from the till, which you cannot take for granted, and third, you want someone who can actually do the job. But if you go to say Whole Foods, which is a high quality, pretty successful supermarket chain, their cashiers are pretty uniformly good, so they put a lot of effort into that and whatever formulas they use seem to work, and when I go to Whole Foods, I really pretty much know I’ll have a good experience at the cashier. A lot of their people are immigrants, they’re from poorer countries, they seem really quite smart to me. And I talk to them a little, and I think, like, you’re undervalued, why don’t you work for me? But they don’t quite exactly have the training where they could do something useful for me, and it doesn’t happen. But they are very good cashiers, they’re very smart people, I think, as a class.

Salvador 5:11

Would you say places like San Francisco with a lot of talent and ambition become less relevant with time because you can just go on the internet, on Twitter and connect with super talented people no matter where they are?

Tyler 5:24

This is may be counterintuitive, but it seems to me the returns to location have only been going up. The returns to being in San Francisco are high and rising. And maybe AI, it encapsulates and can express general knowledge, but it does not contain secret knowledge or knowledge of very particular matters of time and place that are not in print anywhere or on video. So just being there is worth way more, you see this in real estate prices. And I expect this trend to continue, San Francisco in particular. Like what’s new in AI? If you’ve never been there, it’s very hard to know. If you go there some number of times a year, you can keep somewhat current. And that’s, for me, worth a lot.

Salvador 6:08

So I think you say in the complacent class that San Francisco is the best place in the world if you have a vision and want to work hard to achieve it. So that was eight years ago. Do you still think that?

Tyler 6:21

Absolutely, all the more so, the Bay Area, a bit more than just the city, but that general area. And with the rise of AI, which had not really happened when I wrote complacent class, that’s become a lot stronger, and a lot more of it is in the city itself than when I wrote those words. It used to be a bit more like Santa Rosa, or we then called it Facebook, Apple, or outside the city, but the city itself is really rising now. And when we have all these liquidity events, the home prices will go crazy. They’re already crazy, right?

Salvador 6:53

What about Austin? Like it seems there are so many prospects around Austin. Is Austin the new San Francisco in some way?

Tyler 7:00

I don’t think so, I think it’s distant, I wouldn’t even say it’s second. It’s a great place, I love going there. I like the people, but no, it’s not close. And it’s not gaining on the Bay Area either. Some people moved there during pandemic, a lot of them moved back. Same with Miami. Those cities are doing fine. They’re great places of their own, but they’re not becoming second tier San Francisco’s, maybe Austin a little.

Salvador 7:25

Do you think that could ever happen? Like a city suppressing San Francisco?

Tyler 7:31

If California does this billionaire’s wealth tax of 5%, that would give some other places a shot. Even then, I don’t think it would happen. California would have to blow its lead. I don’t think it will simply evolve into something else. Now, eventually, every place does that. Like what’s Florence today? It’s a lovely city, but it’s not an important place, or Rome, for that matter. So eventually, it’s lost. But it does not feel close to me, that event.

Salvador 8:01

Interesting. So I’m always struck by soccer teams that are in the top of the charts during decades and decades. And I wonder if you think it’s more about the team being very rich and being able to hire super talented players from other clubs, or if they actually need to be good at growing talent and have a good academy, otherwise it would be unsustainable?

Tyler 8:25

I know very little about soccer, but I know more about basketball. And for basketball, I think the quality of the general manager and possibly owner and coach matter a great deal. And they have to really care about winning. A lot of teams, in fact, just have a share of the TV contract. They get money automatically. They want to keep their costs down. And no one really cares to do better than that. And those teams don’t do better than that. Like the Washington basketball team, the Wizards, they’ve been bad for decades, pretty much. And it’s not about to change. There is such a thing as a winning organization like Houston and Dallas pretty consistently put together good teams. Obviously those players retire, get injured, but three to five years later they’re back again with another good team, Miami Heat. Those are winning organizations and you can feel it and sense it in them.

Salvador 9:16

So is it about having a good structure to grow talent?

Tyler 9:19

And it helps to have a larger market. So if you’re the Memphis Grizzlies, Memphis is quite a small city. They haven’t done very well much. They have a little bit. They have less revenue, ticket sales matter less, their local TV contract is worth more. It’s not the end of the story, but they’re at a noticeable disadvantage. Players don’t want to go there because if you’re in New York or LA, your shoe contract is worth more, you’re exposed to major media more.So small city also hurts, even when you have good management.

Salvador 9:52

How crucial do you think it is for one to develop its talent to be in the US? So I remember when we had the Zoom call for the Emergent Ventures grant, I asked you for advice and you said that I should try to keep living in the US. Like how crucial do you think it is for, for example, me to stay in the US?

Tyler 10:14

Depends what you want to do. But I would say in over half of all areas of endeavor, it’s very important to be in the United States to hit a top level of achievement. Now there are plenty of things where you can excel in Europe. Even then I don’t think Portugal is a big enough country to be the place to be. But the UK, Germany, Switzerland, France, in many areas you can do very, very well there. In your case, unless you’re natively fluent in something like French or German, it’s really US or UK if you want to be highly successful.

Salvador 10:52

And if I don’t go to either of those countries, do you think I might risk losing my ambition or just become more conformist?

Tyler 11:03

That’s what usually happens. Now again, some areas are exceptions. Say you want to be a politician, that more or less restricts you to Portugal. There are in fact plenty of people in every country, including Portugal, who have the ambition to be prime minister in the legislature. And if you compete in that arena, you won’t lose your ambition because your peers will have the same ambition. But there are not that many people in Portugal who stay in Portugal who aspire to be the greatest economist of all time. You just can’t do it there, you’ll leave. But if you’re in an area like politics, you can stay in Portugal and you absolutely will not lose your ambition, but most sectors you would.

Salvador 11:42

Do you think the startup benefits more from being good at identifying talent than a big company? Because presumably if you work in a startup, every employee is very fundamental in the shape the company will take, or if it will take shape. But at the big company at the same time, you already have the resources to do what you want.

Tyler 12:03

Talent is very important for each, but in very different ways. A few of the big company, say it’s Coca-Cola, you need people who fit the culture of that company. So Coca Cola’s been around a long time. There’s plenty of competition in their markets. People have actually started drinking much less literal Coca Cola, and they like all these weird sweet and fruity drinks. And Coca Cola adjusted, and they’re still a big deal and very profitable because they had talent. People who fit your culture and who will keep you on track. It’s not less important, but it’s very different than you need miracle workers who are employee number four and bring your company from nothing to something that exists. Very different set of tasks.

Salvador 12:48

Would you say that most super talented young people would choose to spend their time in a startup and risk not transform into something big or just go to a straight big company?

Tyler 13:00

Most people prefer to work in the big company. Most people are happier working in the big company. It’s a form of less ambition, but still in a big company you can do quite well and rise up through the ranks. And if after 17 years you end up as some kind of top manager at Coca Cola, you live in Atlanta, it’s a great life. So nothing against it at all. But it’s a different sort of ambition, right? You’re a cog in a machine. You’re changing the world collectively, but not directly and individually so much.

Salvador 13:33

Interesting. So would you choose, if every super talented young people you choose for them to go to a startup or a big company, what do you think brings them more life experience in the long term?

Tyler 13:46

I think it’s in the midst of changing. So seven years ago, I would have said startup, but I think we’re seeing a shift toward big companies. And you look at AI, well, where is good AI work being done? Well, a lot of it’s being done at Google, which is a very large company. There’s a lot going on at Meta, which is a very large company. OpenAI is becoming a large company. Anthropic, I predict, is becoming a very large company. And the way to have impact in the most impactful area is probably to work in those places and not do a startup. There’s something about the compute you need, the testing and evaluation you need that is harder to do at small scale. Companies such as Mercor have succeeded at it. But I’d give, at the moment, an edge to the larger companies. That can change too, but for now, yes.

Salvador 14:38

In what ways does a company benefit from having conformist workers?

Tyler 14:43

You need a common culture. Once your company’s around for a while, that’s your moat. Because whoever innovative your product was, eventually people copy it. Is Pepsi better than Coke? Is Coke better than Pepsi? You debate it, blind taste tests. Pepsi often wins. Coca Cola is still a bigger deal. And there’s something about how well do your people work together that is very difficult to maintain over time. People want to carve out turf and fight wars against each other, they lose track of the mission. It just takes so much work and diligence and inspiration to keep people on that same common track. It’s an issue. We’re here at Mercatus, 130 employees. It’s not a very large number, but to keep people in Mercatus cooperative, which I think we’ve done pretty well, but it’s a never ending thing you need to work on. Never ending. In a way, it just gets harder.

Salvador 15:43

Would you say that a startup benefits more from having less conformist workers than a big company?

Tyler 15:51

It depends on the sector. When you say startup, most people think tech, new product, software. And in those areas, you very often need non conformists. But most startups are quite ordinary things. It could be a restaurant. It could be a shoe store. And in those cases, you probably want more or less the conformists. Maybe you need one new idea, but after that, you just want execution. And then again, you’re looking to the conformists.

Salvador 16:17

Why do you want less conformist people in the tech sector?

Tyler 16:21

It used to be the case, still largely the case, that you need to work insanely hard and a conformist person won’t do that. And you need people who can imagine the future being quite different than it is in their sector. And you need non-conformists for that. But again, if the startup is a shoe store, you don’t need people to imagine the future being totally different. You just need people who can imagine that they can sell shoes pretty well. And that’s more or less going to be the conformists. Then like Mercatus, I’d say we need a balance of conformists and nonconformists. And I think we’re pretty good at that. But the idea people are largely nonconformist. But a lot of the execution people, like your event staff, you don’t necessarily want crazy people on your event staff.

Salvador 17:01

So it depends on the job you are trying to assign them?

Tyler 17:10

And a lot of companies have this mix of both. Like the ideas people will be more non conformist and the executors, again this can vary, but they’re more likely to where you want conformity.

Salvador 17:22

I see. Where do you and Malcolm Gladwell differ when it comes to talent?

Tyler 17:27

Where do we disagree? I’m not sure I know all his views. In his book on talent, he stresses practice a great deal. I don’t disagree with what he wrote, but I think he undersells genetics a bit, at least implicitly. So it’s not quite a disagreement, but it’s a difference of emphasis. But Malcolm is himself an amazing talent, a very underrated talent, one of the smartest people I’ve met. And he’s done a great job throughout his life picking great talents to work with, like publishers, agents, production companies. So he’s a great judge of talent too.

Salvador 18:05

When you look at the academia, why does it seem that professors in America are way more likely to produce original work and have ideas on their own and write books or blogs than when compared to professors in Europe?

Tyler 18:19

We pay people much more and your ability to move if you do well is much higher. So if you’re in Europe, even now it’s hard to cross national borders. The countries are smaller. In Germany, you’re technically a civil servant and you’re on a bureaucratic pay scale. And that’s poison for ambition. And there’s just a lot of paperwork associated with many of those jobs. US is getting worse in this regard. And in terms of immigration in the academic market, a talented academic can just get a visa to come here. It’s not hard at all. It’s like we have open borders for academic scientists. So we attract the best, we pay the most, we have the single biggest market. China is now a rival, but they’re not a rival for attracting people. Like if you’re a great researcher from Switzerland, you probably still don’t want to go to China. It’s just a worse life than coming to the US.

Salvador 19:13

I wonder if you think it’s more important to give money to poor people or to talented people like you do through Emergent Ventures. Because if you give money to talented people, that might just completely outweigh giving money to the poor people. Because the person you invested in might even become a billionaire and give tons to the poor. But at the same time, it doesn’t seem like the average person can really invest in people like that?

Tyler 19:37

I believe in what I call a barbell strategy. You want to do both. It’s people in the middle you shouldn’t give much to. They’re not poor enough to really need it. And they’re maybe not talented enough to do something astonishing and wonderful. You’re never going to be sure the money you give to talented people. What will be done with it? The person might be awesome, but then you ask, well, they might have succeeded anyway, right? You’ll never really know if you made a difference. Poor people, even then it’s hard to know you made a difference. I’d say when you give money to poor people, mostly you’re buying them what I call consumption insurance. So if something very bad happens, they have something to fall back upon. But you’re not elevating them out of poverty. And you need to approach it somewhat realistically. There’s a lot of evidence on this. But my own efforts personally, I help out some very poor people in Mexico and Ethiopia. And then I put a lot of time into trying to help out very talented people. And say like the lower middle class, I’m not much interested in helping them at all.

Salvador 20:37

Do you take the EA 10 % pledge?

Tyler 20:40

No. My wife and I, send a lot of our money to poor countries. And my work for Emergent Ventures is volunteer labor. So in opportunity cost terms, it would be more than 10%. But no, I don’t give 10 % of my money away in that manner.

Salvador 21:00

It seems like Emergent Ventures attracts a lot of effective altruists. Do you think effective altruists as a whole are very talented?

Tyler 21:07

In the past, effective altruism has been a great place to find super talented young people. It was a set of ideas, it brought them together. It was attractive. It was a broadly optimistic view of the world that you can actually improve things. I think that’s important. So I’ve been a fan of it for those reasons, even though I don’t agree with every single one of the doctrines. I agree with a lot of it. Their attitude toward talent, it was different than mine. I think maybe they’re changing a bit. A lot of effective altruism has been focused on projects rather than people. So they’ll say, we know like mosquito bed nets save a lot of lives, so we’re going to spend a lot of money on mosquito bed nets. I think that’s made good sense from a group such as, they used to be called Open Philanthropy, now they’re renamed as Coefficient Giving, because they had a lot of money and could do that at some decent scale. I don’t have resources anything close to what they have. So my hope for leverage is to get really talented people, find them at hingey moments in their lives, often when they’re young, and have them turn into people who will have major impact.

Salvador 22:18

So you don’t think EA is still at fault for smart people?

Tyler 22:22

I think less, EA is less of a coherent movement. Unfortunately, when everything happened with Sam Bankman Fried, EA took a reputational knock, which I consider to be unfair. And EA events are not the attraction they once were. But when you meet all these people who are, they now use the phrase, I’m EA adjacent, they’re still great people, but they’re just a lot more diffused. They self-identify less clearly. That was probably inevitable, but it’s been a noticeable change.

Salvador 22:51

Do think the movement will ever die?

Tyler 22:55

Look, effective altruism we had in the early 19th century with Jeremy Bentham and arguably in the 18th century with Pecaria. It sort of went away. It’ll always come back, maybe with different names. So no, I don’t think it will ever really go away. It makes some basic sense. Again, you don’t have to agree with all of it. But the idea that you should not give money away mindlessly, but you try to calculate maximum impact, that idea will always have appeal.

Salvador 23:22

Do you think humanity benefits more from having smart people or good hearted people in the long term?

Tyler 23:30

I think it’s a multiplicative model. You need first and foremost people who are determined and who stay the course. And then they need to be smart and some of them need to be good-hearted. A lot of them can be bastards in reality. But some have to be good-hearted. And you need all those things to come together to get anywhere. So it’s not really an either or, you need both.

Salvador 23:51

If rich people give money to the poor, does that make society overall more rich or more poor?

Tyler 23:59

It’s a good thing for the poor, and I don’t think it much harms the rich. But I would just say it’s very difficult to give money away effectively. In many ways, it’s easier to earn money than to give it away effectively.

Salvador 24:11

What do you mean?

Tyler 24:13

If you simply give money to anyone, whether it’s the poor or not, whether it’s academics, a lot of them just don’t use it very well, or they don’t invest in it properly, or they give it away to their friends, or they squander it. The money my wife and I send to Mexico and Ethiopia, they’re actually families we know a bit and who behave responsibly. But not everyone is in position where they know some poor families in rural Mexico and Ethiopia.

Salvador 24:40

So you don’t trust the EA effective charities?

Tyler 24:43

Well, I’m sure there are good ones, but it’s hard to know from a distance. And I would trust my own judgment over other people’s judgment.

Salvador 24:52

What’s the best explanation of why Europe’s rich don’t give as much away when compared to America’s rich?

Tyler 24:59

In the United States, it’s a tradition. We have a very particular radical worldview that is in part derived from Protestantism, that you have a life mission and you ought to incur real sacrifice, including working harder to fulfill that mission. Here, there’s also a bigger tax break. And the way peer groups are formed, if you give a lot of money to something, you get on the board, you’re invited to events. You use that as a way of building out your peer group and your network in a way where in Europe it’s maybe more what high school you went to or people you’ve known all your life and the value the selfish value of being philanthropic is much higher in this large diverse country

Salvador 25:43

Often you say that if you really care about the long term future, the best thing can do is to promote economic growth. I wonder if you think the promotion of economic growth, like the creation of innovations, is more altruistic long-term when compared to some EA related approaches like donating to charity in order to reduce global poverty or trying to reduce existential risk?

Tyler 26:06

In general, I’m a bigger fan of innovation, but I would stress a lot of EA types recognize this, and they’ve tried to fund innovations, sometimes successfully. Sometimes they fund the innovations they didn’t intend to. So the people in the EA movement who are the AI doomers, they’ve actually done more to encourage AI advances than anyone else. I find that interesting.

Salvador 26:27

Why?

Tyler 26:29

You talk about how powerful something is, and the rest of the world gets excited. They don’t always buy your story about doom. But they’ll buy into part of your story about its power and they’ll want to invest a lot more money in it. And that’s exactly what happened. And then over time, the institutions that start off focused on safety, they get shaped by the imperatives of being an institution and having to raise money and maximize profit. And over time, they just become very effective companies at building and marketing AI systems, which I think is a good thing, but they’re very different from how they were when they started off. And again, the doomers have spurred this on rather than slowing it down. But I think effective altruism has plenty of room for innovation. Innovation is an ongoing game, it tends to spread to most of the world. Giving stuff away is one time, and a lot of it gets wasted. So if you can pull off an innovation, that’s definitely my priority. But it’s harder to pull off, you can always give more money to anti malaria bed nets, and you know you’ll do some good, like the bed nets work. It’s not that hard a thing. And most innovations fail. So it’s a tricky balance. You want to do some of each, I would say.

Salvador 27:41

You wrote “the true disagreements over longtermism as your most clear concerns remain foundationally rooted in our emotions and our personal temperaments”. Do you mean that no amount of data or analysis can fully resolve them because like we differ on what feels morally urgent?

Tyler 27:59

Yeah, I think people’s views are largely guided by their temperaments. Like I have pretty optimistic world views. I do think they’re correct, they’re fully sincere. But I also recognize I was born with a pretty positive temperament, which my mother tells me I exhibited early on, I was like a well-behaved child and had a lot of fun just doing different things. And so, it’s easy for me to be an optimist. And I think that really matters for where you end up. And it’s hard to talk your way out of it, even when you ought to. So if the world were somehow ending, I probably would be trying too hard to see a bright side in that. Fortunately, it’s not ending, but if it were.

Salvador 28:39

In a conversation with Dwarkesh, I think you said that we have like 700 years left. Do you still think that?

Tyler 28:51

Well, my view is this. There’s always a risk of either nuclear war or something like nuclear war with maybe different kind of weapons, but equally or more destructive. And in any given year, I think the chance of that is quite small. And that’s since I’m an optimist. I think the chance of that in a given year is smaller than most people think. But I do recognize there’s such a thing as a probability density function. And if you let enough years run, at some point, it’s going to happen. Now when I said 800 years, that was a bit tongue in cheek. It’s just a number I made up. It’s probably not going to happen soon, but I don’t think you need a million years for it to happen. I also don’t think it would end all of civilization. Some people will survive, but it would set things back very severely and maybe permanently.

Salvador 29:40

Don’t you think we should be more focused on trying to expand humanity to other planets because a lot of existential risks matter because we only are in one planet so if we destroy this planet, all humanity dies?

Tyler 29:55

As a youthful science fiction fan, I would like very much if we could do that. But it seems to me very difficult. And even Mars, which is relatively close, I think would basically kill or disable all the people who go to live there. And to survive on another planet, you need exactly the right planet. Maybe you have to live underground. There’s issues of radiation. I just don’t see it working. So there’s the upper atmosphere and under the ocean or on the ocean. Those seem more promising to me. Interesting. I don’t even know that we need them. Like, you ever go to Nevada? Like, where are you living right now?

Salvador 30:31

Omaha.

Tyler 30:32

Ok, drive 10 minutes and it’s empty, right? Yeah. So you’re like, we need Mars? I don’t know. Nebraska, there’s a lot of land there.

Salvador 30:43

So do you think Elon will ever launch a rocket to Mars?

Tyler 30:47

Absolutely, but I don’t think it will matter that much. It’ll launch a rocket, there might be people on it on a suicide mission. The'll land on Mars, it’ll be a big deal. But just like we went to the moon in 1969 and that was the end of that, I think it will be a bit similar. What’s really valuable is space, the satellite belt, property rights up in space. We’re going to put data centers in space. We may get solar powered energy from up there in space. That’s super valuable. A lot of that might happen, but that’s where the action will be, not Mars. What’s on Mars? It’s not in Nebraska. Mars doesn’t even have cows. You have great beef in Nebraska, and I should go to Mars?

Salvador 31:28

Interesting. If long-term impact is about what endures for centuries, do you think like EA people underweight the role of religion in shaping institutions?

Tyler 31:40

I’ve noticed sociologically a lot of the EA people do not think enough about culture and religion at all. Very distant from that. But I have seen in the last two, three years some noticeable shifts where they’re starting to do it more. I hope that continues. So I think they’re willing to learn on those topics, but they’re also just harder to wrap your arms around. Like we all know what it means to invest in mosquito bed nets. If you say, well, I want to invest in giving America a better culture. Okay, but what do you do the next day? Much tougher issue. And a lot of the EA groups, want to be transparent and they want to have a kind of defensibility and legibility to what they do. And that pushes them more in the direction of bed nets and less in the direction of these less tangible things. But the less tangible things are super important and they’re right now under invested in.

Salvador 32:33

So do you think if EA people start to look more at religion, they would change some of their practices?

Tyler 32:41

I don’t know, again, if you look at the talent in the EA movement, I would say a lot of it is highly analytical. And as talents, they’re not that strong in the humanities. It’s just an observational fact. So maybe they’re better off just sticking with the analytic stuff. And someone else will have to do the cultural and religious issues. But still, you’d like if there could be more crossover, right, in both directions. But maybe they’re just not good at it. Like some of the EA people, you talk to them, they just seem like they’re in quite a fog, they grew up in the rationality community. They’re very good at a certain, very narrow set of ways of thinking. They can be very effective applying those ways of thinking. Maybe that’s just their comparative advantage.

Salvador 33:24

So you’ve said before that the most important thinkers of the future will be religious.

Tyler 33:29

You can even say the present, you know, I said that a while ago. But yes, religious thinkers, absolutely.

Salvador 33:34

But, wouldn’t you expect that religion generates some pressure towards conformity and like, just seeing the fact that most religious people came from religious families says a lot about it. And the way like we get interesting stuff being done and creations being made is by having more risk taking people, therefore less conformist, therefore less religious?

Tyler 33:54

I think historically what you’re saying has been true and it’s probably still true in Europe today. But I think in America today there’s been a bit of a flip. The religious people are often the nonconformists. The formal religious structures themselves no longer exert much conformity power. Like the Catholic Church, the pope tells you what to do, everyone ignores it for the most part. The Episcopalian Church barely exists. People who are LDS, Mormons, that’s become a much more diffuse thing. Who’s a Mormon who isn’t is much looser than it used to be. So I think religious conformity as a pressure is far weaker. Secular conformity with the rise of the woke became much stronger. And the ability of Americans to use religion to find new and different ideas and justify them, I think has been pretty phenomenally positive in the last decade. Like look at Peter Thiel, whether you agree or not, well, his theory of the Antichrist, there were like some bishops who condemned Peter for talking about the Antichrist, but no one cares. They listen to Peter, they don’t listen to the bishops. Interesting ideas will come of it. That’s just a simple example.

Salvador 35:05

Why do think Europe is behind the US?

Tyler 35:07

You have state churches, those state churches still have a strong small conservative role in your societies. They’re supported by tax money. You have fewer sects in the way that America has them. You also, this is changing, but you have fewer religions. It’s less and less true as non Westerners are migrating more to Europe. But I think the forms of Islam you have are much more conformist than what’s here in the US. They’re more harmful, they’re working less well in terms of assimilation. US has more forms of Judaism that are more active here. That’s another plus. Again, some parts of Europe have that, but overall, much less than would be the case here. Hinduism, much more successful in the United States.

Salvador 35:55

So is it good that there are more religions in the US than in Europe?

Tyler 36:00

I wouldn’t say it’s unconditionally good. I would say the way it’s evolved is good. US has a better functioning labor market. We have better mechanisms for selecting the higher talented immigrants and religious immigrants. We have strict guarantees of freedom of religion, freedom of speech. And you put all that together, our recipe has worked much better.

Salvador 36:20

Interesting, so are Catholics more conformist than Protestants?

Tyler 36:25

Once that would have been true, I’m no longer sure it’s true now. I don’t know. It’s a good question. I would say the US has a quite Protestant set of Catholics compared to Western and Central Europe.

Salvador 36:38

When you look at like the GMU econ department, a lot of you seem to have came from interesting religious backgrounds. So Garrett Jones from Mormon family, Robin Hanson, who’s dad was a pastor.

Tyler 36:51

That’s right. John Nye, Catholic

Salvador 36:53

And Bryan Caplan Catholic. You have Mormon relatives..

Tyler 36:57

No, nothing. Catholic family, my parents were both anti-clerical and non-believers.

Salvador 37:03

Okay, is there any believer within you or are all…

Tyler 37:07

No, I’m very, very far from that. It’s just a...

Salvador 37:10

And what about the GMU econ professors are there any believer?

Tyler 37:14

I don’t think there are many and I’m never quite sure. There might be some, but you’d be looking to find them is how I would put it.

Salvador 37:24

So do you think like it’s just random that some of you came from interesting religious backgrounds or is there like an explanation of people that born in religious families and then became secular are, I don’t know, more interesting?

Tyler 37:40

It makes you less conformist. And some of us, Robin Hanson in particular, still have very religious ideas. So Robin’s whole upload thing, it’s really about the resurrection, which is a secular version of an idea where he used to believe in the religious version. So I tease Robin about this all the time. Bryan Caplan, in some ways, he’s still a Catholic moral theologian, like Aristotle, Aquinas, Rand. Commonalities between that and certain Catholic views, Aquinas in particular. So these things leave traces.

Salvador 38:12

Would you like to believe in religion?

Tyler 38:15

Only if it’s true. The sense of security it gives people, I feel I have anyway, just through life circumstances. I’m not looking to believe, for instance. I think people on average, they’re better off if they believe, they feel better, they feel less fear, they have a sense of community, they belong to something, higher purpose. I don’t feel I need religion for any of those things. But I’m not anti clerical the way my parents were. I think on the margin, religion tends to be good for people, not bad for people.

Salvador 38:45

And do think most people truly believe their religion or they just like going to church and having the community and don’t think too much about whether the book is true or not?

Tyler 38:56

It’s something in between. They don’t not believe it. But they don’t very actively believe the details of it either. They have a general sense there’s a God. If it’s Christianity, they feel Christianity is a good thing. If it’s Judaism, Judaic history, culture, society, community is a good thing. And then they start from there and they don’t necessarily think too long and hard about, you know, what’s the nature of the Trinity or, you know, when is the Pope speaking ex cathedra, whatever. They let a lot of that slide, and they’re willing to admit it might be wrong, but they still think, like, on net it’s a positive good thing.

Salvador 39:32

Do you agree with them? That it’s a positive thing?

Tyler 39:34

At the margin, yeah, I think the US and much of the world would be better off with more religion. I’m not sure in Niger, West Africa would be better off with more religion, but the wealthy countries in the world would be.

Salvador 39:48

Have you ever been to a life church?

Tyler 39:51

Life church? You mean church?

Salvador 39:54

No, there’s a church named Live. I went like two weeks ago, a friend took me there and it was just, I mean, I’m not a believer, but it was amazing. Just a community and it’s like a kind of a rock concert…

Tyler 40:09

I’ve been to things like this. And the music is bad, that’s my objection

Salvador 40:15

I think I’m gonna start going there every Sunday, but it’s not because I believe that it is true, but I just think it’s good and it makes me feel good about myself and I have the community, all people are super nice.

Tyler 40:28

You’ll learn things and you’ll meet people. There’s no reason not to go if you can get there.

Salvador 40:32

And one of the things when a pastor asked me why I’m not religious, I asked them like, what’s the difference between believing in God or believing in UFOs or in a conspiracy theory or there’s life in Jupiter? How do they distinguish that? Do you have any answer?

Tyler 40:49

Well, it’s going to depend on the religion. But in many religions, faith plays this very important role in distinguishing between things you should and should not believe in. And a lot of the things you shouldn’t believe in, say, by a Christian Protestant sect might be considered a form of demon. Like if you believe in UFOs, it’s like saying you believe in demons. Now, some of them welcome this and say, the demons are here. You know, this is a reflection of our religious belief. But a lot of them would just say, you’re believing in something dangerous. Don’t go there, keep your belief firm in Christ and the Trinity and Christ is the Son of God and our Savior. And they want to discourage this kind of multiplication of semi sacred entities. It’s one thing to me that’s always been interesting about Ross Douthat, Ross is nominally Catholic, grew up in some kind of strange Protestant sect due to his mother. And his current beliefs are a weird mix of things. And he’s quite willing to ponder like fairies, demons, all these intermediate beings. They’re pretty welcome in his cosmology. He might be agnostic about them, but he’s certainly not dismissive.

Salvador 41:56

Have you ever been persuaded by any of his arguments?

Tyler 42:00

He and I had a two hour podcast, we did it in this room. So you can listen to the podcast and if you think I was persuaded. But no, I still don’t believe. I had a good time talking about the ideas. I did learn many things, but I still don’t, I’m not closer to belief.

Salvador 42:17

Okay. Would you agree that one of the advantages of being a non believer or secular is that you’re more naturally skeptic? You’re more skeptic of believing in ideologies and more suspicious of dogmas.

Tyler 42:32

I don’t think it’s an advantage. I know so many secular people, like socialism becomes the dogma, woke becomes the dogma, or it could be libertarianism for that matter. But they cling to their other dogmas more fiercely. One of the arguments for religion is just there’s a place you can stuff your dogmatism into beliefs about the Trinity, and then the rest of you is free to be open minded, because you’ve taken care of your dogmatism. You’ve sent it somewhere where it doesn’t really matter that much for a lot of decisions.

Salvador 43:05

So you’ve described yourself in the past as a philosopher who happens to study economics can you explain? Isn’t it like inverse?

Salvador 43:13

Well, maybe it’s both, but I read a lot of philosophy early on. I almost decided to become a philosopher. A lot of my economics is philosophically oriented. Just as a marker, I think I have at least as many pieces in top-tier philosophy journals as in economics journals. Now, that’s unusual, but it’s a kind of evidence, right? Maybe just the categories aren’t that useful would be another way to put it. I was speaking a bit tongue in cheek when I said that, but I also meant it. I tend to think pretty philosophically and when I’m in the role of podcast host if I were mainly an economist I actually couldn’t do it at all.

Salvador 43:51

Who’s your favorite philosopher?

Tyler 43:53

Well, Plato, if you count everyone, I love Derek Parfit and his work. More recently, Robert Nozick and his work. Those would be recent favorites, Quine, just to name a few.

Salvador 44:06

You write in your book, Big Business, that the CEOs are the modern equivalent of successful philosophers and that in reality there is no job that is as philosophical. Can you expand on that?

Tyler 44:18

If you’re CEO, you need to deal with the question, what do people really want from your product? It’s a pretty deep question, in fact. It’s hard to get it right. What motivates people at work? How do I motivate them? It’s really not just about money at all. That’s a very deep question. It’s hard to get it right. Just those two questions alone make you a philosopher. Then there’s questions, well, how much should we invest in following every law, which no company does with full strictness, right? And it’s not even possible. That’s also a philosophical question so you’re faced with large scale significant philosophical questions every day all day long that to me makes you a philosopher no matter what the product

Salvador 45:01

Is that why you say Patrick Collison is one of the best philosophers alive?

Tyler 45:04

Yeah, absolutely, and Stripe has been successful. Now Patrick also thinks about philosophy in the narrower, more explicit sense, but the other counts too.

Salvador 45:13

So do you think the persona of a CEO has shifted from the one of a specialist to the one of a generalist? Or it was always like a generalist persona?

Tyler 45:22

It’s changed a lot with time. So CEOs have more and more become generalists who coordinate their companies and spend a lot of time interfacing with the public, with government, setting the image of the company. 30, 40 years ago, it was much more likely the CEO was, “the person who ran the company”. That is today less likely to be true, much less likely.

Salvador 45:48

What happened, why is it less likely?

Tyler 45:50

Companies are bigger and more complex. No one knows enough to run the company. The demands on your time and attention for government, public relations, communicating the vision, forming the vision, the mission, those are all much more pressing. And the CEO has to do those. whether the title is COO or not, but something like that, someone else literally running the company is a bigger and bigger thing. And that’s just a vision of labor.

Salvador 46:20

Interesting. So like thinking about history, we have the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, where people are generalists, then with the Industrial Revolution we became specialists, and now it seems like we’re becoming generalists again…

Tyler 46:32

The CEOs are. You as an individual may or may not be…

Salvador 46:37

So you don’t agree that society overall is becoming more generalist?

Tyler 46:40

There’s more room for generalists, that’s true, but the people who specialize specialize more and more. So it’s again this barbells thing that you get both trends at once. And it’s people stuck in the middle who are doing less well. You either need to be a really good specialist who does one thing better than other people or an excellent generalist.

Salvador 46:59

If civilization still exists 1000 years from now, who do you think might be remembered from today? Or do think someone who will be remembered from today?

Tyler 47:07

Good question. Probably no one. If I think who’s remembered from a thousand years ago, I would say it’s no one. Now, that’s an odd pick. Like exactly a thousand years, you’re hitting on a time period where things were not going that well. But very, very few people, I think. Very few.

Salvador 47:28

Do you have any bet?

Tyler 47:30

Well, if Mars becomes a thing, it will be Elon Musk. But for reasons we already discussed, I would bet against that. But at least it’s possible, right? Like, Elon has a chance.

Salvador 47:39

Do you think he still believes it?

Tyler 47:41

I don’t know Elon. I’ve never talked to him. I suppose I think he believes it, but that’s not based on much that’s firm.

Salvador 47:48

Okay. What about a book from today or from the past that might be remembered?

Tyler 47:55

Nothing from today. Obviously there’s books from the past you can go see what we remember it’s less than a thousand years ago but I would say Canterbury Tales and Dante’s inferno we still remember those are what you would call the post antiquity books you could name some others but they’d be too obvious picks.

Salvador 48:16

What about the Bible?

Tyler 48:18

Well that’s not post antiquity there’s plenty from early on. Plato, Aristotle from the Roman Cicero, Bible, other sacred texts that are plenty remembered, the Ramayana, go on and on and on. But then you have this break point and those things won’t be forgotten, but after antiquity ends, it takes a long time before you get to things that are remembered again. I guess Beowulf counts as post antiquity. I’m not sure how well remembered that is, but I’ll say like Jocerdonte are clearly somewhat remembered.

Salvador 48:55

Interesting. So do think the Bible will also be remembered 1000 years from now?

Tyler 48:57

Absolutely, and it’s a wonderful book and there’s still going to be Jews, Christians. Yeah, it’s not coming away.

Salvador 49:05

If there were two versions of you, one that has never traveled and one that has never read a book, which one of them would end up closer to who you are today?

Tyler 49:15

I guess the one who’s never traveled. But again, it’s the multiplicative model thing that doing both multiplies the value of each. I know a lot, not a lot, but I know a reasonable number of people who read a fair amount. And I don’t think they’ve traveled much, or if they traveled, they didn’t really travel and explore. A business trip or their parents dragged them when they were 10. You can see what those people are like and they’re still pretty smart but they’re limited in some fundamental ways.

Salvador 49:48

What’s the difference between what you learn and your overall insights when you go to a place, say, for a week to travel versus when you go to a place for a year to live?

Tyler 49:57

Well, when you go for a year or two, you realize how little you understand. When you go for a week, you think you understand a bunch of things. But the value of going only for just one day is immense. The place becomes real to you. Maybe you understand nothing. But when you then later read about it, you have mental and emotional touchstones and things fall into place much better. Like I was recently in Tbilisi, Georgia, just for a day and I couldn’t tell you I understand any single thing but my goodness, my sense of it is so advanced compared to not long ago when I’d never been there at all.

Salvador 50:34

In what sense do you learn by eating different foods? Does it help you crack cultural codes when you eat a food, a typical food of a country?

Tyler 50:44

If you only eat the food, I don’t know how much you learn, but when you read about the food and its history, you learn about their supply chains, you learn about their economic geography, you learn about their history of agriculture, trade, colonization, when that was the case. When you talk to the people who make the food, typically you’re talking to non-elites, which is a useful corrective to what a lot of us end up doing on these trips, which is talking to other elites, you’re often talking more to women or grandmothers or cooks. That’s another useful corrective. And it gives you a destination in many places, like gives it more of quest like feeling. We’re going there for this meal or we’re going to go to Oaxaca and eat in these certain food stalls. And that gives a structure to your trip that makes the non-food parts of the trip better and more instructive. That’s what I would say. You need a quest for a trip, why are you going? And the quest can be a little bit made up or imagined, but it will make your whole trip better. Like you want to see some person, you want to eat some meal, you want to see some church, whatever. I think it’s important for the whole trip, not just for the thing you see.

Salvador 51:57

Did you ever went to a place just because of the food?

Tyler 52:01

Only because of food? I think Malaysia is a great country to visit only for the food. It’s pleasant, it’s safe, people speak English, I like it. But there’s not that much to see and do there that’s special. It could be the world’s best food or it’s in the top, top tier. I want to go back there, but I wouldn’t say it’s top of my list because for me it is mainly the food. People are very friendly there.

Salvador 52:27

Is it necessarily bad that we time a lot of businesses and are less innovative because the best workers get pulled into a small number of companies? Should we expect that we have less innovations from having a few big businesses than from having a lot of average, medium businesses?

Tyler 52:47

Well, these things are clustered and I think you want to build up the cluster. And if you look at, you know, say the Italian Renaissance, the early Renaissance, it was incredible in painting and not nearly as exceptional in music. So maybe we pulled some talent into painting and sculpture and away from music. You’ve just got to do it. Like when you find something that’s working, double down, triple down, keep on doing it. You’re not going to have a fully diverse set of achievements anyway. Maybe there’s a few places like 19th century Paris, late 19th century, early 20th century Vienna, where it’s quite broad based, but that’s really the exception.

Salvador 53:25

Does technology drives the growth of government? Because presumably every major innovation from now on, and AI included, has not only the prospects of significantly benefiting humanity and the human experience, but also of destroying civilization therefore, we need more regulation to make sure it doesn’t go through a dangerous path.

Tyler 53:48

I don’t know if it means more government or less government. So AI will provide a lot of services cheaply. Legal advice, medical advice. I don’t know if the regulations in those areas will go away, but they might be made irrelevant. It’s also possible that we need certain types of laws to set liability for AI property rights. Can AIs have a bank account? To limit dangers, internalize externalities. I don’t know yet if it will mean more government or less government. Maybe there’s just fewer government workers because things are done by AI. A lot of government work is quite routine. If a government workforce shrank like by 4x, it’s not the same as less government because there’s more work being done. I don’t know. I think about this a lot, but I don’t think I have good answers.

Salvador 54:37

Do you think major innovations from now on will also have this safety component like we see with AI where we have people working on the safety side, making sure it doesn’t go through a dangerous path?

Tyler 54:51

Yes, biological innovations, we have that already. We’ll need more of it. The more we do with genomics, there’s different safeguards you need to think about. And I think more interdependence lies in our future with AI and biology in particular. Quantum computing, I don’t know if that will really work and be a practical matter, but that could change cryptography quite a bit, internet commerce. But like the regulations will come late. We’ll be faced with the crises for the regulations in that area in particular. A lot of this stuff will come so quickly. We’ll be scrambling to catch up with it. Like we won’t be ready. Our governments are pretty clueless about most of these areas. And voters are not demanding much action either. They’re vaguely suspicious of AI, but they’re not demanding any particular set of laws.

Salvador 55:42

Should we worry that our governments are clueless?

Tyler 55:45

They’re always clueless, but when there are big new changes, it matters more than other times. So we should worry. But in some ways, maybe it’s good that they’re clueless because they have no choice but to let it happen. I guess that’s my view. But I don’t want them clueless forever. I’m glad they’re clueless for now. But the clock is ticking and the time is coming where they shouldn’t be clueless anymore.

Salvador 56:06

Why do you think blogging requires so much like this big body of knowledge from knowing a lot about different fields? In the sense that bloggers are more likely to just go and search and get a thoughtful picture from a lot of fields in order to write about the problem they are trying to solve.

Tyler 56:28

I’m not sure blogging rewards that in particular. I would say if you want to blog for 23 years running, that’s what you need to stay fresh or interesting. But most bloggers, they blog what they know. Maybe they blog for six months. It’s some value to them, and then they stop. And they don’t need that at all. So most blogging is not like what I’ve been doing. I’m very much the outlier.

Salvador 56:52

In your conversation with Patrick Collison a couple years ago, you said that you would like to see more blogs focus on a single issue, on a single problem. Why do you think that’s so important? Do think people would read them as well?

Tyler 57:04

There’s just a lot that’s under discussed. So Brian Potter has done this very effectively with construction physics. A lot of that is about the cost of construction, which is a major problem. It’s not neglected anymore, in large part because of Brian. That’s been great. Ruxandra from Romania, she’s blogging clinical trials, a major problem. It’s not her only topic, but it’s her main topic. She’s, I think, having a real impact, so I’m delighted to see both of those things happening. I’d love for there to be a lot more.

Salvador 57:35

Have you ever been tempted to stop writing for the free press and magazines and just write on Marginal Revolution or on your personal substack? Like Paul Krugman did.

Tyler 57:46

No, I I write the blog anyway. Keep in mind those other people pay me, no one pays me to write on my blog. But I also like working with editors. New York Times, Bloomberg, Free Press, I’ve always had great editors. That’s important. And you reach very different audiences writing for these other outlets. And I like that I’ve written for different outlets. And now it’s the Free Press where I’ve been very happy and I’ve had great editing and they have great reach. So no, I don’t think I’m going to change that.

Salvador 58:18

Okay. I’m gonna name some bloggers and famous Twitter personalities and I’d like to hear like your take on them. First, Aella?

Tyler 58:30

She’s very smart, a fantastic writer, quite an important figure. Some people hate her. I think you have to distinguish between approving different things she does and what you think of her as a thinker. And she’s a great and important thinker. I’ve met her a bunch of times. I don’t know her, but I like her as a person from the interactions I’ve had.”

Salvador 58:56

Scott Alexander?

Tyler 58:59

Scott has written an incredible series of essays and blog posts over what is now quite a few years. He’s been remarkably influential in the Bay Area, has built up the rationality community, has this one huge blind spot on AI risk, which he just won’t treat scientifically. Other than that, he’s done great stuff.

Salvador 59:18

Noah Smith?

Tyler 59:20

When he started, I disagreed with him a lot. He just has worked so hard and he’s just gotten better and better and better. I love reading him. I think he’s very often right. He has great influence and he’s really mastered what he should be doing in a way based on this continual ongoing ruthless self-improvement.

Salvador 59:43

Matthew Yglesias?

Tyler 59:45

Matt, I’ve always liked a lot in his various incarnations. Now that politically he’s more centrist or even on the right in some issues makes me happy. But I loved Matt even in his strict blogger days when he’d like blog about the wizards or movies or... He’s just a very, very smart person as his father is. And he’s always interesting. And he’s like this American treasure.

Salvador 1:00:09

Roon?

Tyler 1:00:12

I love Roon. I only met him once. He seemed very nice. He’s one of my favorite people on Twitter. He works for OpenAI, so that to me is already a big plus right there. Yeah, I’d like to get to know Roon better. Only positives from what I’ve seen.

Salvador 1:00:31

Razib Khan?

Tyler 1:00:33

I met Razib, I think, once, maybe twice briefly. I wouldn’t say I know him. I believe he’s blogging very high quality material on genetics. I’m not sure I’m able to judge it. It has the sniff test of being high quality, and he covers a lot of things other people don’t cover. It seems to me quite valuable.

Salvador 1:00:44

Richard Hanania?

Tyler 1:00:46

Richard is a long and complicated story. I like where Richard has ended up, and he’s one of the most influential classical liberals. He’s super smart. He’s very willing to be disagreeable, which is usually but not always a strength for him. I hope now he doesn’t get caught in the trap of just repeating his current point, which to be clear, I agree with. But he’s like against the right-wing populists. But I’m a little bored with that, and I’m waiting for his next thing.

Salvador 1:01:27

Samo Burja?

Tyler 1:01:29

I know Samo, I had lunch with him some number of years ago and seen him a bunch of times since. I think his substack newsletter is very good. It’s super well informed. There’s a few calls he got wrong, but he is willing to think outside the box and he’s one of the people you can and should read to actually get different perspectives that are nonetheless backed up by a lot of information.

Salvador 1:01:56

Scott Aaronson?

Tyler 1:01:58

I’ve met Scott a bunch of times. He’s one of the best bloggers. I cannot judge his contributions on the technical side, but I believe they’re thought of very highly. Just one of the smartest people and seems to have good judgment. And it’s a great thing for the world that Scott is out there.

Salvador 1:02:16

Zvi?

Tyler 1:02:18

I know Zvi. He’s very, very smart. I think he is caught up in this one mood of the world is going to end, which I think is quite wrong. And it skews a lot of what he does. But he writes the best surveys on AI. And maybe you need to be a bit caught up to be motivated for the surveys to be that good and that useful. So I get his stuff. And in fact, I usually read it, which is the highest praise, right? I tried to talk him out of his mood, but I’ve totally failed.

Salvador 1:02:51

I’m curious to know what you think about Portugal?

Tyler 1:02:54

I’ve been to Portugal four times, twice to Lisbon, once to Porto, and once to Tavera. We call it Lagos. All of those are incredible places. It’s a very underrated country to visit. I think the food is superb and original, and you can’t really get good versions of it easily elsewhere. Architecture phenomenal. In Lisbon, I love the main art museum and also the Gulbenkian. I like just wandering through smaller Portuguese towns. Tavira and the tiles is incredible. I worry a lot of the country’s dying and depopulating and too old. And like half of it won’t be Portuguese people within my lifetime. It’ll be like British retirees and migrants. And it will be kind of dead. So I’m not sure the country has a future at all, but I think it’s a fantastic place and I love going and I’ll go back again I guess to Braga and Coimbra forgive my pronunciation but that’s how we say them people are so nice I like the sound of the language I can even sort of read the language through Spanish so I don’t feel helpless there

Salvador 1:04:09

Do you have a lot of emerging ventures grantees who came from Portugal?

Tyler 1:04:13

No, Vasco...you...There might be someone else, but that’s all that comes to mind. So everyone go to portugal there’s at least three great parts of the country probably more and it’s easy to get around it safe enough like there’s no downside to going it’s pretty affordable it’s cheaper than most of the rest of Europe.

Salvador 1:04:35

Do think it’s a good place to live in?

Tyler 1:04:40

If you’re retired or young, very young, if you’re a kid or retiree, it’s the best place in the world. In between, what’s your job? I don’t know. I’m then, you less bullish on it. But like the quality of the place is incredibly high. I just don’t know what you can do there with all this shrinkage and ageing.

Salvador 1:05:01

How would you fix it?

Tyler 1:05:02

I don’t think you can fix it. Now, if current Portuguese couples all decided to have three kids it would be fixed automatically. I just don’t see that happening. But like the fix is easy. We know the technology, right?

Salvador 1:05:23

So you don’t vote. I’m wondering if “civic responsibility” takes a different shape when it comes to you because like for the average person, like voting is the only thing they can do in order to influence politics. But your blog is read by millions and I mean, I don’t know, you probably don’t impact policies, but I’m sure you impact a lot of opinions.

Tyler 1:05:51

I’ve impacted a number of policies, often through indirect means that I would not necessarily speak about. But I’ve played a role as an advisor in a whole bunch of things. So I’m doing my civic duty, and I feel voting would diminish my civic duty. It would make me stupider. I would start taking sides. And often, I genuinely don’t know which side to vote for in many elections. Some elections I feel I know, but a lot of times I don’t know, and if I’m not sure and it’s going to make me stupider and I have other things I can do, including with that time, there you go.

Salvador 1:06:27

So two days ago you launched this aesthetics program with Patrick Collison. What’s the larger vision behind it? What’s the motivation?

Tyler 1:06:37

To make the world more interested in beauty again, in inspiration. And if you go, say, to Portugal, the older buildings in most parts are just incredible. And we’ll still go to see them. I’ll travel from the US to go see them. The newer buildings, not only Portugal, but they’re quite unexceptional. You might even say they’re ugly. So why is that? I want people to do more to answer that question, address it, and change it. It strikes me as in a wealthy diverse world, entirely reasonable set of expectations, but someone needs to act on it. And that’s what we’re doing with this project.

Salvador 1:07:13

Is it serving the same big goal as progress studies or is it just fundamentally different?

Tyler 1:07:21

No, aesthetics is a hugely important part of progress. And a purely mechanical material vision of progress studies, I’m convinced, will fail. That the Enlightenment comes from the Renaissance, which had a strong interest in beauty and drew beauty from the ancient world and the best of medieval times, was critical to everything that followed. And I would say the Industrial Revolution came first to aesthetics and only later to industry.

Salvador 1:07:47

So you agree with the view that people are happier when they are in beautiful places, wherever that might be?

Tyler 1:07:54

They’re probably happier, but that’s not what motivates me. Just the beauty itself motivates me. It’s probably good for happiness, but that is not even my sales pitch. We should care about beauty for its own sake.

Salvador 1:08:06

Tyler, thank you!

Tyler 1:08:07

It has been great chatting. Let’s do this again sometime and thank you for coming out. And also hope to see you in Portugal someday, I want to go back and see the rest of the country.

Salvador 1:08:17

That would be amazing. Thank you.

In the spirit of new year, and inspired by Dan Wang’s and Jason Crawford’s anual letters I’ll write an annual letter.

This year was the first year where I really engage with some of humanity’s deepest ideas, and of course, got the chance to ask questions about them in the podcast. Five days ago I met and recorded an in person interview with Tyler Cowen, which was truly one of the biggest highlights of my life! I believe a lot changed with this interview with Tyler. I spend over three months reading everything I could possibly have read (books, marginal revolution, free press columns, other interviews with Tyler, etc) in order to be the best prepared for the interview. It became obvious after the interview that it truly was about the preparation rather than the interview itself. Just the amount of new stuff and ideas I learned from preparing to the interview completely outweighs the single act of talking with Tyler for one hour. This might even be the most efficient way I have to learn, having the pressure (and the privilege as well) of asking questions to people like Tyler makes me truly study, engage and read their work. I don’t mean to say that the interview itself doesn’t matter, that’s obviously not true, but you need to measure how you choose your guests by whether or not you want to spend 3+ months reading and learning about their work, not if you’re gonna have fun while talking with them. And this was a clear yes for Tyler but for the previous guests I didn’t really thought about this question, especially because my prep time was way less than 3 months. And I think both me and the audience benefit from me following my self interest. I have a strong motivation to talk with someone and ask questions I’m genuinely interested in, which should increase the quality of the interview.

I feel like my goal with the podcast has changed quite a lot with this last interview with Tyler. Now it’s more about an excuse to chat with smart people. I would never had the opportunity to talk with Tyler and ask questions for one hour if I didn’t had the excuse of saying it was for a podcast. It also became clear with the Tyler interview the importance of in person interviews. It’s not necessarily that the interview is higher quality (although I think in the Tyler case it is), but just the opportunity of meeting these public intellectuals and see “how they move in the world” (how they interact with other people, how they interact with you, etc) seems to be very valuable. This to say that from now on I think I’ll only do in person interviews. This comes with trade offs though. Instead of doing 1/2 interviews a month as I was doing prior my prep for Tyler, the number of interviews will radically decrease over time.

One of the best things that happened this year and was a byproduct of writing and interviewing people, was getting DMs on twitter from people writing to support me and thanking me. And I even got one from a young mind (like me) thanking me because what I was doing inspired him to act. It’s very important for me to signal to other young people that being young is a superpower in itself if you know how to use your age. It shouldn’t be a limitation or an excuse to not do something you want to do. You don’t need permission or credentials to engage with big ideas and big thinkers, you need agency. It truly is that you can just do things. If you look around you, all those things were built by people that were no smarter than you. And sometimes we have this static image of the world where it seems like we can’t change the things around us, that we can’t affect the world, but we can change things, we can shape them and we can transform them. The world is there to be changed, but again, it takes agency. I think a great goal every young person should have is: try to meet all your personal heroes by your twenties. This tests your agency and ambition. Most young people just automatically assume it must be impossible to do whatever they want to do or to meet up with a hero of them, but I think they underestimate how most people are willing to help them and chat with them.

As I wrote here, I don’t really like the sense of tribalism (or collectivism) even though, humans are cooperators by nature. We should be a group of one, a religion of one, an ideology of one and we definitely are a worldview of one. We are people, and a key thing about people is that we’re exceedingly unique. Your understanding of the ideas in a book will always be different from mine, especially because words are always interpretations (we constantly make assumptions about the context, our previous knowledge on the topic will influence our interpretation, etc). And because you will never agree with an idea 100% (unless it came from your own mind) you should try to reject any kind of label (Christian, Popperian, Objectivist, etc). Of course in real life it’s way harder to do this and those labels exist because they are useful shortcuts. The main problem with being labeled is that once you’re labeled, you answer to the label. Suddenly it stops being about the ideas per se, and becomes about the sketch in people’s minds about whatever their interpretation of the idea is. After all, people already know what Popperians (for example) think. So this is a shortcut, there’s no need for further explanation. Details are dismissed and now it’s about what Popper said or did and not about the ideas, it became about the source rather than the content of the ideas. You should talk about the ideas rather than the people, if you’re talking about epistemology you don’t need to necessarily talk about Popper but I do think that if you’re in some way using Popper’s ideas you should suggest at the end of the conversation for that person go and check the work of Popper and the ideas by himself. “Take no one’s word for it”, after all it’s your interpretation of the ideas and that will be different from the interpretation of any other person. Once you tell someone that you’re a Popperian (or christian, etc) they’ll automatically sketch a picture in their mind of who you are based on what they already know about Popper. You could use those labels like Popperian (for example) when you’re in personal spaces, but by definition, those people in the personal space already know who you are and what you believe in, the problem is with people outside of the personal space. Also, we should want to improve our ideas and correct the errors they have. When we’re stuck with a label, we’re stuck with the exact same idea but we all should want to be better Popperians (for example) in the sense that we will correct some errors Popper did and add some things on our own. So when we don’t label ourselves as Poppperians (for example) we don’t need to answer regarding the label which allows us to modify the ideas and turn them into *our* ideas, it stops being Popper’s ideas even though they originally came from Popper’s mind. We’re also more likely to enter the “war state” when we label ourselves, we’re more likely to caught ourselves defend the ideas rather than explaining them. By definition, Christianity is different from Islam just like Popperian epistemology is different from Kantian epistemology so when we label ourselves as Christians or Popperians, the natural tendency is that we’ll have a conflict with Islam and Kantian epistemology, respectively. But this doesn’t happen when we reject those labels precisely because we didn’t identify with any idea even though we do have our preference of the ideas, we allow ourselves to see the best in each ideas and to correct their mistakes. Furthermore, when we identify ourselves with an idea we’re ultimately defining ourselves, but people can’t be defined because we’re constantly changing and our mind is ever in flux. What I believe yesterday might not be (and for every effects won’t be sometime) what I believe today. And my interpretation of Popper’s work will change over time as I become more knowledgeable and therefore, given one time I may not agree with Popper on a subject but tomorrow I may agree with him on that same subject.

The other day someone told me that even though they have the opportunity, they won’t be going to a lecture of a famous intellectual just because they don’t agree with his ideas. It seems to me that they are in “self rejection” and they don’t even plausibly think that one idea better than theirs might come along. But, again, we know that the way society improves is by questioning our current ideas so we can find mistakes and correct them. And the attitude described previously is an attitude of someone who doesn’t want to change hence of someone who doesn’t want to improve. If you believe your ideas are correct (or even just better), then exposure to alternatives shouldn’t be a threat. The only way exposing yourself to new ideas becomes dangerous is if you implicitly believe that your current ideas are fragile, that if you encounter disagreement, that might dissolve them. To challenge those ideas feels like self harm. But there’s something deeply wrong with this, it treats people as if they need to be protected from ideas, it automatically assumes that being wrong is lethal rather than informative.

I think most people take their ideas too seriously. You are not your ideas, you merely have ideas. Criticize your own ideas and don’t be upset when others criticize your ideas. They are not criticizing you personally, they are criticizing your ideas. But it’s also good to defend your ideas and criticize criticisms. The way to make progress is to create (or conjecture) criticize and repeat.

Last thursday Americans (or people living in America) celebrated thanksgiving. I thought it could be a good idea to write a blogpost about things to be grateful for, not so much about what I’m personally grateful for but about what every each of us should be grateful for.

1. We are unbelievably lucky to be alive right now. Every day, we benefit from thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge, scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations. The average person can sleep in a warm bed, live in a safe home, wear comfortable clothing, and access information instantly and all this without having personally contributed anything to the creation of these innovations. If you go to a museum and see how the kings hundred years ago lived you’ll be shocked by how bad they seem to have lived compared to the average person of today, pretty much we all today have a higher standard of living compared to the kings of the past. That’s the myth of the “good old days”, life was nasty and short before industrialization. Those people that talk about the “good old days” have a romanticized view of the past and none of them would sanely say they would like to live in these “good old days” precisely because they are everything but good. This is a proof that everyone benefits from capitalism and economic growth. I didn’t in any way contribute to the invention of smartphones, antibiotics, or chatGPT, yet I get to use them freely just like everyone else. So for this reason I’m deeply annoyed by people that criticize innovators of any kind (of course some innovators do make the world a worser place but I’m speaking about the good kind of innovators). They make everyone and indeed themselves better off. Most of humans alive today are just enjoying all this while contributing nothing to the human experience of the future. But this is okay, because most of us are so comfortable in this world because of these same innovations that we become complacent, not makers or creators. But this comfort shouldn’t nevertheless blind us to gratitude. We truly are living inside the achievement of others, or in other words, achievements of the human race. Because it’s also wrong to think that the world of today was built by a very tiny group of people, we should think about it as a kind of mountain that people build upon. For instance, Darwin wouldn’t build his theory of evolution without first Lamarck build his (mistaken) theory of evolution. We move from mistaken theories to less mistaken theories always and because of this we shall always have a mistaken theory to start with, to build upon.

2. Civilization is better off with innovations and new knowledge. But for most of human history, preserving existing knowledge trumped creating new knowledge. And this is still true when we look at our current educational theory (see here). People used to use their knowledge to suppress change other than to cause change. But we know that the growth of knowledge (novel or new knowledge) is the engine of progress. And we have (selfish or personal) reasons why we want to have this new knowledge. And this all happens of self interest, of people realizing what they like and solving the problems they’re interested in. It still amazes me that people don’t realize this and don’t follow their passions. The view that you have your job (something that is not fun) and your hobbies (what you actually have fun doing) is so weird. There should be no such thing, your job should be your hobby. You (likely, at this pace) will gonna die, after all your life expectancy is something like three thousand weeks, that’s nothing. Why spending your so precious time doing something you don’t absolutely love? We intrisincly know this but we forget. Don’t do something you don’t want to do, there’s so little time on this planet.

3. Let’s be grateful that human agency matters more than ever. No matter where you’re born today, you can achieve great things. Opportunities are more equal than ever. For most of human history, the talent that used to be wasted just because those talented people were born in places where they weren’t allowed to flourish was giant. But today, opportunities are virtually distributed equally, just like talent. And it seems to me that the country that most rewards human agency is the United States. Just the amount of stories that you have of extremely poor people that rose and became extremely wealthy trumps any other country, you don’t really have those stories in Europe.

4. Let’s be grateful that some of our deepest and fundamental ideas are already discovered and known. I’m talking about Einstein’s theories, Darwin’s theory, capitalism and much more, and of course the ideas of David Deutsch and Karl Popper. Just the fact that we already have the answer of how to construct better societies and how to advance human civilization is massively important here. We don’t need to figure it out how to solve these problems, we’ve pretty much worked out all of the essential answers to human progress either in economics, science or any other field. What I’m not so grateful for though is that so little people actually listen to these ideas.

I’ve been thinking recently about how AI can change how companies operate other than the automation everyone seems to expect, which by the way is already happening (for example, companies customer services have been largely replaced by chatbots and handle a wide range of customer inquires 24/7) but not at such significant degree.

One of the biggest benefits of AI is that we can all have (all the time) a personal tutor. And just the amount of value we can get out of speaking for an hour with an LLM is giant and this is indeed the first time in history where we can all be self taught. Just like the opportunity of having this one to one tutoring where you can go wherever you want with your curiosity and ask whatever the questions to an LLM that virtually has a compilation of human knowledge is even hard to conceptualize. You have this entity that is available to serve you 24/7 and knows way more than you do (no matter how smart you are) and I really think it’s a waste if you never lost some hours in trying to navigate your own curiosity and see where an LLM takes you. I think overall people still underestimate how AI will affect our lives in the future and bellow I’ll attempt to present perhaps one of the most valuable aspects of this new age of AI.

There’s this view that as a company gets bigger, the amount of quality in its employees decreases. So, like the founders of the startup are (probably) highly talented and important (which is somewhat obvious) for its success but as the company starts getting bigger, the overall talent per employee (or talent per capita) decreases. The utility of these employees also seems to decrease, in the purely utilitarian sense. With this framework, if the CEO is one of the founders, then yes, he’s that much better off comparing to other employees and deserves the exorbitant amount of money, but overall is very difficult to really measure how important a CEO is. They obviously can’t control everything nor accompaining every product interaction with the consumer. So, one of the ways we lose overall utility and talent as the company gets bigger is that initially in your startup, everyone knows what everyone knows. If I know ten ways to build a fire and you know ten kinds of wood to burn, then together we’ve got hundred ways to stay warm. But like this ability to combine knowledge decreases as the company (and presumably this also applies to the society?) gets bigger. And there’s already a lot of stuff that somebody knows but you don’t know that they know it so you can’t just ask them. So this is where AI comes in. When you ask an LLM a question, it doesn’t just return a webpage. When you talk with an LLM you’re kind of talking with all the people that contributed to its answer, but you and those people didn’t had to collaborate because AI did it for you. You kind of keep operating like a startup eve though you’ve already scaled your company. So there are some points here. So, following the observation that as the company gets bigger the amount of talented people per capita decreases, is not totally right. It’s not that your company attracts less talented people, or it’s less interest in hiring talented people. It’s just that at some level, the talent doesn’t seem to matter anymore. The value of a single worker decreases as the company gets bigger. In the beginning of the startup, every employee is fundamental and decisive in the shape the company will take (and even if will take a shape), but as it gets bigger, every new employee kind of losses significance over the growth of the company. Every new employee is just not that valuable anymore, no matter how talented you are, you just need to get your job done (unless you’re being hired for a top position like for being the CEO which in that case you’re definitely very valuable and is precisely the competition for hiring you that originates the exorbitant income that most CEOs get). It’s not so much about what you can offer of new to the company, but just that you’re work is already attributed and you should focus in getting it done. But with AI this can change, you can be more than “just one employee in five thousand”, you can truly make a difference. Precisely because everyone can know what you know. Your value as employee increases exponentially. So now, even though you’re not working for a startup, you’re (marginally) as valuable as if you were working for a startup. Of course that it’s not really quite the same because the company doesn’t depend particularly on you to succeed in the case a startup would, but your knowledge and skills are as important. But this is only right if there’s an hierarchy, because if you’re a decentralized system, then you’re (allegedly) as valuable and powerful as everybody else.

I am a big fan of Joseph Henrich’s book “The secret of our success” where he attempts to provide an explanation of our species immense success. As he defends, the secret of our success it’s not so much about individual IQ or individual intelligence, it’s about our collective brain and our ability to interconnect knowledge. So, probably Henrich would say that AI would increase the collective brain because it helps us interconnect our knowledge regardless of (physical) barriers.

I’m not religious, I don’t consider myself an atheist though. I just don’t understand what people mean when they ask “do you believe in god”, what does that feel? What’s really the difference in your inner state between believing in god or not believing and how would you describe that belief in god? Other thing, I just don’t find a compelling reason to be religious. Like it’s a pretty big deal that you say that someone (or something) created the entire universe (including you) and it suprises me how lightly people take it and how most of them don’t really know why they say they are religious.

Religion is the most successful groupthink and contains the most long living memes. In general you have the collective way of looking at the world or the individual way. There’s a kind of conflict between collectivism and individualism. If we really are all individuals, then there’s no one the same. You’re a lion, I’m a tiger, he’s an elephant and so on. Then you have maximal freedom and recognition of the individual but no survivability for the species because it’s just you, the individual. So, the reason why we got here (our species immense success) even though we are all individuals is that we have this ability to cooperate outside of our genetic boundaries (and this is unique in nature). We are all different animals but the tiger and lion can cooperate. They can go to the battlefield because they are both christians or muslims. They have these shared belief system that units them even though they’re individuals as different as a tiger and lion which inevitably originates a kind of groupthink.

Religion is about bringing people together with a higher vision, it’s about uniting the masses. But a key thing about people is that we’re exceedingly unique (again, as different as a lion is from a tiger), so we should be a religion of one. And, also, your understanding of the ideas in the bible will be very different from my understanding of the ideas in the bible, there’s no way it’s the same. So when you say “I’m a Christian” (or any other religion) it seems to me that it really takes a lot of sacrifices to conform to such unified, homogenized ideal. And also, it seems that when you say “I’m a Christian” you caught yourself in a position where you defend the ideas no matter what, and you find yourself saying that you are a Christian even though you have no compelling reason to be (a LOT of people). You will not acknowledge if you don’t agree with something about christianity, you’re caught defending the ideas rather than explaining them and there’s nothing wrong with your side and everything wrong with the other ones. So it really is easier to reject any kind of label even though you might really sympathise with the ideas of christianity (or any other religion) because you will never agree with an ideology 100%, it just isn’t possible. And it also seems somewhat dubious if you say “I’m a Christian but I don’t agree with this premise”. Also, for instance, if you say to someone that you’re a Christian, they’ll automatically sketch a picture in their mind of who you are based on what they know about christianity and label you and dismiss a lot of things that you can came to defend or be opposed to.

No matter what, there’s always going to be a religious impulse. People will keep wondering “why the heck am I here, what happens after I die, etc” and in those questions science hasn’t made much progress. And because people will keep wondering about those questions, we will always have a religion of some kind, whether with god or without. I think there’s a quote (I don’t remember who is from) that basically says (paraphrasing) that we are this unique phenomenon in nature where we are the only species who knows we’re gonna die, we are cursed, and because of this religion will live forever. Religion of any kind.

Another reason why I’ve been moving away from religion with time is that David Deutsch’s work has been influencing me a lot. First Popper, he created this idea of falsifiability which is very important. If you make a statement or assertion about reality that can’t be disproven, it likely is a meaningless statement. “Why doesn’t your car work? Oh a bad spirit cursed my car”, there’s no way you can disprove that and because of that we shouldn’t take it as a serious reason because there’s no way of either proving or disproving. And then David came up and said that theories (or arguments) also need to be hard to vary which means you can’t change the details without changing the outputs. It can’t be immune to criticism and most of the times is a risky assertion about reality. All explanations that religion provides (in the metaphysical sense) are immune to criticism, there’s no way you can prove or disprove if god created the universe or even if it exists. And they are extremely easy to vary, you can apply these same explanations everywhere. “Why is this baby sick? God wished so”, that’s not a good explanation. It seems non sensical and somewhat irrational to believe in a god according to this framework. Theories or arguments that explain everything explain nothing. Also, I’m now more suspicious than ever of groups who claim to know the truth or be right (or even academic papers with the thirty people name’s as authors). Groups optimise for cooperation and coordination, because a group that doesn’t have consensus will fall apart. They are a groupthink and they sacrifice truth in order to achieve that consensus so it can’t possibly pursue the truth. It’s not a truth seeking entity. Humans are cooperators by nature though but individuals are the ones who can pursue the truth. Popper also came up with the idea of fallibility, humans are fallible and indeed every organization, institution or book is fallible. Hopefully, the humans from thousands of years from now will be “embarrassed” of us, of our moral theories and the way we lived our lives the same way we today recognize how bad the lives of our ancestors were. As I said earlier, religious people approach (for example) the bible as this infallible source of knowledge and wisdom. It sure contains a lot of wisdom and truth but it also contains a lot of dogmas and falsehoods. But actually recently I was thinking how amazing it is we have a book with thousands of years old and just this fact must makes it worth reading it, to also understand how the people thought in the past and how we have evolved.

I’ve been living in the United States now for over two months. I thought that it could be a good idea to share the best insights about how the American society is different from the European.

In the US you have a culture of success, people measure you by your success, which is far more fair than it sounds. It’s actually possible to be pretty successful in America, it’s also way easier to be very poor. This reminds of the IQ graph comparing women with men. Women tend to cluster around the average while there’s more men at both the very high and very low ends of the spectrum. There’s more very smart men and very dumb men, while in the women side, there’s fewer very smart women and fewer dumb women, most of women are in the average part. The same happens comparing the United States with Europe. You have tons of very successful people but also tons of very poor people in the US. In Europe, most of the people are in the average part, you don’t have so many poor people but you also don’t have so many very successful people. This is due to the capitalist state it exists in the US, while in Europe, there’s always a kind of social democratic state so it’s tougher to be at the deep bottom because you always have support (the same happens in the US but not at the same degree).

Theres a culture of improvement in the US. People are constantly looking to learn new things and joining more and more tribes, you are celebrated and rewarded for the weird parts of you. This though, is not true of Europe. There’s somewhat an intellectual laziness is Europe, people are very capable and smart there (no less than in America) but they don’t really get things done. People are extremely complacent in Europe, they are extremely conformist, they are content with little and don’t think too much about how to change for the better nor seem to have a long term view. Americans, on the other side, are the “adventurous Europeans”. There’s not such a strong aspiration to progress in Europe comparing to America and the US is certainly the leading force of progress in the West (either by its ideas per se, its values, or the way it’s governed). There are, nevertheless, a lot of problems with the United States, but we shall always be at the beginning of infinity, there’s no perfect or final society, so we should not think the American society is the “perfect” society, we shall always look for improving upon our current systems and ideas.

The US is a country that acknowledges and rewards human agency. It’s deeply rooted in Americans minds these concepts of individual freedom, individual responsibility and individual rights. Americans are the risk takers and the world movers, they are the ones who make the world move and improve. You go to Europe if you want to eat pasta, drink wine, and have fun, you go to America if you want to pursue your dreams and challenge yourself.

Europe has now zero companies left in the global top twenty five in terms of market cap. There’s not a friendly dynamic environment in Europe for startups, it’s not appealing. There’s a kind of assumption in Europe that you can’t just build things or projects. People don’t go from ideas to reality. The most recent example of this is precisely AI. All major AI companies or startups are based in America (more specifically, the tech industry in San Francisco). Only already big companies can really strive in Europe. This is, again, a reflection that Europeans don’t really got from idea to reality.

Go live in the US if you’re ambitious, and specially during your twenties I would say it’s the most crucial time to go to the US (if you’re not already there) because it’s when you can set yourself apart and it’s the time when you are most generally, willing to take risks, fail, start all over again and try new things.

I clearly exaggerated a lot throughout the blogpost. Europe is great and full of wonderful people, food, places and cultures, but there’s a lot of opportunities that you can have in the US that you can’t in Europe. I also meant to say “America” and “Europe” instead of Americans and Europeans because there’s a big distinction here. Smart people are everywhere, but opportunities aren’t. America (still) is the land of opportunities. Talented and ambitious people meet in the US. It’s somewhat strange to me to think of someone highly promising, ambitious and with high agency that lives in Europe. Most of those people end up by moving to the US, where they are more rewarded by their person, more appreciated and surround themselves of equally ambitious people.

I’ve been writing about David Deutsch’s philosophy for quite a while, in a form or another, I appeal to David Deutsch in every blogpost. David’s explanations have significantly improved my world and I consider him a personal hero. He’s an amazing human being, and I believe all his work is rooted in good intentions and he’s someone with high integrity who is extremely careful to do what is right/good. In the podcast, my last question usually is “what’s the most important thing you’ve learned in your life?”, while I’m sure if I were asked that question there would be tons of possible answers, one more objective answer could definitely be the ideas of David Deusch. In this blogpost I’ll explain the biggest insights I’ve gained from reading David’s work and books.

1. No one can teach anything. Once you understand popperian epistemology, you understand how no one can teach you anything and how the entire educational theory is wrong. Even though it may seem that sometimes knowledge does come directly through the senses (more specifically listening, although not necessarily), we always (re)create the knowledge within. “We never speak in a way that we’re not misunderstood” quoting Popper. Instead, we’re constantly guessing what other people are saying and then criticising the guesses and drop the ones that don’t stand to our critical scrutiny. As I wrote here, our education system is precisely based on the view that knowledge is directly transferred from teacher to student. There are several misconceptions in the current educational theory but perhaps the most dangerous one is the idea that there’s some pieces of knowledge that some people have, and those people have the right to decide that the students should get that same piece of knowledge. This is a way to get a society static and prevent the growth of knowledge, a way of avoiding change. This is about preserving existing knowledge instead of creating new knowledge, because indeed, attempts to improve knowledge (or create) risk error. More precisely error that has never occurred, because it’s *new* knowledge.

2. Error correction is the most important mechanism in an institution. Following my last point, school should be optimising for creating new knowledge. And instead of school being afraid of the errors that this new knowledge might cause, it should create a mechanism of error correction. Because errors will be made and that’s okay, we’re fallible, errors are inevitable. So the best way we have of making progress is correcting those errors. Deutsch writes in “the beginning of infinity” that the best hope we have for improving our democratic institutions are institutionalise this error correction mechanism. One way we have is through the voting systems, that’s a way we have of removing bad policies and bad governments but we should be able to do it faster and more efficiently.

3. We shouldn’t prophesy. The world we will be living will be build over knowledge that is yet to be created, so the future is fundamentally unknowable. In today’s world prophesy comes more in the form of doomerism of how civilisation will end, for example Eliezer Yudkowsky in regard to AI. Prophesy arises ultimately from ignorance, from people that don’t have the knowledge that claim to know the effects of that same knowledge.

4. Pessimists are wrong, optimism is the rational approach. Pessimists believe that are barriers to solve a certain problem or situation, they adopt the atitude “there’s nothing I can do” and this is wrong. But deep down both blind optimism and blind pessimism are the same. If you’re a blind pessimist then there’s nothing you can do, if you’re a blind optimist then there’s nothing you need to do. All problems are soluble, there’s no impossible problem (if they aren’t forbidden by the laws of physics, indeed, travelling faster than the speed of light is impossible), so it’s our moral duty to adopt an optimistic outlook. The future is not predetermined so we shall fight for a better world because only progress avoids disaster. Evils come in many forms, but, again, they are forms of ignorance, of not knowing better, all evils are due to the lack of knowledge. The main takeaway about the principle of optimism (all evils are due to the lack of knowledge) is that if we failed at something, we just failed to create the right knowledge. This is an extremely empowering idea, we can solve any problem that the laws of physics don’t prohibit. Optimism furthermore is about embracing problems, because its problems that make solutions and solutions that make problems and so on. In reality we never really go from problems to solutions, we always go to problems to ever better problems.

5. Always be suspicious of authorities. Tyler Cowen once called David the “first freedom maximalist philosopher”, this is related with David’s philosophy against authoritarianism. As I said before, everyone is fallible, errors are inevitable so the best way we have of making progress is correcting those mistakes, an error correction mechanism. But this is precisely the problem with authority, it doesn’t allow an error correction mechanism to occur. This happens because authority implies ideas being hold from criticism, which means that any errors made can’t be corrected, which is ultimately preventing human knowledge from growing and therefore preventing progress. If a problem arises in an area under authority, that problem won’t be solved because the ideas are not open to question. Authoritarianism is also precisely one of the main problems with the education system. The idea that the teacher has the truth and the student should shut up and listen and maximise his efforts in order to get the knowledge the teacher is trying to give.

I’m a pro people person. I think that there’s something very special about humans. Ancient religions besides their countless dogmas and misconceptions, they did got this one piece of truth. They had this tradition of putting humans at the center of rituals, they appreciated and acknowledged this human specialness. Anthropocentrism, the view that humans are the center of it all, that defends this human superiority and moral standing. They appreciated so much humans (of course themselves) that they even thought that the earth was the center of everything (literally), that they were on the center of the universe, the geocentric theory. Of course it turned out this theory was replaced by a better theory but it did contained a deep truth, a kind of metaphysical truth about humans. It has become more main stream with the years a kind of anti human philosophy emerging. This comes in many forms like Degrowth or environmentalism. The main premise of these views is that the relationship between humanity and the natural world is out of balance and some radical changes need to be done to achieve this balance. They advocate for the humanity getting back in time where we live in harmony with nature and with all it’s species, a kind of naturalistic utopia that aims to minimise people impact on the environment. Only by having fewer children, consuming less energy and overall releasing less carbon into the atmosphere that’s achievable. Degrowth ultimately means not only slowing down the rate of progress but completely “eliminating” all the progress humans have made during the last thousands of years. Furthermore, only progress is sustainable in the long run because only progress prevents disaster just like only the growth of knowledge prevents ignorance and only wealth prevents poverty. What degrowthers fail to appreciate is that only us, human beings, can ultimately save our beloved planet. And indeed we’re the only ones who eventually might be able to save every species (if we want to) from death. If one day we can’t live on Earth anymore, it will be our scientific and technological advancement that will allow us to expand to the cosmos, and take every other species with us. The only reason why a cow would be living on Jupiter would be because of human knowledge, not any other thing. But that can only happen with more progress, technology and more creativity flowing. More people means more creativity which directly affects the number of problems we can solve. Only in a sufficiently advanced society (technologically) we will be able to eventually save the earth from a perhaps inevitable sun collapse. Not only this is a self defeating idea but it’s even immoral because a state without technological and scientific knowledge is a state where people live in poverty and shortly, imagine going back even 10 years in time and lose all the technology, medicine, knowledge, would that be desirable? Of course not! Degrowth and environmentalism are fundamentally pessimistic ideas. They reject the power that human knowledge can have on the world, and they don’t acknowledge that all problems are soluble. With a optimistic outlook of the future, people will always come up with solutions for their problems and we shall never avoid problems in the very first place. I feel like the word problem has a negative connotation, when people hear it they automatically assume something is wrong. This is not true, having the opportunity to find problems we’re interested in and solving them is what Deutsch would call of happiness. Being in a continual state of problem solving can be indeed the best it gets.

We are special because we have a capacity to create explanatory knowledge. Deutsch in “the beginning of infinity” writes about two kinds of knowledge, explanatory knowledge and non explanatory knowledge. We are the only species that can create explanatory knowledge, through conjecture and criticism. All other species are limited to non explanatory knowledge, that is knowledge inserted in our genes. Knowledge is the most fundamental force with an infinite reach. If it ever happens that we’ll save other species through taking them with us when we expand to the cosmos, it is ,again, knowledge that took them to wherever they would be, and there’s no limit to to where that same piece of knowledge could go and it’s effects on the physical world. Humans can do everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics, given the right knowledge. We can populate the entire galaxy, we can live 500 years and so on.

Degrowth and environmentalism are scary ideas and a threat to the western civilisation. It’s incredibly ironic how we can be the first species to exterminate itself, like how is it possible that we have some people trying to reduce the amount of people on the planet? So, I wonder that with the decline of traditional religion, there’s no “institution” that acknowledges this human specialness and this tradition of anti humanism just keeps arising.

One of the most pressing issues and hidden problems that literally nobody talks about is factory farming. One reason why the big majority of people don’t know about the real existence of factory farming is that they don’t really want to know. People don’t want to know about what’s happening with this billions of animals because it will make them make choices. They will either acknowledge what happens and stop contributing to the problem of factory farming, in other words, stop consuming anything that comes from a factory farming. This means that they will have to make a big change in their lives since society is not designed for these kind of people and unfortunately common people don’t have a reliable source to know what products actually came from factory farms. People don’t really want to do this, most of them don’t have neither the time nor the resources to make the change they want. Like how far are you willing to go when basically any food in the grocery stores revolves around factory farming. One important thing to notice here is that the diet change is just a consequence of the acknowledgment, not the problem itself. Social change wont occur if people make this problem around the diet, you can stand for this problem regardless of what your diet is (and you should), it’s wrong to make this about the diet. And like, you can definitely do the most good effectively if for instance you donate to the most effective charities trying to stop factory farming (e.g Open Philanthropy), as effective altruism suggests.

One common argument against being contra factory farming is that people will just say that we shouldn’t care about these animals because they aren’t important as we are, and that they are just resources waiting to be used by humans. They will say that since these animals can’t talk, read, etc they aren’t morally significant. But this is obviously wrong, we shouldn’t measure moral significance if the animal in question talks, reasons or reads, what it matters is if they can suffer, as the utilitarian Benthams suggested. And yes, there’s a whole bunch of scientific evidence showing that, yes, animals suffer. They suffer as much as we do. And Dawkins actually has this interesting theory that these animals might even suffer more than we do because they don’t have the rational faculty we have. They can’t rationalise their experience, they can’t tell a story to themselves of how it will be over soon and try to focus on their breathing or something else. So they are just their in the complete present moment just feeling that pain like is endlessly, I imagine, is endless torture.

It’s ironic, because if we look back in the past, it’s clear that moral progress is happening and it’s real. In the past, slavery was widely practiced and people in Ancient Rome would just throw slaves to the arena and watch them being cut to pieces by lions and they would find that amusing. Nowadays this is clearly horrifying and far from acceptable. So with time, yes, humans tend to evolve their moral values. I asked the question of how is it possible that moral progress is happening but we actually see an increase in the practices of factory farming to Michael Huemer. His answer was very compelling. According to Huemer, we didn’t had factory farming in the past, not because we really cared about animal rights, it was because we were less efficient. We never cared more about the interests of animals than we care now. So as scientific progress happened, we’ve discovered ways to have more meat for the least amount of money, we became more economically efficient. But, again, there are several areas in which moral progress happens. For example, slavery, we ultimately did understood how immoral was the way those people were treated. And perhaps the biggest obstacle in people understanding how immoral it is the way these animals are being treated is that they are just way too different from us. In the slavery example, it was easy for the slavers understood how bad that us because they were biologically the same, they were both people. The same happens with women, how women were neglected in the past and deprived of various human rights, they were also people. But the animals aren’t people, they are just way too different from people and this might be indeed the reason why it’s evolving in the opposite direction of moral progress. Not necessarily that it’s taking more time, factory farming is as recent as hundred years old. But it’s definitely stunning how we, humans, were able to manage the suffering of billions of these animals a year.

99.96% of all chickens are factory farmed, this equals 9.2 billion of chickens. These chicken are bred for fast growth and reach their slaughter weight in a very short period, often just five to six week. They are brainless animals, literally pump watches that can explode any minute.

Now, if we completely exterminate factory farming a problem that arises is how we will feed our population. But eventually, I think humans will find a solution to the problem of factory farming and end the immense suffering of all those animals. As Deutsch’s principal of optimism suggests, all evils are due to the lack of knowledge. The evil of factory farming will last precisely as long as we don’t have the knowledge of how to solve it, but problems are soluble. And solutions always comes with new problems, but those are better problems. After eliminating the atrocities of factory farming and successfully preventing the suffering of billions of animals every year, we will have the problem of how to feed ourselves. And as I’m writing this, I might be realising that this is actually not a better problem…Some people defend this view that we should abolish factory farming because they are advocating for getting back in time, often described as a kind of natural state, where where humans live in harmony with nature and every other species. Their argument is what is called of anti humanism. They consider humans this terrible wrong thing in the world, and that those humans will eventually kill the earth and every species. I completely reject whatever they are advocating here. Humans are special, we are definitely special in the sense that we are this unique phenomena in nature that has the ability to change the earth, no other species can change the world. We built our own life support system, of course that Earth gave us the minimum amount of resources for us being able to do this. The life support system of a lion is provided by nature, if one day turns out a lion doesn’t find any prey, then the lion won’t eat. The difference between a hostile environment and a liveable environment is precisely whatever humans change in between (or in other words, knowledge). Degrowth, or environmentalists advocates fail to appreciate this unique thing about humans, we are precisely the only thing that can eventually save the earth. And this has already, we’ve already deviate meteorites from shocking earth.

It’s important to think that there’s a moral question that arises before eliminating the atrocities of factory farming. If we eliminate factory farming then all those animals will stop existing, would their existence be better than nothing? Like how confident can we be that the life of all those animals are so bad that are not worth living? If their lives positive even by a tiny bit then the entire argument to abolish factory farming goes away. Other question is, are their lives so bad that it outweighs whatever we get from them (the entire food supply)? I think the answer to both of these questions are yes, factory farming might be the worst cruelty ever caused by humans. There are pictures 10000x worse than these by the way!

We talk about coercion, education, freedom, parenting, happiness, and what it means to truly take children seriously. Topics are outlined in the timestamps below.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Support my work here and follow me on Twitter here

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

00:38 – Why civilisations overlook children

11:39 – Do we still lack the knowledge of how to raise children otherwise?

15:25 – Is coercion increasing in the way children are raised

27:28 – Inexplicit coercion, is it intentional?

30:28 – Rationalize your reasons to your children

33:03 – We experience the childhood coercion and do the same to our kids

36:56 – Does internal coercion precedes external coercion

43:57 – Teaching problem solving to children

45:46 – Balancing parental desires and child autonomy

56:08 – Coercion is not always wrong

1:01:57 – Raising children without an agenda

1:05:07 – Outcome oriented philosophies are mistaken

1:07:04 – The bucket theory of the mind

1:17:31 – Why having the right epistemology is crucial

1:31:40 – Optimism and pessimism in life

1:37:53 – The most important thing Sarah learned

1:39:24 – Advice to people

“The bucket theory of the mind”. This is a term coined by Popper. It’s the view that our entire education system is based upon, that basically the mind is this passive recipient or a bucket in which you pour knowledge. When we think about it that way it seems obvious that it’s wrong but very few people seem to actually address this problem. Like Popper said “It’s impossible to speak in a way that you can’t be misunderstood”, we’re constantly making guesses about what the teacher says or the coach, etc. Consider the example that you see a tennis player, you can try and copy him in the exact same way and you’ll still suck. Is not by the coach saying “hit the ball before it bounces” that suddenly you’re a good tennis player. It’s by guessing what the coach says and the coach guessing what you’re not getting. But the only way you could improve would be by you wanting to improve, not by the coach wanting you to improve. This view that you can just pour knowledge into the student is an authoritarian view, the teacher knows the truth and the student must shut up and listen. Ironically authoritarianism prevents the growth of knowledge because it implies ideas being held from criticism and that means that any mistakes made can’t be corrected. If a problem arises in an area in which exists authority, the problem won’t be solved because ideas in that area aren’t open to question. The motto of one of the oldest institutions that was founded during the enlightenment, the Royal Society, is “take no one’s word for it”. All knowledge comes from within, not without, through conjecture and criticism. We won’t get new knowledge merely because the teacher want us to (this is, again an authoritarian view), we need to have reasons to why we want that knowledge. It must solve a problem that we have in one way or another, either we want to pass an exam, or it might help us getting with a better understanding of the topic, or simply because it makes our life better. So, the goal of the education system is to make sure every student acquires the knowledge that the teacher is entitled of displaying. But the teacher is the same for various students so this means that students will “get” the same knowledge. And in the final, they will all get a certificate of how they all “have” the same knowledge. This is a complete absurd! One of the biggest insights I got my from interview with David Deutsch (see here) is that all value in society is given by people who are different, not better and not specially the same. It’s crazy to think that we want to create alike physicists, such as any other job. As you might now realise, a good epistemology applies everywhere. If you, in a random area, first contradict the principles of epistemology then you’re automatically wrong, this is why it’s important to have a good and true epistemology (popperian epistemology of course!), you can detect the errors in an area more rapidly and accurately. “If one violates the principles of epistemology then one is wrong” quoting David Deutsch. For example, we can see morality as a subset of epistemology, it tries to respond to the question of “what kind of decisions should we do with our knowledge” but to answer that question, again, we need to have the right epistemology and everything derives from the right epistemology.

There’s only one movement, that I’m aware of, that is based on the application of popperian epistemology. This movement is the very famous Taking Children seriously founded by Sarah Fitz Claridge and David Deutsch. Children are people, not adults but people. While I’m not sure if I agree with the view inside Taking Children Seriously that basically children are full members of the society, children have some advantages comparing to adults. Indeed the children’s creative guessing machine tends to be more active than in adults because they haven’t learned to be ashamed of their guesses, or mistrust them even though they then lack the background knowledge. Taking children seriously describes parenting as giving your kid enough background knowledge so he can sustain himself, so I’m not really seeing anything that is preventing a eight year old from sustain himself. And this seems absurd said in the terms, questions to Sarah Fitz Claridge! Now, I just want to leave a message of optimism ahah. I think people sometimes have this idea that they can’t change things, they can’t make the world a better place, they can’t institutionalise their big innovation, they can’t spread their ideas, and so on. But everything that we see in our current society was made by people that were no smarter than you, you can change things, you can shape them, you can transform them, all you need it to want.

We talk about the reality of quantum computing, cryptography, AI progress, large language models, and what the future might look like when these technologies converge. Topics are outlined in the timestamps below.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Support my work here and follow me on Twitter here

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

03:25 – How computer science views quantum mechanics today

06:50 – Superconducting qubits and how quantum machines are built

10:15 – The rules of quantum probability explained

13:41 – Quantum error correction and protecting fragile states

17:06 – When quantum algorithms provide a speed-up (and when they don’t)

20:31 – Skepticism and testing the limits of quantum hype

23:56 – Why Scott is optimistic about scalable quantum computing

27:22 – Potential applications: materials, chemistry, and beyond

30:47 – Shor’s algorithm and breaking classical encryption

34:12 – Bitcoin, cryptography, and the risks of a working quantum computer

37:37 – Grover’s algorithm and the reality of search speedups

41:03 – Large language models vs hard computational problems

44:28 – What tasks AI still can’t solve (and how to test them)

47:53 – GPT-4 vs GPT-3: progress, hype, and possible limits

51:18 – How companies train and deploy models responsibly

54:44 – The pace of change since ChatGPT launched

58:09 – Power and danger: capability without aligned goals

1:01:34 – Why AI is not just another technology but a civilizational shift

In a perfect world with perfect people, we all would be socialists. But we’ve seen countless examples (the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic crises in Cuba, etc) of how this socialist utopia really fails to deliver this “fair world” and instead of taking poor people out of misery, it just does the complete opposite and puts more people into misery. But what the socialist doctrine fails to understand is that, firstly, humans are inherently an individual (or selfish) species. This doesn’t at all discards that we live for each other, and true happiness is found when we find ourselves immersed in something bigger than ourselves, to be dedicated for something other than ourselves. We certainly need to reconcile this view that happiness is found in the intersection of various life’s but also that we are the most important moral agents of our life. No one really is a socialist, everyone wants (and can) to be wealthy and wants to be recognised according to the work they put in. As Milton Friedman puts it, “The only way in which you can effectively redistribute the wealth is by destroying the incentives to have wealth”. Socialism unable’s (and acknowledges) the creation of wealth and therefore it prevents progress from happening, socialism is the rejection of creativity or all other forms of humanism and it’s an anti human philosophy. If we had adopted socialism during the majority of our history, it would be impossible to build this life support system from us by us. Every society (either socialist, capitalist or anything else) is runned on greed, we now more than ever (specially in the west) have an aspiration to progress. We can see this everywhere, citizens aren’t just expecting the next president to “not mess up”, people want to see improvements in their country and individual life’s. The same happens with companies, the board will demand of the CEO great results and will expect new innovations, if it’s not satisfied with the work of CEO, then the CEO will be fired. By not recognising (and not allowing!) that some individuals give more to society than others, socialism treats us like a bunch of irrational fools who expect nothing more day after day (which is false since we all are greedy). The socialist doctrine that people will gladly, blindly and willingly accept working during their entire life to just have the same faith as anybody else, regardless of the amount of effort, dedication or sacrifice is delusional and sick. Of course that people poor from spirit (and wallet as well ahahah) would advocate for this, but if we think clearly, what’s the system which will offer those unlucky people that borned without good positions, whats the system that will offer them the greatest opportunity? Capitalism. The world runs on individuals pursuing their self interests, and every, every single person acts from self interest (regardless of the system/state). So now, we gotta think, which is the state that rewards self interest? Capitalism. Every socialist society is ultimately a static society. As David Deutsch points out (in the beginning of infinity) “from the point of view of every individual in such a static society, its creativity-suppressing mechanisms are catastrophically harmful. Every static society must leave its members chronically baulked in their attempts to achieve anything positive for themselves as people, or indeed anything at all, other than their meme-mandated behaviours. It can perpetuate itself only by suppressing its members self expression”. Adopting a socialist ideology will reject the idea that people are creative beings and this is indeed a basic human need. If we follow this system, then we become confined with the finite (which denies that the potential growth of knowledge is infinite, that progress is unbounded, that humans are fallible and therefore we shall always be correcting our errors and criticising our theories indefinitely, etc) and capitalism is quite the opposite. The “founders” of capitalism (much likely Adam Smith) didn’t really imaged a utopia, they just wanted to find a state that allowed human flourishing (infinite).

I wrote a blogpost some time ago on capitalism (and explaining why I like it):

We talk about the logic of free will, the illusion of the self, moral responsibility, philosophical anarchism, and how rationality might still matter in a deterministic universe. Topics are outlined in the timestamps below.

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Support my work here and follow me on Twitter here

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

03:22 – Is the bias for determinism just another historical mistake?

06:44 – Deliberation presupposes freedom

10:06 – On truth, imperfection, and rational discourse

13:28 – Is Huemer’s argument for free will a deductive proof?

16:50 – Robots, compatibilism, and why freedom needs alternatives

20:12 – You didn’t create yourself — but can you still be free?

23:34 – The no-self doctrine and what it really means

26:56 – Unconscious influence and degrees of freedom

30:18 – Who gave the government the right to rule?

33:41 – Philosophical vs political anarchism

37:03 – Why most people misunderstand both government and anarchy

40:25 – Defunding the police, private courts, and anarchist reform

43:47 – Why civil disobedience is rare (and should happen more)

47:09 – Can we have progress without chaos?

50:31 – Moral progress and the abolition of slavery

53:53 – What’s changing now and what’s next

57:15 – Why being rational might be a moral obligation

1:00:37 – One philosophical idea everyone should understand

I think the reason why free will is such a tricky and difficult topic to discuss is that it’s probably the question in philosophy that requires the making of the point of “why are we here” because either we have free will or not, it ultimately refers to human nature at its core. The free will debate as going on for thousands of years and I’m not really sure if it’s making any progress. In this way, I would measure progress as if philosophers and people thinking about the issue of free will start agreeing more on their opinions. This means they would be converging to the truth, and since they are seeking the same truth, they must start by agreeing more over time, of course they could take different paths. I never really thought about this question and I think the default answer is “yes, we have free will” everyone wants to assume we have free will. Denying that we have free will, seems, in a way, rejecting human uniqueness. How could it be that the human race after all has the same destiny as any other species even though we are clearly special in the way that we understand everything possible to be understood and we explain everything that can be explained, we’re universal explainers. And not to mention the obvious distinctions (consciousness, etc). Either way, if we have free will or not, it seems to me that we’ll never know and there will be almost no progress happening among philosophers exploring this issue. We still have to do our decisions in the end of the day, if go vote to the next elections, we can think of reasons why we would vote for a particular candidate and for reasons why we wouldn’t vote for that same candidate. But at the end, we’ll still gonna have to make the decision of who to vote for vote for. The same happens if you’re gonna to a restaurant and the waiter asks what you wanna have, you won’t just say “oh waiter, I’m a determinist, let’s see what happens!” you need to make up your mind. Since I’m very interested in meditation, I looked up some arguments that the meditation circles seem to defend, including also the opinion of Sam Harris who actually has a book only on free will! So one of the claims that has the most concise among meditators is that the self is an illusion, it doesn’t exist. Though we perceive a sense of self that’s just a mere illusion. If you take time to meditate, you’ll rapidly notice that there’s no thinker inside your head, or an “I” (neuroscience also comproves this), and your head is rather a theatre where thoughts arise randomly rather than a control center generating them. In this perspective, what we call free will might just be consciousness witnessing decisions that perhaps might have been made unconsciously (in this process of thoughts arise randomly). On the other side of this argument that introspection leads to the realisation that there’s no self, we have Ayn Rand who said the exact opposite. She argued that basically that introspection and looking inside will always be a proof of free will because as she said we are aware of our ability to focus our attention, we can choose what to think about. I do think that we have some power over our thoughts, for instance that single act of being writing this is generating thoughts in my mind about this free will issue. Just like if I were reading a paper on capitalism, I would be thinking of capitalism. So we do have this little power of directing our mind to what we want to see the more of, but inside of the topic e.g capitalism, my thoughts could be totally random. So, then the question doesn’t becomes about if we have the power of directing our mind to thoughts related to something we’re interested in and becomes if the act of “directing our mind to thoughts related to something we’re interested” is free or not. Of course that in this particular situation, we have the illusion that yes, I choose to be reading this paper but then we just could be endlessly asking “did you?” and we’ll never really get an answer. It’s also important to notice that the explanation “it’s an illusion” is a very bad explanation (or better, isn’t an explanation at all). It’s very easy to vary, you can apply that same explanation to everything else and it doesn’t specifically accounts for what was proposed to account for

We talk about what makes people people, why consciousness might be rarer than we think, why explanatory knowledge is the most powerful force in the universe, and what AGI and progress really mean. Topics are outlined in the timestamps below.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Support my work here and follow me on Twitter here

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro

03:18 – How The Fabric of Reality changed Brett’s worldview

06:42 – Optimism, meaning, and the rejection of mysticism

09:52 – What makes humans unique: universal explainers

13:07 – Consciousness, personhood, and moral status

16:44 – Popper’s critiques of academia and progress

19:59 – Why Brett rejects labels like “Popperian” or “Deutschian”

23:15 – What it means to explain something — and why we can’t define it

26:21 – Explanations vs metaphors and epistemic clarity

29:33 – Are good predictions overrated in science?

32:55 – Why AI isn’t approaching AGI (and might be moving away)

36:20 – Creativity, disobedience, and what people really are

39:40 – Tools vs tool users: moral error in anthropomorphizing AI

42:16 – Is empathy overrated? Sympathy, kindness, and curiosity

45:02 – Why “facts” are interpretations too

48:20 – Stagnation, error correction, and what still blocks progress

51:14 – Brett’s vision of extending the Enlightenment

54:38 – The path to AGI — and why forecasts are mostly fake

58:01 – Final thoughts on truth, individuality, and cosmic responsibility