In this episode we're joined by UC Boulder philosophy professor Alex Priou, and Russ Greene to discuss Technology, Progress and History.

Transcript:

William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways it is worse in the past, where it's a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.

Will Jarvis 0:37

Well, Alex, how are you doing this afternoon?

Unknown Speaker 0:39

I'm doing great. How you doing? I'm

Will Jarvis 0:40

doing great. Thank you so much for joining us tonight today. Do you mind giving us a brief bio and some of the big ideas you're interested in?

Alex 0:49

Yeah. Well, right now I teach at the University of Colorado Boulder in a program called the herps program for engineering, ethics and society, basically teaching humanities to engineers. The person who endowed our program deemed them to inhumane or inhuman one or the other. And, you know, prior to that I was sort of in academic wasteland popping from job to job, you know, trying to find something more secure. I've been here for about three years. I did my graduate work at Tulane University. For that I was at St. John's College, I did an MA there and I was at the University of Connecticut and before that I did a BA in Political Science. My PhD is in philosophy, but I work on Plato and the history of political philosophy. A lot of my work is concentrated on Plato in relation to pre Socratic philosophy and poetry I've written on Homer, Hesiod, Heraclitus, pro amenities. And I've wrote a book on Plato's prayer amenities. And I've got a book coming out soon on Plato's trilogy on the question of science or knowledge, the Sophists statesman and the Titas. And, but I've been sort of branching out a bit and doing some some other things, more modern things a little bit lately, just as my interests have changed.

Will Jarvis 2:11

Got it. Got it. I want to talk a little bit first about, you know, progress and knowledge of the future, and how conceptions of that have changed over time. Can you talk a little bit about how Plato viewed, you know, the concept of the future and knowledge and how that might be surprised in the kind of modern day people?

Speaker 3 2:28

Yeah, so it's, it's, we tend to think of science as progressive, right. And, and it's easy to see that as a distinctively modern concept. But there is a kind of progressivism in Plato, but it's not social or political. And the reason for that is that the sort of social and political sphere of the political community is ultimately governed by an wisdom, right or irrationality, to say nothing of necessity, it putting impositions on the ability of a community to deliberate well about things, right. So there's this sort of intractable fundamental opposition to Good thinking, right? To put it most simply, nevertheless, there is a kind of progress that an individual can undergo, provided they have the right circumstances, they can sit and think and learn more and become wiser, hopefully, and, and make some progress in wisdom. The distinctively modern notion of progress, which is what we typically mean by progress is social or political, as well as scientific project is what we know as a community. That's a distinctively modern idea. As far as a natural science, it certainly has a root in bacon, and Descartes. I think, in a way it as a political matter, it goes back to Machiavelli, Machiavelli often looks like a guy who's just trying to revive sort of Roman excellence or Roman virtue, but it's contrived, right? It's through your own sort of social engineering right. Now, just to put it that way, I think you automatically have a kind of bias against Plato and the ancients, right? Because well, we have progress, haven't we, right, we're largely more peaceful, we know quite a bit more, we live longer. So that seems to be a good case against him. On the one hand, on the other hand, it's not clear that the average individual knows more, right? The average individual has more sophisticated opinions and gives more sophisticated explanations, even when they don't really know what they're talking about, right? Think of the way that evolution for example, or my evolution or whatever, it's used in a very sort of haphazard and it's often used as an exponent explanatory tool, without going through the scientific method, right. And there's millions of examples of these. So it's not clear that the average individual is any smarter though. They certainly have the trappings of intelligence and they feel very good about themselves. Yeah. contest regard. I think the the the area in which we're certainly at a disadvantage is that we're often unable or unaware of how to deal with those problems, right? So we live in an era now of fake news, right? And an era of of, you know, pseudoscience, right or or, you know, the overreach of scientists, right trying to, to sort of lay claim to greater and greater authority. I don't think I think because we're so used to thinking of science in an empirical manner and progressive manner. And things just keep getting better and better and better. We're not well prepared to think about the obstacles, right to a scientific society, and possibly the deepest thinker on these obstacles are these ancients who were not inclined to make science a sort of social progress, social project of progressive science, who rather inclined to a kind of traditionalism or conservatism in the laws, right? Be careful about changing the laws, if people get too used to this, right, then everything will be out, right, you need to have a certain reverence and habituation and you have to be accustomed to it. And so the ancients, if they did view science as progressive, it was on the individual level, right. And they thought very deeply about this, as I think we'll get into a little later, but that would be the primary distinction between them as far as the concept of progress is concerned. And I think, as should already be aware, it should already be evident. I'm very much biased towards played on these on these grounds, right, I think he's well, more aware of, of the problem, our problems, our political and social problems, than any modern thinker, really, was precisely because they were so concerned with founding this world, not with criticizing the I'm talking about early modern thinkers here. So I,

Will Jarvis 6:58

I'm curious, is it something where, you know, as we build up knowledge over time, like just the pile of things, you can no just get so big, that if you have to start deferring to experts at some point, whereas if you're in the time of Plato, you know, calculus has not been invented. So there's no way like, you know, a high school student at the time, could, you know, get to this point where they could, you know, do differential equations and all these different things. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3 7:25

Yeah, I mean, we have a kind of a luxury today, I mean, we, you can subsidize the freedom needed. I mean, almost everybody goes to college, whether through loans or their parents, or they go to a, you know, a free, you know, community college or something like that. They, they have a kind of subsidize leisure, you know, the ancients were very clear about this, right? You need to have leisure, that's the first goal in life. And that means getting out of necessity. And then the question is, what do you do with your leisure, and the highest end of leisure is, is to learn, right? And obviously, you're living in a very, you know, archaic time, by which I mean, not, you know, old, right, it's old, and there's slavery, and there's all sorts of constraints, we don't have the benefits, you know, the freedom that you can have, so you can go and you can be born dirt poor, get into college, get a bunch of student loans, you know, major in, in philosophy and spend those four years go on to grad school and, and accrue even more debt. And then you can, you know, after 15 years of this, or whatever, you can go out and not get a job, and then then you gotta pay, you know, then then you're gonna get unless, you know, you know, there's sort of student loan forgiveness, but you're basically screwed at that point. But that was not even an option before, you know, speaking personally. You know, in grad school, I knew there was always a possibility. And for many years, it looked like an inevitability, right? Not getting a job. And, but still, you have those years, you have that time. So there's, there's certain sort of, you didn't have the time, but I think it goes more fundamental than that, right, which is that there is in the world, in nature itself, if you want to put it in the strongest possible terms. Nature itself resists this kind of this kind of activity, right? Necessity gets in the way, not just with death, but you got to pay the bills, right? You got to you got to somehow find a way and if you're rich, great if you don't need much, also great, right, but if you, you know, need certain comforts, and you also you're going to have to work for a living, you're going to have to spend your time doing that right. Now, the modern response to this was like, You think that's nature? Now, I'm going to overcome this, right? And that's where science and technology has been remarkably successful. They've taken care of a lot of these creature comforts and automation and machines and all sorts of of obstacles are out of the way and we can to a greater degree, afford that kind of freedom, right? And when you look at something like look at what Marx is arguing, and you know, he's he's showing you that if you do this right you could, you could actually have all your necessities taken care of, and live whatever life you want, you should have been a bit more pushy should be a philosopher all the time, maybe. But there is that this is to say nothing of the fact that for Plato, for many ancient and medieval thinkers, it's not even clear that every person is fit for this kind of life, right, which is yet another natural obstacle, not just the fact that society's in the way, but also maybe you're not well suited for it. Right. That's another sort of consideration that the moderns who are more inclined to view all human beings on much more equal terms or are going to push against right. Makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure that answers your question. But there's some thoughts.

Unknown Speaker 10:41

Absolutely. Russ, did you want to jump in there?

Russ Greene 10:44

Yeah. I was just thinking about what Alex said in terms of how the modern individual might not know much more. And I think in part that you could break that down into two ways. What first would be the modern citizen, in many ways, is not expected to understand science, but simply to follow it. Right? That, you know, you're told that if you're not a scientific expert, you aren't even supposed to, quote unquote, do your own research, right, you're supposed to pretty much just take it at face value, what they're telling you. And that goes, even to the point that even if you're a scientist in one field, people will tell you stay in your lane, like you shouldn't be taking that knowledge to another that statistical or technical knowledge to another field, and a pining on that, right. So they'll police the borders there. But then even if you take it to the point of you know, okay, we're talking about scientists within a single field, the progress of modern science depends to a large extent on faith, essentially, faith that the work of other people in your field is valid, that they haven't just made it up. But, you know, now we're starting to learn, you know, with the replication crisis and, and scientific misconduct, that, you know, oftentimes that faith is not warranted. So, you know, I, while it's certainly true, therefore, that, you know, science has enabled us to live longer lives, and certainly richer lives. You know, it's a very interesting point that when it comes to maybe the progress of human knowledge on an individual level, we're actually not doing very well, as might be immediately obvious, from perusing social media.

Speaker 3 12:41

I mean, absolutely. I mean, there's a number of things I just want to jump on, right there. And I mean, well, one, the faith thing is obviously an issue. Right? But the the biggest faith, right, is the faith that, that whatever it is we develop is going to be good. Right? And that's, that's highly questionable. I mean, especially now, you know, maybe, you know, a generation or so ago, when, like, iPhones were coming out, like, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, people were just wow, this is amazing. And now you look at it, and all that you hear about is is addiction to technology, right? And social media is it was supposed to be this great democratic thing. It was a little too democratic, it turns out and and it's gotten, you know, turned into a cesspool, right. This is the this is where I think the real faith comes out. And it's, it's, it's really kind of shocking when you really think about it, right? When you look at a thinker like Hobbes, for example, right? And Locke, they're saying, Look, Steve nature was such that you wanted to leave it, right? You wanted to make your future better. And so it's to a certain extent, human life and human industry is devoted to constantly improving technologically and then financial, and so on and so forth. And now, what's the ideal? What's the end goal? If you're thinking in terms of progress, the end goal has to be unknowable, right? If you can know the end goal, right, if you could have that, you just have some sort of absolute standard, and we can, you know, talk about certain immediate goals, right? Like, oh, it'd be nice if we could, you know, be less reliant on fossil fuels for XYZ reason or whatever it is, but you have no idea whether what that's going to bring to you right, if science can be finishable, right? If science is always progressing, then you you never have that kind of absolute certainty, right, resting at the end. Now, when you really wrap your head around that faith, right, that that scientific progress will lead to greater happiness. That's really shocking. And it's it's really, I mean, you're you're essentially saying you're going blind, right into a world in which you'll be increasingly more reliant on technologies and uncertain on uncertain you know, systems that Do you have no idea if that could be good? Right? So one example I like to use is I think it was just last winter, there was that cold snap that went through Texas, right? And the power grid went down. And most new houses don't have fireplaces anymore. So what would you have done in Texas? If suddenly the temperature dropped like that? You'd be like, hey, it's getting pretty cool. Let's get some firewood, put on your jacket, oh, we're running out of firewood, go get some more. What happens when the heating system goes down? Right? I mean, old people die, right? You, you're, you're completely because you're dependent on that. So you lose in self reliance and virtue, but you also become much, much more susceptible. Right. And so there's, there's quite a trade off here, right? The world in which you live with nature as only somewhat beneficent, right, and somewhat antagonistic, and you just kind of live knowing that and you prepare for those contingencies, versus the world in which you fight, a sort of inimical nature. And therefore you develop these systems that you can rely on. And then they shut down and you have nothing, right, you lack, you have no sort of sort of anything to rely on. A great example of this is from Plato's law case, the beginning of the dialogue. These fathers go to these generals law case and Nikias. And they say, Hey, we saw this guy who's got this newfangled weapon, this new technological weapon, right. And, and it's great. He did this display, we're wondering, would this be good to make our sons courageous because our fathers were courageous, and we're not. And we want to make sure our sons are better than us. And we don't screw up like our parents did. And what happens lacaze tells us so he's like, Yeah, I saw that guy in war. And what happened is, is he's doing his display, the ship went by his crazy, you know, barbed weapon got stuck in the netting of the ship, and he was pulling him and he wouldn't let go. He kept holding on because he knew if he lost this, he'd be screwed, ready to have nothing. He didn't know how to fight as a man as a naked man to man. Right, which is what fighting ultimately ends up. But he was relying on that that sort of technology. Right. And that, that that's in a way, the position we're in right now. Right, which is, I don't know how to farm. Do you know how to farm? Well, Ross? No, I mean, I don't know how to farm if everything goes to hell. I mean, I've thought about this, I'm gonna have to go raid some of the corn fields, cannibalism is an option. I mean, there's not much you can do. Right? And that's because we've convinced ourselves it's better to rely on those systems specialized scientifically, that's a massive faith, and what have you given up for that faith and for that comfort, you've given up on your own individual excellence, your own individual self reliance, right. And that's, that's a, that's only going to get worse, it's only going to get worse, because all we do is keep making it more sophisticated, less comprehensible by the individual, and making us turning us into more, you know, pasty, pale in it, unable to do anything, because everything has been sort of outsourced to technology.

Will Jarvis 18:02

Isn't, it almost sounds to me, though, at some level, what you're talking about is a failure of progress in that since the 1970s, you know, like this, this slow decay of state capacity of the ability of us as a society to do things and build things, well, has created these conditions where suddenly we have to worry about these things. Like it's something it almost seems like, you know, the state of a world where Texas can't keep the power on it's not the same government that built the map, you know, the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program at some level. So, I don't know if he talked about the tension a little bit, it almost seems to me like part of the problem is, is because technological progress has slowed at some level outside of these narrow boxes, like the iPhone and things you mentioned earlier. That does force us to it's some level of prayer for a world that makes us go backwards makes us have to know how to be self sustaining, and, you know, farm ourselves and things like that.

Speaker 3 18:58

I mean, the big shift in this I would go a little earlier is really World War One, right? It's, it's a war that was prepared for as though it were like one of these old fashioned wars, and it was just like, a meat grinder of just bombs and shelling and, and gas. I mean, it's, it's frightening when you read this stuff. And it's, you know, I mean, I would even say, you know, great the Manhattan Project, were we were all sort of, you know, that it was, you know, or NASA or early NASA, right, as another example, people that, you know, this is moments of ingenuity and relay, yeah. But, you know, there's a certain there's a certain psychological tick that wants to go that makes a person want to go to Mars, right. You know, there's a certain you know, reluctance to put your own citizens lives online, your own children's lives online that makes you want a nuclear weapon or drones right. Um, this all speaks to a desire to escape these unnecessary constraints. And so, I mean, when you're talking about progress, scientific progress, it's not enough to just progress scientifically and to know more to be capable of more, you also have to know how to use it well, right. And in addition, it's not clear that that that mindset is altogether healthy, right? As I've portrayed it, going back to Hobbes and Locke, right, this is a desire to escape the natural world. Is that is that as a fundamental human drive a healthy drive, like to feel utterly not at home in the world so that you try to escape it? I mean, there's a reason that this stuff started in Christian Europe, right? It's a kind of desire, you read bacon, right? It's a desire for heaven on earth, right? That that's a very otherworldly escapist desire, except the Promised Land is, you know, or the, you know, habit is not to be found in the afterlife, but in this world in the future in progress, right. So, I mean, there's not much you can do about this, you can't like get rid of this project. And that would be to be insensitive to the real benefits it's brought. But it doesn't mean that it's, it's a constant struggle with every generation, to remind oneself, that this is not a fully human life, right? This is not a fully, you know, happy flourishing human life, right. But it requires attending to certain other parts of your soul than the one that wants life to be easier, more comfortable longer, and all that right, that wants consequences, and in sort of real, strong, higher level goals than these low level common goals.

Russ Greene 21:41

That's an interesting, that's an interesting point, you just made that, you know, even though we must acknowledge the benefits of modernity, you know, we should remain aware that it's somehow not a real human life. So I want to, I want to ask you some questions about that, because, you know, I could see an argument from the other side that basically, you know, this is the culmination of the most human things, right? We reach modernity, through, you know, this desire to conquer nature to use and develop tools, right, so the, the economic side of man, and then also through, you know, the, the military and political side of, you know, competition between states, forcing us to develop better weapons and new forms political organization. So, in some ways, this is the culmination or the fulfillment of human nature. And even as you know, we see new technologies like social media, it's not like we're learning new things about, about humans that we didn't know, before, you know, like that they, you know, they like being cruel to each other, for example, like, we already knew that, right. So in some ways, this is like the most human possible time or the most consistent possible time with human nature.

Speaker 3 23:01

Yeah, I mean, maybe one way of putting what you're saying is, is that, you know, there's there's two ways to view the modern turn, right? Was it the sort of human being finally coming into their own right? Was man finally coming into his own? Or was it rather a sort of lowering? And this is a difficult thing? Because, right, this incredible reliance on your own powers is a massive centering of man at the center of the world, right, and nature as a kind of obstacle. And, and, and moving God out of the out of out to the periphery? If not, you know, giving him the put all together, right, in in terms of your specific premises of the project. And that's, this is a difficult question to forge. I mean, I'm inclined to think that while it did center, the human being right, it completely erased any question about whether there are any sort of superhuman standards, right, you know, in throwing out God and making man the center, it also throws out nature, right. And this is the difficulty, right? So, this is so you know, you have as part of the air of the ancient tradition is the medieval tradition, right, which is deeply bound up with religion, and, you know, the, you know, the rule of philosophers and Plato gives way to the rule of priests if the medieval era, and this is, in a way a problem, right? So, that's one way to sort of solve this question. And when you go back to the ancients, you see that they knew what, you know, science and technology could do there all sorts of allusions to this and Plato and Aristotle, but they were still reluctant about it. And they saw that that there are there's nature provides us with an array of human beings or at least different ends or goals, and that there's this kind of heterogeneity in these ends, and we need to be sensitive to these in political life. Right. One of the ways to think about this is in terms of Aristotle's ethics, the three peaks to virtue of Aristotle's ethics what is justice, which is sort of equally accessible to all human beings. Another is greatness of soul or magnanimity, which is this sort of Crown of the virtues, right? It takes, you've got everything, if you've got that you got courage, you've got, you know, this idea. And then there's the intellectual virtues, which are both practical and theoretical. And so you might have a knowing statesman as one ideal, and then a philosopher, you know, complete philosopher, somebody who like theories, but really, you know, think about somebody like Socrates there. And one way to think about what modernity did was, less so in Machiavelli, but increasingly, when you look at people like Hobbes and Locke, is to take those two higher, higher goals and throw them out the window, right greatness of soul and theoretical virtue, and focus on human equality and unmaking human beings, you know, all satisfied in the ways in which we are equal the necessities and, and one that comfort. And if we could make politics do that, it would be far more easy. One way to think about it is in terms of a kind of reductionist physics, right? If you can reduce everything to atoms, right, then you've got something really easy to work with, right, as opposed to looking at a tree, and then looking at a fox and saying, I don't know what I mean, these are just different things, right? If you can reduce them, same thing. And then you're working with genetics and stuff, you've got something to work with, right? Politically, they did the same thing. And, again, remarkably powerful, right, you can build whole systems of government that are, you know, that work here that were there that that are remarkably sort of adaptable to different times in places, but deeply unsatisfying. That's that's the difficulty is you got rid of the high, and you made it work for a lot of people. And you made people sort of content are complacent at best, but maybe also really unsatisfied. And this is, I think, a real problem. When you look at people looking to social media to vent and you look at people looking, picking a fight somewhere, or, you know, they're really struggling trying to find within this world that provides so much for them, the thing that it doesn't provide, right, which is a sense of meaning and purpose. And that was thrown out with the by this particular understanding of nature as a kind of enemy. And it was thrown out when you got rid of religion, right? Or you subordinated religion to sort of more utilitarian ends. So, yeah, man's at the center, but man's far less attractive than he used to be.

Will Jarvis 27:35

What do you think has caused this, this loss of meaning? You mentioned a couple of things there. But can you talk a little bit about that more? Is it truly just the story about the decline of religion and belief in a higher power? Or is it something else that's going on? Or just like lack of struggle or something like that?

Speaker 3 27:50

Yeah, I mean, so maybe just to put this in a in, in a, it might be a lack of struggle, I think courage is obviously the virtue that gives you most immediate meaning, because it has the most on the line, right? You you stand to die. And so people look for things to really fight for. And so this is why you see, you know, you know, for example, during the pandemic, right, it's no secret, right? You're the reason that the Black Lives Matter, in part stuff really took off, all of a sudden, that moment is because people were trapped inside, they were living like scared little animals, right. And there was something there out there worth fighting for. And the frustration, and I think the sense of a lack of real endeavor led to this outburst of a longing for a just cause worth fighting for. And that's where you see some of the excesses there. Right. Some of the, you know, it was mostly peaceful, as we all know, but right the, the the rioting, the burning the tearing down statues, they wanted something that they could fight for. When we don't attend to those sorts of things, and we don't we don't give that an outlet. It becomes unpredictable. Right? And then so then, all right, what's the cause? I think it's, it's the sort of hands on relativistic liberalism. Right? Remarkably neutral, right? And that neutrality for a while, you don't really notice it, because there's a kind of common culture, right? Some would say it's, oh, well, we were a Christian, you know, European nation. Some will say, Oh, is white supremacist. However you interpret that culture, it was more monolithic right then than it is now, as that neutrality is as worn down. And as you know, you bring in different populations, because you are open, right? You end up with this lack of any kind of purpose. And that starts to affect how we understand that neutrality because you can't be neutral and tolerant of everything, right. And so a lot of issues end up coming down to these culture clashes and it's as a result of our political mismanagement, right, a failure of common vision, but rather an ever increasing push for greater and greater neutrality. As a result of that. You see Both Sides Now, deeply unsatisfied with the neutrality, right? One side says no, you've gone too far with throwing out our tradition with calling everything racist. But the other side says, No, you've gone too far with free speech with freedom of expression, right? Certain things. People need to be just persona non grata anymore. And that's, that's all of a sudden illiberalism arises on both the left and the right, precisely by an inability to, you can say judiciously manage our freedoms, right? And be aware and make the case for a kind of common culture. This is what we're living with now, as a result of this political system being managed poorly by those in power.

Russ Greene 30:44

Yeah, that. I mean, it's, it's undeniable, right to you can point to so many statistics that, you know, suicides in general have been up for 20 or so years, especially among teens. You know, as we've discussed before, on the show, you know, obesity is way up over the past 50 years, and male labor participation has been trending downwards. So, you know, you can point to some real trends here. But, you know, I do want to push back on this idea of meaning in religion, because I don't feel like just because I live in a modern liberal society, that I can't have faith, you know, I go to church every Sunday, I, you know, I'm an active member of my church. You know, I, just because I live in the United States of America, doesn't mean I can't believe in God. Right. And, you know, even from the point of view, like beyond faith, you know, you can still find meaning in your local community, you know, whether it's the people you work with, or your neighbors or your friends, I don't see why we should all be looking to our national politics, right, for meaning or for answers, or to tell us what a religion should

Speaker 3 32:02

know. And I don't, I don't, we should, we should be careful not to equate, you know, what we're referring to as a kind of common culture with religion, obviously, religion is the age old source of this unifying, you know, unified thing. And to a certain extent, that might be what what might be actually necessary, right. And the I mean, you know, when you start talking about these questions, you start realizing, you start running into some pretty radical positions, right? I mean, you could easily find yourself maybe as an integral is right, if you're, if you're Catholic, and dancing around these questions, right, or, you know, you could go full, full Aristotle and say, well, we need it, you know, interesting, you know, it's really difficult. And I'm not sure, you know, look, I'd be, you know, I'd be the greatest statesman of all time, if I could solve this problem, you know, intellectually, it's, it's, it's theoretically, you can point to the issue to practically Sorry, I have no idea. Right. But I mean, I would say that, you know, it's, it's great, you can find outlet in your smaller communities. But, you know, that liberal neutrality, right, increasingly, increasingly has asserted more and more sort of hegemonic force. Right? When it was just a matter of the federal government being kind of hands off, and then the states sort of manage their own affairs. Fine, but that's not what's happened. Right. I mean, just to looking at the history of the courts, what is the court done? It is it is increasingly forced, of more and more morally neutral standard, right, to the point that people are forced on a smaller level to regulate their lives and to think and act right in accordance with these these sort of these principles of neutrality, these leave liberal principles, right. And that's, that's where it seems like maybe one way to think about that is that sort of liberal neutrality is ultimately not neutral. Right? It demands acquiescing, right, it demands that now requires on one moment of thinking of it requires supplementation, right? It's, it's neutral, and therefore you need something else among yourselves. On the one hand, on the other hand, the neutrality looks at whatever you put in there and pushes back against it right, insofar as it has a bearing on your soul. So, you know, this is, you know, you talk about, you know, finding meaning in your community. I mean, look at some of the decayed forms of religiosity, right in this country. I mean, I hear people spout some crazy religious views by which I don't mean extreme views, but remarkably defamed and, and sort of, I mean, it's just, it's just religion through a liberal it's liberalism with a religious lens on it, right. It, you know, you know, they have a cross, right, but nothing of what they do is it's really much to do with the church, right, or, I mean, the greatest caricature of this is like Unitarianism and then This goes hand in hand, I think we're sort of, you know, reactionary forms of religion, right? Where you see people adopting it almost as a kind of, you know, social movement or rebellion and not out of any sort of intrinsic sort of attachment to this related, you know, the religion, whatever religion they're practicing. So, I mean, on the one hand, I do agree with you, you can do that. On the other hand, there's every pressure not to write every pressure to to force you to hide your religious views, because you, you're running, you know, afoul of the reigning orthodoxy, and therefore, a sort of enforced, you know, kind of wishy, washy Enos to your religion, that makes sense. Do you

Will Jarvis 35:48

think there is an alternative to, you know, liberalism, like a, you know, to speak at the future that that is, like, more charismatic or compelling at some level? Is there some way? Or are we forced to, you know, like, just abandon it in the over the long term?

Speaker 3 36:04

I have no idea. I'm not, I'm not one of these. I think some people think this, but I'm not one of these anti liberal thinkers, I just think you have to, you have to be deeply critical of it. Otherwise, it's going, you're gonna end up where we are, right? I mean, it's, it's only by being critical of the reigning orthodoxy, right, that you're gonna have some kind of healthy alternative to it. Otherwise, you go too far, right. And you, you end up just sort of, you know, especially when you have a very flexible society like ours, right, where the laws are constantly changing, and people are, are brought up to fight for something, right? You have to fight for your bit of progress, right? Well, what happens when, what happens when things are pretty good, right? I mean, things are pretty good. Right? We have great comfort, and, you know, you know, my criticisms earlier, so we have great comfort and things that are pretty good. Why the house everybody is so up in arms all the time. And you know, there are there are problems, not to say that there are problems, but there's a real lack of historical awareness of how things used to be in this country to see nothing in human history, right, the massive expenditures of life the way that disease used to really ravaged us. I mean, it's, you've untold of opportunities to pursue your you know, happiness as you understand it, and we don't do it, right. And so there's, there's a, when you have that kind of that motivation to find something to change, if nothing readily prevents it presents itself, you're gonna you're gonna go after it, right, and you're gonna go try to find it, and that needs to be somehow tempered. Right. I mean, you know, I personally think that, you know, the civil rights era, which was such an important time in this country for actual progress, like real social progress. One of the negative after effects of that is that, you know, the court thinks that it ought to be ahead of the game on everything, just because of Brown v. Board of Education, but we did it right down. Let's do it again. And that's how you got, you know, roe and Grizzle. All these these court cases that never really sort of stopped being an issue, right? We have somehow gotten ourselves into this habit that we need to find new civil rights issues, new sort of frontiers, but we don't really know what they are anymore. And so what you often see is the same. I'm sure you guys are uses the same repeated fight the same repeated persecuted claims of persecution and oppression, even as untold of acceptance and untold, you know, unprecedented acceptance, unprecedented support for the political sphere unprecedent support from, like, corporate America, as everything gets more and more supporting you. You hear people speak as though it's, they've never been worse, right? And why? Because they need progress, right? That's an insidious cause of unhappiness, a failure to appreciate the good before you because you're always looking towards the the, you know, unachieved good of the future. Not a healthy way to live, right.

Russ Greene 39:00

You mentioned a couple times, you know, the integralis and the anti liberals, you know, and it's interesting that you're distinguishing carefully your position from theirs. I, I've noticed that there's a tendency in both defenders of liberalism, and the anti liberals to sort of paint it as if it's this one single tradition, and, you know, grouping together sort of the rationalists, like John Stuart Mill, or Kant, you know, with people who had a much more nuanced perspective on liberalism and human nature, such as, you know, Adam Smith, David Hume, Alexis de Tocqueville, you know, for example, so, or even Friedrich Hayek I would put in that boat, so, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, part of, you know, taking a more skeptical look at liberalism, you know, also would involve, you know, going back to some of these figures who themselves were liberals, but also at the same time had a more nuanced view of modernity and progress.

Speaker 3 40:08

Yeah, I think that's, that's absolutely the case. I mean, it's, it's me, you, you have to be these are, these are dangerous times there's obviously a crisis, and you need to think about it, right? But the stakes are incredibly high, right? I mean, you know, I see this with, like, for instance, Patrick Guineans book, right, a lot of interesting good points about liberalism. It's wholly negative, nothing positive. That's an irresponsible way to write, in my opinion, right. And not to say that Dineen is not an irresponsible person in his own thinking, but, you know, he has influenced this book was was very, very popular, it's, you know, it's, you know, made the rounds. And, but, you know, now part of this has to do with, to go with, like the Catholic sort of critics of liberalism, you know, they have in mind a pretty clear sense of the good, that's being lost, right? And it's a good that comes through Holy Scripture, right. And that's not something you can really fully argue for. Right? You can make the case for it to a certain extent, but it's a matter of faith. Right. And so I can see their reluctance. I think, you know, revisiting the history of political philosophy, creating great sympathy for people like mill, right? I mean, mill tries, in many ways to create a hybrid between, you could say, Aristotle and utilitarianism, right, where you look at, you know, he has a, he's a trying to adapt to kind of soccer to them to, you know, progress and on liberty, you know, it doesn't work and the defects are interesting. But there is an attempt to sort of restore it to say nothing of figures like Rousseau, but you know, a lot of these people will look at research and say, well, he's just like a proto communist communist or something, which is a gross misunderstanding of a man who's thought you can learn quite a bit from in what he sees as the degrading effects of early modern, modern thought, you know, a failure to do that, right, is is a failure to live up to the crisis that your present day faces you with, you know, and, and that requires an extra labor on your part. I mean, if I can just, I'll put a somewhat personal note here. I mean, my interest in these questions, really, you know, began I mean, I was mostly interested in sort of ancient thought, from the perspective of reason and revelation, a lot of that had to do with the fact that, you know, the, you know, Strauss's thought, and particularly strawsons, thought, in particular, seemed like a remarkably helpful way of understanding what happened on 911. Right, why, you know, radical Islamic thinkers could look at the modern world and say, No, right, and trying to understand the point that they had, right, what they were appealing to, and fine, and then, you know, you get, you know, the Bush years, the Obama years, then you get Trump, right, and, and then all of a sudden, you're facing a different issue, right? And you start to realize that these these questions, you have to go start looking into this history, because you're not going to understand it otherwise, right? You're not going to be able to, I think, as far as liberalism is concerned, it's very difficult for us to look at somebody like, you know, Osama bin Laden and say, well, we just say he's a zealot. That's it. Right? Why can't he be more tolerant? Right, that's a wholly inadequate understanding of, of what exactly he has in mind. You had in mind, you know, when he did, what he did, right, or what other sort of reactionary Islamic thinkers like say he could talk, right? When you look at him, and then you start digging in the history of it, you can see all sorts of interesting debates, right? Going back to, you know, a guy I consider kind of proto crypto, which is, you know, og Ghazali, and a various their debates and what's going on there. I mean, you realize they're actually real questions here that you need to, if you're even going to remain a conscientious liberal, right, that you need to somewhat take seriously if you're going to be thinking about these things, right. And not every person can think about it, right. But this these are where these ideas are turned into policies or are turned into the way that we envision our task and a failure to do that is a failure to confront these these moments.

Russ Greene 44:23

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the role of Islamic philosophy here, because I think that this is one of the big one of the biggest weaknesses of modern defenders of liberalism, broadly understood, is they tend to exclusively identify it with modern Western Europe, you know, usually referring to like Western civilization, right and thorough reasons for that. But what that really overlooks is this, you know, this deeper history of it was actually like what we think of as Western civilization was actually a product of an interaction between multiple different civilizations the Islamic world obviously, not just el Ghazali, and Eman, brushed, you know, every row is, but you know, out of Cena, even called Dune, you know, there are so many thinkers from that period, both in science and in philosophy, who were immensely influential in the development of the West afterwards. And if we ignore that tradition and just make it seem like this is Oh, yeah, this is all just stuff that some white guys in Europe came up with about 300 years ago, I did nothing. And it's great, and we have to keep doing it, you're actually feeding into the criticism of liberalism, right? Because the criticism of liberalism is that it's Eurocentric, and it's, you know, all of that might work for some, you know, like, European white guys, but for everyone else, it's a disaster. So, ignorance of this history and ignorance of these thinkers is actually probably one of the biggest weaknesses that liberalism now has.

Speaker 3 46:06

Yeah, I mean, it's precisely the faith and progress that makes you say, I don't need a look at these old books, right? Well, how old 2500 years? I mean, we 50 years ago, I mean, we didn't even know about computers and things like that, like, How stupid are these guys? Right? So you don't even think about it? Right? But I mean, so I take the great example here, I think is is Spinoza. Right? If you go to Spinoza. In a way, I'm going to just steal stress his own inquiries from the 20s into the 30s and 40s. But you look at Spinoza, he founded the freedom to philosophize on the basis of liberal democracy, that was his sort of task. And this was a completely different approach to the freedom to philosophy, then you find in my mind at ease, and if you go to my Monday's, he's looking back and you go back to vero, he's right, he's securing again, the freedom to philosophize, but on religious grounds over and against the criticisms of people like Al Ghazali, calling him a crypt calling, you know, is is for runners, a crypto Muslim and going back to Ferrari. And you start, you start pulling this thread and you realize, oh, we have a particular approach to a basic problem, which is how do you secure the freedom to think, right, and the freedom to reflect on your own? Good, we've made it a political and social project, and that has come with certain problems, right? I don't think the chief one of them being right, that we all automatically vulgar arrives, anything that's an actual scientific achievement, and that has its own sort of effects. For, you know, pre modern thinkers, right, the attempt was to secure it over and against the resistance of religion. And while you didn't get the vulgarization, you obviously got the overly religious interpretation of philosophy and of science, right? And you also got this, this extreme reaction to any kind of free thinking, right? Or any kind of open questioning, right? I mean, now that your point about, you know, dead white man's thing, right? I mean, this is where when you really trace the tradition back to its roots in Socrates, it's, it's, I think it's absolutely properly understood, it's almost impossible to overcome the Socratic position, precisely because it consists of almost nothing but open questioning, right? Yeah, there are certain objections you can raise. But the idea that this tradition is monolithic, is a mistake, right? Because it's precisely at its core, it's composed of this desire to fundamentally question our opinions. Right? And, and so there's, it's very hard to think of a tradition more all encompassing, more all embracing, you know, than the West has been, right. That's why, you know, the dialogues of Plato find themselves find themselves in the Middle East, and you get a renaissance, right. I mean, this is, this is what happens when you take books like these and thinking like this, it'll have this effect. As long as it can be read, it'll have this effect anywhere.

Russ Greene 49:08

As long as they can be read, and as long as people read it, right. Like, now, we have this paradox, where we have so much media, and like people are just entirely occupying themselves with I don't know, tick tock videos, and, you know, it's like every single second you spend doing something like that, and I'm as guilty as anyone, like, you could be, you could have been reading Xenophon. Right. Doing something much better with you. Right, and yeah, I

Speaker 3 49:35

mean, no, I have, I'm just, I'm just changing offices, and I just put all my Greek books and I always talk about this how, you know, you have these manuscripts they used to have to be copied by hand or now printed and you can buy them anywhere and you can get them in almost any you know, you know, library they they're gonna have something and you can even get the original sources carefully edited and everything they're available. Nobody wants it. Nobody knows I don't know, statistically do more people want it now than before. I have no idea. But I mean, it's it's so readily available. And yet everything our culture is pushing, as you said, like towards tick tock, right? You know, so maybe I should just start, like, you know, a tick tock is one of the reasons I like I like Twitter. I mean, I find that if I go on Twitter, I can have an actual conversation, I could put out a quote, put out a thought, you can inject a little bit of thinking into this incredibly volatile medium and meet people talk with them. And same thing with you know, the podcasts I do, you know, there's, you just, there's a way that you can connect to people, small group, but they're out there, right, and you can use these media. Otherwise, it's just only degrading, right? And only, only a negative influence.

Will Jarvis 50:52

I want to I want to talk a little bit in the last couple of months about Strauss, actually, I will understand from you, what do you find interesting about Leo Strauss, it's to me the fact that I get this idea that okay, and I'm not as well read as you are by any stretch. But I get this idea from Strauss that, okay, when we go back and read these books, we have to understand that everyone writes under a certain set of social conditions. They've got their own Overton window to deal with, and there's certain things that can't talk about. And so we should try and extrapolate out from there. And you know, even in recording this podcast, like, I know, this is true, there's certain things that you don't talk about, or you can't quite cover, things like that, because of the Overton window you exist in. But my question is, is what do you do with that? Like I this is an interesting point. And I think this is a this is a good thing to recognize, but But what is one supposed to do with that when you have that kind of knowledge?

Speaker 3 51:43

Well, I think I think, also to make it sort of simple. So there's a kind of there's a, there's a social constraint, right? You're not allowed to say certain things, obviously. But there's also I think, for Strawson, almost sort of natural constraint, which is that it's not clear that you can solve these questions simply, right? Now, that's he makes a number of remarks, I spent all summer working on this. And he makes a number of really interesting remarks about, you know, the basic presuppositions or his hypothesis is sort of hypothetical basis to his own activity. And it is, you know, there's a lot of talk about the riddle of being or the mystery of the whole, or, you know, fundamental problems, and you have to kind of figure out how these different ideas are operating in his text rhetorically and philosophically, but I'll just to put it simply, I think for Strauss, he understood that modern progress had made us insensitive to certain fundamental questions or problems, right. And it's made us have absolute faith that we can devise solutions. And this Well, it's great, and it's optimistic on a certain level, you have to believe you can solve a question to try to actually understand it, right, you have to take the solution seriously as possible solutions when you read different philosophers, or you study different ways of life. On the one hand, on the other hand, the humility that comes with understanding something of these great thinkers, they're really good reasons for writing the way they did for proposing the ideas, the fact that they're what they taught, and what they thought are on different levels. It has a deeply moderating effect, right? And not just philosophically as an individual. But I think he thought also, politically, I think this is one of the reasons he pushed back against liberalism. And one of the reasons he, he pushed for this, these questions, these, this idea of fundamental problems, right are fundamental questions, or certain solutions that are co evil, and they can't be sort of resolved is that he understood that if this could take some kind of Route in academia, it might not take over the whole thing. But it might create a sort of healthy skepticism about what we can know and what knowledge can accomplish. And that would be a benefit, not just for. For your own growing, it could be a benefit for the regime and for the West. More generally, what if I could just go on to one point, this is something I wanted to talk about along the way. But I think, obviously, there's these questions. And so rich, we went in all different directions. The fund, one of the fundamental texts that I've actually relied on quite a bit is this discussion in the theatres of trying to know your own good. And, and this is over the gift, a relativistic argument. You know, that Protagoras? Socrates is reviving this, but sort of Protagoras and argument against your ability, this sort of relativistic argument that well, what's good for you, and what's good for me, it's a matter of, no, it's not just a matter of what appears to you. There are there's a difference between apparent goods and real goods. And you know this from experience, because you tell yourself, it's going to be a great idea for me to do this. And it turns out the sock right of this movie is going to be great, and you're completely disappointed. There's an experiential now The difficulty here is that when Socrates goes to try to establish knowledge of the good, I don't know, that's, that's difficult, you can know it negatively through mistakes. If that, as a hypothesis, just put it out, if the way you know you're good is through mistakes. And right now we are pursuing the good of knowledge without any kind of right, we're relying on it to go back to the sort of systemic idea that we've been talking about. We're relying on systems, right, they're informing our lives and our actions, right. And we're unreflectively going after them. There's a lot of mistakes to be made, right. And this is where I like to look at Descartes here or bacon as a similar idea. But the idea that you should understand the world as wax that can be formed, right, that can have attributes added to it. That's a remarkable analogy, a really powerful analogy for human creativity and the ability to form our future. This is progress, right? It's ours to be shaped. Well, it doesn't take long of Googling, like plastic surgery disasters, to see what kind of, you know, attempts to shape our own reality, what kind of, you know, horrors that can give birth to, to the I say nothing of the horrors of the soul and the horrors of the body or human life being sort of formed, and in this way, and so taking seriously that there might be some kind of standard, right, or natural sort of standard by which to judge something as good or bad, right? Or just, and that standard might be something as stand alone, as all we know is that we make mistakes, that kind of humility, knowing that you might not know more than that will make us way more judicious in how we pursue science and technology and how we pursue progress.

Will Jarvis 56:43

And ask for humility. That's good. That's really good. Rest of the last questions for Alex.

Russ Greene 56:48

Yeah, I actually wanted to answer your your question too, because I have my own little take on it, which is that I don't, I don't even I'm not convinced that it's actually even possible, at least for a beginner to read, Plato, or Aristotle, or people like that without sort of a straussian. Understanding. Because if you start to read Plato, the first thing you notice is he says things that seem or you know, Socrates, for example, might say things that are obviously we know, now know, to be wrong, or he contradicts himself. Right? And if you come into it, like I did with the mindset of, you know, you know, for my professional career, I'm always looking for flaws and people's arguments, right? And exploiting them. So so then I, you know, I immediately read, and I think, Oh, I caught you, Plato, you know, like, I'm smarter than you what an idiot you are, you know, and it's a closest to your mind to the idea that maybe he has something to teach you. Right? So it's only if you come into it with the awareness and the openness that it's possible that there's a rhetorical purpose, or that it's possible that there's a reason for this contradiction or a reason that he overlooked this obvious counter argument. It's only once you come into it with that, that understanding or that least that possibility in your mind that you can really appreciate these authors. So when I actually entirely found Alex's work in the Strauss, Ian's in general by accident, because I was just reading Plato and Aristotle and trying to understand them. And it turns out if you if you look for commentators from Plato and Aristotle, it's inevitable, you're going to run into the Strauss. Ian's right, and, you know, they they really improve my ability to read and enjoy these texts. So that's my understanding. The purpose of straw.

Speaker 3 58:38

Yeah, and I think, yeah, I mean, the Strauss is sort of basic hermeneutical observation is like, Look, we all know these books have contradictions, right? Certain things don't make sense, right? You got two choices here. Either Plato was like just a straight up moron at certain points, or there's some deliberate and now with Plato, it's great because you have the whole dramatic setting. And then also Socrates, you'll certainly Kenny meanness and then he'll say, like a page later, like, yeah, the only thing I mean, is this really, right? And then the rest is whatever, like, this is good for you. You start to realize, oh, wow, everything is really key chain qualify. You know, Strauss is I think most persuasive with Plato, precisely because of the dramatic stuff. I mean, his his readings of like my Mondays and Spinoza really rubbed people the wrong way. So certain people for that other reason, right, but he I think he's just kind of in a way pragmatics like, come on, you know, and if you read other other commentators who are not salesy, at some point, they will all admit it. They though a little point like, Well, I think he just said this, because of whatever like Descartes, I really think he believed, come on. Right. Like he's obviously conservator, you know, and so you have, you start to realize, Oh, everybody kind of admits it a little bit. Strauss's distinctiveness was to think that sort of admission to its Basic presuppositions, right? And think well, what would the what would the world have to be for this to always be something people have to do? And he took any any thema ties that and made that more explicit than maybe anybody ever has even Plato, right? Where you don't you get these certain metaphysical statements about this, but they're very much in passing.

Russ Greene 1:00:21

Right? And in and just to wrap things up, I'm going to try to, if it's the case, that it's sort of an internal condition of humanity, that there will always be a difference between what's stated or what's written, and the reality, you know, between theory and practice, then that's an inherent dilemma for the modern project of progress, right, which is all about trying to make reality correspond to the text, right? And it's just probably not going to work the way we expect it to.

Speaker 3 1:01:00

Not at all. And this is where, you know, the role of the science communicator is one of the biggest concessions that fraternity has made to antiquity. We need rhetoricians. I need a rhetorician I need, you know, what do we do to get people to take a Vax, call it a Fauci, ouchy, then people really be into it. Right? Like, that's, that's a massive concession to the fact that there are distinct types of people. Right, and that you need rhetoric to relate from wisdom to on wisdom. And that's just, you know, that's a very kind of canned version of, you know, ancient understanding of different human types, you know, which again, it has its own sort of questions and problems, but Right, that's, that's admitting something about the nature of political life. That's not modern.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:45

That's great. That's great. Well,

William Jarvis 1:01:47

Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:49

Where can people find you? Where should we send them?

Speaker 3 1:01:52

So send them the new theories, my podcast I do with my very old friend Greg McBrayer, and my very fat friend, David bar, and go check us out the new Thinkery it's just thinker with a Y on the end, we're on Twitter and check out the podcast. I'm also on Twitter, Alex, pre U P. R. Io. You, you'll find me on there. If you look at the new thing, great. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's the thing, that I'm very proud of the podcast, I think it's great to talk with my friends and to share it. And, and it just to hear that people get something out of it is always a shock, because just kind of do it and send it into space. And then I mean, you'll see statistically like, oh, this many people listen, and then you get an email every now that you're like, Wow, this is wonderful. So if you like any of this stuff, this is what I do accept, you know, we make sort of dirty jokes a lot and probably a little too much than is professionally wise. And, and yeah, it's great. And I think your listeners should know well that you have the whole time he's had this just lovely smile across his face, which is a little bit disconcerting, because I don't know if I've said anything to offend him, but you know not. You should have been doing podcasts. You should be on TV that's out there.

Will Jarvis 1:03:06

Appreciate that, Alex, thanks so much. It's been great talking to you.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:09

Likewise.

William Jarvis 1:03:14

Special thanks to our sponsor, does market analysis for the support. Bismarck analysis creates the Bismarck brief, a newsletter about intelligence great analysis of key industries, organizations, and live players. You can subscribe to Bismarck free at brief dot Bismarck analysis.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives. Special thanks to Donovan Dorrance, our audio editor. You can check out documents work in music at Donovan dorrance.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In this episode we're joined by writer Ed West to discuss the decline of the UK, the future of Europe, and where we go from here. This episode was cohosted by Lars Doucet. 

Transcript:

William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways it is worse in the past, where it's a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com. Additionally, in this episode, my friend Lars to say joins us as a co host.

Unknown Speaker 0:39

Well, Ed, how are you doing this afternoon?

Ed West 0:41

Absolutely fine. How are you? Doing? Great. Thanks,

Will Jarvis 0:45

again for joining us again, for round two, kind of a first guests. We've had to do that, which is it's awesome to have you had we really appreciate it. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Do you mind just giving us a brief bio for the guests who might not have met you before?

Ed West 0:59

Well, I write the substack wrong side of history, which I've been doing for now for, I don't know, 10 months or something. Before that was unheard. And I also wrote for the UK spectator and The Daily Telegraph all the basically, you know, all the reactionary obligations. But now Yeah, moving subsets, that's going to do our vote, you know, right, that politics and with the kind of history flavor, that's my main thing, I suppose my characteristic is I'm quite known as being pessimistic. But you know, I think I'm being proved right at the moment. So you know, you know, there's like prophets who was talking about Doom, eventually, they're going to be proved right. And I think 2022 is my lucky year.

Lars Doucet 1:38

What are all the things are getting proved right about

Ed West 1:42

me just genuinely, while I've been on holiday in Spain, and then recently, I just can't you know, when you're on holiday, and just can't resist looking at Twitter. And it's like, I know, this is ruining my holiday, I'm supposed to be wait for help, but read the news. And even though I'm in this lovely setting by the sea in the Mediterranean just need to be a little depressed. Just the economy, the economy is I mean, economy in Britain is looking very bad. But the gas price situation for us is like they're talking about pints like a pint of beer is like six pounds in London, and like a northerner wouldn't pay more than like, four pounds 50. And they're getting really upset about that. But now they're talking about pints costing 20 pounds, if that if the pubs are going to survive, if they say that two thirds of pubs aren't able to survive the winter, just the price of energy is like, unbelievably skyrocketed. It's like nothing before. So we can, you know, there's talk about doing a cap as the government pay people's energy bills, but I mean, it's kind of it's a bit Latin American, the whole thing. It's, it's kind of heading towards default territories. So I mean, it's generally quite scary that the whole thing is just because of the war. Yeah, I suppose. And so basically, I mean, it didn't help. I mean, a lot of our economy was in a bit of bad shape before then anyway. So it was a bit of a, you know, the analogy is, you know, they didn't fix the roof and sunshine is coming. And we've we, I don't think we've had any growth since 2007. I mean, if reading about the British economy is quite, quite bleak. I mean, around 2007, around the time of the crisis, Britain and America weren't that far apart in terms of GDP per capita. Now, it's like way different than we've had that almost no growth since then, we've basically done the same as Italy, which is 20 years of no growth, nothing. And the same fabulous sort of same end result, which is sort of lots of people in their 30s and 40s, living with their parents, and I kind of just don't do anything, we don't even have the nice food and a nice weather. I mean, we've got the same we're at like, you know, we've had like a fourth Prime Minister in St. Six years now, which is, you know, very, again, very Italian. And, you know, she's coming to power in a really, really difficult time. So, I mean, I wouldn't want to, it's not the best time to be taken over. And, you know, what I have now is it looks much more sort of, sort of worrying then even the financial crisis, and much more worrying COVID

Lars Doucet 3:59

What are some things that led you here?

Ed West 4:01

What for Britain?

Unknown Speaker 4:02

For, for Britain specific?

Ed West 4:07

Um, I mean, Britain has? Well, I mean, obviously, the one obvious fact is, Brexit has definitely made everyone poorer. Because like, over half our trade is with the European continent, and it's just it might it'll fix itself. And, you know, I think the Brexiteers argument is that in 1520 years time, we're going to have much more freedom with a regulation and and actually start to pay off and that may be true. I mean, I didn't know you know, but the problem is that in the short term, we're all alive and it's gonna be a rough few years and it's something that people were very divided over not only half population voted no, but of those who voted for Brexit, there was a huge variety of different ideas about what it meant. So there are you know, it's almost like the different religious sects they just break up and then when the break up and then break up. So there's not really the will so people people might endure suffering and pain and poverty if they I have an idea of what they're gonna get at the end, and if they know what they want, and if they believe in it, but when there's, with Brexit, we're not even sure what we, you know what aim is what kind of country wouldn't be who we want to be aligned to. So there's also divisions, which aren't necessarily like left or right. But in the meantime, you know, it's like just traveling to France in the summer, which you know, that whole English middle class or go to the south of France and their cars, when some of the times comes, and you know, they all get stuck in Dover trying to cross over, it's all very frustrating. There are, you know, all sorts of other things. We have the kind of one of the worst housing situations in Britain, in Europe in the world. I mean, I know all the other English speaking countries have problems. But in the States, it is slightly at least a bit more localized in cities. But you know, London is basically a London is sort of almost on somewhere between San Francisco and maybe a bit less than in terms of unaffordability. And London is basically about all the jobs are in in Britain, in most industries. So imagined, like San Francisco is the only option in terms of affordability, it's impossible to basically break the housing situation to build more houses. Because the kind of political system means that, you know, you know, the Tory party is very elderly now. So it's very controlled by nimbyism. So most of the average Tory voter has their own house, or many of them are retired, there's no real incentives for them to allow new building. So that's basically that's another big block fact that I think another thing is just basically, we're very over regulated. And also, I think we're just getting older, like everyone else. You know, that the Blair thing was the Blair. Government, they had a lot of immigration. For, you know, for economic reasons, but again, it was just you know, now 20 years later, a lot, you know, these immigrants are old as well. And now we just say, Okay, what are we doing now? The population is aging and aging population, inevitably, there are some economic consequences of that. There aren't enough young, dynamic people, it's really notable, if you go to parts of England, that the southwest, everyone's so unbelievably old. You know, I mean, that's the problem ever. I've just been in eastern in Romania, actually. And, you know, and that's the kind of similar thing you can see areas that are quite looked feel quite depopulated, which is the kind of thing you get where, you know, people are going from the poor parts of Europe away, and they're all sort of congregating in the wealthier parts where there isn't enough housing, to sort of, you know, to make a nice life. So yeah, things are looking quite, quite bleak at the moment.

Will Jarvis 7:38

And if you had to pick just one, you know, policy lever, you know, we should all just start jumping up and down as hard as we can to start getting this thing back into this train back on the tracks. In the UK, let's say in particular, what does that look like? Is it is it street votes at the local level to kind of fix zoning, maybe increase housing supply? Is it? Is it something else? Is it just encouraging people to have more kids? Is it rejoining the EU or is it do you have any thoughts there?

Ed West 8:05

I mean, I would say street votes. I mean, I don't know if you know about that, Lars, it's just, I'm sure it's just

Lars Doucet 8:11

been if you could describe it for audience, that'd be great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Ed West 8:15

That it was actually basically the brainchild of a friend Michael bend southward to work for Think Tank, Policy Exchange. And it basically means where there's a street of quite low density houses in an urban area, the entire street and votes that up densify it. So the moment the planning regulations. So if you live in, say, if you live in zone five, and six, which is the outskirts of London, they have a lot of sort of low density streets with either bungalows, or two stories, which are very spaced out. And if you have one of these and you want to extend the build a house, you you can't do that, obviously, because your neighbors will object to you. And another kind of regulation Stop it, but and this system, the entire street can vote on whether they all densify. So that will go from one story to either three or four stories. And they will vote on a plat on an architectural plan as well. So that kind of the most popular type of housing gets built. And that way, you know, the NIMBYs because obviously everyone, everyone, most people NIMBYs for totally rational reasons. Because if your neighbor builds a big house, it makes your house less valuable, because no one wants to live next to the big houses and more people. But this way, it means that everyone financially benefits from there being more housing. So the to the whole, the whole street gets rich. So if there's like a 60% vote, then you can turn these low density things into sort of bigger blocks. And that would densify London and I think there's there's some like 2 million and more properties could have built I don't know what the exact figures that that seemed like the best idea and the government that US government debts kind of the I think that I think I think it might happen still. But the problem is the government is changing so much the moment I mean now suppose I'm Michael Gove who's But by far the most, like intelligent of all the cabinet ministers very effective, like, wherever he, whichever department he running he was did quite a good job. And you know, and the rest of them aren't, like particularly talented. So now he's done though, so I don't know what happened. But that's I mean, housing is the most like, you know, employment I mean, my my when my so when I don't know if I mentioned this last time we were but my daughter had the leaving do when they're all the kids the leaving assembly at primary school age 11. And they will talk about, like, what they're going to do when they're older, like how they see themselves in 10 years time. And they all said about one they said I want in I'm going to be my own flat. And like just thinking like none of you I do want to say none of you are going to be realistic about this. It's like never gonna have you ever known flats when you're 40, let alone when you're 21. And that's like a dream that that's kind of completely disappeared. And compared to like my parents day when my mum came to London in the 60s and she from Ireland, and she you know, she really like a secretary and she lived in Hampstead, which was like impossibly at market. I mean, it was impossible. When I was growing up, right for a secretary. You know that it's like where the Monty Python class or live it's like really expensive. But again, but more generally, if you went into sort of London in the 60s when it was like swinging that it was incredibly filled with young people because that young people would live there and and the even the statistics on the number of young people who lived within zones 123 was a starting place now now it's just really old. So I feel like it's now as my concerns are like less about me and more about my children and you know, what kind of world they're gonna live in? I didn't feel sorry for them, they're gonna miss out on this, like normal, normal young person's experience should be

Lars Doucet 11:42

do you think any of those young people are going to be driven out of Britain entirely? I don't know. I thought I mean, what do you think they're going to do?

Ed West 11:48

I mean, most of the options is so vast that most of them sitting there remain the remain campaign often said about Yeah, our chance to go live in Europe. I mean, most British people go and living in English speaking countries, because it's being English. In Australia and Canada rather have understates basically, and New Zealand those for basically the volt. I mean, Australia, Australia is quite strict about immigration. And I think I mean, I think the current housing situation is kind of a problem amongst all the English speaking world Ireland's got a I mean, you know, islands got something like absurd the other day, there's like something like 80 available flats to rent left in our country. I mean, like, there was a queues of the show pictures of queues of people queuing up for this one bedroom flat or something. I think it's maybe something just do the kind of governance and culture which is maybe, maybe it's, I mean, like the English speaking world has this has this very strong tradition now of like, homeowners having rights, which prevents other homeowners and building and I think maybe that might be part of the problem? I mean, France? Maybe France has its troubles, but they don't really have nimbyism in the same way just because their whole thing is like, okay, you don't you don't want like this, you know, railway being put through your back garden. But you know, tough was, like, Paris says, though, and, you know, I'm the heir to the 14th I can do whatever I like, you know, maybe there is something about Yeah, just kind of the Anglo phone culture of freedom, which makes out and it's basically is described as a Gordian knot, it can't be can't be broken, because there's just no democratic mandate for breaking it. And older people, I mean, older people that you know, it's attractive, common, so all the people, they mostly want grandchildren. So they want their own grandchildren, you know, they want their children to be able to have children, but it doesn't make any sense for them just to allow their own area to be developed. So I mean, it's, yeah, it's, I mean, as for like, other things, I mean, I didn't know the power station thing is depressing. There was a video game around Nick Clegg, who was I mean, there's no reason you'd heard him in the States. He's a complete, like, nonentity. Really, I think he works on Facebook, the, and he was deputy prime minister of Britain. And there's a video of him going around 2010 saying, well, there's no point building power stations, because, you know, let him get anything since until 2022. Now, thanks for that. I mean, there's, you know, like an aversion to building infrastructure, which is a problem here, which I think is kind of related to, we've just, I think, when our major power stations just been shut down, because of, and we've, you know, basically failed to build any new ones. And now that, you know, we've been dependent on you know, unfortunately, most of the natural resources of the world are controlled by quite bad regimes. And now one of them is kind of like our enemy, and there's nothing we can do about it. So yeah, I mean, I think the optimistic thing is maybe like a crisis is sometimes needed, like whether it's like in someone's personal life or whether countries sometimes you need to get to a crisis point before people think actually, this needs to be resolved. And maybe, optimistically and you know, like the power situation like the natural resources now we probably will invent, invest more nuclear energy and in In a renewables because we have to, and now this is a vision of a future where we can't rely on countries like Russia to supply all our needs. I mean, the only good thing is that I mean, if you're Norway now, I mean, laughing Absolutely. Just, I mean, they're already completely loaded as anything. Now, they're going to be the only sort of sort of reasonably reasonable country in Europe, which has all these kind of,

Lars Doucet 15:22

it's funny, because I'm actually Norwegian. I'm a my mom's an immigrant. I'm a citizen. I happen to be born in Texas, I was just up there visiting my family. And it's, it's kind of interesting listening to Norwegians complain right now. And then like, talking to what stuffs a little more expensive than it used to be. But,

Ed West 15:41

but it's only 10 pounds a pint for better? I mean, it's like, incredibly, I want to I want early this year, is that wow. I mean, it really is expensive. But I guess, well, their average income is like $90,000 a year, right? It

Lars Doucet 15:54

is pretty good. You know, it's been interesting, like talking to so many other friends in Europe who are like, I'm not sure I'm gonna make it through the winter. And I'm not trying to slag off my Norwegian friends and family. But like, I think we we have something to be grateful for compared to the entire rest of Europe right now.

Ed West 16:10

But yeah, again, they have also, you know, saved during the good times, you know, they've got this problem. I mean, also there, bless the resources, but lots of countries are blessed the resources and make a complete mess of things. So

Lars Doucet 16:22

what's the like, I'd love to talk to you about that, because you've just got this great political analysis approach to things. So like, I mean, doesn't Scotland and therefore the UK have access to, you know, Norway has access to use North Sea oil resources, but so does the UK I'm not sure if we split it 5050 Or if we got the good end of the stick. But I mean,

Ed West 16:43

I think no, more or definitely hasn't, I mean, Norway's only like four and a half million people in Britain said, Yeah, but

Lars Doucet 16:48

you got access to any of it. And you've had access to a bunch of other stuff, this whole legacy, the British Empire and things, you know. So what we've lost, right, right, right. Well, that's gone now. But um, one thing that I'd like to talk about is, since you mentioned natural resources, so I've spent a lot of time studying the Norwegian natural resource regime, I'd be interested in what you think about it, because the did you know that the Norwegian oil management system was set up by an Iraqi immigrant specifically to avoid the resource curse?

Ed West 17:21

No, I didn't know that. That's very interesting. No,

Lars Doucet 17:24

so there's this guy called True called Kasim. Now, if you ask him, personally, he will probably push back on getting all the credit, because there are other people involved, too. But um, so basically, Norway discovers oil back in the 60s 70s, you know, and they don't know what to do with it, they don't really have an established oil industry. And this Iraqi immigrant is there. He's married to a Norwegian woman, he came back to Norway for his son's health. And he's looking for a job. And they're like, Do you have any ideas what we should do with this oil, but now that you're asking for a job, and he's like, Yes, I do. And he sits down, and he hammers out this plan, where he's like, the problem you're going to have is you're going to have the resource curse, you're going to let the Americans come in and do whatever they want. And they're going to take all the resource wealth out of your country, because by the very act of regulating access to this resource, you're going to create and the fact that it's a naturally scarce resource, you're going to create monopolies. And they're not going to be not only are they going to charge whatever they like, they're also going to monopolize access to that resource, they're not necessarily going to be incentivized to develop it to the full extent. And so what I propose to avoid the resource curse I saw in Iraq, with a, you know, is not to go full socialists nationalization, and not to go full privatization. But you do. What I would classify as a Georgist approach to natural resources through caucus, he never uses this word, but he basically reinvented the approach, which is you have a huge severance tax on oil that comes out of the pipe. But you have a huge subsidy on the exploration and discovery of the resource, right? It's kind of like, because the approach is basically like, if you're gonna sit on an oil, well, you're incentivized to basically be lazy, and to basically just capture resource nodes to keep them out of the hands of your competitors. But if we so we should put a severance tax on that, because it's the people's resource that you're, you're essentially renting. But if we do that at 100%, and just like cut it at that there's this argument that it's like, well, it's really capital expensive to go get that resource. So what we should do is we should subsidize discovery. And the argument is that well, it seems to have worked really well because even my like hyper conservative, like American oil friends are like, yeah, the Norwegians are really good at this. You know, the technology and their investment is like is like really advanced. So it seems to be a good way to manage natural resources and what was really interesting means that apparently the hydro power industry is managed in the same way. And that was set up 50 years earlier. And that was actually set up specifically by Norwegian Georgia's. It's in the early 1910s or so. What the Norwegians are kind of complaining about now is basically the distribution of that resource wealth that supposedly belongs to the people. They're like, okay, shouldn't we be spending down some of this sovereign wealth fund? You know, if we're the owners of this resource, you know, some of them are complaining that we're selling it to Europe, you know, and then others are, you know, this is where there's debates about how do we distribute the wealth that belongs to the people. But in my opinion, it seems like that that's a smart way to run a resource regime seems smarter than the way we're doing it in America. But, you know, you're the big political economy brain, what do you what do you think of?

Ed West 20:48

I don't know enough, that resulted really, I mean, I'm, I mean, I suppose I'm more interested in the culture. I mean, like, presumably, that that could just never ever worked in Iraq, for example, it wouldn't be possible. The culture is different. I mean, Norway has been the United States, like one kingdom since about 900. Ad. You know, it's been well, we've

Lars Doucet 21:05

been we've been a Danish or Swedish protectorate for most of that time.

Ed West 21:10

Yeah, but Norwegian identity has always been while I'm in Vegas, I mean, obviously. So I think the oldest states in Europe already then marketing limit Norway's around the same time? Yeah, you're right. It's but it's always had a distinct identity when it's ruled by the two other countries. I mean, I couldn't ever see a situation where Norway or Denmark or Sweden, yes, oil, when they're sort of like warring clans fighting over? It's just a sort of. I mean, I don't even for the British. I don't know enough. I'm not as much I know, he's been basically stopped, I think, because it was like the hardest oil to get. And now only that's not really making much sense. Although I would say it's probably easier for like a smaller, much more cohesive country like Norway, or, you know, or similar Scandinavian country to manage this better. Yeah.

Lars Doucet 21:54

Also also helps if you have a really smart guy come in, right. The minute you discover the resource before you've established a

Ed West 22:00

lot of that stuff is just like serendipity right there. Right? Just the right man in the right place. I mean, it could be it could have been a complete, they could have had like a Charles Ponzi tying up. And but I mean, I think even if that happens, I think eventually, they probably would have would have stumbled on, on the right way of doing things. I don't know, it just seems, I don't know, all those Scandinavian countries, when I if I go to they will seem a bit like from an ad fraud point of view. This is like a really not a paradise. But, you know, like these, they're very, like trusting places. And when you when you come back to England, it's

Lars Doucet 22:34

not so they are they are very cohesive. They are a very high trust society. But I think at the same time, like I mean, we used to be bloodthirsty Vikings, so I don't think it's in our blood. Exactly. But on the other hand, you know, I do think there is something to be said, for having a smaller unit of government. You know, Norway is famously not in the EU, we are in the European economic system and are subject to a lot of the same treaties. One on ending debate in Norway is that basically, we, we have all the obligations of the EU, but none other representation. But um, but

Ed West 23:04

I think that Britain is gonna get eventually as well. I mean, that seems to be the most likely thing, which no one's really sure why, but just, what a reason. Yeah, yeah. But isn't that I mean, I mean, surely all the most bloodthirsty Scandinavian Vikings went to like Yorkshire and that's why so chilled out and England, I actually reached out the most like, yeah, and Texas. I mean, isn't there actually a theory that amongst Scandinavian migration to America, this is like a semi serious theory, there has been some sort of like, selection effect? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's this whole there's this, Minneapolis and whatever, what what

Lars Doucet 23:40

really happened was, it was most of the poor people who were forced out, it was your second and your third sons, who didn't inherit land, who mostly were forced out to Minnesota, like, I mean, I look at my own ancestry. And I look at my mom's family, and it's like, oh, we own the farm. You know, that's probably why we got to stick around so long in the old country. And the other thing is that Norway, Norway, Norway has consistently been one of the poor of the three Scandinavian states. One of the big things that kind of saved us was potatoes, of all things. A good 150 years ago, this group of people called the potato priests, Norwegian priests, who just like got really of angelical about potato cultivation. I mean, because like, there's almost no arable land in Norway, and that's why we had to steal yours for so long. You know,

Ed West 24:31

it's you're not surprised to get in potatoes. I mean, like, you know, from an Irish perspective, obviously, they have incredible, you know, they can make the population grow fantastically, but obviously, like risky if you have one family. And you're gonna put all your potatoes in one basket, presumably. Yeah, there is a problem. Yeah. I mean, I don't know where in Norway and Sweden were quite poor until relatively recently, what they were trying was fine, straight. Like, I mean, like 1900. I mean, I suppose probably, by the late 19th century, there's quite I'd big civic life though.

Lars Doucet 25:02

Well, I think there was also like, there are some historic land reform around the turn of the century that I think had a lot to do with it because what's really funny is if you read Norwegian folk tales, you can kind of get like the picture of it from like 1800s and region folktales that they kind of end like this. And I'm mixing two of them together here, but this is not really all that exaggerated. And then the young ash lad killed the evil landowning troll cut off his head went home with all his gold and silver and using it paid off most of his debts.

Ed West 25:35

That seems that seems left coded to me.

Lars Doucet 25:39

But it's like it's like literally like that, like someone's like you're expecting like lived happily ever after. And like the punchline is paid off most of his debts. And then like these evil trolls are often like, specifically landowners, like over and over again, which is like really weird from a modern perspective, but kind of telling from like, what the peasants were, like writing stories to each other about.

Ed West 25:57

Yeah, it must be a tough life I went to I went to Denmark as well this year, the Balkan, very nice, very, it's just a kind of home the home the whole model was basically compromise and reasonable. And I think it room where they took things out is called about the compromiser industry. And there's all signs and it's all about, that's just, you know, let's just make a reasonable kind of like model, it's everything is just avoid unnecessarily Stupid, stupid conflict. And

Lars Doucet 26:26

I think I think it helps when you have just less people, you know what I mean? And, um, we do, we do have our conflicts and I do think like, I as a Norwegian and a Texan. I think it's hilarious when my like, Lefty American friends like really fetishize Norway, because there's a lot of things that get wrong about it. Like, I mean, my just be that all my family is from kind of a more rural area of Norway. But like, a lot of my Norwegian family is a lot more right wing than I think any of my lefty American friends, like, have an understanding is even possible in Norway. You know,

Ed West 27:00

that's the general rule, though, isn't it? I mean, Europe is much more right wing in America in actually most Yeah. You know, like, Holland has its bible belt. And I mean, France is very, pretty, quite xenophobic, basically, you know, quite a low trust society. I mean, Americans are much more evangelically progressive. I mean, not on economics, but you know, on social issues. So we Norway's still quite religious, isn't it compared from

Lars Doucet 27:22

a well, it's weird. It's like it was a theocracy on paper until quite recently, you know, with the well, yeah, I mean, still, literally, you know, we got the Queen, who's the head of the Church of England, like, I mean, we disestablished the church kind of like a couple years ago. But like, so Norway is really interesting. And I think it's a really good example of the difference between the American and the European approach to religion. So like, there's the state Lutheran Church, and, but what's funny about it is like most of the country are functionally atheist, right? Or agnostic, or, you know, into horoscopes and whatnot. Yeah, but you've got this really big state church that was like an organ of the government until, like, five seconds ago, you know, we're like, there was like a cabinet minister, who's like the Minister of school and church, you know, that's the same department for some reason. Not anymore. But. And then in America, at the same time, you've got actually like, with that perspective, coming from Norway, like American separation of church and state is actually pretty separated. But what's not so separated over here is church and culture. And that's what people who really are upset about like religious culture actually want. And so in Europe, you don't I mean, in Norway, especially like until, like, even now, I would say you still don't have good separation of church and state, like people didn't even use to have separate birth certificates used to just have a baptismal record. And if you're a Jew, I guess things just were awkward. You know? And, you know, and so like, in America, you have this good separation of church and state, but like, the religious culture is just like, permeates in the religious places. And there's no escaping that was in Norway. It's like, here's the official religion, and everyone is kind of assumed to belong to it, but nobody believes it. You know, it's weird. Yeah.

Ed West 29:05

I don't see factors might be like tangentially linked, there surely isn't. I mean, the fact that state religion probably does actually decrease I

Lars Doucet 29:11

don't think they're tangentially linked. I think it's extremely causal and strong.

Ed West 29:15

I mean, America is just a place of competitive religious sects. And that makes those religious sects stronger in more than one in England. It's just it's, you know, Church of England is a state run bureaucracy and like a lot of state run bureaucracies, is incredibly sluggish and slow and actually destroys the thing. The only place in England strangely, where you have that kind of American style separation is, if you go to secular weddings, you can't they go, like, you know, they say what priming and they go through it, but and I've been at these or they say, and I read it, I read a poem by Elizabeth round and say on a minute, what does it say? Oh, yeah, the second verse, it says angels so you can't say that you can't mention like, you can't and the Pomocy you can't mentioned heaven, like literally any words, even remotely related to religion won't read that poem. They say there's a state this is a state thing. That's the only place where you have to kind of, you know that kind of I mean, otherwise I think it's just I think it's just kind of like awkwardness is, I went to I actually went to a lovely stave church in Norway's gorgeous out. It was a classic scanning story because it was, it was been burned down by like this guy who like

Speaker 4 30:17

recorded on something. Yeah,

Ed West 30:22

that whole thing No way. I mean it's really bad music I mean it's what has been the murderer

Lars Doucet 30:26

and Nazi and maybe was either what were the Nazis

Ed West 30:30

though it's kind of like yeah kind of Viking

Lars Doucet 30:35

murder someone and I can't remember if he's the one who Yeah, Varga he's real bad. And then he also I can't remember if he's the one who was also a cannibal or if that was someone else anyway, it's problem.

Ed West 30:46

I think there's a whole like, slew of them for a while I remember that it was a kind of it was a very 90s moral panic. And since then we don't really get it seems, but they rebuild the church exactly how it was. It's absolutely gorgeous. You know, there's no, there's no even like nails or anything. It's all everything's just fits into pieces. At the end,

Lars Doucet 31:05

it's kind of it's kind of it's kind of anticipating Lego, you know,

Ed West 31:08

but it's I mean, yeah. I mean, maybe maybe that is maybe it

Lars Doucet 31:13

was so cool. But the stave churches is that one of the reasons you have these ancient wooden churches that have persisted so long until some black metal a*****e brings it down? is I think the argument is that Norway so far north, you don't have the problem with bugs that you have in other climates. And so you're able to have a Yeah, so you're able to have like, wood things that just like last way longer, but we'll see if, you know, with climate change that that holds up.

Ed West 31:40

Yeah, I don't know, I didn't ever thought about that. I just assumed because I didn't have

Lars Doucet 31:45

like, we're just better carpenters and everyone else, that's just the secret.

Ed West 31:52

That's how you built the wrong boats that were able to, you know, cross the North Sea and attacking. And yeah, you get a

Lars Doucet 31:57

cop and the weird thing. And I would like your thought on this, the weird thing in Norway that my wife detected immediately she's American, is she's like, your friends and like your cousins will introduce themselves. They're like, I'm a carpenter. And there's like, not a hint of shame in their voice. Right? Whereas like, even in America, someone who wasn't ashamed of being a carpenter, it's like, there'll be a little bit of like, I'm a lower class than you. Right. And that was like, the really crazy thing that she noticed when she was visiting was just like, how blue collar? I mean, I have like friends who are like, manual laborers who are doing better than I am. Because they're in Norway and Norwegian, you know, and I think that's one of the biggest contrast between Norwegian culture and Americans but

Ed West 32:38

that's a Scandinavian thing, isn't it? I think I mean, surely competence is all right. I mean, that's that's pretty prestigious. Good enough for JC Yeah, I found I found that when I went to a Swedish wedding, it was kind of like you meet people and say, Yeah, I drive a tram or I yeah, that kind of jobs, which I guess it's because in Scandinavia, they're probably paid quite well. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the time, the prestige is debate over here about sort of like getting, you know, like, dishes, how do we get like carers and people like that to be more prestigious as a job so that we would want to do it? And I think a lot of it just follows the money we have something's paid well, and it's status normally, I think, because, you know, if I collected everyone's rubbish, and I was paid 200 grand, I would be high status. I don't care. I mean, how much I've gotten.

Lars Doucet 33:25

I mean, your, your history with the Elizabethan era proves that right? Like actors used to be low class, and now they're superstars because we just pay him a lot, right?

Ed West 33:33

Yeah, that's the lowest of the low there was sort of levels of this, you know, there's consider the same as prostitutes, basically. And and I think there were bands in France from being involved in any politics because they were just considered sort of just deviant subversives. I mean, I gotta admit, I think that's the proceeds that are pretty sensible. I did. Like when's the last time an actor opened their mouth? And you thought that was an interesting? Well?

Lars Doucet 34:01

Yeah, well, that's hilarious. Yeah. So so so so so anti celebrities and politics is your take? I take it.

Ed West 34:10

Yeah. I except the occasional one in 100. Who agrees with me? Yeah, exactly.

Will Jarvis 34:15

It speaks speaking about that about politics. What is going on to the UK? Why have the Tories been in power for so long? Is labour just completely incompetent? What's going on there?

Ed West 34:26

Well, we had that was just a weird, like combination of unlikely events. Really, that stopped late, what's the labor law since 2010, but they've been around for ages. So the Tories had a coalition with the Lib Dems who I don't even know how to describe the Lib Dems because they're not really anything that kind of center left, but they're kind of kooky center, left and many then what happened was that there was a kind of series of events that there was actually a by election that started because there'd been a fight in the bar of the House of Commons where like a very drunk Scottish MP punk Come on. This is how it also acids and delta, because there was a byelection involved in that by elections when like an MPS to be recalled, and a new MP voted in between elections, that head of the Labour Party Geigle Ed Miliband, who was a bit of a like a dweeby. Kind of like the guy who was good at you know, like ran the company. He was top of the computer club at school very, like very nerdy kind of laughter a little bit heart in the right place. But he changed the the membership rules as a result of that violation. Remember how and so it basically you know, from being like 30 pounds a year to join, the Labour Party went down to three pounds a year, he wanted to encourage like a wider selection of people to join the Labour Party, what it actually meant was massive like entry ism to the Labour Party from like, the radical left. And so they ended up the new and then all the all the constituent the MPs had their vote in them. So what they do is, the MPs in Parliament will vote to have a selection of of candidates for leadership to be sent to the members. And then so they had lots of MPs said, Well, you know, we want to give the the members like, a wide selection of parties. So as well as the three like mainstream candidates will, will vote for a fourth one who's like the most extreme left wing MP, we have Jeremy Corbyn, who have been like a kind of cranky left wing flight for years and always voted against his own party. Like, I didn't I mean, there's no one really comparable in American politics, like he's committed, he's not Bernie Sanders, because he's much he's much more leftist and Bernie Sanders. And anyway, so went to the party and by the standard policy is completely taken over by like really like radical teachers from London and like, Corbin wins an overwhelming majority. And then in today's point, that kind of long story is Corbin takes over the labour go way to the left, lose a lot this book, but the complicated thing is now the Tories have to they have to announce the referendum result result, they have to announce a referendum because of their own challenge from their own right wing party to them. So they have to have this referendum. And normally, like most of Tory MPs are pro remain and all of labour and liberal Democrats are proven except a hardcore of leftist Labour Party members who are also the anti EU but for like leftist reasons, because they want nationalization, they use upset. So Jeremy Corbyn, who's basically a secret Brexit here. So he's a prominent guy in the red. So that causes a referendum to be lost by Romaine because he's basically working. I mean, I'm almost certain he voted leave. And his Chancellor, John McDonnell, who's to turn up at these May Day parade next to these like banners of Stalin and Mao, I mean, like the National Health, he was gonna be in charge the British economy, it was like, it was comical. So they so they basically the referendum was basically lost because of that. And that and the Tories. Most of the Tories basically wants to have this referendum because they wanted to sort of like get the issue done, but didn't actually want to leave the EU. And now they found that they had to leave the EU. And a lot of the Tory leadership basically left the party or left the cabinet, because they didn't want to be part of it. So what you had left was it was a very reduced or reduced kind of thing. So long story short, so you know, three years later, there's kind of basically nothing gets done. But they can't do Brexit, there's no one gonna vote on the right Brexit and eventually, MP like the another be another prime minister, we've had David Cameron, he had to leave because he lost Brexit, Theresa May, she had to leave because she couldn't get the Brexit done. And so there's I'm Boris Johnson turns up, he had been very popular with the sort of party very charismatic guy, but the problem is, he's a journalist, and he's really like, messy, like, his whole personal life is no one actually knows how many children he's got as the funny thing. I mean, literally, he's either it'd be 20 I don't know, even though he knows he's got he's had three marriages, at least two illegitimate children, which have sort of been covered up he was he's he's like a compulsive womanizer, which was kind of like he was a mayor of London's it's tolerated. It's all kind of fun, because he's quite a very liberal conservative and a kind of good time guy, and, you know, just wants to be jolly. And he's always quoting the classics, and everyone found this amusing. And he was and you know, even though he was in charge of Brexit, and that made him very unpopular with a lot of his son of former sympathizers who felt he'd become sort of nationalistic, he wasn't really wasn't nothing like Trump. He was like, quite just the fun guy. And he said, Well, you know, and then finally, he came to in 2019, won a resounding general election victories of Brexit is basically sorted, we'll get ill. And he pointed, he wants to be the kind of like jolly leader, so why now? Everything's gonna be brilliant. And so, you know, January the first 2020, he does his tweet saying thumbs up, then this is going to be a fantastic year for Britain and you know, like, nothing can go wrong. And then like, four months later, he's in intensive care, almost dying of COVID. And, you know, the whole economy has been completely ripped to pieces by the disease, which is just Come out. I mean, but the funniest thing is that he kind of reigned in complete chaos. So the funniest story is he had to write this Shakespeare biography, because he had to pay off his second divorce. Because during his life while married to the second wife, he had started, like an affair with a younger woman who worked in government, who's now married to. And by the time he he's like, the perfect symbol of like our generation, because in a sense, when he came to Stanford, she was literally homeless, he'd been kicked out his wife, he was living the living with his girlfriend at her place, and Campbell he'd ever stand up blazing round with her, which became a story what they think like, it's the neighbors that reported that screaming and you know, there's been wind thrown it just like this guy is so chaotic. He is really, you know, it's very slapdash. So while all these like the the cobra, who are the British Security Council, they deal with imminent threats. And so January 2020, is saying, like, there's this kind of disease in China, we're gonna, we're gonna have these meetings, like we're gonna have a meeting again, like, and it was fine, fine, just so you know, I've got to finish the bloody biography. So he failed to apparently turn up to five of these meetings. You know, and I think we should you know, you should take this seriously, sir. This is like looking quite serious. nothing done. So then he just kind of hesitated. hesitate, said today said, you know, I think the the history of the COVID response will be debated forever. But I mean, I think he was very slow. And by the time we locked down, we had to lock down a long time because it was already kind of riddled to thing and he was going around, hugging everyone. And then he gets himself. And he's like, quite an overweight guy. So he almost dies, which a lot of people deny, you know, this big conspiracy theory never had COVID Because a lot of people have just been driven mental where politics and think it's all fake. So he survives comes out again, by which time I think he's he's impregnated his wife yet again. Now, that number seven or eight chart showed in more than one sense. But then he was brought down by this like, incredibly stupid scandal, because while they were all you know, everyone has been ordered to lock down and not means anyone. They're all sort of having like regular policies at Downing Street. And this eventually came out a year later. I mean, I think it was kind of the stupidest. It was like the least probably bad thing he didn't did. It was kind of in the Al Capone getting done for tax because it's just stupid reason. I mean, some of these parties wouldn't, they weren't, they were like drinks in the office. But suddenly, she's something bring like a beer. So one of his colleagues was classified as a party. And so everyone got scanned. And I think there's a real sense of, I mean, I'm sure the same mistakes that people there's a kind of very puritanical thing of like, I've got to stop other people, having parties or having fun even situation where it wasn't particularly risky, because people, I guess, naturally attach that moral weight to like a virus I like if you're having a good time, if you're doing something that's a bit seedy, or squalid, or even just fun, and I'm not involved, like, the disease is more likely to spread then than otherwise. And that was, you know, that that scandal just kind of rolled on and on and on until, until basically all the policy deserved. And I mean, the I mean, I think that the choice with things I think the lowest point was so he's it's a kind of classic story. And like Henry the eighth is the obvious parallel, Henry has left his older sensible wife or a younger woman he was attracted to, and it's kind of basically led to Chaos within the regime and, and this younger wife was opposed by his chief minister was Cromwell and the case only eight and as Dominic Cummings, who has since resigning has become a very strong critic of Boris and the entire sort of British government and how the establishment he despises carry, obviously, to his Boris, his wife

been this kind of thing, he's under the influence of the younger wife. And one of the lowest points was during the evacuation of Afghanistan, Boris personally ordered for the British Army and the RAF to evacuate this bunch of dogs, which was, and that was point, he left like this for like the Afghans there, and they evacuated all these dogs because Carrie was like friends or like sympathetic to this, this animal charity, which was like saving on the street. And it was just all these footage of like, these dogs being just like unit risking the lives of like servicemen. It was this thing, it's like a real, that typically British sentimentality about everything I use, I must say that Palmerston, like Churchill, like turning in their graves think that our country has come right, to Kabul dog Airlift. And to me that was the lowest point of everything. And so I think there is just general like dysfunction in the government wish like nothing on some levels that ideological and that they can't kind of get conservative ideas implemented against that resistance from you know, like, obviously, that the the most departments tend to be because the university educated dominates tend to be like more left wing, and there's a lot of resistance in civil service, but a lot of it is just kind of basically functional, you know, then they're just not very effective at running a lot of things with the exception of Michael Gove. I mean, Dominic Cummings, who was Like, he writes, he writes these like 9000 word blog posts and was always quoting for the entire Prussian generals and stuff. He does famous quotes about British government that and how nothing works. And he, he said, you know, everyone thinks that if they go deep inside the government, there'll be like a place like a door where behind there is like loads of ninjas and like this lack of lack of bonding, and everything actually works. And he said, well, there are no ninjas. There is no door and matching. That's just like the best quote, I always see it repeated by people, that actually there isn't there aren't really clever people deep down running the country. It's all just kind of incompetence all the way down. So yeah, so now this dress has taken over. And you know, it's just happened to kind of, you know, take over just as this kind of massive crisis. I mean, the one thing Boris had, I think, has been very good on as Ukraine. So I mean, I mean, I don't, you know, I don't what historians will say about our future, but he that the policy very, very early on, he was he was very supportive, as it was kind of clear that Russia was about to attack. You know, I think, you know, I generally think he should be made ambassadors. Yeah, I think you'd be amazing. He'd love it there and they'd love him there. He's like, genuinely loved and you know, it's a country full of very attractive blonde women he'll, I'm sure he's in absolute love it. But yeah, I guess that mean that his legacy is basically that's going to be the country where he's, he's loved, just like, you know, Tony Blair's loved in Kosovo. But kind of like, hated it. Yeah.

Lars Doucet 46:32

We covered a lot of territory today. You know, one thing to tie two threads together is it's funny that you kind of like mentioned, like, Norway is doing great, you know, what's not doing great is if you want to afford a house in Oslo, because no one can afford it. And it's just like, going, it's not getting better anytime soon, either. You know, so everything else seems to be going okay. But like, just man, like I see the like the prices, people are paying for rent.

Ed West 46:58

Can they not feel that off at all? I mean, that seems I mean, I know that's it's harder said easier said than done. Yeah. There's a big well,

Lars Doucet 47:05

like Norway has, like, is more constrained geographically than Sweden. Sweden's. And that is, I mean, fuels, isn't it? Right. And mountains right. Now, the but it's also I mean, it's nimbyism. It's, you know, people, you know, it's all the land policy stuff. Right. You know, I mean, I've dropped the word Giorgio isms, you know, where I come from, you know, which is something I'm trying to kind of push back in Norway. But, you know,

Ed West 47:32

in Northern Ireland, the Danes are building an island in Copenhagen.

Lars Doucet 47:36

Are they just to get around? Yeah, I mean, I mean, going and going going full Dutch, you know, seems seems like not a bad approach. You know, but I think I think, you know, what, what do you think of gimpy ism, and Georgia ism and all these other like things to kind of like make Land Policy and housing kind of the center of our politics. I don't remember housing being something anyone ever used to talk about? And it seems like every real thing anyone ever talks about now?

Ed West 48:00

It's a I mean, it's, it used to be a sort of dinner party thing. I remember people, I mean, like people a bit older me talk about, you know, house prices and stuff. And that just sort of stopped. I see that one day, no one ever talks. It's, like, depressing, like, why we thought about it, it's just like, we're never gonna write. It just became be unaffordable. I mean, I'm sympathetic to the NBS. I mean, like, I'm like, a much more. I'm like, a bright yimby It's such a thing. Yeah. My UMB friends who are you know, are very real, like very pro. Pretty much freedom of movement between like loads of open borders. I think in Britain, we got like a million people come in, you have to, you know, I think there's only so much you can do if you have that much immigration, because your land prices are still gonna go up. I mean, it seems to me the demand supply issue. I mean, I do think the style of architecture is big difference, although, I mean, that's not going to stop. I mean, I think nimbyism is just everyone's default, right, everyone's going to be NIMBY. And whether there's like a like a concrete monstrosity next door to you, or like a beautiful Moorish Palace, whatever you're gonna, most people will oppose it. But I think people do have are given, like greater moral support by the fact that they know that. Like, in my experience, whenever there's been new buildings, and new builds in my area, they've always been hideous, and like, the more hideous the more likely they're gonna win an architect architecture award. I mean, that's just like, if I were universal,

Lars Doucet 49:21

I went to architecture school. I know exactly what you're talking about. Like, there's no I

Ed West 49:25

met someone from I was at dinner party with someone who's a very nice woman from Canada. She's an architect and I made the joke about like, you know, like an architecture would be like a negative thing, though. And another friend, you know, just said like, then, you know, then you realize like, everything's right. I mean, it goes that saying if something if somebody wins an architecture award like that's, that's nightmarish Yeah. I don't know. The Germans have like quite a good idea and that's so it's like a local so in a lot of small towns and this is like the same everywhere. There are like small towns which are very desirable whether the local, like wage isn't very high like one malls A classic example Foreman's wearing a nice land of misty mountains, pinging off and all that. But corner was actually very poor. It's the poorest county in England. And so lots of people come from London and buy a property and boom, I know. And obviously, if you're local was like, I can't afford anything, I can't afford a home. But the Germans have a system where like a certain amount of money, they have new builds built every year, that's from a city but like a certain percentage can only be bought by local people. I don't know how you measure that. It's like whether you're born there or like live 15 years, but that'd be some local attachment. And that way you say to people, well, okay, we're building the houses, which you might not like, but like, only, you know, your children have a prime chance to buy these. And as the way I see, I mean, it's only fair, London salaries are much bigger, it's only fair that London has to pay more than the local people. And also, I mean, the main like policy, the most important thing and policy wise, is that the things get built, right. I mean, right. However, you both kind of secondary. I mean, I'm kind of less I mean, I you know, social housing is another issue, but we Britain already has a very high level social housing compared to the rest of the rest of I think we like by far the the highest in the Western world. But no, I find that frustrating thing is the kind of the constant grumbles like, oh, we must stop these these flats from being built because they're not affordable. It's like yeah, but just because you block of flats, every single building, it's affordable. It's like basic, like supply and demand. No one seems to Yeah, it's like very few MPs who will say, you know, all their constituents want to like you want to stop this new building. And some of them have been like ridiculous is one in London receipt. And they they stopped these buildings in central London. No, is a barn in the outskirts again, because there was a gasworks. There's like this is literally gas. Right? It's not, it's not the seventh one as well. I think we can you can live with the gasworks been

Lars Doucet 51:52

adapted. Yeah. It's the historic parking lot kind of issue, right?

Ed West 51:56

I mean, there isn't there are quite a serious link thing. parking spaces and fertility, like parking is literally destroying Western civilization for sure. More parking spaces. You have fewer children. Yeah. And that's why we all die out because of just so people can drive to the shops. Right? Yeah. It's frustrating. Yeah.

Will Jarvis 52:16

Very frustrating. Well, Op. Ed, we've got to let you go. Now. Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Really appreciate it. Learn to time. Thanks again. Where can people find you? Where should we send them?

Ed West 52:30

Go to the sub stat just type in wrong side of history at West sub stat that should get you I don't actually know the exact jest but that will get you there. But yeah, definitely go to my sub stack and subscribe for free just to start with and then you can pay later.

Will Jarvis 52:43

Yeah, or just pay up prime. Pay for a year just to Yeah, put on that credit card. Awesome. Well, thanks, Ed.

Ed West 52:50

All right. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Take care.

William Jarvis 52:56

Special thanks to our sponsor, does market analysis for the support. Bismarck analysis creates the Bismarck brief, a newsletter about intelligence great analysis of key industries, organizations and live players. You can subscribe to Bismarck free at brief dot Bismarck analysis.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives. Special thanks to Donovan Dorrance, our audio editor. You can check out documents work in music at Donovan dorrance.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In this episode, we are joined by David Gilford. David's work focuses on the intersection of the private and public sectors, applying technology and new business models to solve urban problems. He currently leads policy and strategic partnerships for Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), a company that spun out of Alphabet to build next-generation infrastructure ranging from robotic recycling systems to roadways for connected and automated vehicles. We discuss the evolution of infrastructure, the role of local government and communities, and the need for more innovative public-private partnerships.  Learn more or contact him at davidgilford.com. In this episode, we cover: 

David’s background.0:05 What’s the right kind of partnership?2:44 The trade-off between speed of building infrastructure and the negative externalities.8:44 Inefficiencies in the environmental process.10:16 Public engagement through digital channels and digital channels.15:11 Broadband gaps in the Us.17:54 When will autonomous vehicles replace human drivers?23:46 Autonomy as a wind problem.29:19 Policy policy and policy politics.32:51Transcript:William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways it is worse in the past, where it's a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.

Will Jarvis 0:37

Well, David, how are you doing this evening?

Unknown Speaker 0:39

i Well, I'm doing very well. Thanks.

Will Jarvis 0:40

How are you? Doing great doing great. David, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. Do you mind giving us a brief bio and some of the big ideas you're interested in?

Unknown Speaker 0:50

Absolutely. So I've really been fascinated since I was a kid really on the sort of the difference between sectors. So having, having experienced both living in a small town and a big city, then started as I started to started to study and learn about the kind of the ways that the economy worked really fascinated by the parts that move really fast, sort of seeing the rate of technological change isn't the things that seemed to be kind of just to take for granted or that are slow and always there. And that's, that's probably been the most the closest thing to sort of a consistent thread through my career starting and working in entrepreneurship in a in a telecom startup, but right out of college, and then then going into the federal government and seeing the very much more bureaucratic, slower moving side of side of things. And kind of along with that, I guess the you know, a big idea that sort of animated my career is really just thinking, what what can I learn from from one sector? What are the strengths and weaknesses? What levers exist in a given sector? And then, you know, how can I apply that to something else. And that's really meant that I've had the opportunity to switch from things as different as local governments, big corporations, you know, tech startups, and now currently in a, in a company that is investing in the future of infrastructure, sidewalk infrastructure partners, and, you know, in through all through all of that, I've really just been been fascinated by how to apply the the technological innovations that happen to problems that really matter from transportation to energy sustainability, and so forth. And I feel just privileged to have had that opportunity to look at that look at the problems from from a variety of different perspectives.

Will Jarvis 2:23

I love that. I love that. I'm curious, having seen all these problems from these different perspectives? Who do you think is most effective at solving some of these big infrastructure challenges? I mean, obviously, there's some level which which government has to be involved with big infrastructure projects. But and there are capital constraints for startups, you know, you can only get so much capital to work on big infrastructure. What's the correct kind of partnership? Is there a partnership model that works the best? Is it just government doing things? Is it something else?

Unknown Speaker 2:54

Yeah, it's there's there's certainly no silver bullet. But I think what's really clear is just the magnitude of the problem. We see it all all over the place in terms of infrastructure that it hasn't, it hasn't even really, in some cases just even been maintained to the level that it was initially built, let alone evolved to deal with the sort of the requirements of of the 21st century. But to your question, I think it really requires partnership between the public and private sectors that can take a lot of different different forms. But at its core infrastructure really is all of those things that our modern life depends on whether it's the clean water that comes out of the tap, when we turn it on the fact that we shouldn't have to worry about our whether our electricity is, is functioning. It so that really means that it's it's something where government has it has a huge role to play. And government in many cases is setting the stage for infrastructure. If you think about where infrastructure is located, it's typically in public rights of way, it's in the shared spaces, it's underneath our cities, it's connecting our cities, it's in the air, it's all sorts of all sorts of places. But I think the the tricky part comes when you figure out how how, how do you even How do you even address a problem where there may be different maybe different definitions of what the problem is, people have different perspectives. There are a lot of different business models, there's technology that that evolves very fast, but the kind of standard ethos of move fast and break things can be pretty dangerous when applied to infrastructure, particularly anything about the critical systems, whether it's the cybersecurity of our of our electric grid, or the you know the quality of our air in our in our drinking water. But I think the the things that give me hope is seeing the entrepreneurs that that focus on this and know that it is it's a difficult problem and it's it's not as simple as publishing something into an app store and getting kind of some viral traction around it. It really requires the public sectors buy in. And I think that there's there's a willingness in a lot of places to look for new ideas given that the status quo is really not working for anyone but the you know, a lot of the a lot of the devils in the details about how do you get that contract, how do you bring private capital into into a problem like this? How do you make sure that there's a balance of risk and reward? So all those things I think are there's a lot of people focusing on it. And I've been in the sector for quite a while. And it's really only in the past few years that you've seen the this sort of level of excitement. Some of it's driven by the public sector, the fact that there's been some action on infrastructure, investing on climate and things like that. But a lot of it also is just the realization on the on the private sector side that this is a huge market opportunity. And it's something that if you can, if you can solve a problem that affects literally everyone in the world, that's about as kind of a big a tam, as he as you can imagine. The the tricky part, of course, is, is aligning timeframes, as I alluded to, and the difference between the fast pace typically of the technology industry, and they're slower, slower relative pace of, of government and policy in particular. But if you can find those places where you can align interests, and really, and really move the needle, it's the the opportunities are tremendous.

Will Jarvis 5:50

It definitely definitely feels like there are huge opportunities, especially in infrastructure now. Is it your sense that things have gotten much worse at the infrastructure level in America over the last, let's say, 50 years? It definitely only seems that way with just with the power grid, and Texas and California, you know, constantly going down. You know, we think about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, you know, there's countless examples where, you know, the roads seem to be beat up, just like physical infrastructure, like we have not been able to maintain it not really been able to, to build new things. In the physical world. What do you think has gone wrong there? And am I right, in assuming that it just seems to work less well than it did in the recent past?

Unknown Speaker 6:30

Yeah, I think I think you're right. And I think that there's at least there are two big factors that come to mind immediately for this. One is that there's a big difference between building infrastructure should of having having an exciting project launch, have a ribbon cutting, have everyone use something for the first time, that typically will get a lot of attention, and in many cases attract capital, versus the critical work of maintaining it over the next 50 years, 100 years, in some cases, like 150 years. And that so that disconnect between building and maintenance is I think, at the heart of why you know why we look. And so I live in New York City and for example, we have, we have the the most robust comprehensive public transit infrastructure anywhere in the country, in part because it's the oldest but it also means that we have a legacy of deferred maintenance, we have to deal with, we have things that were designed in many cases say before air conditioning was invented, or let alone before Wi Fi and cell service was invented, and all those things that need to be worked into the system. So it's both it's about it's both about maintaining, maintaining versus building. But also sort of second piece is just how how much more rapidly technology has been evolving over the past few decades. And I think that's the way that's changed the way we use infrastructure change what we expect from infrastructure, and even just thinking about the past two to three years with with COVID. And the realization that I think, had been had been there all along. But that sort of now no one could ignore it, just how much we how much we rely on digital infrastructure, particularly connectivity. So now it's a pretty common placing that would that that connectivity is a form of infrastructure and that broadband is is some form of a public, a public good, and that if you don't have access to the internet, it's really hard to participate fully in society, whether an economic opportunities or in access to medicine or access to education. But I think it's that that change was already underway. And it's in some cases, it takes a it takes a crisis for people to really reckon with just how severe it is. And for things to move up to the top of the agenda. So I think there's, there's a mix of that this is a problem that has been 100 years in the making, but also that it's, it's a problem that has accelerated and importance just given the increasing demands that we put on infrastructure, particularly, to be able to do all of the new technologically driven applications that are part of daily life. Now.

Will Jarvis 8:45

That makes sense. It makes sense. I want to come back to broadband in a little bit. But I do want to ask question here at you're sitting in New York City, and we're talking about infrastructure, so I can't help but think of Robert Moses, and you know, kind of Bobo's and you know, bulldozing, you know, neighborhoods to build roads, and all this this crazy stuff. You know, and this is something we see in the PRC right now, where they are able to do kind of infrastructure very, very quickly, by I guess, you know, maybe there's this like trade off between, you know, the speed at which you can build infrastructure, and then, you know, taking care of all the interest groups we have to worry about, have we gone too far on being unwilling to, you know, displace buildings or things to build infrastructure? And are we too worried about, I guess, negative externalities at some point, but at this point, or should it? Are we not worried and we strike kind of an optimal balance at this point? Yeah, I

Unknown Speaker 9:44

think I think it's would be hard to find someone that would argue that we have an optimal balance right now because a lot of good projects are not happening and a lot of bad projects still still do happen. So I think the it's it's a tricky question, because we kind of like how infrastructure was built. built over centuries in the United States, our policies and our regulations were built over centuries, and they were built to address real problems. The challenge is that it's easier to kind of add new rules than to kind of start from first principles and think about is this the optimal optimal system. And in part, it has to do with the risk aversion that's sort of understandable in the in the public sector, when these are systems that people's lives in many cases depend on. But it also means that as you add one, one process on top of another process, there are inefficiencies that come about. And you know, the classic example is, if you think about in New York City, how it only took a few years to build the Empire State Building. And we're in the midst of a congestion pricing program that has also been going on for, for, you know, it was passed a few years ago, but it's been something that's been talked about for decades. And there's no actual there's not the same scale of physical infrastructure that's needed. But even so the process of environmental review the process of, of going through the many levels of government does add add years, in some cases, decades to projects. So I think there's, there's a need to rethink a lot of this, but it's not where I would disagree with some people who say that it's just a matter of making things move faster, is that there are reasons why why we need to make sure that our environment is protected, that people are protected, for example, you know, it's when we think about how fast things were built in the old in the old days, it's important to also remember that it was the workplace wasn't very safe, right. And so people would die in construction of skyscrapers and things like that, and take risks that we as a society are not willing to take any more under, you know, rightly so. So but I do think it's, I think it's that that balance is always a bit of attention. Some of it has to also do with how policy takes longer to change than technology does. And it has to do with a lot of reasons. There's not there's no Moore's Law of policy, policymakers or anything like that. And in some cases, as technology increases, even if it took the same amount of time to go through a cycle of evaluating something, figuring out what the right legislation or regulation should be enacting that, that cycle, even if it was the same as it now is, it was as it was 50 years ago, there are so many new business models, so many, so many new applications of technology, let alone the technology itself. That means that that cycle moves a lot faster. So I don't know if we will find the optimal balance ever. But I do think it's something that we should keep keep revisiting and and you're one of the one of the strengths of the US is that we have a diversity of different forms of government. One city may be very different from another city and how it governs itself, we have 50 states that are you know, some people have famously called laboratories of democracy. And I think using that to our to our advantage would be would be great. It'd be nice to be able to see what works and what doesn't, and then share best practices and see what works. I think the the flip side of that is it's challenging to do to scale something out across across the entire country, if each state has its own regulatory regime, and from certainly from a private sector perspective, lack of certainty is in many cases, a bigger barrier than regulation itself. It's, you know, companies can adjust to regulations. But what's harder to do is to sort of price in the uncertainty about what is, you know, is this business going to be allowed in state A versus state B? And does it need to take a totally different, totally different form?

Will Jarvis 13:07

Right, this is definitely a big challenge. I want to double click on something you mentioned there, the environmental review, we had on Eli the radio, I don't know if you know him, he's a scholar, CG, Utah State. And anyway, he talks a lot about and works on policy, he talks a lot about NEPA. And how NEPA has kind of paused a lot of regulation is paused a lot of building, because you have to undergo environmental review, for everything that can be delayed by interest groups that don't want to have new things built, you know, NIMBYs that can kind of, you know, essentially lobby the government or ask for more environmental reviews to kind of just, you know, extend the timelines that which things can get built on kind of indefinitely? How big of a problem you think NEPA is, is it something we should be worried about? And if so, what should we try and do about it? To kind of improve it, not them either?

Unknown Speaker 14:00

Yeah, I think part of it is is really about understanding what the true what the true risks are, and making sure that the burden is commensurate with those with those risks. And so there are there are prophecies where they're categorical exceptions for certain types, certain types of projects. But I think over time, as I mentioned earlier, the the general trend is to add add things in scope rather than rather than removed from from scope. So I think, some form of process of basically being able to, you know, and this is kind of making, making this up as I go, it's not a fully formed thought. But I think that the intention of if you look at every federal form, there's this paperwork reduction act thing, I don't know, I would be interested see how it if this actually has made an impact, but even when you're filling out a passport application or anything like that, it'll say this estimated burden to complete this is 20 minutes or something like that. There was a lot that required that and that probably created its own challenges in terms of added bureaucracy. But if there was extra kind of labeling for environmental review or something where it was clear to the pub Blood that this process adds two years to the timeline, or that's 10 years or something like that. I think it would spark some really healthy debate about what what level of scrutiny is optimal. Because even in many cases, there'll be maybe people that support a project in theory, but they want to, they want to make sure that it is fully vetted. But they don't necessarily realize that this is going to prevent the project from ever, ever, ever taking place. You know, it's not to say that would solve all the problems. And there certainly there is a sort of a general challenge around people not wanting, they want something to happen, but not not in their backyard, of course. But I but I do think that it's that having a little bit more transparency in the process would be helpful. I also think another another thing, potentially positive trend that I've seen recently is just broader public engagement through through using using digital channels, whether it's the kind of pivot to zoom hearings, and so forth in the pandemic, or collecting feedback electronically. Because the challenge from from a lot of the pretty good, like the local level, is if you're trying to build something, and you have you go to a public hearing, and there are 10, people who show up who are very angry and upset about the project that carries a lot of weight with the elected officials who are in the room, understandably, they see their constituents there. And they're, you know, the the supporters may be outnumbered 10 to one by by opponents. But sometimes that's not an actual reflection of the of the sentiment in the community. So making sure that everyone, not just people who have the time to attend those, you know, a public meeting at 6pm, or whatever, whatever the time may be. Having a broader set of input, in many cases can enable the local government to make informed decisions and say, you know, I know there are going to be some people that are not happy with this, anything you do in government there are people will be unhappy with. But the for the majority of the community, they will benefit from this, they want this, they understand it. And it'd be no put some put some of their sponsibility is on is on the government to make sure that that process exists, and that people are educated. Some of it is also on the the person who's trying to build to make sure that they're clearly communicating it, because these are complex topics. And people understandably don't want to spend hours getting up to speed on the ins and outs of a particular type of infrastructure and what the real risks are, and all and everything like that. So having making sure that there's the kind of clear communication in in a format that people that is accessible to everyone in the community, I think could could help remove some of the some of the opposition that can come from it from almost a reflexive opposition to something new coming to the coming to the community.

Will Jarvis 17:32

Makes sense, marketing and messaging really matter when it comes to you know, putting the product on the table? Absolutely. Makes sense. Makes sense. I want to talk about broadband a little bit now. How would you grade America and our access, like public access to broadband at this point? Like how much coverage do we have? How well do we do? How poorly do we do at this point?

Unknown Speaker 17:54

There's there's a few ways of looking looking at that. So there are rankings of countries that for for decades have shown that the US is not in the in the top 10 In terms of internet speed, and things like that. And I think that is reflective of the fact that other other places have been able to deliver to a broader selection of their or of their population, faster speeds. So I think that that's one thing. But the other, the real challenge is that the data has been very inconsistent. So until recently, the FCC has essentially relied on self reported data from internet service providers with very coarse coarsely defined metrics. So really thinking about, if there is service available in one place in a in a block or in a in a region that that whole, that whole region is considered to be served. Even if it's really only one out of 25 people that service, there's also the difference between thinking about access as there being a possibility of connecting versus having that service. So there there are at least two very different broadband gaps in the US one, which gets gets a lot of attention. And it certainly is, is easy to visualize and understand is that there are people who live far from a city they live in rural areas where it's difficult to have that infrastructure to their house, right. So if they're only if they're only four houses in a five mile radius, sort of take an extreme example, the the economics for bringing fiber to each of those may or may not make sense. There are a number of programs that are making some progress around that it's typically fairly expensive, because just have the the economics involved of taking high fixed costs and splitting it over fewer people. But that's that's that's sort of one that's sort of one problem that, that there are programs to address. And there's there's some progress and there are also ways that the technologies include including fixed wireless access can can help address. There's another problem and that actually, in many cases is bigger in terms of the numbers, which is that of the people in the US who don't have broadband access at home. The majority of them are in cities and metropolitan area Is, which seems counterintuitive because the infrastructure is primarily in cities. But the both the infrastructure is not distributed equally around the city. So I'm in I'm in New York, I happen to have a choice of a few different internet service providers here. But if I lived a couple miles away, I might only have one. And if I lived in, in other parts of the city, I might have one, but that one choice doesn't have fiber. So very different levels of access even within, you know, one of the wealthiest cities in the world. And then you layer on to that the affordability challenge that there, there are people for whom a 60 $70 per month broadband subscription is prohibitively high. There have been programs to reduce the cost, there's the affordable connectivity program from from the federal government with the support of a number of internet service providers that have plans at $30 per month, and a subsidy that consensually make it free for for certain low income individuals. So those things, those things are still problems, there's, there's a number of programs to try to address it in part funded by all this recent federal legislation. But at the core of it requires not just not just ensuring that there's a fiber optic cable to each person's house, but also that they have the the ability and the tools. And by tools, I mean, not just the sort of financial capacity, but the devices, the digital literacy, the training in some cases, so that they're able to fully to fully take advantage of that, of that access. Another Another interesting statistic is that of the of the people who don't have sort of normal broadband access at home, the majority of them do have internet access, it comes through their incomes through their smartphone. And smartphone, as we all know, can accomplish a huge number of things and can provide a lot of benefits. But there's certain applications for example, writing an essay at home, if you're if you're if you're a middle school student, and you're trying to type it on your phone, it's a very, you're quite a disadvantage compared to someone who has a nice desktop with a big with a big screen and is composing their their essay there. So those sorts of subtle differences and of having a big impact on the on the benefits that accrue and making sure that more people have access is really key, in my view to true economic competitiveness across the across the country.

Will Jarvis 22:06

Makes sense? Makes sense. Are you bullish on technologies like Starlink, and 5g to solve some of the like problems with, you know, fiber, or like actually physically getting cables to people? That makes sense?

Unknown Speaker 22:18

Yeah, so I'm bullish in the sense that the more tools we have, the more different situations can be addressed. Where I'm less bullish is that any one of these technologies solves the problem on its own. So I think Starlink is a great example. Starlink means that in in places, like where my family lived in rural Colorado, where there was there was absolutely no internet access other than the dial up or a very expensive, very slow DSL connection, they can now for 100, or 200, ollars a month have high quality internet access. So that's the value of that shouldn't be understated. But it doesn't it doesn't replace the need for for fiber in a city, the sheer density of the number of people in place like New York City, or even a much smaller city means that it's far more economical to run fiber to each to each household, who then could have the ability to have much higher access speeds than you could ever get from from satellite and has to do with the kind of physics of light versus radio waves, what you can get what you would have glass fiber can carry versus bandwidth versus spectrum that has to be shared with all that with all the users between here and the satellite. So there's some sort of physics reasons behind a lot of that. But it is it's great that that innovation is happening things like you know that the new iPhone can send distress messages over satellite, if you're, you know, hiking in the middle of nowhere and you get lost, you can contact emergency responders through your phone, even if there's no signal. Those types of things are adding new connectivity options. But again, they're not they're not solving the problem, the kind of core problem on their own.

Will Jarvis 23:46

Make sense? Make sense? Going off of that. This is related. It's all what timelines, do you think we'll see autonomous vehicles make up the majority of vehicles on the road? You know, connectivity is an issue with making this happen. But but you know, is it 10 years away? Is it 20 years away? What's your sense of that?

Unknown Speaker 24:05

Yeah, I mean, the the kind of stock answer I'm tempted to give is 10 years away, but 10 years away is always been how far like if I can think back, you know, at least at least 1015 years that it was 10 years away. And I think we're learning different things, right, we're learning that that there's a difference between autonomous vehicles that can operate in 99% of situations and autonomous vehicles that can replace a human it's quite different because they're just the levels of reliability that we truly need to be able to say go to sleep in a car or to not you know, not have your hands on the wheel or to be able to go in the in an icy road at you know, with with fog. In an unpaved road. There's so many situations that humans can kind of intuitively deal with try and understand if it's safe to keep keep moving. That a even the best AV systems now without without a bunch of support in terms of a variety of sensors, mapping and things like that are going to run into ran into problems. So I think it's, in some sense, the full like full adoption, where most of the cars that we see on the road, that their abs I think is still is still a ways away at its heart, I hesitate to put a specific number on it. But I think that that little bit misses a bigger point, which is that autonomy is happening now. But it's happening in particular use cases. So I don't I don't think about autonomy as when is every is every car going to be naughty and not have a driver in it? But more when can we? When can we get the benefits of it to a at scale. And so I think things like cargo, I think shuttles I think domino freight and sort of deliveries, there are a number of applications where the where there's either a more defined unlimited set of places that the vehicle needs to be able to go or conditions or routes that could enable that to happen in the next few years. You know, of course, there are there are a number of campus scale autonomous shuttles, like ride share type programs, things like that, that are already that are already happening at scale. But I do think that some of some of the innovation is really going to be the the evolution of infrastructure along with the vehicles themselves. And that's actually one of the one of the things that that my company has been doing through our platform, Kevin, who is really thinking is really thinking about what intelligence is needed to in in the infrastructure to be able to accelerate that transition. So right now, if there were a laneway on a highway, it's the same way that you think about a carpool lane or high occupancy lane, that was optimized for autonomous vehicles, there are a number of vehicle systems that are either in in development or commercially available, that could that could operate with that with your hands off and your eyes off the off the road, because the road itself would be able to communicate that it was safe for the vehicle to have to proceed autonomously. So it's things like making sure that you have connectivity, you know, low latency, high bandwidth connectivity available everywhere. sensors to understand if there's obstructions, things like that. So then we're gonna see a lot of innovation on the infrastructure side, that is going to enable more specialized applications that will still be very, very big from thinking about what is what is the future public transportation look like? What is the way they are goods moves or supply chain type improvements. Autonomy is really should be, should be seen as not a single product, but a an approach. And I think over time, we'll realize that the same way that you think about like robotics and technology more and more broadly, that it's, it's less one vertical, and really a whole range of different of different problems that are being that are being solved by by a whole set of different technologies.

Will Jarvis 27:43

That's really cool. And so can you talk a little bit more about cat? Is it Kevin? Yes. Very cool. Very cool. And just FYI, I know you guys are working on effort in Michigan. I was just up in Detroit recently. So I'd love to hear more about that, like how that's progressing and what the plan is there.

Unknown Speaker 27:57

Yeah. So the plan, the plan in Michigan is to do a first of its kind, connected autonomous vehicle, or calve laneway, from Ann Arbor to Detroit. So essentially, it'd be a 40 mile stretch of the highway, that kind of as, as I was alluding to, would have the infrastructure needed to be sort of an earlier adopter of and providing sort of a better experience for autonomous vehicles. And that's a that's a partnership between K Ave and the state of Michigan. It's something that was announced a year or so ago. And it's been kind of progressing through all of the sort of the the development phase now. And the idea is that the in the future that as roads, as roads evolve, that being ready for autonomy, and having the that technology, it will be kind of a core piece of roads, if you think about how roads were built in the past they they've evolved a bit in terms of from everything about from dirt roads to our current interstate system. But they were they haven't really evolved is on the on the on the technology side and digitally. And we think that this is a really exciting time for that where innovations in 5g innovations in digital twins and simulation, things like that can be combined to add add new functionality to roads that can enable better, better use of them from a variety of a variety of different applications.

Will Jarvis 29:19

That's really cool. It's really cool. So it almost sounds like a vision where you've got a I like to think autonomy as a weird problem that a wind problem, it's like, you'd like you said humans are actually surprisingly reliable at some level, and that we can deal with all these different kinds of edge cases in different problems that pop up when we're doing something complicated like driving. But computers are less good at these edge cases. So if you can remove a lot of obstacles, a lot of edge cases, you could actually bring autonomy to bear faster and in a variety of situations. And that sounds like what you guys are working on with cabinet. Just really cool. Thanks. Absolutely. Going off of this I want to talk about public transit a little bit. A lot of people especially on you know, urbanist Twitter complain a lot about our lack of public transit in the US. And I like public transit, I would like more public transit. But I often wonder if the problem with America is that we're just kind of too spread apart, you know, with with low population density just makes it uneconomical to build a lot of public transit. You work in policy, and you're quite familiar with infrastructure? What's the deal with public transit in the US? Is it just kind of uneconomical to build? Or is there something else going on?

Unknown Speaker 30:30

Yeah, I think the answer is really both there are there are challenges that have to do with our density and our population pattern. So you have some some places that are dense, you also have commuting patterns that evolve you have the sort of the growth of suburbs and excerpts and people traveling long distances to, to their, between their home and their workplace. But I think what's important to remember too, is that the dat is not purely a function of geography, yes, we're a big country. But it's really policy choices that drove a lot of that, right. So the creation of the Interstate Highway System was it was a policy choice and a public sector led investment, for example. So I do think that there, it's fun, it's a bigger challenge to have everyone in the USB connected by public transportation that it would be in a, in a in a small country. So of course, you know, a place like Singapore has a has advantage in terms of it's a much more compact country or the whole country is essentially is essentially one city, it's fundamentally easier to deliver a comprehensive system, whether we're talking about transportation, or broadband, or energy or anything, and over a smaller area. But I don't think that that lets us off the hook completely. We have we have the ability to through policy, but also through technology and innovation, to rethink some of those patterns. The most, I think the most obvious of which to some degree is the the change in commuting patterns. So public transportation is in many cases used as a way for people to go from their home to their to their office, the reduction in commuting and a lot of places is, it's certainly been a double edged sword, it means that a lot of people don't have to spend as much time on public transportation or driving, because they're able to work from home at least a few days a week. Of course, it's not an option for all jobs. But it also the sort of that one of the downsides or challenges that is that public transit systems across the country have been struggling with reduced ridership, and that that having having less money coming in at the farebox means that they have to make up for that and other in other areas, whether it's increased government support, or in many cases cutting service. And the the challenge that I see with this is if you if you reduce service and say for example, trains go from it running every every 10 minutes to every 30 minutes, because of fewer people on the train, what ends up happening is that fewer people ride the train because no one wants to get to the get to the station and realize they just missed the train and have to wait half an hour. So then it's a little bit of a vicious cycle there. So that's, that's an example where there are there are policy drivers that are within within our control collectively as a country to think about, you know, how do we how do we prioritize what service should be available, where things should be subsidized, where they should not be subsidized. And technology is, I think, just one one lever among many of delivering, delivering new options. New technology, I think has the has the possibility to augment public transportation, if you think about autonomous shuttles that are able to bring people who are who don't live where the rail was, was built, and it's it's too expensive to extend in the rail. You can imagine a shuttle that brings people to public transportation. That's one possible outcome. Another possible outcome is that everyone has their own personal shuttle and traffic gets worse, because everyone is autonomously being brought everywhere. And the difference between those is not really about technology. It's about it's about policy. And that's what's exciting, but also really challenging about this as you think about what is the impact of a given technology going to be? It's a pretty complex interplay between policy, technology, business, politics, all of these things that ultimately, it's ultimately hard to predict, right. So it's, if you think about the before Uber launched, it was hard to really imagine how much of an impact it would have to go from yellow cabs in some cities to almost anywhere you you arrive, you pull out your phone and go from point A to point B, in a lot of places that increased increased access for people who don't have a car for whatever reason, it may or may have reduced ownership in some in some places. But otherwise, it increased traffic because there's more more cars on the road. So I think it's not it's not always apparent what a given technology is going to do. And that's why it's critical that there's the policymakers and the technologists and the investors and everyone in this in the sector, are are talking and are sharing data and perspectives and things like that. Because the one thing that's that is predictable is that the whatever people think technology is going to be impacted. technology's going to have, they're going to be off in some degree or other whether it's about how long it takes to happen or whether it's who are the first adopters whether it's how fast it skills with liquid it replaces all those things are really hard to predict even if you know the technology itself is going to work.

Will Jarvis 34:59

That's great. That's Great. David, I've got one bad last big question for you here. And it is if you had to pick one gap that America has in infrastructure, what is that biggest gap? And what would you do to try and fix it? If you you know, if you can talk to policymakers and private industry and tech, get everybody aligned, like what is that biggest gap?

Unknown Speaker 35:20

I think what's one area of interest, which we haven't really spoken much about that I that I do think is at the center of a lot of this is, is energy, because our energy system is going through a tremendous amount of stress of transition. If you think about everything from the global supply of natural gas, the disruption, the depression was caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, things like that have made energy prices, of course, a sort of a very important driver of everything from inflation to concerns about Europe being you know, too cold this winter, without durability to heat themselves, sort of shows that these things that we take for granted, can very quickly go from being something that is manageable to something that is, is in some cases, life threatening, or if people are not able to actually have the energy that needed to keep them keep them safe. But you know, at the same time, we have a big technological change happening, particularly around the shift from fossil fuels to electricity, particularly renewable electricity, those are very different things. The going, for example, if we if we change every gas powered vehicle in the country to an electric vehicle, there'd be some great impacts in terms of of emissions from the tailpipe, but we have to figure out how to get that, that get that electricity, how to deliver it, how to charge it, that's a ton of new infrastructure that's needed. And there's a lot of policy choices that are needed that will will affect where it's where the where that generation is built, how its distributed, how you keep the grid in balance, when you have people charging vehicles that when they get home from work at the same time that the sun is going down and things like that. It's I think it's also a tremendous opportunity for for innovation and for making, making the making the grid more resilient by by embracing the kind of dynamism that digital technology enables. So it's goes from being a pretty much a static system where the energy flows in one direction from the central power station to your home. And you are kind of a passive consumer of electricity, to something that's much more dynamic, where people may have a battery, say like a power wall at home, they may have a f150 lightning that they that they plug into their house, they have all kinds of things that are both users of but also either storage of or generation of electrons, that that is a tremendous transformation of one of the oldest most complex machines in the world, the power grid is is is mind boggling when you think about how much we how much we depend on it and how little most people see of it. And think of it and the fact that unlike basically any other commodity, it's it's an instantaneous commodity that can't be just kept in a tank, the way that you know the way that everything from from oil to corn and all other kinds of commodities that we rely on. So that that balance of supply and demand is is critical to get it right as the system as the system evolves, is there's a lot of an element of rebuilding the plane as it's in flight. That's that has to happen here where we can't, we can't turn off the system while we fix it right? This all had everything has to work and has to work 100% of the time or as close to close to that as possible, even as we face storms and disruptions and heat waves. And you know, the kind of near misses in California over the past over past month or so, I think are both a warning of how critical the problem is. But also, you know, I find a little I find a bit of optimism in that in things like the fact that when the California grid was nearing a point where there would be rolling blackouts, people voluntarily cut back their energy consumption. And you could look at it on a graph and see how quickly people responded and turned off things that they didn't need. And that actually prevented prevented things from things from from being much worse. We certainly believe that technology can make that much more of an automated process that people benefit from in participating. So we one of the one of the companies we've invested in ohmconnect is working with about 200,000 households in California, connected to their smart thermostats and being able to incentivize people for their when they're when they're able to, to choose to adjust their temperature or to turn off certain devices that they're not using. And that that I think kind of shifts the nature of what is a power plant, you know, because we think of virtual power plant is really a collection of individuals who have devices, they may have energy storage, they may have electric vehicles, and that kind of orchestration of what's being used and when and where enables a whole level of flexibility to this into one of the again one of the oldest most complex things that humans have created. And in terms of the power grid.

Will Jarvis 39:41

That's great. That's great. I I'm curious, you know, you work in policy, and I'm a big nuclear advocate and supposed to be this, this, the next kind of level of energy production for the world was gonna be nuclear power. We've kind of regulated ourselves out of building new plants at this point. Do we Do you have any hope that we will be able to kind of to build new nuclear plants again and kind of get around this kind of roadblock we've put there for ourselves because of, you know, some scary things that happen, you know, the last century, which were not as bad as they're kind of depicted in, like, you know, media portrayals and things like that, you know, Chernobyl was not as bad as you know, these dramatized television series we saw Long story short, we miss out on a lot of clean, cheap energy, because we were unwilling to build nuclear plants. Do you have any hope for the future there? Are you bullish on nuclear?

Unknown Speaker 40:32

It's tricky, because there's a lot of still a lot of fear around around nuclear. And some of it is sort of, as you described, that it's when things have gone wrong, it's been very dramatic. And it's been things that it's hard for people to wrap their head around the true risk and all of that the technology, of course, has evolved a lot since since the days of the last reactor constructions at scale. I do think it's, I do think there's, there's a high likelihood that there's innovation that ends up that ends up making a significant difference there. I don't know which countries are really gonna be the first to embrace it. I think that's something that's shifting a lot and in part due to the energy versus energy crises that I referenced. So there's been you know, prior to this year, a lot of decommissioning of older nuclear reactors in Western Europe and Japan and the US, kind of around around the world. That has not been has not been replaced by any new nuclear, of course, I think that if if we get to a point where it is clear that the the economics, the economics and the environmental impact, are going to make it an imperative to develop nuclear, I do think that there's I think people will be willing to revisit to revisit this. The challenges though, in the way I'm reason I'm still a little bit hesitant is that you asked about nimbyism, and to people's concerns about you know, even even something relatively straightforward being being built in a neighborhood that's changed. I think that will be a really powerful obstacle. So I don't know I, on the one hand, from a sort of a, an optimism in terms of technology that the technical problems will be will be solved. But I don't know exactly when and how people will embrace it in terms of saying in my, in my neighborhood, I mean, to me not even a neighbor in my city, I would be comfortable with the construction of even even small modular reactors that may have a much better safety profile. But it's there's something almost have a visceral reaction or fear to nuclear beings, particularly located near where people are. So I just think that made that may keep the market size a little bit a little bit smaller than it would otherwise be in terms of citing. But again, it's it's hard, it's hard to predict, particularly given the scale of the need globally. And so I do think some countries are going to embrace it faster. And maybe the early movers will show that it is that it is safe and can cause a bit of a renaissance. But But I think I think time will tell

Will Jarvis 42:54

that sounds great. I Oh, look, here's how I here's how I that that we're able to convince people and and do the positive PR because it is it would be such a boon for for all of us. David, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find you? Where should we send them?

Unknown Speaker 43:10

Yeah, so I'm pretty easy to find online. I'm either David Guilford or D Guilford on most most channels. So relatively easy to find there. You can learn more about our about about the company at sidewalk infer.com. But yeah, happy to, you know, people can find more information there and feel free to get in touch.

Will Jarvis 43:31

Awesome. Awesome. Thanks, David. Appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker 43:34

All right. Well, it was really a pleasure speaking with you and join the conversation.

William Jarvis 43:42

Special thanks to our sponsor, Bismarck analysis for the support. Bismarck analysis creates the Bismarck brief, a newsletter about intelligence great analysis of key industries, organizations, and live players. You can subscribe to Bismarck free and brief dot Bismarck analysis.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives. Special thanks to Donovan Dorrance, our audio editor. You can check out documents work and music at Donovan dorrance.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In this episode, we're joined by Jeremiah Johnson, the creator of the Neoliberal movement. William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways it is worse in the past, where it's a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.

Will Jarvis 0:37

Jeremiah, how are you doing this evening?

Unknown Speaker 0:40

I'm doing really well. Well, thanks for having me on.

Will Jarvis 0:43

Absolutely. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. Jeremiah Deepak giving us a brief bio and some of the big ideas you're interested in?

Unknown Speaker 0:51

Sure, so my name is Jeremiah Johnson. I founded the neoliberal project in 2017, or 2018, depending on how exact you want to be. The neoliberal project is a kind of center left globalist Think Tank organizing group at this point, we do social media, we have pretty large social media outreach through a lot of different channels on Twitter, and Reddit and live streams and podcasts and Instagram and all kinds of other stuff. We also have more than 80 chapters around the country in the world. I think at this point, it's hard to at this point, it's hard to remember how many chapters we have, because there's so many, I think, more than 60 in the United States and something like 20 internationally. And we advocate for what we call neoliberalism or new liberalism, which is kind of a globalist free trade is good immigration is good perspective on politics, we are capitalists who also support the welfare state. So I am very interested in politics, obviously, from this kind of market friendly center left perspective, I am also very interested in the dynamics of how you build a movement through social media, and how you appeal to the kind of the mass audience and how you make your case to the the arena of public discourse, so to speak. I'm also very interested in just other niche topics, like, you know, there's particular policy areas that I'll get down in a rabbit hole on whether that's permitting reform or zoning. I'm very interested in Effective Altruism, I'm kind of adjacent to that world. I've, I guess I kind of consider myself an effective altruist in that I've donated a kidney I've raised a third of a million dollars for against malaria Foundation. And I know a lot of people who who've run in the effective altruists circles. And so I there was a time when I was I've always kind of said, you know, I'm near the effective altruists world, but I'm not part of it. I think I'm increasingly becoming part of it now. But that's, that's just a quick background on me. Obviously, there's a lot more depth we can get into.

Will Jarvis 3:10

That's great. That's great. Well, Jeremiah, what I find super interesting about you, and I think perhaps is your superpower is you've been really effective at building this movement like this, this meme is like, become incredibly powerful over the last couple of years. What do you attribute your success to? You know, did you like? Did you have a plan when you got first started that this is like, Okay, I'm gonna get here. And this is how I'm gonna get there. And I've got this like, kind of robust plan, or does it just kind of emergent, like, you know, you start doing something. So it's getting some momentum, and it kind of feeds on itself, and you kind of kind of happen is into success? How intentional were you?

Unknown Speaker 3:45

Well, it wasn't very intentional at all. That's great. I would love to say that, you know, this is all all the success is due down to my personal brilliance. And, and it's only because I'm a genius that this has succeeded first. I don't think that's necessarily true. But I think the first thing is just that there was a market, there was a space for this idea that people wanted something like this in terms of the the new neoliberalism, I'll call it. And I should note, we've actually just changed our name. We've, we're now instead of being the neoliberal project, in most of the arenas that we're using now, we now call ourselves the Center for new liberalism. New liberal versus neoliberal is literally a one letter change. So do what that what you will, but I think the ideas were strong, and there was a space for this. And the story is really interesting, because it very much was not intentional. Where this started was on some social media spaces, particularly Reddit. Were in the 2016 election, everything became about politics and you know, you had Hillary versus Bernie was a big thing, almost even bigger than Hillary versus Trump in social media. faces because Hillary versus Trump was, you know, in the online world of Twitter and Reddit discourse just kind of considered to be obvious. Well, yeah, obviously Trump is a lunatic and crazy and awful. But Hillary versus Bernie was this bitter tribal war, you know, between groups of people that very much didn't like each other. And particularly in many spaces on the internet. If you were a fan of Hillary Clinton, rather than Bernie Sanders, you were accused of being a corporate bootlicker or a neoliberal shill of some kind. And a bunch of us who were fans of Hillary Clinton who thought Hillary Clinton was great and better than Bernie Sanders. We basically took that insult that was being hurled at us, you're a bunch of filthy neoliberals, and we just said, Okay, well, you know, if being kind of a Clintonite Democrat is being a neoliberal, then that's what we are fine. And we started a space called our neoliberal, the neoliberal subreddit. And initially, it was just kind of a joke like, Haha, here's a place where we can all make jokes about weird things that we like it was it was a very economics heavy crowd at the beginning. And so you'd see a lot of like central banker memes about how Ben Bernanke is God, Ben Bernanke with laser eyes kind of things. You know, Janet Yellen was the patron saint. And so there's just all this very, very nerdy stuff going on. And to our surprise, it grew really quickly, it had no intention at the beginning, other than to be a fun place where we would make like memes and like, like minded people could congregate. But it grew really, really quickly. And eventually, you know, some of us were like, wow, this is getting really big, really fast. Let's make a Twitter account. We made a Twitter account. And all of a sudden, that got really big really quickly, that started to get lots of followers and, and like, important, people started following it. And that was a very odd feeling, the first couple of times that happened. And then, of course, what every dude has to do when they get attention on the internet, we started a podcast. So it's the thing to do. And then the podcast started getting a lot of really cool guests. And it got a lot of attention. And eventually, we just realized we were so good at getting attention on the internet, which is a skill. I do think that myself and some of my co founders have, that we were kind of kick starting this movement without having intended to like, people were identifying with the things that we talked about to a very serious degree. And so we realized that we need to make this an actual organization. And that is how the neoliberal project came into being.

Will Jarvis 7:30

That's really cool. That's really cool. Oh, why do you think this this $20 bill on the sidewalk, hadn't been picked up before it? Was it kind of this intersection of neoliberal policies, and the internet really had not been done before? Do you think that's what it is? That was kind of like, the reason why you were able to get like so much momentum so fast?

Unknown Speaker 7:52

I think it was one of the first times that there was a clear contrast. So 2016 is the first time that socialism kind of became an acceptable option in the Democratic Party, gotcha. Socialism in American politics has been a slur for a very long time, right? It's only a word that you use to describe your enemies. And you know, it's just an attack, nobody would self admit to being socialist. And Bernie Sanders didn't change that in 2016, he was a Democratic socialist. And he, you know, had a very strong showing in the 2016 primary, even though he did lose by a significant amount, but I don't think anybody would have ever guessed that, like a socialist candidate would get 40% of the vote in a major party primary. And so because there was now this contrast, it opened up the space for someone else to say, Well, if you guys are that, then I'm this. And, you know, before that, nobody would have done this in like, 1996 because Bill Clinton being Bill Clinton, neoliberalism was kind of the the water that you are swimming in, right, our brand of neoliberalism is very much that kind of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, kind of 90s Third Way vibe. We throw in a couple of different things in there with with obviously, kind of how pro immigration we are. But I think that's one of the keys is that the Democratic Party really finally split into an identifiable two wings, where, you know, there's been that tension for a long time between the more left leaning part of the party and the more centrist part. But we were able to jump into that space quickly and say, you know, there's an actual ideology opposing, like socialism in the Democratic Party. If you're not a socialist, you don't just have to be this wishy washy, centrist. It's like, well, I want 30% of what Bernie Sanders wants, because his ideas are good, but they just go too far. Nobody believes in that. Nobody everybody can tell that's kind of a fake, lame thing to do. You need an actual coherent set of principles. That's different from that. And I think that's what we provided.

Will Jarvis 9:53

That's great. That's great. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like the neoliberal project at sambal is the core technocratic. The Democratic Party at some sets, Is that Is that a fair like, painting there?

Unknown Speaker 10:07

Yeah, I mean, I think we lean very technocratic at our core. I think a lot of this stems from where we began, if you want to get into the deep lore, the the original users of like this neoliberal subreddit, were from the bad economics subreddit, we are technically a splinter of that. Bad economics was a subreddit where a bunch of economics students and graduate students and PhDs would go to make fun of terrible economics they found on the internet. And so it's very, very wonky. It loves to get into the policy details and to take down stupid commenters who say stupid things about the economy. And we still have a lot of that in our DNA that were very policy focused, we view ourselves as very wonky, very evidence based that's it's kind of a considered a lame thing to say these days. But I do think it's true, we try to follow the evidence where it's where it leads. So I think of us as the technocratic wing of the Democratic Party, we want to make people's lives better, we try to implement the policies that do that, you know, and we're very driven by outcome rather than by ideology. In essence, we are ideological, we have ideological beliefs. But in a lot of ways we're willing to compromise between like, is that, should we use a state solution? Should this be a government program? Should we use a free market solution? Does the government need to get out of the way? Well, sometimes it's going to be one, sometimes it's going to be the other. Let's look at what the evidence says that, you know, the government is a tool, it can be used to do good things, or it can be used to beat you over the head, much, much like a hammer. So you've got to look at the particulars of the case. And I think that's our attitude.

Will Jarvis 11:48

That's great. That's great. I am curious, how do you think about the difference between, like, there's this tension in my mind between good policy and then like, politics is like vibes? You know what I mean, like very much, it seems like, a lot of politics is five. And you've, you've kind of hack the two a little bit, right? Like, you've been able to get some charismatic power behind, like good policy, which is really cool. But do you think that that scales up to the national level? Is it possible to get like really good policy that still has good vibes, you know, it will good vibes in the sense that something you can really sell at some level?

Unknown Speaker 12:22

I totally agree. There's an inherent conflict, I think sometimes between the policies that you want and the politics that you have to pay attention to. With that said, I think there are a few hacks that you can use. One of my theories is that and this is potentially similar to vibes. But I like to say that all politics is identity politics, interesting. Now, in America, identity politics has this connotation like this. If you're black, then you care about like Black Lives Matter and police brutality, because it's your black, that's what you care about. If you're a woman, you care about abortion and birth control, because you're a woman, right, and it's like, it's almost a little condescending to say identity politics, like it's dismissive in a way. But I tend to think all politics is based around identities. And, you know, there's the obvious cases that I just listed, but there's the things that you know, like, watch a Donald Trump rally in like white, rural America, and tell me that's not identity politics, what he's doing, they're appealing to a specific identity group, and telling them that they're important and that their issues matter. You know, a gun owner, you could say gun control is a specific policy. But being a gun owner is now an identity. In America, being a gun person is like a core identity for a lot of people and it informs how they vote. You can go down the list, you know, being a particular religion, being an urban person of color, being a white yuppie, in the finance industry. There's all these things are identities, and I think identities form, how we, how we approach politics, and even specifically ideological commitments that people have, you know, people think of ideology versus identity is two different things. But I think ideologies have become identities. And so you know, it's, it's why you see Magga as such a branded thing, you know, what is an identity have it has particular symbols that represent it, the Red Hat, you know, the waving the American flag, the pickup truck, all of these things are coded in American politics. And you know, you can think about the the Twitter socialists all of them have a red rose emoji in their bio and you know, again, they have kind of holy texts in the same way that like a religion would. They have their holy texts they have their Savior figure they have that the loved in group and the hated out group, they have the internal language and, and structure and jokes that only they get. Every bit of this ideology is formed as an identity in the same way that any ethnicity or religion would be. And I think it really informs how people approach politics. And so when we looked at how do we make weird technocratic neoliberalism? Cool? Our answer was we have to make it an identity. We don't need people to believe the specific things we believe, as much as we need people to identify as Neo liberals. And so that's why you have now globe emoji, Twitter, and you have the neoliberal subreddit where they've got all these in jokes flying around, and you've got our quasi religious figures, and you've got the outgroup that we love to dunk on. And you know, that people are inherently tribal. And they want a tribe to belong to, they want a tribe to war against, and you've got to give them that in the political arena, if you're going to have any success, this is kind of how movements are built. And I think that's one of the things that explains a lot of our success is that we kind of embraced this vision of like, let's make neoliberal an identity that people will identify as, and that will give us power that will give the movement actual staying power and, and produce actual change.

Will Jarvis 16:06

I love that I really like this and I love to contrast this with I'd love to with you know, this whole idea of like the Unity party or something like that, or like we're gonna like, you know, create this like third way, but there's not really an outgroup and Ryan dreamings forward party for a party, whatever the whatever is going on there. I just like seems to like gloss over politics of the political in a way, which just makes no sense.

Unknown Speaker 16:27

Andrew Yang is the most I want to point out I am the internet's like, number one Andrew Yang hater at this point. I was the first when Andrew Yang was running for president like 2015, maybe or maybe early 2016. Back when everybody was still writing the obligatory introductory Andrew Yang think they think of these Vox in the Atlantic in the New York Times. And you know, both right leaning things and left leaning things everybody was giving Andrew Yang, you know, this Whoa, what a crazy interesting thinker. He's, he's the guy to watch out for. And I was looking at his actual policies and saying, Andrew Yang is kind of dumb, like I was whispering it at first and saying, if you read his actual policies, he seems like he kind of might be dumb. And so I wrote about, I wrote about this way back in the day, and I just want credit for that. But at this point, you know, he's, he's a grifter. He failed in the Democratic primary as president. He failed in the New York City Mayor's race. And he basically decided, well, am I wrong for losing my elections? No, it's the Democratic party who's wrong? So I'm going to start my own. The forward party literally has no platform of any kind has no ideology, other than like, big two parties bad give Andrew Yang money, good. That's literally the sales, but you can go to their website, and like, what is the former party think about abortion? It's an important issue these days. Right? It's maybe the most important issue in American politics at the moment. They don't have a stance, their stances? Well, we need to change how we vote, and then we'll have like a Citizens Council. Right. You know, what, what, what should we do with the federal budget? How do we control inflation, which we do with immigrants? Should we legalize dreamers? What should we add more tariffs or be more fruit pro free trade, they literally have no policies, they just don't address it. What they do address is they say we need to change the voting system. And then after that, like kind of magically, magically, some things will happen and like good outcomes will fall out. And I don't know it's just nonsense. And there's no theory of change behind it other than anything that gets Andrew Yang. Attention is good. There's my Yang rant. I know it's not probably the the center of what's going on in this podcast, but

Will Jarvis 18:41

to the Yang staffers who listen, I'm very sorry for that. Yes, it is. It is interesting. I was talking to Marshall of the realignment recently, I interviewed him, he's a good friend of mine. And he made this great point that in politics, at some point, you do have to make a call, like you have to be pro abortion or anti abortion, you really can't be both. You can't be like wishy washy, and I think you guys have done a good job of like, okay, like, you do have to make these tough calls. At some point, you can't just be like, sweep all these things under the rug, we're just going to all be friendly, because at some level politics is, you know, there's gonna be some winner and loser in some of these debates.

Unknown Speaker 19:20

Yeah. Well, and to get back to your point about policy and politics and how they conflict. I think that mostly you just need to be smart about how you play certain things. One of the most intelligent people I've seen on this is a woman named Ashley all and Ashley all was the communications director and kind of the main strategist for the Kansas abortion referendum. So Kansas, obviously a very red state hasn't elected a Democrat to be like in Congress for a jillion years. I don't know he's probably one Democrat from Kansas because it's that sometimes it's how it goes. But no, just it's Very, very, very red state trumpet, Trump always wins it, Republicans always win it. And in this conservative state of thanks to some court ruling, it turned out that abortion was legal at the state level after Roe v. Wade was overturned. So immediately the Republicans in Kansas said, Okay, let's have an abortion referendum, let's put it directly to the voters should abortion be illegal or not. And again, you'd expect that this would go a landslide victory for for the, you know, ban abortion side for the pro life side. But they ran a very, very smart campaign in Kansas, trying to play up specific things that they thought would resonate with conservative voters. Because if you want to win in Kansas, you have to hit moderate and even some conservative voters, you can't win in Kansas appealing to liberal or progressive sensibilities, right. And what they did, which would never fly in New York, or California, was not bring out people to talk about a woman's right to abortion, or about how this is such a progressive cause that would, you know, help women and minorities and you know, LGBT people or whatever. What they did was they brought out a bunch of people to say, don't let the state government of Kansas get between you and your doctor. Yep, you know, don't let the government interfere with your medical decisions. They're private. It's a very conservative framing of the right to privacy, which kind of undergirds why a lot of liberals and progressives thinks that there should be a constitutional right to abortion, but you can make that from a conservative stance, don't let the government interfere with your right to a private conversation with you and your doctor, and they're getting in your medical care. And they would do things like bring out a white straight man, a Christian pastor to talk about why he thought abortion should be illegal, right. And again, this would never fly in New York, you could never do that in California. But you know, there's a way to actually make kind of a policy position that may go against the grain political now are you might piss off some of your allies in that people in New York, if you put like a white, straight Christian pastor, man, as like your lead spokeswoman for women's issue, there would be hell to pay. But politically, it can be very useful in some instances. So I think you know, the conflict exists. But if you're smart, you can actually kind of thread that needle and message things in a way that meet voters where they are, so to speak. Right, Jeremiah?

Will Jarvis 22:31

I'm curious, I really like that kind of approach. And it just it's been weird to me that it almost seems like a lot of people that are activists that wants to change things would be quite unwilling to take that kind of approach. At this point. Is that your sense? Well, because it seems like you know, a lot of them would be like, no, like, we're not gonna go with the conservative messaging. We're gonna go in there. We're gonna like, you know, it's like they'd rather like signal that we're part of, you know, this kind of center left coalition than actually like have abortion big legal in Kansas. is am I like off the mark there?

Unknown Speaker 23:05

Oh, no, you're totally on the mark. Did you see the kids who threw like tomato soup on like a famous water flowers or sunflowers? Yeah, yeah. So that's the current thing. It was the current thing, like two days ago, when we were recording this, you know, now, when this when, when this podcast releases, maybe it'll be like, old and ancient. But it's a great example of that, where, you know, there are those kids, you know, and their teens. So like, I don't know that I want to criticize them too much, because it's never dunking on teenagers is like the lowest form of like internet commentary. But it's worth looking at, because we can see very instructively like those kids are not doing anything to actually help climate change, which was their supposed cause they want to stop big oil. You know, they had shirts that were like, stop big oil. It's more like, you know, stop big oil on canvas is what they were really after. And there's, there's a lot of really constructive climate action being done. It is not going to be done by you know, throwing tomato soup on things. But there's almost this push and pull. Where, you know, the people who do very quiet, very effective stuff, don't get media attention. The people who do very loud stuff, do get media attention. You don't see the people who are quietly lobbying backbench Republicans to support a climate policy that they might have. Otherwise, you know, not, you know, to just allow it to pass, somebody's going to insert a provision into some defense spending bill that you know, it's like 10 million pages long and it's $100 trillion. And so those things always pass and you convince them to not fight this little provision that's going to one line is actually going to change like a whole industry and and lead to like great stuff in the climate. You never hear about that. What you do hear about is the kids throwing tomato soup because it's viral, right? And sometimes there's a trade off between Do you want to be viral and get attention or do you want to be a effective. And you know, we have entire systems, entire architectures of our society that are built around promoting things that go viral and allowing these things to happen. And so it's no surprise that things fall into that. And that there are some people who would rather be high attention activists, rather than people who actually get things done.

Will Jarvis 25:22

Makes sense. Makes sense. So the current media environment, it plays into a lot of these things now where you could just get more airtime.

Unknown Speaker 25:27

And I've been criticizing the left here, like you could do the same thing for the right like there's, there's people who do dumb stunts on the right, Charlie Kirk, or, you know, some of these nincompoops who are just like, would rather own the LIBS rather than get any kind of substantive conservative policy passed. So right, if you actually got a entire conservative agenda past, some of these people, like Charlie Kirk might actually just wither and die, because how are they going to own the lives in that case? Exactly. You know, their entire business model is finding some purple haired sophomore at like a liberal arts college to like, pretend that that's it pretend that's like the mainstream Democratic Party, but I don't know. Right, right. That's a whole there's bad faith people on both sides. There's idiot activists on both sides. I think. Absolutely. I hate to use the both sides phrase but like, obviously, it's true on some on some level Grifters everywhere

Will Jarvis 26:19

in their own place. Right. That's great. That's great. Well, Jeremiah, I'm curious, do you see the future of the Democratic Party as new liberalism as the neoliberal project? How do you think this develops over the kind of the next decade?

Unknown Speaker 26:35

I do think that it's the future of the Democratic Party. And I certainly hope it is. Because I don't think there's no future for the Democratic Party as a socialist party. It's just not ever going to happen in America. I think there's some danger that the Democratic Party can fall prey to a certain kind of error that we've seen in other countries. You look at like what happened with Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. You know, the, the Labour Party in the UK, had a ton of success with Tony Blair, Tony Blair is the only Labour Prime Minister to actually get elected in a popular election in like the last 50 years or something. It's just him and like, a bunch of conservatives. And they had a bunch of success. But Tony Blair was, you know, on his way out for a variety of reasons. And after some time, the UK went in a very different direction from that third way, kind of neoliberal Blair politics, they went for Jeremy Corbyn. And he was a out and out socialist, even in a way that Bernie Sanders is like, like Jeremy Corbyn says a seize the means nationalize, the industry is kind of like, we are going to be waving the red flag kind of socialist. And it just decimated the Labour Party for quite a long time they lost and lost and lost and lost over and over. And this is a country that is amenable to nationalizing things, in a lot of instances, they've got nationalized health care, their, you know, the train system off and on has been nationalized. And you know, it's a more left leaning country than us, but just that kind of politics was too far and over reaction, and it allowed the Conservative Party, the Tories in the UK, despite a series of kind of bumbling and ineffective and frankly, very weak bad candidates, they were just able to keep winning, because they were going up against Jeremy Corbyn over and over. And I think it led directly to the disaster of Brexit, which has been terrible for the UK. And you know, they're having negative growth over the last few years and things like that. And I think there's a similar error that we could make in America, it's one of our possible paths for the Democratic Party, is that they kind of go all in on Bernie Sanders ism, whether it's through the man himself or through one of his acolytes, that they decide socialism is the future of the Democratic Party, we're going to be a socialist party. I think that would be a disaster, electorally, for obvious reasons that America is just never going to do that. But there's a danger in it happening because we're very ideologically sorted. These days, we're geographically sorted, where Democrats live near other Democrats, you know, people in cities are progressive people in rural areas are conservative. And there's a lot of places where, you know, you can live in a particular place, and 90% of your neighbors will vote like you either red tribe or blue tribe. And you won't ever realize how fringe your views are. And this is particularly a problem for activists and journalists, you know, on the Democratic side, who all live in these hyper progressive bubbles in Brooklyn and San Francisco and things like that. And they don't realize how the rest of the country thinks and how you need to triangulate your messaging. In order to win in other parts of the country. If you actually want to hold power. It's far more important to, you know, to appease Montana voters than it is to appease whatever the latest sensibility is in Brooklyn. I think New liberals Islam is poised to do that, and is smart about that in a way that the left wing of the Democratic party cannot be. I also just think our policies are better. But I think we're better positioned politically, to kind of guard against, you know, the threats I see coming for the right. And look, I, I wish there was a better, right leaning party in America, right now the Republican Party is, in my view, very lost, and needs to do some serious soul searching and kind of purge itself of the stain of Trumpism. And that's just where I am politically, I would love for there to be like a more sane option. But at the moment, I think it's pretty important that we guard against what I see as threats to democracy. And that means that we have to actually be a fairly rational sane party on the left as well.

Will Jarvis 30:50

It makes sense, it makes sense. I'm curious, going off of that one of the core problems I saw, well, just let's just take Hillary Clinton, the United States, I think is a good example. Just for whatever reason, not very charismatic. I think like I think most people would agree with me on that. Please don't come get me. But I think like, and I think that was probably her core problem at the end of the day. How do you go about finding more charismatic politicians who also have like technocratic ability to be good managers and like, because it seems like these things are kind of like, don't usually go together at some level.

Unknown Speaker 31:26

I do think it matters, charisma matters. In a lot of senses, the guy you'd rather get a beer with, has won like 10 presidential elections in a row. And it's funny, because some of them are teetotallers, like, Donald Trump doesn't drink. George Bush when he was running for president didn't drink. But if you'd asked people would you rather get a drink with? Would you rather get a beer with George Bush or Al Gore? They'd probably say George Bush brocco, Obama would probably win that fight over both John McCain and Mitt Romney, Barack Obama was a cool guy. And so just kind of the cooler candidate in a sense, has won a bunch of presidential elections in a row. You know, Trump versus Biden is a is an interesting one. Because by that point, Trump's image had become so polarized, it's hard to ask that question. But but

Will Jarvis 32:10

even Joe Biden is like, fairly fairly charismatic, I think compared to Vice politicians.

Unknown Speaker 32:14

Yeah, I think Biden can be pretty charismatic. But I also think policy matters, you know, I don't think it's just a matter of you have to be charismatic, and then you can kind of do whatever you want. Because Bernie Sanders was also more charismatic than Hillary Clinton, he had a lot more energy, his campaign rallies were wild and Drew 80,000 100 people. And he still lost because he was a socialist, and even running in the Democratic Party in the left part of American politics, you can't win as a socialist. And, you know, in in a lot of ways, the Democratic primary and 2020 was a great example of how much policy matters as well, because Biden was not the most well funded candidate, he actually did pretty poorly during the primary in terms of raising money, all of the money was pouring into Bernie Sanders. And Biden wasn't even second, I don't think there was several others ahead of him. And what the distinguishing feature of the 2020 primary is, is that everybody raced to the left, even the suppose had moderate candidates like Beto or Pete budaj edge, or Amy Klobuchar, even the ones who are kind of carrying that moderate wing, not Bernie, not Elizabeth Warren, those moderates were still well, well, to the left of Obama, how Obama actually governed as president, they were saying, We've got to do way more progressive stuff than that they were going all in on like more spending more progressive stuff, more progressive social policy. Even Biden was to be fair, Biden positioned himself to the left of Obama by a little bit. But Biden was the single most moderate candidate in that discussion. And despite not having a lot of money, he basically ran away with the, you know, the whole thing after South Carolina, the whole thing turned into a laugh, and he won in a dominant fashion. And so, you know, to some degree, obviously, charisma matters, charisma can give you that extra marginal one to two percentage points or something super charismatic candidate versus not. But policy matters as well. And how you position yourself, are you positioning yourself as an extremist who's going to commit to a revolution? are you positioning yourself as a centrist who just wants to not rock the boat? You know, America is great, let's make a few little changes. But we're all good that, you know, that kind of thing matters as well.

Will Jarvis 34:36

Make sense? Like so subcombination to the end of the day that you have to get, you have to get some median voter theorem thing, you've got to get close enough. And then you also need to be charismatic, and that really helps the end of the day. Jeremiah, I'm curious, I want to shift a little bit now and talk about Effective Altruism, something I think we're both fond of. And I want to take an interesting track here. Because you have been quite successful. Well building up the neoliberal project this movement and ice a somewhat at a crossroads is getting a lot of press just last month, you know, Time Magazine, well McCaskill is on the front of it a lot, a lot of big big press hits happening. At the same time, you know, the my Gen Z friends, yeas, becoming cringe at some level, you know, people are afraid to associate with it. And I think it has the movement does have a lot of good ideas around effectiveness, effectiveness of charity, how do we prioritize doing good in the world and how we should you know, these mental frameworks for thinking about things I think are important. And a big shift from where things were, you know, in early 2002 1000s 2010s? How should EA position itself to remain like, quote unquote, cool and charismatic over the next kind of decade? What do you think? What are the failure modes here? And how can we avoid that?

Unknown Speaker 35:52

Yeah. First of all, I just want to say if you have friends who think like EA is cringe, then they are very much in the minority, because most of your friends and most people in this country would say, What the hell is this? Right, somebody's done a poll on this? And depending on how you how you ask the question, you know, it matters how you define, do, you know, air quotes, what what it is, but it's something like two to 6% of people can even recognize the phrase Effective Altruism and have heard of it, like, that's the percentage of people who have heard of Effective Altruism. So by any amount, it's less than 10%. I think the failure mode for Effective Altruism is that it fails to define itself in a coherent way, it fails to become an effective force that is unified, and that can present itself as an identity and the way that I think of identities, I'm going to go back to identity politics here. And if it fails to do that, then somebody else will define you on their terms. If you don't create an identity for yourself, someone else will do it for you. And it will not be flattering it will be to their advantage, your ideological opponents will, you know, make the case of here's what an effective altruist is. And here's why you should not be that. And I think this happens more often than people realize were like, one of the things I like to say is, you know, if you want to change the world, and Effective Altruism wants to change the world. It wants to change the face of human society and the future trajectory of our species. And it wants to do really grand world changing things. It has big ambitions, and I love it for that. But if you want to change the world, at some point, you will have to deal with culture and with politics, you can't change the world without addressing those two things. mass culture and mass public opinion will matter. At some point, if you are trying to change society, politics will matter. And if you just ignore the public opinion, and politics, eventually they will not ignore you, politics will come for you. One of the examples I like to use to kind of illustrate how this happens is the tech world. And obviously, the tech world and EA are kind of intertwined. In some ways. Sometimes it's the same people, a lot of tech people out in the bay area are effective altruists. And that's how EA raises a lot of its money from some of these tech billionaires. And tech for a long time had this attitude of, we don't have to care about politics, we don't have to care about what people think we're going to change the world. And we're just going to do it without asking it was this very, like permissionless innovation, move fast break things. And that was the ethos, we are post politics, we don't have to care about politics. And you know, to their credit, they did they change the world, they went and did it. But what they found out is after you change the world, politics is going to care about you, even if you don't care about politics. And for a long time, the tech world was really astoundingly bad at politics. They didn't know what was going on in DC. They didn't care to know, they didn't know how DC worked, what the real levers of power were. And what you're seeing now, a decade later, now that the world has changed, thanks to Google and Facebook and Apple and all these things. Now Congress is coming for them. The US Congress has bills supported by parts of both major parties that would break up these companies into little smithereens, Google would become 20 separate companies. And it's it's the most substantial antitrust legislation that has been proposed in generations maybe. And I don't think it will pass. But it might. And it's a consequence of tech feeling like they didn't have to care about public opinion. They didn't have to make public appeals. They didn't have to care about politics. And I think there's a failure mode, that EA could go down in the same way where they try to change the world and they even start to succeed. And then they get blasted out of nowhere by some cultural or political force, because they never bothered to interact with that or care about it, right?

Will Jarvis 39:58

No, I think this is the is super smart and going off your tech example. The thing mistake I think I've seen tech make is to primarily support, you know, finance plays both sides of the aisle, you know, they fund Democrats and Republicans, you know, it's 6040, some years, you know, one way or the other. Tech is primarily funded Democrats. And what that means is, is that you have Elizabeth Warren, being like, we need to break up big tech, and you have Clarence Thomas, saying, Hey, we should also break up big tech. It because, you know, Democrats, they know, you're not gonna fund Republicans. And so there's no like armistice there. And my worry for EA is that if it becomes a core, left wing institution only which it is primary left wing, just by demographics, there's this issue where, you know, you can see it now front page of National Review. These people care about the bugs, they don't care about you, your fellow Americans, you know what I mean? And this is like, it's very difficult to come back from that kind of thing.

Unknown Speaker 40:54

Yeah, and I mean, to some level, it's, it's unavoidable, because you can't, like in tech, just the workers just aren't there progressive. Right? Exactly. You know, the you can talk about the billionaires are one thing, but the actual workers at these companies are just super progressive, you can't stop them from being that way. I think the failure with tech is not that so much as it is just basic competency that they literally didn't know how things worked for a long, like, there's an organization I know of called Join Lincoln, which is literally just trying to interface tech people with DC people and like, DC people. Here's how technology works, because Washington has no idea how technology works. Most of the time, congressional offices are staggeringly internet on technical aspects of like science and how the internet works. And in the same way, tech people just had very, like, how do you pass a bill through Congress that, you know, nobody had Facebook could have told you a while back. So I think it's just a matter of competence and caring to some degree. Gotcha. And with EA, it's something I think about a lot that I think EA is pretty bad at politics, they're bad at doing politics, they feel like they should care, maybe a lot of people in our policy focused in EA, it's like one of the one of the hot new things is to go into policy rather than to go into like a specific charitable cause to like work in government or work for a think tank and try to advance policy causes. And I think that's a good idea. We need more of that. But yeah, he needs a theory of how to work in politics, or else all these people's time is just going to be wasted. An EA needs to be better at defining itself on its own terms in the public eye in the public arena, I think he is obviously done a lot of work thinking about EA cause areas and what is effective altruism, and how many angels can dance on the head of a pin kind of discussions where you get into these really weird, esoteric things. But they don't do any of this in the public eye. None of this is taking place in the public forum. They're not out there having the debates. They're very much insular having the debates within their community, and not addressing the public not caring what the public thinks. And like I said, to me, that's a mistake.

Will Jarvis 43:06

I'm curious. Jeremiah, oftentimes, there's, I get the sense that, you know, there are conversations that, you know, not every conversation should be public. You know, if we're trying to, like figure something out some policy thing that, you know, there's some things that are just best, like you and I, if we were trying to craft some legislation, we probably should not just be on the, you know, pages New York Times debating, oh, there are other things that we should definitely be talking about in public. How do you think about balancing that within the eh, because, you know, there's some things like, okay, when we're talking about effectiveness, we need to like calculate, you know, like some cost effectiveness of different interventions. And there's sometimes you need to have difficult conversations with that, which are not like super great to have in public, perhaps, I don't know, am I wrong about that? Or is there something where you just need to be able to have a good PR team have good, like, way to interface the world and make ideas palatable? While also like, you know, me doing things? I don't even know how to say this. But like, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 44:05

yeah. And I think I know what you're, I think I know what you're talking about. And my answer to this is that, you know, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, we can do two things, it is possible to do two separate things. And that that I think this is actually a cultural failure of EA, I don't think it's a policy failure. I think it's a failure of EAs. I think it's a failure of EAs culture and institutions. And the, the signals that the people at the top send, frankly, were the most important thing is how smart and brilliant and thoughtful we all are. And we really want to sniff our own farts about that. And like it's not polite to say to some extent, but like, look, you can have a PR strategy, you can promote EA as a good thing to the wider world while still having technocratic conversations within your tightly knit circles. The fact that you have a tightly knit circle does not preclude you from also doing the other thing like, how do you think every other organization works, you know, if I'm, if I'm the Republican Party, there's an amount of work that I do that's enormous that is behind the scenes, we're actually writing bills behind the scenes, we are, you know, writing the specific legislative texts that deal with code 6.1 dot 1.3, of the CDCs, charter to blah, blah, blah, like, there's an enormous amount of that, and all that takes place out of the public eye. But then you also have an entire messaging wing that's trying to just get people to vote for you. And the same thing with the Democratic Party and every, you know, and not just political organizations, but immigration groups. There's times when the immigration groups make big public appeals. Immigrants are good there. They make America strong, blah, blah, blah. There's also times when they're behind the scenes trying to get particular things fixed, or trying to, you know, argue with themselves, should we use this specific language or this specific language? Should we try to appeal to a conservative sensibility that immigrants are good for business? Should we try to appeal to a progressive sensibility that immigrants are a protected class that needs, you know, special protection in the same way that, you know, people of color or LGBT people, you know, you can use either one of those to promote immigrants? And those discussions definitely take place at pro immigration, think tanks? And, you know, my message is just it's not hard to do both. And it's a failure of EAA, that somehow they think it's almost very widely thought, well, we can't do both. Because if we do one, it precludes us from doing the other or like, the quality of our conversations will like, decline like it. That's a very weird one to me, because I think about like, I would love for EAA principles to filter through the water, even if you don't call it through Effective Altruism call it something else. But there's core principles like the idea that we should expand our scope of concern, our moral circle, right? That we should care about people who are not just ourselves or our immediate family or community, we should care about all people, whether that's people in Africa dying of malaria, whether that's people in the far future. That's an idea that I would love to filter through to the rest of society, whether we call it Effective Altruism or not. And the idea that if like, you get like Sandy in Des Moines, Iowa, who's like a soccer mom with two kids, and she works as a receptionist at the local company, and if you get her to be like donating a few more dollars to like Africa, rather than her local children's theatre, the idea that that's going to like impact, like the quality of the conversations that we have on the EAA forum. That's absurd to me, like, we're not trying to get Sandy onto the EAA forum until like will McCaskill what he has to care about. We're just trying to influence the way Sandy donates her dollars, because the Sandy's of America collectively donate about $500 billion every year. And like, why are we not going after that? There's a few organizations in EA that are still like trying to go after that like normal person. But for the most part EA doesn't most people in EA just don't seem to care about it. Is my impression.

Will Jarvis 48:02

Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. But it is like, there's a huge lever on just like you mentioned, like, you know, evangelicals, I think give us gifts, like something like $200 billion a year. And just moving 10% of that towards more effective charities could really have this huge impact. But we're kind of ignoring.

Unknown Speaker 48:21

Yeah, I mean, it's my favorite line to say, when I talk about EAS that regular people, just America as a whole is a very generous country. It gives half a trillion dollars every year, a lot of money. It's a lot of money, but 1% of that if we can shift to 1% of that, just regular people's money. That's like finding a new SAM Venkman fried, who would donate his entire net wealth every single year in perpetuity, a new San Venkman fried, and to me, that's a big deal. And like, I'm not I think a lot of the focus that we're EAA gets lost in itself sometimes is that it's a very hyper optimized place. It's very elite driven, and it's very hyper optimized. And rather than thinking about, well, how do we make the world better, they think about how we make the world best. And look, I think it's great that there are people having these like weird, esoteric conversation conversations about like, what is technically the best, most single hyper optimized thing that we could possibly do. But I think you lose focus on like, the idea that just there's a lot of money out there that is essentially wasted of that $500 billion. The number one thing that it goes to is religious organizations, your local church, or your local churches charity drive, number two is education. And 75% of that education money goes to four year universities, aka it's it's money donated to the Ivy League, it's a donation to Harvard who already has a $40 billion endowment, you know, that you'll name like a bench, you can give them $10 million. And that's probably what you get as a bench at Harvard. So, you know, I think I'm focusing so much on the hyper optimized cause of like, we're gonna, you know, only attack, we're gonna only recruit from Harvard and Stanford and MIT and Yale, and Cambridge and Oxford, and that's where we're gonna get our people. And you know, we're not just going to try to get convinced them to donate money, we're going to get just a couple of them. But we're going to convince them to donate their entire lives, their entire working lives to like these incredibly hyper optimized causes, where we're counting how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and we only need a couple of funders, we're going to get like two or three funders who provide 80% of all of EAs money is like two or three different billionaires. And it's just, it's this very insular, very elite driven thing that only focuses on a couple things at a time. And I just want to say, like, you can do a lot of good by just shifting the needle, a little bit of mass culture, mass culture is a really big thing. And it's hard to move the needle. But if you can move it even 1% you're actually having just an enormous gargantuan impact over the long run. Absolutely, as

Will Jarvis 51:06

Oh, well. What do you think? What do you think a successful effort to shift that kind of culture of looks like, is it? Yeah, yeah. Just like that mainstream culture, you know, should we be, you know, making a lot of tick tock videos, I mean, what's the best best approach?

Unknown Speaker 51:21

Successful in terms of like, what is the outcome? What is it look like at the end? Once I've succeeded? What strategy or what is your what

Will Jarvis 51:28

strategy should should you take at some level to shift like public opinion?

Unknown Speaker 51:32

So I don't think actually using the branding of Effective Altruism is necessarily the right way to go in terms of well, actually, you know, I'll I'll change that and say, I think because I have an identity driven theory of politics, I think you need to create a group of people. And this already exists to some extent, that identify themselves as effective altruists. And I think that's already happened. But I think it needs to happen in a lot more visible way. There are Effective Altruism, there are people who identify themselves as effective altruists. And if you ask them, they would say I am an effective altruists, like it's part of my core identity. But they're doing it in a in a non public way. Most of the time, they're like EA Twitter doesn't exist there. To a large extent, there's just there is no EA Twitter. There's not really an Effective Altruism subreddit, there's the forum, but that kind of like almost cannibalizes, anything that would go on a subreddit, I think. And so like in the grand social media spaces where America in the world fights its cultural battles, where we're having these discussions about politics and policy and culture and the future. EA is kind of missing from those places. And I think EA needs to be in those places, if it's going to succeed in the long term. So I would love to see a more active EA Twitter where effective altruists actually like put the light bulb emoji on their handle so that they're identifiable you can identify them at a glance the same way you can identify the globes or the red hats or the red roses, you know, as kind of tribal markers. So I think better social media game is part of it. I think better interaction with mainstream media is needed. I think will McCaskill is book was like one of the first good steps towards this that I've ever seen, where, you know, a lot of EA will do publicity, but it's like going on 80,000 hours, which that's inside the circle or insular? No, maybe you'll get crazy and go on Tyler Cowen's podcast. But again, that's that's friendly ground that's still basically inside the circle. Right. Will McCaskill was out going on Trevor Noah, you know, and I think that's fantastic. And, you know, he wasn't, and he, to his credit, I think he did a good job. He wasn't talking about the crazy stuff. He wasn't talking about killer API's or, you know, weird stuff to do with like shrimp welfare or whatever. And like, again, I don't want to, if you work on that stuff, I'm glad we have a lot of people working on very different areas. It's not what we should go forward to the public with, though. He just talked about like, people should donate more of their money to like really effective causes. You know, he donates a lot of his money. He's a cool story. His exist, personal example is great. He talked about very relatable things. And I think that like that appearance, will do more good for the movement than like 100 times going on Tyler Cowen's podcast. And I would love to see you know, more people when we have instances where we can like this going on Good Morning America and the view and like Joe Rogan's podcast and just like very, very mainstream kind of normies stuff, and really, not even saying that you don't have to go on Good Morning America and look out to the all the soccer moms out in, you know, and the oil workers in Texas and all these random people across the country. You don't have to go there and say, All of you should be effective altruists and do exactly what I say. But again, you want these kinds of core ideas, expand your moral circle of concern, do some degree of cost effectiveness, do some degree of just try it try something just a little bit. And like one of the things I do in my personal life is I'm not out here telling my parents, for instance, we're very charitable people that they need to donate all their money even to malaria nets. Even malaria nets is a little weird sometimes. But like, I just say, look, okay, so you care about education, you donate it to your local school, that's great. What about donating to the school in Nicaragua, where, you know, you could educate the, you know, 30 students for a year for like $100, or whatever, just think about how much good you could do for them. And like, kind of meet people where they are and just try to get them to be a little bit better? I think that kind of thing. That kind of public messaging could be enormously influential in the medium to long run.

Will Jarvis 55:46

Yeah. And I think it's a huge lever. And it's something you know, yeah. Should we think about a little bit more? I think it's quite a valuable exercise. Jeremiah, thanks so much for taking time to come on today. What's next for you? What are the next 10 years look like?

Unknown Speaker 56:03

You know, it's it's interesting, because I am still working at the neoliberal project, and still helping run the neoliberal project, I run the neoliberal podcast. So I am also a host of a podcast, and I love having these interesting conversations with all sorts of different people. I'm also kind of thinking about how I can help the Effective Altruism community, because my experience over the last few years has been kind of building a mass movement, doing kind of mass outreach and movement building. I've been thinking about how I might be able to help EAA and some of these things and, you know, some of the things I think, need, you know, better interaction with politics, better interaction on social media, better communication strategy to kind of the mass market. All these things are things I think I'm pretty well positioned to help with. So I would not be surprised if you know, in a year or two, you saw me doing some work in in that area as well. Great, great. Well,

Will Jarvis 57:04

we'll be looking out for it. Jeremiah, where can people find you? Where can they find the podcast?

Unknown Speaker 57:08

The podcast is the neoliberal podcast. You can find it anywhere you get podcasts at any of your fine purveyors of people's voices. You can follow us on Twitter at neoliberal except the OH is a zero. We've been trying to get the original one and we just can't. You can find our website is C in liberalism.org. That's the Center for new liberalism. So see in liberalism.org. And yeah,

Will Jarvis 57:37

that's great. Well, Jeremiah, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it really enjoyed the conversation.

Unknown Speaker 57:41

Thanks for having me.

William Jarvis 57:46

Special thanks to our sponsor, does market analysis for the support. Bismarck analysis creates the Bismarck brief, a newsletter about intelligence grade analysis of key industries, organizations, and live players. You can subscribe to Bismarck breeze and brief dot Bismarck analysis.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives. Special thanks to Donovan Dorrance, our audio editor. You can check out documents work in music at Donovan dorrance.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In this episode, we're joined by Dartmouth student Jeremy Hadfield to talk about x-risks, Nietzsche, Degrowth, and a whole lot more. 

In this episode, we're joined by Stand Together CTO Mark Johnson. We discuss: Mark’s background, the problem with tech transfers from basic research, the cultural differences between Silicon Valley and San Francisco, how can we encourage a bottom up approach to philanthropy, how to manage well, and a whole lot more. 

William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways that is worse in the past towards a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.

Will Jarvis 0:38

Well, Mark, how you doing this afternoon?

Mark Johnson 0:41

I'm doing fantastic. How

Will Jarvis 0:42

are you? Doing? Great. Thanks so much for taking the time to kind of come on the show here. Do you mind giving us a brief bio and some of the big ideas you're interested in?

Mark Johnson 0:50

Sure. So um, I worked as a product manager in search when search used to be cool for everybody, basically, Buck Google. And then I'm a three time CEO, one was an AI newsreader called Zite, sold out to CNN and then sold it to Flipboard. The next one was spent out of Los Alamos focused on satellite imagery, so AI for satellite imagery to understand the planet. And then I ran an ag tech startup, focused on using AI to help farmers. And now I'm CTO at a community of nonprofits in DC. So I've been all over the place. But my real passion is trying to take deep technology and turn it into something useful. So most of the startups I've worked at have either had a lot of scientists in them and or have been spun out of the lab. And that's really my passion areas. How do we take all the incredible work that's being done in labs, and turn it into something that's useful?

Will Jarvis 1:49

That's great. That's great. And you mentioned that, you know, you worked at a startup down there and out of Los Alamos, which, which is interesting. And now you're working in DC. I am curious, it seems like an a libertarian think tank. Nonetheless, if you don't mind me categorizing it, I think that that's safe to say,

Mark Johnson 2:05

Ah, I mean, we're many things I would say that a focus on liberty may be one way to put it. I mean, our core principles here are that we believe in people, but we prefer bottom up solutions to top down solutions, and we'll partner with anyone to do right. I think some people can read Liberty into that. But really, the goal here is to address the root causes of some of America's greatest challenges. So we work on everything from criminal justice reform, to free speech and peace to end to economic progress. And I would say really, you know, the community of nonprofits that exists here exist to try to address those problems from as many angles as possible. So, you know, I'm working here in technology, we have folks focused on community based organizations, other folks focused on policy, but really, sort of it's a broad set of of capabilities that we try to bring to bear on on some pretty tear Aryan tough issues.

Will Jarvis 3:04

Love that. I love that and not trying to come after you at all. But I just want to I want to paint the picture for this question, which is something that's been bothering me for a long time. It is interesting. So you know, you guys are focused on bottom up kind of solutions. You know, you've worked at a startup out of Los Alamos, you know, the Manhattan Project turned into the Department of Energy, which seems to just be quite ineffectual. You know, we can't build a nuclear power plants, like what's going on man? Like, things just do not seem to be working at the federal government level, when it comes to technology? You know, what is your sense of what the heck has gone wrong? Like why they can the federal government not build technology anymore? Like, you know, this is what you're passionate about is, you know, bringing technology and making deep scientific progress, technology, making it useful to everyone. But it seems like the federal government is just not very good at that anymore at all. Like, you know, the best example anyone can come up with now is operation warp speed. There's a question about how like, effective, how fast, you know, how fast that really could have been, but it was a lot slower than like, we would have hoped. And that's kind of the shining example, right now, of state capacity around the technological, you know, frontier for the US government. What do you think's gone wrong? Is my thesis correct, that we're a lot worse than we were in the 40s? And 50s, that building kind of technology from the federal government lens?

Mark Johnson 4:20

Yeah, I mean, well, I would say a few things. One is that let's remind ourselves that we live in the Internet era, right? We went from not having mobile phones to everyone having mobile phones that are connected to all the world's information that are basically connected to processing units in the cloud that are equivalent to the human brain. I mean, a lot has happened just in the past few decades. So let's not forget that. But I think one might first question is what's the proper role of government with respect to deep technology? And sure, the Manhattan Project was a moment in time Bletchley Park, right when we, well when when England figured out how to crack the Enigma code, right, these really important projects, maybe you can even say In the Apollo program in the space race against against the Soviet Union, although that's probably a bigger scratch, those are sort of points in time where we really needed to bring technology to bear for existential threats to society. The reality is, we don't really have that kind of existential threat anymore. So a lot of what the government does is more speculative for the future. And I think the positive side is when the government tries to allocate dollars to deep tech to make society better, I think it's a great thing. I think the the dark side is when something like the NIH basically becomes a monopoly and funding. And we're not getting the healthcare outcomes that we want to see when there's so much regulation in health care markets, and the patient isn't put at the center of care, such that entrepreneurs like me, I am will started, I almost find a technology out of Medical Center in Nebraska while I was there, and the red tape and all the problems that were associated with it caused me to throw up my hands. So you've got a competent entrepreneur that basically when people say they want to go into some sort of healthcare related technology, the first thing I do is steer them away. So I think that like there's a lot of implications, the government's sort of getting involved in deep technology. I mean, maybe the last thing I'll say is that, certainly, like a lot of money comes from the government that goes to universities and national labs, we do an absolutely abysmal job of spinning out technology. So there's a lot of things you can criticize, I think in the science environment. But the one that I'm most focused on because I've done this multiple times is try to spin something out of an organization. So there's this well meaning app called the by goal act way back in the 80s, that was intended to to spur more tech innovation, and tech innovation coming out of these university centers that got government grants. What's happened with that, as you've gotten this massive bureaucracy where these tech transfer centers, they feel like their primary job is to protect IP, rather than get it out to the world? And I think that there's a lot of reform that could potentially happen there to encourage more entrepreneurs to want to work with research labs.

Will Jarvis 7:10

That's great. No, that's really interesting angle we actually haven't talked about on this podcast is, you know, tech transfers from basic research, you know, research labs or universities, university contexts definitely comes to mind. What are the biggest problems? Is it just the fact that people are protected via IP, and it's more just like, you know, you're only going to get punished if someone goes out and makes a lot of money? And there's only like downside risks, the licensing, there's not upside risk for X, perhaps for the tech transfer offices. Was there something else going on there?

Mark Johnson 7:41

Yeah, I mean, I think this obsession of wanting to the treat this it like it's a product, right? Like we're, you know, what's going to happen at the other end, the reality is that most of those products are still in very researchy phase, that still needs an enormous amount of research engineering to figure out what the product could be under a lot of market development to figure out how to turn that into a product and go to market. So I think they're starting too far back in the process and demanding things like royalties, demanding these onerous payments. And worse yet, keeping the talent in the organization rather than letting it spin out. And trying to use the IP is the as the thing to broker. And I just think this is a mistake all around. If you look at something like Los Alamos for every one actual researcher like Shockley, they had nine research engineers, and these people, their job was to take that weird transistor that Shockley and Burdine built originally and turn it into something that Western Union could go mass mass produce. And I think that's often forgotten. And you see this in a lot of these research institutions where they just are trying to peddle this IP that's not ready for primetime. And there's just this gap. There's a gap between deep tech venture capital, which isn't patient enough to figure it out and doesn't want to deploy enough capital, and the universities who want to click to access dollars, I think,

Will Jarvis 9:02

right, that makes sense. Oh, why do you think about connecting these two up a little bit more? You know, is it all like the the legal side, you know, a lot of these inventions and research is backed by federal government money? You know, should we be pushing them, you know, to be a little more lenient and getting more tech, like transferred into the real world?

Mark Johnson 9:20

Yeah, I think there's probably, you know, there could be some statutory changes that I haven't thought through all those. I think it's just really a point of view, really, is that if you look at where it's been very successful, for example, it's Stanford. And I wouldn't say it's their tech transfer, per se, that was so so positive, they're back going back to Hewlett and Packard, who came out of Stanford University, who were encouraged by the professors to go out there and start something. And that became a cultural element of Stanford. So it wasn't just again, it's not just about the technology that's being developed. It's about the people developing the technology. This against something tech transfer forgets, especially in this fast moving world, a patent today is not going to be useful a few years from now, in most fields that are at the bleeding edge, what you really need is the system that's going to generate more IP over time. And that original IP might be the base and in some cases has a company associated with them. But But in most cases, really, you just need to build more. So I think it's just a complete slip in thinking about how it fosters early stage startups. Frankly, I think there's a market gap here. I think I've thought about building this for years, I call it Morton labs, there's like there's something in between where the VCs fund, and where the ideas spun out. There's that messy middle that needs to be funded. And I haven't quite figured out the right business model for this yet. But I really think there's an opportunity here, and we can see a real flourishing and science technology if we got this right.

Will Jarvis 10:56

I really liked that I really liked that keep exploring. I that's really exciting. This is exciting there. I'm curious, you just mentioned some things, which remind me of, you know, different cultures, in within different institutions, and how that can kind of affect outcomes. You know, you've worked in a variety of different, you know, locations from DC to New Mexico to, you know, the middle of the country, and you know, San Francisco or the bay area as well. What are the big differences you see culturally between all of those different kinds of locations? And how do you think that kind of leads to certain success in different kinds of like, endeavors or perhaps hampers people along that kind of journey?

Mark Johnson 11:36

Yeah, um, you think, you know, in San Francisco in particular, there's sort of like this wonder for the future. And I say San Francisco, New the entire Bay Area, right? Remember, Silicon Valley is, is the South Bay originally. And people come there, like I came there in the 90s. Because I was a misfit in my own town, right? Like I like to read, I liked, you know, reading weird books, I like playing with computers. And I was really hopeful about science in the future. And it turns out, lots of people moved to the Bay Area. Because of that. It means there is a culture of helping people, right, like, doing interviews for people is now something I'm honored to be called on to do. In my early days, I was helped by so many friends and mentors to give me early introduction, that's just what you do in the valley. I don't think people appreciate the the concentration of talent, and all the interactions, that that creates in a place like San Francisco, it's very, very hard to replicate elsewhere. Like when we came to New Mexico, the reality was that we had to import a lot of talent into the company, because it's, it's just not there. Like a lot of the talent that would have gotten gone into computer science ended up going somewhere else to go study computer science, and then stayed there. So there's not a lot of latent talent there. The people that chose to stay at Los Alamos, right, you're, you're going to Los Alamos, because you're probably at the top of your science career, you're going to spend 2530 years there, get a nice salary, a nice pension, you're almost by definition, very risk adverse. It's a great job and your service of the company country is, is welcome. But like that's not the kind of person necessarily that's going to be at a startup. Same thing with Omaha, when I went and did the Ag tech company, right? There's just not a huge concentration of talent here. I think, to me, this is what's really missed in in when people talk about the death of San Francisco, the reality is that there is a concentration and a culture there that is very hard to replicate elsewhere.

Will Jarvis 13:32

Yeah, I definitely think that is absolutely the case that collaboration effects I think, are still actually perhaps underrated. Just going back, you know, seeing everyone in Hayes Valley, I'm walking around, and I'm connecting, you know, ever I see, you know, someone that's been on this podcast, you know, once every, like, two hours walking around Hayes Valley in San Francisco, and it's a bit of a leading indicator that perhaps is the right place to be, I'm not sure or maybe not, maybe you should avoid it. But it's, it is interesting how, you know, the the concentration of talent, despite the fact that San Francisco is quite honestly a little bit unlivable. You know, from a perspective of, you know, just crime and, you know, housing prices just being so out of control, that it actually, you know, it would be difficult, I think, for us to do what we're doing with it without paying a lot more in salary early on. Yeah, I mean,

Mark Johnson 14:23

these are issues that I frankly, is one of the reasons I moved into the nonprofit world is that, you know, I spent, you know, my 30s really selfish and I'm walking through South of Market to my office, I always used to walk and I'd be like, when is someone going to solve these problems? And it's really weird for someone who has a libertarian focus to wonder when the government is going to do something. And frankly, the shame on the government of San Francisco for abandoning so many homeless people abandoning the youth with their terrible schools abandoning groups in San Francisco, particularly minority groups in terms of just their, their their general personal safety, like shame on the government of San Francisco, I don't think we should look to the government of San Francisco is the solution. There are plenty of really smart people that live in San Francisco with more means than any other city in America, surely they can come together in this sort of Third Sector, the independent sector, and try to solve some of these issues, I'm confident that with the creativity and talent that they apply in looking at technology, and matching that to business problems, I am certain they can go look at technology and other tools available to them, and apply that to social problems. And frankly, I'd call them them go do it, right, like I came into the social sector. Exactly. Because I saw this gap. And I just wish San Franciscans would really step up around this.

Will Jarvis 15:50

Yeah, I definitely think that there needs to be a call for more people who are, you know, look up and say, Hey, like, maybe it is my, my duty to help here and being a citizen, and perhaps just generally, that's, that's more of a bottom up approach that we could encourage is for everyone to think more closely about how can I help my community, you know, flourish? And not just how can I help myself flourish? But it's difficult to, you know, impart that message to

Mark Johnson 16:11

people? Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's

Will Jarvis 16:12

easy to point the finger. It is it is it is, I want to talk more about, you know, some of these bottom up solutions to a lot of American social problems. You know, it seemed together, you guys are doing a lot of good work on trying to encourage this around zoning around, you know, loosening kind of occupational licensure and a lot of things like that. And tell me if I misspeak on any of these fronts? What do you think the biggest lever is that you guys have on the policy arena, to encourage, you know, personal responsibility, or the ability for people to kind of take charge and help themselves out of some of these sticky wickets? We've gotten into as kind of a culture and society?

Mark Johnson 16:51

Well, I think, you know, one of the things we look for, in the organizations that we support, is that they start off with empowering people. Right? I think that this means that, you know, not just like, how are we going to live a better day or week? But how are how are they going to help people to live a better life? Right? How are they going to find life's of meaning? How are they going to become self actualized. And that's a key thing that we look for, you know, one of the ways you do that is by helping people are recognizing that everyone is an individual. And then you can't just use a template for helping them out of whatever situation they're in. So let me just give you a few examples. Like the Phoenix is one of my favorites, they, they focus on people with substance use disorder, introducing them to sort of athletics as a way to build a community around them for supporting, and it's truly incredible, they built many gyms, you know, started off from a founder that was close to the problem, something else that we look for is like, much like you look for passionate founders in technology, who are obsessed with the problem. Oftentimes, the best proud founders in the social sector, are those that were closest to the problem also. So they you know, they've taken this model, it's, they've been able to scale it up. It's been a great, great collaboration with them. And recently, there's a technology component now to where they've started to build an app to build an offline community. So unlike gyms, which are very expensive and tied to a location, you can set up sort of fitness schedule anywhere and give support to people no matter where they are on their phone. This becomes a powerful new tool. So I think that you know, a few lessons here is, you know, how do you empower people? How do we find organizations that are founder led, where they really understand the problem? Do they have a novel solution to one of these sticky wickets, as you said? And then can we find ways to scale them up? Like if this solution is working? Well? What ways can we use technology and other tools to help them scale up? And that's sort of generally what we're looking for as a community when we find an organization to support?

Will Jarvis 18:59

That's great. That's great. And I do love the focus on technology. And philanthropy seems to be like, that's something an underserved area that has a lot of kind of alpha left.

Mark Johnson 19:10

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the mental models that I've tried to break in my head over the past year is this nonprofit thing, right? Like, what is a nonprofit nonprofit is a tax designation and nothing else, right? At the end of the day, all these organizations are creating products that serve their customers, and help them live better lives. And when you think of it like that, you realize that there has to be a business model there. Sometimes donations are the right business model. Sometimes there's another kind of business model. So one thing that's really unique about Stan together is we're also pretty agnostic to the type of organization only that the organization is really helping people in their lives. So for example, we have a venture fund. So stand together ventures labs invest in for profit organizations. And what's cool about it is maybe two things one is He will often look at deals that other VCs would pass by because they can't see the billion dollar opportunity. He's that connects to the second point that? Sure, would we like a financial return out of that it'd be great if we did. But really what we're going for is a social social return, the financial return is just validation of that product. And showing that began a sustainable business model and get the product or service into the hands of the people that needed the most. But really, we're looking for that social good, right? Like, how can the portfolio companies create social equity, not just capital for us?

Will Jarvis 20:36

That's great. That's great. This is this question is somewhat related to this. And you might have answered it already. Recently, I was talking to someone who worked in philanthropy for something like 20 years, when started their own nonprofit. And he was complaining to me one of the problems he had, he was an advisor to a very wealthy person who had made some money in natural resources. And one of the problems he had, he's a very smart guy was that, you know, a lot of people in philanthropy want to find things that are under served or, and also, you know, somewhat something someone else has not done yet. So they can get that kind of excess return of good or utility in the world. One of the problems he had though, was, you can find these people, but then you know, you've got to keep supporting them for the long term if you want them to be successful. And there's kind of this drive, I feel like in a lot of a lot of, you know, context to get people to something that kind of self sustaining knowledge there were oftentimes you can have underserved or problems that are overlooked. But if you find them, you're almost kind of committing to finding them for a long time, because by definition, other people have overlooked them or thought they're not important.

Mark Johnson 21:45

Mmm, that's an interesting perspective. Again, I'm, I'm kind of an outsider to this market. And, you know, given my sort of very venture focus lens, I'll give you that lens. Too many philanthropies are around for too long, they do too little period. And I would love to see like no use business terms here. I'd love to see more consolidation in the budget. Yeah, I'd love to see better data driven decisions, right? Like, rather than trying to like, I'm sorry, there's just not that many problems, like what are the problems we all care about, we care that people are educated that they have good jobs, that you know, their children are growing up healthy and happy, their children are well educated, right? Like, these are all the standard prompts, that when someone falls in society, there's a place that we can help them. These are the same problems that have resonated with with humans for probably 1000s of years. So I really don't think there's that many new problems out there. Go instead of starting something new, go find an organization that already exists. I really encourage people to do that. When you do find one, really understand how they're changing people's lives, not how they're just a point solution for today, but how they're really changing lives to the long term. Also look at how are they using data? Are they really talking to their customers, or their donors, their customers, or the people that are serving their customers, there are just far too many philanthropies that treat their donors as customers, because that's where the revenue comes from, rather than the people that they're serving as customers. So I really think that there is there's hopefully, you know, a sea change coming in philanthropy, we're far more customer focused, we're far more data centric. And we're far better at sort of leveraging the principles of in business to, to go help people live better lives.

Will Jarvis 23:34

So just less navel gazing overall, and more just focus on on the ground, like, how do we actually help people perhaps?

Mark Johnson 23:40

Yeah, no, no, and I'm not trying to be heartless here, I think quite the opposite. Right? I think that I think that, like, it's just really important that we, again, this this sort of focus on the customer is something that's really often lost in philanthropy. And, you know, I think that I want to see more people come into this sector, and more novel ideas. But like, also recognize that there's a lot of organizations out there right now that may be doing the kinds of things that they already care about. So it's worthwhile, it's worthwhile taking a step back and understanding before you just jump right in,

Will Jarvis 24:14

kind of take the outside view there that perhaps, you know, perhaps everyone's not not, you know, off the rocker there, they're already on to something and, and then go from there to try and try and improve things. For sure. That's great. That's great. You wrote a piece about kind of a post mortem on Descartes Labs, which was incredibly helpful to me, I think, in framing my thinking about how to build, you know, a business that's kind of related to data, and some of the pitfalls that can happen when you're trying to do that, you know, as a young new founder, what's the one piece of advice that you would give me to try and avoid a lot of heartache as I build this kind of data business?

Mark Johnson 24:50

Ah, I mean, there are many I think at your stage, it's just make sure you have product market fit, and don't fool yourself. Gotcha. Uh, you know, I think that, you know, one of the things that we committed to Descartes Labs is we had some really early or early customer success. And we are investors, we pat ourselves on our back and just assume that we were doing something right there. And the reality was that we didn't have something that was scalable, right, they say, nail before you scale it, and too many companies have spent way too much money, trying to scale something before they really, really found that product market fit. So that's the number one piece of advice is just make sure it makes sure that you found that.

Will Jarvis 25:35

So be sure that you can, that you've executed well, and you've got product market fit before you go and, and put gas on the fire, if that makes sense.

Mark Johnson 25:44

Yeah, and, you know, the road defining that is really hard. Right? So, you know, another sort of mistake that we made at Descartes Labs was, you know, we were really a glorified consulting business. And the thing that like, it's so easy to point fingers and say, oh, you know, you've made a big mistake doing that, like, literally, that's how all enterprise software companies start. Right is yes. It's so true. Yes, absolutely. Right. Like you're, you're, you're in there solving a really particular problem for someone praying that other people have that problem to maybe get some a little bit of evidence that other people have that problem. Maybe you have a thesis that people have that problem, then you go try to find them. But the reality is that a lot of your early solutions are going to be highly custom. And that's okay. The problem is, if five years in all of your solutions are still custom, you do not have a scalable software business with high gross margins, you have a consulting business with low multiples and much lower gross margins. And that's just a very, very different business to be in. And it's probably not what your investors signed up for? Well, and

Will Jarvis 26:48

it seems like it's one of the challenges, it's very difficult to tell early on, like you said, you know, you've got to do things that don't scale to quote Paul Graham, but that inherently implies more of like a consulting esque approach. And so you're just trying to first make someone happy and then see, okay, is this repeatable? And you've got to kind of do both. And sometimes, like, you get there, and sometimes you don't?

Mark Johnson 27:09

Yeah, and I think this is where it's so funny. Like when you write something like this, people's comments on Twitter are sort of like these like, tiny little aphorisms that sort of tried to be pieces of wisdom or point out all the flaws. It's like, of course, we thought about a lot of that while we were doing it, it's just Hindsight is 2020. Let me paint you just a quick picture of that company for people that don't know about it. So spin out of Los Alamos, it was me and number of scientists that came from Los Alamos, the expertise was in big data supercomputing, AI, and particularly satellite imagery, so complex datasets. So what we did is we apply this to large global datasets, initially looking at agriculture. So basically, the things you can see from the sky typically are large, they don't move, we successfully applied in agriculture, particularly looking at global corn and soybean yields. So how much corn and soy is growing at any given time on the planet, it's a really important number, if that's one of your inputs, or if you're trading it, or if you're a farmer. So those those kinds of numbers are quite useful. We had something that's pretty accurate. And that's how we started off the company. The big problem we had was, we weren't sure what kind of product we ultimately wanted to build. So our biggest deals were large consulting deals. But the question was, were we going to do more custom consulting deals? Where were you going to sell the platform itself? Right? Are we going to sell our scientists, we're using this platform that access to petabytes of data, and can use it to build these very valuable models for our clients custom? Should we sell the clients those that platform? Or maybe a third option is Do you sell products on top of that platform? So call it predictive feeds that sit on top of that product platform that are fed by satellite imagery? And this was what I call in the post the Descartes Labs dialectic? Which was, are we a platform company? Or are we a consulting company? Are we a software company or consulting company, and that really define sort of the history of the company and in both the things that we did really well? And where we sort of tripped and fell?

Will Jarvis 29:18

That makes sense? That makes sense. Do you think, and we don't have to talk about this too much. I know like these things are not like fun to talk about in retrospect. But I think it's very quite helpful for folks to learn about this. And just like how these businesses unfold, like, you don't I mean, like, there's all kinds of different ways to go. And I mean, you still exited the company. It's not like it maybe wasn't the exit you wanted, but it's still the company still exited. I'm curious, do you think you would be would have been better off just picking one like, we're gonna be consulting shop, or we're gonna like try and just burn the boats and build a platform or is it like, I mean, hindsight is 2020 Right. You guys were optimized, but you could get a ton of really smart people so it's not like you know, there's a reason you guys did all that right?

Mark Johnson 29:57

Yeah, I would say we mean that let me be a boy. Look down to two fundamental mistakes. So one is, I think that we should have been honest with ourselves that we were a high end consulting company. And there was plenty of money being thrown around at that time to organizations like ours that had that kind of talent pool that could build really valuable models. So I wish we would have done that maybe like even even further back, I think we should have just created a hedge fund, because we've all been very rich if we did that, but I think that we were just honest with ourselves and our investors that we were a consulting company, it wouldn't change how we grew, we could have said, Hey, a product me come out of this. But I think we can grow steadily year over year, we would focus on the gross margins of every deal, right? Like make, it makes sure every deal had margin rather than sort of the promise of future revenue. And we just want the financial engineering for the company would have been totally different. Honestly, the other mistake we made is getting way too hung up on the data set. So like we did some stuff with satellite imagery that at the time was crazy, remarkable, right? Like one of the first things we did in the first six months was to process a petabyte of data in under 24 hours on Google Cloud using 30,000 processors. Google had never heard of that before. They told us it was the largest calculation ever run on Google Cloud outside of Google at the time. So we became real buddies with them. But then we got all excited about it's like, oh, what can we do with satellite imagery? Look at how big our data sets is, when we were saying to the VCs, look at how big your data sets is, give us some money or customers the same thing. What they all should have been hearing is while you're burning a lot of cash, because you're storing petabytes of data, and doing enormous amounts of cute compute, is that really valuable. And there's probably a post to be written here too. But I don't think there are a lot of commercial use cases for geospatial data, such that the cost of manipulating the data, acquiring the data cleaning the data is greater than the alternatives that exist. And that's something that like was proven to us over and over and time and time again, the reality is people wanted to buy or sell signal for corn, they didn't want to see pictures of corn. And that was one of the fundamental mistakes we made in that company, for sure. That makes sense. Don't get obsessed with the data. Right? Yeah, it can be very attractive. And it's interesting, right? You're

Will Jarvis 32:23

getting a lot of applause as well, right? You talk to Google, he talked to the Google sales rep. He's like Holy mackerel, you know, no one's spent this much cash on us before. This is the biggest, you know, compute ever done on our system, you know, and all this stuff, and customers get excited about it. But perhaps the utility isn't isn't always there. But it's a real challenge to kind of navigate that. Well, Mark. So I'm curious. So you've, you've worked in the private sector, you've worked in the public sector, you've kind of you've been across the kind of domains here, I am curious, how is it different running a, you know, a startup versus running kind of a big philanthropy? Or are they pretty similar at the end of the day, with regards to how they operate?

Mark Johnson 33:05

I mean, look, there's always, there's always going to be differences in how organizations are managed, particularly on based on their size and how long they've been around. So we've been around for long enough that we're more stable in a startup. That being said, one of the reasons that I'm here is that we focus on constant creative destruction. So our founder, founder, Charles Koch, one of his biggest fears, and they'll say this directly is, is entropy, right? That systems that don't have injections of energy, tend towards boringness and will eventually get disrupted. So if, if you believe that someone outside of you is going to disrupt you, if you don't do anything different, you darn well better do something different. It's something I really appreciate about being part of stand together is that, you know, we're constantly challenged here to think bigger. We're constantly challenged to think about how we might do things better. And we're constantly challenged about how we might do things differently. So it's still like, based on those core principles we have that are how we run the organization. But luckily, we didn't have a VC a few years ago. Now we do it started off as an experiment. We've made almost 20 investments now. And now it's becoming a larger part of the organization because the experiment was very successful. You know, that I think that's probably I am blessed, because I think that's pretty atypical for your typical nonprofit in DC.

Will Jarvis 34:37

Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. And I'm curious, how do you keep that pressure up from a leadership angle? When there aren't, you know, in startups, like there, there's the market forces in you know, philanthropy, you know, those can be less How do you keep the pressure up when there's less kind of evolutionary kind of, I guess, pressure on the organization to be kind of successful?

Mark Johnson 34:59

Well, I Yeah, I would say, I feel like we feel a lot of pressure here. Because look at the world around us, right? Like, if you're looking around the world in 2023, and saying, Well, this is the best week in America, like, I don't think you're paying a lot of attention. So like, I think we actually feel a lot of pressure. Like one of the reasons that I came here is I thought, If not now, when, right, they have the right set of experiences for kind of this first half of my career, where I learned a lot in startups and technology and big companies and sort of like how the business world works, and how we can apply technology to big problems, I wanted to try this in a new domain, that domain being America and some of the problems that that she's got right now. So I don't know, I feel like we feel a lot of pressure here, even though it'd be easy to sit back and be sort of, you know, be sort of staid and boring. But we're just not like that at all be the the one other thing I'd say is that we run on a management system here called principle based management. And the easiest way I found to describe it is it's a kind of, it's a management system for let's call it self organizing organizations. So the same principles of you know, believing in people and empowering people, bottom up solutions over top down solutions, those the same kind of principles that are embodied in our management system. And that really tries to push down decisions to the people closest to the problem, really empower people within the organization, be really clear about our vision. And I think that helps us to stay really nimble, too, even though it was inspired by, by, again, the management system, Koch Industries, I think we've adapted it in such a way that it keeps us very nimble and very creative. And frankly, Koch Industries is an excellent, excellent model itself, you know, having grown from a small oil gathering business back in the 60s, when Charles took it over to the one of the largest privately held companies in the world today.

Will Jarvis 36:59

That's great. Can you talk more about that kind of management system, and perhaps how that works, like on a kind of day to day basis?

Mark Johnson 37:05

Yeah, so I, honestly, it's one of the greatest gifts that I've gotten from Stan together is a deep understanding of principle based management. So the principle principles in principles based management are the principles of human progress. So sort of like the thinking of it as sort of like the basic things in the Declaration of Independence, Life, Liberty, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, along with a bunch of concepts from psychology and economics that Charles picked up over the years. So that's sort of like the basis, what this has been distilled into, is we call the five dimensions of principle based management, we sort of define how an organization works. So it's how do you set vision? You know, how do you find the right people? How do you make sure that they're motivated, empowered, how do you make sure knowledge is flying to the organization at the right rate, so that people can make the right kinds of decisions. So these are the five dimensions and sort of like how we cohere as, as an organization. What this does for us is, again, it tries to empower every individual by like, for example, here, you write your own job description, right? Your roles, responsibilities, and expectations are something that you work out with your supervisor, what those are going to be, which I found very, very empowering here, because it encouraged you to think about what you do best and how you can contribute most to the organization. So like me, this is a really long way of saying it's a very, very thinking heavy system, and that it forces everybody in the organization, never shared language forces, never have forces in in principle based management, and encouraged everybody in the organization to have the same language and to feel individually empowered to to take control of their situation, and make the maximum amount of impact they can. So I just found this to be really powerful and a framework that I've been able to apply not just at work, but in life more generally.

Will Jarvis 39:04

That's great. Do you think more organizations should adopt a management style like this?

Mark Johnson 39:09

Absolutely. Like I will, like, I'll be very bold here. I think this is potentially a leap forward in management. If you look at sort of the history of management sort of, and how it came about, you know, there's this period of let's call it Taylorism. That's very top down, we tell people what to do. We're really clear about job descriptions. You get into systems like total quality management that are all about product efficiency and charts and making sure people follow rules to get good efficient products. These were all sort of leap forward and management that allowed us to get the modern corporation. But this idea of empowering all the individuals in the organization is extremely powerful. And I think what you get is more flexible organizations, right? So this idea of that organization and being able to self organize based on the individuals within that organization is something that, that, frankly, not only have I not seen, but I've not done. I mean, to a certain extent, if I look at some of the other startups that that I've run, you know, I did a little bit through tyranny, which is funny because my politics are definitely anti tyranny, anti top down, and a lot of how I managed was very top down. And now I have a framework for better empowering people based on their talents for selecting people based on on their talents that I never had before. So now at some point, there's probably a piece to be written here too, about kind of what I've learned from from principle based management, I really encourage everyone to check it out. It's a, I'm pretty sure it's principle based management.com. You can download some booklets there, Charles has written a few really good books. And if you're interested, please do reach out to me, because like, I'm really passionate about this, I'd like to see, I'd like to see more startup founders think about management, as a discipline earlier in their startup career, he said he would really benefit them, it would have really benefited me. But thank God, as anybody who's been managed by me over the past few decades would say the same

Will Jarvis 41:13

thing. If you had to give one piece of management advice to you know, a young founder, you might be talking to right now, what would that be? Like? How can we do it better?

Mark Johnson 41:23

Ah, spend more time listening and less time talking. I have a lot. I mean, as you probably tell from this podcast, I have a lot of trouble with that. It's not necessary advice I always follow. But you can learn so much from people in your organization, you have to remember, you are not close to most problems. The people on your team are close to those problems. And either you trust them to give you good advice. And if you don't trust them, the right solution is not to get in there and do their work for them. They might not be the right person for that role. So really trusting people and listening to them is something that I wish I would have learned far earlier in life.

Will Jarvis 42:02

Make sense? That's really good advice. That's great. Well, Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. If people are interested in this conversation and other things we popped up, I'll put some show notes in the in the dark down there with links for everything we mentioned. But where can people find you? Where should we send them?

Mark Johnson 42:21

I'm philosophy geek pretty much anywhere. Check out my Twitter, my medium. Those are probably my two primary ways that I get things out there. So yeah, look for me at philosophy Geek on Twitter.

Will Jarvis 42:35

Awesome. Thanks so much, Mark. Awesome. Thank you well. Special thanks to our sponsor does market analysis for the support. Bismarck analysis creates the Bismarck brief, a newsletter about intelligence grade analysis of key industries, organizations and live players. You can subscribe to Bismarck free at brief dot Bismarck analysis.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives. Special thanks to Donovan Dorrance, our audio editor. You can check out documents work in music at Donovan dorrance.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In this episode we discuss: When to throw in the towel and when not to, the commonalities between the best and worst founders, the bottleneck to innovation in tech, dealing with pressure to grow bigger funds, venture as an access game and a whole lot more. 

Transcript:William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways that is worse in the past towards a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.

Will Jarvis 0:39

Well, Eric, how are you doing this afternoon?

William Jarvis 0:42

Doing great. Well, how are you doing? Well, doing? Well,

Will Jarvis 0:45

thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. Do you mind giving us a brief bio and some of the big ideas you're interested in?

eric 0:52

Yeah, absolutely. So, so quick background on me, basically. So grew up in New Jersey kind of grew up there, I spent my whole life there, I went to school in Boston, really gonna found my interest in in kind of tech and venture more broadly, while I was there. So started a payments company in in school. And then a few years after that moved out here to SF, so was an early employee at a at a startup that got bought by Lyft. But you know, kind of knew that I wanted to build another company, and it kept coming back to this idea that hadn't been in the back of my mind for several years, I think this idea, really, that the next generation of venture was going to be focused, you know, not on the company, but on the person. And, you know, I'd spent a lot of time, you know, kind of meeting a bunch of really talented friends and peers and things like that. And I think the interesting thing for me was that, you know, these are people that everybody kind of knew we're going to go on and do great things, right, you know, there's their success wasn't necessarily a surprise, right. But but it kind of always, always really interesting to me was like, when you took a step back, you know, in the earliest days, nobody was actually doing anything in a systematic way to kind of identify and and kind of capture that that talent specifically, right. And so we started thinking about, Okay, well feel like there's this huge opportunity to kind of build one of the best venture firms of our generation focused on just that right, focused on really kind of, how do you identify the person before the idea in many ways, right. And it kind of felt like, you know, if we could do that better than most, you know, you could build something really unique, really special, and something really lasting? And so that's kind of what we said the past, you know, five or so years now, in a building at contrary, which is this, you're going to venture firm built like a tech startup backed by many of the world's best entrepreneurs, where if all we're doing is kind of systematically identifying and investing in some of the world's top talent, and so I'll pause there, but hopefully, we can have a good, good high level for you. Yeah, I

Will Jarvis 2:49

love that. And I love the concept of, you know, finding talented people, maybe before they've had that idea, or they've come across that $20 bill on the sidewalk that they can take advantage of, I think you'd Caskey has this great line, you know, everybody gets maybe two or three of these $20 bills on the sidewalk that are really big that you can like pick up and but they're not. It's not like they're all around, you know, the markets are fairly efficient. But oftentimes there are there are things we can find where their market inefficiencies that people can take advantage of. So picking talented people beforehand. Sounds like a like a really good way to do battle people early. When did you first have this idea? And you know, how sure, were you that it was going to work when he first got started? Either? Did you have to be like the tried, I love to ask like people that founded things before, you know how sure, were you before you kicked off? Yeah, if you had to assign like a probability score to it, where would you put it?

eric 3:44

Yeah, for sure. So I had the idea for it when I was in college, actually. And I had the idea, because I was just really consistently finding myself around a lot of people that I thought were super talented. Right. And I think to me, you know, whether naivete or whatever, like I, I was pretty confident that these are super smart people that we're going to go out and do great things, right. And so, you know, that was where I actually hatched the original idea for, you know, for for country but didn't work on at the time, right? It was, you know, working on another startup and, you know, kind of life happened and, and he kind of, you know, didn't didn't really swing back around to it for three or four years. You know, but but kind of over time kept kind of being in the back of my mind kept thinking about it and kind of just continually was excited and energized by it. And so swung back three, four years later, still didn't really think that anybody was doing something like this thought that this was would exist and kind of jumped in. So that's kind of when I first kind of incepted the the idea, I think, in terms of the probability of success. It's hard to tell right? I you know, I never remember saying to myself look like, you know, there's a 1,000,000% chance that this thing is going to work. Right. I, the way I framed it was in the way I think about kind of starting companies in general. Like, it's, it's a, you're making a series of bets along the way. Right? And so the way I thought about it was look like, you know, here's an idea that I have a reasonable amount of conviction in. And, and, you know, I think it's a good idea, right? I think something like this will exist, I think it will probably work. But I can't say with certainty, right. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the next in my case, I kind of box it as like two years, I said, it's like next two years of my life. And I'll, you know, really kind of work super hard on it. And I'll kind of throw myself at IT spend every waking moment of kind of my life at it. And, you know, and we'll see what happens, right? And if after two years, it looks like it's working and kind of progressing and doing well, like, fantastic, like, I'll keep on doing it, right? If not, though, right? And maybe it doesn't look like then then I'll kind of move on and do something else. So that's kind of how I thought about it. I think that a lot of people actually shortchange themselves. I think a lot of people don't spend enough time working on an idea before they decide to kind of throw in the towel. And I think a lot of companies aren't ultimately kind of created as a result of that. And whereas with with country, like I think two years is roughly kind of the right period of time, if you're, if you're wondering, kind of like is this going to work? So?

Will Jarvis 6:27

That's really great. That's really great. I like that framing. Do you think? I guess it's like, super case by case? Right? But how do you think about advising founders on, on how they should time like, like, when is it right? To throw in the towel? And when is it right to push through? Right? Because we can imagine that there's times where you really should keep pushing, you can definitely give up too early, we can definitely give up like too late as well. How do you think about balancing that? And like advising founders when they're thinking through those kinds of challenges? Yeah,

eric 6:57

I mean, there's no, there's no kind of formula here. But after now, having, you know, been a lot gone through this and yeah, kind of, you know, with dozens of founders over the past, you know, five to 10 years. The answer the unhelpful answer is that, you know, right. Like, you know, you know, and it's different for every company, right? I mean, maybe there's co founder conflict, maybe, you know, they literally can't raise capital downstream, maybe it's just kind of plodding along, right. And it's been years at this point, and there's just, there's just kind of no light at the end of the tunnel, right? It's not growing quickly, you're not able to attract right now. It's just kind of like a zombie, right? So it varies by startup, right? But it is one of the kinds of things where, like, you do absolutely no, right? Like, you kind of feel it in your bones, right? You're like look like this, this, like, it's run its course, right? I've kind of given it my all right, I've kind of done everything I could, for whatever reason, like it just, it's just not worth me spending an incremental, you know, kind of year or two of my life working on this. And then you have a hard conversation with your investors and teammates and go from there. And I think at the end of the day, like, for us as kind of VCs, right, like, the the expectation is that, you know, for a seed stage portfolio, or an early stage portfolio, you know, half of these companies are gonna go to zero, right? It's part of the fund math, right. So we expect it to happen. Obviously, it's a hard conversation, but it's it's not a I think sometimes founders get nervous to have that, and understandably so. Right. Like, they get nervous to have that conversation with their investor. Right? And, and, look, I think more often than not, like, we feel the same way that they do, right, and we say, look like, you know, we gave it a shot, we gave it a good run, and like, you know, if you choose to start another company, I'd love to be your first investor. Right? And that's often how it plays out, too. So

Will Jarvis 9:04

good deal. Good deal. So it's very much. Yes, you just need to be smart about things need to be self reflective, and see where you're at. And, you know, don't beat your against your head against the wall unnecessarily. If you've reached a point where, you know, you look inside, you're like, Okay, maybe it's time to go and pivot and do something else. That makes sense. That makes sense. I'm curious, getting back to some of the original things you mentioned, how do you think about evaluating talent? Is it something that is kind of intuitive to you? And that you see somebody like, wow, this person, really impressive? Is there a set of characteristics you look for? Is it a very case by case thing where each each person is individually talented in different ways? And you kind of like it's like an art to it? Or is there kind of a science to evaluating talent that you found over the years looking at so many talented young people working on?

eric 9:54

Yeah, I think the answer is both. You know, I think it's, it's Are there elements of it that you can be particularly scientific about? Right? You know, you can look at a lot of different heuristics. But at the end of the day, you just need to have a good old fashioned conversation with someone oftentimes, right and, and you know, new amount of credential or where they worked, or whatever will will kind of help you understand, like, Hey, what are my goals and ambitions? Right, what I want to do, do I want to build a company do I do I want to know, like, what's the, like, what are my motivating factors here? And, and, and, you know, I think there's no way that, you know, a link somebody's LinkedIn, or something that you could find online will tell you that right. Like, it's just, it's just not the reality. So yeah, all that all that is to say, like, you can do pieces of it scientifically. But at the end of the day, like, you just need to talk to people. And that's like, the, I won't even call it a Saturday, I think it's a great reality. Right? It means that it'll be really hard for the foreseeable future to abstract away, you know, human beings from from early stage venture. So,

Will Jarvis 11:10

good, good deal. If you don't, you're not worried about the large language models coming for you quite yet.

eric 11:15

Not yet. Maybe at the growth stage. But yeah.

Will Jarvis 11:19

Fair enough. Fair enough. When you're having a conversation with someone, and you have that aha moment, that they're really talented, is there anything? Yeah, yeah. Are there any commonalities there you found?

eric 11:38

Um, I don't. I don't necessarily think so. Other than just like absolute hunger, right. Um, like, I think the best people have such exceptional tenacity and clarity of thought, again, it's a kind of, you know, it when you see it type of thing. Whereas, you know, your typical, your typical kind of individual or person that you talk to, just doesn't have that sense of purpose, almost, you know, kind of like, you know, me against the world kind of thing. And, and I think that like that plus clarity of thought are probably kind of the two most important commonalities that you see. You know, I think there's a huge difference between a great founder and and, you know, like, an extraordinary founder, right. Like, you know, there, there are people that we've talked to you that are probably, you know, top five of, you know, the top five people that we've talked to, since starting contrary, five or six years ago, right. And like, those are the people that you want to be investing in, but you maybe find those people once or twice a year, right? You talk to 1000s of people, you come across one or two a year and two, you know, it's, it's hard. But when you come across those kinds of people, you just kind of regardless of what they're doing, you just have to like backup, the bucket loader, and, and the results tend to be pretty special. So

Will Jarvis 13:13

that's great. It does seem to me that venture is kind of this crazy search problem. At somewhere. We mentioned the intellect, there's kind of a handful of people you want to bag, it's very powerful, all based on the returns seem to be very parallel based. Have you think about about going out and finding people? Is it just trying to get as much exposure to different people, college campuses, wherever you can find them to expand the search net wider? Are there any things things, you know, any special things you've done at contrary to kind of source these people?

eric 13:42

Yeah, well, I think traditional venture firms and that traditional, I mean, basically all venture firms, they just sort through networks at the end of the day, right? So they sourced through their personal network, they sourced through, you know, a founder referral, they, you know, if they have a good brand, people go inbound to them. Right. It's it's just like, it's, it's very traditional in that regard. Right. And I think to be clear, like, that works, right. So so, you know, I think I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with it. But I think if you if you kind of believe that venture is continually evolving and changing and, and that, you know, venture kind of today will not be kind of venture a decade from now. And then you think you have to ask yourself, like, what gets what changes? Right? And I think for us, it's that venture is kind of on this, like, inexorable kind of, you know, creep and march kind of earlier and earlier and earlier, right. And where, what has historically been an industry very focused on the deal and the transaction will be one that becomes more and more and more about the person right? it. And so if you believe that to be true, then you have to go earlier. Right? Then you have to actually be identifying and building deep, authentic relationships with people before they even start a company, right? Because if they've started a company, it's too late already. Right? And I think that's our view is that venture is just going to become more and more competitive. And so if you're trying to kind of, you know, play the game in 2020, or 2022, and 2030, like, you're just going to lose, it's as simple as that. And so I think like, while not a bad game to play today, I think it's very clear to us that in kind of five or 10 years like this, this will not be, it'd be totally different game. So

Will Jarvis 15:44

it's not gonna be the way things have been done in the past. I definitely agree with that. I'm curious. I've always had this question where the bottleneck of innovation is in the economy at this point, it seems to me like when we, you know, put more money in the venture market, they just, you know, push the valuations up, which seems indicative to me that like, maybe we're bottlenecked on like, talent or something like that. I'm curious, what are your thoughts there? Where is the bottleneck at this point? Is it talented founders? Is it, you know, talented builders? Is it money? And just money's not allocated properly? Or is there something else going on?

eric 16:21

Yeah, I mean, I think I think what's happened in the venture market over the past couple years was simply I mean, it was it was it's, you could have a you have an entire podcast about that. But I think like, you know, high level read, it's, it was a combination of like, macro policy plus COVID. Right. And so, you know, tac was, was a massive beneficiary of those when ended up being tailwinds. Right. Obviously, that's corrected, right. And people were talking about, wow, like, you know, this has moved tech forward 510 years in the adoption curve, right. Like, it's only the beginning, like, you know, a lot, a lot of very HYPEE things and, and, you know, people were funding companies like, you know, hop in or whatever, at these, like, kind of, you know, kind of, you know, egregious valuations thinking that, you know, the moment that kind of COVID died off or kind of receded, you know, that that kind of, it would continue to persist. And I think it's very clear that that was not ever going to be the case for us at least, right. And so, you know, you're now seeing kind of a bit of a reversion to reality. And that's great, right? And I think look like, you know, you ask yourself the question of, like, you know, kind of what is tech look like in a decade from now. And I think I think the reality is like tech continues to, to kind of, you know, eat and dominate, you know, kind of the world and be one of the best growth categories over the next decade. Like that's not changing, like, structurally, tech is not going anywhere, right? It's still a very small percentage of GDP, all things considered. And so, like, we're absolutely kind of, you know, bulls on on tech, things like this. And what's been going on over the past few months, I think are just healthy reminders and recalibrations to people that, you know, hot money and easy money is not often kind of, you know, easy to come by. So

Will Jarvis 18:11

definitely, definitely up. This does remind me we, we had another guest on the podcast, Paul smelting. He's an economist at Yale, wrote this paper, it's very hawkish, but it describes how there has been this 800 year decline in long term interest rates. You know, it's noisy, right. So, you know, we're kind of going back up right now. But do you think this like long term trend towards lower interest rates, will over time just make venture increasingly competitive? Or are we not doomed to that kind of fate? As people get pushed?

eric 18:43

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. Um, you know, I I think that venture is simply going through kind of the exact same adoption curve as other asset classes have, right. So I think my view on on venture is very similar to what happened in, you know, p in the 80s, hedge funds in the 90s. Right, like, where you kind of have this relatively sleepy industry for the first 30 or so years of its existence, right? And then, all of a sudden, you can't I mean, you're just writing this literally like 50 to 100 year secular kind of slow trend, right? And then at a certain point, it kind of finally starts to accelerate. And it goes from being a cottage industry, right? If you if you remember, like, you know, I mean, as recently as 10 years ago, people would still refer to venture as a cottage industry, right. And it largely was, and it still is today in the sense of like, it's still a very small slice of the asset management pie, but like it's obviously less than it was. But But I think ultimately like venture will experience that exact same kind of growth whether are not interest rates, you know, you know, kind of continuing increasing or decreasing, I think, obviously ventures and net, like all kind of asset classes tend to be alts tend to be kind of beneficiaries of low interest rate environments. Right. So I don't think venture is unique in that regard. But I think my broader point here is like, almost in spite of what happens with with interest rates, I think venture will continue to grow and scale and mature as an asset class. And I don't think it's going anywhere. So

Will Jarvis 20:30

Got it. Got it. I'm curious, you know, you invest primarily in the early stage, correct? Yeah.

eric 20:36

We do. We do kind of full stack investing, but but a lot of what we do is kind of early stage. Yeah,

Will Jarvis 20:40

gotcha. It seems to me that there's this inherent tension where as you get bigger, so you know, as you become more successful over time with contrary, it seems like there's, you know, some pressure to grow bigger funds, etc. But then you have to, you know, kind of go farther, you got to, you know, maybe start have to start investing in series A Series B, you're doing growth stuff, because the piles of cash are bigger, and it's just hard to distribute that and find alpha, if that makes sense, with the deal size are smaller. Is that something you expect to have to deal with? Are you consciously thinking about that? Or it may be keeping the font smaller over time to deal with that? Or what's the long term vision there?

eric 21:19

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, I mean, Mike Maples kind of popularized this, this phrase, which is just, it's gold. And then he's, he's, he's absolutely read anywhere. He says, you know, your font size is your strategy, right. And I think he's absolutely true, right. And I think at a certain point, as a manager, you make a conscious decision as to what you want your firm to be, right. And in the venture world, it's, it's, it's basically, let's say, you know, sub 50 million, it's maybe 50 to 150 million, let's say, in that range. And then it's everything north of that, right. And when your sub 50 million, you can play really nice with everybody, you can get small checks into competitive rounds, you're always collaborative, all that kind of stuff. When you're 50 to 150 million, you know, you can, or even a couple 100 million, like, you can still be somewhat collaborative, you're a little bit more competitive, you're leading rounds now, but you can still get venture style returns, right, you can still kind of five to 10x funds, if you if you're, you know, leading rounds of excellent early stage companies. But once you go that past that kind of like couple 100 million dollar threshold, if you just do the math, I mean, you need to be, you need to be generating massive, massive multibillion dollar kind of exits and returns to put up venture scale kind of numbers. And so you end up building more of a platform. Right. And there's nothing wrong with that. Right. There's nothing wrong with doing what Andreessen has done or whatever, right? Like, you know, I mean, to their credit, right, they build one of the most powerful firms and in all venture by taking this kind of, you know, full stack multistage kind of kind of model. Right. And, but it's just different. Right, you know, the the Andreessen 's of the world are getting the same returns as a $50 million fund, because it's just easier to multiply smaller numbers, right? Again, there's nothing wrong with that. But you just have to understand like, what are you optimizing for, right? are you optimizing purely for, you know, kind of cash on cash returns? Right? are you optimizing for scale? And AUM, like, What game are you playing? And I think once you understand that, then you can basically, you know, figure out what your strategy and your fun side is going to be from there. So

Will Jarvis 23:46

and where do you come down on this? Like, like, do you have thoughts here? And if you don't want to talk about it publicly? That's fine. But But where do you want to be like in 10 years? Do you like that, like, the game you're playing currently? Do you want to change it up and grow into a bigger fund? What were your thoughts there?

eric 23:59

Yeah, I mean, like, I think we're, we're still early in our journey, right? Like, we're, you know, we're kind of four or five years into into investing. And, and I think it's kind of too early to tell, but But I do think we'll remain laser focused on on this kind of core thesis around how to identify great talent early. But absolutely, I mean, we already do this, we want to support those founders for their entire journey. Right? Right. And we want to be there not only their first check at seed, but we also want to, you know, kind of be leading their series A or Series B, or Series C, or whatever it is, right, as they kind of grow and scale their businesses. And so, you know, I don't know kind of what the future holds in that regard. But I think will absolutely kind of continue to grow and scale with our companies over time. I, you know, we won't take that first box, right, we won't, you know, have kind of sub $50 million. I mean, we already are larger than that, right? But like, we will kind of be larger than that $50 million, kind of threshold for sure. Yeah,

Will Jarvis 24:59

that makes sense. I'm going off of that I, I've often had this question about why, like top quartile returns and venture are better than like the bottom 75%? Is it your sense that it's because it's something like ventures kind of a Keynesian beauty contest, where, you know, you as an investor, you're not only thinking about whether this company is viable, but it's whether this company can raise money at the a round B, round C round down the road. So even if like you find, let's say, this, this company, that it's an amazing company, but it's just too weird for any other investors to grok that they'll have trouble raising capital down the road. And can you get around that maybe by self funding startups as they go down? Kind of they're wiped by their lifecycle, like you described? Yeah,

eric 25:45

um, I think the answer is, it depends. I mean, There absolutely are companies where they're just real funky, and nobody wants to fund them. And that's why they die, right. And so either you're left to fund them yourself, or like, you know, and you hope that somebody clicks for somebody in the next 12 months, or like, you know, there are a lot of really weird scenarios out there. But I think the reason why venture returns are so they're not even at 20 they're there, they're, you know, 95 five, right, from a creative point of view, is that it's just an access game at the end of the day, right? And, and venture. Brand is, is is king, right? And the best founders want to work with the best brands. And the best brands are good proxies for talent and additional capital, and customers and all of those kinds of things. And so, you know, having a powerful brand, is I think, objectively speaking, like the most powerful moat in venture right, now, you can screw it up, for sure. And many have screwed it up. But but it takes a long time, you need to really work hard at screwing it up, I think just to screw it up. You know, but people forget that, that, you know, like Excel was struggling before, you know, they, they kind of led Facebook's, you know, Series A, you know, four or five, whatever it was right, like, you know, and obviously now they're I mean, you know, they're absolutely a world class firm. Right? But, but it wasn't always that way. Right? And this happens time and time again, right? There's this huge kind of narrative, kind of, you know, fallacy out there, that oftentimes either observers or certain, you know, LPs that are a little bit newer to venture kind of subscribe to, which is, you know, oh, if I, if I'm going to invest in in kind of venture funds, like, the only the only kind of thing that makes sense is to invest in a, you know, a cocktail party name, right? A Sequoia or whatever, right? It just couldn't be further from the truth, right? I mean, you go back and every 10 years, like almost kind of, to a tee. You know, there is this generation's Sequoia that gets created. Right? And, and you think about a decade ago, it was, you know, maybe kind of, you know, Andreessen and then five years before that it was Founders Fund. And five years before that, it was Lightspeed and five years before that, it was benchmark, right. And, and so on, and on, and on and on, right, like this. This is this happens time and time again, right. So like, your job should be to hunt for the next Andreessen or the next Founders Fund or the next whatever, right? Because they're, they're out there, right. And they're being built right before your very eyes. And those will be the ones that will provide you with to get best kind of asymmetric upside. So

Will Jarvis 28:40

that makes sense. I'm curious, how did you think about bootstrapping brand at the beginning, now contrast? Great brand, but in the beginning, you know, when you're just getting started, how do you think is it like just trying to find that one breakout that can kind of you know, like, like you said, Excel, like finding Facebook or something like that? Or is there anything else you can do to kind of get that going?

eric 28:58

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, there are so many different kinds of prongs, I think, to kind of that that answer. Right. But I think the most important thing, at the end of the day is consistency. Right? It is like it is understanding that this is a long game. Right? I was just talking with a friend this morning. And, you know, he started investing in venture a decade ago, I think 2010 Actually, and they're still waiting on some of their first returns. Right. You know, they've returned half of the fund are three quarters of the fund, but not the whole fund. So they're not getting care yet. Right? So and we're 1112 years in, right. So it is a long game. And so it requires showing up consistently every single day. Right? And that means making great investments. That means, you know, getting kind of PR where you can that means you know kind of building your Twitter following which is something I have done a poor job of but others on my team have done better jobs of you know, it means like having both people in the engine Stream, your peer set and founders kind of having good things to say about you, right? It's like, these are all things that require years of consistent effort, right? You can't just show up one day, put your hand in the air and say, hey, you know, I'm raising, I'm raising a venture fund, right? Like the people who do do that, oftentimes are people who have been doing it for a decade or more already, right, they already have built that credibility, they already have built that track record. And so then putting your hand in the air and saying I'm starting a fund is, is is a decade plus of really hard work. Right. So yeah, I think that's my answer is it's just, you know, a consistent kind of grind basically, across 5678 different factors. So

Will Jarvis 30:42

it makes a lot of sense. Has it been harder, easier than you thought? When you originally got started? Harder? It's been harder.

eric 30:52

Yeah, harder? Yeah.

Will Jarvis 30:54

Can you talk about? Can you talk about that it just just in all factors? Or is there one particular element that really surprised you as being more difficult than, than you imagined? Um

eric 31:13

I think let me put it this way, I think I would say that building our generation Sequoia, which is our expectation is harder, then probably building a comparable, a comparable kind of sized startup, let's say. And I say that principally because of the brand moat that I talked about earlier. Right. Where, you know, it's funny when you look at startups, right. And you look at incumbents. They tend to not have the best brand, ironically. Right. And so they're actually easier to unseat in that regard. I mean, obviously, there's, there's a whole host of other challenges, right? They're incumbents. So, you know, it's like an oracle or whatever, right? Where, you know, you're just you're trying to just extricate them from the situation, but they can't You can't they can't your you know, just to built in, right. So there are certainly other reasons, right. Why why, you know, it is harder, let's say, from a startup point of view, versus just focusing on brand. And but I think when you when you think about kind of what we've been talking about here for the past 2030 minutes, and there's typically only one, maybe two venture firms every decade, that become household names, right. And you put that in startup parlance, right. I mean, there are many, many, many, many, many dozens or hundreds of startups over a decade period that find a meaningful amount of success. Right. And so, yeah, I think I think it's, I think it's harder. I actually think it's harder than kind of building a building a startup, if that is your goal, right? If you simply want to raise capital and invest in some companies and all that kind of stuff, fine. It's it's, you know, it's hard but doable, right. But if your ambition is to build one of the best firms of our generation, very hard.

Will Jarvis 33:28

Well, it does seem to be quite, it's probably Yeah, generally more competitive, just generally, it is very competitive. Just because, like you said, if it's parallel business there, you know, most deals are not very good deals, finding the good deals, is a difficult challenge and getting in those deals. Although working early stage, you can't get around some of that you're fighting less ever deals, I assume. And more. It's fine to the people, which which seems to be a better challenge to try and tackle.

eric 33:54

Yeah, well, and the vast majority of VCs are just selling a commodity at the end of the day, right? And so that's even more of a wrinkle, right? That's why brand becomes even more important, because if you're selling the exact same thing, which is, you know, cold hard cash, right, like, what is your wedge? So?

Will Jarvis 34:12

Definitely, definitely. Yeah, it's a it's a real challenge. I got another question here. It's been a bluff term. But I asked this to most of my guests. What is common knowledge within your field that lay people might find surprising?

eric 34:33

Think just how much inside baseball goes into the entire industry, I maybe maybe will frame it in the context of fundraising for founders, right. But raising capital as a startup founder is not as simple as kind of putting your hand up in the air saying I'm fundraising, walking into a meeting pitching your company and then in a vacuum, somebody's saying, Yeah, that looks great, let's invest or no, that's bad. Let's not invest. Right? And I think you have to assume that everybody's talking like almost by default, right? Like, if you're talking to a venture firm, that has some shred of credibility or respect, right, like a halfway decent venture firm. They generally will all know one another, to some extent, right. And there are people that yes, have stronger relationships with, you know, certain firms or groups than others. But generally speaking, you know, that is, is kind of the plan. And that is kind of, I think, how it works. And I don't think that's common, right? I think most people would just say, hey, like, I have an idea. I'm gonna pitch it, I'm gonna hope that you know, this person likes it enough to invest. Right? But but you have to assume that that VC is probably talking to whoever introduced them, or how do they know them? And then they're talking about it with a couple other VCs and they're sharing notes and right, like, it's, even though they might not be the same firm, like, everybody is still talking. So

Will Jarvis 36:11

Got it. Got it. So that does seem like to me like, if you are fundraising, you should be aware of that and plan accordingly, I guess.

eric 36:21

Yeah. And I mean, I think it's the reason why. You know, like, if you think about like a, like a, like a v1 of AngelList, right? When they first started 10 years ago, whatever it was, right? Like, the original idea was, like, let's let's, or one of the original ideas is like, let's democratize access to startup investing, right? And like, everybody put your deals on this platform, and we'll fund it or whatever it's like, then and like, at the end of the day, like, that doesn't work, right. And it doesn't work, because like the best deals aren't an exceptional currency. Right? The best deals are very, very, very valuable. And so by definition, like, you have an incentive to keep them internal, either within your own firm or within your trusted kind of sphere of friends. Right? And I mean, that's, like, that's its own can of worms, right, in terms of why that's bad. And, you know, how that affects things like, you know, kind of, you know, access for capital for diverse founders. And like, it's a totally different kind of segment. But but that is nonetheless, the reality today. Right. And so, you know, yeah, I think it's, uh, it just kind of is what it is, as long as the incentives are kind of aligned that way, obviously, a lot of people working to fix that. But it's tricky. So, real challenge.

Will Jarvis 37:32

Do you have any advice for founders who are going out to fundraise? What do most people get wrong? When they when they go to do that?

eric 37:39

Yeah, um

think maybe the, I think kind of the two pieces of fundraising advice I'd give are number one, like you have to, you have to run it like a process. Yep. Much like, much like you would any sales process, right? Like, there has to be a level of structure and rigor that goes into it. You can't just simply say, oh, like, I just don't want to raise like, I'm gonna go talk to somebody this week, and maybe somebody and week from now. And like, you will never raise capital if you don't run a very systematic, rigorous, thoughtful process. So that's, that's number one. Right? I think number two, is understanding the signal and quality of how you are getting in the door. And yes, there are VCs, us included, who will invest in people who cold email you, right? But it's harder, there's no doubt, right? Like, because trust is involved, right? Trust is involved, like somebody is giving you capital, right, and they have a fiduciary obligation to their investors to you know, generate the best returns and to not have that money get lost, right? And so, you know, understanding that, like, hey, if so, and so well respected founder acts, or if another very well respected VC, whatever like is the person introducing you the probability of success that you have goes up along in having, you know, five to 10, HIGH signal introductions versus 100 meetings that came through cold email, like you're, you're dramatically more likely to get one of those five convert than you are, you know, the 100 cold emails. And I mean, this is coming from somebody who, you know, did a ton of cold email in the early days, like it works, but it's a volume game, and it's significantly lower conversion than than the other way. So

Will Jarvis 39:31

that's great. That's really great advice. Well, Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find you? Where can people find contrary if they want to check it out?

eric 39:41

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Well, I mean, if you want to learn more about country, best way to kind of, you know, learn more is basically just check us [email protected] Or, you know, shoot us a note at at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter. So, love it. Love it. Awesome. Thanks, Eric. All right. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.

William Jarvis 40:02

Thanks for listening we'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In this episode, we're joined by Eli Dourado to discuss his recent article Heretical thoughts on AI. How LLMs will interact with the culture war, how alignment can make the great stagnation worse, and a whole lot more. 

Transcript:William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways that is worse in the past towards a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.

Unknown Speaker 0:41

Well, Eli, how are you doing this afternoon?

eli 0:43

I'm doing great. Well,

Will Jarvis 0:44

are you doing? Well, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. Again, again, one of our first repeat guests. This is exciting. Eli, do you mind giving just a brief bio for folks who might have not heard the last episode and kind of some of the big ideas are interested in right now?

eli 1:00

Sure, sure. So I'm a senior research fellow at the Center for growth and opportunity at Utah State University. And I'm an economist by training. And basically what I work on and think about and try to do in the real world is in the great stagnation, right. So try to increase total factor productivity growth back to at least 2% a year where it belongs, rather than the much, much lower rate of growth that we've been having, since the early 1970s. But especially since about 2005. So I think about like a bunch of industries, energy, transportation, aerospace, particularly I love you know, health housing, you know, kind of the big the big sectors of the economy that have have not really grown as fast as they should have over that period.

Will Jarvis 1:49

I love it. I love it. Um, Eli, if you had to rate how we'd been doing the 2020s, or about 21% 20% of the way for you so far. You know, do you think we are on the right trajectory to escape the great stagnation or what do things? How do things look for you?

eli 2:06

i Yeah, I'm, you know, it's a little skewed by COVID. Obviously, like, we don't know. But what would happen, you know, Operation warp speed was like an Dawn complacent event. Right. So that's, that's, that's great. Yeah, but overall, like, I don't see any signs of like, you know, kind of waking up out of our slumber and and, you know, taking seriously the need to, like, grow and like these, these big industrial sectors.

Will Jarvis 2:38

Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, it's tough man. And even people are friendly to cause I hate to, you know, we've had a lot of Essex County MPs had a lot of success recently, which I've been really excited about, that makes me bullish, but then, you know, it's time to build Marc Andreessen still, you know, privately, well prevent building an Atherton. So it's, it's tough man. It's tough out there for, for folks trying to fix things. I'm curious. One of the biggest high points recently has been LLM is chat GPT, you know, really can cause kind of caught the imagination of everyone. I found it quite useful in my day to day, in fact, I used it to help a cup, right, a couple of conference submissions, I thought would take, you know, a full day of writing ended up finishing them in about 15 minutes with thanks to chat gbta. So, you know, there's there's been some, you know, productivity increases, but then again, it may not be the end all be all for knowledge workers and improving productivity. What do you think, you know, when we look back five years from now, what will we think about the LLM kind of hype train right now? Will it have solved some of these productivity growth problems? Or will be be kind of disappointed about the effects?

eli 3:49

That's a great question. So I think over the next five years, these models are just gonna get better and better. Yeah. Right. And they are going to play a role in our lives. And especially I think they will affect pretty significantly the content industry, the media industry, the advertising industry, things like that, you know, like the media industry is only 2% of GDP, but it is it punches like way above its weight in terms of like cultural salience, I say, right, and so like, for people like you and me, we spend a big chunk of our day in front of a screen, right? And we're consuming media. And so it's gonna feel like, oh, wow, it's this massive change. But if you look at, you know, how it's affecting these sort of large industrial sectors that are in the world of atoms and not the world of bits, like, I think the impact, you know, I think it probably will be minimal. I think it's conceivable that it wouldn't be minimal, but it would rely on us sort of Not sabotaging it in like we've sabotaged everything else in these sectors for the last two years.

Will Jarvis 5:07

So actually, I want to take this in in an interesting direction. This might be a little unexpected, but I would love your take on this. One of my big worries about the alignment community and like everyone focused on that is like, you know, I feel like LLM are one of these few areas of innovation in our economy right now. And this whole, like, kind of Luddite sentiment that we need to stop like whatever like we need to, clearly this is the end of the world, this kind of like revelation to ask, you know, New Testament free, millennia Aryan Protestantism, or what something weird, like the apocalypse is coming, we need to stop it. And it is, I'm much more more worried about the stagnation Apocalypse that is upon us immediately, then this somewhat more imaginary alignment problem, which I believe is still promising, we should be thinking about it, but I don't think we should stop the brakes on our progress because of it.

eli 5:59

Yeah, I, I agree with you. And to Yes, and you, I would also say add the the issue of just even I think the idea of like moderating the output of these MLMs is kind of crazy, because it it's going to turn the LLM into a culture war object. Oh, yes. Great point, like, like the idea that, that we have to make sure that the LLM 's never say anything taboo or offensive. Yes, in the same way that we kind of make sure that like, we, you know, we limit the offensiveness of what you can say on Twitter or Facebook, right? Like there's like you can, you can obviously say some offensive things, but but that battle over where the line is, and who should be in charge, and how we police this, it's coming, you know, it's going to come for the LLM. So it's it's going to be this very unpleasant cultural war extension, over over LLM. And so I think I do think like, we should be thinking about, like, how can we make credibly neutral? LLM? Oh, nice. Right. Like, yeah, like, what is what is, is there an approach to that, right, and I think like open source models, and, you know, the tools that we might be able to build that, that allow, like federated training, or that, you know, that sort of can do fundraising for for an open source model that that would be like more credibly neutral, and that you could you could run on your own device instead of running it in the cloud, right, that those kinds of innovations, I think, are going to be important if we want to avoid, you know, like, a very unpleasant few years.

Will Jarvis 7:47

Yes, yes. This is a great point, the political football what chat GPT thinks about Joe Biden or DeSantis? Or something like, it doesn't, right? It's it's quite bizarre thing to be worried about. But it does seem like a lot of people have this top of mind, the end of the day. A very interesting, do you think, um, you know, LLM will make knowledge workers a lot more productive, perhaps like consultants, you know, like, you can just build the deck immediately. You don't have to spend hours grinding on it for you, like, will it make, you know, producing content or like, you know, analysis easier? Or do you think it just is kind of like more of a parlor trick than we want to believe right now?

eli 8:27

I have, you know, I've like tried to use it a few times. And it hasn't, hasn't really, it's not like self evidently. Put anything, you know, changed my process in any way. It's not, for me, it's not been compelling. I think. Now, it kind of depends on what kind of content you're you're producing, right? Like, if I'm, if I'm writing, like, a blog post on my personal blog, like, I aspire to, like, the highest levels of like, surprise and newness, originality, right? In those posts, I'm not writing to like, check a box or to like, submit a form, or, you know, or, like, you know, like, like, and I think if you're, if you are, you know, I think there's a lot of a lot of process in the, in the world, right, where it's just like, we need you to write this many sentences about this, you know, on your application, so that so that we can can move forward. And like, you know, I think it might be able to help some with that. But then, I mean, the real question is, like, that process is really stupid, right? Like, like, if we're ever kind of, if it's if it's kind of like reducible to like, a lesser number of bits, like, we should just be like sort of asking for those bits, rather than using AI is like a compression and expansion tool to like You know, to, to like, you know, mediate between the thing, you know, the two humans who really just need to exchange a smaller number of bits. Right? So I don't know. And then I think about like, you know, business processes, like we saw, Microsoft announced, like Microsoft Teams premium, right, which has like some tools that look like, okay, like, like, meeting summaries and like, you can figure out what the action items were from the meeting, like, really quickly and stuff like, that seems like, not obviously bad, or, you know, like, maybe potentially useful. But like my question, like, in terms of productivity, it's like, you know, what I want to know, is like, when do we start replacing people? Process? Like, when do we lay people off? Because like, Oh, we don't need you anymore, because we have an AI model to do your job. And I don't know, when that's coming in the business world, right. Like, like, you know, with with word processors, like we got rid of a bunch of secretaries. Yeah. typing pool people. Right. And, yeah, I'd be curious to like, to know, like, what are the when are those layoffs coming? Because until the layoffs happen, like, we're not getting more, we're not really getting more productive? Gotcha. It's, I think it's like, it's a, I wouldn't say I wouldn't say it's an illusion either, but it's just like, we're getting more information. That is possibly not really that high value.

Will Jarvis 11:35

Gotcha. So this is actually this is really worrisome to me, because it seems like, you know, this is one of the big areas of, of hyper, like, you know, when you point someone to like, oh, like, you know, we're getting, you know, look, progress is increasing so fast, and all these things, and they pointed to MLMs. And then it's like, well, if there's really not a ton there, at the end of the day, it's like, maybe we're more cooked and, you know, even the the bears would like to believe.

eli 12:01

Yeah, yeah. That's, I mean, that's, that's kind of my concern with it as well, that they that sort of, like people can say, like, Oh, don't worry, like economic growth is coming. We can like, sort of sit back and wait for it to happen, as you know, Moore's Law progresses. And yes, you know, people are training these models and stuff, and we're gonna have like, you know, post capitalist, like, luxury, everything, because we're just gonna have the AI models produce everything. I don't think that's the world we're in. So. So, you know, I think we got it, we got to, we got to work pretty hard and figure out how to unlock these, these more physical sectors of the economy, and, and take the most advantage of the AI tools. Because I think, you know, like AI tools could have huge benefits in say medicine. Yes, right, if they're applied properly, but probably it's gonna be illegal for, you know, some period of time to like, apply them the way we should. So we got to fix that. Right?

Will Jarvis 13:06

I just want to highlight for the audience how, and I agree, you live with your perspective. I like a lot, but but just how different it is when I visit Berkeley, and I'm talking to everyone, and they're literally like, These things are so powerful. They're gonna kill all of us in 10 years. And I'm not saying for retirement. I mean, this is like what someone told me at a house party, right, a very smart, well known, you know, rationalist blogger, right. And is it just it these things are like diametrically opposed, right, which is, which is, which is very interesting, but I do think it is the case. I think you're right on this, you know, that that the they really are, it's just the it's not it's not quite there, there's something people are missing. What do you think? Why do really smart people have such differing views on this? Do you have any? That's like a meta question. That's very difficult. Maybe not, you're not able to answer it, and that's fine. But but do you have any sense of why that is?

eli 14:05

I don't know. I, you know, thinking about my own experience, right. Like,

I'm a little bit older than some of these. The most enthusiastic AI proponents, and I've been burned before. Right. Like, like, like, you know, I think that I think that's, I think that's part of it, is that, you know, I was, you know, I kind of was around for like, the rise of the web, right. I got on the web as a teenager and tinkered and I was like, this is gonna change the world. And I was, like, super excited about it. And, you know, late 90s, early 2000s, you know, continued to follow it and stuff and I was like, Yeah, this is gonna, this is going to change the world. And it did change the world. But just it didn't change the economy. Right, right. It didn't it didn't you know, it didn't it didn't get deliver massive amounts of growth. And I think there's not a lot of people who, you know, if they're if they're kind of like, they're both like tech aware, and, you know, sort of economic See, in terms of their way of thinking, you know, and have been around. Right to get burned the first time. Right. And so I think that's, that's, I think that that is, you know, part of my perspective is that is that I kind of, I think got it wrong, right. Before that, I thought, I thought digital technology was going to do more for us than it than it did. Right. And now we're just it feels very much like, Okay, this is just an extension of that.

Will Jarvis 15:48

Right, make the mix makes a lot of sense. Going back to what we can actually do, to kind of juice growth. You know, we talked, it was probably a year and a half ago about NEPA. Have there been I know, at the time, the Trump administration was working on a couple of different things and trying to get things moving again, has there been any positive movement on kind of fixing kind of these broken, you know, permitting and environmental review processes in the US?

eli 16:15

You know, legally, I don't think there's been, not much has moved the needle, right, like so. So Trump did get some reforms through on, you know, changing the NEPA implementing regulations. Some of those were, a small number of those were immediately rolled back by by the Biden White House when they got in. Some of them have stood up for now, some of the guidance like that Trump rolled back also like the Biden, Biden administration is now in the process of reinstating. So so legally, like, you know, like some of the Trump changes have stood in some have, you know, I think think that Biden administration might might still going to take another crack at figuring out what, you know, what a more comprehensive reform could look like. And I think, you know, according to their last rulemaking on this, like, they were going to do more in the future. So, so, you know, we'll see, but it's been it's been, it's been pretty marginal. And but I think that there has been something really positive that's happened over the last year and a half. Yeah. Which is, more and more people have become aware of the problem and have agreed that it it's a problem. Right, so So I think, I think in particular, the, like the climate community, right, people who really want to build a lot of clean energy, yeah, projects over the next 10 years. I think they're starting to realize like, okay, tactically, if we want to build this much clean energy, we're gonna have to do a lot of environmental reviews. And, you know, conservative opponents of this can use NEPA to object to it, right. So you see, you know, you're seeing, you know, offshore wind projects, getting

Unknown Speaker 18:09

NEPA getting

eli 18:09

challenged, right, like, like, by by people who are like, ostensibly are concerned about, like, some, like crabs or something like that. Right. And, and that is holding things back. I think you're, you know, what, one thing that I think is still not in public consciousness, but there's a case where people are challenging in some immigration reforms on the basis of NEPA. Right, so like, I think it's like the Biden administration's decision to stop building the border wall has been challenged on NEPA grounds. Yes. So and that case is live. And it's like ongoing in the in the DC District Court. So. So So I, you know, I think that as I think that as that awareness grows, so there was, you know, a lot of talk with in the last Congress about, about some kind of permitting reform for energy. And this was pushed by Joe Manchin and part of his deal for supporting the the inflation Reduction Act. Right. And I think, I think that that conversation will continue. But even even the mentioned Bill was, like, pretty marginal, on terms of the reforms that it would do so. So I don't know, I think that probably what needs to happen is there probably needs to be some marginal reform pass that like, you know, it's probably not going to do much we need to have a few years go by where not much gets done. And then we need to revisit it and say, like, oh, look, not much got done. We need to we need to have more, more serious reform.

Will Jarvis 19:45

Gotcha, gotcha. You like if if I said, you know, you need to fix NEPA, you've got a year. Let's say I give you a war chest of, I don't know 10 million bucks. Is there anything you know, is there anything anything like any and you had to give your best shot? Well, Would the approach be there?

eli 20:03

I don't know. I think you know, I so one of the things I'm thinking about more and more is, let's say there was someone in the White House who was really committed to this. Yeah, I think there's a NEPA is an act of Congress. Right? That's right. You don't you don't get you don't unilaterally get to repeal acts of Congress if you are president. But there isn't a lot that the executive can do. Gotcha. Right. There's a lot. Just just executive action. Yeah. So. So, you know, if there is a were to be a new president in, you know, a couple years, and and they wanted to really, really like spend their political capital. Yeah. On, on fixing, you know, maximal permanent reform? Yeah, they could, they could do quite a lot without Congress. And I think that's kind of one thing I'm thinking a lot about is, you know, I don't know when we'll have the opportunity. Right. If we, if we had the opportunity, what would what would the playbook be?

Will Jarvis 21:01

Gotcha, that makes sense? Well, I love it. And, Eli, I'm really glad you're admiring this problem. I think this is an incredibly important problem. And, you know, I'm quite concerned about stagnation and not enough people working on it, but I'm talking to people like you, it gives me hope that there is that, you know, there's still a chance we can we can escape it, which which I'm happy about. Eli, you know, if the audience wants to think more deeply about these issues around NEPA, etc, and try and contribute and help them move the needle here, where should they go? What would you recommend?

eli 21:38

Well, you know, my organization, the Center for growth and opportunities, looking very closely at this issue, so yeah, find us online at the cgo.org. Yeah, that's, that's the main thing I would recommend.

Will Jarvis 21:53

I love that. I love that. Well, Eli, thanks again for hopping on. It was great to catch up and catch up. And, again, I'm really excited to working on this problem. I think it's one of the most important problems and it's quite neglected as well, which is good.

eli 22:06

Thanks. Well, Matt. Great. Great to be with you.

William Jarvis 22:08

Absolutely. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives.

In this episode, we're joined by previous guest Ben Reinhardt to discuss his newest venture, Speculative Technologies. https://www.spec.tech/library/introducing-speculative-technologiesWe also discuss the ins and outs of starting a new organization, how to bootstrap legitimacy, the second order effects of technology, large language models, and the future of robotics and its current challenges. 

Transcript:

William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways it is worse in the past, where it's a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.

Will Jarvis 0:38

Ben, how you doing this evening?

Ben Reinhardt 0:40

I'm doing well. Um, as I mentioned earlier, I'm slightly overwhelmed. But other than that, things are things are going well. Yeah, being a

Will Jarvis 0:49

founder is no joke, man. They they don't tell you this, you know, the founder school we all go to before we get there.

Ben Reinhardt 0:56

Oh, man. Okay. So something that I really I've realized is that I think that starting any organization is the same regardless of like, what the form of that organization is. So like, you know, it's like, everybody knows that like starting a company, you sort of like roughly go through the same, the same things. But I think that starting a nonprofit is the same thing. And which is also the same thing as starting an academic lab. Because I know a number of people who are in network labs, and it's like the exact same process of things where you basically have to, like, somehow bootstrap legitimacy for this thing that has no track record. Yes.

Will Jarvis 1:37

So and how do you go about this? Yeah, it is. It is a interesting job. What do you think's been particularly good for you in bootstrapping legitimacy?

Ben Reinhardt 1:45

Um, and good for me. Like, I think that having written a, an obscenely long piece about my entire thought process has actually been pretty good for bootstrapping legitimacy. In the sense of a, like, I've clearly at least thought through what I'm doing. Right. And I clearly, I might be wrong about it. But I clearly like have, I'm not just like making things up. I'm thinking that's yeah, no, this is a thing I think about all the time is like how to bootstrap legitimacy, ya know, coming on your podcast, right?

Will Jarvis 2:34

Doing the podcast tour, you know, like, give your name upsides of different folks that have done some good stuff. And yeah, writing your ideas down seems to be important. Writing online, I think that's a really powerful mechanism. Definitely, definitely.

Ben Reinhardt 2:47

The thing, the thing that I would say about writing online writing, specifically online is specifically as opposed to generically, like writing things that are like, very much like, oh, like, you're the person who wrote that thing that had like this very particular opinion, right is good. Also, just really, truly it's, it's once you can get a couple of people to be excited about what you're doing. It's like leveraging that, right. So it's like, the like finding, finding program managers by getting, like one researcher in a field to take you seriously. And then they like, introduce you to other people. And then look, that's how you bootstrap legitimacy? Definitely, I

Will Jarvis 3:36

don't know. I think that that makes it. That's a that's a great segue for the audience. Ben, can you talk a little bit about what you're building? It's really, really exciting.

Ben Reinhardt 3:44

Sorry, I got ahead of myself. So I'm building a organization called speculative technologies. We're a nonprofit research organization, modeled after after arpa. And the the sort of mandate that I've set out for us is to build new paradigms in materials and manufacturing. That's, that's sort of like the one liner about it.

Will Jarvis 4:13

I love that. I love that. And I know you spent a lot of time going to conferences, exploring manufacturing and new technologies around material science. Was there an aha moment where you realize there's a lot we can do here that we have not done yet as a species?

Ben Reinhardt 4:30

I'm not sure if there was an okay. I'm not sure if there was an aha moment around that. Can I can I tell you what, there was an apple. So the aha moment was was like that, like in in basically all domains. There are things that we could be doing that we're not doing, right. So the trick is, is is less to figure out where you can do things that you that people aren't doing, but to knit almost like narrow down. So aha moment was around the fact that we should be focusing on on materials of manufacturing, and that came from this, sort of the, like, basically crystallizing the, the opinion that again, many people may disagree with me on this, that the like, biggest, sort of like social and economic effects of technologies are all second order effects. And the and I can I can dig into that, but then the technologies that are like most likely to create second order effects are materials and new manufacturing processes. Like every time we create one of those, there's these this like ripple of second order effects that happen out in the world.

Will Jarvis 5:46

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Ben Reinhardt 5:48

Yeah, um, the example I, that I point to the most is how, you know, a couple of decades ago, like, not really not too long ago, overpopulation was an existential threat to humanity, right, like, you have The Population Bomb. And you have basically people worried about this, this exponential number of people leading to starvation and a cascade of effects that, you know, it was like migrations that would destabilize even developed countries and, and, you know, like, really bad things for humanity. And if you look around the world today, we passed the eighth billionth person in the world not too long ago, and like, not to not that much fanfare, right. And that's because over overpopulation, just like isn't a thing we worry about. And that is, in large part, thanks to the fact that we invented the haber bosch process, which lets us fix nitrogen from the air and create much more fertilizer than we could just using natural fertilizers. We figured out how to do that some amount of genetic engineering, so you have the whole green revolution. And in many plants in crops that are much more productive, and then more generally, like, we create a lot of technology that have made people a lot more wealthy, which, if tends to make people have fewer kids. So between the three of those, these, like, second order effects of technologies, this this existential threat was was no longer a problem. So that's, that's like, the classic one. And then we can like point to like, all these other things, right? Like, you know, it's like, we don't really like whales are doing a lot better, in large part, because we use electricity and natural gas instead of whale oil. Our cities are no longer covered in insert, not because we got made really good technology for cleaning sweat off of buildings, but because, again, we don't use coal for heating and powering factories anymore. Right. Like, and like, I mean, everybody points to the ways in which, you know, like computers have sort of like reconfigured society. Right. So anyway, well, etc, etc, the list goes on. But it's all. All sort of like, the social and economic effects are second order effects that were very hard to predict in the first place.

Will Jarvis 8:30

Gotcha. And so these positive second order effects. It sounds like you either think, too many people are focusing on software, and not enough people are focusing on manufacturing and material science. Is that correct? Or is it just hire less leverage to humanity to focus on manufacturing and material science?

Ben Reinhardt 8:51

Or, but I'm not sure if it's, like, I don't know, the balance of like, number of absolute number of people. Right. But I think that right now, there is a lot of work, like the work itself, like I can't think of a lot of work in well, even actually, rescind that even. There's even a lot of work in in, in computer science that's not being done. I just think that there is like, a particularly large amount of work that's not being done in materials and manufacturing, sort of because of, of institutional constraints. Gotcha. And so, and like, that's where we're, I see sort of, like, my highest leverage point, being, you know, it's like, yeah.

Will Jarvis 9:49

Can you talk about like, what are those institutional drag factors that you've noticed, that prevent people from making more innovation in these spaces?

Ben Reinhardt 9:58

So Let's see, let's, I guess what I like to do is like walk through the different institutions that we sort of have that better that are responsible for that, we would hope are doing this. So, in in academia, a lot of the incentives are around doing new things like really, really like, and especially new ideas, and like showing that that a new idea is feasible. So people will, will come up with like, with a new material, right? Or they'll come up with like, one piece of a manufacturing process, and then they'll say, Okay, well, you did it. I wrote my paper, I've done like, let's, and then, if they tried to do sort of, like, build on it, reviewers are like, well, like, and their peers are like, Well, this has been done. This is not, there's not new why, why, right? Why are you doing this. And so what it does is it creates things that, like, are completely unscalable are not that they're unscalable, but they require a lot more work to scale. You'll see this all all over the place where we're scaling, like materials, and manufacturing processes often requires as much research as inventing them in the first place. So that work is not being done in academia, and then or you get a situation where you have a whole bunch of components. And again, you need to do just as much research to put those components together into a functional system, as you do to invent the components in the first place. So that's, that's actually Kenya to, then we think about startups. And, like, startups are really great mechanisms for scaling things that you know, how to scale, and building products and selling things to customers. Right. And, and, like, that's, that is a great thing. But the kind of work that that I was describing, is still really researched, there's like, really sort of fundamental uncertainties in there. And so it just like does not make a good investment, both because of the levels of uncertainty, not just about, like, whether it will work, but whether it will like turn into a product even, or like something that you can cap. And additionally, the type of work that you need to do is often creates public goods, whether you like it or not, in the sense of like, if there's if you think of them as being like some very large design space, then like the work once you say like, okay, like this point in design space is the right point, everybody else can copy that, but it might take you like many years and millions of dollars to find that point. And like, that is that's like the opposite of a moat. That's exactly the anti moat. Yes. And then, and so between those things, and just like the timescales and amount of money involved, and the amount of value you can capture, it means that like doing this work is just not well suited for a venture capital back startup. Right. And then we might turn to industrial labs, as as sort of a third and final institution. And, you know, it's like this work was in the past, done by industrial labs, like Bell Labs, they, you know, your, your classic example. But sort of due to a combination of restructuring of the industry and like a lot of outsourcing of r&d to startups, partially because of that, partially because of just increased investor expectations from the public markets. And then third, just in terms of like, the the companies that sort of have the, the, the slack to do really sort of speculative work being primarily software companies now. You don't have companies doing this sort of work, especially when it would sort of go contrary to their main product line. So so they'll do research, when it's like, okay, like this, this will, like, augment our main product line, but when it's something like, Okay, we're gonna, like, reinvent the process by which we make this thing like they have no incentive to do that. So those that that is a very long explanation of why this sort of work has not have a home in any institution right now. Right. That makes sense.

Will Jarvis 14:47

And how difficult has it been been to convince like philanthropy and funders to fund it? Because it makes sense, right? There's no place that does this right now. And It's like it is speculative, speculative, it's in the name, right? It's speculative technologies. It's like, we're not sure we're gonna find somebody, we'll probably find something out there. We're not exactly sure what its gonna be. You know how it's like, that sounds like a difficult pitch, you know, I just finished fundraising. And it's pretty hard to fundraise. And we had this pretty, pretty concrete thing where we're selling. And I mean, it sounds like a pretty difficult thing to go out there and do but you've been successful at it. Can you talk about that process at all? And how you think you've made that work?

Ben Reinhardt 15:26

Yeah, I would say I've been somewhat successful. I mean, I like I need to be more successful in order to sort of achieve achieve our goals. Let's Let's call a spade a spade. I mean, right now, our funding has come from very generous donors who kind of get it already, right? Like it was not, because they did not give us money, because I convinced them that this was a problem worth addressing. I like that, that is the I would actually say like, that's sort of like, the biggest next thing that I need to do is really like start trying to convince people of this. And so in that sense, it was a matter of finding. funders who already realized that this was this was an issue worth tackling. And doing the slightly easier argument of like, the way that the way that I'm proposing to tackle it has a chance of succeeding. Gotcha. So that's what they're betting on.

Will Jarvis 16:51

Like that. So you start with initial, I think there's a good lesson here, though, initially, you start with a group of core people who are sympathetic to what you're building, and you come to them and say, Hey, like, I've got this really good plan to go out there and try and solve this. You know, what do you think about this plan? Like, would you be interested in supporting this? And then you bootstrap to start convincing people as you build success over time?

Ben Reinhardt 17:12

Yeah, I assume I assume it's similar to building a startup, right? Like, you're gonna go, yeah. Your initial customers are gonna be the ones that like, get it. Exactly. And then once once they start sort of like having a lot of success and getting the testimonials, then maybe you'll start to convince other people who right now or skeptical, but like, then once you show them momentum,

Will Jarvis 17:35

exactly. You get these early adopters, right? And then you can move into like the more general public over time, as you

Ben Reinhardt 17:42

succeed, see, building building things, it like building new organizations is the same. The domain

Will Jarvis 17:49

is very wide. So it's a wise observation. I think this is it's definitely on the money. So I've been out of my curiosity, I wanted to how are you think about finding program managers? And can you talk about what the program manager role looks like? They are program managers. Right? That's the right, I'm using the right term there. Yeah.

Ben Reinhardt 18:06

Yeah. I'm not sure that that's exactly the right title. Yeah, that may change in the future, but like, DARPA calls them program managers, that seems like a reasonable name. So the problem with it is that they're, they're PMS, you also have product managers and project managers. And all three of these roles are are wildly different. So anyway, how do I go about finding them? So the question is, how do I go about finding them?

Will Jarvis 18:41

So can you describe the role and then we can talk about you know, like, ideal, who, you know, who slots in there? And

Ben Reinhardt 18:46

yeah, so the the role is effectively to be kind of like the mini CEO of a specific of a program and what I mean by a program is a roughly five year sit like five year thing that starts off by doing a lot of planning around basically like, what, what projects need to happen within this program umbrella, who's going to be doing those, those projects, like why are we doing this whole thing in the first place? What's going to happen at the end of this thing? And like, you know, what are the risks? I right now are rough framework is trying to first like go through and answer the questions in the homebuyer catechism, which is like, what are you trying to do describe it with zero jargon to how's it done today? I may be mixing up the order on these three What is new in what you're trying to do? For who cares? Five? What are the risks? Six? How long will it take? And seven? How much will it cost? I may have missed one, put in the show notes. But anyway, let's just roughly answer those questions anyway. So like, you plan it, and then the program managers job is to, like, figure that out, and then figure out like, who at other organizations we could work with, give money to, in order to work on separate projects, that all sort of, like, have to work together towards building, you know, a final or final goal. So that's the role. And then the way that I go about finding them, frankly, is mostly some combination of telling people I know, like, Hey, I'm looking for people who might have really ambitious and good program ideas. Yes, introduce them to me. And then to kind of having a very, like rough sense of, of a program that might might fit into the organization. You know, reading, reading a bunch of papers in that area, and then contacting the authors and being like, Hey, I read your paper. I'm really interested in like, you know, just like what you think about this more broadly, do you think that there's room for programs there? And then if they're like, oh, yeah, like, there might be room for a program there that I'm like, Oh, cool. Like, do you know anybody who might be really great at at running that? And then, you know, it's like, they'll introduce me to other people. It's like, and then put me to other papers, and then you wash, rinse and repeat.

Will Jarvis 21:46

Make sense? Make sense? And are there any characteristics you found that make people successful in these types of roles? Are they kind of like, inside are outsiders like, you know, do they like they know the field? Well, but they're not exactly they fit the mold of like, your average like, person who who ends up as a tenured professor at in academia? What kind of characteristics these people have?

Ben Reinhardt 22:08

Yeah, so So, like full disclosure, I'm still figuring this out. So I can tell you something like, I'll tell you my current height, no, I can tell you my current hypotheses, I just yeah, like, want this to like, like, have like, high epistemic uncertainty about what I'm about to say. So I think what it so whenever someone's doing one of these programs, it's going to be like, broader than any one person can have done. But they should have, like, some strong experience in like, at least one piece of what the program will be. They need to have done, like, some amount of like, real physical research. And so what I what I say is, like, they don't need to have a PhD, but you need to have done something like, like that, right? Where you're like, I spent like, like, you know, what it is like to suffer while trying to get the like, real world to yield up and secrets in doing something that nobody's ever done before. Right? So it's like, yeah, you don't that's that's like, pretty hard requirement. And then beyond that, it like, it's, it's there's like, it's like this, like some combination of like curiosity. But like the curiosity of a scientist, and in critical thinking of a scientist combined with like, the hustle of A and the hustle and ambition of a startup founder, with like, a giant dash of epistemic humility is kind of like, the general recipe.

Will Jarvis 23:55

That's awesome. That sounds hard to find.

Ben Reinhardt 23:58

Yeah, it's really hard.

Will Jarvis 24:01

Not impossible, which is good. You know, like, like, it says, is most of your job it will ended up being recruiting at the end of the day,

Ben Reinhardt 24:10

I think. I mean, unless, unless, you know, so that ends up being someone else's job. Right. Like, that's, again, similar other things that are the same with startups. Right. Like, at the end of the day, the founders job ends up being just like recruiting and fundraising, for the most part, right. Yeah, I would estimate that there's like, under 10,000 of these people in the world, like that's, that's kind of like my rough.

Will Jarvis 24:42

That sounds about right, rough hunch. Yeah, it's about 1000, though.

Ben Reinhardt 24:47

It is much more than 1000. I suspect. There's more than 1000. And I suspect to some extent, it can be trained. Like I don't Yeah, I think then that's kind of the hope with building a new institutional structure, right? Is that like, at first, the only people that you can get are the ones who like through some set of luck are like, good for that institution. But eventually, like institutions kind of generate people who are, are good for them. Like, yes. I don't know. Like, I would argue that, because startups became such a big thing. There are more people who would make good founders in the world, then, right. Then there were like, in the 1980s.

Will Jarvis 25:37

Yeah, Matt, Matt Clifford talks about that, you know, what to? His question always is in a given country, what did the ambitious people do? And if you're in Singapore, the Yeah, civil service or something like that. And then and perhaps with a in Ben Reinhart, Stan, you know, people go and they've come program managers. That's what

Ben Reinhardt 25:55

I agree with. I agree with Matt on most, like, by default, I agree with Matt on things so

Will Jarvis 26:01

smart guys forgot. Yeah, exactly. That's cool. So Ben, other than fundraising, and recruiting and everything, and trying to do everything all at once, which, you know, building new works is, you know, what is the single biggest challenge you face so far? That if you could wave a magic wand, and alleviate, what would that be?

Ben Reinhardt 26:22

Besides, besides fundraising in recruiting? Mmm hmm. I have to go like pretty far down in my life. My my priority list, let's biggest challenge. I mean, so like, I guess, like, interested like, this is this is not particularly. And I guess the kind of is tied to those is like a broader question of like, how do you know that research is good? Like, like, like, that, like that challenge? Right? Which is like, both sounds incredibly philosophical. But then it's also like, like, how will like the question of like, how will we know when we're successful? Right? Like, what, what does that what will that actually look like? And then the, on top of that, is, is there any way to get leading indicators of the fact that, that we're doing good work? Right? Yes. Because it's like, you can see, throughout history, like both like inventors and scientists, who don't see the impact of their work for, until after they're dead, right. Yeah. And that's like, that is both hard to to course, correct on and also hard to convince other people that we're doing a good job, if that's the case. So, so really trying to figure out like, how do you? How do you judge yourself? Is, is I think, a big challenge. That is,

Will Jarvis 28:03

it's a huge, it's a huge challenge in the research space. I have you do you have any sense of like, how to go about, you know, measuring these things, you got to talk to Don Braden, a long time ago, he had some labeling, which I cannot quite recall, just checking in with people. And if they're still like, following interesting paths or something, I don't know. What would you think? Yeah.

Ben Reinhardt 28:21

Yeah. Um, I mean, right now, right now, the, the hunch we're acting off of, is sort of tied up in these roadmaps of, like, here's our hypothesis about like, what the things that we would want to hit in order to achieve this technology and sort of like, almost like, really going deep on not necessarily a justification, but like a reasoning behind all of it to ourselves. So you can say like, okay, like, we think that this technology is worth building, because it will have like, these general purpose, because like, it will have, like these general purpose uses. We could potentially imagine a future where, where it could people could do this. And then like, here are the biggest risks and the things that we need to do to show that these are not risks are like XYZ. And so it's almost like kind of just building up this like, really big causal chain. And I think at some point, you sort of just need to say like, okay, like, are we executing on this causal chain? Yes, no. How are things going? But, but I think it's really hard to it's like, I might almost push back against the idea of like, measurement per se. Got it. In the sense that like, I think that that measurement involves like, somehow We're making like a universal, like a universally transferable sense of something. Yes. And, and I think, almost, again, this is this is not something that many people would agree with. But I think that I think that we've lost in that we need to do is kind of build like these like chains of trust, where it's like, okay, like that, like, I build trust with the program manager, they build up trust with scientists, the scientists build up trust with each other. And then, like, get everybody to be really honest, and just sort of say, like, like, Is this is this working? Is this stupid? Right? And go from that. And it's like, that's, I realize, like, deeply unsatisfying to everybody, including myself. But I think like, I think this is, is a thing that has sort of been lost and like, on the margin, we need to do more.

Will Jarvis 31:03

With does seem like a lot is lost, if you just get obsessed with the free rider problem. And you're, you know, and all you're trying to track is not getting, you know, like on the margin, someone running off with the money or something like that.

Ben Reinhardt 31:17

Yeah. crackpots? And it's not, it's not it's not zero. Exactly,

Will Jarvis 31:25

exactly. It's something like so if we were talking about Matt Clifford, earlier, and one of the things he mentioned on how he can identify if one of the startups and entrepreneur first is doing really well, is the number of positive surprises that frequency, do you think something like that might might might work as well? It's not like so much that, you know, hard metrics, but wildly interesting things are happening quickly. Yeah,

Ben Reinhardt 31:51

I think that's probably a good one. And another one. So I'm not sure if you know, this, I actually worked for Matt. Yeah, I worked from it in. In 2019. I worked at entrepreneur first and Singapore. So I was like, intimately involved in this question of like, how do we know if, if, if founders are doing well. So so like another, another sort of, like leading indicator that actually was was pretty strong, was like, just like, like, how much they get done. Interesting. And I'm actually yeah, like, now that you bring that up? Like, I think that that's actually a pretty good indicator, even in science. I'm sorry, not science, but like in, like technology research, because because I think we want to exclude the kind of like Einstein going off and like spending 12 years figuring out general relativity, right. So it's like, there definitely are domains where you want to see people just like, like, it is possible for people to just go off and solve for Mars last theorem or whatever, you know, in a room. I don't think that we're there. I think that what you want to see, when you're doing kind of experimental building focus research is still just like, oh, like, tried this didn't work. Doing this other thing. I had this idea I like if I executed on it, it was a bad idea. Right? Like, you want to see that, that iteration speed. And it doesn't necessarily mean like pivoting just means like, like, some some like level of activity.

Will Jarvis 33:37

Yes. I was having Friedman, describe this to me, as he said, Well, you've got like a very low powered flashlight, and you're running around in the dark room looking for treasure. And the only thing you lever you have is moving around faster. It's like, that's how you should think about finding product market fit, which is may be related.

Ben Reinhardt 33:56

Yeah, I think it's not. It's like not quite, it's not exactly the same for the same analogy. But I think that there really is something to just like, doing smart things like and like I almost think that like planning, planning itself can be one of those things that you're doing right? So if you're like, like I wrote down like these five possible scenarios, and like rule like these two out and talk to these two people about them, right? Yes. I would look at that and say like, oh, yeah, like that's, that's great.

Will Jarvis 34:28

If not just flailing about or something.

Ben Reinhardt 34:30

Yeah. analogy, that, that Peter van Hindenburg. I'm butchering his name he runs Incan switch gave me that I loved is this term of building better, which is from boating, which I don't do at all, but like, unless you have like water jets on the front of your boat. You can't turn unless you're moving. It's right. So so like in order to be able to change the action in a boat didn't move at all. So it's like something around that. That's really good. It's really important. But but at the same time, like, right, like, it's like, the tension there is like, how do you like what is what is like good action versus like flailing action? Right? Yes. And that, that. I don't know how to try to discriminate that.

Will Jarvis 35:27

Maybe it's like obscenity, you kind of know what when you say it, or something like that, which is not helpful, but like to describe on the podcast, but perhaps is true.

Ben Reinhardt 35:35

Yeah, I think so. I, like I'm kind of optimistic and confident that if we pay attention, it might be possible to come up with like, better theories about Gotcha. About how that works.

Will Jarvis 35:52

What's my beautiful successful? Yeah. Ben, Ben, you're you're super smart guy. Why pick this problem? In particular, I've realized I've never asked you this. Oh, you got a lot of options. Right? You know, yeah, see all kinds of different stuff. But this is appealing.

Ben Reinhardt 36:08

So like, the really honest answer is because I want there to be more awesome sci fi s**t in the world. That's awesome. Like, that's actually it. It's like that. That's what I want to happen. And it's like, I, I've managed to convince myself that this is the best way that like, I give it like, do it. Like, given my set of skills can can try to make that happen? Frankly, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 36:40

I love that. I love that.

Ben Reinhardt 36:42

There's nothing more profound, profound to it.

Will Jarvis 36:45

No, that's great. That's it for you personally, are there any technologies you're super jazzed about that you think has just been overlooked?

Ben Reinhardt 36:53

I mean, my my sort of big one is, is general purpose teller robotics. So basically, the possibility of through some system, you could imagine, like putting on a headset, and going into some contraption, basically being able to seamlessly act through a robot anywhere in the world. And so the reason for that is some combination of a belief that I think like automation, like general purpose, automation, is going to be much harder than many people think it is. And the fact that it is it's not just sort of like automation, but it's actually like, allows people to effectively teleport, to like, recall, that's something that that really would excite me is like, a, a scientific lab, where you basically have collaborators all over the world working together. 24/7. So you have like, different shifts based on different places in the world. And everybody just was like, seamlessly handing off. And that's just like, really not even something that people are thinking about automating anytime soon, but is like, yeah, so anyway, that's, that's, that's one.

Will Jarvis 38:18

I like that. And you said something interesting there that, you know, general purpose automations can be much harder than people realize. We were talking to a Facebook, email engineer, he works in automation, you know, general prefers automation, or he did at the time. And that's one of the things he mentioned, as well, it's like, you don't realize how hard a lot of this stuff is. And we see that even with self driving cars, it seems like they're always, you know, perennially, five years away or something. Yeah. You know, maybe we're getting there now.

Ben Reinhardt 38:45

Yeah, I'm kind of bullish on the cars. You know, it's like, you can you can ride around in San Francisco and a cruise car. That's true. Maybe like not like, yeah, I don't know how well it'll go from city to city, but like, but in terms of like, the robotics automation problem? Yeah, I think so. It's hard. It's really hard. Again, like, I think, I don't know, I can arguments about this on Twitter, sometimes. Yes. And, you know, it's like people, people who have have some amount of training in an area are often the like, the most the ones who are like the least able to predict a paradigm shift. So, you know, it's like, I could be completely wrong about this, but it's just like, I don't I don't see the mechanism by which a lot of the advances that we're seeing in AI on computers, which really depends on like, truly obscene amounts of data. I don't see that translating into the physical world without some, some sort of discovery about how to do things differently.

Will Jarvis 40:00

Gotcha. Something like, I think you mentioned this to me, but when we were having coffee, but it's something where there just isn't the same data layer that we have for text for the real world.

Ben Reinhardt 40:09

Yeah, exactly like it's, yeah, we just don't. It's like, literally everything that goes on in a computer can become data for training for trading, like a large language model or something. But we don't have anything like that in the real world. Right. So it's like, so hopefully, I'm wrong. Right, right.

Will Jarvis 40:33

But that'd be great. That'd be great. So So do you think? Do you think the effect of large language models are being somewhat overrated right now? Like for the next 10 years of human productivity?

Ben Reinhardt 40:43

I think so. I, I think that we're going beyond my mindset. But like, sir, I think I think like the thing that I would say is, like, I think like my, sort of what I'm making is a very scoped claim, which is that like, I think that the effect of large language models on doing things outside of a computer is going to be limited. I think like that's, that's sort of my like, inside of a computer. I I have I have no have no have no way of knowing.

Will Jarvis 41:24

Gotcha. Great does Oh, yeah. That makes everything that makes sense. And it directionally jives with with my thoughts. Ben, I want to thank you for taking the time to come on. specular technologies, it's been a ton of fun specular technologies, what can the audience do? Are you looking for any money? Are you trying to recruit for anything? Is there anything we can help you with?

Ben Reinhardt 41:46

Yeah, very, very concretely if you know anybody who wants to donate. That's, that's always always appreciated. Always looking for good program managers. If if there is a some technology that is currently bottlenecks in materials or manufacturing that you think could be really big if true. Get in touch. But yeah, and just sort of spread the word. When this airs, the website should be live. They'll be great. Do you have a domain for it yet? Yes, it is spec. Dot tech.

Will Jarvis 42:24

Perfect. Love it. Love it. That's easy. That's it for

Ben Reinhardt 42:26

speculative technologies.org I think both of them redirect.

Will Jarvis 42:30

Awesome. Love that a little bit. Well, Ben, yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. Again. Really appreciate you.

Ben Reinhardt 42:34

Thanks for having me. Well, it is always a pleasure.

Will Jarvis 42:37

Definitely. Special thanks to our sponsor, Bismarck analysis for the support. Bismarck analysis creates the Bismarck brief, a newsletter about intelligence grade analysis of key industries, organizations, and live players. You can subscribe to Bismarck free at brief dot Bismarck analysis.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives. Special thanks to Donovan Dorrance, our audio editor. You can check out documents work in music at Donovan dorrance.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In this episode, we're joined by On Deck cofounder Julian Weisser to discuss the right framework for finding new ideas, lessons for founders to draw from the past, aligning on values before aligning on ideas, founding pairs that work well, the role of defensibility, the role of no code, distributed ownership vs. concentrated ownership, and a whole lot more. 

William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways it is worse in the past, where it's a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.

Unknown Speaker 0:37

Well, Julian, how are you doing this morning?

Julian 0:40

I'm doing great. How are you? Doing? Great.

Will Jarvis 0:42

Thanks so much for taking time to come on the show. Do you mind giving us a brief bio on some of the big ideas you're interested in?

Julian 0:49

Sure, I'll keep it really brief. I come from a fairly non traditional background when it comes to tech, went to music school dropped out. And when I was in Boston, that was kind of when I realized that I there was so much to the world of technology that was beyond just what programmers might be building. There's such an opportunity for people who have different skill sets to contribute and to build the future. So that was the that was the thing that really got me into technology, which is being in a city where there was a lot of technology being built. But we can go into different areas of my background, I think that the thing that I've realized quite recently is the thing that gets me really excited is really the intersection of ideas, people and creation. And that can take a lot of forms. Right now I'm really focused on people who have great ideas that are building startups around them.

Will Jarvis 1:40

I love that I love that. Well, what in particular about startups makes them so compelling, you know, they're really compelling to me, they're really compelling to you. But to the listener who may be less involved, maybe they work at a big corporation, or a government or nonprofit, what makes startup special?

Julian 1:56

Well, I think that startups in general are fairly permissionless, right? In the sense that, you don't really need to get permission to go and try and build something. And a lot of the infrastructure that keeps getting built, to allow more people to create things just kind of increases the level of permission, lessness, right. Prior to prior to, you know, AWS, for instance, Amazon Web Services, you really needed to have a significant amount of money to actually buy a server and run a server and things like that. Now with AWS is just one example, you don't need the permission of somebody who's going to fork over a bunch of money, you can actually get started extremely cheaply. And if you're in a program, like something like on deck or something like that, AWS actually is partners with all of these programs essentially give you credits for free. So it cost pretty much nothing to run a server nowadays. And it's also based on usage versus, you know, having a fixed server cost. So things like that, just really allow people to go and create the things that they want to build. And then if you look at something like even like sigma, which was recently acquired, that was a company that was started because of all of this technology that came before it, that they were able to build off of. But it also created the platform for other people to go out and make things. You know, Adobe used to be very expensive, it still is. But figma, you know, started out and it was free for you to individual users. So I think that that's, that's one of the big things here is, as as time has gone on, and as technology has developed, it's been become easier and easier. Well, I should not say easier, it's become cheaper to start startups, it's still very hard. But the challenges have changed.

Will Jarvis 3:38

The bank sets up, what do you think that the challenges have shifted to, you know, like you said, we've seen this kind of deep, massive decrease in cost, not the by the big servers anymore, you can just go ahead and get started spinning up a simple web app, you know, probably for free and get, you know, 10s of 1000s of users without having high upfront capital costs. Where do you think the barriers have shifted to now at this point in time?

Julian 3:59

It's a great question. You know, my, my general inclination is that, you know, there are a lot of things that were kind of just obvious, and more and more obvious, in hindsight, but I think were obvious to a lot of people who are early to the internet. That was actually obviously before my time, but this idea that there were so many things that can be built, that were kind of like the simple things. And, and now, of course, like all of those simple things have been built. And there's usually like 20 different, you know, versions of them. I mean, just think about, you know, some of the some of the things like note taking apps, right? There's gonna be more note taking apps in the future. But there also are a lot of note taking apps that can solve a lot of people's problems. But at one point, there weren't many, right. And at one point, there weren't many, there wasn't a place to store your photos online, right, or backup your photos or to share your photos, right. So the challenge has gotten to be that you really need to have something that breaks out and solves a fundamental problem, but a lot of the base problems have kind of been solved.

Will Jarvis 4:57

That makes sense. So how should founders operationalize that it seems like it is a real challenge that a lot of low hanging fruit has been picked. But the greatest founders, I think of like, you know, Parker, Conrad at rippling seem to find a way to, you know, get behind that kind of event horizon of, of what is possible. And perhaps you know, for rippling it's this combinatorial thing where maybe if you could build the entire HR and IT stack together, you could get lower costs, you kind of vertically integrate at some level. What do you think the right framework is for founders to use to find those new ideas?

Julian 5:32

Sure. So I think there's, there's two things. And the first is really thinking about as you're thinking about, from an investor perspective, you really want to think about not just the founder, but you want to think think about the market that they're building in. And traditionally, what people say is bet on the founder or invest in the founder. And it's really all about the founder. And yes, like, it really matters that the founder is a good founder, that they think about things the right way that they are driven, that they can hire, that they can retain talent that they can manage, potentially, if they're going to be the CEO. But the other thing that I think gets a lot, that doesn't necessarily get the attention that it deserves, is the market. And, you know, when you when you brought up Parker, he's the exact example of a person who thought so deeply about the market and the need for a different type of solution in the market, or the opportunity for different types of solution. So I think it really comes down to evaluating the market. And that comes from the founder perspective, you know, do you really want to spend your time if you're a, you know, an exceptionally talented person, you want to spend your time banging your head against the wall of a market or an opportunity that doesn't really exist? Or is there or is worth your time to actually, you know, figure out in advance, what kind of market should I be building? And what opportunity should I be pursuing? And then also, like, there's this debate as to whether or not, you know, sort of like markets are sort of like willed into existence, or like opportunities or of a world into existence, I generally think that that's true. It takes you know, there, as you said, rippling is a good example of a place where there's an ultra saturated market, a lot of people would have argued that the opportunity didn't exist. But you know, if you can see an interesting angle, and then you actually can willed into existence, then there's usually a big opportunity in a market where there's, you know, low NPS.

Will Jarvis 7:15

I love that. I love that. How much do you think luck, luck plays into these things? And how much of it is just willing things into being at the end of the day?

Julian 7:26

Yeah, I mean, look, I think that ultimately, you have to be, you have to be lucky. But at the end of the day, it's like, it really does come down to a combination of things, right? There's a really good song that I liked that I can link to that, that essentially just shows that like, yes, ultimately there is determination, where it has to do with the work that you put in the people that you hire, but you can't predict everything that's going to happen. And and ultimately, you know, it luck, luck does play a factor, but wheeling into existence is really a thing. That that I think, you know, people don't want to accept is actually the the main the main form of the outcome, the main thing that drives the outcome?

Will Jarvis 8:05

Well, we can't control like, so it seems like, you know, it's something that's that's best, like ignored at some level, you can only control your inputs. I'm curious, when you first got started, let's say with ondeck? Sure, you know, how much of a hunch did you have that it was going to be, you know, a big deal, and that you were going to you know, build a really great company around it. What were you were you sure it really sure when you got started? Did it like? Did you have these hunches along the way? Like, what did that kind of look like?

Julian 8:33

Yeah, so I think that it was, it's worth going over the history there. So, you know, ondeck started as a community that my co founder, Eric built, and it was really just casual dinners, happy hours, that sort of thing for people who are looking to explore starting a company, and, or even explore what was next, maybe they were looking at leaving their job, and maybe starting a company was one of the options. But it was this very informal, informal community for people to explore what might come next. And that was a really powerful idea. As it turned out, there were a lot of people who maybe they were a job that they didn't care for that much, or they felt there wasn't actually going to really take them to the place that they wanted to be. And having a space for like minded people or people who are in the similar sort of time in their lives was really important. I think that the the thing that was very interesting about on Deck is that people were essentially trying to pull a product out of us as I started running dinners. David, on deck CEO started running dinners as well. And these were all just informal affairs. But people kept trying to get us to do something that was a little bit more structured than these one off dinners and happy hours. And that was really interesting, because people were trying to we felt this poll, right. And the poll ultimately meant that we were able to build something that people wanted because they were telling us specifically what they wanted. And now ultimately, we've had to do a lot of iterations on that but it pretty much directly led to the ondeck founder Fellowship, which is remaining is our flagship program, you know, four years or so after after starting the company around on deck. And you know, we're in our 15th cohort coming up. I've seen so many incredible companies get started out of it, somewhere around 800. At this point, they've raised a billion dollars. And ultimately, I think it really comes down to like, sure, there were a lot of there are a lot of people working in sort of the accelerator space. But there were almost no one. And still, to this day, it seems like in my opinion, a very big opportunity is the pre accelerator phase. accelerators, you need to have a co founder, you need to have an idea. Typically, you need to have traction. And what we said is, we said, hey, there are a lot of people, potentially a lot more people that are starting companies today, who might get off the sidelines, who might get off the fence, if we actually help them find the missing pieces, right. So maybe if we can help you find a co founder, or if you can help you figure out your idea, or if you can help you figure out what your go to market might be, maybe that's the difference between you starting a company or staying at your job. So ultimately, I think that there was there was a lot of the product full there. And this novel idea, which was, hey, we can actually increase the amount the amount of founders if we just help, you know, catalyze creation of companies. I love that. I

Will Jarvis 11:12

love that. What lessons do you think founders can draw from that when they're they're building products? And you're right is something like, you know, you need to be in the search space for a while. And something will make itself clear, given enough time, if you work hard, or is there, there's something else to draw from that.

Julian 11:28

So I think the answer is annoying, because it depends. Ultimately, some people have these insights that they've somehow gotten through work or through side projects and things like that, or through conversations with friends or family members. But ultimately, far, far more people end up having to go back to the drawing board multiple times. And I think one of the biggest, the biggest mistakes that we see is the people who go out there, they they have extreme conviction, when they probably shouldn't, they're kind of lying to themselves, and they go out and they try and raise money, they might even succeed in raising money, which is actually, in my opinion, one of one of the worst things because that almost validates this idea that they have a good idea. Because now people are giving the money to go and pursue it. And then ultimately, when that happens, it means that they're kind of driving themselves down that down this one way path. And it's a lot harder to rewind, and a lot harder to sort of start from scratch again. So what we try and do at on deck and I try to do what I'm just working with founders one on one is really trying to encourage them to not go with the first or second idea unless they have extreme pull towards the idea from customers or something like that. And really try and figure out, you know, what it is that they should be building and not just immediately jump into it. Same thing goes for co founders. Yeah, I think that generally speaking, you shouldn't just go with the person that you've happened to have worked with who may be interested in starting a company, you shouldn't necessarily go with the first person that you talk to. I know it's, it sounds probably very silly, to some people in the audience who are a little bit further removed from from tech startups. But there are a lot of people who just end up going with the person who happens to be closest to them at the time to decide that they want to start a company. And it usually doesn't go well. Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

Will Jarvis 13:12

It's kind of like getting married, you know, when you just you somebody walks in, and he's like, Let's get married for 50 years and be great. And you can bet each other pretty much not a good idea. Speaking about that, how do you go about finding a great co founder? How would you recommend people do that? Is it just, you know, iterating more, having more conversations and finding someone who's a good fit, not taking that first person? Is there more to it that you recommend?

Julian 13:35

So I think there's, there's a couple of things. One thing that I like to say is align on values before aligning on ideas. And this is this is, you know, again, it might sound it might sound silly to people, but you're really describing sort of what the ideal outcome is to someone else, you know, a potential co founder is important, right? The idea that you might not want to sell your company for $20 billion, you might want to actually take it public. Or it might sound like putting the cart before the horse, but I don't think it's actually true, because there will be some people where they get an offer for what could be a life changing amount of money. And they will, they will want to turn it down because they want to continue to build this really big organization, but the other co founder might actually, you know, want to want to sell. And I don't think that either of those are actually bad, necessarily, as long as there's alignment between the founders on what they want. Another thing is, you know, very common, which is like work life balance, right? I first of all, I think that founders really don't have the opportunity to have much of a work life balance. But when they think about sort of their hiring their team and things like that, or of course, like remote versus in person versus hybrid. These are all important things. And then of course, just like how to treat people, sort of like what what are the cultural values? I think it's really important for companies to have non values as well, which is this idea of sort of what the company isn't about, or reasons that you might not want to work at the company. But I think aligning on these things is actually much more important. Because ultimately, the idea and sort of the the product creation process usually will happen. After you've sort of aligned on your co founder, it's usually not a thing where you go out, and you figure out your idea. And then you go and recruit a co founder, this happens occasionally. But generally speaking, I recommend that founders have some ideas or have some interest spaces, but don't necessarily kind of get really aligned, or don't really figure out exactly what they want to build until they have the co founder that they want to build it with. And then they go, and they co create the idea together.

Will Jarvis 15:38

That makes sense. So you're kind of iterating the search space together if you have a partner that can help you tell beachy chapter thinking etc. It does seem to me like that, that's super valuable. Because if you have someone else checking your thinking, it's easy to have one person who's a kook, but it's harder to have two people or more people than that, you know,

Julian 15:55

I think it's good. I think it's also good. I mean, being kooky is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it's like, if you are aligned in your kookiness, I think that's really good. Founders in general, I think are just kind of weird, or at least some of the most interesting ones. And, you know, I think you need to be weird together. Right? If you're weird, and the other person isn't very weird. And you don't really get along in that way. And you don't sort of see eye to eye on these kinds of like, probably, I would describe them as eccentricities. If you don't, if you don't sort of have those aligned, I think it's it becomes a lot harder to actually build something sustaining together.

Will Jarvis 16:32

That makes sense. I'm curious, how important do you think it is to be mission driven? At the end of the day, when you're building these these breakout companies?

Julian 16:39

I think it depends, because there's really two, in my opinion, there's two types of founders. There's the ones who really love the problem that they're working on. And they're the ones who just really love building businesses. And problem solving more generally, think it's, I think it's a lot harder to be one of the founders who really cares about the mission of the company, at the earliest days, because the mission might slightly change, change, given given the nature of, you know, early stage startups, they haven't found product market fit. So they might ultimately morph into something that the founder is less excited about. Having said that, I think that if you are mostly directionally keeping it, keeping it going, and the way that you you thought you were when you were going into it, I do think that's generally good, right? I heard some some story about how you're, for instance, still in field with figma, they were trying to build something, it was like a meme generator, you know, to start when they when they dropped down to the till fellowship. And they just weren't excited about it. You know, they realized, like, is this the thing that we want to spend the next, you know, a few years of our lives on building a meme generator company? Now, there are probably people in the world who that's extremely fulfilling for, right, who love comedy, who think that comedy and sort of like spreading interesting ideas and jokes across the Internet is really valuable. Right. But it wasn't for them. So I think it's really important to figure out like, what's the thing that actually gets you excited and motivated? And ideally, your co founder as well? Because ultimately, if there's misalignment on that, that's a pretty, pretty, pretty big challenge.

Will Jarvis 18:11

Yes, it seems like quite an issue. I'm curious, you guys have been quite successful at merging co founders together helping people find co founders, which kind of went against the grain in Silicon Valley. And in tech that, you know, you had have known your co founder and grown up in the womb together or something like that, to truly be successful. How did you guys realize that that was kind of a $20 bill on the sidewalk? Was it just like seeing a couple of examples of at work, where people had kind of engineered that kind of serendipity? Or was it just like, I don't know, I a thought you came up with kind of from first principles?

Julian 18:45

You I think it's definitely one of those things where you start to see it happen. And you know, when it's when it's once it's like an anecdote, but like, you actually start to see a trend. And that that's when you get really excited about it. But I also think that this is a thing that yes, we we discovered, we've had a lot of success with. And I would say that some of our fastest growing companies, I think I've looked at it was something like 10 of the, the top 20 or something like that. Companies in terms of the amount raised are actually one of the co founders, at least one of them. Sometimes there are three co founders met the other co founder or co founders through on deck. So it's just a, it's a very surprising thing to see how these pairs have actually done really well at fundraising. And usually, you know, the conventional wisdom is, it's hard to fundraise if the co founders don't really have this deep, long term relationship where they've known each other as you said, you know, they've been coding together since they were in the womb. You know, it's it's interesting to see that shift happen, but it's not a shift that has gone unnoticed. Right, because about a decade ago, there was a video of Paul Graham talking about, you know, whatever you do, make sure you only work with a co founder who you've had some prior work experience with that you have had a relationship with, right. And that was really, I think, the operating principle for YC, when it came to them screening applications, for the most part for quite a while. Now, obviously, there were exceptions to that. But that was the general advice given. If you look, now they have a co founder search tool, right? You're on deck does a lot of co founder matching, there are other people who are now in the co founder matching game as well. And you're seeing YC take that shift from Hey, like, make sure that you have worked with this person before before co founding a company with them to like actually having a tool out there is a really big sign in my opinion, that you know, that things have shifted and that everybody is acknowledging that even people who used to have a hard and a fairly hard and fast rule about it.

Will Jarvis 20:44

Yeah, that makes that makes makes a ton of sense. I'm curious, are there pairings you've seen that work really well, kind of like two in the box? You know, maybe once more business minded once more technical? Are there other other pairings that seemed to work really well that or is it just kind of there's very little pattern to these things.

Julian 21:01

So this is less about co founders that meet through on deck, but just more about co founders in general, I think that the biggest sort of red flag, if you will, is when people, you can't tell who the CEO is, if you can tell who the CEO is. That means that usually that means like, when somebody says that they're the CEO, and it kind of feels awkward, you can kind of feel this awkward energy. When that happens, that shows that there isn't necessarily a huge amount of alignment and sort of happiness around that decision, necessarily, or there's some sort of hesitance. And I think that's actually one of the biggest things in the early days, it's very important to define who the CEO is, if you don't have that happening, you ended up with all sorts of weird things going on. And ultimately, I think that's probably one of the biggest causes of co founder breakups is the fact that people actually wanted to be the CEO. No, they weren't the CEO, maybe they should have been the CEO, by the way, I'm not saying that they shouldn't have been the person who wasn't CEO. But But ultimately, that that is one of the things I think is important to look for. Another is, I think, it really depends on the business sort of the skill sets, ultimately, there is going to be a need to be a person who is kind of running the sales and like building out sort of like the Oregon fundraising and things like that. And there needs to be a person who's building the product. You know, they don't have to be technical and non technical pairs, right? There could be two people who are very technical. And one of them happens to be, you know, sort of the CEO of the business and is running sort of the sales stuff, and actually like doing the fundraise. So I don't think it really matters quite so much, you know, technical ability. But I do think that, generally speaking, it's extremely hard to start a company if they're, you know, one of the co founders had doesn't have some pretty significant technical skills needed to build something, it seems like, Yeah, makes sense. So I mean, it is changing slightly, because, you know, people are able to prototype and to build, like fairly substantial things using lower no code. I think this you know, we're talking about kind of the the barrier points to actually starting companies, no code has been absolutely huge for that. You could build a lot of infrastructure. In fact, on deck, I don't think that we wrote a line of code for the first year of ondeck, as a company, because we were just using zaps, and we were using air table, and our admissions process, you know, it was was pretty sophisticated at the time, but we were able to build a really great business, using all these off the shelf tools that we then, you know, duct taped together.

Will Jarvis 23:38

Can you talk about what no code is? For, you know, people in the audience that might not be aware? Sure. So

Julian 23:44

so no code is this, what I think is one of the most important, but under discussed developments in technology, which is essentially giving people the ability to interact with data interact with websites interact with, like various applications, in a way that used to be restricted to people who can interact with these things at the code level, meaning they would actually have to write code. Another word for code might be a script to trigger different actions if something happened. So, for instance, a really basic example of this would be somebody every time you receive an email, having the email be logged to a database, for instance, a Google Sheet, right? Or in more common cases, nowadays, we use a product called Air table, which is kind of like Google Sheets, but better for people who are going to be interacting with non non number non number data. So for instance, names or cities or statuses, right. And the idea is, you know, we could use in the past, you would have had to actually write code to be able to trigger something that would happen every time you received an email to log into Google Sheets. or, you know, an Excel file or something like that. But now with with the tools that exist, you can actually have stuff like that happen. And you can, you can sort of program that, but program that without knowing how to write any code at all. And that is such a big unlock, because while that example is very simplistic, it's like, well, who cares? Like you can, you know, shift some data from an email to, to air table or to Google Sheets really easily, you can actually build an entire admissions process, with email flows with automatic automatic updates with different pings to people in Slack, if they need to fill something out. Like you can actually build an admission like a monitored admissions org, for instance, like we did it on deck, without writing a line of code, and not just crazy. And you can, you can do that with all of these tools that already exist out there. Now, granted, they might cost a little bit of money, but developer time costs a lot of money, right? So I think that's really important to note that no code is kind of allowed people to develop these skills that would have been restricted to developers. And the other thing that's quite exciting about no code is that I mean, ultimately, everybody on your team now has way more ability to create things and build infrastructure, that that is going to be very stable. And that's going to work quite well within your org. So you're no longer having to wait for the dev team to go and build something that helps you with, you know, internal processes or external processes.

Will Jarvis 26:29

That's great. How do you know when it's time to start writing actual code? You know, because you can scale these infrastructures with no code tools to really surprising degree, but but when do you decide when it's time to actually, you know, go hire some developers and start building something?

Julian 26:45

Sure. So I think there's two there's two things. One is, I'll talk to sort of the founder side of things like when founders are kind of prototyping, and then we'll speak to the sort of like the actual like building a product, building the business side of things. So oftentimes, this is what you see, when you're looking at non technical founders, they're like, I can't get started on my company. Like, I'm looking for a co founder who's technical, who will build this idea that I have this amazing idea. That is, if I were somehow to get a co founders technical co founder, we would have a multi billion dollar company, right. And you just have to trust me, non technical co founder or potential technical co founder, that if you join me, and you use my idea, you're going to have such an amazing time. And we're going to go to the promised land together, we're going to make so much money. This is a really, really bad sales pitch. Because anybody who works in startups knows, it takes a extremely long time to actually find true product market fit. When you when you think you have it, you usually don't. And, and ultimately, you know, this, this technical co founder or potential technical co founder is signing themselves up for potentially years of working with this person. And that person hasn't necessarily proven themselves. Yeah. So what you can do now, as a, you know, a non technical quote, unquote, co founder or founder is you could actually go and say, here's my idea. And here's the little note code prototype that I built, right. And I drove some people here, you know, either using, you know, some some mailing lists that I built up or that use some Google, you know, or Google or Facebook ads to like, just drive some test audience to this landing page. And you can actually start to show that as a non technical person, you have proven that there's interesting demand, you've proven that people are clicking around on this prototype. And that ultimately makes you extremely desirable, because you've put in the work. Now, people are saying, okay, this person hustles, they don't know how to code, but yet they put together this, you know, pretty janky prototype. And now that's showing me that they actually understand a little bit about product, they're not just saying they understand product, and they've actually built something that people are using or interacting with. And that actually in that thing that they've built actually seems quite compelling, even though it's not, you know, the most beautiful thing. So, so that's the first piece is I think it's important for founders, especially non technical co founders to do that. But also, technical founders are increasingly realizing that starting with no code, as a way to prototype is just so much better than diving into code and, you know, getting into the weeds so quickly. So, so that's, that's one piece. And the other is, you know, when it comes to actually switching from code, or no code to code, I think that it really depends, you know, like, on deck, honestly, you know, our admissions process, we switched to, you know, internal internal tooling that we built. And there are a lot of issues with it. And I think it's actually way better to have maybe we should have stuck with air table or maybe we shouldn't have moved off of off of the product Foley or the no code product fully. And is that do, you know, we maybe could have done more of a slow transition. So I think There's, there's a lot to be said for, even when you think it might be time to move off, maybe it's not. And then, of course, there are many examples of businesses where it's like, okay, we should probably just be building this thing. You know, from from day one with it with custom code, it doesn't make sense to be, you know, building no code stuff. If we if we feel like we're, we already have a pretty strong insight into the customer, and that sort of thing. And the NoCo tools can't, you know, can't do everything. So it's good sometimes to, you know, to go right into it.

Will Jarvis 30:29

It's perhaps if you're building, you know, a quant fund, no Kool Aid kind of tools might not quite be it. But if you're for plenty of other things, there's great applications there. How do you recommend founders navigate the search space to find product market fit and iterate quickly? In the beginning? Is it just iterating? As fast as you can, trying to talk to as many users as you can? Or is it something else?

Julian 30:50

So I think that there's, there's two things there. The first is, Product Market Fit usually isn't a thing that people even are looking for, until like series A Series B stage there, just to just to really emphasize what I mean by that, you can have millions of dollars in ARR. And you could still not have found product market fit like true product market fit. Right. So there are companies that that I know that are, you know, they have a ton of revenue, but they they admit to themselves, like it's not like they don't have blinders on. They don't think that they that they have figured this out yet. And I think that that's really important for people to realize is that that doesn't happen anytime soon. And almost anytime that a founder says they have product market fit, and they haven't, you know, gotten much further along in terms of org building, in terms of, you know, like, fundraise, and things like that. It's almost always untrue. Now, obviously, there are exceptions, but for the most part, I think that it's it's something that founders should be, should be like very cognizant of. The second thing is, I think it really just comes down to it might sound trite, but like, really making sure that you're building things that people want to pay for. Right? I think that this is this is the main thing is like, the I think the monetary wise these modules build things people want. But you really need to actually quantify that, like, how much do they want it? You know, how much do they want it? How long will they want it for? Right? Like sustainability, of being able to actually build something that people want to stick with? is extremely important. Right? So I think those are those are really important factors to consider.

Will Jarvis 32:35

That makes sense. Can you talk a little bit more about like companies that, you know, do have millions of dollars in recurring revenue that might not have product market fit? What do you mean there? Exactly? Is it that perhaps they're able to make sales, but it's not really exactly jiving with their customers? What does that mean?

Julian 32:50

Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's a big difference between having one to 2 million ARR and, you know, breaking into the next into the next hurdle, like 10 million Arr, or something like that. There's also a big question about retention, right? Just because you have you have that revenue right now doesn't mean that you're, you're not going to churn through, you know, in six to 12 months. So I think there's just a really big question as to whether or not revenue now means that you're going to be a successful company, you know, five years from now. And, and I think that that's the other thing is like, also, you know, there's, it's not like nobody else is building while you're building. So just because you're building something now that people are kind of enjoying doesn't mean that somebody else isn't gonna come out and sort of like, you know, knock over your applecart.

Will Jarvis 33:35

Yeah, you definitely want to try and avoid that, if at all possible. defensibility. Seems seems quite important.

Julian 33:41

Yeah. And the other thing is, like, I don't, I don't think that companies typically die, due to competition, but they definitely die. If they stop building and they stop, you know, stop creating things that people want, because the things that people want and need, will shift, as you know, different workflows change, or as the world changes, I mean, you know, not not to pick on any one company by name. But there were a lot of companies that were started during the pandemic to solve pandemic problems, right. And a lot of those problems kind of went away as the pandemic has receded. So, you know, and ultimately, they were raising at extremely high valuations. Because people were using the thing like crazy things like crazy, right? But, you know, once once we started to, you know, get rid of lockdown, once people started to actually be going back to spending a lot more time IRL. Some of these pandemic problems kind of vanished. Yeah. So that's an another example of like, well, maybe your product market fit. But you know, when external conditions change, like part of product market, fit, can evaporate.

Will Jarvis 34:47

And you need to you need to be aware of that. As a founder going off of that, you know, we've seen a lot of companies shift to remote first, after the pandemic, do you think we've kind of reached an equilibrium there For companies where, you know, we've barring, you know, huge innovations from data or something like that, it seems like we've kind of reached this kind of stable, maybe it's 20% of jobs are remote, but it's like, will it shift drastically in the future? It doesn't really feel like it. But but I'm not, I'm not quite sure what what do you think about that.

Julian 35:19

So I can't speak to, you know, huge organizations, I don't feel like that's my expertise, what I will say is that, you know, we do the best that we can, right. And with sort of the situation that we have, right, so ultimately, people started companies, and don't work co founders and teams that they couldn't, you know, be in person with during the pandemic, you know, at the height of the pandemic. At the same time, I don't think that anyone would say that all things being equal, it's good for co founders not be working in the same office together, right? Now, if that's like the thing that's barring you from working with a really exceptional person, then it's worth considering right, doing a remote startup and things like that. But generally speaking, I think that the earlier the team is, the more important it is to be in person. And then as teams grow, then maybe you can have some sort of hybrid policy. I'm not particularly, I'm not particularly like dogmatic about any of this. I generally think that it's important to be in person with your co founders, though. I mean, on deck, everybody thinks about it as a remote company, because sort of our second chapter has really been entirely remote. But we started out entirely in person, all of our events were in person, right? So ultimately, and the team was in person. So ultimately, what happened is we shifted when the market shifted to remote, right. And to Silicon Valley in the cloud, I think that we were probably the people who, who actually who actually coined that phrase, but ultimately, you know, we're talking about well, or somebody asked me recently, like, are tech hubs, or Silicon Valley as a hub gone? I said, Well, I don't think that Silicon Valley is a hub is gone. But I think that there are many new hubs, right, and the Internet kind of connects them all. And I think it's important for you to be in, if at all possible, it's important for you to be in one of the major hubs, physical hubs, but you should also not discount the fact that, you know, the cloud is extremely important. And some of the some of the stuff that's happening, especially in web three, for instance, I think that like the cloud is more important. But But ultimately, if you can be somebody who's building a web three, it'd be really active in the cloud, but also in Venice, or in Brooklyn, where, you know, web three seems to have congregated, like, certainly doesn't hurt.

Will Jarvis 37:41

It definitely helps it do you think the benefit to being in person is mostly just like lower communication costs. You don't have to opt in to, you know, we don't have to, like just hop on Zoom to talk to each other. We're just right across the table from each other. And so information, just, you know, shares more quickly, do you think that's primarily the benefit for, you know, companies that are co located together?

Julian 38:02

I think it's I think it's actually less that and more the idea that the best ideas, and the best conversations, and the best breakthroughs often don't happen because they're scheduled on a calendar. Right? Do you know, I can't think of any, like breakthrough idea that came through a scheduled meeting really, like, relative to the stuff that just happens completely surreptitiously. Right. That, to me is, is the really important stuff. And I think it gets it gets way way. Kind of underrated or like, I think that people don't want to acknowledge that. When they're thinking about the cost of remote. They're like, hey, it's actually easier. We can be async we can get stuff done all the time. And like, I don't think that they're, I'm not going to be one of those people who says there's no benefits to remote. There certainly are. But you also have to be like, you know, wide eyed about the the downsides, the cost of it.

Will Jarvis 39:00

There's costs as well, definitely. I want to talk about web three a little bit. Now. In fts. In Dallas, particular, you've been involved in a very large toppling of Constitutionnel. Is that correct? Yeah. What do you think the bull case is for NF T's and dowels within the next like 1015 years.

Julian 39:17

So I think that the the, the interesting thing about NF T is is it really is the first time that I'm aware of where you can actually own a thing that's digital, and that it's not restricted really to to any particular platform. Right. That I think is quite interesting. I think that we haven't really even gotten close to figuring out the implications of that. Both positive and maybe there's some negative ones, right. But I think that there's something very unique about that. And that's that's about all I'll say about kind of NFT specifically, or as like a broader category. And if T art I think is absolutely fascinating right now. You go, you go from looking at DeviantArt I think we're about the same age Deviant Art, you know, is this website when I was really young, that people would post all sorts of digital art, for the most part, it was digital art that they created. And then they would make no money, right? Now, you could have people who create digital art, and you actually have a way to monetize that and actually have patronage around digital art. And I think that's really cool. I'm, you know, I'm a music school dropout. So I've really liked the idea of giving people ways to, to be creative and be rewarded for being creative. When it comes to douse, you know, Dow is essentially as you know, as broad as saying, like C corpse. So it's really hard to talk about Dow is broadly. But you know, constitution, Dow is this example, that I can give just a quick background, we saw that a copy of the US Constitution was going for sale at Sotheby's, we had about a week, we decided that we wanted to try and raise money to put in a competitive bid to buy and essentially co govern copy of the US Constitution. And anybody could put in any amount of money that they wanted to be a part of that experiment. And we raised about $47 million in the span of what was under a week, because we, we decided we were going to do it. The auction happened a week later, but we actually couldn't start taking payments until maybe two days. And so about five days, we raised $47 million. I think this is a really interesting thing, because it shows that people can't we lost by the way punch line, we didn't when somebody outbid us $47 million. It was not enough money. But but you know, I think the thing that we realized was, gee, this is this is interesting, for a few reasons. One, it's bringing people together, to rally around something that really wasn't financially motivated. Nobody was thinking about, Oh, I'm gonna buy a copy of the piece of the Constitution. And that piece of, you know, that piece of the governance token that I that I purchase, is going to be worth something in the future, I really don't think people were thinking about it that way, they were thinking about this is amazing. Imagine what would happen if you know a bunch of people came together, you know, we're able to acquire this really important artifact, they were able to just, you know, decide on its feature, we might want to display it, do a traveling roadshow with it and display it in certain contexts, we might want to lend it out to different museums, I think it's just such an interesting, such an interesting idea. And I think people got really enamored with that. The other thing is, it was it was the first Dow to bid this sort of auction level ever. And you know, it was the largest amount of crowdfunding raised for a physical object of all time. And I hope that that's not the end of it. I hope that that's just the beginning. But you look at people who are trying to do things that are, you know, adjacent, there's people who are trying to buy an NBA team, as a Dow, right. And think about how cool that would be, you know, I'm not even a basketball fan. But I'm just so enamored with the idea of fans being able to co own an NBA team, and be able to be involved, and a lot of it. And if you think about that, it's like, well, especially if it's a team that's not particularly popular right now, if you could actually change it to become the internet's team, instead of like the New Orleans Pelicans. Well, that actually starts to really open up the audience base, right? Because you might be somebody who lives in a country where there aren't any, you know, professional basketball teams of note. And now you can actually have your own basketball team, right, you can be a part of that. So I don't know, I'm just very excited about the creative aspects of this, and the ones that are less speculative in nature.

Will Jarvis 43:41

I love that. I love that. And this distributed ownership does seem to be less speculative and very interesting, some of these kinds of distributors approach to, you know, spreading out organizations that were having them concentrated within, you know, one person's hands or a couple of persons hands.

Julian 43:55

That's right. And it's also just absolutely chaotic. And that's kind of fun. Right. You know, ultimately, had we won the Constitution, I think that we would have done, you know, right, by, right by the document and the importance of the document. But, you know, it wouldn't have been without without its own challenges, right. So, so in a way we lost, but we were able to make a lot of impact in terms of how people think about Dows how people think about web three, how people think about their relationship with the Constitution, which is actually quite funny. I think that a lot of people were thinking about it much more in that week, and sort of afterwards than they had previously.

Will Jarvis 44:32

I love that. What do you what do you owe your success to the Dalits out? What do you think we can Oh, the success of raising so much so fast. There's something like super mimetic about, you know, the Constitution itself. It's this physical object, you know, and it's this really cool idea and we live in troubled times. Do you think I really contributed to it or was there like, really? Was it well, really well planned and executed in the short amount of time you had?

Julian 44:55

Well, I think it's one of those things where, when you have when you have something that Like resembles product market fit, you can f**k up a lot of, I don't know, if we're allowed to swear, but you can f**k up a lot of things, you know, and it will still, it will still like go quite well, because there's just so much Paul, I think that's kind of what happened with constitution down, we had a lot of challenges. I mean, as you would imagine trying to raise, you know, 10s of millions of dollars in a week, and prior to, you know, that week, not having even met, you know, two thirds of the people that you are going to be working with very closely. So, so we have a lot of challenges. But ultimately, I think it's like, one, it's there is the meme right? To there is the dream, the meme is so is so important, because that's the thing that's sort of like the jokey part, right? And people love jokes on the internet, right? People like jokes, slightly, slightly less than they like, you know, anger and outrage. But ultimately, like, you know, we were able to, we were able to really focus on the jokes side of it to get people excited than the dream is really, there's a couple of dreams, right? There's the dream of what might happen if we actually accomplish this, like, how crazy would that be? Right? Like, what would that mean for the internet? What would that mean, for web three? What would that mean for society, quite honestly, right. And then there's also like the American dream, right? And the the American dream, everybody, no matter, you know, where they live, you know where they're from, they live in the US with a US citizen, it doesn't really matter, everybody has some sort of connection to the United States. And that can be a really a great relationship with the United States where they feel like America was the land of opportunity for their ancestors, they could also feel the exact opposite, that America has let their ancestors down. And both of those points of views were actually represented in participants in the Constitution now, because people really liked this idea that this was sort of a, a way of interacting with the American dream, a way of interacting with our country's history or, or the United States history. And I think that that was, was something that really resonated with people as well.

Will Jarvis 47:02

It's really symbolic. Yeah, I love the concept. And it is very vivid in one's imagination. Think about. Very cool. Well, Julian, thank you so much for coming on today. I've got one last question for you. Sure. You've been quite successful. So far, you've been very helpful to me in my career, lots of great advice, etc. What are the next 10 years look like for you? And do you plan out that far?

Julian 47:25

You know, it's a good question. I haven't planned out that far in the past. And the reason for that is because, you know, a lot of my life makes a lot of sense in retrospect. But I don't think it would have made sense or I wouldn't have made the same decisions. Because I wouldn't have known about the opportunities. Like, quite frankly, I didn't even know, when I was playing, you know, the Super Nintendo and the Nintendo, when I was a kid, that you could even be involved in creating video games. If you weren't technical if you weren't a developer. I never thought about that. Right. So So I think that one thing is I try not to expand what's pot or I try not to stop looking at what's possible, or sort of, I really like to think about how the things that I that I do, I might not even be aware of them. Right constitution now is a great example of that. Never in my life, did I think that I would be working on constitution down to be clear, I was one of about 25 people who were on that core team. Lots of amazing backgrounds and lots of stories there. But, you know, ultimately, I just would have never known. And I think that's, that's one of the most important things to think about when it comes to technology, and creativity, and opportunity. Is that, yes, like, you should be optimistic, you should try and put yourself in good positions, right? You should try and probably say yes to things that you might be a little bit worried about looking silly for doing. Right. But ultimately, I think that if I had said no, or I had sort of tried to follow a more conventional path, I would have missed out on all of the amazing things that have happened in my life so far. So the answer is yes, I'm trying to think a little bit more about what the next year the next decade looks like. But considering I hadn't thought about it at all, previously, I think it's gonna it's going to look probably still a lot less clear eyed, and a lot less, a lot less structured than then people who might have taken, you know, a much more sort of, like, predicted or planned path up until this point.

Will Jarvis 49:32

I love that a little bit. So it seems like the lesson is, you know, say yes to opportunities, keep your eyes open, have enough slack to do that, but also work really hard and good things can happen to you.

Julian 49:41

I think it's right. You know, I think that it's one of those things, we're naturally you have to say yes to less things, the more you sort of develop and like, you know, build, build a reputation or build a following or, you know, like I think that ultimately the younger you are in the less experience you have, you don't really necessarily know what thing might be used sort of a breakout for you? So ultimately, you have to you have to be more likely to say yes. But I'm trying to optimize for saying yes, more than, than a person who might and, you know, sort of my stage. And I think that ultimately, that was the thing that led me to constitution Dow. And I think that will ultimately be the thing that allows me to pursue, you know, things that I work on, you know, in the future.

Will Jarvis 50:23

That's great. That's great. Well, Julian, thanks so much for coming on. Where can people find you? Where should we send them?

Julian 50:28

Sure, I think the the first thing is to check out what I'm doing about in Dec. We really are focused on founders and also angel investors, I split my time between working with people who are trying to find the missing pieces to get started with a company from finding co founders to finding, you know, the idea and the go to market. And then I also spend half of my time working with our program for angel investors, people who are looking to really develop a muscle, I describe invalid investing as strength and conditioning. Like you need to go to the gym multiple times a week to develop the angel investing muscle, you cannot just expect to invest in, you know, one or two companies a year and have that be the thing that ultimately helps you, you know, develop a skill set there. So, so you're on deck beyond deck.com is our website. And then personally, you know, I'm on Twitter, unfortunately, that's Julian Weiser and then my website is just my last name. WEIWE i s s. E r.io weiser.io.

Unknown Speaker 51:32

That's great. Thanks so much. We'll put those links down there in the show notes. Cool.

Will Jarvis 51:40

Special thanks to our sponsor, does market analysis for the support. Bismarck analysis creates the Bismarck brief, a newsletter about intelligence great analysis of key industries, organizations, and live players. You can subscribe to Bismarck free at brief dot biz market analysis.com Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives. Special thanks to Donovan Dorrance, our audio editor. You can check out documents work in music at Donovan dorrance.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai