Samo Burja & Auren Hoffman on the Decline of Fertility Rates and Institutional Trust

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today, we're releasing a conversation from the podcast World of DaaS with Oren Hoffman. Oren sits down with Sam Oburia, who you may know from Turpentine's show Live Players, and they discuss the future of cities, the decline of trust in elites, falling fertility rates, and more. Please enjoy.

Hello, data nerds. My guest today is Samo Burja. Samo is the founder and president of Bismarck Analysis, a research and consulting firm. He currently chairs the editorial board of Palladium magazine, and he's an all-around super intellectual. Samo, welcome to World of NAS.

Wonderful to be here.

I— now, you're— one of the things you're kind of known for is this idea of this great founder theory, where kind of a small number of really extraordinary people, great founders, are kind of responsible for driving civilization forward. Can you break down that theory a bit for us?

It is very close to a whole family of theories of history that is sometimes called great man history, right? This approach, I think, has been sort of unfairly disregarded by academics in the last 100 years.

Where they kind of— sometimes people say, well, this would have happened anyway. If Lenin wasn't around, it still would have happened. If Napoleon wasn't around, it still would have happened. If Hitler wasn't— like, they kind of go through all these different things.

all of these reasons, right? And like, partially the strongest reason that they sort of have against this approach is the argument that the individuals themselves are a product of their times, which in a strict sense is true. But it doesn't mean you can predict anything concrete about the individuals. The individuals are too stochastic, right? And there's nothing deterministic about it. Like, you have many, many people who, say, grow up in very similar circumstances, and you will only have a few individuals that stand out. There's no way to predict what those individuals are going to be like just from the society that they came from. And I think that's a stronger and harder to defeat argument than the counterfactual, because the counterfactual, it's just like, it's just too ridiculous. If you look at the life of Napoleon, it's sort of like when he escapes the prison on the island of Elba and the French government falls and he's restored again to power. I guarantee, like, there's just— it is so implausible that the government of France would've fallen.

Correct.

And it's so implausible it would've had a war again with the British and so on. Now, of course, Napoleon lost that. You know, that return was 100 days in power. It was a temporary return, but it still shows how pliable history still was to his agency and his influence on it. But here I will also point out how great founder theory, and there's a manuscript online that I released years and years ago, the audience can read if they're curious, it differs from some of the great man theories, right? Because I think a lot of the great man theories posit that amazing and tremendous events in the world are sort of initiated or driven by The exceptional individuals. And while I think that is true, the counterargument of this, like, long-term trends, like things like economic growth, rule of law, et cetera, religion, all of those forces, they're these almost like glacial forces that sort of transform the landscape. So maybe while you have a big— you make a big splash, 50 or 100 years later, your effect is washed out. Now, in Great Founder Theory, I propose that these forces actually have a human origin too. I think that great founders create these exceptional institutions that come to shape our history. So this means that perhaps it's not just the conquering general that's interesting. Even more interesting is perhaps the general that reforms how the structure the command structure of a military, changes the model of the military, right? Um, perhaps has something like, you know, what we today think of as the modern officer system, or perhaps changes how conscription is done. Or perhaps, you know, you have people who create new states, who create like, you know, America's Founding Fathers, or Charlemagne taking what's basically still a tribal coalition and forging something we could recognize as feudalism. that then like defined medieval European civilization for 600 years. But it can also be, you know, the prophets of history, right?

If you take like a, if you take like a Bismarck or somebody, you know, so in some ways like Germany was already kind of on the rise when he was there, but like maybe wouldn't have unified. Maybe there was another, maybe there's an alternative history where it wasn't like, how much of Germany's rise was inevitable versus how much was driven by like this very obviously clearly capable person, Bismarck?

Well, let's break it down. All of the key challenges of— if we look at specifically Bismarck at his career, Otto von Bismarck, I think that it is plausible that Prussia would not have actually succeeded in unifying Germany on exactly the same timescale or would've done so in a more decentralized way. Engineering for the French to be baited into a war that they lose, that resulted in a much more centralized Germany than what would have happened otherwise. He needed to bait—

uh, was that, was that 1871 or somewhere around that? He needed to bait France to attack.

Napoleon, specifically Napoleon III, right? Right. Who also sort of, uh, you know, was perhaps a genius politician, but was not a genius military commander or a strategist like Napoleon I was. So really, it was a situation where France couldn't help but intervene. Now, I think that it's possible to try to carry out such a strategy where it completely fails. Had you failed to get the coalition forces prior to the war of all the German states on your side, if, say, some of the German states went with France, And if enough of them went with France, you'd basically be engaged in a hostile occupation of these countries.

Could they have aligned with others? Could have broken up and they've aligned with— you could see a lot of different alignments potentially that could have happened, right? Exactly.

Actually, that was normal German history.

Yeah.

If you look at, uh, even the Thirty Years' War or the Wars of Religion, you would have powers like, you know, uh, that you had the Habsburgs contesting, you had the Swedes intervening in the war, you had the Catholics and Protestants, you know, like, like at each other. Exactly. Like, whenever you have an area that has many small states, uh, the default isn't that they all band together and they go fight an external foe. That's kind of the exception in world history. What normally happens is that the local conflicts are, you know, inflamed or used by external powers, and they're divided against themselves.

Right now, how do you— Like, when you look at the founding of the US, like there's these extraordinary people, some of which I think if they didn't exist, the US would still be amazing today as a true country.

Yes.

But some of which maybe they put it on the trajectory. And it's so hard to know, did Washington put it on the trajectory because he stepped down and he wasn't a dictator and he modeled the right way to be a president? But then was Jefferson— first of all, he was brilliant. Was he really necessary? I don't know. Or Hamilton, was he really necessary? So I'd love to get your thoughts on what's the alternative history if a few of them didn't exist? Would we still have the America we know today, or do we need a whole lot of them not to exist for not to have the America today?

Well, each of them is almost a great example of how a country can have— how an individual can have a long-term legacy in the country. So let's look at Alexander Hamilton. I think without Alexander Hamilton, America, America is basically running an industrial policy.

Yeah, we'd be more agrarian, right?

It'll be much more agrarian. Concrete views on trade, concrete views on banking, uh, financing of ventures. But also, and this is the funny part, which, you know, I think some of my American friends don't know, today we think of China as stealing a lot of Western IP. Well, the US was stealing a lot of British IP.

Yeah, certainly throughout the 1800s, it was quite good at that.

Yes. Exactly. Because Britain was ahead technologically, right? That's important to know. The colonies were ahead in some spaces, like maybe they had better guns than the British, but really when it came to the industrialization, there was one country in the world that had the IP and that country was Britain. And all the other countries like the United States, Germany, Belgium, they were all trying to steal as best as they could the IP and rebuild industry there. So without Alexander Hamilton, A much slower industrialization. Now it still happens. New York is kind of like, you know, already on this trajectory of becoming a rapidly growing city, being a center of capital, being a gateway to the Great Lakes region. The geography of the Great Lakes region is beautiful. There's these vast coal reserves, you know, Appalachia. There's like immense mineral wealth. There's like cheap labor. It's all set up for industrialization. But for example, if the US is slower to industrialize, might the Civil War last longer before the North wins? For example, right? I don't think you can rig it without ham— without just Hamilton. I don't think you get a situation where like the South wins or anything crazy like that. But can you have a longer war? Oh yes. And if we assume that, say, Benjamin Franklin—

Well, by the way, they don't have to win. They could at some point, like if the war was 4 years longer, like people would have, you know, they already had riots in New York. You already had all these other things going on during the Civil War. where people didn't want to go to die there, you know, they— you know, you could see an uprising just saying like, okay, just let the South have their— like, who cares? Like, they'll, they'll have their own country, we'll have ours. Ours is better, but like, we don't need to go fight with them, right? You could have seen that scenario if the war went on a little longer.

Of course. And of course— and here's another funny one about New York. Uh, there were pamphleteers arguing that actually New York should declare independence from the Union and just be neutral in the Union versus South conflict. So interesting. They would be immensely successful as a city-state. Manhattan is an island. It's not quite Venice, but it is an island.

Yeah.

So alternate history, independent New York. But for Alexander Hamilton specifically, undeniably, he accelerated American industrial technical development. He, on the other hand, also accelerated the strength of the federal government. So all else equal, the country would've been more devolved and more, you know, in the political sense of devolution, it would have been more decentralized. Right. And then if you look at someone like Benjamin Franklin, you know, I think there's a very subtle effect where the concept of an American genius sort of starts with Benjamin Franklin, the idea that there's an American polymath or an American inventor.

And so what I like about Franklin, it was like it was a worldwide phenomenon. He was not just known in the US as the American genius, but All of a sudden it became known there are American geniuses. Like when he goes to France, which was like probably like the most, you know, one of the most further along countries, they were like, oh wow, he is a genius. Like when the French say someone's a genius, then they really think this person is a genius.

They truly respected him. He was completely the right ambassador for France, like a great intellectual. Also someone that was very good at flirting, someone who was very socially, uh, you know, he was exceptional at making friends, right? You can just read his writing, read his biographies. And I think that without his assistance, the diplomatic relations with France would be worse. That's very important, right? French support at various times, and at other times French neutrality was crucial for about, like, at least the first 30 years of American history, not just their interventions during the Civil War. Sorry, not their interventions during the Revolutionary War.

Yeah.

But also them being willing to lend support and being kind of a counterbalance still to the British in a variety of contexts.

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Assume you believe like it would be great if we had more great founders, right? There's a— yes, you could, you could, you could, you could, you can make an argument. So if that's true, like how do we do that? Like how do we get more great founders? How do we double? How do we 10x the number of great founders that are there?

Well, I, I, I think it's very— like I said at the start, it's very probabilistic. I don't think we have a science of human psychology or biology Or spirit or whatever it is that is sufficient for us to produce truly unique genius. I even would go as far as to say that, you know, if we dig up and clone, clone, say, von Neumann, who's a great scientist, right? We'll certainly get very good physicists, but I'm not completely convinced unless you get the upbringing just right that you would get this unique genius. After all, there are many, many smart people who do very little with their lives.

Right. You could have a high— you can have an IQ of 160 and really do very little.

And part of it is, I think, if I were to venture to guess what our society might be, say, lacking to certain other societies that I actually think had a higher density of great founders than we do. Now, to give examples, I'll give the example of the Roman Republic, almost overflowing with exceptional individuals that routinely reform armies, social systems, land redistribution, et cetera, et cetera, legal institutions, new cities. And, you know, produce— the Romans routinely produce conquerors on the level of Alexander the Great. Okay. Like, it's like Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar and Crassus. These are like, if any of those individuals show up today, they're Elon Musk tier immediately.

Right.

Like, let's remember Crassus, for example. It's like he made his wealth, right? He was like a real estate mogul. Real estate mogul comes to be political. Political big shot, runs an attempt to conquer Persia. Now, he dies early in it, but if he didn't die, maybe he'd even succeed. So what did they have? They had an appreciation for ambition. They had an appreciation for this view that if you do something amazing in society, if you— in a way, even if you elevate yourself, but if you do a good enough job in the self-elevation that it's not mere self-promotion, but it is great accomplishment, that you crave that. the glory, yeah, that society benefits. The Romans were like, oh, you know, Caesar, of course, is full of himself, but Caesar is also for the people. Right. And they had this intuition that human greatness is excellent. And I think America used to have that. Right. Early 20th century, you would get like— you would still get a parade as a victorious general. Right. And you would still get a parade for at least the NASA astronauts that landed on the moon. Like Neil Armstrong got a parade in New York.

Yeah.

John Glenn. Exactly. Of course, it was like a big bureaucratic NASA behind it, but that was the man that risked their life, went to space. That's the man who the president would mourn in a speech. Do you ever read the unpublished Richard Nixon speech, uh, for if the astronauts died?

No, I never read that. Oh, wow. Oh my gosh.

It's worth reading, right? It's like now just there in the archives and it's, uh, you know, it kind of has a grim determination. It's like, oh, these astronauts, they're like stuck on the moon. They're going to run out of oxygen in 72 hours. We can't do anything. for them. We like salute their sacrifice and like they're going to be forever—

That was a real possibility. Yeah.

Look, look, how in the world are you going to incentivize like risking your life in any way or even risking your fortune if there's not upside?

Yeah.

And I think in our society, as soon as someone who is prominent fails in any way, even a small way, we immediately attack them. We turn on them.

And it's almost opposite though. I feel like when they fail, people are People kind of like almost celebrate them, but it's when they succeed is when they attack them in our society.

Okay, that's, that's an interesting take. Well, I think we're not comfortable with anyone being quote unquote too powerful or too wealthy.

Yeah, that might have always been true, right? People are always conspiring against people who are too wealthy and too powerful.

But, um, but there was the sense that, but there was the sense that we needed it. Yes. Like in previous eras, the view was that, okay, We don't want too many people being too powerful, too successful. But our country really has these problems. We really need this individual to succeed. I think maybe we're getting a little bit of that back right now. It sort of feels that, let's say, in the last 2 to 3 weeks, I think on net, the country now sort of wants Elon to succeed, and they sort of wanted him to fail 2 months ago.

Yeah.

Now, succeed at what is a different question, right? Going to Mars? I think they would be way happier with him going to Mars now than if he was going to Mars under, say, a different administration or under a different cultural moment, right? Since this, I think, is not a narrow party issue. I think you can't actually vote your way to a great society, to an amazing society. But I think that we have to develop some sort of public counterbalance to the feelings of, I think, envy and spite. And frustration.

I feel like we do feel we're okay with like people in their lane. So it's like, I think people always love like Elon Musk, like building rockets and going to Mars. Like most probably the 80% of Americans probably love that and, and hope that he gets fabulously wealthy from that. Or they, they love that Taylor Swift gets fabulously wealthy off our singing songs, you know. Or, you know, or just think of, um, Patrick Mahomes being like just this incredible quarterback. And getting fabulously wealthy because he entertains so many people. And so I think the— but sometimes Americans don't like when they slightly change their lane. Like, if all of a sudden Patrick Mahomes is going to be like a business mogul or senator or something, maybe like, whoa, you're a great quarterback. But so they have this kind of odder feeling for some reason. I don't know why, when somebody slightly deviates from the narrative of who they are.

Well, when Arnold Schwarzenegger went from bodybuilding to being an actor, people said he's no actor, he's just a muscle guy. When he became a politician, people finally said, well, he's an actor, he's no politician. So at least they didn't, you know, they acknowledged the achievement of being an actor after there was a third lane he crossed into. But I think the truth of it is that if you have, you know, people who are truly amazing, well, we mentioned Napoleon earlier. Uh, you know, there's, there's a math theorem named after Napoleon.

I didn't know that.

Because he was just corresponding with Laplace, the famous French mathematician, and he wanted to troll him a little bit and just sent him some fine math to demonstrate in this metaphorical way, if I was not Alexander, maybe I'd be Diogenes. The classic encounter when Alexander the Great meets Diogenes and he's like, hey, I can do anything for you. And this philosopher in a barrel is like, well, move away. from, you know, move away from the sun, leave me, stop, stop throwing shade on me. And he says that, you know, if I wasn't Alexander, I'd want to be Diogenes. And Diogenes is like, if I wasn't Diogenes, I'd want to be Alexander. So a lot of these people have in them the capacity for many different amazing lives. They're not insects. They're not super specialized.

Yeah.

And I think that Perhaps that you are correct. I think you're actually right in that very narrow accomplishment is okay with us, but the jumping to something else is something we have grown less comfortable with. Let's note, no one took Eisenhower's military record to be a reason that he shouldn't run for president, right? Great military achievement.

Yeah.

Followed by great political achievement. And I think that People were sort of holding the businessman background against Donald Trump back in, let's say, 2016 when the campaign started. Now everyone thinks of him, of course, as a politician. Like, that's what he is now in people's minds. Um, but I think that there's something about it where the more you can do, the more— sorry, the more you do, the more you can do. And I think that's just never never stops being true. I think it just keeps being true to very uncomfortable levels where we kind of have to face a very inegalitarian conclusion. We can't tell ourselves the story that, you know, if only I trained as much as Mike Tyson, you know, I would actually be Mike Tyson.

Yeah.

That's, that's not true. If only I dedicated my life to music as much as Taylor Swift, I would be Taylor Swift. It's not true. I mean, you can be something else that's amazing. Right.

But, uh, well, in some ways I think for a lot of these it's like they have to thrive. In some ways it's freeing. Oh, well, I just like, I focused on the wrong thing. I just spent so much time boxing, but I actually could be great in some other area. And maybe in, you know, there's, there's like a line that maybe everyone can be great if they just found their, their calling. But then that's probably also not true either, right? Um, it's a, it's, it's— now how do you think, like, the thing of these, like, you know, you talk a lot about these live players. Most of the world are these, these NPCs. these non-player characters that exist, um, for many— there might be some NPCs that have agency, and when they want to become live players, how does that work? Like, how does, how does one move from one to the other?

I think, uh, the concept of a live player that I introduced in a, I think, 2017 essay, um, it's been picked up, is tied to the ability to go off script. So every time you have Every industry, every sort of established field of human action, right, be it academic or otherwise, has sort of a predetermined script of how things are supposed to be. Okay, this is what a successful academic career looks like. This is how many times a year you publish. This is the kind of topics you publish on. This is how you treat your doctoral advisor. This is how you treat your grad students. This is how you interact with, you know, student protests if they show up. This is how you answer email.

Mm-hmm.

It's a lot and it's received wisdom and people will not be able to deviate from it in the moment. They won't be able to improvise on the spot and a live player will. So in the academic context, you know, maybe actually say back in the day, you know, Richard Hamming was like breaking social script by showing up and like asking people—

I have no idea who Richard Hamming is. Who is that?

Okay. Have you ever heard of the Hamming question?

No.

Okay. The Hamming question is— he's a mathematician. His name is Richard Hamming. He was quite accomplished, and he would ask scientists in other fields, what are the most important problems in your field? And then he would follow up with the very provocative and rude question, why aren't you working on them? So it's kind of funny. It's an interesting question. Now, you can, of course, answer it, oh, comparative advantage, maybe. Maybe fluid dynamics is the most interesting area, but I'm not really talented for that. So, I'm doing this other thing that's also very good, and we're looking at how ice crystallizes and all of that stuff. But I think people usually don't have the answer. I think people usually are like, oh, it's not really my place. Well, whose place is it? And like, who gets to have a shot at solving the most important questions in a field? So, I really want to emphasize this doesn't just apply to like, oh, this person rewrote the book. on how to do a tech company, right? Or, oh, this person totally changed French politics. It can also be that this person totally changed the field of physics.

Yeah.

Going around and asking uncomfortable questions. And it's not that the uncomfortableness is itself super good. It's just that you're not tied to the script. And when it doesn't make sense, you don't do the thing that doesn't make sense, and you do instead the thing that makes sense.

Even if you're the only one doing it, do you think you could have a high percentage of identifying live players when they're 16? Like, do you think you could, like, I don't know, somehow interview 16-year-olds and have a very high likelihood of, of picking? Or do you think it'd still be very, very hard to pick live players?

I mean, you know, I think that for young people it is actually quite tricky. Because what you can see, what you can see is that you can see intelligence, you can see sort of maybe confidence, like drive and some drive, you can sometimes see very early signs of like a savant, a very high accomplishment. And you can certainly see when someone is spirited.

But you know, okay, why do I say maybe a little bit of a rule breaker or something?

Exactly. But you know, how much of that is useful testosterone?

Yeah.

Everyone's a rule breaker at 17 or 16. To some extent, our culture encourages it. 26, fewer. 36, oh, very few people, right?

Yeah.

So a lot of this, in a way, is almost more like a marathon than a sprint. Yes, in our society, for example, in mathematics, it happens to be true that a person has to be a very young brain to win the academic races and do all the mathematical accomplishments. But even historically, that wasn't true. Like Gauss, was producing world-transforming math in his 50s. So I do have to ask whether it's actually true or whether we've just decided that only like people very early in their career can do math. And once they accomplish something exceptional, get a Fields Medal, they kind of lose the drive to do more and no one expects them to do more and they can retire.

There's something about like—

I would say that we could sort of spot people, I think, by the time they're like 23. I think 23 is like a very good age. Because if they've been live players, if maybe they say started in high school, or if they only sort of broke with, for example, broke with the implicit expectation of their parents in the college era, that still gives them time to have successfully switched at least once something important about what they're pursuing. Right. So maybe they start being super intellectually interested in mathematics.

Yeah.

They figure out something interesting and they're like, you know what, actually, this would be a great company. Or maybe they start off interested in biology and then they realize, wait, actually, actually, academia is just so messed up. I'm going to go reform how science is funded. That's the real problem. That's what I'm going to do. And they start doing well right away. So I would look at someone who has done at least 2 things extremely well, and ideally they're somewhat unrelated. They can be adjacent. It can be still a logical jump. But it should be the mastery of a totally new set of skills in a way that's too fast to have been preparation. Like, a lot of people can be raised to be a doctor or raised to be a lawyer, but that just means you've learned a very high-functioning script very well. No one can, like, go and do amazing things in a new field 2 years in if they're not writing their own script.

Now, I know when back in the '90s, like in Internet 1.0, I happened to meet a lot of people who had who looked at the time a lot like Elon Musk did. They had very similar types of exits. They were very— they seemed to be very ambitious. And literally none of those people, even though they're all young at the time, they're all in their 20s at the time, literally none of those people you have ever heard of. There's not one of those people who I knew back then who you've heard of today. They're all You know, they're still wealthy, um, but mostly they're— they created a winery or something like that, and they just— they kind of fell off the ambition path. So how would one know? And I think if you looked at them, they seem like the rule breaker. They're starting the companies, they were successful, they— but some— at some point they just kind of fell off the path, maybe because they were a little— just a little bit too normal, um, or they were just too optimizing for happiness, or I don't know, how would one know if they're going to fall off the path or not?

I think it's a very interesting question as to why does that happen so often. I think for many people, it's sort of like— I think that there's something interesting that happens, which is like, okay, I've made my money, so it's time to retire. And often it's like it's a big amount of money by any objective measure, but it's not often even a Silicon Valley large amount of money. Right? It can be like just a relatively low bar, something like, okay, I can now be upper middle class for the rest of my life and never worry about earning any more money. Or maybe it's time for a family, it's time for kids, or something like this.

Yeah.

And I think if we were to drill into it, if we were to be able to like talk to them very, very deeply, and they might not trust you, I think every single live player has a very esoteric and strange view of the world under many layers of normality. They have some, like, crazy thesis. They're like, okay, I mean, now this is no longer a crazy thesis, but 20 years ago, if someone shows up, it's like, you know, the human era is about to end in 25 years and we are like at the cusp of the singularity.

Yeah.

That was a way more interesting person to talk to than if someone shows up right now and says, we're 5 years away from the singularity.

Correct.

The human era is near. It's a totally different filter because I think this is when kind of almost a worldview or like a philosophical position, but it has to be an embodied philosophy, right? It has to be motivating, animating. That's why I often use this term of spirited. I mean, if you were superstitious, maybe you call it a possession or an obsession at the very least. If it enters late in your life where you're sort of like, you know, it's like all your layers of personality are developed, you look around, okay, turns out AI is the thing. That's very different than, okay, you think about intelligence and you read some science fiction and you grasp, wait, but if we had an artificial form of intelligence, that would change everything. And you get very excited and you think about the world and you're like, wow, okay, this is going to define my life. This is what I'm going to do with the next 30 years. I'm going to say, like, of— and many prominent people today have this element of almost a mystic to them. To give an example of someone who's like pretty obvious, who almost doesn't hide it at all, even shows it. I think actually Ilya Sutskever is like, he's practically a mystic of AI.

Sure.

If you like listen to him talk about, oh, models want to learn, or like the, you know, intelligence, or Vitalik is kind of like that for Ethereum, right?

He really does seem like, like that. The, the, you know, yeah, some ways like the, the whole crypto thing is kind of interesting to me because there's this, these, these like series of founders there That are somewhat deity-like, right? I'm starting with Satoshi, who we don't even know if it was a person or a group of people, um, or a man or a woman. We really just don't know anything about Satoshi.

Or maybe a team at the NSA.

Right, right.

It could have been. Exactly. But we then can, because of that, we can project onto Satoshi what we want, um, he or she, this deity to be. Um, and because it's a deity and not a real person, it doesn't have flaws. Uh, it's not like, you know, cheating on their spouse and doing all this other, you know, stuff like normal, you know, uh, people that we know of do. So like, it's, it's, it's perfect, right, in some ways. And then we have Vitalik, who's kind of the next deity. And then it seems like he is pretty perfect, like in a very weird way. He seems like he actually is a good person, right? Like, of all the tech people, I mean, He's like, he probably has like the least evil in him if you had to like score evil stuff, right? He just seems like actually a genuinely good person. Now, like maybe he is a secret evil genius, I don't know. But like, but yeah, but that's part of the reason, you know.

But, but do you know, ironically, no matter what the mechanism of Ethereum is, the fact that he's such a trustworthy person and such an original thinker and just basically does what he perceives to be the right thing, That in itself should make someone more bullish about Ethereum.

Of course.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's not irrational too. It's kind of funny, right? Because crypto had for a long time this theory of a trustless, you know, how important trustless systems are. But let's be real, at the end of the day, trust in those founders.

Yeah, we're trusting Vitalik, right? And then Satoshi may be dead. We don't even know. So it's like, then we're trusting this other thing out there.

Exactly. I mean, currently anyone who's participating in the crypto bull run is like sort of trusting that the Trump administration will like restrain the, uh, overregulation of crypto that was perhaps otherwise in the cards. Um, so they're at least trusting the administration in some way, or trusting at least to not do certain things, even if they don't trust it to do certain things.

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Speaking of trust, like, there's been this decline of trust in elites in the society. Um, are, are elites less good today than they have been in the past? Like, is that trust warranted?

Well, I think trust has to be earned.

Yeah.

And I think we should not be developing Let's put it this way. We should not be delusionally trusting because misplaced trust will be abused and eventually will be broken anyway.

Yes.

Because no matter how much you might exhort people to sort of like, you know, have faith in their government, there's some bad people, but, you know, it's good on net. Behave in a good trust way to the universities, to your HR manager. Like, it has positive externalities if you act that way. But in another way, no, actually low trust is a healthy immune response to institutions and individuals who are no longer worthy of receiving trust.

How do you square that? Because like, we have like, it seems like we have lower trust in institutions, but we still have like a fairly high trust society. Like, we still kind of trust that no one's out there like gonna rob us and stuff. And we still like, we're still generally like, we interact people. I'm wiring money, you know, to people all the time. Like, don't— I've still fairly high trust they're not going to abscond with it to, you know, Venezuela. And, you know, like, we're, we're, we're so like in business, it's, it's very— like, the US is very high trust in business, like extremely high trust.

That's true.

Like, you know, just to trust like a complete stranger, you know. And if you think of venture capital, complete stranger shows up with an idea and you're like, great, here's a million bucks, you know. You know, it's like, so it's, uh, it's like kind of crazy that we do that, but we, we do that because, because it actually generally it It works out. Like, they usually don't abscond. Like, they're not like bad— they're usually not bad actors that are out there. So how do you square this kind of like lower trust within institutions with still like fairly high trust of everyone in society?

I think we, we, we are, uh, declining from a very high baseline of trust.

Okay.

I think there used to be a very high baseline of trust in, um, everywhere we're declining. And politics. Well, in, in politics, it's pretty straightforward. Like, the General Society Survey, uh, if you compare results from today versus the 1950s, I think the only institution that is still trusted at 1950s levels is the US military, and even that's losing points.

I think that's way down from where it used to be.

Um, well, over the last 2 years especially.

I think the military has been going down every year for— I mean, Obviously Vietnam, it took a hit, but then the Iraq War took a hit and Afghanistan took a hit.

But the presidency and Congress and the federal agencies actually lost the trust even faster. So it's sort of a question of like, what is the last man standing, right? What is the most trusted organ of government? I will note that I don't think the US is going to have a coup anytime soon, but in countries where the only trusted organ of government is the military tend to not be the happiest countries. So the, the result isn't now to blindly trust a government that has demonstrably failed. You say a government that, that, that tried to block through a variety of policy measures, say, open and free discussion of the realities of the COVID virus and the realities of the COVID vaccines, which, you know, I'm in favor. I'm in favor broadly of the vaccines, but I thought it was insane the amount of information control Western governments try to exert over the internet. Yeah, it's like, why?

It didn't make any sense. Well, I think that's actually what public health— what created the distrust. Yeah, was that— so sometimes this overregulation, this over kind of regulation, was what creates distrust on certain types of things. You clearly have something to hide if you're not going to allow people to debate, right?

Or you're trying to nudge people or manipulate them to behave in ways that are against their individual self-interest. And there's so many tells When you, as policy, try to encourage the individuals in a large country to behave in a way that is maybe collectively good and individually bad, and you lie to them that it's individually good for them, they can tell. So there's a certain amount of lying that the government can get away with. In fact, here's— I'm going to be a little cynical. I think people want their government to be able to lie to them a little bit, because if the government can't lie to you a little bit, it means it can't lie to your enemies.

Of course.

And then you want the government to keep you safe from the scary enemies in the world out there. But there's a tolerance zone, and the government's way out of that tolerance zone. And the politicians as individuals, people don't even trust that they're doing their work in government well. So it's not just trust of abstract systems. It's like trust in, okay, will this representative actually be a representative? Will they actually be more than just a social media personality? I think we're losing that because the class of politicians is worse and we're losing trust in the bureaucracies because the bureaucracies are so broken compared to when they were built. I don't think we can get away with having a society with no bureaucracy, actually, by the way. I think bureaucracy is like markets, right? Bureaucracy is amazing. It's a great machine where you string together 50 people following rules and together they almost do as good a job as a single genius would.

Yeah.

And that's very fortunate because we have Probably 50 or 500 or 5 million people per genius. So it's a really good trade-off. It's like we have so many millions of people, you can get 50 of them to do the job. Amazing, right? But over time, they become cancerous. They become out of date. People expand headcount. They find creative ways to reinterpret what the mission of the bureaucracy is. On paper, it's achieving it. In actuality, it doesn't. All these normal effects. And this has truly added up. Now, you said that we still trust people. But if I hear in San Francisco, if I go to a store, the shaving cream's locked up. What's the point of an inconvenient convenience store? At that point, I truly shouldn't go out in the street. I should truly just order it on Amazon.

Yeah. What you do, of course.

Which I do more and more. But then that's kind of a death spiral for the whole concept of a city. And at the end of the day, do I prefer living in, like, let's call it Universal LA, where I drive everywhere and I have everything delivered to my home and I never take a stroll down the street with some storefronts and I never just, like, explore a physical world with lots of bustling people around. I don't like that. I actually, like, I prefer us being able to use these physical spaces. I think Manhattan is great for the world. Big cities are great for the world. They make everyone more productive. They make everyone more social. They socialize them. in a deep way.

But no one, no one actually like forms their opinion on everything on first principles. Like, that would be impossible because it takes so long to go down the first principles rabbit hole. Like, maybe, so maybe people we know like pick like a few topics a year to go on first principles on and form their opinion of. But like, I don't even know, honestly, I've never even gone first principles of whether the world is round or not. Like, I just kind of trust The— I trust the, the quote-unquote experts, whoever these people may be, that it is round.

I don't know.

Um, I'm just kind of making like— I've never like gone around the rabbit hole of whether we faked the moon landing. I'm just kind of like trusting that we did it and that people like Neil Armstrong, as you said earlier, actually landed on the moon and then actually came back. But like, who knows? Like, I'm not— I'm not like— so I— you can— you can't go down on everything. You have to decide. And then of course If you're trusting the experts, you're picking the experts you trust. So everyone is trusting some expert somewhere on something, right? They're going on the internet. It could be on the internet, and they're looking at some YouTube influencer who's an expert on your health, and they're trust. They might be trusting that person over the quote unquote medical establishment, but everyone is looking to an expert to trust on almost every single issue, and then rarely ever going on first principles on anything. Um, so a lot of us is— a lot of the decisions is just deciding which expert to trust, and hopefully that person went on the first principles on it, and we are going to trust that they did a good job doing that, right? Or is that— is that kind of like in the end what we're doing? And we're just— so now it's not that we're trusting experts less, it's just we're trusting different experts.

I think that's correct, because it's not like there's generalized skepticism. But for example, You might not trust the FDA, but you trust the bodybuilder Twitter account that you follow when figuring out your diet and how to lose weight, right? You don't follow the food pyramid.

And why would you trust, you know, it's like, cause at some point you're like, the food pyramid has been wrong, right? Exactly. This idea of this food pyramid, who knows how that, no one even knows. There's, there's no one even knows how actually that even came up. Like, it's not even clear. So it's like, okay, well, they've been lying to me all this time. They don't maybe even know why they're lying to me. They may not even know they're lying. So I'm going to find another expert who maybe hasn't, maybe is lying to me, but I don't know that they're lying to me yet. So I'm going to go to that person because like, you know, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, you know, fool me twice, shame on me. Sorry. Yeah.

No, no, it's exactly the case. And I think it's, it is, as you explained, it is impossible for us to rethink absolutely everything. It's just a question of whether we are capable of occasionally rethinking things. And that's actually very difficult, right? You, you are. immediately very strange if you're like the first person to trust the anonymous dieting guy over the FDA's recommendation, or you're the first person that sort of like, it's like, you know, I think I'm going to inject myself with this Ozempic stuff. I think it's pretty good, actually. I've read the papers and everyone's like, what are you doing? Like what?

Well, there's safety in numbers too. So if you have enough friends or people you like who trust this person, then you're more likely to trust this. Then it gets easier.

Yeah, yeah. And look, I think that there's perhaps— let's put it this way. As long as we have the mechanism in society to update eventually the legal recognition of who are the best available experts in our society, this is actually a pretty healthy process.

Yeah.

Because over time, people will, you know, I think if given enough time, people will cohere and find the new experts. Now, whether these experts will be accredited, like, will they be credentialed? Will they be recognized by the government or by big companies in their official decision-making? That's another problem. So I think there's like individual trust, like on that level, the whole internet has been slowly rerouting to new sources of trust, like new media platforms, new writers, new scientific authorities on all sorts of topics. Some of these are, of course, bad. They're like, medical misinformation is rife both among so-called experts and among the contrarians. But on that, I think individuals will find their way, but the laws will be the same.

Yeah.

And then everyone will be like, well, I figured out my entire treatment plan online and I figured out— I talked to everyone about what I need to do. Okay, the only thing I now have to do is go to an office with this person who's technically my doctor, and convince them to sign off on my internet-assembled treatment plan.

Yeah.

It's like, I'm like, why do you need that person in that office? How long are we going to do that? Like, because that's in a way a miscredentialing, right? That's a— I mean, the person might even be a great doctor. They just literally don't have time for you. And we need to open bureaucracies to accept the input of, hey, this person that's like, or this organization has come up with this treatment plan. Insurance company, this is just as valid as if a doctor did it, and there's no laws preventing you from, from, you know, reimbursing them, right? For example, if you even were to use insurance for that. But, but there's, there's like a deeper problem here because you can have a bureaucracy that's stupider than the sum of its parts, because sometimes the sum of its parts just know things that are inadmissible in the official record. Now, you know, even for foreign policy, if you printed out like a blog post from like a really insightful commenter on geopolitics and you show up and it's like a State Department meeting, yeah, I don't think that works. Now, maybe it works in the Trump admin.

Well, even there, I don't think it works. It's been, um, yeah, well, I, I think for the, the U.S. foreign policy, I think some other countries are quite good at it, but U.S. foreign policy in some ways has been so discredited Over the last 25 years, the experts have just been so wrong at almost every big issue. They're maybe right on a lot of the small ones or whatever, but at least on the big issues, they've been wrong on almost every one. Um, that, that I think it's much easier to do today. Uh, yes, but still amazing how much power the, these quote-unquote experts have when they've been wrong so much. Um, right. Imagine investors who've just been wrong on literally everything for 25 years. Like, they probably would not be the ones in power anymore.

Yes.

If that was the case, because they would've lost all their money. So it is kind of interesting to me that even though we've essentially lost the kind of like, you've run all these big bets and you're wrong, you invaded Iraq, whatever the big bets were that were completely, utterly wrong and were disastrous things, yet you still have lots of power, which is kind of funny to me. Now, if we're in a, like, there used to be a scenario where There really weren't any live players, let's say, after the age of 80 or something. I mean, it was just like, you know, maybe historically there was maybe one or two, but it's extremely— it'd be extremely rare where that would've ever happened. Either they died before then or like they just were just not functioning as a live player. But we're moving to a world, and maybe even 70 for, you know, many cases that was probably the case.

Yeah.

Now we're moving to a world where like they're clearly going to be live players after 70. There's clearly going to be live players after 80. Um, there may be live players after 90, maybe live players after 100. Um, like, how does that— because now we're just gonna have like the, the life— look, someone, it will be a quote-unquote live player for much longer. Um, you know, Napoleon was really not that much of a live player for that long. Um, he's briefly—

He died fairly young.

Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah. And, you know, so he's briefly a live player. Um, and, you know, people are gonna span a much longer life cycle of being alive? Like, how does that change things?

You know, I've had this discussion with related to life extension before, and let me propose that actually very long lifespans will be a boon for true merit, not a detriment to merit. Let me explain.

If modern politicians over time—

people will learn, people will change, and especially we should not conflate Old incumbent powerful people with live players, right? There are many people who in America, it's practically a seniority system, but the average age of Congress goes up by a year almost every year. So that's kind of wacky. We are now about, and I think the average age of Congress, this is a depressing one. I think it's the average age of Congress right now is like about 10 years older than the Politburo in the 1980s, the Politburo of the Soviet Union. And we call that gerontocracy back then, right? Because America was more ageist.

The Senate. is very old.

The Senate is very old, right? And to be fair, the word does mean old, right? Senate is sort of senior in the Latin, et cetera. But it's not supposed to be that old. Okay. It's not supposed to be that old.

Yeah.

Um, even, even the Romans would be like, what are you guys doing? Um, so I, I do think that, you know, if Benjamin Franklin had access to TikTok, I think great things would be happening. I think it would be tremendous. I think he'd figure out how to do it. I think he'd probably even figure out like new little viral dances, but also he'd probably educate you about science and he'd come to his own bespoke opinion on vaccines.

Yeah.

And of course, maybe occasionally he'd have to defend a statement he made in 1820, but by that point there'd be so many other people around who made like a statement in 1820 that is like now racist or sexist or whatever, that the actual statement of, hey, I was very young. It was a different era. I've learned better. Here's the things I've done in the last 100 or 200 years where I've changed my social views. I think that we would be better off. Like, wouldn't you feel better if in modern politics you had some of the greatest politicians of the last 200 years competing together on an even playing field? I think that would actually result in mere seniority decaying. Because let's put it this way, I think that even a young— let's put it this way, a 30-year-old Alexander Hamilton would certainly outmaneuver in politics a 150-year-old Cromwell if he was forced to compete with him. So I think there will always be new geniuses, new young people who will come to succeed and who will come to compete with the old live players. Now, gerontocracy as a whole, though, is a massive problem as we move into a low fertility regime where even the United States is a low fertility country. It's just masked by immigration. We literally have European-tier fertility in this country now. It's like TFR 1.6. It used to be the case that elitist games in all human societies, in all places, favor the old, and democratic games tend to favor the young. But what happens when the median voter is old? Then you have a world where both like populism is gerontocratic and both elitism is gerontocratic too. And of course your bank account keeps going up if let's say the economy is growing and like you invest in the stock market and the stock crashes never— and corrections never happen. So compound interest also works in your place. So anything on that, we're gonna have to do something to empower young people systematically. Like I think—

Let's double-click on the fertility stuff because I know that's like That's something that you're super interested in. I mean, we now have like Japan is kind of like a mid-fertility country. We used to think of it as like a super low fertility country, but it's kind of been flat for a long time. And I think, what are they, TFR 1.3 or something like that?

They're in that range.

Okay, so like that's actually pretty good. That's better than like it seems like most of Europe now, right? Certainly better than most of all— most of East Asia, right? Um, sort of way better than China, way better than, than Korea. Um, um, etc. Uh, well, Korea is what, uh, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, in that range? Um, yes. I mean, this is insane, right? Uh, I assume China's in that same kind of range as well.

Um, and, uh, uh, which is, which is, which is crazy, especially in the cities, right? If you look at Hong Kong, that's right, or Singapore, or if you look at Shenzhen, like, even below 1, the official ones for China are like a little above 1, but They might be inflating them, right? I think we've entered the point where countries are going to hide how much their population is declining. For example, a census in a country, in a European country like Romania or even Ukraine, is politically super explosive because then you have to admit that during, say, the last 10 years, 20% or 30% of the population moved out.

Right. And what does the census even mean? Because you might still be counting people that, that, that, that moved out.

Yeah, they don't work, don't make babies. Yeah, in the country.

Yeah, but they move to Poland or they move to the UK or they move some other place or, you know, something like that. Like, at least in the US, like, people aren't leaving the US usually. It's pretty rare for someone to leave the US for another country. Um, we're, we're not that much of an exporter of people, um, to other countries. But yeah, when you think of some of these other places, like, you've got this like doom loop that they're eventually kind of exporting folks outside of it. But like, what is it? What is a country— like, do you think— so many things have been tried to increase fertility. It doesn't seem like anything has worked. Um, and it seems like fertility is going down everywhere. I think you had mentioned it's even going down in Iran, like, massively. So yeah, it's like, it's not like religion solves it or something. Um, and, um, you know, people make a big stink, like, okay, the, the only, um, you know, first world country that has, you know, relatively high fertility is Israel. But like, Who knows why? Like, there's just like, it's such a unique and small country that it's like, it's hard to generalize that to anything.

Uh, my dispiriting prediction for Israel is that Israel's fertility will come to decline as well. It's an outlier in that it's like perhaps a bit slower, but it's on the same trajectory.

Yeah.

If we were talking 10 or 20 years ago, we would actually be talking about America as a high fertility country. Right?

Yep.

And America is a very religious country. But if you today look again at the self-identified religiosity of teenagers and people in their early 20s, America and Europe have converged. America is actually, in the young generations, about as secular as Europe. And the fertility is again sort of comparable. So a lot of the time when you— when something seems like an exception, It's sort of like the last data point that's like straggling before it joins this cluster that's all going the same way.

In America, like, I have this theory that like, okay, it's— well, the, you know, there's a certain expectation of how you want to live. Um, and you know, you know, back in the day we maybe had okay with like cramped apartments and kids running around, but like we have a certain expectation. So if you're like not wealthy, well, it's like It's hard to afford having more than 2 kids or something, right? And then if you are wealthy, then there's this whole other kind of weird loop in America, which is kind of somewhat unique to America, which is that the people are investing so much in their children. Everyone has multiple, you know, if they have multiple kids, they're both on 2 crazy travel teams and they're traveling every weekend.

Yeah.

So, well, if you're like, you have 2 parents, you can't even have more than 2 kids. It'd be like functionally almost impossible. To be like on the travel team, you know, you would need, you would need like this whole staff of people and stuff. Um, and so it's like only billionaires now can have like lots of kids or, you know, or something. So even if you have the space in the house to, to go do that, it seems, it still seems harder for people to go do. And then of course a lot of them are paying for private school. So, you know, these costs kind of like go up pretty significantly over time. And I think certainly that's been true in Korea where people are putting so much Um, into their kids. They're spending so much time with their kids that in their case, I think it's even hard to have more than one because they just spend so much time and they're— because they're going to so much tutoring and they're, they're really investing so much in them. Do you think there's any truth to any of this?

I think it is. And but also to say, the kids are not happy with it in Korea.

Oh yeah, all this is terrible.

They hate the test prep. Yeah, test prep.

Yeah, in Korea. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, in Korea. Yeah.

And I feel like American kids are pretty happy. Yeah.

Well, I feel like America, like, is— I think that the ideal of a happy childhood is more important in the United States than it is in Korea. So I think in both cases, you have a fertility reducing power here at work with the parents basically competing with each other. In America, in a way, it's like you get your kids the most enriched childhood, even if it means you have like very few of them. And in Korea, it's like your kids will be well-educated because it's good for them and also means you're a good parent because you got your kids to become like a doctor, an engineer, and they went top of their class. They have a perfect score. It still is tugging on the same heartstring of like caring about children, just the view of what is good for children. It's like in the US, it's like, okay, maybe it's happiness. And in South Korea, maybe it's education. Though I would say even in the United States, I bet Americans overvalue formal education at this point. There are definitely kids in America who have a completely choreographed high school resume, all in the service of trying to get them into an Ivy League university.

And they're all on the fencing team or something, or the sailing team to help them.

A lot of them burn out.

Yeah.

After they get into They're at school, their parents are okay, okay, go be happy. And they're like, I don't know myself. Yeah, I guess I'm going to be a consultant at McKinsey. I don't know.

That's what happens. They're all, they're all at McKinsey. What?

No.

Yeah.

So, so that's, that's kind of like something that destroys, you know, not just to riff back on some of our previous topics. I think it can just, it can derail or it's a detour in the life of a live player to be like shepherded excessively by parents being given opportunities. Yes. Guidance, sure, it's useful. But I think that there's a way in which parents are way more responsible for what their children do now than they would have been 100 years ago. It's like, you could literally, as a kid or a teenager, you could literally get a job and never talk to your parents again at 15. If you're, for example, if your dad was like a raging alcoholic, or if they had a religion you disagreed with, So even though in a way children are much more protected, you know, maybe, you know, and I don't want to see them working in coal mines. That's fine. But wouldn't it be interesting if it was more normal that a 15-year-old could like start a company if they want to, or they can have a normal job if they want to, or they can be—

Honestly, what's wrong with working in a coal mine? Like, go for it. Like, if you—

okay.

Yeah.

I mean, I mean, we have, we have now, you know, you have the the masks and so on, so you don't destroy your lungs, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm just saying, I understand the impulse behind banning child labor.

Yeah.

But I think we've become such a rich society that it's like the hyper-exploitation is not going to happen anymore. It's just going to be like mostly win-win situations. And I think the liberation of children is something that the United States could do more where, for example, You know, how many parents are now comfortable to have their children go for a 5-mile trip and back unsupervised?

Almost none.

And that was very normal, correct? Even 70 years ago. Yeah, even 20 years ago.

When I was a kid, that was, that was normal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So what the hell happened?

Yeah, yeah. And, and sorry, not even 5 miles, let's say even a 1-mile trip, you know, people aren't happy with.

Yeah, but, but even the 5-mile one's not Arbitrary. You've seen that sort of scope of shrinking. Um, there's like this map online that shows like over generations how the, the range of where people let their children go on the same town just kept shrinking generation after generation.

Most parents I know won't even let their kids go outside their house, you know, you know, without, without knowing where they are, without unsupervised, or, you know, that's extremely rare nowadays.

And then of course, of course, the only youth culture possible exists Yeah. Because that is the only space where they can go on their own. And now you're even perhaps supposed to maximally monitor their online exposure, right? So it's really, it's sort of like the situation where we have put onto parents the task of making the world safe for their children, or rather keeping children safe from actual dangers, because there are actual dangers, to be real. And but are also— but 2 things, our tolerance for danger has dropped so much that I think we are too into the safety.

Yeah.

Too into safety in all dimensions. It's like, you know, let's put it this way. People might think you're a bad parent if your kid gets into an injury. But, you know, I'm going to be like super provocative and say, if you've had like 4 or 5 kids and none of your kids has ever broken a bone, You're also a bad parent. You've actually smothered them. You've actually made the world much easier.

Probably not physically, but generally, though, they usually are on the soccer field where they break their bones nowadays, right? Which is maybe fine.

Sure, but that's better. That at least means you let them play a dangerous sport. Okay, there are people who won't even do that.

Yeah, right. Yeah, look, look, people are not getting married later too, right? And so, yeah, now, now I don't know really if they're getting married much later than they have been historically, because historically I think people did get married, especially men got very late. I think in the '60s in the US was the all-time lowest age for marriage, certainly for men. And women's has always been, you know, younger than men, but certainly for men it was way younger. It was probably, probably the average age for men getting married for the first time in the '60s was in like their early 20s, whereas I think at the beginning of the 19th century— sorry, beginning of the 18th century, beginning of the 20th century in the 1900s It was probably like in the 30s where men got married. So it probably went down 10 years during that time frame. Um, and then now it's starting to come back up to like the 30s again and stuff. Mm-hmm. But of course, you know, back in the, you know, the 1900s, we didn't have birth control, we didn't have other things that were preventing, uh, uh, people from having lots of kids. Like now we have all these things, and now that people get married later, like it's just harder to have lots of kids. If you get married when you're 35, it's just You know, just technically more difficult. You have to have IVF. And then of course, like, well, you're, you're older, you don't have as much energy, you know, all these other types of things as well to have lots of kids.

I think, I think part of, um, part of this transformation is that, you know, people say that, oh, you know, say artificial wombs or better reproductive technology will solve this problem.

Yeah.

But I think if we make it possible, and by the way, I'm in favor of developing those technologies. However, if we make it possible to have your children in your 60s, biologically your children in your 60s, I think the same sort of Red Queen race, the same sort of competitiveness to seem like a good parent, whether or not it's actually good for your children, to be best at your career and invest everything in your career at the right time to get into the right spots in the right corporate hierarchy, whatever. I think all of those races will intensify to the point where people will feel that they can't have children before 50. And, you know, maybe then life extension kicks in, but there's another deep cost to having children later in life. It's not just total fertility. It is intergenerational continuity. How much time do you have with your grandchildren?

Yep.

Right. And look, while of course the world has changed massively, And, you know, the baby boomers, well, perhaps they weren't like the font of wisdom. Maybe they were more like the broken chain, broken link in the chain. You know, I still think that human nature has some persistent truths to it. And like, say, evaluating like character is as useful today with some updates as it might have been 100 or 200 years ago, or understanding like even your temperament, right? Like, for example, someone that has a melancholic temperament. and enjoys reading poetry and perhaps share some poetry with their children that their children enjoy, possibly because they inherited some of the same melancholic genes. That right there is a psychiatrist customer that is not raising GDP. They don't need lithium. They don't need it. And they're better off for it. They may have an extra creative spark. I think we've forgotten How much cultivation it takes to really make yourself a functional human being. And we want to outsource that, you know, we want to outsource that. We've, we've sort of like, like religion did provide a lot of this, but also like small, these like micro family traditions provided that. They really did. Different families used to be different. And now I feel like we want to sand away all these differences and we want to be like, okay, you have to raise your kids like a therapist. Or you have to raise your kids like the, the tiger mom way. Either consensus is actually equally stifling if we like contrast East Asia versus California.

All right, now a couple, a couple personal questions before we leave. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

Okay, uh, very straightforward. I think, I think Lyndon B. Johnson, uh, was doing his best to sort of get Kennedy out of power or get him killed.

Oh, really? Okay, so you think he was, he was involved in the assassination somehow?

I think he, he was trying to enable it because, of course, the vice president is the most unimportant role you can think of. Yeah, Lyndon B. Johnson is among the most, you know, I'm not even critiquing his positions, but objectively he's one of the most, like, ruthless politicians.

Correct.

If you read Path to Power, which is an incredible book, like, yeah, yeah, he's a ruthless man. Yeah.

Yes, yes. Okay, so that, that's conspiracy theory.

Okay, I like it. Okay, all right, that's awesome.

I love it.

Okay, and last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

That's tricky, right? Because I could give many normal answers, the answers that are normal in our Silicon Valley, like, contrarian set. Like, if I were to say, oh, college is overrated, etc., right?

Nowadays, that, that might be—

that's common wisdom. Yeah, yeah, it's conventional. So, so let's try to stay actually unconventional. And, um, you know, okay, Okay. Taking a year or 2 off from an extremely highly accomplished career to go and read in seclusion or travel outside of tourism and so on. And let me emphasize, don't do ayahuasca, don't do acid, don't go to like alternative spiritual communities, just Actually read old books and contemplate things in seclusion and nature for a year. I think that's really underrated. People used to understand that's necessary, but there are models out there.

For a whole year?

A year.

Okay.

Yeah, a year to break all your habits.

Yeah.

And then you'll go back, you'll still have an amazing biography. Hopefully you're not in the position where your CV as written makes or breaks you, right? Like, ideally you have a strong enough reputation that that's not a problem. But at the end of that year, if you're like a driven individual, you will have basically like remade your, your whole concept of the world. And if you look at people, often there are misfortunes that are encountered in professional life, like there are companies that fail, there are political parties that lose elections. Sometimes, you know, in cases I mentioned, Mike Tyson, you know, he went to prison and he actually read a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah. She read a lot there, right?

Yeah.

the use of that, the use of reading, like, in a way, we are a post-literate civilization. So we're undervaluing reading and we're undervaluing the reading of like a book as a full format, not fragments on your phone, not doom scrolling. So I would honestly say that, you know, this concept, the Roman concept of otium, right? Like, you could call it leisurely or free time. But it's almost this self-renewal. I think it's underrated. And I think, uh, many highly accomplished people—

How does one do that? I mean, for, for many people, they are— they're still in— even if they have amazing exit, like, they're integrated in society. They're still, uh, they still have parents they have to interact with. They may have children, they may have a spouse, um, they may have other friends that are relying on them. Like, how, how does one, like, extricate themselves from society for a year?

Well, I have no solution for a spouse that will not go with you to the ends of the earth. But to be fair, that's a very rare commodity in any era, in any time, in any place. Right. So, you know, that's hard. Find that person. For children, you know, usually, you know, if you take them off, you can take it, you can take them with you and they're not going to have a bad year. They're really not going to have a bad year.

They'll probably learn more.

Yeah, exactly. And again, the extrication is so that you After having been very deeply socialized in a very successful industry, you achieve distance from it before you do the next step.

Yeah.

And/or distance from your previous politics. Like, you know, uh, you know, when Dominic Cummings was like, you know, in British context, kicked out of politics, he just, you know, he said this in interviews, he just like started reading a bunch again.

Yeah.

And of course he'll be back in politics. If I were to bet on an individual being prominent in British politics over the next 5 or 10 years, It's going to be him. Of course, you know, his involvement in Brexit. Exactly. But the breather, the chance to think, the chance to like have— it's not even that your cortisol goes down, it's that your sources of information decorrelate from your current network and you can go back to the network. This is why in politics, often a political defeat is what happens before a comeback.

Yeah.

You know, it's not clear to me that Churchill would've done as good a job during, say, World War II, had he not been basically a disgraced politician before that.

Yep.

Right? Because he advocated the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. He did a lot of writing. He even wrote some science fiction.

People can find it. Well, every president, every president in my, you know, in my lifetime before Trump, um, lost a major election. Oh, Trump was, you know, Trump, Trump lost, you know, Trump won before they won the presidency. Right? So, you know, Clinton lost in '82 for, you know, reelection, um, for, for governor. Um, George W. Bush lost for, for Congress. Um, uh, Barack Obama ran against Bobby Rush for Congress and lost. Um, you know, uh, so you just have all these, you know, Reagan ran against Ford, historic, you know, and lost, um, uh, for, for the presidential nomination. So it is a constant. Um, really, Trump was literally the first one to kind of break the mold of Kind of like never, never losing an election before running for president?

I mean, I think that it's going out into the wilderness and being, first off, being able to endure defeat, but secondly, also being able to wean yourself from the addiction because every profession has its own deep addictions. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

And I think, I think being able to, to live without the immediate social approval of the people It just actually fortifies you. And then since no one else reads books, you know, let's be real, if you read 10 books on a topic, probably top 0.1 percentile, unfortunately.

You know, it's interesting. I, I, I, um, we're, we're taping this in kind of like mid-November 2024. I'll probably end this year with reading about 50 books. Um, and I think I'm reading way too much. And my New Year's resolution for 2025 is to read way fewer books. Um, I feel like many of those books are just not impactful. They're not helping me. True. They're not, you know, they're, they're, they're kind of somewhat enjoyable.

There are many bad books. There are many bad books.

Yeah, they're somewhat enjoyable, just like watching TV is somewhat enjoyable and stuff like that. But maybe I should have actually just watched more TV. Um, like maybe I should have replaced it with watching more TV.

Maybe you've done that already, right? I'm just talking Again, there's no universal advice, but you know what? I bet I bet a significant one-year change where you do something really, really different. And I know you've done several things that are quite different.

Because I'm just going to watch more TV. That's my that's my new interest.

Honestly, yeah, I would so read more film reviews. I would really I would take your movie recommendations. Okay, all right.

I like it. All right. Well, thank you, Samuel Boya, for joining us on World of Das. I follow you at. Sam Oboria on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been super wide-ranging and a ton of fun, so thank you very much.

Thank you.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts to shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting things founders, investors, and influencers like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's E-R-I-K at turpentine.co, and let's partner together.