Samo Burja on Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and George Soros

Sam Altman might hear the common wisdom and his response would be, yes, and. Thiel's response would be, no, but. And then I don't think Elon's even listening, where I think that Elon's perspective is so first principles driven that while he does recognize what is popular or not and can work with it, his decisions as to what to do next are not tied at all to the mainstream, but are following, I don't know, like a, A technology tree chart derived from basic physics or his favorite science fiction story. Let's expand through the universe. Let's have AI not kill us. Let's like actually reach a new destiny. Thiel's question is like, how is the mainstream wrong and what can we do about it to make it correct? Which makes him a great technologist, but also great investor. Peter would be the most willing to back just causes that are unpopular. Sam will like see where the enthusiasm and energy lies and it's like, okay, can we harness this, even grow this and push it somewhere real? And then Sam is sort of like, let's reach abundance. It's like, okay, the advocates and the critics of capitalism are right.

Yes.

And right. It's like socialists are right and the capitalists are right. Let's make capitalism work so well that we can all have UBI.

In this week's episode, I sit down with Samo Burja to discuss the individuals in today's society who are straying from established norms to shape the future. Samo is a political scientist and founder of the excellent research and consulting firm, Bismarck Analysis. For more conversations like this, be sure to listen to my new podcast with Samo, Live Players. Please enjoy our discussion.

Samo, welcome to our first episode of our new podcast, Live Players. Really excited to do this with you.

I'm excited to get this started.

So let's give a brief background as to the term Live Players. It's a term you've coined and you've popularized. Why don't you unpack the significance of that term and why the inspiration for the podcast?

Yeah. The most basic observation is that nearly everyone is following conventions, right? You follow conventions and predesigned scripts. In your life, be it through the educational process, be it following the standards of your industry. And for the most part, these conventions are in place for good reasons. You don't necessarily want your doctor improvising your treatment. Well, that is until you do, until you do have a rare condition that's not common and that's not well covered by the literature. So, the vast majority of society is not improvising. They're not very good at coming up with new processes, new ways of doing things on the fly. Honestly, they're not even that good at evaluating evidence. There's plenty of empirical evidence for this poor quality of our ability to evaluate evidence on the fly. Massive literature, some of it even replicates in the cognitive science field and the biases literature and so on, but also just day-to-day experience. So why live players, right? People who actually are always thinking from first principles, they're remarkably rare in society. But one of the best ways to sort of spot such individuals is people who easily and successfully jump multiple domains through the course of their life. So a classic example I like to give is Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's a fun example because it's someone who basically goes AOL from the Austrian military to win a bodybuilding competition and then goes back to his commanding officer arguing that, since I won the bodybuilding competition, actually this is good for our military unit morale and you shouldn't punish me. So, classic example of asking for forgiveness rather than permission. And then we all know, right? Everyone was like, okay, he's just a bodybuilder. He's appearing in documentaries. and then everyone's saying he's not a real actor, uh, once he becomes famous with movies like The Terminator and so on. Of course, once he becomes a politician, you, you say, oh, he's not a real politician, he's an actor. Um, and if he were interested, I'm sure he could even return today and just be a tech CEO of a major company. Like, if he shows up in Silicon Valley and started fundraising for an AI company, come on, who wouldn't take that? Who wouldn't take that investment?

CEO of OpenAI, perhaps. I'm just kidding.

I mean, the position is changing hands so rapidly. You know, I feel like he would be understood to be a determined and tough leader and probably take safety seriously, right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're gonna get into the Sam Altman thing in a second. But first, just because it is the first episode, let's give a little bit more background on you. You're a live player, if I could, if I could, you know, say so myself. You're You're both a historian or academic intellectual, but also a practitioner in that you are interested in applied insights. And you have a consulting practice, Bismarck, which consults some of the biggest live players around the world about how they can, you know, develop and exercise their power to achieve their goals and make the impact that they want to make. What more background should you, should you give on, on how you think about yourself, if there are any analogs or people that you most admire historically that demonstrate the impact you seek to have.

Yeah. I believe basically that the deep reality of history. In other words, not only do we need to know history to understand our own current society, because our current society is just one data point, and in the very near future, This present moment, this society we think of as our practical present will be the past. To think about the future, you need the past data points. You need the snapshot of, say, I don't know, American society in 1995, 1965, 1865, 1765. And not just American society, but all the other societies and how they progress through these classical stages. So that's the first takeaway.

It's societal.

But the other takeaway is personal. I honestly think that, you know, you don't need historical knowledge to be a live player. Like, you almost don't need it. However, it sure does help to know that other human beings have achieved remarkable things. The most difficult thing in mathematics, often it's sort of like, you know, proving something for the very first time. The first time you have a mathematical proof, it's often very long. Very complicated, very difficult. As soon as that proof is verified, within weeks mathematicians come up with shorter and better proofs. Isn't it interesting that they don't find the shorter, better, easier to understand proofs first? The search costs in math are huge, but so it is with human action. So when you look at past remarkable individuals, you find existence proofs. You're like, wait, it is possible. for a person to say be an entrepreneur and then go into politics, or it is possible to have a deep exploration of knowledge and human nature and then go and produce something of commercial value. So yeah, for me, my biggest, deepest passion has been sort of understanding our civilization. Why is it rising? Is it falling? What are future civilizations going to be like since I don't think ours is going to be last one. We're not going to be the first immortal one. I'm willing to say that. Eventually, somehow, maybe centuries from now, maybe years from now, it's going to be transformed or fall. And secondly, I wanted to contribute to this process the best I could. So, in my mind, the historical study that I've pursued in a variety of organizations, for example, been a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation where I'd looked at how some of the longest-lived organizations in the world persisted, things like German inns and Greek monasteries and Japanese craftsmen organizations working with the Japanese imperial family. But also, I look at the data points of today, and that's what my consulting firm, Bismarck Analysis, is all about. I provide a perspective to my clients, and I also learn from my clients. And we mostly work with technology companies, but we've done work for philanthropies, for governments. It's really, really interesting seeing this machinery up close. And I have to say, since 2017, when I founded the firm, so many of my perspectives on various social technologies, how the world is organized, how it works, have changed. And it's always sort of enriched, right? It's enriching, adding another data point. to the big historical trend line and sometimes reinterpreting past events. Winston Churchill was a good historian because he wrote history in a literal sense as well, right? He wrote the history of World War II, and once the war was over, he wrote, of course, a flattering story about himself. But sure, don't you trust Churchill about 19th century British politics more, having known that he was a practitioner in the '40s and '50s. Like, how could someone that never practiced possibly understand? Or another example is Thucydides. The account he gives of the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece between Athens and Sparta is partially intriguing and trustworthy because he was both a general and a politician. And as an Athenian general exiled from Athens, well, you never get a neutral perspective, but that's about as good as it gets, right? He's not going to be flattering of Athens. And he's not going to be biased towards Sparta. And a Spartan general sure would not be inclined to write a history to begin with.

What's one or two things that you could share with us that you've changed your mind on or that you've sort of strongly reoriented since 2017? Or what's something you could share that you've strongly updated on?

I think one of the strongest updates is that we are not actually serious about the energy transition. I thought at the time, oh, these are basically like anti-science and anti-human views. Anti-science is sort of like, oh, nuclear energy, technological progress is bad. It only helps us destroy ourselves. We shouldn't build these power plants. We shouldn't advance any technology. So that's the first sort of anti-scientific view where you distrust it. And then on the other hand, the anti-human view is like, well, you know, we should reduce human population. Like, essentially, humans are always a cancer on nature. Some solar cells are not going to change it. I used to view the barriers as basically ideological. I think they sort of still are. I think definitely there's a real environmentalist degrowth thing. But I also realized, wait, demand for energy is not increasing. All of our wonderful energy sources, that we could really develop and push much, much forward, right? Nuclear and solar are the two that are honestly my favorites that I think are just immense technical potential. Immense. But even something like geothermal, to have the economics work out on nuclear and geothermal and stuff like that, right? Or let's say nuclear since geothermal is less explored. Our civilization would have to spend about 10 Or 100 times more energy. So in other words, I realized, wait, to make nuclear reactors cheap, you have to build a lot of them. There's going to be 1 or 2 accidents, but the accidents aren't a problem. The problem is unit economics. There's a missing country, a country of 10 billion people or 100 billion people with a unified regulatory environment that spends per capita at least as much energy as China or as much as the US. And in that country, nuclear reactor construction would be immensely profitable, and we would build hundreds of them, and we would learn to build better and better and better ones, and they would become cheaper. And eventually you could export to tiny countries like China or America. But no such country exists, right? It's not likely to exist anytime soon. So in a way, we use fossil fuels because they're a fuel for an unserious and small civilization. that's not climbing up towards the Kardashev scale yet. So maybe the best way to get clean energy would be to spend vastly more energy than we are now, ironically.

And do you see that happening potentially anytime soon, or do you think we are going to remain unserious about this for a while?

I mean, I think we are sort of plodding along with A solar revolution that we almost kind of don't deserve. Like, solar will eventually get good enough to make electricity cheaper, and that's the actual way to beat coal. The actual way to beat coal is to make it cheaper, because no matter how well you think you regulate things internationally, there will always be a poor country that's like, you know what, we could be richer by just burning coal. And who are these people who have already burnt their coal to tell us that we can't burn coal?

right?

Who is this Germany, this Japan, the US? Why do they get to be rich? We're going to emit our carbon too. So this is even assuming you totally believe in global warming. You still will be like, look, you guys got your fill. Why don't we get our fill? So because of that, you have to beat coal on price. It actually has to be the best way. So I think solar might push us there. And once we get clean energy because of solar, We might be more open to spending energy on, I don't know, supercomputer clusters, for example. Because in this, if you take this like crazy assumption, and I acknowledge it's something we could have and maybe we'll have a whole podcast episode on seriously, then, you know, I don't know, something like the high energy costs of Bitcoin mining or whatever, or the high energy costs of training runs and running the servers for the AI stuff. That's actually a feature. Like, I could easily see us spending 5 or 10 times more energy on that. I could also easily see us spending much more energy on transportation technology over time, right? Especially if we reach the point where we're synthesizing aircraft fuel, which is something that's being worked on. You could have a situation where the grid electricity is used to synthesize carbon-neutral airline fuel because you can take carbon from the atmosphere or elsewhere from the system and just make synthetic fuel. And, you know, these are all well-known technical possibilities. It's just the economics of them are tricky.

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We'll put a cliffhanger in that and do a whole episode on it at some point. But I do want to segue into a bit of a deep dive on some certain live players. First, let's talk about the one of the moment, Sam Altman. You know, we're talking on just a couple days before Thanksgiving. And by the time this releases next week or so, maybe the drama will be resolved. You know, changes by the minute. But let me ask you and say, hey, a few days after, you know, Sam was ousted by the board, what are your most interesting reflections either on Sam himself, on the board structure, the nonprofit, or the surrounding sort of, you know, public perception? What do you think we've learned? Or what do you find most interesting?

Well, honestly, events are still unfolding. So we see how they occur. But I think it's already been proven beyond reasonable doubt that Sam Altman is a live player. Look, when you are deposed by your board, either a for-profit or nonprofit, usually that's that. And usually the board has in advance figured out someone to receive and carry out the transition. It's not— you don't have a protracted search for a transitional CEO. Whoever is named by the board usually just does that. In Sam's case, however, I think he's well-liked in the company, but let's also reflect. It is not enough to be very popular or well-liked to get 700 out of 770 employees to sign a statement, which has happened in the past few days, that they will quit and, I don't know, maybe go work for Microsoft unless he is reinstated. That requires Substantial support from other executives at the company. This requires team leaders talking to their teams. This requires people who are senior and junior encouraging each other to sign. This was a wonderful, wonderful, like, like, agentic campaign. It's like, it's like, it's not that it's not tapping into real sentiments. Of the people at OpenAI, it's just clear that kind of thing, that kind of activity requires coordination, right? It's not correct to think of it as, uh, oh, they, they're all just sort of spontaneously following. It's like, no, this, this, this has to be something that was done in stages. And he's completely winning the PR war completely, right? He was there with the first take on the story and what's happened, uh, following the example, you know, Greg Brockman.

Mm-hmm.

You know, had it only been a statement by Greg, like that would've been understood as loyalty. And then anyone I think in the Valley would've happily invested in Greg and Sam's new OpenAI startup, but they got the snowball rolling. And once you have this kind of open rebellion, then you flip the script on the board. It's like, you know, I shouldn't go. You should go. I don't think we've ever seen that.

Yeah.

And, and I feel like the for-profit versus nonprofit stuff, I honestly think it's a distraction. I feel if it was a for-profit board and they made this argument to Sam, and let's say they would say, oh, you're not going fast enough, which by the way, let's remember a few days ago, all of our, uh, you know, accelerationist friends on Twitter before this drama, they were all, you know, they were all, you know, Sam Altman is slowing down AI progress. He's putting down regulations. He's a, you know, uh, he's a decel, right? That's the term. They all like him now, but you can imagine a world where there's a for-profit board that's like, why is Sam Altman talking about safety and why is he slowing down product release? But in that world, I think he could have done the same exact thing. And I think it's because he has successfully created a classical startup. Like, I think people today, don't understand how much early startups in the 1990s and early 2000s were cult-like. People there genuinely believed in a mission that was carried out through a for-profit vehicle, but no one working at them was profit maximizing. Companies, software companies have become so successful that people have truly forgotten that this was part of the original magic of them. Now, of course, everyone wants to get rich. People were intending to get very rich, but there are many ways to get rich and some of them don't involve changing the world very much. And you know what, working at a major software company today, you can easily get $300K compensation. You know, if you have not been fired in the recent layoffs, you get your nice, like little package, compensation package, eventually a vest. You're a single double-digit millionaire. And what did you do? You worked on making Gmail a bit better, or you worked on making the ads on Meta a bit better. And, you know, sure, you're doing something. It's real work. I'm not devaluing it. But if you didn't do it, you're ultimately fungible. Someone else would have done it. To believe a startup has a mission, which I think almost everyone at OpenAI believes, is to believe that you are doing something that is not inevitable. And I think this is one of the deepest insights of this early 2000s literature that I know when I talk to younger friends and colleagues, I'm actually the oldest person at my organization. Bismarck Analysis only has hired younger people or people of my age. And we of course learn and our clients are older, People in their early 20s, they've not read these classic works. All they see is an industry that for their entire adult life has been the best way to make money. Like if you went into finance in 2012, or if you went into tech, 2 parallel lives, financially, you were way better off having gone into tech. And that then results that people expect it to be basically a normal profession. There's a reason people, you know, people now love Microsoft because Microsoft has now been anointed by Sam Altman because he has the charisma of the individual that was supposed to be pushed off the curtain, off, you know, pushed off stage, but wasn't. But, you know, if I ask people 2 or 3 weeks ago, it's like, okay, what's the difference between talking about a tech company and a software company? I think people don't really think of like, Microsoft as a tech company in its culture, I would argue, right? There was a difference, right? And that difference is this kind of like irreverent, disruptive, crazy, dedicated view of what your company is and how it's changing the world. I think very few people at Microsoft believe they're changing the world. I think they believe they're providing value to shareholders and they're providing value to customers, but I don't think they believe they're changing the It's interesting, you know, Sam has sort of sped run, or potentially sped run a Steve Jobs arc if he comes back.

But the people that people often compare him to are, are Elon and Thiel. Why don't you do sort of, you know, share some brief reflections on what you find most interesting or most distinct about, about perhaps those 3 people? Or how do you compare and contrast perhaps the biggest live players in technology or just in business?

Well, each of those individuals is worthy of several books and books have been written. Many articles have been written. Many friends and people I immensely respect have said far wiser things than I could. But to really sketch out a few interesting basics, I think Thiel is extremely good at noticing when the common consensus is correct or wrong for basically bad reasons. And I do include correct here, where whenever you think that even if people are directionally making the right bet for the wrong reasons, there's some financial alpha there. There's some possibility of finding that distinction. And if I were to contrast that with say Sam or Elon, I think it's sort of like I could come up with a basic schema where say like Thiel might be, Sam Altman might hear the common wisdom and his response would be, yes, and. Thiel's response would be, no, but. And then I don't think Elon's even listening, where I think that Elon's perspective is so first principles driven that while he does recognize what is popular or not and can work with it, his decisions as to what to do next are not tied at all to the mainstream, but are following, I don't know, like a technology tree chart derived from basic physics or his favorite science fiction story. Thiel's question is like, how is the mainstream wrong and what can we do about it to make it correct? Which makes him a great technology investor, a great technologist, but also a great investor. And Sam will see where the enthusiasm and energy lies. And it's like, okay, can we harness this and even further develop it, even grow this and push it somewhere real? Like he sees, like, I don't know, cryptocurrencies. And he's like, what about Worldcoin? Like, what about a coin for the world that changes the world economic system to be prepared for the post-scarcity future? He sees green energy. Hmm, great. Let's have a fusion company. And so on and so on. But it is downstream off of what I think he sees as viable in the landscape. Meanwhile, Elon will go and look at the space industry when everyone thinks it's hopeless. Everyone thinks it's a mature industry. Everyone thinks it's a hyper-regulated industry. and Gomes SpaceX is going to go into a crowded field of lots of green companies, all of them that failed basically from the Obama era and tried to make the electric car, but again, but have it work this time because the batteries kept getting better. So logically, eventually a car company would work, but you would have to think of it not in terms of car companies, but the raw energy potential of batteries. And also think that it's important for global warming or important for human technological development, or possibly important to save capitalism because this is a missing, um, missing side of things that people don't, don't consider. Um, if you provide a technological solution to an externality produced by, say, the free market system or whatever, you've actually made yourself a political enemy of people who don't like the free market system because every failure of the free market is political mandate. to do something. I don't believe all free market failures can be corrected through free market means. Like, I don't believe that, but I believe any that can probably should. But on the other side, they might just view, say, global capitalism as an inherent problem, right? And this then brings me to sort of an ideological comparison of the 3. And again, all I'm doing here, it's all synthesis you can get just from publicly available sources. This isn't from— You know, the special, you know, any other conversations that I might've had, uh, you know, all of them have some variant of making sense of and legitimizing their own activity in the economic sphere, which is not surprising, right?

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And I think the contrast would be Thiel's view would probably be very closely related to preventing violence on a global scale and the abuse of individuals and the scapegoating of individuals. Elon's would be focused on species survival and why, you know, let's expand through the universe, let's have AI not kill us, let's like actually reach a new destiny. And, uh, you know, that's the point of the activity. And then Sam is sort of like, let's reach abundance. It's like, okay, the critics, the advocates and the critics of capitalism are right. Yes. And right. It's like socialists are right and the capitalists are right. Let's make capitalism work so well that we can all have UBI. Right. And then this orientation, I think, cashes out in the differences in priority.

Yeah.

Like I would expect of the 3, Peter would be the most willing to back just causes that are unpopular and Sam would be the most happy with redistribution, for example.

Yeah.

And like, you can, you can run with this scheme, right? You can just, you know, the crazy part is you can just take some live players seriously at what they say and think for a second about how different their actions should be. And you can just compare whether they're actual actions match their stated worldview. The shocking amount is I think live players can be more honest often than the mainstream people because the live players are so strange. People never think through the logical implications of what's said. You can plainly say what you're going to do. People don't believe you will because it's not a normal thing to do. You can say why you're doing it. People still don't believe you. And only after it's all already been done, they're like, wow, who could have predicted this? And I'm like, well, You could have listened to the person.

Yeah.

They said what they were going to do.

It's fascinating how much that resonates because, yeah, Sam is able to identify trends that people are excited about and thus that makes him an amazing fundraiser and recruiter and perhaps one of our best. And Thiel is looking for where the mainstream is wrong. And so he is willing to take big bets that make him very unlikable by many people at the time. Also in perpetuity, like—

But often vindicated.

Exactly.

Often right.

But, you know, things like betting on Trump, betting on, you know, against higher education, betting on longevity, betting on charter cities, things that are, that are an anathema to, to many people, and looking like a genius to sober-minded people once, once they are proven, proven correct to some degree. That's, uh, it's fascinating.

I, I view the, the core function of live players, right, which I, I think that I should, uh, explain. Uh, even my long-term, uh, followers and listeners and, you know, uh, readers, uh, friends sometimes even are confused why I like so many different people, live players who often have completely incompatible ideologies or might even seem to be at odds with each other, right, pushing society in like very different directions. The simple reality is I think of these people as absolutely necessary. They are the stem cells of society. All we are living in are institutions that were founded sometimes by great founders, sometimes by people who aren't quite great founders, who are just live players. And our society would be brittle Dying, aging, and ossifying without occasional live players. It is totally— it's actually very, you know, important that society both has its bones, its skin, its organs, like all of the people like ourselves who, you know, mostly abide by convention and mostly do what is expected and what's well-trodden wisdom. But we need stem cells or society will undergo crisis. It might seem tempting to say, oh, this or that live player, I choose that one. But unless you're a live player, there's really no strong epistemic standard you can apply to that, except for, are they deviant from norm in some way? And if that's the standard, well, if we eliminate those, if we make that bet, then again, society would be static. and unchanging and will become brittle and will begin to decay. And I really think that's my opinion is more live players, please. And I sometimes suspend judgment. I feel sometimes I personally might disagree with someone, but I'm like, you know, if I 60% disagree with you, the 40% you will do as a live player will still probably improve society. Like it'll renovate some part that was destined to decay or destined to fail anyway. And the stuff I disagree with, Well, it's probably going to be corrected later in the story by a different live player. So I'm fine. I just want to accelerate live players, full stop. And I endorse them and I want them to thrive. And I think we should be doing our best as a society to generate more of them since we are metaphorically and literally growing older and visibly older.

Yeah.

What would a live players academy consist of? Or is that a bit of an oxymoron? Can they not be... facilitated or discovered or made in some way?

Well, I think it's not an oxymoron for the first generation. It might be an oxymoron for the second, third, or fourth generation, right? Because cohorts are immensely valuable. It's definitely the case that I think the proof of possibility that remarkable things can be done and it being normal in your social circle to have people do remarkable things, I think that brings out the live player potential in almost everyone, right? You can go with the straightforward imitation and say, oh, Elon made an electric car company. I'm going to make the electric car company. Or you can take the story of he made an electric car company. It's possible to do green tech, or you might take an even smarter story of, oh, there's physics fundamentals that are not yet priced into the market and people are not thinking about the longer perspective and the long— sorry, the raw technical potential. They're just seeing what companies have come into existence already. I think an academy of live players would basically bring— and I wouldn't even call it an academy, right? But it could be anything. YC, if you explain YC today as a kind of— that it started as a startup academy, it sounds very sensible. It kind of makes sense. We know what a startup accelerator is. At the time, it was far less obvious, right? I think it was one of the first ones, no?

Yeah.

Or at least one of the first ones that combined like deep mentorship and network creation. Well, just look at the list of that first cohort, right? What the— well, let's say Sam, who is the past and maybe future CEO of OpenAI, he's there, but then also Emmett Shear, the interim CEO. And like, I think, you know, Alexis Ohanian.

Yeah. Justin Kan, T. Kan Bernstein, Michael Siebel. There's only 20 people.

The list goes on.

Yeah. And it's just people who've come to run Silicon Valley, basically. I mean, it's pretty incredible.

But then also consider something that's sort of spontaneous, right? Like the PayPal Mafia, right? The people that created PayPal. It's like, you know, it's like Peter Thiel and, you know, Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk as well worked at that company, though he's not included in the photo. There is an interesting teaching training effect that happens. It does have probably a high attrition rate, but this is when people— I think when people think of elite schools, they think on filtering individuals out. The presumption is the whole world wants to join your social club, or your school or your board or your investment. Your job is to say no. I think that that is a corrective filtering function, but it doesn't actually select that well for live players. I think if you wanted a live player academy, you would say yes. The world doesn't yet know that they should or want to join whatever organization, society, group of friends, uh, company, and you are going out and headhunting them. And you are saying yes to things that say Harvard might've said no to, right? You say yes to things that Jane Street might've said no to. Everyone wants to hire an OpenAI engineer now. Did people want to hire OpenAI engineers 3 or 4 years ago?

No.

Yet if you did, 4 years ago, let's say, you would probably hire a higher quality person than today. No disrespect, uh, you know, to OpenAI engineers. I, I love all of them. Many of them are our friends, uh, you know, uh, and they're so adorable on Twitter with their heart emojis. You know, that was, that was great, great PR. Yeah.

Yeah.

But still, let's be real. People who have been hired into OpenAI in the last year have made the normal bet. It is the one remaining island of prosperity in a tech industry that you could even joke was hit by like a tech job recession, right? Like all the layoffs, right?

Yeah, totally.

So 4 years ago though, you know, whatever you think of like Ilya or Rachman or whatever, these were like amazing, amazing people willing to do something that's like outside the norm. So if you headhunted them back then, that would've been both a live player move. And also live player training. And I think honestly, history will show that OpenAI was, early OpenAI was an incubator of live players. Hence why I'm, from the perspective of civilization, I'm sitting happy. It's like either OpenAI continues to be a wonderful, innovative place, or it breaks open and all these live players go on and create amazing new things. Either way, I think society has benefited. Either way, I think— remarkable work has happened and there's way more human capital, like truly unique, remarkable human capital has been forged by this event, by these events and this organization.

Totally.

It's fascinating. Like, it's like the next Google won't look like the last Google. Like if you're trying to create the next, you know, big startup, you're not just going to copy a search engine. And similarly, it's like the next early Google engineer is not going to look like the current Google engineer. Like, you can't just hire the same person and expect them to bring that same energy. You need to find sort of the arbitrage or the new talent. I agree. And it's also interesting to think about when live players kind of stop becoming live players. Like, maybe that, you know, that same even OpenAI engineer, you know, 4 or 5 years ago might have just been hungrier, right? They were eager to make it. Now, if they're early at OpenAI, perhaps they made a bunch of money. And, you know, you could look at someone like Paul Graham, right? Like, Paul Graham was certainly, a live player when he was creating YC, but is he a live player right now? I don't know, right? But you can get a sense that Sam Altman, 10 years from now, is probably still going to be a live player. Like, there's something to just the durability of these people. And also, sometimes when these people who were once live players kind of check out.

I mean, they retire partially because it's not 2 reasons, right? Reason number one, they were moderately ambitious or very ambitious and their ambitions are fulfilled. You have to be kind of unreasonably ambitious and have a goal that extends beyond the possibilities of what a single individual can reach, yet at the same time is something you can meaningfully contribute to. Because if it's something that's beyond the life's lifespan or energies of a single individual and impossible, then okay, that's just like a fantasy. That's futility. So the life players are actually people that have greater, greater, larger than life ambitions in a technical sense, right? Larger than what is possible in a life. So they don't run out of stuff to do towards that goal. And it has secondly, also a decent feedback loop where they have some successes that make measurable progress towards that goal. So that's reason number one. They They were very ambitious by almost any reasonable standard, but not larger than life. And number 2 is, honestly, psychologically, it's very, very difficult to sustain yourself when there is a constant stream of basically even your friends, family, even the friends and family you make after success, Uh, disagreeing with you, right? It can wear on people, and at some point they're like, you know, everyone hates me for doing this. I think I'm doing it for everyone. Or maybe they don't think that, but some of them certainly see themselves almost as like servants of a greater, nobler cause, right? Um, some of them are more, more, um, objectivist, right, in their thinking. Like, that's also a valid way to be a live player. No, no disrespect, but If you see yourself as helping all and you're receiving constant negative feedback from all, where the negative feedback isn't constructive criticism, it's just, you are a bad person, you are aberrant, you're not good, it eventually might get to you. You might have the energy in your early 20s just for biological reasons, To overpower it. And you're like, later in my life, they're going to see and they're going to know, and maybe they'll even like me, which is very insecure. But let's be honest, all of us are human beings. There's some ways we are all insecure. Even extremely highly accomplished people can be insecure.

Maybe especially.

And later in life, this expected reward doesn't happen. And then you're tempted to just retire. You're like, I'm a famous actor. I'm a billionaire. I'm a successful musician. I'm a Nobel Prize winner. Time to garden. Time to, I don't know, go on the beach. Time to party. Time to spend time with my grandkids.

Yeah. Jeff Bezos.

Yeah. I mean, I still am sort of hopeful. I sort of feel like he seems like he's being rejuvenated by love. Also, probably advanced medical technology, but mostly by love. And I wouldn't be shocked if he— there's a way in which being very happy with someone, at first you go down into the rabbit hole of the relationship, but then the happy relationship is a foundation to do even more. So currently, I would agree, he looks like he's retiring, but I wouldn't be shocked if they stay happy that he actually comes back and does remarkable things.

Yeah. And one thing you've also covered on your Bismarck Brief, which is a must-read for anyone listening to this, if you don't already subscribe, you have to subscribe, is you do deep dives on live players who've had a durability to them but have evolved their— the game basically from capitalism to philanthropy in some cases like Soros or like Gates or like Koch. What is it about this kind of transition, or what do you find commonalities, or what do you find so interesting about people who make it big in business and then say, okay, I'm going to take that same energy and apply it to philanthropy?

I mean, first off, I think they're one of the more important shapers of American society. There's a very real way in which if you take an active role in philanthropic spending, You can shape the very important intangibles of society. There are many, many things that can be done for profit, but political power, often you spend money to have political power or to have cultural influence, and it's not easily monetized. And the market does what the market does, and there are some things that are not profitable, But change society and lock in various path dependencies. And if you're never willing to exit market logic into patronage logic, that is always going to be owned by your enemies, or it's always going to be less ideal, less great. If you are successful, the snowball of economic efficiency eventually gets so vast, so big, That while you can reinvest and like keep on creating amazing new companies, I think Elon's a great example of doing this. Bezos was a great example of doing it, right? For example, I think he is serious about Blue Origin. For example, it might yet be his next Amazon ten or twenty years down the line. This this space company as well. It is the case that. For most, it's sort of like, okay, is my life's impact 1% greater GDP for the planet? Like, it's a pretty good impact, but like, of these 10 choices that a wealthy society could be, which, which direction does it go in? So I find it interesting in that way. It's like, it's sort of looking at the people who have chosen sort of influence over an immediate return.

Yeah.

Because that also shows that they are not like, they're not playing a cookie clicker game, right? They're not playing a game where the number has to go up, though it's a very fun game. Anytime you want to make a number go up, it's extremely addicting and money is useful. But I think the more of it you have, the more painfully aware you become of the ways in which there are things money can't buy, which isn't— Happiness. Okay, we can you know a lot of happiness can't be bought, but some happiness can be bought. It's more there are structural things in society that no matter how much money you have, you can't really just use money in a straightforward way to get them. So philanthropy is actually a way to spend money to get some of them, and it's also a way to advocate for values institutions right that are non monetary. Now for We mentioned Soros, Koch, Gates. I think that for Soros especially, his view was that political disaster is always possible. So if you interpret, and we could again talk about Soros for a whole hour, his storied career. For those who don't know, George Soros was a very successful investor rising through London firms in the '50s and '70s. Rising then further in New York in the '80s, and you know shorted famously the British pound in the 1990s, and also created the Open Society Foundation, a foundation that was in 2018 barred by Viktor Orbán from operating in Hungary. An organization that's actually you know, and by the way, that drew accusations of antisemitism. But then the funny part was the Israeli embassy was like, "No, no, no, no, he's actually a troublemaker." Like look at this Palestinian stuff. Peace funding. So I found that super funny, right? When Israel backs Hungary, it's like, okay, that's, that's very interesting what's happening there. It's not the fact that, you know, Soros is like, you know, you know, um, Hungarian Jewish American, right? Um, he's a, he's a, he, he pisses off a lot of people, even his erstwhile allies on the center-left. Like in 2004, he was anti-invasion of Iraq. Um, And he's sort of become like this boogeyman also of the right, in some ways for good reasons, because he is deeply influential in all of these agendas. So why does he make the Open Society Foundation? Uh, he believes, you know, he said, uh, you know, in the 1970s, we start with the assumption that the stock market is always wrong. And he shares that same exact assumption for politics always being wrong. He thinks humans Because our minds are embedded in society, in action, we never have access to absolute truths. And it's extremely politically dangerous when someone has access to absolute truths. And that extends to him being then anti-communist and anti-fascist. Like, that's, that's the Karl Popper-derived theory that he has. And of course, he was a student of the philosopher Karl Popper in the 1950s, from who he borrows the term open society, which is a society that is continuously open to disproving its core thesis and makes no absolute guarded claim to truth, and is contrasted to the closed society where the political structure to be stable must make truth its enemy, therefore inevitably becomes totalitarian. And his belief is that sort of like democracy, social democracy, capitalism, these are more open than other systems, but he thinks they could be even more, this kind of open society that's constantly philosophically reevaluated. And that caused him to fund all of this stuff. Like in the 1980s, actually, when he started doing this, he funded scholarships in Eastern Europe And ironically, President Viktor Orbán was one of the recipients of a Soros scholarship. So maybe that's also a fun way to notice how the lives of live players can cross. At one point, you receive a scholarship, then you take over Hungary, and then you ban the guy from the country. Like, no more scholarships from you, okay? We don't need any Orbáns. We got me. It's fine. We're done. And also, I bet by 2018, as age advances, I've not seen many live player moves from Soros since the 2010s. So I suspect most of the funding is devolved to hired experts at the Open Society Foundation. I don't expect the Open Society Foundation will stay a live player in the next 10 years. I think it'll become normal. It'll endorse the next Iraq invasion because it doesn't distinguish 100% agreeing with your political allies, let's say on the center-left, versus 90% agreeing and having a principle generator that's different. And Soros was pretty much an example where in the 1980s, he at least narrates this, that he figured out he had 25 million dollars and that was enough. Maybe in today's money that would be like $200 million or $100 million. He literally was like, okay, I have enough, uh, what should I do? And okay, let's try to shake up the politics of societies and transition them to an open, uh, to that open society direction.

Yeah, well, it, it's fascinating because, and this is what typically happens with people who espouse open society or Popperian-like um, sort of, you know, ideals is they, they usually get, uh, taken over by people who use those ideals against them, who they themselves don't, um, don't recognize sort of free speech or the sort of equality of, uh, of, of voices. But they'll say any— and they'll use that against them to overpower them. And it's no surprise that it feels like Soros is, uh, has been very sympathetic or in agreement with far-left causes for quite some time. You mentioned the Palestinian cause, the BLM cause, these other causes that they themselves don't even pretend to be about, uh, sort of, you know, for free speech or, um, equality of, uh, sort of treatment. They in fact endorse the standpoint theory that whoever, you know, a certain person from a certain group has a special privilege to speak, which is anti-potpourri. And so it's a, it's a bit ironic that Soros both, you know, promotes the Open Society but also has supported causes that explicitly don't.

Yeah, I think it is a common pattern of evolution. You start with a principle, you follow the principle to power, and so on. But once you become hegemonic, if your principle was countercultural when it started, by the time you become hegemonic, like the dominant power, the dominant player, you might have theoretical critiques of yourself, but you're not even going to have practical critiques of of yourself. You don't see them. So in a funny way, if Soros is a true Paparian, when he started his journey in the 1950s, he could have predicted this. He would have been, I too do not have access to absolute truth. I will attempt to course-correct society, uh, with the information I have, the ways in which it's insane. And at some point, and I will not be able to tell when, uh, I will no longer be The corrective, I will be the agent of a closed society calling itself the open society. It's like actually is embedded there. There's no claim that just because you have the society, the, you know, open infinite growth mindset, maybe similar to say David Deutsch, right? Or some other Paparians, uh, that your insights are extended because of that. It's you do your best, you act, and eventually you need correctives. So maybe Soros crossed that line in like the early 1990s. Maybe it's like fighting communism seems pretty fine. Maybe shorting the British pound, even that causes economic damage, but it's like a good description that these mechanisms were bound to fail. And after the 2010s, 2020s, I think the insight's exhausted. And also, old age advances and we have completely biological reasons. Dementia sets in, memory loss sets in. You cannot be as active as many hours a day. In fact, the people I would contrast, say here with Henry Kissinger, who has probably due to just biological luck remained extremely active and probably will until the day he dies.

Yeah, no, it's tremendous. Let's, uh, let's wrap up this, uh, this first episode of Live Players, and, uh, we'll go more into detail on some of these, uh, next time. Uh, Samo, thanks so much for joining.

Uh, thank you for having me.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Turpentine is a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more covering tech, business, and culture, all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from AI with Cognitive Revolution to Econ 102 with Noah Smith. Our other shows drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, and investors like Moment of Zen and my show Upstream. We're looking for industry-leading hosts and shows along with sponsors. If you think that might be you or your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co.