← Dialectic
Dialectic
51: Nan Ransohoff - Power Laws for Philanthropy
02:11:31
Stripe's Head of Public Goods talks GMs, ambition, problem selection, and AI-era philanthropy
Loading summary
Transcript480 lines
- [00:00]
A
I kind of get nerd sniped by problems that are important for the world. And when I get down the rabbit hole and I'm like, okay, who's working on this? Who feels that it's their job to see this problem through? And I don't find anyone, I kind of panic. I read the 2018 IPCC report in 2019, relearning the climate math, saw we need a lot of carbon removal. It took me like three weeks to talk to everyone in the field, which freaked me out and was like, okay, I'll quit my job and work on this. In basically all of the cases, I am not the best person to work on it. But it's kind of like you go to war with the army, you have. The first wave of FL philanthropy was the Carnegie's and the Rockefellers. But the second wave of philanthropy is very measurement oriented. It was sort of like dailies and cost benefit analysis. In my opinion. A lot of the questions that we're going to be grappling with now from a public sort of goods and moral perspective are harder to quantify. What does meaning look like? What does good look like? What does beauty look like? They don't lend themselves very well to cost benefit analysis. Yes, I would definitely have like self described as like, I was like really good at playing the game, you know, I was good at the gold stars. And the sort of fear around getting off the path was incredibly overwhelming for me. If you step off the path, like nobody really cares that much and nobody's really paying attention and it feels better because it feels more you.
- [01:16]
B
Welcome to Dialectic Episode 51 with Nan Ransohoff. Nan is the head of climate at Stripe and she is also the founder of Frontier, an organization within Stripe that has coordinated a number of parties to pre buy an advanced market commitment of $1 billion of carbon removal before 2030. NAN is also working on a recently announced effort to target and eliminate respiratory illness. Her ambition, when it comes to what you would call public good or philanthropic efforts, rivals that of some of the most ambitious founders in technology in Silicon Valley. What I was most interested in talking to Nan about was not only her work here at Stripe and on Frontier, but how we might have more nans, what it would take to have more GMs, as she calls them, focused on some of the world's most important and pressing challenges that don't currently have owners. Nan suggests that we ought to take an approach more like founders and company building to attacking these problems not just by slice, but as a whole and have some of our smartest people break them apart and systematically target them and track them down and make real progress on them. I think we tend to assume that there are adults in the room are going to solve these things, and in many cases there isn't. We also talk about Nan's recent post on the third wave of philanthropy, as she calls it, essentially the near $40 billion of philanthropic funding that is about to come into the ecosystem. Keep in mind, I think modern American philanthropic funding annually right now is about 600 billion and between just OpenAI and anthropic we can expect something like 40 billion a year, fairly conservatively. And so this money is going to have to be allocated by people, it's going to have to go to ambitious efforts and we're going to need a lot more. And Nan, I think has been really thoughtful about the way that this is going to look different from previous eras of philanthropy and the of ambition and entrepreneurial people were going to need. It was really fun to talk to her about it, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. You can find all the links and references for the episode at Dialectic FM Nanan before we end the episode, I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectic's presenting partner. Notion has reinvented itself for the AI age and built the product from the ground up around combining all of you and your team's work documents context with the new capabilities that are possible thanks to AI and agents. This takes a few forms, including Notion's primary AI which allows you to use any model within their harness to custom agents which allow you to have little guys in your workspace who are working all the time for you, and workers which are part of Notion's developer platform which allows you to have maximum leverage, flexibility and customization in building cloud hosted service providers who can work for you and your team. It's been fun to have a front row seat to Notion's transformation over the last several months as we've been working together and the founders absolute commitment to both transforming the company for the era that is to come, and ultimately being disciplined and tasteful and focused on the ways that AI can be a part of our work without automating the human parts. Ultimately, Notion's goal is to help us think together, both with each other and with the range of new intelligences that are now at our disposal. You can learn more@notion.com dialectic and if you haven't checked out Notion in a while, I would strongly encourage you to check out particularly the way that AI has been embedded into Notion In a way that feels intuitive and obvious and also deeply, deeply useful. With that, here's my conversation with Nan. All right, Nan Ransohoff, thank you for joining me. This is so fun.
- [04:56]
A
Thanks for having me.
- [04:57]
B
We're here at Stripe. My first time, there were some interns walking through it, and they were like, this is where they make the videos and we're doing it. I want to start with a question that you might find slightly annoying, but I'm going to ask it anyway, which is when I first met you, we had a conversation about some of what you do. Less so the frontier stuff and more the stuff you've been writing about a little bit lately. GMs and new philanthropy and so on. And one of the things I wrote down was, we need to figure out how to have more Nans in the world. And in some sense, I think part of what you've been writing about, or at least thinking about, is a little bit of, like, GMing the GMs, how do we have more of these people? And so, if you'll indulge the kind of silly frame, what is an an. What is it that you kind of have found yourself doing? And why do you think this sort of shape is fairly unusual?
- [05:53]
A
I kind of get nerd sniped by problems that are important for the world, and I go down a rabbit hole because I'm just interested in the thing. And when I get down the rabbit hole and I'm like, okay, who's working on this? Who feels that it's their job to see this problem through? And I don't find anyone, I kind of panic. And that just seems to be like, a pattern for me. Um, and that is exactly what happened with carbon removal. I read the 2018 IPCC report in 2019, was learning about sort of relearning the climate math, saw we need a lot of carbon removal. It took me, like, three weeks to talk to everyone in the field, which freaked me out and was like, okay, I'm gonna quit my job and work on this. So. And that's again happened with this new thing on respiratory infections, which we can talk about. I think I basically find a problem that seems important to the world I can't get out of my head. And in most. In basically all of the cases, I am not the best person to work on it. Like, I was not an expert in carbon removal. I'm not a expert in respiratory infections. But it's kind of like you go to war with the army you have, and, like, if no one else is going to take responsibility for it. I just find myself like, I want to work on this. And that's not to say there's not lots of other people who also can take responsibility for it. It's just this sort of like almost feeling of like, like shock or outrage or like awe that like these big problems are going unmanned and wishing I could work on all of them, but like not being able to. So picking a couple of them and then you realize, okay, well geez, there are like so many different problems to work on. So how can we get more people thinking about finding a really big problem and taking ownership over it and not just working on the problem, but like really obsessing about the outcome? How do I deliver the outcome for the world? And that can exist at a lot of different altitudes. It can exist at really big ones and more micro ones. And all of those are fair game. And finding the right problem and defining at the right altitude is a whole thing. But yeah, I think when you say GMing the GMs, I think a thing that gets me really excited is how do we identify these big problems that should have people working on them and find awesome people and match that sort of problem and people together and do that at increasingly larger and larger scales.
- [08:16]
B
There's an element of this that's like, surely the adults in the room are working on this. Most people sort of bounce off these intract untractable like or intractable problems. Most people, when they learn about whatever. You have some math somewhere. It's like the, the trillion dollars for the teraton. Trillion dollars a year of spend to remove a teraton of carbon. Most people don't go spend three weeks talking to everyone in the field. And maybe you're just super high agency and la la la. And you clearly are super ambitious. Perhaps the problem is that most very ambitious people work on other types of problems. But do you have any sense of like either. Was that always the case for you when you've seen it in other people? Like what trait wise causes you to be attracted to these types of problems that normally go. You talk about it like they, they're orphaned or they're invisible or they're just like so large that there's finish line in sight. So it seems really hard.
- [09:14]
A
Hmm. I don't know. I, I don't know. I feel like I've become progressively more that way over time.
- [09:24]
B
Yeah.
- [09:26]
A
And I am trying to sort of think about why that might be the case. I think, I think maybe some of it is just like natural career progression. You kind of like Start working on a project and then you're working on a product and you're trying to build a company. And now we're trying to build an ecosystem. And now we're trying to build an ecosystem on top of an ecosystem. If it's sort of like in my head that is a little bit how it ladders up. So I don't think I've always been thinking at the scale that I am and I hope that I'm thinking at a bigger scale and the future version of myself is thinking at a bigger scale. But I think maybe another piece is like I don't feel actually that I let myself kind of follow my own interests and curiosities for a really long time and I've increasingly let myself do that. And that has led me in more interesting directions that feel more authentic to who I am and what I want to be thinking about and what lights me up. But I. That was a muscle that I had to build over time and I don't feel that for the first like 25 to 30 years of my life I did a very good job building that. And now I just like, yeah, I've given that a little bit more space. It's a bit of a woo answer, but I think that is. Is part of it.
- [10:39]
B
You were, you've always been ambitious. Was there an element of this that was these problems are lower status or like that doesn't seem quite right.
- [10:48]
A
But like I think it was maybe more historically was sort of like a little bit chasing the things that one is supposed to do and was probably more. A little bit more box checky. Like I did the whole PM thing and you know, I did consulting after and then I did the PM thing and those are great, but I think I just got a little bit bored with that. Um, and now
- [11:11]
B
which came first by the way? Getting bored and then finding the climate thing or finding the climate thing and making it realize you were bored with the other. The other stuff.
- [11:18]
A
I did consulting for a few years after undergrad and got. I was like interesting on a skill level but then boring on a. Why am I working till two in the morning on like a random.
- [11:29]
B
But maybe Uber. Like you then went to Uber, which is less boring for sure.
- [11:36]
A
Yeah. I don't know. I guess I felt maybe I like, I got like more confidence to diverge from a more traditional path or something like that. Like I genuinely, when people ask what I do now, I sometimes struggle to describe it. Like it is a little confusing even to me. And the fact that I work in a version of philanthropy is not in line with like where I ever expected I would be. Like, I feel that I actually kind of was a little dismissive of it historically and am still in some capacity. And like, it doesn't quite match my mental model of myself, but I think it's where important problems and interesting work are and if you can come up with creative mechanisms to do the, to sort of do that work, then it's a really fertile space. Yeah, there's something about just getting more comfortable with more off the beaten track stuff that has maybe come with age and other facts of life that has like, let me pay more attention to what I'm actually interested in solving rather than like what I should be working on.
- [12:39]
B
There's an element of this that I think, and you have an amazing post on, on this GM idea, but there's an element of this that is part problem selection, which I want to talk about, but it's also part like seeing the chessboard. Maybe unlike like, and not all of technology is like this, but a lot of tech startups, like the Y Combinator tech startup is very much like find one loose thread and just pull that thread. And like, don't wor much about the chessboard. It doesn't seem that carbon renewal is that type of problem. It is like very much like seeing holes and understanding coordination problems and understanding market forces and figuring out how to induce demand where there isn't demand. Is that skill set something that you developed as like aspects of in other jobs? It's something you kind of had to learn on the fly. Is it something that's kind of intuitive? Part of what I'm. Part of the reason I'm asking is I'm curious about like other types of people who would be good at this type of problem. Like where might they be coming from?
- [13:35]
A
I think that the maybe like a difference between a YC type of approach and like a GM type of approach is. In a GM type of approach you are obsessed with the outcome that you want to deliver and you're working backwards from the outcome. Whereas oftentimes in startups you're sort of like, yeah, as you said, starting somewhere and like pivoting your way to the outcome. But you're maybe less, you're less specific or you care less exactly where you end up.
- [14:00]
B
It's more emergent and you're more bottom up.
- [14:01]
A
It's more emergent. Exactly, it's more bottom up. And I think that for GM type of outcomes you're sort of like, this is the outcome that I Want. And the thing that's gonna have to flex is what I do. Everything else. Everything else. And I think that people. But I actually think that the traits that you need for both of those different things are maybe quite similar. Because in founder, you know, when you're starting a company, you often have to play a lot of different roles. You're wearing a lot of different hats. You're like a policy person one day, and you're an engineer another day, and you're a designer another day, and you're taking out their hatch another day. And the case of, you know, a gm, it's very similar. You're kind of pulling whatever lever you need to pull and. And you're like obsessed with a thing, however you define that thing.
- [14:46]
B
Yep.
- [14:47]
A
And so I think that those traits. And you're sort of like. Because in both worlds, you're sort of having to respond dynamically to the environment around you and to the world around you. You have to adapt quickly. You have to be really nimble. You have to reason through things on the fly when you get new information. And those are traits that I think are quite similar to both in both cases. Which is all to say, I think there is a huge potential for the shapes of people that would sort of otherwise be founders to make for really good GMs. And that is a bit of a paradigm shift in how we think about people working in philanthropy because. And also ambition, broadly, we'll say more about that.
- [15:32]
B
You started to allude to this when you were talking about kind of the feeling you had towards philanthropy, which is sort of like serious people work on companies. Totally.
- [15:43]
A
Totally.
- [15:43]
B
Which is obviously that's not true in every part of the world. That's probably broadly true in San Francisco and especially in the kind of like high tech startup kind of ambition part of the world. And so there's an element of this that's like being able to take the force of ambition and also just like all the other things associated with it, the opportunity and the status and the challenge and the maybe the opportunity to get rich and all these other things that often aren't connected.
- [16:10]
A
Yes. Okay. Two things. One, I a little bit, even still now bristle with the word philanthropy, because I think the thing that we want to deliver is good outcomes for the world and that are sort of like, we want to think about public goods, or they don't even have to be public goods, but like things that benefit the public.
- [16:26]
B
What are public goods?
- [16:29]
A
I think they're broadly like. Broadly speaking, they are like things that benefit many or Most people.
- [16:35]
B
And so scale critical to that.
- [16:39]
A
What would an economist say? I think it's part of it, but I don't think it's like it doesn't have to benefit every, every single person, but like a canonical public good would be carbon removal, which does benefit everybody because we all share the air.
- [16:50]
B
Maybe the most important problem.
- [16:52]
A
Yeah, it's a big one. But I think that like we should choose the most capital efficient mechanism to solve the problem. So if you can deliver a great outcome for the world and make money from it and build a business around it, great, do that. Only do we sort of move into like pure philanthropy? If you can't figure out. I see this. So I'm, I just want to say that I'm like, I think that like capitalism is great and if we can build great companies to solve world problems, we should do that first. And. Yeah, so philanthropy is sort of a subset of building good things for the world to sort of like, yeah, improve the world. I think that's a, maybe an important point because there's a lot of different kinds of companies in between pure philanthropy and you know, maximizing profit. And I think those are all should be, in my opinion, on the table and considered and just like move down the stack as needed. But like start by trying to make money.
- [17:44]
B
Yes. There's also a. I would, I would. The, the tech world, I think tends to barbell, which is either like most ambitious possible version of a company or like pure nonprofit philanthropy thing. That's like charity, basically.
- [17:55]
A
Totally. And I think that like there's a really interesting space in the middle, but that needs creative funders and that needs people who are going to consider allocating capital in this sort of like squishy middle. Anastasia Gamik has written a bunch about this. These sort of like companies that should exist that don't because the sort of risk reward doesn't fit into venture, private equity or philanthropy. And they're kind of. So they go on sort of unworked on. But I think that that's like an also important space to hunt.
- [18:24]
B
Sort of like a philanthropic lifestyle business.
- [18:27]
A
Yeah, totally. Yeah, exactly. It's not venture scale returns, but it's also not a grant.
- [18:32]
B
The big idea here, I think for both the GM thing and the broader point is all of these things. The type of, whether it's a business or nonprofit, the approach, whatever it might be, is downstream of like what is the best way to attack this problem.
- [18:46]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [18:47]
B
And the GM orientation is like less about. I'm going to start if a founder is oriented around a company. The GM is oriented around the problem.
- [18:53]
A
Yes. That's a really pithy and good way to describe it.
- [18:56]
B
What makes for good taste in problems? One of the things you write about is like it's. There's a, there's a interesting sort of spectrum of problems that tend to go unsolved and it ranges from things that we don't really see because they're kind of illegible to like climate, which is just like impossibly big, to things that surely other people must be working on. You even have a point where you say some are perhaps better described as things we want to be true rather than problems.
- [19:24]
A
Right. I have some experiences, but not a ton of experience in this I would like more. But yeah, I think that there are, I think like a good, a good forcing function for or like a good prompt for people to sort of think about is like, in what way would I like the world to be different? Like what do I look at in the world and say to myself, like that is crazy that we're still dealing with that. Or like I cannot believe like the. Just sort of. Yeah. That this, this sort of like shock and awe that it is that the world is a certain way. That's like a good place to start of like kind of. And you can kind of feel it in yourself. I think part of important and probably problem selection is does it light me up? Like, does it get me fired up? And that's maybe like an initial good filter which requires by the way, to even get to that point. I think like kind of like dialing up our like Larry David sort of annoyance with things or something.
- [20:20]
B
You have to see the water on the. This to go back to climate. Like my presumption would be that you had some care or thought or interest in the climate stuff and then there was some ignition point either in reading that 2018.
- [20:31]
A
Yes.
- [20:32]
B
Data or something else that like caused it to be a hair on fire problem. Whereas for me I'm like, I intellectually know the climate stuff matters, but I like nothing's burned.
- [20:40]
A
Do anything for you? Well, what, what are like examples of problems that elicit that reaction for you?
- [20:44]
B
Well, I think part of the, part of the interesting thing about this is that like we are, when I was listening to you talk about like we are trained to like we, we grow to not see the water on some of these types of things.
- [20:56]
A
Yes.
- [20:58]
B
I think maybe this is too meta. But like I probably tend to orient towards most of my interests through people. So like if I met someone who was firing up about, like, I wasn't that interested in philanthropy, frankly, until I met you. And there was an articulation of it that like, partly was your energy, partly was your articulation, partly, maybe it was framed, you know, it's framed around GMs, which are the people who are going to solve these problems. So it's like. Is a receptacle for me. So maybe, I guess there's two ways to ask the problem taste question, which is like, actually just what are the types of problems that are really important? And maybe there's a separate thing which is like, yeah, the problem matters, but also choose a problem that fits you.
- [21:36]
A
Yes, right. There's like, there. Yeah, I think there's like, there are different ways into the problem piece and maybe to sort of finish laying out. It's not really a framework, but like, good proxies for this is like the thing that kind of gets you upset or riles you up is like, Is a good lens. I think that the. The tractability piece is a really tough one to assess because there are lots of problems that are really important and make people frustrated and upset. But like, how. How to tackle, like, figuring out the right altitude to define the problem at and come up with some solutions to actually move the ball forward is. Is really tough. So in that category of thing, I think that's where like, either one is already an expert and they can sort of see the levers to pull, or you become an expert, or you talk to experts and try to ramp yourself up to see if there's a there, there. And then I think another bucket here is the kind of neglected piece. Like, is there anybody else working on it? And if so, like, kind of in some sense, if there's already someone great working on it or you can find someone great working on it, like, get them to do it. Like, it's sort of, I don't know, I feel.
- [22:45]
B
Or go help them or whatever.
- [22:46]
A
Yeah, go help them. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like oneself is last resort or something like that. Yeah, some combination of like. Yeah, is the problem big and important? Does it light you up? Is it tractable? And, you know, the neglectedness piece of it. I kind of sneaky think that most people don't even get to the second two because they're. It's. I think we can all pay more attention to the kinds of problems that pay more attention to, like, defining more in a more normative way, like our vision for the world. And like, what do we want to see the world look like and that can be in so many different domains. But I think that exercise that we are very quick to be able to critique the world and it is harder to establish a vision or to ask a question that is sort of like, what is the way that you want the world to be? What do you want to be True.
- [23:38]
B
Yes. Yes. There's an interesting. I talk about this with a few runs. There's a lot of people with very specific negative orientations of the world. Specific and pessimistic. And there's a lot of people who are vague and optimistic. But the part of that matrix that's rare is optimistic and specific.
- [23:54]
A
Totally. I think that's a really important point and I think that specificity is what makes it believable that something can be solved.
- [24:06]
B
Yes. And it certainly makes it much easier for someone to join you, which is one of the things that the startup world has gotten really good at is like, how do we engineer the gravity and an interest. You have a great speaking vision. You have a great older post on, like, which moral virtue is in short supply? And you're talking about vision. Either what makes for really compelling visions and. Or if that's not the right question, like, who's good at this?
- [24:34]
A
I think we can all be better at it. I think that is like my honest take.
- [24:39]
B
Or how does one get better at this?
- [24:41]
A
Vision, in my opinion, can exist at, you know, it sounds like this big, bold thing, but. And it is. But I think it can exist at the level of like the world. It can exist at the level of a family. It can exist at the level of a self. Like what? Imagining what oneself looks like in 10 years. Imagining what one wants their relationship with another person they care about to look like in 10 years. Imagining what one wants carbon removal to look like in 10 years. Or the city of San Francisco. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to scope that, but we can practice on maybe, like, I think practice at the level that you feel most comfortable with is maybe a way to think about it.
- [25:22]
B
Is.
- [25:23]
A
I was sort of thinking about this in the context of like we were asking ourselves at our. At the lunch table at, for on the climate team, you know, a couple months ago, like, how would you spend if you had like a billion dollars to spend unrestricted on good things for the world, what would you do? And I think that kind of prompt, like, reveals a lot of not knowing in all of us of like, how would I spend that? Like, what are the things that I care about? And how would I allocate capital towards those things or practicing it on the level of San Francisco, like, or the city that you live in. Sort of like, I love this city. Okay. What would I want it to look like in 10 years? Okay, well, what does good look like to me? How would I sort of reason through that? And maybe it's talking through it with your friends, but lots of ways to skin the cap. But I think those prompts for me are, like, really expansive and force a lot of questions around, like, both the values that would drive the end vision, and then also, like, tactically and specifically to your point, what are the things, levers that you can pull and, like, things you can do together? I don't know. Does that resonate at all?
- [26:29]
B
Yes. You had some prompt somewhere where it was like, what would you do if you were mayor of San Francisco?
- [26:34]
A
Yeah.
- [26:34]
B
And it's you also somewhere else that, like, most politicians actually don't have a vision. Like, we don't really exercise this muscle.
- [26:42]
A
Yeah. Well, why do you. Why is that? Like, why aren't we as, like, citizens demanding this of, like, the fact that we're electing people in any country? I mean, not to say nobody has vision, but I'm just like, if one asked me, if somebody asked me to, like, clearly articulate, like, what was the vision for the last ex presidents about where they wanted America to be at the end of their term? I couldn't do it. And I'm. This is not the area that I am most educated in, so maybe other people could do it, but, like, don't we think that the average citizen should be able to repeat that back? I. Yeah. Why is vision in short supply? I don't really know.
- [27:20]
B
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a. A friend that I then talked about on an earlier podcast this year, which is she had asked me, what do you really want? And I, like, couldn't answer.
- [27:32]
A
Yeah.
- [27:33]
B
And. And there was an element of.
- [27:34]
A
Define that question.
- [27:35]
B
Well, one of the mental images that we had in one of the conversations was like, it's sort of like when a kid really wants ice cream.
- [27:42]
A
Yeah.
- [27:42]
B
This sort of like, you can feel it in your body. You're bouncing, you're bounding down the street. And so I almost wonder if part of this is, like, in adulthood, society definitely trains you to critique, and it doesn't really train you to be like, that thing is over there and I'm going to go get it.
- [27:58]
A
Yes.
- [27:58]
B
Which is a sort of silly version of the agency thing. And I almost wonder if there's some aspect of that that Is this. Which is like, to your point, being able to even say. And maybe it takes some silly prompt like, here's a billion dollars, or it's funny. This makes me think. There's the classic question, which is, like, what would you do if you had a billion dollars? And I think it's Jeremy Giffon or David Zen or one of the two has this inversion of that prompt, which is, what would you not stop doing for $1 billion if I offered you a billion dollars to stop doing everything you do? Well, you don't stop doing. It's easier for people to answer that, which almost is pointing at, like, some of the. And so I think I almost wonder, like, were you someone. Who are you someone either growing up or now, like, were you someone who, like, does annual planning or, like, sets annual goals or like any of these types of things?
- [28:45]
A
I do a version of that now, but it's not like an OKR thing. It's more like. It's like, squishier than that, I guess. But, yeah, I do sort of. I do now try to force myself to, like, think, like, what do I want to be true by the end of the year for myself. And like, last year I had a section on, like, there's like, a few projects and, like, things more specific things I wanted to do. And then some of them were kind of like vibes or more like character development kind of things. But I do think that just articulating that is helpful. Like, that is some version of, like, manifesting or something is just being able to, like, you know, athletes do this all the time, right? That is like, they're sort of picturing themselves in the sort of winning state. Or they're picturing, like, Michael Phelps. He's picturing himself all the things that could go wrong. His goggles, you know, get water in them. He's still swimming. His suit rips. He's still swimming. He's sort of going through all these scenarios so that when the sit, he's never surprised. And I'm sort of. There's like. There's something to the visualizing of a future scenario that makes it more likely to happen.
- [29:57]
B
Michael Phelps has the advantage, though. And this, maybe this goes to your example in your work life. You have very specific. Some aspects of it are complex, but there's aspects of it that can be a finish line. And that's what Michael Phelps has. Whereas maybe, like, emotional goals for your life or your relationships are hazier. And so I almost wonder if part there was. You mentioned Anastasi Anastasia Yeah, Anastasia. One of the points she makes in at least one of the posts I read of hers is the importance of a finish line. And it feels like that is also very critical to the GMING thing broadly. It's like somewhere you say, like, it's not like a slice of the problem.
- [30:34]
A
It's the thing, it's the outcome.
- [30:35]
B
So maybe the challenge is like, when we don't. When sports has an easy finish line. I always give example. Last year I had two very, not very big goals. I had two goals, which is one was to do 21 episodes of this podcast where I could quit before halfway through the year. And the other was run the New York Marathon.
- [30:50]
A
Okay. And like, yeah, those are very clear.
- [30:52]
B
Clear finish line were way better for me than like, I want to run more any of these hazier things. What. When it comes to, like, maybe it's worth using either the Frontier example or the new respiratory example. Like carbon removable. Of all the things that can have like, an impossibly large finish line, that's probably. It's among the biggest. Maybe like making sure the AIs don't kill us. When it comes to a problem like that, respiratory illness, presumably you have some big finish line in the future, which is the teraton of carbon removed. Are you then like breaking off little other finish lines? And if so, like, how does, how does that work? Like, what makes a good finish line?
- [31:34]
A
Yeah, I mean, so we, you know, talk about planning, but basically we have, you know, for Frontier, which we started in 2022, we have this sort of like, end goal. Like you said, In 150 years, we need to do a trillion tons of carbon removal roughly in 150 years. And then you say, okay, well, how much money is going to be needed to do that? Okay, it's between this and this much. And then you kind of work backwards, so you don't. I don't think one needs the specifics of the whole plan, but very, very tactically we have the kind of end goal. Then we have, when we started, a vision for where we wanted the field to be in 2030. So we wrote a set of statements of what do we want to be true?
- [32:10]
B
That was almost the real finish line. Like, yes, the other. The other one. But that a hundred years.
- [32:14]
A
Like, yeah, I mean, maybe we'll be alive, but ye. It was sort of what do we want to be true in 2030? That was the kind of vision. Then we have a strategy which is our best guess at any given point in time of like, how we think we are going to get there or what we're going to do versus letting other people in the field do things that breaks down into an annual plan. So we do annual OKR planning and when the world changes, we will change the plan. Then that translates into what we call ships and then that translates into a weekly plan. So like it's very concrete and tactical of like just reasoning backwards from the outcome and then the world changes and it gives you new information and your plan changes and that's okay, that should change, that is fine. But like if you don't have a plan, it's pretty unlikely you're gonna do it.
- [32:59]
B
How did you. Very broad strokes. How did you arrive from like you joined stripe in 2020. Yeah, from 2020 to 2022. That vision and plan like at some point because presumably there's a mix of like what is actually the right finish line and goal, what is the right way to. We haven't even talked about like advanced market commitments and all the sort of structural things again to maybe go back to the original point which is like everything is downstream of problem solve. But like how does that. I think part of the reason this is so hard is like we have a lot of templates of what this kind of looks like in a company building and this feels like going from it. I mean yes, it's amazing. You did it and you could, you've published a lot of this so people could go back but like compressing that you could see how someone would bounce off it.
- [33:46]
A
I don't think it, I guess I, I don't think it's that different from the company planning piece. Like I think maybe it's different from you know, for a mature company that has a, or like a growth stage startup. There are they, they have, you know, most companies have well run companies have like a vision of where they are, the things that they want to be true where they want to be in X years. And the OKR planning process or whatever planning process one decides to use is a way to take that sort of end goal and work backwards from that.
- [34:23]
B
Maybe this is where I'm getting hung up actually, which is in this case. And granted you were doing it from a very strong foundation in your case which was Stripe.
- [34:33]
A
Yeah.
- [34:33]
B
So we made it in that way. It wasn't like a startup but in other ways. It's actually a lot more like going 0 to 1. You have to do both. Yeah. The best comp would be like Elon's Tesla master plan or the space master plan which is like you have to go 0 to 1 a whole bunch of different times and do all the like OKR level strategic planning that a mature company would do. And so that's why it feels so big.
- [34:56]
A
That's fair. I think that's fair.
- [34:58]
B
And you're just like, well be more ambitious.
- [34:59]
A
Well, I mean I just, like, I think that's, I, I, I think that more, I don't think it's rocket science. I just don't like, I think that like how hard was it to become
- [35:09]
B
an expert in this if you presumably talk to all the experts in three weeks? Because that would be, maybe that's another part of this which is like, oh, like I'm learning about climate in 2018, like this it would take me five years to even get up to speed.
- [35:22]
A
You don't have to learn the whole thing. Like I think it's like you're scoping the thing that you are learning. And for me a very motivating thing. And to be clear, there were other people working in the field. There was, you know, this is not just, just me by any stretch, but part of a really motivating thing is like who else is going to do it?
- [35:40]
B
And that is a really specifically this slice of.
- [35:42]
A
This slice of it. Yeah.
- [35:44]
B
How early was the. And maybe this is an opportunity to go a little more specific. Another frame of sort of what you do is like it may not everything you do, but part of what you do is like identifying areas where market forces or markets demand would be really valuable but there isn't any yet or there isn't enough of it yet. And so in that sense it was maybe a vertical, a specific kind of cut on the climate problem which is like, I'm not going to solve all of climate, but there's a specific opportunity here, the specific wedge. What did it look like to arrive on that and why is this sort of like orientation around what an advanced marketing commitment, like how did that become this sort of like elegant blade or tool in this problem?
- [36:25]
A
The short answer is that I think it's just to the point of what's the end goal that we're working on and how do we reason our way back from it? That is the compressed version of it. The longer version of it is, okay, so with carbon removal it is the canonical public good. You're sucking CO2 out of the air, you're storing it somewhere. Nobody wants to pay for that because the customer doesn't get a benefit from it. And when you have no market of customers, you have very few companies that want to Build anything because who they're going to sell their product to. You got very few investors because who they're going to invest in. So then you, then you say okay, well who's responsible for selling public goods? Well, it should be governments and but I'm not a policymaker so I was like, I probably can't do anything there. That's not, that's going to end in the end it's going to be really important. But that's not where my skill set is.
- [37:14]
B
You weren't a public goods philanthropist.
- [37:17]
A
I was working self driving at the time.
- [37:19]
B
I see.
- [37:20]
A
Yes.
- [37:20]
B
And so there was enough similarity. It felt u shaped enough.
- [37:24]
A
Well, the policy did not feel me shaped. The thing I was trying to reason through was you read this, you know, you read the IPCC report and you're like, okay, we're going to need like gigatons and eventually a teraton of carbon removal. Who's going to do that? Okay, well why doesn't it exist? Well, who's going to pay for it? There's nobody to pay for it. Can we get governments to pay for it? Okay, I can't because I don't know how to do that. So who's the next best thing? Well, it's individuals or companies that have disposable income. Who has disposable income? Well, SaaS businesses have pretty good margin. And, and at the time Stripe had published this blog post by Carbon Roof Million dollars. And my, and my. How much a million dollars? A million. Very small, but a thread, a thread. And the theory of change around that was the right theory of change. Christian Anderson, who started Watershed wrote this post. At the time my friend Clay at Lower Carbon was like, okay, like watching me go down the rabbit hole. And he was like, you should talk to these guys. And the interesting thing about you know, Stripe was yes, a million dollars is, is a, is a good start. But Stripe has millions of businesses all over the world that are high margin SaaS businesses. So the distribution is there and if you can convince them to give a small rev a fraction of their revenue to carbon removal, you can potentially aggregate a lot more and use that to buy even more carbon removal down the cost. That was like a, that was my
- [38:45]
B
like logic through you're squinting and seeing the flywheel.
- [38:48]
A
Totally, totally. It was through the lens of that problem that I was like, okay, this is like a really, this is the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of interesting stuff here. When I joined Stripe, I did not know what an advanced market commitment was that was not a pre. I could see the stripe climate piece of how do we make this a product for stripe businesses? That was the thing that got me really excited. But we did that and it went really well. We got to tens of millions of dollars and then we all sat in a room and we're like, okay, well what do we do next? That's nice, but we got to get this. Add another zero to the round yard.
- [39:17]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [39:18]
A
And so AMC's advanced market commitments had been. Is a concept that was developed in the context of global health. And the sort of general idea is there's a thing that you want to exist. And part of the reason that it doesn't exist in the case, in the original case it was for the pneumococcal vaccine for low and middle income countries. And we wanted pharma companies to work on this, but they didn't because who's going to pay for that? These are poor people in countries that won't have enough money to actually pay for it. And so the idea behind the AMC was to pull a bunch of money from, in this case, the Gates foundation and a bunch of other countries to say, hey, pharma companies, if you can make a vaccine to spec, there's a billion and a half dollars waiting for you. Yeah. And it worked. And so I cold emailed the economists who worked on the original amc. Michael Kramer, Rachel Glenister, Chris Snyder.
- [40:13]
B
There had just been one, basically there
- [40:16]
A
had been one and a half. So that was the first one. And then there was sort of part of Operation Warp Speed that was also an AMC and those same economists also worked.
- [40:24]
B
And that was a different shape problem in that there was obviously lots of dollars for that vaccine. But there's this risk of Pfizer develops it first.
- [40:33]
A
Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [40:34]
B
But it's all about this sort of like playing with, it's like helping markets sort of collate on this equilibrium or something.
- [40:42]
A
No, exactly. It's fixing, it's saying, okay, we want this thing to exist. It doesn't because there is some incentive problem around the demand. And what is the intervention that will fix the incentive problem to get the suppliers or the developers to build the thing we want them to build. Yeah. And everyone is exactly like you said, it's a little different. Like the original AMC was different. Operational Warp suit is different. Frontier is a little different. And that is, I think, just goes to show that like you just have to study your problem and make a solution that works for your problem. And if it's a, like the Sort of theory and practice are very messy. Yeah. And that's okay because problems are messy. Yes. But I think that's the. That's sort of what we tried to really workshop with Frontier is like, in what ways does it differ and how do we modify the core model for the problem at hand?
- [41:36]
B
Speaking of messiness, what does maybe to go back to this sort of like mature company versus early stage company comparison in a new company or a small company, the only thing that matters is focus on like a single thing, get to product, market, fit, and then grow it or whatever.
- [41:53]
A
Yeah.
- [41:55]
B
Obviously Patrick Collison has a lot of different areas of focus and in some sense your problem, especially in the early days of a, of a new effort like this is probably closer to the early start startup founder, but the set of possible things to do is closer to like mature Patrick Collison.
- [42:14]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [42:14]
B
And so I'm curious, even now, like with Frontier and some of these other efforts, like, what does focus mean somewhere else? You talk about, like, making sure all of the most promising ideas are being worked on, which is like knowing the unknown unknowns or. Excuse me, the unknown unknowns, which just
- [42:31]
A
feels very broad or something.
- [42:33]
B
Yeah. Like there are theoretically an unknown amount of important aspects of the climate stuff for you to be working on right now.
- [42:42]
A
Okay, well, when we say all the most important problems, I think in that context is probably in the context of carbon removal.
- [42:47]
B
Yeah. And yeah, let's say carbon. Let's make it a little more narrow.
- [42:51]
A
So I've been working on carbon removal since 2020 and we've been working on Car Frontier since 2022. So like, that is in some sense a lot of focus like that. It's been six years of like figuring out what this thing is and getting it off the ground. We now have an incredible team. The team is like cruising.
- [43:10]
B
And there's a. Maybe not a playbook, but there's a. There is a coherent strategy that needs to be updated. But like, it is moving. It has momentum.
- [43:18]
A
Totally. It has momentum. And there are still not to sort of discount a ton of kind of open existential questions and largely on the side of getting governments involved at the scale and speed that they are needed to be involved in. But like, yeah, carbon removal is, is doing really well. And this woman on my team, Hannah, who basically founded Frontier, you know, we found a Frontier together. She's amazing. She's been, you know, we've been working on this for five years. She's basically running Frontier at this point. So like she and has been for you Know, for a little while. So, like, I think part of the reason that I can think about other things is because she's jamming it.
- [44:00]
B
Yeah.
- [44:01]
A
Like, she's. She's really, really good. And as is the rest of the team. Only when those things are true does one, like, earn the ability to think about other things. And I think that that would be true for most leaders. Like, you know. Yeah, like Stripe is doing, you know, is run amazingly well. And so, like, that affords one the ability to like, you know, poke around in other. In other areas. But, like, you gotta get the core thing humming first. I don't know if that answers your
- [44:31]
B
question, but I think I was trying to ask a slightly different question, but that is actually very helpful. I was sort of trying to. And maybe it's worth jumping ahead, which is like, part of what it seems like you're good at. And you even talk about this in the new philanthropy context too, which is like one of the single highest leverage, if not the single highest leverage thing you can do with dollars, and ultimately usually a relatively small amount of dollars is get the snowball rolling is the ignition piece of it. And so I was actually asking a question about, like, focus on the ignition piece. Like, maybe it's worth using some of the respiratory stuff as an example. Like, I know we're rehashing it, but again, it's like really big problem. You're sort of like surveying the. You're patrolling the waters and looking for a place to go deeper on. But again, with a company, it's sort of like find some area of product market fit and then just like pull on it for a long period of time. Whereas this, it's like, it feels like you have to have a constant awareness of other, better strategies that, especially in an area like maybe showing my ignorance here, but in an area like respiratory illness, presumably the field is changing. Biotech's evolving. Like, there's all these new AI, like, and so it was kind of a question about, like, focus in that sense, which is like knowing. Knowing where to best allocate resources in this continuous way. It's almost like you have to be way more paranoid.
- [45:55]
A
Yeah. But again, I don't know if that is like, I'm just like, pushing back because I don't know if that is like, that different from a company. Like, the payments world is changing a lot right now too, with AI and agents. And it's like, you know, there's a ton of paranoia and, you know, this is not my at all my area of expertise. But, like, everybody's having to adapt and sort of in, In. In every business of like, how do I pivot my. Or how do I sort of adapt my business to AI and the way the world's changing? So, like, I think. I don't know if that's so unique to. Yeah, to this. I mean, I think the difference, I guess, like a difference maybe in some areas, like, carbon removal is like. And maybe this is more what you're getting at. Like, in carbon removal. Carbon removal is a specific problem in that it was kind of starting from zero. Like, nobody in the world realized that this was a thing that we were going to have to do in, at the scale we needed to until the 2018 IPCC report it came out. So you're like, okay, sorry, we have to get from zero to what? And how. What. And so you're trying to feel like. And all of those people, you're like, okay, we need to think about supply and we need to think about demand. And we had to think about the markets that bring them together. And all of the thing that maybe feels overwhelming is the ecosystem.
- [47:12]
B
This is what I'm. This is what I'm trying to get. It's. Oh, it's structurally overwhelming. Similar. Most of all of these problems that you're giving examples of, respiratory illness, some of the stuff, some of the ideas Jacob has on by, like, it's just like, oh my gosh, how do I even have a chance of starting? Yeah.
- [47:28]
A
And I think it's a great question. And I think a lot of them, in some sense it's easier to just. In my opinion, it's easier to start with a problem that has nothing because nobody's entrenched in any worldview. Like, carbon removal was a little easier in that sense. In some sense, like the respiratory infections piece is a bit harder because you have different people who have different sort
- [47:49]
B
of fundamental beliefs or this has been tried or.
- [47:51]
A
Da, da. Yeah, exactly. And like, this is sort of like carte blanche. Like, you know, we see. We'll see what happens.
- [47:57]
B
So.
- [47:59]
A
Yeah, and I think that's actually like a really fun, creative exercise of like, how do you decompose the problem into its component pieces? It's like there's a supply piece and there's the demand piece and there's the ecosystem piece. And so each year we have okrs in each of those buckets. But, like, I think that one can.
- [48:15]
B
That to me seems like the central GM skill, by the way, is like
- [48:18]
A
the decomposition of messy problems.
- [48:20]
B
It's like slicing it up.
- [48:21]
A
Yeah, I think That's a good point. Like bringing. And I, Yeah, I think bringing structure to the messiness of these problems and making them feel tractable. Cause I think a lot of problems, you know, big problems, you see, and you're like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna write this off. Cause it's impossible. But if you give somebody, even yourself a sketch of like, just sketch it out. Yes.
- [48:43]
B
This goes back to our vision conversation. Yeah. It's almost like if you could have a perfectly written memoir, 20 page memo on any problem in the world, like, it would be way more likely to be solved.
- [48:55]
A
Totally. I think that's. Yeah, I think that's. I think that's a really good. I think that's a great point. And there's a role for, I think people. I think there's probably a role for more people who are doing the sketching.
- [49:04]
B
Yes.
- [49:05]
A
And that can get the. Get other, you know, the sketchers and the GMs don't have to always be the same people. So like people who know a field and see and are good at the decomposition piece and are good at sort of setting out what should the world look like and what's a rough path to get there. And maybe it's wrong, but it gives people something to react to.
- [49:23]
B
Right, right, right. Also, just frankly, like, even in companies, amazing tacticians and strategists are often not the people with grand visions.
- [49:33]
A
Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing if you can find them in the same people, but sometimes they're not. And you know, is it important for
- [49:41]
B
people like this to, for lack of a better way of putting it, like, be a mascot for it? Like, increasingly you have. You have dialed up how public you are about some of this and frankly, some of your other work around, more recently on philanthropy and GMs, like, maybe it made a different way of asking the question, but like, is how important is like the legibility aspect of it?
- [50:05]
A
Which. The legibility of which part a problem?
- [50:08]
B
Having a, like, flag bearer who's doing part of this is like the person
- [50:12]
A
who wrote the memo, Lewis Ballard, of, you know, ending factory farming or something like that.
- [50:16]
B
Yes. Are you, Are you going on enough podcasts? Is a silly way of asking this.
- [50:22]
A
I think that it depends on the, like, I don't mean this to be a cop up. I think it's just sort of like working backwards from what is the thing you're trying to do. Yeah. And is going on podcasts and is like the comms and marketing piece a really important piece of it. I would argue in the case of like you know, factory farming or something. Getting more broad, sort of like individual support and like political support for that cause is a part of the strategy. Yes. Does that matter as much in carbon removal? I don't know. Does it matter in getting more people working on interesting problems? Yes. The thing that motivates me to write is usually when I think there's like, yeah, there's like a thing I want to happen because of it or something like that. And I think a thing I do feel really fired up about sort of these days right now is finding really awesome people to work on like more important for the world problems. There's so much money coming in to philanthropy in general and I think we are really short founder shaped GM people to man those problems. And so I feel more urgency to make, to bring attention to that because I want more great people working on more great problems. But it's not from a like, I guess it's the com. The legibility I think is downstream of the problem or something for me.
- [51:52]
B
I guess part of the thinking behind my question is like Silicon Valley is quite good at. Take someone like Bark Andreessen.
- [51:58]
A
Yeah.
- [51:58]
B
One of Mark's centrally like singularly great skills in may. Not singularly, but rare and important is his ability to like create a meme around a thing. Software's eating the world, American dynamism, whatever. And you can make a pretty strong case that Mark's often not first to these things. Like Founders Fund was investing in whatever. But he's good at creating this like gravity engine around it. Even something like the term gm, which obviously you didn't make up but like has in a little corner of the world has a little more buzz. And so like my sense is there's something. One of the reasons, one of the main reasons we don't have more people working on these things is because there are less legible famous examples of people who are doing this in an awesome way and that like if you could point to you, if you. The average 25 year old in Silicon Valley can name 10 founders. So they want to be like right.
- [52:51]
A
But they're not like oh my gosh, Henderson eradicated smallpox and I want to be just like him. Yeah, for sure.
- [52:55]
B
Did you feel like you had to lower your ambition to work on public goods?
- [53:02]
A
I think when I joined Stripe to work on climate initially my friends were like excuse. They're sort of like what's going on? But I think that I, and, and mostly just because like I was doing, you know, I was working self driving and I was doing Product stuff. And I think it's a, I personally think that it's a, it's an increase in ambition because I think you are taking on more consequential, like in some cases more consequential problems and they're harder. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [53:42]
B
No, to be. My implication was not that it's less ambitious, but paradoxically like there is something about it that's like if it works, it's way more ambitious.
- [53:54]
A
Yeah.
- [53:55]
B
Or if you make a real dent on it. But otherwise like the.
- [53:57]
A
That's true in startups. Lots of people fail in startups.
- [53:59]
B
It's true.
- [54:01]
A
Like, I think we, we sort of take like we love a good power law applied to startups, but we don't do it for philanthropy, like almost because
- [54:09]
B
we don't believe it.
- [54:10]
A
Yeah.
- [54:10]
B
I think, I mean really at the root of it I think is probably like, like what are you going to do? Like extract a teraton of carbon.
- [54:16]
A
Yeah. Good luck to you. Yeah, I think it's sort of this odd discontinuity or something. Like we are very comfortable with hits businesses, like with sort of a hits based approach in VC in the private sector, but we don't take that approach in the philanthropic sector and as a result we probably don't get the kind of outcomes that we want to get.
- [54:38]
B
You wrote a great piece on modeling kind of a third wave of philanthropy. And really what I think is so compelling about it is you borrow from Silicon Valley. You have this kind of triad of in the startup sense, LPs and VCs and founders and in your sense funders, allocators and builders.
- [54:57]
A
And our conversation was really helpful actually in helping me sort of like piece that together. So I'm very appreciative of that.
- [55:02]
B
I'm glad in some sense you're sort of trying to pull all of those forward. It's. And it's like a little bit of a three body problem or like a chicken three. Three part chicken and egg problem. Maybe the first question would be like, does the GM frame apply to all three of those roles? I think probably you are kind of two of the three of them, if I understand correctly, which is you are both an allocator capital and a builder. Is that right? Or do you think you're closer to just an allocator?
- [55:40]
A
I think that we are. Yeah. I think the gm, gm sort of a mindset. I think it's, I think, I think it's, I think it is a mindset. I think like, you know, we are, we, we kind of straddle I think we are technically in the role of the capital allocator. If you had to put us in one up frontier, that is where it would be. But I, I think we do wear lots of different hats. Like, we are spending a lot of time trying to get more capital by talking, you know, by working on the policy pieces to get more policy driven demand. We're working a ton. If we are, we. We find really promising carbon removal areas that we don't see worked on. We're starting, we're trying to get them going ourselves. So I think our primary role is that of a sort of customer in the form of a capital allocator.
- [56:31]
B
It's a lot like the most ambitious VC firms though, they're going to incubate companies. Mark Andreessen spending all of his time fundraising all across the world to figure out how you can have a $20 billion fund versus a tent, whatever. Yeah, maybe to ask an obvious question, but what are the builders in the, like what is the typical builder in the, in the frontiers context?
- [56:52]
A
Companies working on carbon removal companies. So that's direct to air capture company, that's a surface and mineralization company, an enhanced weathering company. There's lots of different pathways. And so it would be a company saying, you know, we have an approach that we think can be really big and really cheap. We sell carbon removal. Who's going to buy it?
- [57:09]
B
These are primarily companies though, not nonprofits.
- [57:12]
A
They're companies. Yeah.
- [57:13]
B
And is that, do you think that's like most of these types of problems are more likely to shape that way? Is that something due to the kind of market shape of carbon renewal? Is that because of the advanced market commitment aspect of it? Like if you were to try to generalize to the broader kind of like new philanthropy orientation, presumably most of the things OpenAI foundation aren't going to be funding, aren't going to be companies.
- [57:37]
A
Yeah, I don't feel, I feel it's so area specific. So I don't know what.
- [57:43]
B
Maybe a better question be like, why is, why do you like structurally, why are most of these people working on the climate stuff, carbon removal stuff companies?
- [57:53]
A
Well, you know, they're like, it's kind of like in sanitation, like you need people to, you know, take out the, like pick up the garbage for your city. But like those are companies that you pay to do a service. And this is sort of like we need a lot of, of sanitation companies, but for the air is sort of one way to think about it for carbon removal. But that is a. There's like A supply and demand element of this in carbon removal that may or may not be the case for other I see problems.
- [58:20]
B
So if it can be a company, it probably should be a company.
- [58:22]
A
Yeah, I think so. I think that's the right way to think about it. And the only way that there can be companies is if somebody is buying their products. So that was the market sort of mechanism that we were sort of fixated on. But I think that every, it's not that generalizable. Like if you're working on, you know, biosecurity or AI safety, is it a supply and demand problem or is it a policy regulatory thing? Is it a sort of evals thing? I don't like it's so specific to that problem. I don't think that it's that useful to generalize.
- [58:55]
B
And there's probably an element too of like the thing you're trying to do is actually very clearly targetable and measurable. I think in carbon renewable, like, like we know exactly what we're talking about. Maybe, I mean, maybe not quite exactly. Versus something more ambiguous, something more philanthropic. That's like we want to increase the beauty of cities. I mean that's an extreme example.
- [59:21]
A
But yeah, I think, I think that this is one of the things that we're gonna collectively struggle with, with this round of the sort of third wave of philanthropy. So part of the way I was thinking about it was like the first wave of philanthropy was the Carnegie's and the Rockefellers. The second round of philanthropy was the sort of Gates's of the world. And, and, and to some extent parts of ea, although that sort of bled into this third, third wave as well. But the second wave of philanthropy is very measurement oriented. It was sort of like, you know, dailies and cost benefit analysis and how do we do the thing with the highest roi? And that has generated, you know, that's a really important tool that has generated a huge amount of good for the world. And we should, you know, we should be very grateful for that sort of skill set that we got from the second wave of philanthropy. And in my opinion, a lot of the questions that we're going to be grappling with now from a public sort of goods and moral perspective are harder to quantify. They are questions of, you know, there is a lot around AI safety and how do we navigate this transition through AGI if we do get, you know, successfully through that? These.
- [60:42]
B
What's our vision for the world?
- [60:43]
A
Vision for the world. What does meaning look like? What is, what is it? What does good look like, what does beauty look like? I think these are maybe not the most urgent questions right now with, you know, at least for some of these funders, but they will become important questions and they don't lend themselves very well to cost benefit analysis.
- [61:03]
B
Yes.
- [61:03]
A
And I think that's going to feel really uncomfortable for many of us who grew up really like that. We're very familiar and comfortable with those, those tools, but those tools are not quite the right fit. And I'm very. I think that those things, the shape, the types of things in that bucket are going to take. We're a little anemic there. I think we're going to fumble around for a while to try to figure out, like, how do we even jumpstart, like, answering those questions in a substantive way. And my, I guess a hope that I have is that we don't just do the AI safety stuff in the next one to 10 years, that we also start to give this sort of second bucket of stuff more attention, because I think it's. I think it's going to take us some time to kind of get our sea legs and figure out which way is up.
- [61:58]
B
Is it. Do you think it's fair to slice that as sort of like the last round of philanthropy? And probably also stuff like carbon removal to some degree or even AI safety or is more about like floor raising or downside mitigation. And this other bucket you're describing is much more about raising the ceiling, Right?
- [62:17]
A
Yeah, I think that that is.
- [62:19]
B
And granted, there are probably a lot of people who would be like, upside problems. Like, we'll deal with those later. Like, people are dying.
- [62:27]
A
Yeah.
- [62:28]
B
Or. Or the earth's or the like. Another thought I had is like, in some sense, the carbon removal problem, despite the fact that a lot of progress wasn't made on it, is actually more of a wave two of philanthropy type problem that it would be good at solving.
- [62:43]
A
Yeah, I think that's right.
- [62:44]
B
And for whatever reason, intractability or whatever, like, it wasn't. Not a lot of progress, was there? But we're going to increasingly have a new set of problems which are like, what do we want life to look like? And should philanthropic dollars even be the type of way we. We improve them?
- [62:58]
A
I think that's right. And I think, like, how does one answer. How do we answer the question of whether philanthropic dollars are the right place to start? Well, what. I think it kind of comes back to the vision piece of, like, what do we want the world to look like here? What does. What. How, how might we imagine what great looks like for humanity and for ourselves and for our city. And in some period of time, working backwards from that and saying, like, okay, are these companies? Are these, you know, are these funding more writers? Are these funding more artists? Are these figuring out what is the next moral framework that is maybe not Christianity or Judaism and Nadia, but a third thing. Like, what. Yeah, I think these are sort of big, squishy questions that. That are. Yeah. Are just going to take time for us to figure out. So I'm. I'm kind of eager to get cranking on some of them.
- [63:51]
B
In some sense, we'll just kind of come down to, like, the moral hierarchy of the rich people and the Open AI Foundation,
- [64:00]
A
I think, and.
- [64:02]
B
And slash. Sorry to interrupt you. Like, Ross Douthat wrote an interesting response to your piece, and he. I thought it was cool. He made a strong case for, like, making more beautiful things in the world. And yet it's also like, well, that's great, but we still have crazy amounts of poverty in the world. Like, presumably, like, I don't know, some anthropic employees listening to this, trying to decide where to spend their new fortune. I suspect it's probably pretty hard to in earnest be like, I'm gonna spend it on beautiful buildings when. And maybe this is too EA of a mindset or whatever.
- [64:32]
A
It is very EA mindset, and there's a lot to love about that.
- [64:36]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [64:37]
A
I don't know the answer is, I guess, the answer to that question, but I guess I just wonder if there's a little bit more room for a portfolio of approaches here and if we have to so strictly adhere to sort of like a single. I think it feels a little bit hubristic or naive to think that, like, everything is captured in a cost benefit analysis that we can sort of put into a spreadsheet. And a lot is. So I don't want to minimize that at all. But I think it's like. I think we can all kind of feel it that something isn't quite always captured in that lens. And that's not to say we shouldn't fund all that stuff, but there's probably a bit more space for some of the squishier stuff. And whether that's 5% or 10% or 30% of the portfolio funding, I don't know. And it's not my decision to make, but I'm like, what? You know, should we be a little bit more kind of experimental in thinking about that especially, and acknowledge that some of the questions are. Are just different? Like, I I guess one way to like, how would, how if somebody was really set on the cost benefit piece, maybe one way to sort of like reason through that with them would be, you know, one would might believe that in sort of post AGI we're like living in this age of abundance and in that world we have, have ticked through a lot of the things on the top of the spreadsheet, so to speak, or most of the things on the spreadsheet. But the squishier things are just going to take more time to sort of figure out. So let's use that, the time we have, you know, now to our advantage and like start to get some of that going. Like, I don't think that they, I'm not sure that those problems can absorb so much capital right now even if we wanted them to. I have not looked at it, but that is my intuition.
- [66:34]
B
And so you do need some kickstarting, some snowball rolling.
- [66:37]
A
Yeah, exactly. So like and that's probably not that expensive. So like maybe we should just do those things and then like at least we have the option down the line to like expand them or something. There's like a time element.
- [66:49]
B
Maybe this is slightly tangential, but I think it is quite related. Which is inside of this is actually like philanthropic dollar spend typically tends to be far more risk averse than capital, venture capital or other forms of investment. And one, I think there are a million reasons for that bureaucracy, all these other things. But one reason might actually be that like people don't want to spend their money. People don't want to be criticized for spending their money on beautiful buildings when they could have spent it on malaria nets or whatever. And so on some level it actually is going to require like, which is
- [67:22]
A
a shift by the way because like philanthropy used to be funding New York Public Library.
- [67:25]
B
Yeah. Yeah. So it actually that's a, that's an interesting point which is like there is a resistance to being divergent to, to being in the same way that I'm sure by the way, the average venture capitalist right now, in 2020, in 2026, if you're not funding AI, you better have a pretty good reason. And by the way, I would actually, I would probably argue that you're probably more likely to find something really interesting outside of AI now maybe not more
- [67:49]
A
likely, whatever, because everyone's looking at that.
- [67:51]
B
Right?
- [67:51]
A
Yeah.
- [67:51]
B
Right. So anyway, there's a, it's like the
- [67:54]
A
non consensus, there's a pressure to be
- [67:55]
B
super consensus in philanthropy. One question, and this may be silly, but one question I Kind of found myself thinking about and asking is your setup has two scarcities, you and Patrick basically. And that's like, that's doing a lot of extra work but like basically the allocator or the, excuse me, the funder and the ambitious person that could probably go be working in something else or starting a company or whatever. I think it's in the GM piece you had laid this out for part of why at least the, the funder dynamic is scarce. You say in practice this means funders who, one back an ambitious problem, want to solve the whole thing versus a slice of it, two resource it well, three, give their leaders genuine autonomy to do whatever is needed to solve the problem, four, compensate these leaders competitively and five, commit to sticking with the problem for a very long time. Again, the pithy question is like what, what, which of those two roles do you think is actually more scarce in this ecosystem now? People like you or people like, or funders like Patrick? And then I think there's a lot of follow up questions but I think,
- [68:57]
A
I don't know the relative scarcity, but I think they are both really scarce. Like we have, we have a really unique setup in the context of our like public goods work at Stripe. Like all of the things there are true and like that. You know the question I get most when people, when we're like hiring a new person on the team is just like skepticism coming in and being like, is this real? Like what is going on here? And like, or could Patrick just get
- [69:23]
B
bored or distracted or are you bored? Tell them.
- [69:26]
A
Yeah, yeah. Are you going to shut it down?
- [69:27]
B
Go public? They're like, why are you doing this?
- [69:29]
A
Totally. Are you going to shut it down? Yeah. Well, will priorities change? Like it's not the core business. Like are you sure you're not like spending all of your time jumping through bureaucratic hoops? And like I get the skepticism because I think at most organizations that is true and it is not the case at Stripe. So I think we've just like, yeah, Patrick and John have just created a really like, I feel really lucky because we have sort of like these perfect conditions to take on really long term projects in really sort of higher than usual risk appetite ways. And we have, I think in part because we've executed well like consistently over a long period of time have like earned the trust to continue to do that. But I think the piece, like the generalizable piece in my opinion is that this is replicable. It's not rock. Like, like you can like more companies I think could House organizations like Frontier and like this new respiratory infection initiative and the sort of, you know, when we were starting Frontier, my instinct was to spin it out of Stripe because I'm like, we, you know, this is getting really big, bringing in money from other companies. We shouldn't do this in stripe. And, and Patrick was like, I think we should keep it in stripe. And one of the reasons was we want to shepherd this for the long run. And the other reason was that we can pay people tech salaries while working on this and so we're going to be able to attract better people. And I think that like those are very non consensus things to like approaches to philanthropy and they really make a difference. Like those are kind of I think sneaky advantages that we have and I think those are replicable by other companies. So like those are, those are in theory things that like I think leaders at other organizations could decide to do. They could decide to say like we also want to take on really big problems. We're going to pay people who work on these public goods like other people at our company and we are going to protect them from sort of any, you know, having to. They are different from the core companies. So we're going to protect them from processes that don't apply to them and we are going to pay them reasonably well. And I think that's like a sneaky huge arbitrage for companies.
- [71:52]
B
Two thoughts. One is, I think it's telling that Patrick's done this in different forms, which is all of this is a part of Stripe. Arc's a separate thing. What he's doing this stuff with Tyler, whatever, which, which is another nice example of sort of like downstream of the problem. Figure out whatever why And I don't want you to speak for him or whatever but like I understand the point you're making when you say it's replicable. On the other hand, it's like this happens because out of the goodness of their heart, more or less. Like I think is there a real
- [72:24]
A
business case for this stuff in the really long run? We are interested in economic growth and climate change is a threat to that. People getting sick from common respiratory infections is also a threat to that. Like probably half a percent, 2% of GDP every single year. So like that is not trivial, but that's a really, over the really long term that is true. So I, in the short term, you know, these are revenue destructive. You know, these are, these are not. We spend a lot of money on carbon removal that we do not recoup. We spend a lot of Money, maybe
- [73:00]
B
it's brand like it improves stripes brand.
- [73:02]
A
You know, I, I've never been asked that. Like that has never come up in interesting a conversation. I just like don't. But, but I think you're right that like these like hyper smart, conscientious, wanting to sort of like souls oriented in a good direction there, those are, yeah, there's, there's those. They're hard to find people.
- [73:27]
B
To go back to the scarcity question, do you think that there's any world where you could be doing something like this somewhere else?
- [73:33]
A
I think that the tectonic plates are shifting right now a lot in philanthropy and so I hope the answer to that question, whether it's for me specifically.
- [73:42]
B
Yeah, I'm asking for Nan's 2 through 100.
- [73:45]
A
Yeah, I think that there, I hope there are and I think that there definitely could be. Like we have. When we think about how philanthropy is changing, one of the reasons for the change is that there's a lot of money coming in from OpenAI by the OpenAI foundation from Anthropic founders who pledged to give a huge amount of their money the way and anthropic employees who have taken advantage of this really epic employee matching program that the founders put in place. There's also lots of other money from people who are second order benefit from that. Maybe SpaceX folks end up being philanthropically minded. But the point is that there's a. Of money coming, new philanthropic money coming into the space and the types of funders who are behind the money grew up in Silicon Valley. They grew up kind of like their orientation is like we want really smart, fast, nimble hustlers to like own a problem and like deliver results. And that has the potential, the combination of the funding and their orientation around the talent and the fact that like the problems that they're worried about are very time consuming.
- [74:54]
B
Their worldview, by the way, it's actually not software people as much, it's AI people, which is almost a different genealogy there.
- [75:00]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, exactly. And like the worldview of that type of person is like, okay, we gotta move fast. And so all of those things I think have the potential to come together to like. Embolden and fund and catalyze this whole new wave of philanthropic.
- [75:21]
B
Patrick, less scarce.
- [75:22]
A
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [75:24]
B
In that, in that piece, you basically, to put some numbers on it, you say, I think your conservative estimates like almost $40 billion a year of new philanthropic dollars that come in, I think the total number now is about 600 a year.
- [75:36]
A
Yeah, 600 yeah, 600 a year in the US
- [75:42]
B
you have all these great let's like whatever, 5,000 IFP's and however many ARC institutes and so on. Like realistically there's just no way that we're gonna have enough things to fund like that.
- [75:56]
A
Yes.
- [75:57]
B
So what do you actually think is gonna. I mean part of this is the reason you wrote the post, but like what do you actually think is going to happen over the next two years, let's say.
- [76:05]
A
Well, I think that like without significant intervention, I don't know. Yeah, I think the thing that the
- [76:12]
B
money just won't get spent.
- [76:13]
A
Yeah. I think the default is that like. Yeah, the funding doesn't materializes but doesn't actually go anywhere because funders are like, I'm not finding these like amazing projects that I want to put the money towards, but part of that is in our control to fix it. So like, what I hope happens is that we can sort of see this tidal wave of funding coming down the pike and we figure out how do we better characterize the problems that these funders want to fund and that we sort of the world, quote unquote should solve. What is the pipeline of talent from, you know, people working as a, as a tech PM that maybe they want to get into a different type of thing or they're sort of attracted to these like hyper ambitious kind of public goods, good for the world shape problems and now have a path to actually being able to work on them unencumbered.
- [77:05]
B
But it's, it's. You're sort of like speedrunning saying like it's like the cultural aspects of this are like venture capital in the 1980s and we're about to have the funding level of the 2010s and like it's
- [77:15]
A
going to happen fast. Yeah, well, okay, I think it will happen fast. But also like it's going to take the funders time to like build the muscle to spend the money. Like it's a lot of money to move. So it's not going to ramp up immediately. That's going to take time. And I think there need to be capital allocators to like help facilitate the deployment of capital. That's like a whole shape of funder of. Sorry. Of like founder that needs to exist in addition to the builders.
- [77:41]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [77:42]
A
But I think the thing to take away here is that like there's a lot of money that is going to be pointed at really interesting and important problems for the world and the thing that is going to be needed is really talented, amazing people to GM the problem and to figure out the path forward. And I think that the job, what funders I hope do is like give these founders the space and the breathing room and the like non administrative like
- [78:12]
B
this is the quote I read about Patrick. Right?
- [78:14]
A
Yeah. Like I think like if the, the thing that I am like most would be most anxious about in any of these cases is like I don't want to work in a, in an environment where like I'm going to be hamstrung by having to like produce random reports all the time. Right, right. Like that is the most like I would take a crazy pay cut to not have to deal with that.
- [78:34]
B
Ambitious people love autonomy.
- [78:36]
A
That's on the funders to figure out how do I like make sure because that's the pull is always in that direction. So like how do as funders we are sort of self aware of saying like okay, I'm going to push back against that like that.
- [78:48]
B
And also I'm going to fund the weird stuff and I'm going to fund the weird stuff.
- [78:52]
A
I think there's going to be natural interest in funding the weird stuff from this set of funders because of the type. Yeah, they like the weird stuff. You know, anthropical ipo, I don't know in a year or something like that or maybe later this year and then there's a lockup period and blah blah, blah. So maybe funding becomes available in a year. It's going to take, you know, if I decide today that I find a problem that I want to work on, I have to quit my job. I have to learn about that problem, I have to ramp up that problem. I have to figure out what is my strategy. I have to find funding for that. I'm find a team for that. I have to figure out how to work with my team. Like that's going to take a year to like build up some basic capacity. We got to start that now. Like the time to get going on that is now. So that in the next couple of years there is when the exciting part
- [79:36]
B
maybe is if you're the entrepreneurial person is like the funding is in a way that it hasn't really been before going to be there in this very, very not low hanging fruit. That's probably like a little bit of a silly way of putting it, but much more like it is kind of like the grants are out there. Yeah. It's like yours for the taking.
- [79:53]
A
Yep.
- [79:54]
B
Maybe just a few miscellaneous questions on this stuff. Like back to the snowball idea. Like usually actually the highest Leverage thing is to spend a small amount of money on getting something rolling. When does the size of the amount of funding really matter? And like it? Like, presumably one other way this could be shaped is like we're talking orders of magnitude, billions of dollars being given away possibly to individuals like, who knows? Or at least hundreds of millions. Like maybe it's the coefficient giving thing, it's really small or whatever. When does a large amount of capital really, even for something like what you do? Like when does it really move the needle? Presumably something like Frontier is a dramatically different orientation than the $10 million stripe was giving away. But is it about a proof point? Is it about a repeatable kind of funding mechanism?
- [80:43]
A
I think it's too problem specific to answer that. But I think the generalizable thing is in most cases a new problem isn't going to be able to absorb like $10 billion right off the bat. So like.
- [80:56]
B
Right, right.
- [80:56]
A
You can't.
- [80:57]
B
It's another reason you have to get started sooner.
- [80:58]
A
Exactly.
- [80:59]
B
Got it.
- [80:59]
A
Exactly.
- [81:01]
B
Any sense on the types of problems that are better served funded by private philanthropy versus government?
- [81:08]
A
That's like a question I feel that I need to have a better answer for, for myself. Yeah, I, I, I don't know. Like in some sense I do feel that carbon removal should never have been private sector driven. I think that that is like a little insane. But you go to war with the army you have. And I guess like in theory, not all philanthropy is sort of like in the general, there's like a scalability. Like how, how broadly might it serve the public, public's interest? Maybe philanthropy is sort of better positioned for like, more, I don't know, like specific or like hyperlocal things or something like that in a way that like governments aren't. But I don't know. Do you have an answer to that question?
- [81:53]
B
Well, I guess that some political view response to this would be like, these people shouldn't even be this rich and like should be taxed way more. More like the government's job is to do philanthropy. The private sector shouldn't even be doing it. I think a very strong counter example would be something like Frontier, which is like, turns out the government doesn't always solve the problems we have. I'm sure there are people who think that the OpenAI foundation should be deployed by the government.
- [82:22]
A
Yeah, I think that is not the case. Like, I think it's like, okay, that might be true. And I am not one to speak about kind of what is the fate of these AI companies in the long Run. But I.
- [82:46]
B
Yeah, the more interesting question, to be clear, I think, is about the types of. The government is good at funding certain types of things and it's not as good. And part of it is just whatever. The. Maybe the answer is actually as simple as just, like, what are the areas that the government is not funding enough? Like, go nuts.
- [83:04]
A
But that's different. I feel like there's a difference in the question of, like, what should the government be funding and like, what does the government fund? And I think that, like, in reality, a lot of the philanthropy that we're seeing is like, going to fund gaps that the government is not doing. Now, I think that, like, in theory, the government, like both philanthropy and governments, are in theory, interest. In the interest of the public. They're interested in sort of like, how do we better serve people and the world. So, like, in principle, they should maybe be interested in very similar things. Now, maybe there are differences because individuals might have different world views of what does serve the public. And so, like, the government has one worldview. And so a philanthropist might think, well, I don't agree with that. And so I want to do this other thing and I value this a lot and the government doesn't. But they're both broadly aligned towards serving the public. I think another thing that maybe way that they differ is that philanthropies are smaller than the government. So, like, what are, what are. There are probably things that the government can fund that like.
- [84:07]
B
Right.
- [84:08]
A
Individual philanthropists can ever do. Now, OpenAI foundation has a lot of money. So, like, it's.
- [84:14]
B
Yeah, more government. Right. This is the tension, I think now
- [84:16]
A
you're kind of getting, like. Because some of these, some of the dollars, depending on where, you know, AI company valuations go, could get really, really big. I think that there is this question of, like, I don't know, maybe it's the. Maybe they could start funding things.
- [84:33]
B
If improv gets to a certain size, should they be doing the ubi?
- [84:36]
A
I mean, yeah, UBI is. Yeah, I don't know how to think
- [84:40]
B
about that, but it is, it is that kind of like, at some point you get to a level of scale or healthcare or whatever it might be.
- [84:46]
A
And I think that, like, you know, this really, like the sort of worldview and orientation and like the character and morality of these funders and organizations, because of the potential scale here and because of how concentrated it is, like, end up mattering quite a lot.
- [85:05]
B
Do you think we'll ever get the level of ambition required if there isn't a clear path for Quote unquote philanthropic founders to get anywhere near as rich as non philanthropic founders?
- [85:20]
A
I think that's a really good question. I, I. Conceptually I think it is sort of silly and a little crazy that we like, we're like, okay, if you solve this like amazing thing for the world, we still expect you to take a huge pay cut.
- [85:37]
B
Right.
- [85:38]
A
Like if one delivers a great outcome for the world, like we should make them rich, that's great. And I think that like that is a, I don't really actually know where the whole one has to self sacrifice in so many areas to do philanthropy came from.
- [85:54]
B
I don't know if it's that. I think it's actually the inverse which is just in companies. I mean the reason Silicon Valley has created so much wealth in a way that's even distinct from finance or whatever is ownership. Yeah, like Larry Page made Google and as a result of it owned an ultimately fairly small part that's worth a ton of money. Maybe there's something like an advanced market commitment as a bounty, like somehow. But it's actually, it's closer to the advanced market commitment problem, which is like there isn't enough demand. Who's paying?
- [86:27]
A
Like, well, you want to pay for outcomes is sort of what you're getting at, right? Yeah, yeah, I think, I think that like, you know, you talk to some, some folks in AI and they're sort of like, okay, eventually like an ASI will allocate sort of of there will be like a, you know, we'll allocate sort of rewards based on people's relative contributions. Yeah. Or, or yeah. Societal contributions. And I think that like that is a, maybe on one end of the, the sort of extreme. I think another way to think about this is like, you know, companies, let's look at the typical company, a company. How do companies compensate for performance? Well, there's like a base salary, but there are oftentimes performance incentives like you're getting a cash bonus or you're getting, you're rated. You're, you're sort of often like rated based on how well you've done in a given year. And some of that is outcome based, but some of it's a little squishy. But it kind of works like people, you know, it's a half objective, half subjective measure. It works for companies. I'm sort of like, why can't we do the same thing for philanthropies? Like if the funders determine that like, like a founder is killing it, can we pay them more? I think another interesting Dynamic and a very unique dynamic about this round of this wave of philanthropy is that the money coming in is currently sitting as equity in the most, you know, some of the most value valuable companies in the world. The most like coveted equity in the world. And so can we use that to sort of like the advantage of these problems to say like, okay, if a founder kills it, can we give them, can we pay them a performance bonus in the form of anthropic stock?
- [88:07]
B
Yes.
- [88:09]
A
I think that's like a sneaky, cool, unusual piece. Like, I, like, part of me like wants to just. This is not the first time people have had a version of the, like, we should change performance incentives and philanthropy. So like, part of me thinks this is a dead end and part of me wants to hire like a cracked out lawyer to like figure out how to do this.
- [88:28]
B
It's not that, I mean, you don't have to confirm or deny it. Presumably you have equity in Stripe.
- [88:33]
A
Yeah.
- [88:33]
B
And that is a really good incentive for someone who would. Yeah. Right.
- [88:37]
A
And I think there's like a version of that. Yeah, there's like a generalizable version of that now that we have the funding that's sitting in equity and it's a lot of money. Huh?
- [88:47]
B
Yeah. Conversely, though, it probably, you still have the ownership problem, it probably looks closer to like a highly competitive high frequency trading bonus structure. Part of the, part of the challenge too is you just need more competition, which is like, currently these funders don't have to pay out that much in philanthropic outcomes because the most ambitious, like. Yeah, it's.
- [89:11]
A
Wait, say more about the.
- [89:12]
B
What would you like? The reason the bonuses are so high in HFT is because there's a hell of a lot of competition.
- [89:17]
A
Yeah.
- [89:18]
B
In this domain there's a lot less competition. And so the best people are in less demand. And as a result, like you're like, oh, cool, you did a good job on your nice philanthropic thing. Here's an extra 100k.
- [89:27]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [89:28]
B
Again, part of this is that you're never going to get a bonus at the level of startup equity.
- [89:32]
A
Yeah.
- [89:32]
B
So it's like there is the ownership thing that maybe you solve. It's. It's a cool area to. I mean, the other way you solve this is you just have more. Bill Gates was quite innovative in terms of how he thought about philanthropy. And you could have. We're going to have some really rich people and they could be quite creative for how they think about.
- [89:50]
A
Totally.
- [89:51]
B
Like, if somebody solves this problem, here's $100 million.
- [89:54]
A
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that. Okay, so I mean there's like the bounty or the prize model. I think the challenge.
- [89:59]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [90:00]
A
With that is like. Yeah, if you're going to. It takes you like 20 years. You have to self fund during that time.
- [90:05]
B
And also who do you create? Yeah, yeah.
- [90:07]
A
But I, my instinct is that like there is some, there's like something here around the pay piece that like we do have to look at this right now. If we want the best people working on the most important problem for the problems for the world, we are going to have to get creative about how to compensate them. Now I don't think we need to like let the perfect be the enemy of the good here where we can borrow a lot from the private sector. Like we can borrow a lot about performance incentives and, and bonuses, et cetera. Like we don't. I'm not convinced we should like totally reinvent the wheel.
- [90:40]
B
Yes. And yet you're currently relying on someone like Nan Ransohoff being like I'm gonna ultimately, I mean, I don't know ultimately. And I, I think your decision to pivot to stripe was a good one. Yeah, same in lots of ways. That was probably not that obvious back then. Especially when it came to like, like you're going to have to take. Have people take the gambit that like one, I'm going to maybe sacrifice my total earning potential and maybe this is going to evolve in a new way. Like these, these, these pieces are all going to have to be.
- [91:14]
A
It's kind of like a trust fall kind of vibe. Yeah, I mean I think that they're. But, but I think that that is also a tractable problem in and of its like what does a sort of YC for philanthropic founders look like where there is some sort of. Even if it's a small batch, you're sort of saying, okay, like for the best folks who come out of this, there's this much funding reserved for you.
- [91:34]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [91:35]
A
You know, equity in X company or something like that. That you give people a bit more and you don't have to fund everybody. Like YC doesn't fund everybody.
- [91:44]
B
I talked to a few people before this conversation and speaking of maybe the pivot and transition, I think you're someone who like very much inflected your life in a non obvious way. Not that early. Like you weren't like in your early 20s.
- [92:03]
A
Sure.
- [92:06]
B
Maybe to set the tone, you were talking about the marriage question and why it was meaningful to you and you said. But if I had to summarize the net effect of this book on me. It was a massive infusion of courage to not snap to grid by default for big life choices. In talking to other people about you, I think that there's just overwhelming sense of like someone who is like super ambitious along like a static ladder and then like, somehow you got off the, the main highway. Maybe two questions. One, what did you have to sacrifice? Or did it feel like it was actually sacrificing something? And then two, for other people out there who probably have like some semi conscious or like partly conscious feeling of like, yeah, I'm doing pretty well. I've done the thing. You, you talk about this in the context of millennials really well, which is like, you're chase the gold stars. Like, do you. What advice would you give them to the people who like, know that maybe there's some other path out there, but, like, it feels like they're too far along or whatever?
- [93:11]
A
Yes, I would. Yes. Yeah, I would definitely have like self described as like a. I was like, really good at playing the game. I like, you know, I was good at the gold stars. I was good at school. I like, kind of did like life as I was supposed to do it and, you know, got into good schools and got good jobs and, you know, got married and got a house. And then there was sort of a series of things that happened in my life, including a sick parent and a sort of 15 year relationship and marriage coming to an end. The end Covid. That sort of like all ended up coinciding around the same time. And those sort of like some combination of like. Yeah, the combination of those things shook kind of the foundation of everything, I think, in some sense for me. And I was like, I think there was a lot going on during that time and it was very fear inducing for somebody who is, you know, was very much like kind of on the path. And the sort of fear around getting off the path was incredibly overwhelming for me for many years. And I think that getting through to the other side of that and realizing that like, my life didn't fall apart and, you know, some things that I was really scared, the things that I imagined that was going to be the worst things ever did not materialize. Our brains are very creative in that way. And then realizing that, like, the space that I cleared, like the space that was cleared from this sort of new phase was an opportunity for all this new stuff to grow. And for part of what we talked about earlier and like developing confidence that to like, listen to my own instincts a bit more and Listen to my own interests and curiosities a bit more, like, happened through that process. Yeah, I think. I think that the combination of those things, while deeply painful at the time, were very important for my growth as a person. If you step off the path, like, nobody really cares that much and nobody's really paying attention, and it feels better because it feels more you. Like, it is sort of. I think I've upweighted my. I've upweighted how much I'm trying to, like, understand and live in accordance with my own values and self and less what I'm, like, supposed to be doing. But that was a real unlearning process that I think, you know, I have great parents, and they did amazing. You know, they're amazing. And I think I just kind of also got got by the system that many of us get got by. But I, you know, I look at people like. Like, there are so many people in. Especially in San Francisco who I feel, like, have like, gone their own weird, zaggy ways really early in their lives. And I feel some envy of them because I'm like, ugh, I wish that I had, like, gotten there sooner, but, like, I didn't. But you could still get there.
- [96:33]
B
There's hope yet.
- [96:34]
A
There's hope yet. I think I was so fixed on the path that, like, things needed to get a little bit messy before I could, like, really kind of get there. But. But other people may not be as well.
- [96:45]
B
I think the hard thing is it compounds.
- [96:48]
A
Yeah.
- [96:48]
B
Like, the long. The reason It's. The reason most people don't ever get there is because after a certain age, you kind of just stop assuming that,
- [96:55]
A
like, yeah, inertia's a thing.
- [96:57]
B
Another maybe related part of this is just, like, lots of people who describe you as, like, super hardcore and fun.
- [97:05]
A
Oh, that's nice.
- [97:09]
B
And just, like, lots of dimensionality. I'm sure part of it is. Is related to what you just said, but maybe a theme that has come up in lots of my conversations with people I admire is, like, managing to hold both, like, deep seriousness and intensity and lightness. And, like, I'm curious if there's anything that comes to mind for how you create that or foster that. Like, because, by the way, like, maybe. Maybe there's some feeling of, like, oh, I wish I had whatever, found my weirdness sooner or something. But, like, I think part of what makes you you is also your seriousness and intensity. And, like, maybe that part of that came from.
- [97:48]
A
Yeah, that's probably striving.
- [97:49]
B
But,
- [97:52]
A
yeah, I think that's. I Don't know. It's so hard to know what my life would have looked like had I taken. Taken a different route. I think I've become, like, less rigid and probably more fun over time, in part because. More fun. I don't know about that, but, like, less. Definitely less rigid over time and maybe more. Okay, I took. We all take Myers Briggs event. We're all forced to take Myers Briggs at some point in our lives. And I used to be, like, a really strong J. And I've, like, become like a soft pea now. And I. Well, and whatever. This is all kind of pseudoscience stuff.
- [98:23]
B
One of your friends described you as the only person they know is going from Kiki to booba in their 30s.
- [98:29]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, for sure.
- [98:31]
B
I think that's true about a scientific. As Myers Briggs.
- [98:33]
A
Yeah. And I think that's a great. That's a great summary. And part of that is, was, I think, just the exhaustion with the kikiness of it all. Like, I think I just kind of was like, this isn't that fun for me. I've kind of been there, done that. And there were people that I, like, did encounter. So Ryan Orbach, who we worked together early days on stripe climate, he was like, one of. Even though I lived in San Francisco for a long time, I interestingly didn't. I was in a very different part of San Francisco. And Ryan, I think, is one of those people who, like, he's just always following his curiosity, and he's, like, sometimes a little disorganized, but in a really fun way. And I think that that was very sort of shocking to me at the time. And I was like that.
- [99:22]
B
Allowed to be like that.
- [99:23]
A
Yeah, in a very helpful way to see. And I now, you know, I think I actually have many friends that are like, sort of versions of that, but it was very helpful to sort of see what that looks like and. And sort of permiss myself to, you know, not be as. Yeah, I just kind of loosen the grip on things.
- [99:48]
B
Speaking of Ryan, he told me to ask about a lost drone exploring carbon removal projects in Iceland.
- [99:55]
A
Okay. Oh, yeah, we went to Iceland to look at some carbon removal projects in, like, 2021, maybe something like that. We were driving around. There was like, a film crew we were bringing with us at the time, and Ryan, there was a drone. They wanted to fly a drone over the car as we were driving, but the guy who was controlling the drone lost service with the drone, and it ended up going down in this massive field of identical rock and moss. So you just. It was like the perfect camo conditions for a drone. So for like two hours we're like parked on the side of the road and. And I was like, let's just get a new drone. But you're in Iceland, so can you get a new drone in time? I don't know. And so we were just all out. We're all walking around this field. We did end up finding it, but it was truly so. It was so random.
- [100:47]
B
It's a normal day on the job.
- [100:48]
A
It's a normal day on the job.
- [100:50]
B
Stripe climate. Exactly. Why do you think Patrick and Stripe care so much about funding things like this? Or Stripe Press or any like. What about him? He's not unique maybe, but he's certainly unusual for his peer set.
- [101:09]
A
I keep going back to like their souls are pointed in a good direction, like they want the world to be better. And I think they have pretty non nor like expansive views of what that can mean. They're very long termists and they have unusually high appetites for weird, riskier, off the beaten path ideas. And I think the combination of those traits is unusual. And I think like actually a thing, you know, to the thing we were talking about earlier. Like, like they're not, I have not observed them to be like roi obsessive in the, in the, in the sort of like works in progress, press frontier like side of the world. They, they're not asking questions like what's the brand benefit of this and can you quantify it? They're sort of like a little bit more of this like intuition and judgment and belief of like this is prop. Like ideas for progress. Like ideas are a way that we spread good things in the world. So we should have a. How do we distribute more great ideas?
- [102:29]
B
Also probably a lot of trust in the people running these things.
- [102:33]
A
They also have that. Yeah, I think that they care a lot about finding great people and then working with them for really long periods of time. And that trust does compound over long periods of time.
- [102:45]
B
Why do you love scones? Or maybe do you love scones?
- [102:48]
A
A dirty little secret is that I don't actually love scones that much. Yeah, basically I was on a trip maybe like five years ago with a bunch of people, including my sister and my best friend Sarah. Both of their names are Sarah and I don't like, we were, we were like eating a really good scone and then we came up with the name Scone Heads. And then we were like, we should start a scone rating account called Scone Heads. But we just like Thought the pun was funny. And now five years later, we're like still rocking. Yeah. I would say that we need a bit of a brand refresh.
- [103:23]
B
Okay.
- [103:24]
A
I would say we've gotten a little lazy in our day. But. There's a. But, you know, scone-heads.com, take a gander, see what you find on that website. It's been, I think it's like a fun project for. It's like a fun example of making stuff with friends. And that has been. It's just like a silly. A silly side hustle with friends. It has been a real treat.
- [103:46]
B
You have a great little old essay on relationship primitives. Speaking of making things with friends, have you updated your thinking or had any more creativity on the ways that sort of. Maybe one of the points you make there is that friendship, I think is an especially under explored category of ways that. That you can have unique relationships with people and the things you can do with your friends is including the lack of commitments and all these other things. I think that was probably three or four years ago.
- [104:18]
A
Yeah, Bri and I wrote that together.
- [104:19]
B
Oh, yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Any updates? Any updated thinking?
- [104:25]
A
I mean, I still think that. I still think that friendship is like the kind of under. Is like the. It kind of gets the dregs.
- [104:37]
B
Yes. Right, right.
- [104:40]
A
We don't make, like, we make things with co workers, but we don't make them with our friends as much.
- [104:44]
B
There's no default together time.
- [104:46]
A
Default together time. I. And I feel like that actually crystallized for me when I was. I did some work on my house a couple of years ago and I ended up moving in with some friends, with two friends and their three kids now, three kids was two at the time. And we lived together for three months. And I got, you know, I was friends with them before, but not like super close with them. And it was just like a really magical experience. How often do you get to live with friends as adults? And you know, we're always joking, like we're meeting in the micro kitchen for a snack break or whatever. And it's just, it's real joy and the closeness that you get from that sort of spontaneous reaction, I think is you have that with a partner, you have that with family growing up. But like, it is hard to sort of like replicate with friends. And this is why, you know, the Phil Levins of the world are like, you should live near friends. And that's the whole thing. And it's really amazing if you can do it. But it's hard to sort of execute in practice. Yeah. Friends. We don't go to therapy with friends. Not that one has to go to therapy at all. But like it's just interesting to me the things that we unconsciously bucket into certain types of relationships. We do this activity with this type of person, but not with this type of person. Why is that? And I don't think you have to do anything with anybody.
- [106:03]
B
But it's more just like see the boundary.
- [106:05]
A
Yeah. Make a choice. In the.
- [106:08]
B
You were talking about the John and Paul book that Ian Leslie wrote and you wrote that it's deeply romantic but not sexual. What does that mean?
- [106:18]
A
This is a really.
- [106:18]
B
What do you mean by romantic specifically? I guess my question.
- [106:21]
A
What do I mean by romantic? It's like I can like feel it but I can't put it in words. It's like it's like a soul conversation or like a seeing each other deeply or a. An appreciation for one's like being or something like that that is like more. It like feels more like holy or something than. Than like just a friendship. I think that reading that book made me feel like we are. I'm even struggling to find the words now. And I think that that's because we are. We're impoverished for the language to describe these different kinds of friendship.
- [107:03]
B
And do you think that's specifically because it was a creative relationship?
- [107:07]
A
I suspect that had a lot to do with it. Like I think that. That the sort of melding of the minds and the melding of the artistic spirit of folks like making something with anybody is a intimate act. Right?
- [107:21]
B
Yes, yes.
- [107:22]
A
And like you know, the most intimate version I suppose is like the raising of the children together or something like that. But like creative projects, whether it's art or music or getting a new thing off the ground with somebody like a co founder. Scone heads. It's great. I love this organic marketing versus coneheads. The like co founder relationship. That is a marriage of sorts. And I don't think all of them trend into romantic territory, but I think that the creating of something creates some conditions for that. Yeah. Does that resonate?
- [108:02]
B
It's funny, there's something like there's. You were pointing so like there's almost like a sacred element of it. Yeah. I don't know if it's. It feels most resonant in the creative because like you. You hear, you look at Johnny. I've talk about Steve Jobs. It's like the same thing. There's some or you. You even somewhere reference like all these creative duos. That's the part. And So I. I do wonder if it. If it's possible without the creative part.
- [108:28]
A
But I mean, it must be because, like, I guess if you think about like relationships or partnerships, like is.
- [108:37]
B
It's like, how many soulmates do you have? It's like that.
- [108:41]
A
Yes. But like, if you specifically think about the creativity, like if. If like romance is conditioned on sort of a creative endeavor. Like, is marriage. In what way is marriage a creative endeavor?
- [108:52]
B
I think it's a creative endeavor. I haven't been married, but
- [108:56]
A
raising kids or sort of like. But I guess it's like it can take. Maybe that can take a. The creativity and the making. Things can take a lot of different forms.
- [109:05]
B
I think part of it is obligation. One of the things about friendship that's funny is like, there's no technical obligations at all.
- [109:12]
A
Yeah.
- [109:13]
B
You're allowed to walk away at any time. And that's not quite the case with a creative partnership or the marriage or with whatever. But I ask about soulmates because I've had dinner party conversations about this and like, how many. I think some people would say, yeah, I have one soulmate and it's my wife or whatever. And then other people would be like, I've had seven and like, two of them were sexual or whatever.
- [109:35]
A
Right.
- [109:35]
B
So there's clearly. You're pointing at something. A great old deep cut that. The syllabi site. Do you have any requests for syllabi?
- [109:46]
A
You know, I've kind of deprecated that project because I think that you can create great syllabi now. Out for yourself. On with the LLMs.
- [109:55]
B
I totally disagree.
- [109:56]
A
Okay.
- [109:57]
B
I care specifically that it's Devin Zweigle's city.
- [110:01]
A
That was a good one.
- [110:01]
B
Curation. Like, I don't want a generic. Like, I don't want the Internet's average.
- [110:09]
A
Right, right. You want like the tippy top or
- [110:11]
B
like somebody's cut on it?
- [110:17]
A
What syllabi would you like if we revive the project?
- [110:28]
B
I mean, I actually don't think is the right answer, like, based on what I was just saying. It's like guides of cities and very, very specific cuts on somebody's taste of it or the way that they experience a thing. But to the spirit of the original project, it's about learning. I don't know, like, this is a total cop out. But like, if I had to learn anything, finding out that somebody I was friends with knew a ton about it and would. Was gonna like, guide you through it. Not even if they were gonna tutor me. Like, even if they were just like, here, I'll Put together, it's very similar to, like, I'm going to Tokyo. It's like, I can go look up the average, like, top takes, or I can get a specific friend's list, and maybe if I'm lucky, they might even add in a few tweaks for me.
- [111:11]
A
Yeah.
- [111:11]
B
And so, like, that. I just think, what a beautiful way to learn.
- [111:14]
A
Do you. Does it matter to you that you know the person or just that you, like, you respect their taste?
- [111:21]
B
I think it's more. Especially if it's about learning. I actually don't think it matters quite as much that I know the person. That's an extra nice thing. But I'm. I want. It's the same reason having a great professor.
- [111:35]
A
Yeah.
- [111:35]
B
Is more. Much more. Or a great reading list. Somebody's.
- [111:38]
A
Yeah.
- [111:39]
B
Reading list is way more interesting than, like, the list of the best books.
- [111:42]
A
Do you. How much do you think, though, that, like, the. Because one of the things if you're, like, snapping to a person who's curating the syllabus is you are. They might have slightly different interests than yours. So, like.
- [111:55]
B
But it's a syllabus. To use your definition. It's like, how should I spend the first five hours learning about this topic?
- [112:01]
A
Yeah.
- [112:01]
B
The goal would be that I get deeper into the pool and then I can swim for myself.
- [112:04]
A
Yeah. But like the introduction to the topic.
- [112:07]
B
Right. And it's like, I'm in good hands here.
- [112:10]
A
Yeah.
- [112:10]
B
Like, I know that Devin's gonna. Or whoever's gonna, like, give me a. I know I'm.
- [112:15]
A
It.
- [112:15]
B
It actually hilariously goes back to we were talking about earlier in the conversation, which is like, this thing is so, like, when you don't know anything about something, you don't know where to start.
- [112:22]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [112:23]
B
And so it's like a helping hand that says, like. Like, you're.
- [112:25]
A
Okay, here's the map of the territory. Like, drop in. Drop in.
- [112:28]
B
I want the AI version of that.
- [112:29]
A
Yeah.
- [112:29]
B
And if it's AI, I want it to be a specific AI. I want it to be. Maybe Claude's gonna have a strong point of view. I don't know. But.
- [112:35]
A
Okay. So the original prompt for that. The original thing I wanted to do with syllabi before it became the current version of it was the thinking was there are, like, a category of topics that we. That are really important and consequential to how we live our lives. Friendship, partnership, conversation, squishier, things like that that we don't really study. We like. If you think about how do you learn A topic, you can like study it or you can experience it. And in academic topics, I think we probably tend to overstudy and under experience. And in life topics, we probably over experience and understand.
- [113:14]
B
Oh, I like this.
- [113:15]
A
And so what I originally wanted to do was like, okay, I want like the syllabus on friendship. I want the syllabus on like xyz. But finding a person to write that syllabus is really hard and I couldn't crack it. So I reminds me of and pivoted to something easier.
- [113:28]
B
One of my favorite things I found in this prep is art is for seeing evil.
- [113:35]
A
Oh, so good. You read it?
- [113:37]
B
I read it. I read it in Bedlam.
- [113:39]
A
Did it blew your mind?
- [113:40]
B
It blew my mind. It's really like, if I could recommend. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. And ironically, the start of that piece, she's like, I'm teaching a class on death and this is part of the syllabus.
- [113:50]
A
Yeah, I know. I like would like, we should just reach out to her and get her a syllabi for that stuff. That probably be good.
- [113:55]
B
That would be cool. Oh my gosh, that piece is incredible.
- [113:58]
A
Okay. Such a. Such a good piece. She was actually going to like, I read somewhere, maybe I'm making this up, but I think she was gonna like, do a class on like partnership or marriage or something like that.
- [114:10]
B
She referenced that in this piece.
- [114:11]
A
Okay. And that was in this piece. Okay. And I. I'm like, will it take would be so interested. Cause I think another piece about, like the squishier life topics is that we have, like, we look at friendship or marriage or raising kids from the lens of our geography and the time that we're growing up in. We're sort of like space and time constrained. Whereas, like, it might be helpful to sort of think about like, how has marriage evolved over time? How has child rearing evolved over time? Giving us ideas of like, oh, it wasn't always this way, or that's not the only way to do it, or in Japan they do it differently. You know, in my head, it's sort of a hack for how do you get out of the default snap to grid? Yes.
- [114:58]
B
The. My sense is the big reason that's not really the case is there are a set of things where it's like, you don't want to trust general wisdom at all. I don't know aspects of science. Like, it, like, things are changing. And the list of things you just described on a relative basis, you want to trust your grandma about marriage or whatever. It's not changing. That much. But because of that we sort of default to the like. Yeah, you should never like fully even inspect this thing.
- [115:29]
A
Yeah.
- [115:33]
B
And you should just learn it passively. Like you shouldn't learn it actively.
- [115:36]
A
Right. I think the past is the passive, active thing that feels odd to me. Whereas like we're so open minded and active in other parts in like the like less emotional domains. And then in the emotional domains we sort of like, we don't like. Yeah. We don't study it in the same way. And is there, is there something to. I read this, I read this anthology last year, a couple of years ago called Wing to Wing Order. And it's basically a syllabus. It's like an anthology that Leon Cass and his wife put together about marriage. And you know, it's like, it's, it's excerpts from the Bible, it's excerpts from the Greeks, it's excerpts from Shakespeare and literature and Darwin and philosophers. And like it's a really neat. It was sort of the closest thing that I ended up up. It's, it's fat, it's a tone. But it. And I didn't read the whole thing but you know, poke around. But it was sort of the closest thing that I found to like a course catalog on, on you know, a big squishy topic like that. And I'm, I'm eager to read more of those.
- [116:48]
B
Maybe we're afraid of like how dare you claim to have some objective view on marriage. So like you're not allowed to write a syllabus on it. But this goes back to like, I don't want the objective syllabus.
- [116:57]
A
Totally.
- [116:57]
B
I want somebody's perspective.
- [116:59]
A
Totally, Totally. Totally.
- [117:01]
B
There was a this words that matter recommendation thing you did. Pulling from that on a few points. I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but you're talking about Ted Joya. And he, he was making a point about inputs. Creative, creatively primarily. My sense is you're someone who's fairly consistent. Are there any critical inputs that have been very consistent for you?
- [117:28]
A
I actually think this is not an area of consistency for me and this is a muscle that I'm like actively trying to build. Yeah. So I'm gonna dodge the question, which is to say I am trying to make the like, input piece a better habit for myself. One of my problems is that when I get obsessed with something, I just like, is really. My blinders are on.
- [117:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [117:52]
A
And I'm just like every incremental, you know, moment should go towards that thing and I kind of starve other areas of my life. So I go through kind of spurts, which is like, I do a lot of my reading, for example, on vacations and over breaks and in transit. And I would like to change that. You know, I think like, that is.
- [118:12]
B
You think we can change these things about ourselves?
- [118:14]
A
Yeah.
- [118:15]
B
You do?
- [118:15]
A
Yeah, I think I've gotten better at it, for sure. I think it's a muscle.
- [118:19]
B
Like, I wonder if I'm ever going to be someone who can do things in with incredible earnest long before they're due.
- [118:25]
A
Okay. Like, I bet you could.
- [118:28]
B
I've been trying for a while. I don't know.
- [118:29]
A
Okay, interesting.
- [118:30]
B
And so sometimes I wonder, should I just, like, accept it? Yeah. Part of the point is, especially on inputs, it goes back to my marathon thing.
- [118:39]
A
Like, I.
- [118:40]
B
Every year I'm like, I'm gonna try to run a little bit more. And like, I guess I'm. There's some aspect of running, it's autotelic. Like, I like to run. And then I decided I was gonna run in a marathon and my level of seriousness about running totally changed. And so, like, having a great output goal was really critical. And so, like, yeah, I don't know. I, like, I would love to become this idealized version of myself that has all the best inputs. But.
- [119:06]
A
Well, I feel like that. But the. But I mean, in that example, I feel like your hack is just like you. The trick to getting you to do better input inputs is just framing it as okay.
- [119:16]
B
Yeah, so maybe that's. Maybe that's the answer.
- [119:18]
A
So you need maybe more like mini marathons or something.
- [119:20]
B
I'm reading inputs is like, almost like you're practice. Well, yeah, specifically, like, I don't need to care about the output.
- [119:30]
A
I. Okay. I mean, I think that's like. Yes. And here you gave a good example earlier. You were like, I'm going to do 21 podcasts this year. Okay. I'm gonna read for an hour a day for three weeks or something like that. What's the. What's the. Yeah, there's. I think there's. There's maybe like you can whatever, gamify the inputs or something. If one must. Yeah.
- [119:52]
B
This romantic idea of the person is just all inputs and trusting themself and it's all intuition.
- [119:56]
A
And I think probably it's the kind of thing though that, like, for me, it's the kind of thing where, like when the muscle has atrophied, it's. The startup costs are hard and you're like, ugh, this isn't that fun. But then when you. Then you trust yourself and it feels more fun again. Like, I feel like there are periods, you know, and I hate to admit it, but there are periods where, like, I'm not reading that much and, like, reading feels like I want to check my phone, I want to, like, do other things, and then I'm like, ugh, I'm never gonna get this back. But then, like, if you just force
- [120:27]
B
yourself, make it till you make it.
- [120:28]
A
Till you make it. Yeah, there's, you know, there's real truth to that.
- [120:32]
B
A great line from one of your blog posts. We've all lost days to ennui. So did Mark Twain. What Mark Twain never lost. Was this a day to YouTube shorts?
- [120:43]
A
I gotta credit that one with Jacob.
- [120:45]
B
So GLPS for attention is where that post comes from. Maybe it's kind of like the input thing, but, like, reading that post, I'm always too. I had talked with a bunch of people about this idea, like, Ozempic for TikTok. Could it really work?
- [121:01]
A
Work?
- [121:01]
B
And similarly, it's like, is it cheating?
- [121:07]
A
Does it matter?
- [121:08]
B
So this is the question. I don't know. I don't. I really don't know. Like, there are certain things where I'm like, if I have to force it, am I. Am I. Like, if you need Adderall to do your job, to really be focused on your job, and I don't know, this maybe the wrong example in too loaded of a question. But, like, one of the things that I. I'm like, I always joke, like, I don't really totally believe in willpower. Like, if you really have to grit and bear it, like, you're. You might be doing the wrong thing. And yet you. You give. I love the metaphor of, like, dieting. It's like, I. If I really just was hedonistic, I would eat candy all day. And I don't eat candy all day, or I don't drink alcohol all the time. And like, but for some reason, there's some attention. It's like. And I worry about this so much. I mean, I think it's the talk about a thing that would be like, we solve all our problems and we all just like, we live in this abundant world and we sit on, like, algorithmic vision pros.
- [122:02]
A
Like, yeah, well, what feels icky to you? Like, what is the thing that feels. Do you feel that way about GLPs themselves? Do you feel that there's, like, a cheating thing there?
- [122:16]
B
No, but I don't. I don't struggle with overeating. So it's like a little bit hard for me to know, but do you
- [122:24]
A
feel that way about other. When other people take them?
- [122:28]
B
But yeah, it's like it sort of feels like I'm giving up the game to algo capitalism and I'm not strong enough. And like, maybe, maybe that's just like such a. I don't know. I don't feel that way about caffeine, but I suspect if you asked people about this, like you're. I'm give you a drug that just allows you to focus on whatever you want to focus on. Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe. This is a very silly thing. I'll look back on in 20 years and be like, oh my gosh, I was just playing on hard mode. Like if this existed, would you take it now?
- [122:55]
A
Yeah.
- [122:57]
B
Okay.
- [122:58]
A
I guess I, I guess I.
- [122:59]
B
Maybe I have like a thing where there's like no free lunch in the universe and, and it's just all trade offs.
- [123:05]
A
Yeah.
- [123:06]
B
Yeah. There's downside of caffeine and I take it anyway.
- [123:09]
A
Yeah. Okay, well, if like, I mean I, I think then one would need to weigh the down. Like everybody needs to weigh the downsides of GLPs in their context or whatever. But I guess in this case, like, it. I think for like it is the hypothetical drug that does not exist for GLP1s for attention that we are discussing. If you, if it did exist, what are the. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? And like if that lets you focus on the things that you want to rather than scrolling Instagram or TikTok or whatever all day and get good things done for the world and do things that are meaningful to you and it makes that easier. Like,
- [123:51]
B
okay, it's like a Luddite style. Natural. Like.
- [123:54]
A
Yeah, it's not natural. Yeah, yeah, no, I know and I, I think like we all have that little, little glimpses of that and I don't. Yeah, it's a good thing to interrogate like, kind of where that comes from. Like there, there is something in, in struggle generally, like you get something out of struggle. Yes. There's something that makes. It builds character. And when is struggle good and when is struggle bad? I don't.
- [124:14]
B
That is what I'm grabbing.
- [124:15]
A
Yeah, I think that that's an important question. But I guess in this case, like in, in the. In for many people, the. This is the struggle of, of like spending all of your time combating. Spending all of your time trying to like not think about food. Is that really that yielding that much benefit? Like, I don't I don't know.
- [124:37]
B
Totally. What did you learn from interviewing your dad?
- [124:43]
A
Oh, okay. Well, so, okay. The context is that I was up with my dad in our cottage in Canada one year. It was just the two of us. We go there every summer. I basically decided to like turn a bunch of our conversations into podcasts. So I just throw it on the phone. I would pick a couple different topics and I would ask him questions about a certain period of his life or music, Big, big classical music guy, or relationships or, you know, et cetera. This is a kind of going back to the relationship primitives thing. It's like if you approached your family member the way that you would approach a work interview or a. Like, with the same intentionality of like approaching a conversation that you would prepare, there's a lot of insight in those, in those family members of ours and there's a lot of experiences that you don't know about because you even interrogated them intentionally in those ways. So that is the thing that I walked away from is sort of being like, there are like these treasure troves of cool stories and history all around us that we. I think bringing the, like borrowing a lens from the workplace and applying it to your family member, applying it to your spouse is like a. Is a neat mix and match.
- [125:56]
B
Yes.
- [125:56]
A
Yes.
- [125:56]
B
There's some implicit thing which is like, you're not supposed to like, think about it that much.
- [126:00]
A
Yeah. Or like it's just supposed to be free flowing.
- [126:03]
B
Right. This goes back to the point you were making about the syllabus for some of these software topics too. It's like these things you're just.
- [126:08]
A
Yeah, right. Like these ones are supposed to just come naturally and you're just supposed to feel them out. But like, and I think that that's fine also. Like, that's great. Like people should shoot the shit with their friends and that's awesome. And sometimes if you haven't seen a friend in a long time, one might throw together a, this quick little agenda in your head of like, I really want to understand, like, how are they doing on this thing or what's going on in this part of their lives. And again, it doesn't have to be a hundred percent of the time, but I think infusing like 10% more of that like intentionality into the relationship. Yeah. It's quite interesting.
- [126:43]
B
And we don't love. This is something, it's funny. It's like it's very SF and to use even stronger language, like very autistic to like say the quiet part out Loud and. And it's delicate, and you can definitely go too far. But sometimes San Francisco can be culturally, can be kind of charming in that people will, like, say the quiet part out loud, see the water on the intentionality part, and play with it a little bit in ways that can be really great and lovely Again. I think there can be other times where you're like, you don't need to say this part out loud. So it's challenging. My last thing, you referenced this amazing little obituary on your grandmother, Regine Weiss Ransohoff, the Lives They Live Together piece. And it's. Your aunt had written it. You say you can feel how fierce, principled, irreverent, brilliant and witty she was, even in just a few short paragraphs. And then it makes me wonder what my hypothetical daughter would write about me. What would you hope that hypothetical daughter would write?
- [127:45]
A
You know, if I get an obituary that is similar to my grandmother's, I'll be a happy camper. I. I did an exercise actually, like this when a couple of years ago when probably five years ago, when kind of I was trying to figure out which way it was up, was like, kind of sketch out an obituary of yourself and use that as a bit of a guide to, like, are you roughly headed in the right direction? I think, like, I don't know exactly, but a couple of things that I hope will be in there or that I aspire towards are, like, doing good things for the world and, like, trying to use what I have to make the world better in some capacity. I think another big one is, like, helping the people I care about in my life be, like, the. The best version of themselves and, like, become the best versions of themselves. And so, like, I think that the people who have held up versions of me and, like, helped me see those when I wasn't able to see them have been really. There's all these studies, like, kids who are told that they're great at something early on end up being great at that. And, like, whether or not they have that innate ability, it's easier to believe in that when sort of someone else is holding. Is helping you hold that for yourself. And so those are. Yeah, I think that I don't always hit the mark on that, but that is, like, something that I aspire towards and doing that for myself and doing that for the people around me. And then I think there's like, yeah, there's like, the zag piece that, like, I made my own decisions and, like, if you don't like them, you know, make your own art kind of thing. Like do things the way that feels right for me at the, you know, and aligned with myself. And then I think like have fun doing it. Like I think that the fun piece is a important thing to lean into and you know, we're not here for that long. Maybe we'll be in the future. So maybe we'll be here forever. But I think in the meantime, and great, more fun if that's the case,
- [129:46]
B
the advanced market commitment, bounty for living forever will probably be.
- [129:49]
A
Yeah, I know. I think somebody's working on that though. People. People are on that. But something about. Yeah, just kind of enjoying it as it happens.
- [129:56]
B
Thank you Nan.
- [129:57]
A
Thanks so much. It was a really fun conversation.
- [129:59]
B
Thank you for listening or watching to my conversation with Nan. And if you enjoyed it, the most impactful thing would be sharing it with someone you think would love it too. You can also rate like subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Every little bit helps. I'd also like to thank Notion again for presenting Dialectic. Notion is a collaborative workspace for your life's work that allows you and your team to have access to all of the world's frontier AI models and use them right where you do all of the rest of your work. That doesn't just include your documents and databases and all of your team's context, but also custom agents and AI that work inside your workspace with you, help you automate away the busy work, have more leverage and think more deeply, work more quickly, and do far more together. I'm super excited about Notion's new developer platform. There's a video that explains all of what's possible thanks to IT and Workers, which are cloud hosted agents that are maximally flexible and customizable and will work with any other software you're using. I'm only scratching the surface of what's possible now, but it has really, truly made Notion a first class end to end AI native computing platform. You can learn more at notion.com dialectic Finally, Notion's team is growing so if you're interested in working with them across product, brand, storytelling, engineering or otherwise, please let me know. You can reach out@workaxandall.com or reach out to Notion directly. Thank you as always for listening and I will see you next time.