[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org for a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links visit conversations withth tyler.com hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler today I'm here with Paul Graham Paul welcome thank you
you've written several times that your wife Jessica Livingstone is a better judge of character than you are what other areas of talent judgment is she better or much better than you practically everything to do with people she's a real expert on people and like social protocol what to wear at events what to say to someone anything like that but you have all this data so why can't you learn from the data and from
her to do with as well as she can what's the binding constraint here in limiting someone as a judge of human Affairs partly I don't I just don't have as much natural ability and partly I just don't care as much about these things where the conversations we have are not Paul you can't wear that they're like Paul you can't wear that and I'm like really why not what's wrong with this I just don't care as much but say when you're
judging Talent Sam Alman Patrick hollison you're judging people of course it's the business plan but much of it is the talent oh it's all the people the earlier you're judging startups the more you're just judging the founders so it's
location for Real Estate right the founders are like that so yeah sure which is why the earlier stage you invest the more you want to have these people who are good judges of people so if she's better than you at human
Affairs comparing you to other people what exactly in the smallest number of dimensions are you better at than the other people what am I better at yes what are you better at you can't be so terrible at this right you mean to do with startups to do with people how well they will do with their startups what's the exact nature of your comparative advantage I can tell if people know what they're talking about when they come and
talk about some idea especially some technical idea I can tell if they know what you know if they actually understand the idea or if they just have a sort of reading the newspapers level of understanding of the thing and how well can you judge determination determination it's hard to judge by looking at the person the way you would judge determination because people act determin people think they're supposed
to act determined no one walks into their why combinator interview thinking I need to seem diffident nobody thinks that they all think they're supposed to seem tough which is actually really painful and stressful it would be better if they just were themselves because someone trying to act tough is just H it's so painful to watch but the way you tell determination is not so much from talking to them as from asking them stories about things
that have happened to them that's where you can see determination and it's how they tell the story or it's what happened no no it's what they did in the story that something went wrong and instead of giving up they persevered why are there so few great Founders in their 20s today saying is that true is that true though I've heard about that 105 years ago you have a large crop of people who obviously have become massive successes
today it's less clear companies seem to be small the important people seem to be older Sam Alman was important early on but now he's very important he's what 37 38 something like that seems like more of a synthetic set of abilities we need it could be because I'm not even sure this is true it could be that it's not actually true and that there's something else going on like for example people manage if you look like athletes for
example athletes learned how to stay stay good for longer and so you have like people who are really International Quality soccer players at age 34 right and that didn't used to happen back in the days of Johan C smoking cigarettes between halves they didn't last till 34 and so it might have seemed like all the good football players are 34 and it's just an artifact of them lasting longer but the 20-year-old Stars seem to have
vanished there's not an next Patrick Collison Patrick Collison probably didn't seem to most people to be the big star and you can prove this because if he had they would have invested in early stripe rounds and they didn't so anybody who claims they knew early on that Patrick Collison was going to be a big star show me the equity okay but there was Peter teal there was uh sequa there was yourself a bunch of people knew in
fact or strongly suspected yeah yeah some people did but certainly not everyone so I don't know if this is true I don't know if this is true I'll investigate this summer we're going to go back to YC and talk to some Founders and I'll talk to the partner ners and I'll see what's going on because I had a mental note to check and see if this was actually true there a Paul gram worldview in your earlier essays where
you want to look for the great hackers and a lot of the most important companies come from intriguing side projects oh yeah but if we want older people who are somewhat synthetic in their abilities are those other principles still true no no not necessarily not as true part of the reason you want to find young Founders who've done stuff from side projects is that it guarant teas the idea is not because if you if young
Founders sit down and try to think of a startup idea it's more likely to be because they don't have any experience of the world older Founders can do things like start supersonic aircraft companies or build something for geriatric care and actually get it right younger Founders are likely to get things wrong if they try and do stuff like that so it's just a heuristic it's a heuristic for finding matches between
young Founders and ideas why is Venture Capital such a small part of capital markets so it's big in Tech it's somewhat big in biotech but most other areas of the economy you finance with debt or retained earnings or some other method what determines where VC works and doesn't work growth you've got to have high growth rates cuz VCS it's so risky investing in startups investing in these early stage companies that maybe
don't even have any revenues so the only thing that can counterbalance the fact that half the companies completely fail is that the ones that don't fail sometimes have astonishing returns so can you imagine a future where there's a
lot more Tech in terms of the level but slower rates of growth and VC quite dwindles because the growth rates aren't there or VC goes to some other area VC has been dwindling in the sense that they have smaller and smaller
percentages of companies if you go back and look at the stories from the 1980s they would do these rounds where they would get 50% of the company and even when YC started they would get 30 and now it's down to 10 in these rounds God knows what they're called they keep renaming the rounds but for a given round size the amount of equity they get is much smaller than they used to it at least seems we have a new Dynamic
Microsoft that ships products quickly and innovates and on the surface appears to act like a startup again how can that be true we all know your famous essay about Microsoft culture what just happened I did not say that they wouldn't make money done more than make money they've impressed us with their speed I meant something very specific in that essay incidentally I talk in that essay about how I was talking to a
founder and I was talking about how Microsoft was this threat and you could see he was clearly puzzled like how could Microsoft possibly be threatening I didn't mention who the founder was but it was actually Zuck it was Mark Zuckerberg who was puzzled that Microsoft could be a threat and still to this day if you ask Founders are you afraid that Microsoft might do what you're doing none of them are so it's still not a threat to startups yeah it
makes it's it makes more money now but it's still not a threat like it used to be it doesn't matter in the sense of factoring into anyone's plans for the future no startup is thinking I better not do that because Microsoft might enter that and destroy me in the early years of Sam Altman what did you see in him other than determination because he's not a technical guy in the sense of a technical guy he was a CS
major but you're not buying the software he programed there's something about what Sam Alman does well now he become a sort of manager but he knows how to program but that's not why his Ventures have succeeded right oh no he does there some ability to put the pieces together yeah yeah but he's not a non-technical guy he's not just some business guy he's a technical guy who also is very formidable and that's a good
combination there's a now Famous Sam tweet where he appears to repudiate his earlier advice of finding product Market fit early and then scaling and saying oh maybe I was wrong saying that what open AI has done is not exactly that do you
agree disagree maybe open AI is a special case cuz you have to have giant warehouses full of gpus you can't just mess around and throw something out there and see if it works maybe it requires some amount of advanced
planning for something on that scale I don't know I don't know what he meant by it or and I also don't know what it's like inside open AI really so I don't know either do you still take a dim view of solo Founders it's harder I know I wouldn't start a startup alone because it's just so much weight to Bear to do something like that but it's very hard to find a partner as good as you are so it's harder and it's easier you can just
do it people should do some work people should put when I talk to people who are in their teens or early 20s about starting a startup I tell them instead of sitting around thinking of startup ideas you should be working with other people on projects and then you'll get a startup idea out of it that you probably never would have thought of and you'll get a co-founder too right so I wish people would do more of that you can get
co-founders just work with people on projects you just can't get co-founders instantly you got to have some patience why if they're not more ambition in the developed World say we wanted to boost ambition by 2x what's the actual constraint what stands in the way huh boy what a fabulous question I wish you'd asked me that an hour ago so I could have had some time to think about it between good at boosting ambition so
you're you're pulling on some lever right what is it you do oh okay how do I do it people are for various reasons for multiple reasons they're afraid to think really big there are multiple reasons one it seems overreaching two it seems like it would be an awful lot of work right and so as an outside person I'm like an instructor in some Fitness class and so I can tell someone who's already working as hard as they can all right
push harder right it doesn't cost me any effort and surprisingly often as in the fitness class they are capable of pushing harder and so a lot of My secret is just being the person who doesn't have to actually do the work that I'm suggesting they do how much of what you do is reshuffling their networks so there's people with potential they're in semi aage netw question we should talk about that some more though cuz that really is an
interesting question imagine how amazing it would be if all the ambitious people could be more ambitious that really is an interesting question and there's got to be more to it than just the fact that I don't have to do the work I think a lot of it's reshuffling networks so you need someone who can identify who should be in a better Network you boost the total size of all networking that goes on and you make sure those people with
potential by reshuffling networks you mean introducing people to one another of course you pull them away from their old peers who are not good enough for them and you bring them into new circles which will raise their sights maybe maybe that is true when you read autobiographies there's often an effect when people go to some Elite University after growing up in the middle of the countryside somewhere they're suddenly
become more excited because there's a critical mass of like-minded people around but I don't think that's the main thing like think about the power of London in the 17th century so the Industrial Revolution happens further north but the ideas the science in near London maybe Cambridge and Oxford and those are the networks people are brought near London only in this sense that everything in England is near everything else by American Standards
it's not really that London was the center of ideas there were a lot of smart people there but things were more spread out be careful with English History there back to this idea though of how to get people to be more ambitious it's not just introducing him to other ambitious people there is a sort of skill to blowing up ideas blowing up not in the sense of destroying like making them bigger right there is a skill to it there is a skill
to it to take an idea and say okay so here's an idea so how could this be bigger there is somewhat of a skill to it so it's helping people see their ideas are bigger than they thought yes oh yes we often do this in YC interviews and people say you're especially good at that this is what the other people say that's why I'm muling over what actually goes on because there is this skill there the weird thing about YC
interviews is in a sense they're a negotiation right and in a negotiation you're always saying oh I'm not going to pay a lot for that it's terrible it's worthless right and yet in see interviews the founders often walk out thinking wow our idea is a lot better than we thought just because what we do you know what we do in YC interviews we basically start YC the first 10 minutes of YC is the interview so you see what
it's like to work with people by working with them for 10 minutes and that's enough it turns out so you think the 11th minute of an interview has very low value I've thought a lot about where the cut off is like where is the point if you made a graph what's your probability of changing changing your mind right after minute number n yeah and after minute number one or two the probability of changing your mind is pretty high I
would say YC interviews could actually be S minutes instead of 10 minutes but 10 minutes is already almost insultingly short and so we kept it at 10 we could have made it 7 I think there's often a threshold of two and then another
Threshold at about seven yeah and after that it's very tough for it to flip right yeah although that doesn't mean you're always right in just be after 3 hours going to flip yeah you're not going to CH I didn't say 7 minutes is
enough to tell notice I said seven minutes is the point where you're probably not going to change your mind if it's going somewhat badly and the person is flipping positive at minute six what is it that's happening both in the interview and in you if it changes from 2 to 7 clearly from zero to one or two they get over nerves or they adjust the sound volume there's plenty of those stories it's probably we misunderstood
what they're working on initially so great idea bad at presenting it no more like they're near some idea that we're familiar with and we just assume they must be doing that idea and they say oh no we're not doing that we're
doing this I'm like oh okay thank goodness and then they get extra points because not only they're not doing the stupid thing but they understand that the stupid thing is stupid so now it's F it's they get extra credit for what we
were subtracting for in the past Who falls through the cracks in the YC process as you've experienced it y see one of the reasons I'm so contemptuous of University admissions is that I am also in the admissions business and I am obsessed I not only measure we not only measure when we fail but we're obsessed with the failure cases YC has a list of all the companies that that we've missed that we've that have applied to YC and
we've turned down and they've gone on to be successful and we spend a lot of time like like someone thinking about past injuries what's a common element though now that you to the when there are common elements my god do we act quickly to fix that and so I remember early on there was this company doing email they would if you wanted to send mass emails I forget what their name was and this was back when we were reading the
applications if the first reader gave it a sufficiently low grade it would never be seen by anybody else so the first reader who was Robert mors who's extremely he was like designated wet blanket of what C gave this application a c and with the comment spam company that was nobody ever saw it again and they like ended up going public and so after that I changed that thing in the software made it so that no one would
ever see something no no second reader would see it after that every application had to be seen by at least two people how did you get over your fear of flying oh really did you did you did I already talk about this you know there are either two or three places in your writing where you mention that you had a fear of flying but you used the past tense which implies you got over it but you never told anyone how oh it's a
bizarre strategy I learned how to hang glide which sounds crazy that will do it though right if you're afraid of flying how could you learn how to hang glide but the answer is you learn how to hang glide gradually you start by just running along the flat and if there's a headwind maybe you feel a little lift right and then you go 10 ft up the hill and run as fast as you can and you reach a total altitude above ground level of a
foot right you're not afraid when you're a foot above the ground so you go out a little further up the hill until a month later you're like jumping off a cliff with a h glider on your back and so after I was good at hangliding I took flying lessons so there's this intermediate point where I was comfortable totally comfortable jumping off a cliff with a hand glider on my back moderately comfortable flying a sass 172 where the
instructor had just turned off the engine and said okay land it cuz the glide ratio is actually similar to a hand glider and still afraid of getting on an airliner that shows you how irrational these things are but when I finally did get on an airliner my God it was like a spaceship compared to the planes I'd been flying it was fabulous and it totally worked my fear of flying was completely cured and what did you
learn about startups and talent selection from that process boy if I learned anything I haven't considered it until this moment but you might have learned it quite well just not articulated it I don't know you asked me these hard questions I don't have time to think about them did that have anything to do with I don't think I've ever consciously used anything I learned there do you see Founders who go through a comforable process with something
other than flying oh I get where you're at and here's how what you need to do next a lot of technical type Founders hate the idea of doing sales and going and talking to people and so you can tell them look just go do this and you know after a few few months they'll be used to it they may never like it I mean I would hate doing that myself now but they can at least do it were the medich good Venture capitalists or do you give
greater credit to the Florentine guilds I have no idea I have no idea I need to learn more about the the guilds would run competitions the medich would just pick the people they liked they both have good records in different ways but obviously they're competing models you're an economist you've read books about this stuff I don't know I don't know what do I know about the medich I think the medich were overrated and the
guilds were more important but it's a debatable view You could argue way they could well be overrated they were the ones who had all the publicity so I have no idea your time spent at rzd and in Florence how did it alter or affect your thoughts on software design and talent selection man if you asked how it affected my ideas about painting I well we'll get to that right Florence was all about Talent selection because how many
people in quite a small area became both great and famous yeah one I remember there was one moment I was sitting in Florence and I realized I had gone to the wrong place I was studying Florentine history all the buildings are right around you I found myself thinking damn Florence was New York City in 1450 with 60,000 people yeah that's why it was good at Art it wasn't some weird Florentine thing about art or some
special Florentine sense of Aesthetics they were just just the most Progressive City I it's really too bad that the far-left has hijacked that word it's such a good word maybe we can get it back but it was but I remember thinking
I've gone to the wrong place I went to the place where the puck used to be hundreds of years ago but you can learn a lot from studying where the puck used to be oh not really are the Academia was a pretty crappy art school
but being in Florence itself oh I can learn a lot from looking at the works yes but I don't have to go and live there but what is it you learned that was relevant for y combinator because you're doing something comparable to what the florentines did picking a pretty small area making it the absolute Center for talent selection a magnet that Drew people in and having a lot of winners so you copied what you were
living I had already learned that from Harvard maybe you had to learn it twice no I was already very well aware this phenomenon so to the extent YC uses anything like that we were definitely thinking YC was started like within the convex Hull of Harvard like the plac is Harvard spread out through Cambridge but like YC's original office was within it and so we've consciously tried to make YC the Harvard of startups no question
about that we had the model right there Harvard's very screwed up as you know you look at their admissions how much is like Dean's favorite and Legacies and affirmative action it's not it's not why combinator right they're trying to build a coalition and you're just caring about picking winners the thing is though all universities have a sort of admissions process that's corrupt in that way except possibly Caltech Caltech might
actually do undergrad admissions properly and so since they're all messed up Harvard does still have this draw compared to the others does I make programming even more like painting God what a question how do you make these
questions does AI make programming more like painting I have no reason to believe that it might be true it might be true you're piecing things together more arguably in this new world post GPT world what I was saying when I said
programming was like painting is they're both building something right and you're not building something anymore more with AI than when you were writing code by hand so I would guess not I would guess not how far is Mid Journey from quote unquote real art I don't is it more decrepit modernism is it a fantastic Revolution or as art put aside the startup angle how do you view it I don't I all see all these AI generated images
and I don't know which ones are from mid journey and which ones aren't so I can't say for sure about mid Journey but I've have definitely seen some AI generated stuff that looks amazing that looks truly as art not just that it looks impressive so it's amazing as graphic design but do you think it's art in the same way that rembrand is Art this whole thing about like what's art and what isn't I think it's all a matter of
degree like a my crap Carnation coffee mug is Art it's just not very good art so there's not like some threshold where Above This threshold it's art everything people make is Art just to varying degrees of goodness but I can tell you some of the things I've seen that were AI generated I'd be impressed if a person made them so that probably is over your thresold if you're good at Talent selection who is an underrated painter and why ah
wow boy there is a topic I think about a lot so there's a bunch of different reasons people can be underrated almost all good artists are underrated I agree it sounds weird but if you look at where the money is spent at auction it's almost all fashionable contemporary crap because if you think about how prices in very high-end art are set their their auction prices how many people does it take to generate an auction price two
just two right and so you have boneheaded Russians who want to have a Picasso on their wall so people will think they're legit or hedge fund managers wives who've been told to buy impressive art to hang in their Loft so when people come over they'll say oh look they've got Damian Hurst the way art prices at the very high end are set is almost entirely by deeply bogus people which is great actually when I was an artist I used to be annoyed by
this now that I buy a lot of art at auction I'm delighted because it means there's all this money you Andy Warhol screen print selling for 90 Mill ion dollar right yes and Old Masters can be I wouldn't say cheap but I would say radically underpriced a couple hundred thousand or even R for some good ones yeah and so I know cuz I buy them but I used to be annoyed by this and now I think it's the most delightful thing in
the world CU there's all this loose money slashing around and so-called Contemporary Art is like the sponge that just absorbs all of it there's none left some of the things I buy I I'm the only bidder I get it for the reserve price no one else in the world wants it or even knows that it's being sold so I am delighted about this so the answer to your question which artists are undervalued essentially all good artists
the intersection between the very very very famous artists like artists famous enough for Saudis to have heard of them like Leonardo I would say is probably not undervalued except for the artists who are like household names every Elementary School student knows their names they're all undervalued if you think that something has gone wrong in the history of Art and you tried to explain that in as few Dimensions as
possible what's your account of what went wrong oh oh I can explain this very briefly brand and craft became divorced it used to be that the best artists were the best Crafts People and once art started to be re reproduced in newspapers and magazines and things like that you could create a brand that wasn't based on quality so you think it's mass media causing the divorce between brand and craft it certainly helps and then talents responding
accordingly fundamentally what went wrong you invent some shtick and then in technically it's called a signature style so you paint with this special stick if someone can get some sort of ball rolling some speculative ball rolling which specialize in then someone buys the painting with your stick and hangs it on the wall in their Loft and Tribeca and people come in and say oh my goodness that's a so and so right which
they recognize CU they've seen the shtick but say if we have modernism raging in the 1920s in the 20s Mass media's radio for the most part no newspapers were huge modernism was not for showing paintings there's no color in the papers it was you have the 1920s were good enough to make painting like Saison fashionable so it was just about getting going in the 1920s why can't we build good British Country Homes
anymore or do you think we can there's nothing stopping you but it doesn't happen I mean except they planning people and you can't do you know anything about building houses in England you just cannot build it's impossibly difficult it's one of the worst countries it's the reason it looks so nice here yes if they had America's zoning rules here the entire Countryside would be plastered with houses you wouldn't have any Fields left at all
because the difference in value between Agricultural and building land it's like God 100x or something like that and and this place is small yeah but there are new buildings say in Cambridge many other parts of Britain and the new buildings are not Country Homes yet everyone on average is wealthier and why the change wealthier than where oh than the old weier than Britain in the old days so even before the railway you have
large numbers of country most Country Homes being built when living standards were pathetically low a country house has got to have a certain amount of land around it you can't just have them plastered down a street it would look wrong you want a different style of architecture for something like that there is a place where they build big houses you know what it is it's like when the Macintosh appeared and you could have whatever font you wanted
right most people have bad taste in the old days you had to have a classical looking house because that was the only way to build houses and in the Victorian period actually was when things went wrong you could have in Italian Villa or wait no it could be a greek temple or something that looked like it was from the tutor period take your pick mix them together greek temple with tutor bits and it was all over from that point on
really in which way if it's not like they build good houses in America either no and neighborhoods are worse yeah there are nice individual homes but is there any truly beautiful neighborhood built after 1950 where would it be in any country no in Palo Alto there's a neighborhood of there are neighborhoods of houses buil built by this guy called Iker this developer who hired some of the best mid-century Architects and arguably
those neighborhoods are good although they messed up the trees when were those built 50s and 60s okay but that's 70 years ago now you haven't done anything in 70 years I'm sure's your model of that someone is building some good houses somewhere the point is you don't really need to and so it only happens by accident right developers mostly are thinking we need to just turn this land into houses as soon as possible the
Boyer buyers don't have any taste we don't need to sweat that so we'll just build random houses that look big and have large master bedrooms people will buy them we'll get our Capital back and go on and do the next one they don't need to be good how's it don't need to be good they didn't need to be beautiful in the old days either it was just technology was so constrained you didn't have any choice you get to go back in
time your health is guaranteed and you know whichever languages you might need and you spend 6 months some somewhere safe your safety is guaranteed where do you choose I often think about this question you seem like someone who often thinks about this question yeah sadly the way I think about it is I keep trying to escape from the obvious answer and I don't manage to because the obvious answer is that Athens which is that's
where everyone would pick it's not what I would pick but what's your choice number two then I'll tell you mine I think but there are things where I am obsessed with the mystery of what the hell was going on in Dark Age Europe I'm deliberately using the term Dark Age because they're trying to outlaw it but it's correct I think if the term Dark Ages hadn't been invented already that would be a fabulous
invention to describe that period yeah sure new things were getting invented some people were doing good things just like always happens but it was as bad as things have been and there's so few records nobody knows how things happened like I would be really interested to know when barbarians infilled the Roman Empire but there were still big Roman landholders and they had to give a large percentage of their Estates to these new
barbarians who were in a sense running things and yet they were in the cockpit but they didn't know what the buttons did so you want to go to North Umbria northern France or where do you want to be dark ages you've picked the ARA now give us the spot like provance provance provance in 600 what was going on what was going on in provance in 600 I would be very interested Ed to see that but almost like morbid curiosity I wouldn't learn
as much as I would from going to Athens but I just really want to know what was going on I'm a big fan of morbid curiosity by the way it's the best kind of curiosity in many cases I can tell I would pick the azc Empire before the Spanish arrive so I feel I have vague glimpses of what ancient Athens was like there are still Greek ruins but the Europeans marveled at the cities they saw and they burnt all the books and I think I would learn more by
somewhere more strange maybe the reason I'm interested in medieval Europe is it's because where our world came from right the clocks we use the writing system all the clothes eventually evolved from that so the reason I'm interested I I long ago realized that the medieval period wasn't a dip it wasn't like there was this high level of civilization and then it dropped down for a while and then it Rose back up
again it was more like there was one civilization that was high and went down and another civilization based in the north that rose up and so in a sense it was the beginning of everything right that's why I want to know what the hell was going on in six or 700 did Rome have to fall or can you imagine a path where Rome has an industrial revolution and we save ourselves 700 or however many centuries of time like you need the fragmentation to
get the competition maybe for Britain to become significant maybe maybe I don't know ah 200 years is a long time or even 1700 years right China was decent until 200 so 1500 years but 1500 years things could have changed a lot but did they in China Chinese Empire never collapses it takes many forms many dynasties but it ends up stalling so maybe the collapse of the Roman Empire was one of the best things that could have happened for
Europe at least people I'm sure people didn't think so at the time I'm sure people were thinking at the time it didn't have to be this bad I don't know neither us knows about this kind of thing looking forward how optimistic are
you about the future of the UK no real wage growth since 2008 no real productivity growth for as many years what's up and what's the path out of that I am optimistic because they still have a gear that they haven't shifted
into I suppose I'll really have gone native when I say we instead of they cuz you grew up in Pittsburgh right you're Pittsburgh yeah but I'm British by birth does that count are you you really British or like your parents were diplomats here or oh no yes I'm you're really British yes yes just ask hmrc as far as they're concerned I never left hmrc is the British IRS Okay the reason I'm optimistic about Britain I was just
thinking about this morning is because people here are not slack they're not lazy and they're not stupid and that's the most important thing So eventually non- lazy non- stupid people will prevail and I funded a couple startups here you can see like when you introduce these people to the idea of trying to make something grow really fast and have these really big Ambitions it's like teaching them a foreign language but they do learn it
they do learn it it's not like English people are somehow genetically inferior to Americans so I think they have all that potential still to go I'm astonished when I see statistics like I think GDP per capita in the UK is only 2/3 of what it is in America Tibet the same as Mississippi it's Preposterous I know so imagine the potential there imagine the potential but you don't feel that way about Mississippi necessarily
no I think Mississippi is probably already up close to its full potential I don't know I've never actually been there I shouldn't say things like that but why and how did so many things here end up under capitalized so the water utilities the NHS it seems to be a consistent pattern that could make us more pessimistic because the flow numbers don't reflect the fact that Capital maintenance is even worse than we had thought I don't
know you're an economist I don't know what the term Capital maintenance a British person I'm under capitalized I don't know what these things mean they've been NHS is run by the government so things run by governments are often bad although the NHS seems to be pretty good even though people attack it it's a lot more civilized than the American system but how long it takes an ambulance to arrive if you well that
only recently got bad that's what under borro fces get bad they fix things this place is not run by the kind of yahoos that America is it may be a small country but people running things you know they're not just like boneheaded political appointees like when things are wrong they notice they're wrong and they fix them this is a very old country that's another reason it's not going to tank they've been through some bad stuff
before there have been a ups and downs are you an optimist about the city of San Francisco not the area the city tell us why I can't tell you because there are all sorts of things happening behind the scenes to fix the problem in politics you mean or in in Tech startups no no no politics Politics the problems with San Francisco are entirely due to a small number of terrible politicians it's all because Ed Lee died the mayor
Ed Lee was a reasonable person and up till the point where Ed Lee died San Francisco seemed like a Utopia but it was like when Gates left Microsoft and things rapidly reverted to the mean although in San Francisco's case way below the mean and so it didn't take that much to ruin San Francisco it's really if you could if you just replaced about five supervisors San Francisco would be instantly a fabulously better
City but isn't it the voters you need to replace are those people got elected reelected the reason San Francisco fundamentally is so broken is that the supervisor have so much power and supervisor elections you can win by a
couple hundred votes so all you need to do is have this hard core of crazy left-wing supporters who will absolutely support you no matter what and ab and turn out to vote and everybody else is oh local election doesn't matter I'm not
going to bother it's a uniquely weird situation that wasn't really visible it was always there but it wasn't visible until Ed Lee died and so now we've reverted to what that situation produces which is a disaster now we're in 2023 say two or three years from now what do you think the regulation of AI will look like oh God knows oh you keep asking me questions I have no idea about you have plenty of idea you know as much as
anyone I suspect no that's not true that is not true I really have no idea what AI regulation will look like or even should look like which is an easier question here's an easier question yet so this's it broadly a Tech Community in the Bay Area like if you said I had to make up the regulations for AI this afternoon it would be really hard I agree so that's how far away I am from being able to answer that question on
the spot I couldn't even figure it out in a day like when it should be modular or when there should be a regulation on AI is a thing that itself is intractable I'll tell you one meta though there was a guy on Twitter I think his name was Rob Miles who said that trying to make safe AI will be like trying to make a secure operating system and that is absolutely true and therefore frightening because the way way you make
a secure operating system is not by sitting down and thinking at a table with a piece of paper about the principles for making a secure operating system more like you try and make such principles and then someone hacks your
operating system and then you think oh okay sorry and you patch it and then they Hack That making a secure operating system is like making a fraud-proof taxx code it's basically a series of patches that were based on Hacks successful
hacks right is it melon they say the us tax code is basically a series of responses to things melon did some parts of it yes yeah so secure operating systems are like that and so I'm worried about AI because whatever the regulations are they'll be wrong I'll tell you that they'll be overregulation in some ways and miss and have huge holes in others there's a Bay Area Tech Community at least in the not too distant past they agreed about many
things but very recently it seems on AI there's quite a Divergence of views people who are very worried oh it's going to kill us all in the world people who say oh there's problems but this is going to be great in as few Dimensions as possible what accounts for that difference in perspective from people with broadly similar backgrounds and who used to agree on many things is it temperament is it genes is it like a
snake bit it's probably which aspect of the problem they choose to focus on right you could focus on either one and so if you focus on how it could be good there's all sorts of exciting things to disc and you discover lots of genuine ways it could be good and if you focus on how it could be bad it's true there too so it could be either I manage to keep both thoughts in my head simultaneously I simultaneously think
there will be all kinds of good things and all kinds of bad things and that both will be they will be unimaginably good and unimaginably bad so it sounds like that produces oscillation doesn't it yes that's worrying that in itself is
worrying right why hasn't l been more successful or do you think it has closure is a dialc of lisp and closure is very successful so it's been successful in that respect and there's another way it's been successful some
languages that are not considered dialects of lisp like JavaScript if you showed JavaScript to people in 1970 they would say this is a lisp except for the syntax this is a lisp so closure is literally successful through closure it's de facto through successful through JavaScript but why doesn't everybody use why doesn't everybody use closure or some other dictive list because the notation is frightening there's an initial hump with the
notation and if you give people an initial hump like if you put you must know about this there must be names for this in economics if you put some sort of obstacle right like a container in front of people's front door they'll go off to the left and then they won't go right back in front of the container and resume their original path no they'll take this other path that goes like miles out of their way just because of
that one block in front of their front door and so the intax the reverse polish notation puts people off so is AI generated programming going to vindicate you on lisp over time or cousins of lisp no because the AI doesn't care about the notation right it does it does because it's trained based on the amount of code that's out there but you could train it on something more like lisp if you can't you have to train it on actual examples
people have written but you have ai write some code and kind of perpetual motion machine train other AIS on that code and converge to something better better better no there was some research paper recently where they trained an AI on the output of AIS and it converges on crap maybe there will be some solution because this is a very rapidly evolving field but I think you have to have a large Corpus initially of examples
written in the language other than hackers and hacking what other human activities are what you have called high cost inter ruption that is if you're interrupted you lose your train of thought have to start all over again well math I think must be like that I think anything painting yes or no not as much in my experience not as much you don't have to think ahead as much in painting it's annoying to be interrupted no matter what but it
doesn't absolutely destroy you like it does in the middle of writing a program or something you don't build a big mental model of something in your head when you're painting that's what it is it's when you've got this giant house of cards in your head that's when you get destroyed by an interruption do you think kids today spend too much or too little time learning high cost Interruption activities do they spend too much or too
little time working like are we under investing in high-cost Interruption activities well if you think about what it's like in schools kids are constantly been being interrupted and they always have been so whatever the answer is it's not going to be kids these days it will be a statement about school for centuries kids have such short attention spans one thing they can't do is things that are big and long I think if you
said okay you have 5 hours to sit in a quiet room and build something I don't think they'd be up to it anyway our last segment is what I call the Paul Graham production function which is how you got to be Paul Graham
would you major in philosophy again at what Cornell if you were doing it all over no I would not major in philos and why not didn't it allow you to think at a very general level well it's hard to say it's hard to say right it's good to
be able to take ideas and flip them around like a Rubik's Cube and take them apart notice the two parts are the same shape or something like that but I don't think I actually learned that in philosophy classes I think you would have I would have learned that in classes about anything hard I mistakenly thought that you could just go and learn the most abstract truths right it sounds great to a high school student why do I
have to learn all the specific crap I'll just learn the most General truths and it needless to say that's one of those things sounds too good to be true and it is because if you go and look in philosophy classes I remember when Clinton Bill Clinton was saying you know it depends what the meaning of is is and I'm like hey that's what I majored in what the meaning of is is literally which kinds of ideas come more
naturally to you while you're walking which kinds yes so maybe not painting ideas but some kind of ideas because you're written about how using walking to learn ideas is a good thing but which kinds of ideas there cross-sectional variation right yeah well ideas about whatever you're thinking about until a few years ago I was working very intensely on programming and so I had the problem I was working on loaded into
my head and whenever I was walk doing something without any interruptions I would start to think about that so I think it's good for whatever you happen to be thinking about like mathematicians apparently walk a lot I find it best for learning from what the other person knows not so good for my own ideas you're with someone else with someone else and I'm talking with them and I learn from them better I don't find that I'm very generative when I'm
walking walking makes all kinds of thinking better I've seen images like MRI images or something like that of brain activity I don't know how they do MRI images but some kind of images a brain activity and like your brain is definitely more active when you're walking so YC office hours classic YC office hours were to walk down the block and talk as you walk which also has the side benefit that you're side by side
and not looking the other person in the face which I think may be better L threatening right it's like confession in the church yeah you don't see the priest or you're on a therapist's couch probably you're not looking right at them or but in vice versa or you're driving your kid back to boarding school your team and they'll say things they would not otherwise have told you or a talk at all yes what are the best environments for
learning while walking Urban British Countryside or oh my God like how do you optimize this dose okay I actually have you I think Britain is wonderful for learning while walking because it's never too hot so you heat up while you're walking it doesn't pour with rain on you like it did today I was drenched today it ends in 4 minutes right you can bring umbrella you you run to the Gazebo but there is a gazebo there wasn't no
gazebo where I was this morning I think it's good to always walk in the same place you don't want to see things that distract you right if you're trying to have ideas you're not going to get ideas from things you see probably not not relevant ones and so you want to walk in the same place and it should be something where there's no distractions so I would think the countryside where I go walk is on this a common this
preserved medieval common to American it would look like a large Park and it's the perfect thing I just always take the same route there's not much on it so I see grass and trees that's about it what's the most important thing you've learned about soundproofing boy there's a good question I've learned a few things about soundproofing can I only say one thing one thing is fine you said what's the most you can say you can say
more than one okay one is that sound comes through holes and so it doesn't come through your walls it comes through your windows probably most places and so if you fix the holes you fix the noise problem the other thing I've learned is that the solution to sound the basically the solution if it's not it's either multiple layers in the case of Windows or simply Mass you make some big thick door and make it have hinges that make
it sink down that's what recording studios have so when the door opens it rises up a little bit and when it closes it goes right down onto the floor so great big heavy doors multiple pained windows and weirdly enough I've noticed
I've managed to soundproof some places so effectively that I've noticed this phenomenon you only notice with soundproofing all kinds of things make annoying noises you never noticed that's right the war of attrition of sorts yeah
exactly exactly sound proving is worth it though quiet is really good at least for me there's an optimal level of Fame do you feel you have too much or too little what is the optimal level of Fame I suppose it's when you can get resources you need or something like that or if there's someone you need to talk to they'll talk to you so I can now talk to most people I need to talk to if I want to talk to somebody I can find
somebody who will introduce me so that must be enough but are you past the optimum I don't know I don't know that's the thing this sounds very arrogant but but I realized this with YC combinator I realized that why combinator had become famous long after it had become famous because as far as I was concerned I was just doing what we'd always been doing we would every six months we would get all these applications we'd have to find
the needle in the Hast stack right get all these startups help them grow find investors for them and then it would start again it didn't seem like YC was any different it was the same building the same people we would get more startups right meanwhile YC was like starting to be considered as this giant gatekeeper for Silicon Valley or something like that Jessica knew it was different right I don't think you're not
you're not aware famous people don't know how famous they are unless they're experts on it like movie stars or something like that they're always basically taken by surprise and so we were especially taken by surprise because the thing is the companies we funded would grow until they had thousands of employees but YC itself didn't grow like the value of the portfolio grew with these giant companies but we didn't see it we were
still just a few people doing the same thing we'd always been doing so how could we be famous but I discovered like that was one of the biggest mistakes I made with YC I didn't realize how many people were watching us I thought we were just we could just keep doing what we were doing and nothing really mattered and why was that a mistake per se maybe it was better being no because everybody when basically anybody outside Silicon
Valley who wants to blame Silicon Valley for something who do they blame they've never heard of the people who are actually powerful in Silicon Valley they only know a handful of people who have consumer Brands me among them so basically the world sucks because of tech and Tech sucks because of Paul Graham because theyve never heard of any of the other people I don't seem to get quite so much of that anymore I don't
know I'm glad about that but with YC definitely I didn't know how prominent YC was becoming and how many people would be out to get us as a result very last question in my view a life properly lived is learn learn learn all the time that's what Charlie muner say yes now what have you recently been learning about oh other than soundproofing Tinto and what are you learning vasari had a very low opinion of him vasari is
unreliable on most things right I don't know I don't know I don't he way overrated his patrons the medich yeah you have a thing about the medi clearly he said that Tinto was too independent-minded that Tinto was the sort of mad genius and that he would have been better if he had constrained his creativity and stayed within the limits of proper art you know what I mean very Florentine sort of idea I think Tinto would have looked down on
vasari as a minor league artist but that was interesting that was interesting to learn that's how at least some of tinto's contemporaries viewed him and vasari in particular and a why combinator co-founder is not going to buy that argument is he which was that he was too radical and too off on his own Oh I thought you meant Jessica wasn't going to agree about Tinto there's two of you that neither of you
would agree with visari I don't know I'm now going to look I'm now going to look I never thought about this but I was just looking at some tintos I was just in Venice looking at the squal of Grande D San Marco perhaps squo Grande or
something where all those tintos are and they were so dirty it was hard to tell what the paintings actually looked like but I'm going to go look I'm going to go look and see if they seem freakish Paul Graham thank you very much
thank you boy that was so many hard questions thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app if you like this podcast please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review you this helps other listeners find the show on Twitter I'm @ Tyler Cowan and the show is @ Cowan convos until next time please keep listening and [Music] learning