"Tyler, welcome. Dwarkesh, great to be chatting with you.  Why won't we have explosive economic  growth, 20% plus, because of AI?  It's very hard to get explosive  economic growth for any reason,   AI ..."

"you could agree with that, right? I don't know what the word "could" means. So I   would say this: You look at market data, say real  interest rates, stock prices, right now everything   looks so norm..."

"You're one of our best people, right?  You're frustrated by all kinds of things.  I think I'm gonna be making a  lot more podcasts after AGI.  Okay, good. I'll listen.  I'll be bottlenecked by time.  ..."

"but it's not actually that important. It's the  bundle, and the bundles are scarce. And then the   bundles interacting with the rest of the world. Like just try going to a mid-tier state university   ..."

"feel it as so revolutionary for a long time. The whole vibe of this progress studies thing is,   look, we've got all these low-hanging fruits  or medium-hanging fruits that if we fix our   institution..."

"basically totally wrong. The people who study that  issue, I trust the experts. If you put together   the two views where in each area you trust the  experts, then you get my view, which is amazing   ..."

"have to go from the farmers to industrial  revolution 10x. You can just look at actually   cases in history where we have had 10x rates,  sorry, 10% increase rates of economic growth.   You go to Chin..."

"shocked if somebody's AI model, in less than  three years, beat human experts on a regular   basis. Let's put it that way. Did that update you in any way,   that now you've resigned on these questions..."

"Yesterday, Patrick was talking about  how important it is for the founders   of different institutions to hang around and be  the ones in charge. I've heard you talk about,   you know, the Beatles wer..."

"for courage. Those would be two reasons. How does that explain the Beatles' success?  Well, the Beatles are an interesting example. I  mean, they broke up in 1970, right? The Rolling   Stones are stil..."

"observation of the competency crisis? I see it differently from Patrick,   and he and I have discussed this. I think there's  basically increasing variance in the distribution.  Young people at the to..."

"pretty proven by numbers that that's the case. I  would say this increasing variance is a weird mix   of where the gains and declines are showing up. I've said this to Patrick, and I'm going to say   ..."

"there's a very modest decline, I would say. If the top is getting better, what do you make of   the anecdotal data he was talking about yesterday  where the Stanford kids come up to him and say,   "Al..."

"high standards the Beatles had. How old are you, by the way? Okay, now go back however many years.  Was there a 24-year-old like you doing   the equivalent of podcasting? It's just  clearly better now..."

"Okay, so even if you don't buy the Stanford  kids, if you don't buy the young kids,   the other trend he was talking about, where  if you look at the leaders in government,   whatever you think of Tru..."

"Well, give me like a country and a name and  a time period, and I'll try to answer it.  He was from the university. That's what was wrong with him,   right? Just think of what school it was. Who? Wood..."

"but that would be like a partial start. You compared our current period to 17th-century   England, where you have a lot of new ideas and  things go topsy-turvy. What's your theory of why   things go t..."

"It seems like a simple question, but how  do you make sure we get the good things   and not the crazy civil war as well? You try at the margin to nudge toward   the better set of things. But it's poss..."

"What's your most underrated cult? Most underrated cult? Progress studies.  I think you called peak EA right before SBF fell. That's right. I was at an EA meeting, and I said,   "Hey everyone, this is ..."

"Well, I was surprised when SBF was insolvent.  I thought it was a high-risk venture that had   no regulatory defense and would end up being  worth zero, but I didn't think he was actually   playing fu..."

"still. And from this day onwards, I don't give  up that belief at all. But just as a movement,   I thought it was going to collapse. When do we hit peak progress studies?  You know, when Patrick and I..."

"That's not proven yet. You see some signs of that.  You wouldn't say it's really flipped, but a lot of   reforms. You're in an area like no one else has  any idea, much less a better idea or a good id..."

"developing networks in a way where if there  somehow had been no transformers and LLMs, I would   have stayed a bit more as the producer of content. When I was preparing to interview you,   I asked Cl..."

"As far as I can tell, no one else is doing  this. No one is writing or recording for   the AIs very much. But if you believe even a  modest version of this progress—and I'm modest   in what I believe ..."

"Do you actually have a conscious theory of what's  going on when you get on a call with somebody,   and three minutes later you're like, "You're  not getting the grant"? What happens?  Well, often the..."

"And what's going on with the 75%? We don't know. But I think you can   become much better at figuring out the  other 75%, partly just with practice.  Yesterday Patrick was talking about these  concent..."

"to be seen how much it helps us with that. I'm guessing ever since you wrote the progress   studies article, you got a lot of applications  for Emergent Ventures from people who want to   do some prog..."

"Why aren't you more leveraged if you think the  growth rate's going to go up even slightly?  Well, I also have this view: maybe a lot of  the equity premium is in the past. People,   especially in thi..."

"unknown that an economist could really earn  anything at all. There were no tech jobs with   billionaires. Finance was a low-paying  field. When I started choosing a career,   it was not a thing. Ther..."

"more information and be an information  trillionaire. Like Dana Joya has that   same goal. He and I have talked about  this. I think that's a very worthy goal.  Was there a second field that you were ..."

"And that's not going to change. No one's built  a real model to show why it should change,   other than sort of hyperventilating blog posts  about everything's going to change right away.  The model i..."

"One concern you could have about progress in  general is, if you look at the famous Adam   Smith example, you've got that pin maker,  and the specialization obviously has all   these efficiencies. But..."

"I don't have pessimistic expectations. I just  see it as a big change. I don't feel I have   a good prediction. And if you don't have a good  prediction, you should be a bit wary and just say,   "Okay..."

"fun work for me. I know I always learn something. Now I'm prepping for Stephen Kotkin, who's an   expert on Stalin and Soviet Russia. That's been  a blast. I've been doing that for four months,   read..."

"That's right. There's a lot of other  evidence that that's the correct portrait.  What's going on there? A smart guy who's read  all this literature, all these different things,   never even questions..."

"So, it's a tendency. There are other forces,  but culture really matters. Hayek is writing   about a very specific place and time. It really surprised me. There are these   family-based Gulf monarchie..."

"So there's some way in which all these things have  to balance. I think the US has done a marvelous   job at that, and we need to preserve that. What I see happening—the UK used to do a   great job at..."

"feel the French person is very foreign from me. And there's something about America they might   find strange or repellent. And I'm just so used  to it. I see intellectually how many areas we   fall f..."

"One frustration that tech people have is that  they have very little influence, it seems,   in Washington compared to how big that industry  is. Industries that are much smaller will have   much great..."

"You all here are so far from that, in part  because you're dynamic and you're clustered.  Final question. Based on yesterday's session,  it seems like Patrick's main misgiving with   progress is that ..."