#269 Dwarkesh Patel: Competitive friendships, institution degradation, internet studying vs college

Dwarkesh Patel [00:00:00] Okay, it's gonna be this place, this time, Tuesday, be there. And if you're that guy, you can just, like, the benefits from creating this social group and being, you know, being the focal point, not in some sort of like attention sense, but in some, the sense of being able to meet everybody that these people know and then getting them to come as well. I mean, the, the benefits of that are huge. I, I, I really recommend that people try doing that.

Vance Crowe [00:00:23] Hi, I'm Dan Crow, a small business owner living in central Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crowe podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today, we talk with an innovative writer, a guy that thinks about things in a very deep level, but just graduated with his degree in computer science. So we are talking to Dwarkesh Patel. He's a very interesting character that Ben Anderson found. And we span the, the concepts of networks and how do you make new friends, and what do you talk about with these people and how, why is it that corporations expand and decay, and how is this related to the rise and fall of countries? It's a fantastic conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. Ben and I are quite excited. For those of you that don't know, Ben is my executive producer, and we have been doing Legacy Interviews where we record people's life stories, starting with their childhood, then talking about their career, their marriage, the parenting that they hope they did, and the legacy that they wanna leave behind. We are moving into a studio, and if you are interested in booking us to record one of your interviews, either online or in St. Louis, go to Legacy Interviews dot com. So that's Legacy Interviews with an s.com. It's a brand new domain. We hope you'll go there, check it out, book a, an interview, and we'd love to have you. All right, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Marakesh Patel, welcome to the podcast.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:01:48] Thanks for having me advance.

Vance Crowe [00:01:50] So you run a group called The Lunar Society. First of all, that name is unique, and so let's just start there. What is the Lunar Society and why'd you start it?

Dwarkesh Patel [00:01:59] Yeah, so the Lunar Society, it was a club in the 18th century in London. It included people like James Watts, era, Darwin, people who were, as your group does, thinking about interesting ideas that ended up shaping society, scientists, philosophers, people like that. And so, you know, I, the pandemic hit and I was in college and I wanted to start a podcast because I was bored. And so I needed a name and it sounded like a good one. And so I named my podcast Lunar Society, that's also been the name of my blog. And then I've had the pleasure of having on people, economists, scientists, philosophers, builders, you know, people like Tyler Cowen, David Deutsch, Brian Kaplan. And then we just like to go deep into the ideas that these people have, delve deep into the implications, the contradictions and so forth.

Vance Crowe [00:02:50] So you're younger than I thought when I had been reading your articles. It didn't dawn on me that you were just about to finish college. That right now it's kind of in vogue to put down the college degree and say, ah, that's not worth it. You should quit. You should, you know, go, go start a company. Why did you go to college and finish that all the way up?

Dwarkesh Patel [00:03:09] So, I mean, I didn't know that I was gonna be doing this by the time I entered college. I, I'm actually about to go to my graduation in about two or three days. I, I, I, I graduated about six months ago, but it feels like I've been skipping class for a few months. But yeah, so the, the question being why did I go to college and should somebody go to college? I went to college. I think a computer science degree, honestly, is probably a good use of your time. If we go to college, there might be better and more efficient ways to get an education in computer science by teaching yourself. I mean, as you know, CS is a field that's especially easy to teach yourself. The dis discipline and the concentration and the peer group that the college provides is, is hard to artificially give yourself, ask for other degrees. I'm not in a position to say whether or not they should have gotten that degree, as in, I, I don't know if it was a good idea for people who are doing something less technical to get a degree. I, I'm always a little bit confused when I hear about the course curriculum of my people who are in the softer sciences or the softer humanities. It's, it's not clear to me what exactly they're learning, but hopefully they know

Vance Crowe [00:04:14] What

Dwarkesh Patel [00:04:14] Is

Vance Crowe [00:04:14] A modern day computer science degree consist of. How did you spend your time?

Dwarkesh Patel [00:04:19] Yeah, actually, I, I have a blog post coming out next week about this. And my, my, my claim is that a computer science degree is the ultimate generalist education. So, you know, there's a lot of careers out there where you need somebody who's just like a general problem solver, can think about the context of an idea or a problem, and can figure out what different ways to approach it. You know, people, things like in management, consulting, executives, so forth. And my claim is that such fields might benefit from hiring computer science people, even for non-technical roles. So for, let, let's just take a look at some of the skills you learn as a programmer in college, right? One of them is debugging, which is when you see that your program isn't doing something, you want it to, you figure out why that is. This is basically what you have to do when you're trying to solve a problem when, right, life, right? And that's, that's what debugging teaches you. You need to get concentrated. You need to know that you can solve the problem, and you need to just exhaust all the ways in which you could be wrong. Another part of the computer science curriculum is something called comp, a complexity theory, where you think about problems and how they scale as the amount of inputs go up. This, as you can imagine, might be important for a company like Google or Facebook, if they have, you know, millions of transactions per second, they had to think about are are our algorithms optimized to be able to handle this scale of input? And this is applicable to so many other disciplines, as I'm sure many of your audience know, things like climate change, right? So how we approach climate change, that kind of depends on what is the relationship between CO2 concentration and a global temperature rise. So is it a linear, linear relationship? Is it exponential?

Dwarkesh Patel [00:05:50] Is it logarithmic? If there's diminishing harm to the marginal CO2 molecule, then you know, the, then the case might be weaker for addressing climate change. If there's increasing harm, then the case might be stronger. There. There's so many other problems like that that the complexity theory helps you address. So there there's a few other ways in which I think CS education is actually quite generalist, if you think about it. But yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:06:14] I mean, and at its core in computer science, you have to have both mathematics to be able to just, You know, be able to lay out, even if it's something as simple as how does this website look? But then if you're doing complex math, like, you know, Hey, let's make sure, let's test out, do these genomes, if we were to model out breeding these together, what, what kind of outcomes do we have? They have to have huge amount of mathematics. But undergirding that mathematics is philosophy. How do you think about problems? How do you construct the problem? All the way down to the, the most basic premise, I loved studying philosophy in school. And what I learned there is that most of philosophy comes down to how do you define your terms? Mm.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:06:52] And

Vance Crowe [00:06:52] Once you define terms, then you can build an entire language and a belief system and all of these things on top of it. And at its core, computer science requires you to go all the way down to the basics to say, I'm gonna input words. These words have an impact on how this computer takes action. And so I have to be very clear on what these words are defined as.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:07:12] That that's such a good point. So that, that is especially true in programming. So you can think of it different layers of the stack, right? So on one layer is a practical side of the words you're programming into the computer, and whether they have the relationship with other words that you think they do and to other concepts. And like, there's an entire abstraction to a code base that you had to hold in your head. There's another more theoretical sense in which that you need to have that skill, which is, if you think about what a complexity theorist or a computational theorist does. So there's basically like two sides to computer science. One is the sort of practical side, which is the one we've been talking about with like debugging and programming languages and stuff. And another is a more mathematical side, which you also brought up. And here are your, it's, it is literally very philosophical. I mean, you're, you're really there. There's these like purely theoretical contrived objects like NP or BQP or touring machines, the these, and you have these things don't exist in reality. The hope is by defining what these things are and how they're related to other such platonic objects, we might be able to, you know, use that knowledge to help define algorithms that we'd use in reality. And you know, I have this joke that like a philosopher would love going to this website called Complexity Zoo, because this website, complexity Zoo, it's filled with these complexity classes. And complexity classes, by the way, are just d different models for types of computing. And most of these like, don't, can't physically exist. But you know, like how philosophers have like, oh dare does idea of the truth versus coin's idea of the truth and how are they related?

Dwarkesh Patel [00:08:45] What are the overlaps? It's so similar to that.

Vance Crowe [00:08:49] When, when I think about the idea of computer science and how are you constructing these sentences and then thinking about it in philosophy, I think most people don't even have a sense that you have to have an idea model in your mind for how the world works in order to be, I mean, like, so of course you can sit down on a computer and say, I'm gonna draw a box with this, and then I'm gonna put text in there. But when you're talking about actually building something that goes out into the world, it creates an app, it does something. Those equations that you were talking about, the one that's really popular in agriculture is yield is G by E. So you have Y equals G the genetics by the environment. And so then you think, oh, well that's a really simple equation, right? But now you've gotta say, well, what does that g the genetics, how complex is that? At what level of granularity are you going to zoom down into it and e the environment, you know, what does that mean? That's not just like, what is the soil type that you put it in and what's the weather? It's what's the, the microbiome of that soil and how much does that impact things? And how complicated that, that, that equation can get is, becomes really apparent. But most people don't even realize that in order to do truly new creations in computer science, for example, you have to create these equations to find them and then build them out and, and it, it's just something most people don't deal with in their daily lives.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:10:15] Yeah. Oh, so that, that's very interesting. So let me ask you, I'm, I'm very curious about how, how in farming maybe you're like trying to optimize for, you know, total yield or like total tonnage of the crop from HEC hectare or something. I'm, I'm sure that involves, as you were talking about, just like optimizing so many d and so many different functions of everything from your soil quality to fertilizer to how the thing, different things relate. So I, I'm curious, I, I'm guessing this probably has, this probably requires a similar skill to trying to get a program if you're, if you're working in a place like Google, right? If, if a programmer can save you like a millisecond on Google search by messing around with like what part of the disc the algorithm is stored on and all kinds of other things, that's probably worth like millions of dollars. And I'm sure a similar thing is true for farming. Am am I correct?

Vance Crowe [00:11:01] Well, you are, but the bigger challenge is saying, because there are so many variables moving, you can't hold things constant. Mm.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:11:09] You

Vance Crowe [00:11:09] Don't always actually know. Did the input of, you know, a couple, like 10 more pounds of nitrogen on your fields, is that what made the difference? Or was it the fact that you planted three days earlier, so you got three more heat units or maybe six more heat units. And so I actually have a friend that has done a ton of programming. He worked for a company called The Climate Corporation, which was owned by Monsano. And he basically said, I wanna start figuring out if the fungicide that a company is selling to a farmer is actually gonna pay off. Well, the only way you can do that is to actually run statistically valid tests on your farm. So you have to hook into the planter, okay, we're gonna put this planter out on the field and we're gonna run AB testing, and then on some of the things, we're gonna come back and put the sprayer with this fungicide on it. And some of them we aren't,

Dwarkesh Patel [00:11:57] But

Vance Crowe [00:11:57] We don't wanna do it over like vast fields. You know, you can't do like one field one way and another field another way because maybe the soil composition of those two fields is different and maybe the way it drained is different. So it's really complicated. And

Dwarkesh Patel [00:12:09] Right

Vance Crowe [00:12:09] Now the farmers only have the companies that are selling them these things to trust or, you know, an extension agent, which may be a person that comes along and says, yeah, I think that's a good deal. So there's all this work going into coders trying to figure out how can we help farmers do this? But the big players, like the Googles of the world are almost like a foolish entry into this market. 'cause they think, ah, we can just be a bunch of programmers and, you know, write some code and figure this out. But it is so complicated that the only way you're gonna figure anything out is if you are highly specialized in ag.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:12:43] Oh, yeah. That's interesting. And so are, are these big tech companies involved in involved in farming in any way?

Vance Crowe [00:12:48] Well, they, they are. So, you know, if you wanna run, you know, you wanna try and figure out which way we're gonna do genetic testing, and we're, we're trying to see with these genomes that have millions of base pairs, you're using their clouds, you know, they're using AWS you're using their software, but like the ones that are actually making a difference are full-time focused on it. Like my friend that runs that company, it's called Farm test.ai. That is all he does every single day. And these people that are doing these dalliances in it, I mean, I, when I was working at Monsanto for a while, you would see these companies like Microsoft be like, oh, we'd like to jump in here and help you out. And they don't realize like, you're getting in way, way, way over your head.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:13:27] Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. I mean, it's, it is such an old discipline. I I imagine that there a lot of the low hanging fruit has been plucked.

Vance Crowe [00:13:35] Yeah, absolutely. And you know, there's something you wrote about that actually made me like, I think really pairs well with this part of the conversation, which is you were saying, look, we have this idea that if somebody goes to work at Google or Facebook, that is like, that is the big brand, but in, in reality, most of the people that go to work for these giant corporations are working on some subdomain that is a subdomain, that is a subdomain like way in the bowels. They're not changing the world. And yet our perception is that they're at the top of the world.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:14:05] Yeah. So this, this idea came to me. I was, I was reading about how, how Formula One works, and I'm sure many in your audience know more about Formula One than I do. I actually haven't watched Formula One myself, but apparently the reason, so if you think about like the r and d cost of developing a Formula one car for a company like Honda, that, that, that's really high, right? You're developing a car that's not gonna go out to consumers. It needs to be like so fine tuned. I mean, if it's 1% worse, it's not gonna, it's not gonna be anywhere close to the finals. It's not gonna be anywhere close to the first car to finish. So the cost is really high. And you think, well, this is not a card they're gonna be able to sell anyways. Why are they spending so much money on this? The answer is, the hope is if they win or something you'll associate in your mind that Honda, your, the Civic you might buy with this hyper tuned car that has nothing to do with, you know, with, with the car you're using to drive your kids around. And I, I was thinking, you know, th this might be a good model for thinking about how companies like Google a, Amazon, Facebook, how they invest tons of money in these sort of hair brain schemes. If you think of like Google's deep Mind or a, you know, Amazon Pro project to launch of a competitor, starlink, I mean, many of these things like might be sensible investments on their own, but in many cases it's unclear what benefit the company itself is getting out of them. They're investing billions of dollars. And you can almost model this as how Honda will invest a bunch of money, like developing a Formula One car so that when somebody buys a Civic, they'll associate with this, with Honda, if you go and work for Google, you know, you're family and you can think like, oh, this is, this is the people that are building DeepMind. They just came out with that new library that, you know, that, that, that's it.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:15:36] Sound sounds like a human, but in fact you're, you know, you're like working on the third sub menu from the third sub menu from the third sub menu and like the Android settings.

Vance Crowe [00:15:44] And I think there's so many things that are, that are like this where you think, oh, the giant company, I, I was actually, I was in a coffee shop this morning and I saw a young woman wearing a shirt that said Harvard on it, you know, and you think about like, if you go to your dresser in the morning and you decide I'm gonna wear my Harvard shirt that is saying something, right? It is putting a message out there that is, is Noticable and what, how people feel about it. Like the polarity, oh, I like Harvard, or I don't like Harvard. You still have this association deeply with who that person is, how either that they themselves are intelligent enough to go to Harvard or they're connected with somebody that does. And it, that seemed like those two had a parallel right, with the, with what you were saying, because there's like a, a weird thing about wanting your car to your, for your Formula one car to be the same brand, but you can see somebody doing it or taking pride in driving a civic in a way that they maybe don't deserve, but their Formula one car one.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:16:39] That's a, that's such a great point. And it's actually a much, much, I, I didn't think about this way, but this, that's a much better example because you can ask the question of why somebody wants to go to Harvard. It's not the education is any better. It's probably worse because I mean, the reason you wanna go is like, oh, this is like, they'll tell you in their brochures, right? This is like a world class university. We have world class researchers, they're doing world class work. Do you, do you get advance, it's world class work? And, and then, then you think about, okay, so are these world class researchers? They're, they're just spending time talking to like freshmen about their ideas that they have time. No, no, no, no. It's like 200, 300 person classroom. So you're not getting a better education. You're getting to associate with people who are world class, but associated in a sort of like, in impersonal way. I mean MIT and Harvard's curriculum, much of it is to their credit, it's, it's available on YouTube and on their websites. So really if you think about what is the value we're getting, it's just the association in some sort of like vague distant way with these, with these, with, with these world class faculty.

Vance Crowe [00:17:36] Yeah. And there's a weird thing going on with association that you've pointed out. I mean, when I went to your website, I'm not even sure how I found it, but I, I was looking around and I'm like, oh, look at all of these people that have tweeted about him. It was Jeff Bezos. You've had Tyler Cohen on your website or on your podcast. And you think like, that actually is what people are claiming the value of a really high-end education is. And the internet for, for all the things that it did about making those MOOCs, those massive online courses, like you're talking about, or being able to watch a Stanford lecture on psychology on YouTube, right? Like you can get access to those things, but the internet really democratized or equalized the access to people that can touch you in some way. And that, that like either you get like association or, you know, I heard you talking on your podcast, you get this sense of fulfillment that one of those people from on top of the mountain came down and saw you. And I think it was probably much of what people used to get from going to Harvard that close to the association with people from the top of the mountain

Dwarkesh Patel [00:18:39] That, that's so interesting because I think, you know, I was just recently thinking about it, like how how many other 21 year olds there are. Like, there might be like literally a handful or maybe less 21 year olds who have just like the complete series of lucky coincidences and the, the attraction that my podcast got me, it gives me the chance to talk to pe like the, the most interesting people in the world, the people who I'm, who I could learn the most from. I get a chance to talk to them, right? I I, even if I was like going to Harvard, I wouldn't get a chance to talk to some of these people. Like if you, you think they're giving office hours to like random or, you know, random students. So the, yeah, so the, if you do something like, you know, start a podcast, there's so much low hanging fruit and fields like this where you get to talk to some of the most interesting people in the world, you can learn at a faster rate, even if you're not talking on the podcast. I'm trying to, I'm trying to interview these people who are working in fusion and to prepare, I can just, you know, talk to the people I've met through the internet, like, Hey, do you know anybody who's like doing research in Fusion and get connected to these people? And now I can talk to like a fusion researcher, right? Like what, how, how else would've that, that have been possible?

Vance Crowe [00:19:39] Well, I think my, my executive producer of the podcast is actually the most brilliant of all because he doesn't actually have to do the podcast. All he has to do is find a researcher whose paper he was reading. He dropped outta school, he was at Wash U getting a biomedical engineering degree. And he was like, ah, I've already built an app that's making more money. I don't, I don't wanna do that. And we ended up hooking up and he became the best executive producer that you could ever have because he is like, I just read this guy's paper on how you could regenerate limbs. I'm going to load you up with some questions that I want you to ask him. Let me know when you're done and I'll listen, you know, after the fact. And like, it's a brilliant strategy. I think that not only then does he have the, he gets to ask these people the questions he wants to, but then he's already been talking with them, can share notes on their papers, can have all of these relationships where he has almost a student-teacher relationship with these people without having done the schoolwork. And yet they find value out of it because they get to come on the podcast, he share their ideas and they've got somebody actually paying attention to what they're doing and, and doing it on a deep level.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:20:42] Yeah. Yeah. But by the way, the limb person is, was that Matt Levine Levin?

Vance Crowe [00:20:46] Michael Levin. Oh,

Dwarkesh Patel [00:20:47] Michael, sorry. Yeah. Michael, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:20:48] Michael Levin. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Dwarkesh Patel [00:20:49] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:20:50] You know him.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:20:52] I am aware of him. It's been recommended that I should have him on. So yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:20:55] This up, you could, like, I I would say he is one of the premier best podcast guests because his depth of knowledge is so good and he can disagree with you to the point where you're like, yeah, that's the way I thought about it. No, I completely, 180 degree changed my mind. And he's just, he's exceptional and, and the way that he is exceptional is that he defines all of his terms. And there are a lot of, like we were talking earlier about the philosophy part of this conversation, there's a lot that we make assumptions about in, in our everyday life because we have a term and we think we know what that means. Like what does it mean to be alive? You know, what does it mean to, you know, any, any, any concept you can have. And he just breaks them down in a way that my brain doesn't naturally do. I just kind of accept those definitions.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:21:39] Yeah. Cool. I'll have to have 'em on. Yeah. With regards to the idea that you can just talk to people who you find interesting, it also, it also encourages you to learn more because if you're gonna have these people on, well, you know, you could have them on in the first place, right? So that means like, you should be consuming all the content you possibly can consume. And because so many of these people you wanna talk to are themselves so interdisciplinary, you have to educate yourself. I, I guess I'm talking, I have to educate myself on all the things, all the, all their adjacent scenarios. So it like speeds up your rate of learning so much. And, and in many cases, these people, when they get interviewed, you know, it's stunning when you like, just look up some of these like celebrity public intellectuals. You look at the other interviews, there's so few that are good, right? Like most of them are just start off like half the half the interview is just like them summarizing their book, but not, not even the whole book. It's like summarizing the intro chapter to their book and the, the, so there's very few podcasts where you can just listen to somebody go deep into their ideas like, you know, you have, right? So I, I think even they can be delighted sometimes if somebody will prepare. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:22:46] Yeah, and I think even like the preparation being deeply important because it shows a level of like, Hey, what are we gonna talk about? But I also think there's like, there's a level of paying attention when you're talking to somebody that just doesn't happen normally. And, and I find this whether not even on the podcast, right? Like most of the time people are so inside of their head when they're talking with somebody else that they ask somebody a question and then they're like, okay, I only have a few moments before, I'm gonna have to ask them a question again. So instead of listening to what they're saying, they're thinking about whatever their next question is. And one of the things that the podcast gave me was I got to the point where being present in the conversation and not worrying, is there going to be a question that pops into my mind when this person's done talking, like, that's going to get figured out. That really helped me in everyday conversation. And I think it's, it's just sheer volume. The sheer amount of time that you're talking to somebody is what gives you the ability to trust that when you're done saying whatever it is that you're saying, I can pay attention to it fully, and there's gonna be a question ready to be loaded in my brain right after that.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:23:54] Yeah. Paul Graham has this interesting essay. I, i, I can't remember what the title of it was, but he's talking about like, what makes somebody a good founder or what he is noticed about good founders. And one of the things he points out is, good founders have this ability to think about what you're saying and think about the implications. He, he, he, he draws an analogy. It's like, if, if you're talking to somebody who's going like, likely to be a bad founder, it's like, you know, following, following tennis ball to them and they're just like unable to return it. They, they can't think about the implications of what you've said or, you know, put what you've said in the appropriate context. So I, I'm curious, I I sometimes notice, at least I did initially when I just started the podcast like two years ago, that sometimes I would actually have the opposite tendency when I'm talking to people outside the podcast where I'm asking them kind of podcast questions, the, the kind of catches you would ask to somebody who's almost a stranger that you're trying to get, get deep on their ideas with, but maybe not the kind of questions you should be, like your, your conversation with your friends can sound almost too impersonal and like you're trying to do like a Socratic grilling of them. I, I don't know if you've had that experience. I think I'm getting better now, but, well, at

Vance Crowe [00:24:57] First I was thinking like, now that that doesn't happen to me, but I definitely was, I get together with the same group of guys every Thursday night. It's like almost sacro Sant, right? And I had one of my friends Give me a really hard time about like, Hey, you're asking him questions like he's on the podcast and you're doing it so that way you don't have to think, right? Like, 'cause this is your automatic. And I was like, all right, fair enough. The, I would say for me, I am not, I do, part of my time is spent on these podcasts where they're public, but a, a big section of what I do are these things called Legacy Interviews. So I sit down with people and record their life story, and that's a whole different level of connection with somebody because you and I are talking and I want to keep the subjects in a place where not only you'll find it interesting to answer, but other people will want to know what those answers are. When you're doing these Legacy Interviews, I am only trying to figure out what is the information that this person would want to capture and their family would want captured

Dwarkesh Patel [00:25:56] If

Vance Crowe [00:25:56] They were able to think about it objectively. But that because of where they're sitting, they can only think of it subjectively, which means you have to be prepared. You know, if you brought up something that I could tell kind of wi made you wince or like hurt a little bit, we'd probably just go around it. But in the Legacy Interviews, right, if somebody says something along the lines of, well, and that's when we lost our second born child, and that was really difficult. Like, you know, you feel that, ooh, this is awkward and in normal conversation you go away from that. But this one, if they brought it up, it's because there's something that needs to be captured. And so I find myself leaning in far harder into those conversations, and I'm not sure yet how much of an impact that's had on me having regular conversations with people because I find myself pushing way deeper into people's personal lives because I'm doing it so much in my professional life.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:26:47] Yeah. I I actually didn't know you provided that service, but that's, that, that, that is super valuable. I mean, you, I'll probably have to think about it at some point in the next decade or something to, you know, to kind of exhaust the stories my relatives I to say. But yeah, yeah, there, there's, there is a, a quality to some people where they can just sit with the uncomfortableness of a given topic and instead of immediately changing it, you know, delve deeper and see if there's something to it.

Vance Crowe [00:27:15] So you're in the, you know, the CS field, which is filled largely with people that, you know, in my community we call Asies, right? Where they are hyper, hyper-focused on, you know, one or two things. They, they can drown out all of the other noise, but the cost of it is really a very difficult time knowing what's socially acceptable, having trouble reading the emotions of the other person, or even really recognizing, hey, or is the way I'm behaving impacting other people? One, like, how did you do in this field when it appears to me after just a short conversation that you don't have those same disabilities? Oh,

Dwarkesh Patel [00:27:54] You only think that 'cause it's not a long conversation, it's it, it's, it, I think it's overstated. It, it could be the case that the most successful people are as b and then there's that Peter Thiel, the theory about how the most successful people are able to avoid the, the social, the the social factors that tell you to be conformist or, and or like discourage new ideas. And because they can ignore that or they have to ignore it because they're quote unquote disability, they're more likely to have a contrarian an idea. So it could be that the average computer science person is actually not that a b it just, the people on the tail who are very successful end up being Aspy. So you see people like vi Vitalik Butrin or Mark Zuckerberg, and they do appear to be kind of aspy, but I I, I don't think that the median person in my CS field was that asby to be honest.

Vance Crowe [00:28:48] Okay, that's fair. I mean, I would say that my community of people, the people that I, you know, spend the most time with are definitely on the upper edges of being highly successful, right? Like they are at the level that they can discover new things or build things that other people haven't built. But I, I would also say that one of the things that draws me, you know, basically everyone, not almost everyone I'm close with has some of these characteristics, but a lot of it, because I like being around highly disagreeable people, right? I like to find people that are willing to say things that other people don't agree with or contrarian. Do you find yourself, do you think on the agreeability scale, are you highly disagreeable?

Dwarkesh Patel [00:29:26] Yeah. Yeah. I, I do have that tendency. And then there's also another coming to think of it, there's another aspect of this, which is the obsessiveness. It's, it's not just that you're willingness allows you to be disagreeable and contrarian. It's also you get to be super obsessive about a certain thing. I mean, somebody who has a social impulse will need that feel the need to exercise that impulse and, you know, won't just like, spend weekends just coding away, right? But somebody who has Asperger's, like the, their ability to concentrate and focus on a problem, it's not just the ability, it's the need to do that, right? And I think that obsessiveness also has a lot to do with who, who ends up being successful and, you know, changes the world.

Vance Crowe [00:30:04] Yeah. And that's actually probably a more balanced way to reflect what's going on there, right? Like the, the, the pull, right? Like it's, it's so easy for everybody to look at the deficiency and say, ah, is it the deficiency that's driving you as opposed to, you know, this is the characteristic that why, why somebody becomes curious about something. I, I really like when you read Carl Young and you find out that he says like, Hey, if you're really, really bored by a book, that's your brain telling you like, quit this book. There's something that's that's that's better for you out there. You should go towards your urges, not necessarily given to all of your impulses, but that your impulses themselves will guide you towards the things that are primed for you.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:30:44] Yeah. Another interesting fo essay here is that he, he points out that one way to demarcate the fields that are likely to be doing real work versus fuel that are not, is just to ask, would this work be done by somebody, even if it was not an academic field, just for their own curiosity. So if you think about mathematics, there's plenty of people out there who do mathematics for fun, right? And it might not be everybody, but the people who do it are the ones that are for fun or the ones who most likely to make progress. Think of something like comparative English. You think people would be writing like Judith Butler, like undecipherable essays. If, if there wasn't a market for, if there wasn't like an actual academic institution that made you do that. You know, I I, I don't think people are gonna be, I don't think people would, would be, so that, that's an interesting way to think about what is likely to be real. And if it's real, then maybe people would want do it just for its own sake.

Vance Crowe [00:31:34] So what do you find interesting to explore or interesting to build on that you think, you know, somebody else would do this even if they, if it, you know, if I wasn't deriving my, my production from my podcast or blog

Dwarkesh Patel [00:31:47] Yeah, computer science obviously. So uni programming and stuff, I haven't gotten a chance to do as much of it recently as I would like to. The, the other fields that are actually very, actually interesting to learn about it, it tends to be fields where they give you conceptual tools to be able to think about other fields as well, to come up with metaphors. I mean, if you think about my blog posts, I'm, what I'm really doing is just like, apply concept X to domain Y, right? And then you can think about like, what are the implications when you apply concept X to domain Y? So something like viewing talent as options, that's, that's one of my blog posts, right? So you're, you're finance is actually a great field for these kinds of implications. 'cause you, you get to think about how do you value something, how do you think about how things values change over time? How do you think about volatility and things like that? For the same reason economics is super valuable in thinking about a broad range of topics and computer science, like actually anything from like linguistics to economics, you can, a knowledge of computer science really helps you think about a lot of different problems. So I, I guess maybe the answer is what are the fields that help you think about other fields?

Vance Crowe [00:32:51] Oh, I love that. I mean, and that's what allows you to bridge across networks. I, I often, I have a thing if, if you wanna look it up, it's called the corn galaxy. And it was made by some computer scientists, I know that work working at Monsanto that showed all the breeding relationships. So, you know, in corn, you, you artificially create male and female lines and it's artificial because corn has both male and female parts. And so you say, Hey, we're gonna treat these inbreds as females and these as males. But when you show all the connections between them, it actually, people either say it looks like a galaxy or it looks like the neurons or the synapses in a brain where you've got the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere

Dwarkesh Patel [00:33:30] And

Vance Crowe [00:33:30] You see the ones that are the brightest stars in that galaxy are the ones that are most connected with things, with other things, right? So bridging between two different nodes is what makes you brighter. And I, I think like being able to find the relationship between two different networks, two different disciplines or domains, that's the, and the more that you can connect, the brighter that you, your star becomes.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:33:56] There's Neil Ferguson has an interesting book called The Square of the Tower, and one of the points he makes in there is that the, some of the people who have been most successful in history or had the most impact have been people who have just been the central nodes in a very important network. If you think about somebody like Henry Kissinger, you know, he was super connected to people in academia, you know, he, he, he, he was like, I think a professor at Harvard and also like, had connections all over the world, all over the state apparatus. And so he's like, even I, he's like barely alive now, right? And he's still probably one of the most influential, one of the most influential, like people who are determining, determining foreign policy today. You think about somebody like Voltaire, I think he had like, he'd written like 40,000 letters or something like that to the other people in the enlightenment network. He was the central node of this letter chain that was determining what were the popular ideas at the time. And yeah, so it is not only that the ideas that are central nodes end up being very important. It's like, it's, I think it's just a general phenomenon where even the people who are central nodes have a lot of impact.

Vance Crowe [00:35:02] Yeah. And that's actually something when you're a young person, you don't fully understand how your life will change just as long as you keep the connections that you found when you're younger and maybe not all of them, but maybe you're curating so that you say, Hey, these network nodes were really valuable to me and they, and I'm gonna stay in touch with them somehow. And if you keep building them as you go along, whether it's on your career or you move around or whatever you wake up in, you're 40 and you have a superpower that's in your back pocket of the, all the contacts in your phone that you never set out to make, right? You just, it just appeared. And as long as you kept up with it, as long as you maintained it and curated it, the value of that network changes what you can do in your life that you couldn't do 20 years ago. Now the trade off is you're tired or you, you know, you've got all kinds of responsibilities, but that network that you build, like for me, my, my network is so much more valuable than I could have ever imagined it would be, but it, it just happened as a function of living.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:36:04] Yeah. And yeah, I, I'm lucky to because of the podcast that I can kind of have my own version of a, a growing network early on and it's, it's a lot of me. So there's an interesting question. I I really wonder about how many, how many like 18, 19 year olds are that are out there who are just incredibly smart, have just been reading everything they get to get their hands on since they were 12. I'm trying to meet more and more of these people. So if, if you are one such, actually do shoot me a line. But, and so I, I think the greatest advantage of having the podcast is not even meeting the meeting like the older people who are very smart and can teach me things. It's meeting like these 18, 90 year olds, 20 year olds who are, who can be like peers who can help me think about topics from, you know, as a colleague or friend.

Vance Crowe [00:36:51] Yeah. I, when COVID I hit, so I, my executive producer and I started a, a network called the Articulate Ventures Network, and that was just like, hey, listeners of the podcast were saying, I love your stuff. I would like to donate. And I was like, I don't really wanna take a donation and it feels like busking, right? Like, and I just didn't feel right to me. So instead what I did was say, Hey, why don't you just subscribe and meet other people that are on the podcast or other people that listen to the podcast. And the result of this ended up being a collection of people that, sure they're listening to my podcast, but they're also listening to other things and they're the type of people that would want to meet people that listen to the podcast. And so you have this collection of people that I would never go out and make friends with on my own just 'cause I could, I wouldn't have time to do it or I wouldn't have time to keep up with it. And yet they meet each other, they find ways to talk. And then as you start growing, we've grown on both ends of it, right? So we have a bunch of people that are my age and then we had some, like kids that were in college and some people that were retired or came out of retirement to drive a truck or now live with their wife and are just planting their tomatoes. That's what they do. And the, the watching the network send information across themselves is, is incredibly valuable. But also, yeah, it, it's something that I, I literally couldn't have done on my own. It was like building something and then watching it some sort of new thing emerge from it.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:38:16] Yeah. You know, I should, I should probably do something similar. I I I I've been thinking about adding like a community aspect to my podcast and a blog. Until recently I didn't have like an an actual like, audience big enough to sustain such a thing, but I, I might be getting there. So I I should really look into doing something that, because that sounds

Vance Crowe [00:38:32] Yeah,

Dwarkesh Patel [00:38:33] Sorry, go ahead.

Vance Crowe [00:38:34] Well, I was just gonna say, you know, when I first started it, a lot of it was like my, my work or my Ben's work to like make things move. And then later you started finding people putting their hand up and saying, Hey, I wanna run, we have a thing called like the speaking gym, right? So this is where you get to practice giving speeches and people give you feedback. Well, like now other people are running this. And so what, what you, what you derive out of it will be how strong can I make this community that doesn't require, like if I die, that community will keep going. And that's because the community is way bigger than just me, but someone needs to start it. And that was a thing that I didn't realize until I did it that somebody just needs to start these things.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:39:14] Yeah. There's, there's a concept in a programming called the Bus Factor. It's like how many people, I think it's how many people could, could get hit by a bus and the thing would still function or maybe it's the other way around. But that's a basic idea. And I think you will probably want a community where the bus factor is the bus factor is really high. Like, you know, like the kai who started the community, like you could, could, you know, if you left, then the thing would be self-sustaining, which is, which is related to the concept we were talking about earlier with networks. If you find like two, two disconnected networks, this is something like somebody who's like done graph theory or computer science will understand it's, you can reduce the edge distance between two nodes just by establishing a connection that would not otherwise exist between like two graphs that are somewhat disparately connected, you know, in a sort of very lengthy way. Were not for your intervention.

Vance Crowe [00:40:10] One of the best things I did, which I actually, my executive producer did this, I it's really valuable what you're describing is I got together a group of about 16 of my friends that I had known throughout my life, and each one of them maybe knew one other person, but they didn't know each other. Well, once you do that, you've just taken your graph and folded it over on top of each other itself.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:40:32] And

Vance Crowe [00:40:32] Now the amount of information that crosses those networks in the same way that the Articulate Ventures network, like now things can happen and like people are going to have network connections and it, but if you're the one that engineers them or, or like we call it like node running, if you're gonna be running between these these things, you get to derive a ton of value by being at the center of, of making it happen. But anybody could derive value by introducing their friends to each other.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:40:58] Yeah. There's, there's such, you mentioned that you have this thing where you go out Thursday with your friends. I, you know, I have a similar thing there. There's, there's such high returns to being the guy that organizes a group of people and makes them, 'cause people wanna meet people, right? It's just like you need somebody who's the shelling point who's just like the guy who's like, okay, it's gonna be this place this time, Tuesday be there. And if you're that guy you can just like, the benefits from creating this social group and being, you know, being the focal point, not in some sort of like attention sense, but in some the sense of being able to meet everybody that these people, people know and then getting them to come as well. I mean the, the benefits of that are huge. I I, I really recommend that people try doing that.

Vance Crowe [00:41:39] Yeah. And I am not a joiner, right? Like, it is so hard to get me to go to events or to club meetings or anything like that. So I was the least likely person to do this. But you know, once you start doing it right, like all of a sudden you start being like, Hey, I just got to see my friend Christina, meet my friend Mike. And like, hey, now, now all these things are happening. But the, to go back to your point about the meeting regularly, there's also something really, really valuable to, once you find a group of people making it so that's sacrosanct, right? Like the, the tree that gets watered every single week, you know, no matter what happens, that tree continues to grow and grows really big. And you can't go backwards and get that back if you don't find a group of people that you're starting to invest in now five years from now, you won't have a have a tree that's grown for five years.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:42:31] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And then the growth is not only in getting to know them better and see their progress, but also to get to know the people who you get to know through them. And it's really cool if that group of friends you're talking to is people who are making a lot of progress in their lives. So, you know, every week you can meet together and it's like somebody's just done something amazing the last week, right? And you can just like talk about that if it's like, if in that round robin fashion, it's just like happening to somebody every week, the such kinds of groups, you know, I always feel kind of a little embarrassed every time I come back from meeting my friends. 'cause all of them are just so amazing and they're, every week they're just doing something really cool. It's like, I gotta set my game up to make sure that, you know, I I I can be worthy of them.

Vance Crowe [00:43:13] Yeah. I think that's like a mark of great friends, right? Is that you're like, Hey, I like, I can't just have a day where I loaf around and watch, you know, three Batman movies, right? Because Rob's not going to be doing that. Rob's still working or Rob's, you know, putting something together.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:43:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's, it's, there's a similar theory of why these great groups through history, you think of like Ally Athens or you think of the Renaissance in Florence. Why, why were these great groups of prominent Ben? And you can think of these like as competitive, competitive, competitive friendships that these people had. So these people all knew each other, right? Like the great painters in Florence, they all knew each other and, but at the same time they were competing against each other. And this like, coordination of competition and friendship, I think, I think it really does boost people's productivity.

Vance Crowe [00:44:03] Well, one of the things we talked about last night is my buddy Rob said, one of the questions he likes to ask programmers is, you know, in their weekly meeting is, tell me something you saw that was beautiful, which I thought was like a very curious question, but I think a good one, right? It gets you to explore your ideas and step out of the, the focus area that you were, you know, kind of typically on. So I, I would pose that to you. What's something you've seen lately that's beautiful?

Dwarkesh Patel [00:44:29] I, I've started this habit of just, it's not like the most, it is not even, especially, it's not especially a scenic place to be, but there's this lake that's right next to the place I'm living. And every morning I'll just like take a cup of coffee and then just take a book with me and I'll just like hang out there for about an hour before I start writing. So the, the place during sunset and sunrise, it just, it's super beautiful and it's associated with me with having all these ideas and learning about these ideas and there there's almost compounding returns to being in this place because the ideas that you were learning about last time you were here are in your head as are the ones you're learning this time. So I would say that like, that's next to my house.

Vance Crowe [00:45:11] Yeah, that's quite good. I and when, when you were reading, what were you reading

Dwarkesh Patel [00:45:17] The recently, I've been reading this book called The Black Jacobins. It's about this, this guy. So the Haiti was I think the only successful slave revolution in the world at the guy who orchestrated it, the guy who led it, he had this, he, he was, he had a unique leadership strategy. He would ha he would, if he beat like a French general or a British general, he would ask them to join him, right? And these are, these are people who are orchestrating this brutal regime of slavery that was even worse than American slavery. And he would say like, listen, we beat you, but we want you on our side. This was similar to like a ity that Julius Caesar used when he was trying to, you know, conquer Rome during the Civil War. And his ability to like put aside entirely reasonable grievances and, you know, put together this island and orchestra the only successful slave revolution in history. It, it's, it's something really interesting to learn about. And the author interestingly is a Marxist. So I'm personally not a Marxist, but I think like slave revolts are the o one of like the few cases where actually a Marxist lens is probably illuminating, right? Because usually you can think of like, usually just people working for somebody else. It's, it's not exploitation, you know, you're like playing with words there. But if you have slavery that actually is like Marxist exploitation.

Vance Crowe [00:46:36] Oh, that's an actually really interesting concept. I, I didn't quite understand where you were going with that. But if you are being exploited and if the means of production are actually being held from you, not in a, in a capitalist society, but actually as slavery, it would change the way you looked at things. The, the challenge that you would have if you were, that the general that's bringing people onto his side that he's defeated is the biggest people that would complain against that would be the people that were in your high ranks on your team, your own team would then start undercutting you because they would feel threatened by these generals coming in. They would feel like, why are you, forgiveness is not something that revolutions are quite very, very good at. Right? Like, how do you keep up your anger if you're forgiving the people that you just fought against, that, that whoever did that must have had an ability to connect with people on a scale that would be, you know, very difficult, difficult to replicate.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:47:34] Yeah. And if you, if, if you think about like a place like South Africa, I mean, they recently had troubles, but one of the, one of the reasons for their initial success was just that the, the whites there, like their property wasn't exed or something. Right. And there, there, there's, it's tricky because you need to have a leader who has enough gravitas to be able to sell this compromise. And it's, it's very unlikely to get passed because if you are that per, if you are like a slave, it sounds entirely unreasonable and rightly so. It's, it's actually kind of, I, I'd actually be kind of curious about like, what are the leadership qualities that allow somebody to be the guide that can sell people on something that sounds so distasteful to them? There's probably long run a good idea.

Vance Crowe [00:48:23] Yeah. I mean, I guess you could probably look at this in the, and it would be definitely through a different lens, but mergers and acquisitions, right? So I was in a, I was in Monsanto when they first tried to go out and buy Syngenta, which ultimately was bought by Kim China. But at the time, so what was going on was Syngenta got the offer letter from Monsanto and said, N no, we reject this and we are gonna start posting online what your letters were, how much your offer was. So now if you go to somebody else and decide to give them a different offer, we've just, you know, blown that up for you. And they basically said, you know, we, we'll take the ship down before we'll let you take us over. And they ultimately were bought by, by China. But imagine if after they had done those things, they had done a hostile takeover, how would you treat, would you, would you ax that entire management team as soon as you came in? Like how would you handle it after you've gone to that level of toxicity in a war?

Dwarkesh Patel [00:49:24] Yeah, there's so many good management stories where, like Ben Horowitz has this book. He's, he's a venture capitalist. He has this book where he talks about how when he had a company, they had to acquire another company and this guy had to get brain surgery, but legally they weren't liable to cover his health insurance because they had just acquired him and, you know, but they, they went ahead and did it anyways. And the result of that on morale was so much higher than the cost of paying for that health insurance plan, taking care of people. You know, there's actually, there's actually this like, funny quote or a funny, funny teaching from Roman history. I'm, I don't remember the exact quote, but the basic idea is if you, if you're gonna battle somebody and you win, you either destroy them completely so they could never retaliate, or you make them so happy that they're better off than they would've been had you not conquered them. But if you leave that in the middle ground where they're capable of retribution, but they're also not like, happy with the outcome of what happened, that's a trouble spot

Vance Crowe [00:50:24] That makes total sense, right? You think about the cultures that allow the people they've conquered to keep their language or to annihilate the language, right? Those, there's, you either are doing one or the other, and if you do that middle ground, but you don't go all the way one way or the other, you leave yourself vulnerable to, you know, revolutions and uprisings. But, but truthfully, the, the one that seems easiest seems like vanquish them, right? The, the other one of like, trying to find that peaceful away seems like fraught with, with dangers.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:50:59] Yeah. Yeah. It's, I it's always, it's always hard to think about like how many of these lessons from ancient history actually applied apply to your corporate strategy. But there, there, one, one interesting thing is if you have, so if you think about like an acquisition from like a company like Apple, you are the people who are getting acquired, or maybe not Apple, but like if you're getting acquired by a company like eBay, like PayPal did right at the, into the two thousands, and PayPal at the time had people like Musk, Peter Thiel, max Lian, the people who were going to go work for eBay from PayPal. These were like the most talented people in the valley. And eBay by comparison was really complacent, really complacent, complacent company. So you have this phenomenon where the people who got acquired or defeated in some sense are much more capable than the people who are gonna be leading them. And that sets up an interesting dynamic.

Vance Crowe [00:51:54] Wait, I'm not sure I understand. Why, why would the people that have just acquired be less capable?

Dwarkesh Patel [00:52:00] Well, if you, so if there's a company like eBay, so the reason PayPal, PayPal was even able to exist is that eBay didn't imp they were, PayPal was the payments transaction for eBay. So

Vance Crowe [00:52:12] They were making money off every transaction that eBay was doing, or

Dwarkesh Patel [00:52:15] Yeah, many of them where eBay could have just like made their own internal payment transaction that would've destroyed PayPal's business overnight. The fact that eBay wasn't able to do that is just that because it was like a much bigger company at that point and wasn't as competent and versatile. It didn't have all this talent. And so the fact that they had to acquire them was the result of the fact that they weren't as talented otherwise they would've just been able to compete them away.

Vance Crowe [00:52:38] Yeah, I see that, I mean, that actually reminds me of when Peter Thiel was describing to Google, like, Hey, you know, you can't invent anything. You've gotten so big that you guys are relying on being a technology company, but in fact, you are afraid to hand out the dividends that you guys are, you know, you're just stacking piles of cash, but you don't have anything to invent. So what, like, and the Santa Fe Institute often talks about, you know, a company starts and then grows really, really fast and then levels off like a plateau. And the only way that you stop from just dying the same way the mammal does, you know, where you're born, grow really fast, level off in adulthood and die, is that you become a vampire and you acquire other companies and you suck out their innovation. And this is exactly what happened to Monsanto when they first started realizing like, Hey, we can no longer innovate very well on the inside. Then what they started doing was acquiring companies. So I talked about the Climate Corporation, they went out and for a billion dollars bought a company that was gonna help them figure out how to sell insurance to farmers. And they, that gave them new life for two to three years. And then that life was, all those people were all converted into the Monsanto Eyes system, and then they went looking around for more, and the only thing they could do would be to try and acquire another company. And when it didn't work, then they got acquired. And it, it's, it's, it's playing out

Dwarkesh Patel [00:53:55] Exactly

Vance Crowe [00:53:56] Like, like an ecology in some way.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:53:58] Yeah. Sam, Sam Abuja has this interesting theory. He calls it the Great Founder theory. And the idea is that you have the, the basic cycle he envisions of history is you have these great founders who build a country or who build a company, and when they set it up, there's a living conscious person who has thought about these structures, these institutions, these incentives. And so it works really well and the institutions degrade over time as there's not like a live person who's like, Hey guys, why everyone would we change this? This is clearly different from what the person had envisioned, or there's not this coordinating person who can be the focal point, who is, who can just like, who, who who can make coordinated changes across the entire structure of this behemoth. You think of like a company like Google, they, they're probably still trying to max the metrics that Larry and Sergey left for them, right? Which is increased ad revenue, but they're not able to make that next leap judgment of like, Hey, if we're gonna just like be putting this SEO junk on our front page, eventually we're leaving a lot of alpha for a competitor. So the, these companies degrade over time until another great founder comes in, like, you know, Steve Jobs coming back to Apple and putting in that coordination again. Or they just like keep going downhill until they collapse. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:55:14] And you see the, the scar tissue that happens at a large corporation because somebody does something right, they over expend on their expense account. And so then you've gotta charge in and say, how do we make sure this never happens again? Well, let's make a rule and now we have to have somebody that monitors that rule, and now we have to have reports. And so then you start stacking bureaucracy on in order to be able to get rid of these problems. And that becomes so much scar tissue that the, that the organization can no longer move.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:55:41] Yeah. Yeah. I it'd be interesting to see how some of the most dynamic companies today, like Tesla or SpaceX, what do they look like in a hundred years when Elon Musk is long dead? Like, do they end up looking like what IBM looks like today? I mean, I hope not. I I wonder if you can put in a way to make sure that they have longevity, but I mean, history tells us that they'll probably go that way.

Vance Crowe [00:55:57] Yeah, I mean, I think the best examples are the Japanese companies that have been around for a hundred or 150 years. And there you have a little bit of a problem because there's a deeper relationship between the company and the government that we don't have in the United States.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:56:09] But

Vance Crowe [00:56:10] Still, these are, you know, some of these companies that they have the recognizable brands are, are ones that have been around for more than a hundred years, which there's, I mean, know most American companies once they get listed on the stock exchange, the New York Stock Exchange or, or they have about 12 years and that's it, and then, and then they're they're dead.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:56:29] Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, there's, there's so, so cyclical elements to so many institutions. You think about how, how many empires there have been in history and how, how it's, it's almost inevitable evil. They'll grow, they dec they'll decay and we don't understand why exactly they decay or how they were able to grow so fast initially. But, you know, maybe the comparison between like an empire and a company seems farfetched. But think about it this way. So Great Britain, at its peak, I think it was 1870 controlled quarter of the world's land equivalent per a percentage of the world's GDPA quarter of the world's GDPA quarter of the world's people at that time its GDP was $190 billion in like 1990 adjusted terms. And today, apple's, I think last year, apple's annual annual revenue or annual earnings, it was 360 billion. So Apple is twice as big as the British Empire was at its peak.

Vance Crowe [00:57:26] That is astounding that, that, that is, I mean, like, you know, there's some amount of inflation and the way the economy has changed, but I don't know that it's all that different. You know, the thing that strikes me of being really similar is the Dutch East India company

Dwarkesh Patel [00:57:42] In

Vance Crowe [00:57:42] The 16 hundreds ran that country, right? It was basically that company and the church, which was a Protestant breakaway. And the, the way that those two things worked together was astounding. And I don't think people in modern day understand that they, they would, you know, they would force the sailors that were going from the Netherlands all the way down to India or down to Papua New Guinea to like try and get these silks or these spices or their, whatever. They would force them to be religious. And if you broke any of the religious tenants, they could literally murder you. They, they could kill you. And, and you think about like, well, how is it that they got to that level? Well, they controlled all of the trade, 80% of the trade or something along those lines. So if you didn't want to go along with their regime, you couldn't have access to goods. And you start looking around at our, at our system and you think, like, I don't think Amazon's at the level that they could exact, you know, religious temperance on everyone. But it does seem to me that that power is not something you should be taken lightly, that you should recognize that when you control all the shipping, you have a tremendous power over a people.

Dwarkesh Patel [00:58:54] Yeah. There's, there's an arresting figure where if you look at how many colonial officers there were in British India, for every Indian citizen, there were a total of, I think 1000 colonial officers at the, at, during like the early 20th century in India. So that means the ratio was one colonial officer per 3 million Indians. And you think about how is such a society stable? Like how can you have that kind of ratio? And it really raises interesting questions about how, you know, British and India was able to cooperate with the local natives to be able to have this level of control, how you can have a big empire that is so effective at so many local levels, how you have coordination through all these infrastructure. But yeah, yeah, it,

Vance Crowe [00:59:38] It seems bigger than just great founder theory, right? Because they weren't just doing that in India, they were doing that in Kenya. You know, I lived in Kenya for a while, and one of the things you discover, at least the telling of the story now is the British really amped up tribal differences

Dwarkesh Patel [00:59:53] And

Vance Crowe [00:59:54] They would purposefully give power to groups that were less powerful, like in the minority to cause conflict so that the people were fighting against each other rather than the British. And they call them the karu there. And whether or not those are true stories, it is interesting that I don't think it was, you know, one officer to 3 million, but I'm sure the numbers were just similarly skewed in Kenya. But, but same British culture there.

Dwarkesh Patel [01:00:21] I think there's a story about how in order to, in advance of World War I, in order to make sure that the Ottomans were in a worse place, I think, I think the Kaiser had, this didn't work out, but the scheme was basically that the, they would send out agents to the Ottoman Empire and, and then just like try to rile up these like, ethnic divisions between different sects of Muslims.

Vance Crowe [01:00:44] Oh, it totally happened. That's Lawrence of Arabia. That's, that's the story of him running around on camels being like, you know what? We brought you some dynamite and you can go blow up this train that's allowing the Ottomans to do this. Oh, we can go try and get the Turks, you know, to fight us and try and have a revolution. I mean, Saudi Arabia came about as a function of the British saying, you don't have to be under a Turkish rule. 'cause they wanted the Turks to be completely enmeshed in, in war, in, in an internal conflict, so they couldn't be facing outward.

Dwarkesh Patel [01:01:13] Yeah, yeah. It, it that, that's very interesting. I wonder what is the corporate, corporate equivalent of that? Like, how do you, how do you get your enemies to get into a war with themselves?

Vance Crowe [01:01:24] Tell you Ill you the way it, the way it happened in agriculture Yeah,

Dwarkesh Patel [01:01:27] Yeah. Is,

Vance Crowe [01:01:28] You know, all of the other ag companies let Monsanto be presented to the world as the only company that had GMOs, right? There were six major ag companies, but most people could only name one, right? Monsanto. And, and it's because whether it was just the seed companies or you think of a company like John Deere, so this would be the urban myth. Part of, part of what, you know, I, I should probably put a big disclaimer. When GMOs first came in, and now you can start using chemicals to get rid of weeds, you have Roundup, right? You now can make it. So instead of having to drive a spike into the soil and then drag it, you know, using this giant diesel engine to be able to rip open the soil and tear the roots apart, now you just go over with this little sprayer and you just, you know, spray over top of them and they all die. So who now is losing the most money when, when glyphosate comes out? Well, the tractor companies are right. They aren't selling as big attractors. So the, the rumor is that one of the ways that they created pressure on the seed and chemical companies was that they were the ones that then funded or at least blew oxygen on the anti GMO movement because the anti GMO movement costs them the most money.

Dwarkesh Patel [01:02:41] Oh, that's not interesting.

Vance Crowe [01:02:43] Whether or not that's true, I don't know, but that is definitely the urban myth around where did these people that are running the anti GMO movement, how did they get millions and millions and millions of dollars to run these campaigns to make documentaries, right? Was it really people that were so passionate against GMOs, maybe, but also maybe they were getting money from somewhere.

Dwarkesh Patel [01:03:04] Yeah. That, that is super fascinating. There's, there's a strong element to there, the competition being destruct. I mean, you go back to the PayPal example, right? You have pap. I, I think one of the brilliant things that, that PayPal founders like Peter Teel and Elon Musk were able to do was they recognized that their true competition was this behemoth called eBay. And it wasn't x.com and PayPal. So x.com was Musk's company, and PayPal was originally Peter Teal's company. They realized the, the bigger fish was their true competition, and by fusing together, they're able to avoid that sort of competitive debt spiral that would've otherwise killed them and avoid, prevented them from taking on that, taking on the behemoth.

Vance Crowe [01:03:48] Well, 'cause going to war is always expensive, right? Like e even in corporations, right? Like if you have actual enemies better to be ignored, which is what the other seed companies thought, right? Like, well, we're not gonna jump into this fight. Let's just let our, the top company Monsanto fight with all of this. But it's so expensive to fight that, even if you're the number one company, if you're spending a third of your resources on pushing back against these models, or, or now your share price goes down because people think, oh, we hate that company. They're evil. You know, you, you, you win by not playing the game. That old, that that famous, what is it? Enders game line.

Dwarkesh Patel [01:04:27] That's funny. Do

Vance Crowe [01:04:27] You know what that, you know what I'm talking about? The, the, the best way to win is to not play the game. It wasn't Enders game, it was that it's an eighties movie. I guarantee there are people yelling at their podcast right now. I just can't

Dwarkesh Patel [01:04:37] Think of it. No, no. I'm actually not aware.

Vance Crowe [01:04:40] Okay, so you were saying that, you were reading about the book about the Black Jacobian, but what is the best fiction nonfiction? No, I'm sorry. Fiction book you've read recently?

Dwarkesh Patel [01:04:50] Huh? Fiction. Oh, there's, lemme look at the title. The Lincoln Highway. The Lincoln Highway is this book by, you had to fix the audio on that by the way, me just crashing into the mic. But the Lincoln Highway is this very good novel by a More Towels. He wrote a Gentleman in Moscow that was, that was like a big hit a few years ago. And what I really like about the book is it is, it is just, it is wholesome in a way that's like hard to describe it. It's, it's easier to like, you know, you like Parks and Rec is like kind of wholesome, right? And the book has that quality too, but it's also not fluffy. I, it's like, I don't know, wholesome in a kind of a deep way. I, it is the best way to describe it, but I I, I really do recommend it and the characters are my age, which I also enjoy. So,

Vance Crowe [01:05:36] Well D Rakesh, I, I was really, when Ben suggested you, I was like, all right, I'll go. And then I started looking at your stuff and I started getting excited about it. But after this conversation, I feel like, man, I could keep going and going and going, but I've got a little girl that we have a date at the botanical gardens I gotta take her to. If people wanted to read more about your stuff, how would they find it?

Dwarkesh Patel [01:05:57] Yes, it's Dwarkesh Patel dot com houses my blog and my podcast. And the unfortunate thing, by the way, about having a name like Dke is you can't just tell people to go to Dwarkesh Patel dot com. So hopefully that'll be in the description or just like, look at my name. I'll put it

Vance Crowe [01:06:09] In the show notes for sure. Absolutely.

Dwarkesh Patel [01:06:11] But so you, the podcast is called the Luna Society. It's available on, you know, YouTube, all your Apple podcast, Spotify. And the blog is available at Dwarkesh Patel dot com. And my Twitter handle is dwc sp

Vance Crowe [01:06:27] Well, I'll put all of that in there. I, I have to say, I really have enjoyed your podcast, but your writings are just like these little doses of like, huh, that's a good thing to think about today. That's, I I would put it on par with something Eric Hoel is putting out, or Michael Levin. So I'm, I think you should feel very good about it and I hope you keep doing it.

Dwarkesh Patel [01:06:45] Yeah, yeah, they're, they're, they're, they're like role models of mine. So that's, that's, that's very nice of you to have.

Vance Crowe [01:06:51] Alright, man, well you will definitely be back on. So thanks for coming on today.

Dwarkesh Patel [01:06:55] Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me on, man.