Samo Burja - live players vs NPCs: hidden forces shaping history

Samo Burja is an entrepreneur and political researcher. He’s the founder of Bismarck Analysis and the editor of Palladium Magazine, a publication focused on governance and societal challenges. In this episode of World of DaaS, Samo and Auren discuss: Why great founders shape civilizationGlobal fertility decline and its implicationsThe magic of founders at age 23Why trust in institutions is collapsing Looking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for ou...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Auren Hoffman?

  Hello data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Safegraph and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news at worldofdaas.com. That's spelled world of D-A-A-S dot com. Hello data nerds. My guest today is Samo Boya. Samo is the founder and president of Bismarck Analysis, a research and consulting firm. He currently chairs the editorial board of Palladium Magazine, and he's an all-around super intellectual. Samo, welcome to World of DAS.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Wonderful to be here.

• 0:38Auren Hoffman?

  One of the things you're kind of known for is this idea of this great founder theory, where a small number of really extraordinary people, great founders, are responsible for driving civilization forward. Can you break down that theory a bit for us?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  It is very close to a whole family of theories of history that is sometimes called great man history. This approach, I think, has been unfairly disregarded by academics in the last 100 years.

• 1:04Auren Hoffman?

  Sometimes people say, well, this would have happened anyway. If Lenin wasn't around, it still would have happened. If Napoleon wasn't around, it still would have happened. If Hitler was around, like, they kind of go through all these different things.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  All of these reasons. Partially, the strongest reason that they sort of have against this approach is the argument that the individuals themselves are a product of their times, which in a strict sense is true, but it doesn't mean you can predict anything concrete about the individuals. The individuals are too stochastic, and there's nothing deterministic about it. You have many, many people who say, grow up in very similar circumstances, and you will only have a few individuals that stand out. There's no way to predict what those individuals are going to be like just from the society that they came from. And I think that's a stronger and harder to defeat argument than the counterfactual, because the counterfactual,

• 1:56Speaker 01

  it's just too ridiculous. If you look at the life of Napoleon, when he escapes the prison on the island of Elba, and the French government falls, and he's restored again to power, it is so implausible. That the government of France would have fallen. And it's so implausible, it would have had a war again with the British and so on. Of course, Napoleon lost that. That return was a hundred days in power. It was a temporary return, but it still shows how pliable history still was to his agency and his influence on it. But here I will also point out how great founder theory. There's a manuscript online that I released years and years ago. The audience can read if they're curious.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  It differs from some of the great man theories. Because I think a lot of the great man theories posit that amazing and tremendous events in the world are initiated or driven by the exceptional individuals. And while I think that is true, the counterargument of this long term trends, things like economic growth, rule of law, religion, all of those forces, they're these almost glacial forces that transform the landscape. So maybe while you have a big splash, 50 or 100 years later, your effect is washed out. In great founder theory, I propose that these forces actually have a human origin too.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  I think that great founders create these exceptional institutions that come to shape our history. So this means that perhaps it's not just the conquering general that's interesting. Even more interesting is perhaps the general that reforms how the command structure of a military changes the model of the military. Perhaps has something like what we today think of as the modern officer system, or perhaps changes how conscription is done. Or perhaps you have people who create new states. America's founding fathers or Charlemagne taking what's basically still a tribal coalition and forging something we could recognize as feudalism that then like defined medieval European civilization for 600 years.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  But it can also be the prophets of history.

• 4:09Auren Hoffman?

  If you take like a Bismarck or somebody, Germany was already kind of on the rise when he was there, but maybe wouldn't have unified. Maybe there's an alternative history. How much of Germany's rise was inevitable versus how much was driven by this very obviously clearly capable person, Bismarck?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Let's break it down. All of the key challenges of, if we look at specifically Bismarck, at his career, Otto von Bismarck, I think that it is plausible that Prussia would not have actually succeeded in unifying Germany on exactly the same timescale, or would have done so in a more decentralized way. Engineering for the French to be baited into a war that they lose, that resulted in a much more centralized Germany than what would have happened otherwise, and much less Austrian influence.

• 4:59Auren Hoffman?

  He needed to bait France to attack.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Specifically Napoleon III, who also was perhaps a genius politician, but was not a genius military commander or strategist like Napoleon I was. It was a situation where France couldn't help but intervene. I think that it's possible to try to carry out such a strategy where it completely fails. Had you failed to get the coalition forces prior to the war of all the German states on your side, if say some of the German states went with France, and if enough of them went with France, you'd basically be engaged in a hostile occupation of these countries.

• 5:37Auren Hoffman?

  You could see a lot of different alignments potentially that could have happened without Bismarck.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Exactly, and that was normal German history. If you look at even the Thirty Years' War or the Wars of Religion, you would have powers like the Habsburgs contesting, you had the Swedes intervening in the war, you had the Catholic French.

• 5:56Auren Hoffman?

  Because you had the Catholics and Protestants at each other.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Exactly, like whenever you have an area that has many small states, the default isn't that they all band together and they go fight an external foe. That's kind of the exception in world history. What normally happens is that the local conflicts are inflamed or used by external powers, and they're divided against themselves.

• 6:20Auren Hoffman?

  When you look at the founding of the US, there's these extraordinary people, some of which, if they didn't exist, the US would still be amazing today as a true country. But some of which, maybe they put it on the trajectory. Did Washington put it on the trajectory because he stepped down? And he wasn't a dictator? And he modeled the right way to be a president? Or Hamilton, was he really necessary? I'd love to get your thoughts on what's the alternative history? If a few of them didn't exist, would we still have the America we know today? Or do we need a whole lot of them not to exist for not to have the America? Not today?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Well, each of them is almost a great example of how an individual can have a long-term legacy in the country. Let's look at Alexander Hamilton. I think without Alexander Hamilton, America's basically running an industrial policy.

• 7:06Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, we'd be more agrarian.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  It would be much more agrarian. Concrete views on trade, concrete views on banking, financing of ventures. But also, and this is the funny part, which I think some of my American friends don't know. Today, we think of China as stealing a lot of Western IP. The US was stealing a lot of British IP, quite intentionally.

• 7:28Auren Hoffman?

  Certainly, throughout the 1800s, it was quite good at that, yes.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Britain was ahead technologically. The colonies were ahead in some spaces. Maybe they had better guns than the British. But really, when it came to the industrialization, there was one country in the world that had the IP, and that country was Britain. And all the other countries like the United States, Germany, Belgium, they were all trying to steal, as best as they could, the IP and rebuild the industry there. So without Alexander Hamilton, a much slower industrialization. It still happens. New York is already on this trajectory of becoming a rapidly growing city, being a center of capital, being a gateway to the Great Lakes region. The geography of the Great Lakes region is beautiful. There's these vast coal reserves, Appalachia. There's immense mineral wealth, cheap labor.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  It's all set up for industrialization. But for example, if the US is slower to industrialize, might the Civil War last longer before the North winds? I don't think you can rig it without just Hamilton. I don't think you get a situation where like the South winds or anything crazy like that. But can you have a longer war? Oh, yes.

• 8:34Auren Hoffman?

  Well, by the way, they don't have to win. If the war was four years longer, they already had riots in New York. You had all these other things going on during the Civil War where people didn't want to go to die there. You could see an uprising just saying, okay, just let the South have their, like, who cares? They'll have their own country. We'll have ours. Ours is better, but we don't need to go fight with them. You could have seen that scenario if the war went on a little longer.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Here's another funny one about New York. There were pamphleteers arguing that actually New York should declare independence from the Union and just be neutral in the Union versus South conflict. It will be immensely successful as a city-state. Manhattan is an island. It's not quite Venice, but it is an island. Alternate history, independent New York. But for Alexander Hamilton specifically, undeniably, he accelerated American industrial, technical development. He, on the other hand, also accelerated the strength of the federal government. All else equal, the country would have been more devolved. In the political sense of devolution, it would have been more decentralized. And then if you look at someone like Benjamin Franklin,

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I think there's a very subtle effect where the concept of an American genius starts with Benjamin Franklin. The idea that there's an American polymath or an American inventor and so on.

• 9:50Auren Hoffman?

  And what I like about Franklin, it was a worldwide phenomenon. He was not just known in the US as the American genius, but all of a sudden it became known there are American geniuses. When he goes to France, which was one of the most furthest along countries, they were like, oh, wow, he is a genius. When the French say someone's a genius, then they really think this person is a genius.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  They truly respected him. He was completely the right ambassador for France, like a great intellectual. Also someone that was very good at flirting, someone who was very socially exceptional in making friends. You can just read his writing, read his biographies. And I think that without his assistance, the diplomatic relations with France would be worse. That's very important. French support at various times and at other times, French neutrality was crucial for about at least the first 30 years of American history. Not just their interventions during the Revolutionary War, but also them being willing to lend support and being kind of a counterbalance still to the British in a variety of contexts.

• 10:51Auren Hoffman?

  I assume you believe it would be great if we had more great founders. If that's true, how do we do that? How do we get more great founders? How do we double? How do we 10x the number of great founders that are there?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  It's very probabilistic. I don't think we have a science of human psychology or biology or spirit or whatever it is that is sufficient for us to produce truly unique genius. I even would go as far as to say that, you know, if we dig up and clone, say, von Neumann, who's a great scientist, we'll certainly get very good physicists. But I'm not completely convinced unless you get the upbringing just right that you would get this unique genius. After all, there are many, many smart people who do very little with their lives.

• 11:32Auren Hoffman?

  You can have IQ of 160 and really do very little.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And part of it is, if I were to venture to guess what our society might be, say, lacking to certain other societies that actually think had a higher density of great founders than we do, to give examples, I'll give the example of the Roman Republic, it's almost overflowing with exceptional individuals that routinely reform armies, social systems, land redistribution, legal institutions, new cities. The Romans like routinely produce conquerors on the level of Alexander the Great. Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar and Crassus, if any of those individuals show up today, they're Elon Musk here immediately. Let's remember Crassus, for example, he made his wealth. He was a real estate mogul. Real

• 12:18Speaker 01

  estate mogul comes to be political big shot, runs a attempt to conquer Persia. Now, he dies early in it, but if he didn't die, maybe he'd even succeed. They had a appreciation for ambition. They had an appreciation for this view that if you do something amazing in society, even if you elevate yourself, but if you do a good enough job in the self-elevation, that it's not mere self-promotion, but it is great accomplishment, that you crave that glory, that society benefits. The Romans were like, oh, Caesar, of course, is full of himself, but Caesar is also for the people. And they had this intuition that human greatness is excellent. And I think America used to have that. Early 20th century, you would

• 13:00Speaker 01

  still get a parade as a victorious general, and you would still get a parade for at least the NASA astronauts that landed on the moon. Neil Armstrong got a parade in New York.

• 13:10Auren Hoffman?

  John Glenn.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. Of course, it was like a big... Bureaucratic NASA behind it, but that was the man that risked their life, went to space. That's the man who the president would mourn in a speech. Do you ever read the unpublished Richard Nixon speech for if the astronauts died or were stuck on the moon?

• 13:28Auren Hoffman?

  No, I never read that.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  It's worth reading. It's like now, just there in the archives, has a grim determination. Oh, these astronauts stuck on the moon. They're going to run out of oxygen in seventy two hours. We can't do anything for them. We like salute their sacrifice and.

• 13:44Auren Hoffman?

  That was a real possibility.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  How in the world are you going to incentivize risking your life in any way? Or even risking your fortune if there's not upside? And I think in our society, as soon as someone who is prominent fails in any way, even a small way, we immediately attack them, we turn on them.

• 14:02Auren Hoffman?

  It's almost opposite, though. I feel like when they fail, people celebrate them, but it's when they succeed is when they attack them in our society.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  That's an interesting take. Well, I think we're not comfortable with anyone being quote unquote, too powerful or too wealthy.

• 14:17Auren Hoffman?

  That might have always been true. People are always been conspiring against people who are too wealthy and too powerful.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  But there was the sense that we needed it. In previous eras, the view was that, okay, we don't want too many people being too powerful, too successful. But you know, our country really has these problems. We really need this individual to succeed. I think maybe we're getting a little bit of that back right now. It sort of feels that, let's say, in the last two to three weeks, I think on the net, the country now sort of wants Elon to succeed. And they sort of wanted him to fail two months ago. Succeeded, what is a different question? Going to Mars? I think they would be way happier with him going to Mars now than if he was going to Mars under, say, a different administration or under a different cultural moment. Since this, I think, is not a narrow party issue.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  I think you can't actually vote your way to a great society, to an amazing society. But I think that we have to develop some sort of public counterbalance to the feelings of, I think, envy and spite and frustration.

• 15:19Auren Hoffman?

  We're okay with like people in their lane. I think people always love Elon Musk building rockets and going to Mars. Eighty percent of Americans probably love that and hope that he gets fabulously wealthy from that, or they love that Taylor Swift gets fabulously wealthy for singing songs. Or just think of Patrick Mahomes being this incredible quarterback and getting fabulously wealthy that because he entertains so many people. But sometimes Americans don't like when they like slightly change their lane. All of a sudden, Patrick Mahomes is going to be like a business mogul or senator or something. Maybe like, whoa, you're a great quarterback. But they have this odder feeling for some reason, I don't know why, when somebody like slightly deviates from the narrative of who they are.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Well, when Arnold Schwarzenegger went from bodybuilding to being an actor, people said, he's no actor, he's just a muscle guy. When he became a politician, people finally said, well, he's an actor, he's no politician.

• 16:11Auren Hoffman?

  Correct.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  So at least they acknowledged the achievement of being an actor after there was a third lane he crossed into. But I think the truth of it is that if you have people who are truly amazing, well, we mentioned Napoleon earlier, there's a math theorem named after Napoleon. He was just corresponding with Laplace, the famous French mathematician, and he wanted to troll him a little bit and just send him some fine math, sort of to demonstrate in this metaphorical way, if I was not Alexander, maybe I'd be Diogenes, the classic encounter, Alexander great meets Diogenes. And it was like, hey, I can do anything for you. And this philosopher in a barrel is like, well, move away from the sun, leave me, stop throwing shade on me. He says that, you know, if I wasn't Alexander, I'd want to be Diogenes.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  And Diogenes is like, if I wasn't Diogenes, I'd want to be Alexander. A lot of these people have in them the capacity for many different amazing lives. They're not insects, they're not super specialized. I think you're actually right in that very narrow accomplishment is okay with us, but the jumping to something else is something we have grown less comfortable with. Let's note, no one took Eisenhower's military record to be a reason that he shouldn't run for president. Great military achievement followed by great political achievement. We're sort of holding the businessman background against Donald Trump back in, let's say, 2016, when the campaign started. Now, everyone thinks of him, of course, as a politician.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Like, that's what he is now in people's minds. But I think that there's something about it where the more you do, the more you can do. And I think this just never stops being true. I think it just keeps being true to very uncomfortable levels, where we kind of have to face a very inegalitarian conclusion. We can't tell ourselves the story that if only I trained as much as Mike Tyson, I would actually be Mike Tyson. That's not true. If only I dedicated my life to music as much as Taylor Swift, I would be Taylor Swift. It's not true. I mean, you can be something else that's amazing. I think for a lot of these, it's like they have more drive.

• 18:15Auren Hoffman?

  Well, in some ways, that's freeing. I focused on the wrong thing. I just spent so much time boxing, but actually could be great in some other area. There's like a line that maybe everyone can be great if they just found their calling, but then that's probably also not true either. You talk a lot about these live players. Most of the world are these NPCs, these non-player characters that exist. There might be some NPCs that have agency, and when they want to become live players, how does that work? How does one move from one to the other?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  The concept of a live player that I introduced in a, I think, 2017 essay is tied to the ability to go off script. Every industry, every sort of established field of human action, be it academic or otherwise, has a predetermined script of how things are supposed to be. This is what a successful academic career looks like. This is how many times a year you publish. This is the kind of topics you publish on. This is how you treat your doctoral advisor. This is how you treat your grad students. This is how you interact with student protests if they show up. This is how you answer email. It's a lot, and it's received wisdom, and people will not be able to deviate from it in the moment. It won't be able to improvise on the spot, and a live player will.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  So in the academic context, maybe actually, say, back in the day, Richard Hamming was like breaking social script.

• 19:35Auren Hoffman?

  I've no idea who Richard Hamming is. Who is that?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  He's a mathematician. His name is Richard Hemming. He was quite accomplished. And he would ask scientists in other fields, what are the most important problems in your field? And then he would follow up with the very provocative and rude question, why aren't you working on them? So it's kind of funny. It's an interesting question. Now, you can, of course, answer it, oh, comparative advantage, maybe fluid dynamics is the most interesting area, but I'm not really talented for that. So I'm doing this other thing that's also very good. And we're looking at how ice crystallizes and all of that stuff. But I think people usually don't have the answer. I think people usually are like, oh, it's not really my place. Well, whose place is it? Who gets to have a shot at solving the most important questions in a field? So I really want to emphasize this doesn't just apply to like,

• 20:21Speaker 01

  oh, this person rewrote the book on how to do a tech company, or, oh, this person totally changed French politics. It can also be that this person totally changed the field of physics, going around and asking uncomfortable questions. And it's not that the uncomfortableness is itself super good. It's just that you're not tied to the script. And when it doesn't make sense, you don't do the thing that doesn't make sense. And you do instead the thing that makes sense, even if you're the only one doing it. So there is an implicit bravery.

• 20:52Auren Hoffman?

  Now, do you think you could have a high percentage of identifying live players when they're 16? Do you think you could somehow interview 16 year olds and have a very high likelihood of picking? Or do you think it'd still be very, very hard to pick live players?

• 21:09Speaker 01

  For young people, it is actually quite tricky, because you can see intelligence, you can see confidence, some drive. You can sometimes see very early signs of like a savant, a very high accomplishment. And you can certainly see when someone is spirited.

• 21:24Auren Hoffman?

  And maybe a little bit of a rule breaker or something.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. But how much of that is useful testosterone? Everyone's a rule breaker at 17 or 16, to some extent. Our culture encourages it. 26, fewer. 36, oh, very few people. A lot of this, in a way, is almost more like a marathon than a sprint. Yes, in our society, for example, in mathematics, it happens to be true. That person has to be a very young brain to win the academic races and do all the mathematical accomplishments. But even historically, that wasn't true. Gauss was producing world transforming math in his 50s. I do have to ask whether it's actually true or whether we've just decided that only people very early in their career can do math. And once they accomplish something exceptional, get a fields medal, they kind of lose the drive to do more.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  And no one expects them to do more and they can retire. I would say that we could spot people, I think by the time they're like 23. 23 is like a very good age because if they've been live players, maybe they say start in high school. Or if they only sort of, for example, broke with the implicit expectation of their parents in like the college era. That still gives them time to have successfully switched at least once something important about what they're pursuing. So maybe they start being super intellectually interested in mathematics. They figure out something interesting and they're like, you know what? Actually, this would be a great company. Or maybe they start off interested in biology and then they realize, wait, actually academia is just so messed up.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  I'm going to go reform how science is funded. That's the real problem. That's what I'm going to do. And they start doing well right away. So I would look at someone who has done at least two things extremely well. And ideally they're somewhat unrelated. They can be adjacent. It can be still a logical jump. But it should be the mastery of a totally new set of skills in a way that's too fast to have been preparation. A lot of people can be raised to be a doctor or raised to be a lawyer. But that just means you've learned a very high functioning script very well. No one can like go and do amazing things in a new field two years in if they're not writing their own script.

• 23:35Auren Hoffman?

  Back in the 90s, I happened to meet a lot of people who looked at the time a lot like Elon Musk did. They had very similar types of exits. They seemed to be very ambitious. And they're all young at the time. They're all in their twenties at the time. Literally none of those people you have ever heard of. There's not one of those people who I knew back then who you have heard of today. There are still. Wealthy, but mostly they created a winery or something like that. They kind of fell off the ambition path. I think if you looked at them, they seem like the rule breaker. They're starting the companies. They were successful. At some point, they just kind of fell off the path, maybe because they were a little bit too normal, or they were just too optimizing for happiness. How would one know if they're going to fall off the path or not?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  I think it's a very interesting question as to why does that happen so often? I think for many people, I think that there's something interesting that happens. Okay, I've made my money, so it's time to retire. And often it's a big amount of money by any objective measure, but it's not often even a Silicon Valley large amount of money. It can be like just a relatively low bar, something like, okay, I can now be upper middle class for the rest of my life and never worry about earning any more money. Or maybe it's time for a family, it's time for kids, or something like this. And I think if we were to drill into it, if we were to be able to like talk to them very, very deeply, they might not trust you. I think every single live player has a very esoteric and strange view of the world

• 25:04Speaker 01

  under many layers of normality. They have some like crazy thesis. Now this is no longer a crazy thesis. But 20 years ago, if someone shows up, it's like the human era is about to end in 25 years and we are at the cusp of the singularity. That was a way more interesting person to talk to than if someone shows up right now and says, we're five years away from the singularity. The end of the human era is near. It's a totally different filter because I think this is when almost a worldview or like a philosophical position, but it has to be an embodied philosophy. It has to be motivating, animating. That's why I often use this term of spirited. If you were superstitious, maybe you call it a possession or an obsession at the very least.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  If it enters late in your life where all your layers of personality are developed, you look around, okay, turns out AI is the thing. That's very different than, okay, you think about intelligence and you read some science fiction and you grasp weight. But if we had an artificial form of intelligence, that would change everything. And you get to like very excited and you think about the world and you're like, wow, okay, this is going to Find my life. This is what I'm going to do with the next 30 years. And many of prominent people today have this element of almost a mystic to them. To give an example of someone who's pretty obvious, who almost doesn't hide it at all, even shows it. Ilya Sutskever is practically a mystic of AI. If you listen to him talk about, oh, models want to learn. Intelligence is a fundamental property of the universe.

• 26:30Auren Hoffman?

  Or Vitalik is kind of like that for Ethereum.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 26:33Auren Hoffman?

  The whole crypto thing is kind of interesting to me because there's this series of founders there that are somewhat deity like. Starting with Satoshi, who we don't even know if it was a person or a group of people. Man or a woman, we really just don't know anything about Satoshi.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Or maybe a team at NSA, or we don't know.

• 26:52Auren Hoffman?

  Exactly. Because of that, we can project onto Satoshi what we want this deity to be. And because it's a deity and not a real person, it doesn't have flaws. It's not like cheating on their spouse and doing all this other stuff. People that we know of do, it's perfect in some ways. And then we have Vitalik, who's kind of the next deity. In a very weird way, he seems like he actually is a good person. Of all the tech people, he probably is like the least evil in him. If you had to like score evil stuff, he just seems like actually a genuinely good person. Now, maybe he is a secret evil genius. I don't know.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Ironically, no matter what the mechanism of Ethereum is, the fact that he's such a trustworthy person and such an original thinker and just does what he perceives to be the right thing. That in itself should make someone more bullish about Ethereum. And I think it's not irrational to. It's kind of funny. Crypto had for a long time, this theory of how important trustless systems are. But let's be real, at the end of the day, trust in those founders still underwrites.

• 27:55Auren Hoffman?

  We're trusting Vitalik and then Satoshi may be dead. We don't even know. So then we're trusting this other thing out there.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. I mean, currently, anyone who's participating in the crypto bull run is trusting that the Trump administration will like restrain overregulation of crypto that was perhaps otherwise in the cards. So they're at least trusting the administration in some way, trusting at least to not do certain things, even if they don't trust it to do certain things.

• 28:20Auren Hoffman?

  There's been this decline of trust in elites in the society. Are elites less good today than they have been in the past? Is that trust warranted?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Well, I think trust has to be earned. We should not be delusionally trusting because misplaced trust will be abused and eventually will be broken anyway because no matter how much you might exhort people to sort of have faith in their government, there's some bad people, but it's good on net, behave in a good trust way to the universities, to your HR manager. It has positive externalities if you act that way. But in another way, no, actually, low trust is a healthy immune response to institutions and individuals who are no longer worthy of receiving the subsidy.

• 29:10Auren Hoffman?

  It seems like we have lower trust in institutions, but we still have like a fairly high trust society. We still trust that no one's out there like gonna rob us. We interact with people. I'm wiring money to people. I have fairly high trust. They're not gonna abscon with it to Venezuela. And the US is very high trust in business, extremely high trust. Just a trust like a complete stranger, if you think of venture capital, complete stranger shows up with an idea and you're like, great, here's a million bucks. It's crazy that we do that, but we do that because it works out. Like they usually don't abscon. You're usually not bad actors that are out there. So how do you square this lower trust within the institution, with still fairly high trust of everyone in the society?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  We are declining from a very high baseline of trust. I think there used to be a very high baseline of trust in day-to-day interactions, business and politics.

• 30:02Auren Hoffman?

  Everywhere you think we're declining.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Well, in politics, it's pretty straightforward. The General Society survey, if you compare results from today versus the 1950s, I think the only institution that is still trusted at 1950s levels is the US military. And even that's losing points. Meanwhile, Congress has dropped like a rock.

• 30:21Auren Hoffman?

  I think that's way down from where it used to be, the military.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Well, over the last two years especially.

• 30:27Auren Hoffman?

  I think the military's been going down every year. Obviously Vietnam took a hit, but then the Iraq war took a hit and Afghanistan took a hit.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  But the presidency and Congress and the federal agencies actually lost the trust even faster. So it's sort of the question of what is the last man standing? What is the most trusted organ of government? I will note that I don't think the US is going to have a coup anytime soon. But in countries where the only trusted organ of government is the military, tend to not be the happiest countries. The result isn't now to blindly trust a government that has demonstrably failed. You say a government that tried to block through a variety of policy measures, say, open and free discussion of the realities of the COVID virus and the realities of the COVID vaccines, which I'm in favor broadly of the vaccines, but I thought it was insane. The amount of information control Western governments try to exert over the internet.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  It didn't make sense in the name of public health.

• 31:21Auren Hoffman?

  It didn't make any sense. That's actually what created the distrust was that. So sometimes this overregulation was what creates distrust on certain types of things. You clearly have something to hide if you're not going to allow people to debate.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Or you're trying to nudge people or manipulate them to behave in ways that are against their individual self-interest. And there are so many tells. When you ask policy, try to encourage the individuals in a large country to behave in a way that is maybe collectively good and individually bad, and you lie to them that it's individually good for them, they can tell. There's a certain amount of lying that the government can get away with. In fact, here's, I'm going to be a little cynical. I think people want their government to be able to lie to them a little bit. If the government Can't lie to you a little bit, it means it can't lie to your enemies. And then you want the government to keep you safe from like the scary enemies in the world out there. But there's a tolerance zone and the government's way out of that tolerance zone.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  And the politicians, as individuals, people don't even trust that they're doing their work in government well. So it's not just trust of abstract systems, it's trust in will this representative actually be a representative? Will they actually be more than just a social media personality? I think we're losing that because the class of politicians is worse. And we're losing trust in the bureaucracies because the bureaucracies are so broken compared to when they were built. I don't think we can get away with having a society with no bureaucracy, actually, by the way. I think bureaucracy is like markets. Bureaucracy is amazing. It's a great machine. You string together fifty people following rules and together they almost do as good a job as a single genius would.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  And that's very fortunate because we have probably fifty or five hundred or five million people per genius. So it's a really good trade off. We have so many millions of people. You can get fifty of them to do the job, amazing. But over time, they become cancerous, they become out of date, people expand headcount. They find creative ways to reinterpret what the mission of the bureaucracy is. On paper, it's achieving it. In actuality, it doesn't. All these normal effects, this is truly added up. Now, you said that we still trust people. But you know, if I here in San Francisco, if I go to a store, the shaving cream's locked up. What's the point of an inconvenient convenience store? At that point, I truly shouldn't go out in the street. I should truly just order it on Amazon.

• 33:39Auren Hoffman?

  Which you do, of course.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Which I do more and more. But then that's a death spiral for the whole concept of a city. And at the end of the day, do I prefer living in, let's call it, universal LA? Where I drive everywhere and I have everything delivered to my home. And I never take a stroll down a street with some storefronts. And I never just explore a physical world with lots of bustling people around. I don't like that. I prefer us being able to use these physical spaces. I think Manhattan's great for the world. Big cities are great for the world. They make everyone more productive. They make everyone more social. They socialize them in a deep way.

• 34:17Auren Hoffman?

  No one actually forms their opinion on everything on first principles. That would be impossible because it takes so long to go down the first principles rabbit hole. Maybe people we know pick a few topics a year to go on first principles on and form their opinion of. I've never even gone first principles of whether the world is round or not. I just trust the quote unquote experts, whoever these people may be, that it is round. I don't know. I've never gone around the rabbit hole of whether we faked the moon landing. I'm just trusting that we did it and that people like Neil Armstrong, as you said earlier, actually landed on the moon and then actually came back. Who knows? You can't go down on everything. You have to decide. And then of course, if you're trusting the experts, you're picking the experts you trust.

• 35:00Auren Hoffman?

  Everyone is trusting some expert somewhere on something. It could be on the internet and they're looking at some YouTube influencer who's an expert on your health. They might be trusting that person over the quote unquote medical establishment, but everyone is looking to an expert to trust on almost every single issue and then rarely ever going on first principles on anything. A lot of decisions is just deciding which expert to trust and hopefully that person went on the first principles on it and we are going to trust that they did a good job doing that. Is that in the end what we're doing? So now it's not that we're trusting experts less, it's just we're trusting different experts.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  I think that's correct because it's not like there's generalized skepticism. But for example, you might not trust the FDA, but you trust the bodybuilder Twitter account that you follow when figuring out your diet and how to lose weight. You don't follow the food pyramid.

• 35:52Auren Hoffman?

  The food pyramid was been wrong. They had this idea of this food pyramid. No one even knows how actually that even came up. It's not even clear. So it's like, okay, well, they've been lying to me all this time. They don't maybe even know why they're lying to me. They may not even know they're lying. So I'm going to find another expert who maybe is lying to me, but I don't know that they're lying to me yet. So I'm going to go to that person. Four or five times.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  It's exactly the case. As you explained, it is impossible for us to rethink absolutely everything. It's just a question of whether we are capable of occasionally rethinking things. And that's actually very difficult. You are immediately very strange if you're like the first person to trust the anonymous dieting guy over the FDA's recommendation, or you're the first person that is like, I think I'm going to inject myself with this Ozempic stuff. I think it's pretty good. Actually, I've read the papers. And everyone's like, what are you doing?

• 36:43Auren Hoffman?

  Well, there's safety in numbers too. So if you have enough friends or people you like who trust this person, then you're more likely to trust this expert in this one narrow thing.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Then it gets easier. As long as we have the mechanism in society to update eventually the legal recognition of who are the best available experts in our society, this is actually a pretty healthy process. Because over time, people will cohere and find the new experts. Now, whether these experts will be accredited, will they be credentialed, will they be recognized by the government, or by big companies in their official decision making, that's another problem. So I think there's individual trust. On that level, the whole internet has been slowly rerouting to new sources of trust, new media platforms, new writers, new scientific authorities on all sorts of topics. Some of these are of

• 37:35Speaker 01

  course, bad. Medical misinformation is rife, both among so-called experts and among the contrarians. But on net, I think individuals will like find their way. But the laws will be the same. And then everyone will be like, well, I figured out my entire treatment plan online. I talked to everyone about what I need to do. Okay, the only thing I now have to do is go to an office with this person who's technically my doctor, and convince them to sign off on my internet-assembled treatment plan. I'm like, why do you need that person in that office? How long are we going to do that? That's in a way, a miscredentia. A person might even be a great doctor, they just literally don't have time

• 38:14Speaker 01

  for you. And we need to open bureaucracies to accept the input of, hey, this person or this organization- Has come up with this treatment plan. Insurance company, this is just as valid as if a doctor did it. And there's no laws preventing you from reimbursing them. For example, if you even were to use insurance for that. There's like a deeper problem here because you can have a bureaucracy that's stupider than the sum of its parts. Because sometimes the sum of its parts just know things that are inadmissible in the official record. Even for foreign policy, if you printed out a blog post from like a really insightful commenter on geopolitics and you show up. It's like a State Department meeting. I don't think that works.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Now, maybe it works in the Trump admin, but even there, I don't think it works.

• 39:04Auren Hoffman?

  I think some other countries are quite good at it, but US foreign policy in some ways has been so discredited over the last 25 years. The experts have just been so wrong at almost every big issue. They're maybe right on a lot of the small ones or whatever, but at least on the big issues that we're wrong at almost everyone. That I think it's much easier to do today, but still amazing how much power these quote unquote experts have. When they've been wrong so much. Imagine investors who've just been wrong on literally everything for 25 years. They probably would not be the ones in power anymore. If that was the case, because they would have lost all their money. So it is interesting to me that even though we've run all these big bets and you're wrong, you invaded Iraq. Whatever the big bets were that were completely utterly wrong were disastrous things.

• 39:49Auren Hoffman?

  You still have lots of power, which is kind of funny to me. There used to be a scenario where like, there really weren't any live players, let's say after the age of 80. Maybe historically there was maybe one or two. It'd be extremely rare where that would have ever happened. Either they died before then, or they just were not functioning as a live player. And maybe even 70 for many cases, that was probably the case. Now we're moving to a world where there're clearly going to be live players after 70, there's clearly going to be live players after 80. There may be live players after 90, maybe live players after 100. Someone will be a quote unquote live player for much longer. Napoleon was really not that much of a live player for that long. He was briefly a live player.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  He died fairly young.

• 40:30Auren Hoffman?

  People are going to span a much longer life cycle of being alive. But how does that change things?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  I've had this discussion with related to life extension before. And let me propose that actually very long lifespans will be a boon for true merit, not a detriment to merit. People will learn, people will change, and especially we should not conflate old incumbent powerful people with life players. There are many people who, in America, it's practically a seniority system. The average age of Congress goes up by a year almost every year. So that's kind of wacky. This is a depressing one. The average age of Congress right now is like about 10 years older than the Politburo in the 1980s, the Politburo of the Soviet Union. And we called that gerontocracy back then because America was more youthful then.

• 41:21Auren Hoffman?

  The Senate is very old.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  And to be fair, the word does mean old. Senate, it's sort of senior and the Latin, etc. But it's not supposed to be that old. Even the Romans would be like, what are you guys doing? If Benjamin Franklin had access to TikTok, I think great things would be happening. I think it would be tremendous. I think he'd figure out how to do it. I think he'd probably even figure out new little viral dances, but also he'd probably educate you about science and he'd come to his own bespoke opinion on vaccines. And of course, maybe occasionally he'd have to defend a statement he made in 1820. But by that point, there'd be so many other people around who made like a statement in 1820 that is like now racist or sexist or whatever, that the actual statement of, hey, I was very young,

• 42:04Speaker 01

  it was a different era, I've learned better, here's the things I've done in the last 100 or 200 years where I've changed my social views. I think that we would be better off. Wouldn't you feel better if in modern politics you had some of the greatest politicians of the last 200 years competing together on an even playing field? I think that would actually result in mere seniority decaying. I think that a 30-year-old Alexander Hamilton would certainly outmaneuver in politics a 150-year-old Cromwell if he was forced to compete with him. So I think there will always be new geniuses, new young people who will come to succeed and who will come to compete with the old life players. Now, gerontocracy as a whole, though, is a massive problem.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Move into a low fertility regime where even the United States is a low fertility country. It's just masked by immigration. We literally have European tier fertility in this country now. It's like TFR 1.6. It used to be the case that elitist games in all human societies in all places favor the old and democratic games tend to favor the young. But what happens when the median voter is old? Then you have a world where both populism is gerontocratic and elitism is gerontocratic too. And of course, your bank account keeps going up. If let's say the economy is growing and you're invested in the stock market and the stock crashes never and corrections never happen. Compound interest also works in your place. So we're going to have to do something to empower young people systematically.

• 43:34Auren Hoffman?

  Let's double click on the fertility stuff. Japan is a mid fertility country. We used to think of it as like a super low fertility country, but it's been flat for a long time. What are they, TFR 1.3?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:46Auren Hoffman?

  That's actually pretty good. That's better than most of Europe now. Certainly better than most of East Asia, way better than China, way better than Korea, et cetera. Korea is 0.6, 0.7, 0.8 in that range.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:00Auren Hoffman?

  Which is insane. I assume China is in that same kind of range as well.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Especially in the cities. If you look at Hong Kong or Singapore, or if you look at Shenzhen.

• 44:09Auren Hoffman?

  They're going to be even below one.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  The official ones for China are like a little above one, but they might be inflating them. I think we've entered the point where countries are going to hide how much their population is declining. For example, a census in a country, in a European country like Romania, or even Ukraine is politically super explosive because then you have to admit that during, say, the last 10 years, 20 or 30% of the population moved out.

• 44:34Auren Hoffman?

  What does the census even mean? Because you might still be counting people that moved out.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Don't live, don't work, don't make babies in the country.

• 44:41Auren Hoffman?

  Maybe they're still voting there, but they moved to Poland or they moved to the UK or they moved some other place. People aren't leaving the US usually. It's pretty rare for someone to leave the US for another country. We're not that much of an exporter of people to other countries. But yeah, when you think of some of these other places, you've got this doom loop that they're. Eventually exporting folks outside of it. So many things have been tried to increase fertility. It doesn't seem like anything has worked. And it seems like fertility is going down everywhere. I think you had mentioned it's even going down in Iran massively. So it's not like religion solves it or something. People make a big stink. The only first world country that has relatively high fertility is Israel.

• 45:23Auren Hoffman?

  But it's such a unique and small country that it's hard to generalize that to anything.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  My dispiriting prediction for Israel is that Israel's fertility will come to decline as well. It's an outlier in that it's perhaps a bit slower, but it's on the same trajectory. If we were talking 10 or 20 years ago, we would actually be talking about America as a high fertility country. And America is a very religious country. But if you today look again at the self identified religiosity of teenagers and people in their early twenties. America and Europe have converged. America is actually in the young generations about as secular as Europe. And the fertility is again comparable. A lot of the time when something seems like an exception, it's the last data point that's straggling before it joins this cluster. That's all going the same way.

• 46:13Auren Hoffman?

  In America, I have this theory that there's a certain expectation of how you want to live. Back in the day, we were maybe okay with cramped apartments and kids running around, but we have a certain expectation. So if you're not wealthy, well, it's hard to afford having more than two kids. And then if you are wealthy, then there's this whole other weird loop in America, which is somewhat unique to America, which is that people are investing so much in their children. If they have multiple kids, they're both on two crazy travel teams and they're traveling every weekend. You can't even have more than two kids. It'd be like functionally almost impossible to be like on the travel team. You need like this whole staff of people and stuff. Only billionaires now can have lots of kids. So even if you have the space in the house to go do that, it still seems harder.

• 46:58Auren Hoffman?

  And then of course, a lot of them are paying for private school. These costs go up pretty significantly over time. Certainly that's been true in Korea where people are putting so much into their kids. They're spending so much time with their kids that in their case, I think it's even harder to have more than one because they just spend so much time and they're because they're going to so much tutoring and they're really investing so much in them. Do you think there's any truth to any of this?

• 47:21Speaker 01

  I think it is, but also I was to say, the kids are not happy with it in Korea.

• 47:26Auren Hoffman?

  Oh, yeah. All this stuff is terrible for kids.

• 47:28Speaker 01

  They hate school. They hate the test prep stuff.

• 47:31Auren Hoffman?

  In Korea, for sure. I feel like the American kids are pretty happy.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  The ideal of a happy childhood is more important in the United States than it is in Korea. So I think in both cases, you have a fertility reducing power here at work with the parents basically competing with each other. In America, in a way, it's like you give your kids the most enriched childhood, even if it means you have like very few of them. In Korea, your kids will be well educated because it's good for them. And also means you're a good parent because you got your kids to become like a doctor, an engineer. They went top of their class. They have a perfect score. It still is tugging on the same heartstring of caring about children, just the view of what is good for children. It's like in the US, maybe it's happiness and in South Korea, maybe it's education.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Though I would say even in the United States, I bet Americans overvalue formal education at this point. There are definitely kids in America who have a completely choreographed high school resume, all in the service of trying to get them into an Ivy League university.

• 48:36Auren Hoffman?

  And they're all on the fencing team or something, or the sailing team to help them do that.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  A lot of them burn out after they get into school. Their parents are, okay, go be happy. And they're like, I don't know myself. I guess I'm going to be a consultant at McKinsey. I don't know.

• 48:49Auren Hoffman?

  That's what happens. They're all at McKinsey.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  It can derail or it's a detour in the life of a live player to be like shepherded excessively by parents being given opportunities. Yes, guidance, sure, it's useful. Parents are way more responsible for what their children do now than they would have been 100 years ago. As a kid or a teenager, you could literally get a job and never talk to your parents again at 15. For example, if your dad was a raging alcoholic or if they had a religion you disagreed with. So even though in a way, children are much more protected, I don't want to see them working in coal mines. That's fine. But wouldn't it be interesting if it was more normal that a 15 year old could like start a company if they want to?

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Or they can have a normal job if they want to, where they could be signing contracts.

• 49:39Auren Hoffman?

  What's wrong with working in a coal mine? Go for it.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  You have the masks and so on, so you don't destroy your lungs, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm just saying, I understand the impulse behind banning child labor. But I think we've become such a rich society that it's like the hyper exploitation is not going to happen anymore. It's just going to be like mostly win-win situations. I think the liberation of children is something that the United States could do more. Where, for example, how many parents are now comfortable to have their children go for a five-mile trip and back unsupervised?

• 50:14Auren Hoffman?

  Almost none.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  And that was very normal, even 70 years ago. Even 20 years ago, it might have been very normal.

• 50:21Auren Hoffman?

  When I was a kid, that was normal.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. So what the hell happened?

• 50:25Auren Hoffman?

  And not even just five miles, let's say, even one mile trip, parents are happy with.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  One mile trip, sure. The five-mile one's not arbitrary. You've seen that scope of shrinking. There's like this map online that shows the over generations, how the range of where people let their children go on the same town just kept shrinking, generation after generation.

• 50:43Auren Hoffman?

  Most parents I know won't even let their kids go outside their house without knowing where they are, without unsupervised. That's just extremely rare nowadays.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Of course, the only youth culture possible exists online because that is the only space where they can go on their own. And now you're even perhaps supposed to maximally monitor their online exposure. We have put onto parents the task of making the world safe for their children, or rather, keeping children safe from actual dangers, because there are actual dangers, to be real. And our tolerance for danger has dropped so much that we are too into the safety in all dimensions. People might think you're a bad parent if your kid gets into an injury. I'm going to be like super provocative and say, if you've had like four or five kids and none of your kids has ever broken a bone, you're also a bad parent.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  You've actually smothered them. You've actually made the world much too safe. They've probably not been physically active.

• 51:42Auren Hoffman?

  Not just on the soccer field, though they usually are on the soccer field where they break their bones nowadays.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Sure, that's better. That at least means you let them play a dangerous sport, okay? There are people who won't even do that.

• 51:52Auren Hoffman?

  People are now getting married later, too. I don't know really if they're getting married much later than they have been historically. Because historically, I think people did get married, especially men got married very late. I think in the 60s in the US was the all time lowest age for marriage. Certainly for men and women, it's always been younger than men, but certainly for men is way younger. It was probably the average age for men getting married for the first time in the 60s was in like their early 20s. Whereas I think at the beginning of the 20th century, in the 1900s, it was probably like in the 30s where men got married. So it's probably went down 10 years during that timeframe. Now it's starting to come back up to like the 30s again. Back in the 1900s, we didn't have birth control.

• 52:33Auren Hoffman?

  We didn't have other things that were preventing people from having lots of kids. Now we have all these things. And now that people get married later, it's just harder to have lots of kids. If you get married when you're 35, it's just technically more difficult. You have to have IVF. And then, of course, you're older, you don't have as much energy, all these other types of things as well to have lots of kids.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Part of this transformation is that people say that artificial wombs or better reproductive technology will solve this problem. And by the way, I'm in favor of developing those technologies. However, if we make it possible to have your children in your 60s, biologically your children in your 60s. I think the same sort of Red Queen race, the same sort of competitiveness to seem like a good parent, whether or not it's actually good for your children, to be best at your career, invest everything in your career at the right time to get into the right spots and the right corporate hierarchy, whatever. I think all those races will intensify to the point where people will feel that they can't have children before 50.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Maybe then life extension kicks in, but there's another deep cost to having children later in life. It's not just total fertility. It is intergenerational continuity. How much time do you have with your grandchildren? While, of course, the world has changed massively, baby boomers, well, perhaps they weren't the font of wisdom. Maybe they were more like the broken link in the chain. I still think that human nature has some persistent truths to it. Evaluating character is As useful today with some updates as it might have been 100 or 200 years ago, or understanding even your temperament. For example, someone that has a melancholic temperament and like enjoys reading poetry and perhaps shares some poetry with their children that their children enjoy,

• 54:20Speaker 01

  possibly because they inherited some of the same melancholic genes. That right there is a psychiatrist customer that is not raising GDP. They don't need lithium and they're better off for it. They may have an extra creative spark. I think we've forgotten how much cultivation it takes to really make yourself a functional human being. We want to emphasize that religion did provide a lot of this, but also like small, these micro family traditions provided that. Different families used to be different. And now I feel like we want to send away all these differences. You have to raise your kids like a therapist or you have to raise your kids the tiger mom way. Either consensus is actually equally stifling if we like contrast East Asia versus California.

• 55:04Auren Hoffman?

  Couple of personal questions before we leave. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Very straightforward. I think Lyndon B. Johnson was doing his best to sort of get Kennedy out of power or get him killed.

• 55:15Auren Hoffman?

  Do you think he was involved in the assassination somehow?

• 55:18Speaker 01

  He was trying to enable it because of course the vice president is the most unimportant role you can think of. I'm not even critiquing his positions, but objectively he's one of the most ruthless politicians of the 20th century.

• 55:29Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, if you read Path to Power, which is an incredible book, he is a ruthless man.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:34Auren Hoffman?

  That's awesome. I love it. Okay. And last question we ask all our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Taking a year or two off from an extremely highly accomplished career to go and read in seclusion or travel outside of tourism and so on. And let me emphasize, don't do ayahuasca, don't do acid, don't go to like alternative spiritual communities, just actually read old books and contemplate things in seclusion and nature for a year. I think that's really underrated. People used to understand that's necessary.

• 56:13Auren Hoffman?

  For a whole year.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, a year is to break all your habits. And then you'll go back, you'll still have an amazing biography. Hopefully, you're not in the position where your CV as written makes or breaks you. Ideally, you have a strong enough reputation that that's not a problem. But at the end of that year, if you're like a driven individual, you will have remade your concept of the world. And if you look at people, often there are misfortunes that are encountered in professional life. There are companies that fail, there are political parties that lose elections. I mentioned Mike Tyson, you know, he went to prison. Yeah, she read a lot there. In a way, we are a post-literate civilization, so we're undervaluing reading.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  And we're undervaluing the reading of like a book as a full format, not fragments on your phone, not doom scrolling. The Roman concept of OTM, you could call it leisurely or free time, but it's almost this self-renewal. I think it's underrated.

• 57:09Auren Hoffman?

  And how does one do that? I mean, for many people, even if they have amazing exit, they're integrated in society. They still have parents they have to interact with. They may have children, they may have a spouse, they may have other friends that are relying on them. How does one like extricate themselves from society for a year?

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Well, I have no solution for a spouse that will not go with you to the ends of the earth. But to be fair, that's a very rare commodity in any era, in any time, in any place. That's hard. For children, usually if you're well off, you can take them with you and they're really not going to have a bad year with you. And again, the extrication is so that you, after having been very deeply socialized in a very successful industry, you achieve distance from it before you do the next step or distance from your previous politics. When Dominic Cummings was in British context, kicked out of politics, he said this in interviews. He just like started reading a bunch again. And of course, he'll be back in politics. If I were to bet on an individual being prominent in British politics over the next five or 10 years, it's going to be him.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  For those who don't know, can Google him and his involvement. But the breather, the chance to think, it's not even that your cortisol goes down. It's that your sources of information decorrelate. From your current network and then you can go back to the network. This is why in politics, often a political defeat is what happens before a comeback. It's not clear to me that Churchill would have done as good a job during, say, World War II, had he not been basically a disgraced politician before then because he had the disastrous Calipoli campaign. He did a lot of writing. He even wrote some science fiction. People can find it.

• 58:46Auren Hoffman?

  Every president in my lifetime before Trump lost a major election before they won the presidency. Clinton lost in eighty-two for reelection for governor. George W. Bush lost for Congress. Barack Obama ran against Bobby Rush for Congress and lost. Reagan ran against Ford and lost for the presidential nomination. So it's a constant. Really, Trump was literally the first one to kind of break the mold of never losing election before writing for president.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  I think that it's going out into the wilderness, being able to endure defeat. But secondly, also being able to wean yourself from the addiction because every profession has its own deep addictions. Being able to live without the immediate social approval of the people, it just actually fortifies you. And then since no one else reads books, let's be real, if you read ten books on a topic, probably top zero point one percentile, unfortunately, on that topic.

• 59:45Auren Hoffman?

  We're taping this in mid-November twenty twenty-four. I'll probably end this year with reading about fifty books. I think I'm reading way too much and my New Year's resolution for twenty twenty-five is to read way fewer books. I feel like many of those books are just not impactful. They're not helping me.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  There are many bad books.

• 1:00:04Auren Hoffman?

  They're somewhat enjoyable, just like watching TV is somewhat enjoyable, but maybe I should have actually just watched more TV.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Maybe you've done that already. There's no universal advice, but I bet a significant one-year change where you do something really, really different. And I know you've done several things that are quite different already.

• 1:00:21Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, so I'm just gonna watch more TV. It's my sabbatical.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Honesty, I would so read, or in film reviews, I would take your movie recommendations.

• 1:00:31Auren Hoffman?

  All right. Well, thank you, Samoboria, for joining us on World of DaaS. I follow you at Samoboria on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been super wide-ranging and a ton of fun. So thank you very much.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:00:47Auren Hoffman?

  If you're a super data nerd, go to worldofdaas.com. That's D-A-A-S, worldofdaas.com, and sign up for our weekly Data as a Service roundup newsletter.

• 1:01:00Auren Hoffman?

  Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, consider reading this podcast and leaving a review. For more World of DAS, and DAS is D-A-A-S, you can subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts. And also check out YouTube for videos. You can find me at Twitter at at Auren, that's A-U-R-E-N, Auren, and we'd love to hear from you. World of DAS is brought to you by Safegraph. Safegraph is geospatial data for physical places. Check it out at safegraph.com. And by Flex Capital. Flex Capital vests and data companies like those we talk about at World of DAS. Check it out at flexcapital.com.