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The Wordcel Queen Of Silicon Valley — EP 89 Anna Gát · Core Memory

0:00
SPEAKER_00: This week's episode is a little bit different.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: We're doing a intellectual deep dive into technology and society,
0:08
SPEAKER_00: and we're doing it with Anna Gatt.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: She is the founder of Interintellect.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: It's a platform for having deep, thoughtful, meaningful conversations.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: Anna has developed a type of system over the years for having dialogues
0:26
SPEAKER_00: that are hopefully fruitful and that help people Add some intellectual texture
0:32
SPEAKER_00: to their lives.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: As such, we go through the tech industry, why people hate it, why people hate AI.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: Is this a good thing?
0:42
SPEAKER_00: Is this a bad thing?
0:43
SPEAKER_00: Is it warranted or not?
0:45
SPEAKER_00: We get into Elon Musk's writing style.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: We get into one of my favorite topics,
0:50
SPEAKER_00: which is engineers taking over the world and what this means for society.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: All kinds of juicy topics and on a Has big thoughts on them all.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: She is Hungarian by birth and writer and screenwriter by training and intellectual.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: In her mid-30s,
1:13
SPEAKER_00: she basically changed her whole life to go chase after this inter-intellect idea due
1:19
SPEAKER_00: to some Some personal tragedy and drama in her life,
1:23
SPEAKER_00: which we get into a bit in the show.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: She's just a cool,
1:28
SPEAKER_00: cool cat who has a big following online and among intellectual circles
1:33
SPEAKER_00: in Silicon Valley and beyond.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: And so you're going to enjoy this discussion.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: I am Ashley Vance.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: This is Core Memory.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: Here we go.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: First of all, Ana, thank you so much for being here.
2:02
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for having me.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: It's a treat.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: I have all these friends that tell me I should be interviewing you.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: Really?
2:09
SPEAKER_00: Oh, thank you, friends.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I got lots of messages as well.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: Really?
2:13
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
2:15
SPEAKER_00: And so you're usually in New York, but you're doing some kind of a couple weeks in the Bay.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: That's correct.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm actually on the fence about this a little bit because I'm based in New York
2:24
SPEAKER_01: and I've been living there for two years because if you're a European Jew,
2:28
SPEAKER_01: that's where you have to start.
2:29
SPEAKER_01: There are rules.
2:30
SPEAKER_01: That's like level zero.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: And now I'm thinking maybe I should come here.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: This was going to be one of my questions.
2:38
SPEAKER_01: I'm feeling a strong pull and I'm emotionally conflicted about
2:42
SPEAKER_01: because this is like so far away from home.
2:44
SPEAKER_01: Every time I walk around in San Francisco, I'm feeling like I have a lot of friends here.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: My investors are here.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people I work with are here.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: But I might as well be in New Zealand in terms of cultural proximity to where I'm from.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: I'm Central European.
2:58
SPEAKER_01: I'm technically from the Shire of Europe,
3:00
SPEAKER_01: if the Shire was something that commits horrible mistakes in wars
3:03
SPEAKER_01: and gets invaded all the time.
3:05
SPEAKER_01: We have like two hills and two rivers, one of which we don't like.
3:11
SPEAKER_01: So that's my like geographical backdrop.
3:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm Hungarian.
3:15
SPEAKER_01: So here I'm like, you know, Alice in Wonderland.
3:18
SPEAKER_01: Like you guys have everything.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: All right,
3:20
SPEAKER_00: let's get into that in a second.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: But just briefly before we do that, I, you know, I...
3:25
SPEAKER_00: I intro'd you, but I was curious.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: You have an unusual life.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: How do you describe what you do?
3:34
SPEAKER_01: Wow, it depends who's asking, right?
3:37
SPEAKER_01: I usually say that I'm a philosopher and a technologist.
3:41
SPEAKER_01: And if somebody's like, what's that?
3:43
SPEAKER_01: We don't understand.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: You lost us like five words ago.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: Then I say that my background is in philosophy and languages.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: And I run a technology startup.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: And you,
3:55
SPEAKER_00: and obviously you get a lot of attention,
3:58
SPEAKER_00: um, for these salons that you have this art of conversation and all of that.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that,
4:04
SPEAKER_00: that's, that's part of this and bringing this intellectual discourse to technology.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: Is that fair?
4:10
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
4:11
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was always my goal to build something where other people can run events
4:14
SPEAKER_01: that are not kind of poisoned by politics, that are not just about networking.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: They don't have a clear goal.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: That's the European side of me.
4:24
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I run inter-intellect.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: Anybody can host their own literary salons, workshops, book clubs there.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: It's going really well.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: We do very...
4:32
SPEAKER_01: Like beginner level stuff for young people.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: And we also now have the biggest publishers and the biggest thinkers,
4:39
SPEAKER_01: writers using our platform proactively.
4:42
SPEAKER_01: And you like guide people on how to make these successful.
4:46
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know how long I should go back.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: This isn't really the heart of what I'm interested in your ideas.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, now I just got to go.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're a host as well.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: So I think we are colleagues in this sense.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: So my background is in languages and philosophy.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: But my career since my late teens used to be in film and drama.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: So I wrote plays.
5:08
SPEAKER_01: I worked with screenwriters and wrote screenplays as well.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: It was like European art house level stuff,
5:15
SPEAKER_01: but I also worked on more like bigger budget stuff as a script doctor.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
5:22
SPEAKER_01: around 15 years ago, I started becoming very interested in the science of dialogue.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: And I started researching like neuro linguistics,
5:30
SPEAKER_01: like what happens in the brain when two people are talking.
5:33
SPEAKER_01: I started looking at like super early level NLP and what AI was doing at the time
5:39
SPEAKER_01: in terms of like languages and communication.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: And it was basically the understanding that since Aristotle we had understood how
5:48
SPEAKER_01: to create good conversations in drama.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: But science is just catching up to this ancient knowledge to be able
5:55
SPEAKER_01: to mathematize it and express it through technology.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: I thought, okay, that's great.
5:59
SPEAKER_01: I spent 15 years trying to have fictional people have better conversations.
6:04
SPEAKER_01: And what if I did something that can do that for real people?
6:07
SPEAKER_01: And so Interintact was born first as an AI company, and I was building...
6:11
SPEAKER_01: At the time, very heuristics-based tools to help people have better dialogues.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: And then at some point, I thought, this is too early.
6:18
SPEAKER_01: AI is too early for this.
6:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm just going to do super analog.
6:22
SPEAKER_01: Interinsack literally started with an Excel sheet and my insomnia.
6:26
SPEAKER_01: I built it that way.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: Can we do at scale, materially better dialogues for people without intervention?
6:35
SPEAKER_01: And so I started hosting.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: I mean, today we've done this tens and tens of times.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: We haven't had any toxic incident during any of the conversations for seven years.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: So I know that something in the kind of human engineering algorithm really beautifully works.
6:49
SPEAKER_01: But it's all theater.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: Like I take everything from Aristotle and classical dramaturgy.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: This is creating...
6:57
SPEAKER_01: A sudden setting, a play, and then let people play in that.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: And somehow the result is really good.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: But you're not hosting all of these, so how do you push the other people in the right direction?
7:09
SPEAKER_01: I don't push them.
7:10
SPEAKER_01: It's the magic.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: I host a lot of events myself on the platform,
7:13
SPEAKER_01: so I do a kind of role modeling, as VCs would say.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: It's really important.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people,
7:19
SPEAKER_01: when they want to come on Interinsact and start their hosting career,
7:23
SPEAKER_01: they want to build their community,
7:24
SPEAKER_01: they want to build their praxis, they first come to a couple of my events.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: And then, of course, I Experiment and play with the genre a little bit.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: But they see the basic,
7:35
SPEAKER_01: which is a living room-sized group of people who usually don't know each other.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: There is a big topic or a big person present,
7:44
SPEAKER_01: something that,
7:46
SPEAKER_01: you know,
7:46
SPEAKER_01: removes whatever is being discussed from your immediate self a little bit
7:50
SPEAKER_01: that helps people, you know, have a little bit of space for the discussion.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: And then there is a way of doing it so that everybody...
8:00
SPEAKER_01: Joins in and everybody becomes a really good conversationalist, which is the magic part.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's like a lost art and I see the children growing up.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: I have two boys who are actually quite personable and can strike up the conversation.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: I noticed they're Not like I'm trying to compare them fully to their peers.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: I just noticed that these young kids are not the best conversationalists these days.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: Well, just send them to Interintellect will help.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: So I wanted to go, I did want to go a little biographical.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: You come from a part of the world that's like near and dear to my heart.
8:39
SPEAKER_00: When I was, oh God, how old was I?
8:42
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I did a semester abroad in the Czech Republic at school.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: And then I did many months around the same time.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: Backpacking through Europe and Budapest was like this.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: When I went to visit there, it was a revelation for me.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: I was a Russophile growing up as a teenager and deeply into the Soviets
9:01
SPEAKER_00: and had read all this Soviet literature.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: So just to kind of get to see some of the remnants of this, it was cool for me.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: I know it comes with a lot of baggage, but it was cool to see for me.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: And Budapest and then Prague kind of became my My two favorite spots.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: Prague's a little different these days than when I went to visit.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: I did my semester abroad in 99.
9:24
SPEAKER_00: So it was like,
9:26
SPEAKER_00: it still was like a little more, still a few more, less touristy and a little more.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: You had the Gordy Park.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: And it was, I enjoyed that.
9:36
SPEAKER_00: Like they did not like tourists.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: They didn't like Americans.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: It felt, it was nice.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: You had to, if you spoke a little Czech, you could.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: The world would open up to you, and it was cool.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: But so you grew up in this quite famous family that's making...
9:52
SPEAKER_00: A television, like an extremely popular television show, right?
9:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was kind of wild.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: I always tell people here that my parents were super famous,
9:59
SPEAKER_01: but in a tiny country nobody cared about.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: So you learn a lot about fame and public life through the prism that there is fame
10:07
SPEAKER_01: and it's so relative.
10:08
SPEAKER_01: In my Substack essays, I write a lot about fame and how I myself approach it.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: So my grandfather was a big film star during communism.
10:18
SPEAKER_01: One of my grandfathers,
10:20
SPEAKER_01: basically the regime picked him to be The everyman,
10:23
SPEAKER_01: the kind of Sean Penn style roles always went to him.
10:26
SPEAKER_01: He died when my mom was very young, so I never had a chance.
10:29
SPEAKER_01: We never overlapped.
10:31
SPEAKER_01: And my parents, my dad had passed away, and my mom is still active in her career.
10:36
SPEAKER_01: They spent their entire careers in television, making TV shows.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: They had a couple of really big hits.
10:43
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, comparable in the U.S. to The Golden Girls or something like that.
10:47
SPEAKER_01: That level of...
10:49
SPEAKER_01: You know, a basic tenet of culture, pop culture,
10:52
SPEAKER_00: pop culture history.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: I mean, wasn't there like 80% of the population was watching these shows or something?
10:57
SPEAKER_00: Oh, no, 100.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: There was one
10:58
SPEAKER_01: TV show.
10:59
SPEAKER_01: So you either watched my mother in the 80s on Saturdays or nothing, or you didn't watch TV.
11:04
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: These were the two options.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: There was one channel.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: And it was what?
11:10
SPEAKER_00: Like a sitcom or a drama?
11:12
SPEAKER_01: So they did a
11:16
SPEAKER_01: comedic police show throughout the 80s.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: And then my dad did,
11:21
SPEAKER_01: I think his best TV show was just around the time of the change of the regime
11:26
SPEAKER_01: between 1989 and 1991, which took place in the army.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: But sadly,
11:34
SPEAKER_01: like the whole concept was the compulsory enlistment that still was going on
11:39
SPEAKER_01: during communism.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: And then basically communism disappeared underneath them.
11:43
SPEAKER_01: And they still did one more season because it was absolutely hilarious.
11:47
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a masterpiece.
11:48
SPEAKER_01: And then they stopped because this compulsion, this societal compulsion just went away.
11:55
SPEAKER_01: And then my dad also did throughout the 90s,
11:58
SPEAKER_01: the first and to this day,
12:00
SPEAKER_01: kind of the only big Hungarian sitcom that Basically,
12:05
SPEAKER_01: I think he sat down and on these VHS tapes watched a bunch of American sitcoms
12:09
SPEAKER_01: to try to decide, you know, the history and the format.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: And that ran, I think, throughout the 90s.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: So I grew up on the side.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: I grew up with the child actors there and saw how it's being pulled together.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: So how did they...
12:25
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so your mom's an actor.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: And your dad's directing and writing.
12:29
SPEAKER_01: He was a producer and director.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: And then...
12:32
SPEAKER_00: Show creator.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: And how, I mean, they must have been confined in what they could say initially.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: Or no, were they pushing?
12:40
SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: So in the 80s, yes.
12:45
SPEAKER_01: And I do remember,
12:46
SPEAKER_01: I actually wrote about this in an essay,
12:48
SPEAKER_01: Three Prologues to Language,
12:50
SPEAKER_01: that one of my first interests in drama and dialogue science
12:54
SPEAKER_01: and dialogue writing was It was not even the fact
12:57
SPEAKER_01: that my parents were making these shows.
12:59
SPEAKER_01: I did learn, and I'm happy to talk about what you learn when you grow up that way.
13:03
SPEAKER_01: It was more that in the 80s,
13:04
SPEAKER_01: when I was still in kindergarten,
13:06
SPEAKER_01: there was this absurd vibe where parents,
13:09
SPEAKER_01: adults were afraid of children, which you never really see.
13:13
SPEAKER_01: Maybe during the craziest woke era, you would see something like that.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know,
13:18
SPEAKER_01: say you have a child who's five years old,
13:20
SPEAKER_01: and at home with your wife,
13:21
SPEAKER_01: you say that,
13:23
SPEAKER_01: That article is clearly written by a propagandist or that actress is only
13:27
SPEAKER_01: in this movie because, I don't know, she is with this big party officer.
13:33
SPEAKER_01: Or you would say that,
13:34
SPEAKER_01: you know, this hospital is falling apart because we went there to get a flu shot.
13:37
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
13:38
SPEAKER_01: there are like deer grazing in the quarters and the child is listening at
13:44
SPEAKER_01: the dinner table.
13:45
SPEAKER_01: And you have to somehow ensure that the child is not going to go in and talk
13:49
SPEAKER_01: about it at kindergarten because then the Kindergarten teacher hears it who is maybe
13:53
SPEAKER_01: a big party operationic and they will report on you and you lose your job
13:58
SPEAKER_01: and nobody goes to university anymore in your family ever.
14:01
SPEAKER_01: So I remember this weird tension and I think it does,
14:04
SPEAKER_01: first of all,
14:04
SPEAKER_01: like dictatorships and dictatorial structures do multi-generational harms
14:09
SPEAKER_01: to families and people misunderstand how well they are able to keep
14:14
SPEAKER_01: an oppressive narrative outside their home.
14:16
SPEAKER_01: It actually poisons your relationship with your children, with your wife, like everything.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: It's a, It's a full texture coverage in society.
14:26
SPEAKER_01: And so I remember that tension and always being told not to say things
14:30
SPEAKER_01: or say things differently when I'm engaged with adults.
14:34
SPEAKER_01: And I think that was my first kind of peek behind the curtain,
14:38
SPEAKER_01: that there is this thing we call language,
14:40
SPEAKER_01: and it seems like the truth, but that people might be, like there's subtext.
14:45
SPEAKER_01: I think I realized very early that there is subtext and that my parents are very,
14:49
SPEAKER_01: very aware of it.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: And were your parents,
14:51
SPEAKER_00: were they trying to push buttons with their show or they were just trying?
14:56
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't that kind of show.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: They were just making entertainment.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: Like, was it a commentary, I guess, on the times?
15:05
SPEAKER_01: I think through comedy, a lot of things are permissible.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: But I think it's very important for Americans to understand that during
15:14
SPEAKER_01: the Soviet regime, people didn't know...
15:17
SPEAKER_01: People could not faith them that it could ever go away.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: So I was working on a movie when I was still a screenwriter about
15:24
SPEAKER_01: the Chernobyl disaster and its coverage within the Hungarian evening news and
15:27
SPEAKER_01: the media.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: And I interviewed all these newsmen who worked like they were the morals of
15:34
SPEAKER_01: the Hungarian media between like 85 and 89 or 1990.
15:41
SPEAKER_01: And I was very interested in the moral quandary of having professional Excellence
15:48
SPEAKER_01: in such circumstances because they were really the best,
15:52
SPEAKER_01: best, best, best, best, but the wider system was horrible.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: So what is your talent serving?
15:57
SPEAKER_01: I was very interested in the movie.
16:00
SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that they always said was that even in September 1989,
16:07
SPEAKER_01: so one month before the Hungarian Republic was announced on the 23rd of October 1989
16:14
SPEAKER_01: on a balcony, they could not imagine that it's falling apart.
16:19
SPEAKER_01: The same way as we can't imagine that,
16:21
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, the United States would fall apart ever, right?
16:23
SPEAKER_01: And if somebody comes and says that,
16:25
SPEAKER_01: you say it's Lindy or that,
16:27
SPEAKER_01: you know,
16:28
SPEAKER_01: it has survived so many other things and I think one thing that you learn as
16:31
SPEAKER_01: an Eastern European is that anything can go away.
16:34
SPEAKER_01: And if we like something and if we want it to stay,
16:36
SPEAKER_01: not saying that communism was like that,
16:38
SPEAKER_01: but there are good things in the world,
16:40
SPEAKER_01: like apolitical conversation spaces,
16:43
SPEAKER_01: then you have to have a couple of people who do this as a job to fight
16:46
SPEAKER_01: for their continued existence.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's one of...
16:50
SPEAKER_00: The reasons I'm so interested in that part of the world,
16:52
SPEAKER_00: it feels like they're just always for centuries now just in the between Russia
16:58
SPEAKER_00: and Germany.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: We are the halfway house.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: Like Hungary is like right the invadable corridor.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, I mean, there are noble aspects of that as well.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: Like Hungary had a...
17:13
SPEAKER_01: A prime minister in 1940 who committed suicide over this very moral dilemma
17:20
SPEAKER_01: because he didn't want to give the railway up for the Germans to transport weapons
17:26
SPEAKER_01: across the country.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: Because then your country basically becomes a target, right?
17:30
SPEAKER_01: Like a bombarded target.
17:31
SPEAKER_01: And he didn't want to.
17:32
SPEAKER_01: Endanger the population.
17:33
SPEAKER_01: There was no way out.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: He killed himself.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: So when you were growing up,
17:37
SPEAKER_00: then some people would just recognize your parents on the street then.
17:41
SPEAKER_01: Oh, my God.
17:42
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
17:42
SPEAKER_01: And my parents were paranoid about it.
17:44
SPEAKER_01: And ever since then, I feel really sorry for all famous people.
17:48
SPEAKER_01: It's terrible.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: And then especially.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you get a reservation more easily,
17:51
SPEAKER_00: but that's literally where it stops.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: So many times, I mean, you just take on extra risk, too, by being of note.
18:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they were very, very much kind of visible in the system.
18:07
SPEAKER_01: But I also think that because of that,
18:08
SPEAKER_01: they kind of left them alone because, you know, they weren't doing direct harm.
18:14
SPEAKER_01: It was all just quote unquote comedy.
18:17
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, very interesting.
18:18
SPEAKER_01: I think everything I do in my adult life,
18:21
SPEAKER_01: it basically comes from these inspirations in a way that I'm still exploring.
18:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: This episode is brought to you by Brex.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: I spend all of my time inside of
18:30
SPEAKER_00: the world's most ambitious companies making rockets, semiconductors, robots.
18:36
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18:42
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18:45
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19:26
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19:31
SPEAKER_01: slash Core Memory.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: So you get in, I mean, you've had, like you mentioned, this varied career, and when I was...
19:40
SPEAKER_00: Buried up
19:40
SPEAKER_01: to a point,
19:41
SPEAKER_01: and I started interns like 10 years ago,
19:42
SPEAKER_01: and I haven't slept since, and it's just been that one thing.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, before that, it was crazy.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: There was a quote that I found somewhere in here about, maybe I'm fast-forwarding too much.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: Sure, go for it.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: You wrote, I went on Twitter in 2018 because I had nothing.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: I had lost everything.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, okay...
20:04
SPEAKER_00: I woke up one day and I thought, I don't care.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: One thing I have is myself.
20:08
SPEAKER_00: And this is all leading up to, I believe, your move to the US around this time.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: So what happened?
20:16
SPEAKER_00: Why did you wake up in 2018 and have nothing?
20:19
SPEAKER_01: I basically had a major life cataclysm in January 2015 because of
20:25
SPEAKER_01: a domestic violence incident that blew up my whole family.
20:29
SPEAKER_01: And I lost everything.
20:32
SPEAKER_01: I left basically with a suitcase.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: I got stuck in England at the time.
20:38
SPEAKER_01: I was doing very badly.
20:39
SPEAKER_01: I lost a lot of my friends and family members.
20:43
SPEAKER_01: And I basically restarted my whole life, put it back together.
20:46
SPEAKER_01: I had complete PTSD for a year, so I didn't have thoughts.
20:51
SPEAKER_01: And that was great because I could read any scientific book I wanted.
20:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm serious.
20:55
SPEAKER_01: My brain had no resistance.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: It was like an empty bucket.
20:59
SPEAKER_01: And I was just like shoveling coding and biology and whatever I could find into it.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: It was great.
21:05
SPEAKER_01: It was actually a very interesting time.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: Meaning you had no thought, you had no competing thoughts.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: No, I had no thought at all for nine months.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: It was amazing in some weird way.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: Your brain just shut down.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: It just shut down completely.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: And so I just fed it like crazy.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: I was like, it will come back online at some point.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: It's like rebooting.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: And it did and eventually it came back and I became a completely different person.
21:26
SPEAKER_01: So that was very interesting.
21:29
SPEAKER_01: And then basically the past 10 years, I put my life back together.
21:33
SPEAKER_01: At first I was working in like babysitting,
21:36
SPEAKER_01: Catering,
21:37
SPEAKER_01: customer service, basic jobs, which actually are super useful now as a founder.
21:41
SPEAKER_01: I can train my customer service team because I literally have done that job.
21:45
SPEAKER_01: I did it when I was a poor, traumatized immigrant in London.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: And then in 2016, I had the realization of what I had to do.
21:57
SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to be a founder beforehand.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: I just wanted to work at a place that is like inter-intellect and it didn't exist.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, oh, no, I have to become a startup founder.
22:05
SPEAKER_01: So I sat down, read a bunch of things about it.
22:07
SPEAKER_01: Like, what is a startup?
22:08
SPEAKER_01: Where are startup founders?
22:10
SPEAKER_01: And I basically like two days later, I registered a company.
22:15
SPEAKER_01: I also was reading this article.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: There was a New Yorker interview that Sam Altman gave in, I think, October 2016.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, wow, this is how you make a real difference in the world.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: It's startups.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: It's not a production company.
22:30
SPEAKER_01: It's not a think tank.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: That was the Y Combinator story.
22:34
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: And it was very funny because the first time I ever came to America when I was 35,
22:39
SPEAKER_01: Sam was my first meeting.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: Because I was like,
22:42
SPEAKER_01: you have to meet me because you changed my life with this weird article,
22:45
SPEAKER_01: with this weird interview.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: And that's why it's so important to always give interviews.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: You never know who's going to read it.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: How'd you get in touch with him?
22:52
SPEAKER_01: I called, DMed him.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: On X?
22:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: And you met him here in the Bay Area?
22:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and he was still at YC and I brought him Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon,
23:02
SPEAKER_01: which is one of the best books on.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: Changing the life of younger people or beginners.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: And then a one and a half,
23:09
SPEAKER_01: two year period started when I got a job in London working as a night editor
23:13
SPEAKER_01: on finance news.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: So I would go to work at 10.30 in the evening and finish at 6.30 in the morning.
23:18
SPEAKER_01: I would sleep a few hours and then I built Intrinsack for one and a half years.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: First as the app and then as the platform for the community and hosting.
23:28
SPEAKER_01: And then slowly but surely it gained traction.
23:30
SPEAKER_01: I went on Twitter or X, as you mentioned.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: I was like, well, I don't have anything anymore.
23:34
SPEAKER_01: I used to have a status and famous parents and nice clothes.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: And now I'm sitting in this bed sit basically in London.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: I have a suitcase and another suitcase for my books.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: Let's see what I'm made of.
23:48
SPEAKER_01: And after this experimentation,
23:49
SPEAKER_01: a couple of visits here,
23:50
SPEAKER_01: when I got to sit down with people and ask for guidance,
23:54
SPEAKER_01: I realized, okay, this is how internet tech is going to be.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: And then I just started raising money and kicked it off.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: And then five minutes later, the pandemic started.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, you talk about how quickly it happened, right?
24:05
SPEAKER_00: And that you were amazed that this was possible.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: There is still this funny thing about Silicon Valley where- I mean,
24:11
SPEAKER_00: you're reaching out to Sam as a total stranger.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: I've always found this the whole time I've been reporting.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: It feels different to other industries.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: Completely different.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, maybe it happens.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure like a big pharma CEO or like,
24:27
SPEAKER_00: you know,
24:28
SPEAKER_00: the head of Exxon is just taking random meetings from people
24:32
SPEAKER_00: who reach out very often.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure like why tech still is that way as it's gotten bigger and has
24:39
SPEAKER_00: a shape that's a little more similar to these other industries,
24:42
SPEAKER_00: but it still seems to exist.
24:44
SPEAKER_01: I really believe in that.
24:45
SPEAKER_01: I mean, of course, tech is a very imperfect industry.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: It has people with various different incentives.
24:50
SPEAKER_01: And when we say tech,
24:51
SPEAKER_01: you can use it as a kind of Rorschach test
24:54
SPEAKER_01: where anybody can confirm their previous biases and think whatever they want.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: But I find that a lot of things that we say about America
25:04
SPEAKER_01: in any era is only
25:06
SPEAKER_00: really true about a specific part of the country.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: You know,
25:10
SPEAKER_01: there was a time in the 20th century when people equated New York City with starting
25:15
SPEAKER_01: from zero, right?
25:16
SPEAKER_01: When all the immigrants went to New York and you could move into,
25:18
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, tenements and then one generation later get a law degree.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: There was a time when,
25:25
SPEAKER_01: you know,
25:26
SPEAKER_01: Hollywood was the American dream and people used becoming a star kind of metaphor
25:32
SPEAKER_01: for the American journey.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: I do think that that's Silicon Valley today, right?
25:37
SPEAKER_01: I always say that things that used to stop dates for me bring in investment
25:43
SPEAKER_01: and business for me in Silicon Valley.
25:46
SPEAKER_01: Because here it's like, oh yeah, she's a little bit weird.
25:48
SPEAKER_01: That's really good.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: We've been looking for somebody weird.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: There's money in this.
25:54
SPEAKER_01: And I just deeply value it.
25:56
SPEAKER_01: I think for all bizarre people, you need a place where that's somehow a competitive advantage.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: And right now that's Silicon Valley and people are like,
26:03
SPEAKER_01: I invest in, I mean, I'm sure you do that too.
26:06
SPEAKER_01: Like we are looking for The well-adjusted insanity that contributes to society and the future.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: I looked for that in my stories.
26:15
SPEAKER_00: Tell me.
26:15
SPEAKER_00: I've never become an investor type.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: Really?
26:18
SPEAKER_00: No, I mean, I was a journalist.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you can't for ethical reasons?
26:23
SPEAKER_00: I definitely couldn't when I was at the New York Times or Bloomberg.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: And then it's probably like a little bit of a grayer area now just because,
26:30
SPEAKER_00: well, I could do whatever I want, I suppose.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: But, yeah,
26:33
SPEAKER_00: I just tried never to get anywhere near investing in anything I'm going to write
26:36
SPEAKER_00: about.
26:37
SPEAKER_00: And so...
26:38
SPEAKER_01: That's clever.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: I write about a lot of stuff, so it's limiting.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: But it's sad.
26:44
SPEAKER_00: It's the thing I know the most about.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's true.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: And I have,
26:47
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's absurd to claim a proven knack at identifying some folks
26:54
SPEAKER_00: who are going to do pretty well, so it couldn't be useful.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: I invest in aerospace because I wanted to become an expert in something as
27:00
SPEAKER_01: an angel investor that has nothing to do with my day job.
27:03
SPEAKER_00: I saw that.
27:03
SPEAKER_00: I saw you were in Airship Ventures, I think?
27:07
SPEAKER_00: They're in Los Angeles, aren't they?
27:08
SPEAKER_01: There are a couple of really cool things there, yeah.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: Airspace is probably like the worst place you could invest.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: It's like the highest risk.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: You know,
27:18
SPEAKER_01: I think the chances for me to become a great intro investor are like not impossible,
27:23
SPEAKER_01: but down the line.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: So now I'm just following my heart.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
27:27
SPEAKER_01: Let's see what happens.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: So you're in London, you start reaching out, people like this weird person.
27:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: And then you're coming.
27:33
SPEAKER_01: Not everybody, of course.
27:34
SPEAKER_01: Right.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: Enough people.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: And this is 2016-ish and you're pitching this idea of creating
27:43
SPEAKER_00: this discourse,
27:45
SPEAKER_00: this intellectual boost to things.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: In my experience, the tech...
27:55
SPEAKER_00: If I'm trying to raise money for a documentary or something that's more in
27:59
SPEAKER_00: the arts world or that comes with this intellectual trappings,
28:03
SPEAKER_00: it's much easier for me to do it in New York than it is in Silicon Valley
28:07
SPEAKER_00: where you go to the people and you're like,
28:10
SPEAKER_00: well, you'll be lucky to get your money back on this documentary.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: That's sort of the goal is to end up with a really nice film,
28:16
SPEAKER_00: get your money back, and then we'll have some fun.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: You can go to Premiere, you can see your name, and you'll have made this art.
28:22
SPEAKER_00: I find Silicon Valley people have a very hard Time wrapping their head around why
28:26
SPEAKER_00: that would be of any value.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: So, but when I look at your investors, I mean,
28:30
SPEAKER_00: people like Balaji and some other folks,
28:33
SPEAKER_00: um, these are very much, you know, full on, full on tech, uh, Figures in this world.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I mean,
28:43
SPEAKER_00: did you find,
28:44
SPEAKER_00: obviously you found people were into this unconventional idea
28:48
SPEAKER_00: that doesn't immediately have the look of like a hockey stick growth SaaS company
28:54
SPEAKER_00: or something like that.
28:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean,
28:56
SPEAKER_01: first of all,
28:57
SPEAKER_01: in 2016 and 2017,
29:00
SPEAKER_01: basically into 2018,
29:01
SPEAKER_01: so two and a half years or two years,
29:05
SPEAKER_01: I was doing Just my own research and experimentation.
29:09
SPEAKER_01: So I did a pretty big private research on text messaging, on Twitter, Valence.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: I relied a lot on what Spotify was doing with music and how to understand
29:23
SPEAKER_01: from lyrics and cadence the sentiment of different songs.
29:28
SPEAKER_01: And I thought that I could do that on language.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: And nobody really was doing this at the time.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: I was invited to give talks at At the time it was called Twitter in London.
29:39
SPEAKER_01: It was a new area.
29:41
SPEAKER_01: Everybody was focusing on blocking at the time.
29:44
SPEAKER_01: So this was the era when,
29:45
SPEAKER_01: you know,
29:46
SPEAKER_01: the New York Times and the kind of established media branch in the U.S.
29:51
SPEAKER_01: was very convinced that the Internet is helplessly toxic and harmful.
29:57
SPEAKER_01: And the best thing we can do for people is to build walls and give them shields
30:01
SPEAKER_01: that they can switch on anytime they want.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: Nobody trusted that,
30:04
SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
30:04
SPEAKER_01: Twitter would itself build these tools or Instagram,
30:08
SPEAKER_01: you know, later on built their tools as well.
30:11
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know,
30:13
SPEAKER_01: I always wanted to do something positive because I,
30:15
SPEAKER_01: you know,
30:16
SPEAKER_01: coming from academia and coming from cinema,
30:18
SPEAKER_01: I know that If the setting is right,
30:21
SPEAKER_01: people will have very,
30:22
SPEAKER_01: very fruitful conversations with each other and they will do deep association.
30:26
SPEAKER_01: Like on inter-intellect,
30:27
SPEAKER_01: we have so many marriages, babies, books, co-written, people moving to each other.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: So clearly setting leads to good conversations at scale.
30:35
SPEAKER_01: And then that leads to real change in people.
30:40
SPEAKER_01: And so I had a lot of domain knowledge.
30:43
SPEAKER_01: And by the time I realized that this was going to be something,
30:45
SPEAKER_01: something like inter-intellect,
30:47
SPEAKER_01: which was Mid 2019, I wrote a viral essay that just went crazy.
30:55
SPEAKER_01: I put on a waiting list on the internet and it just went crazy.
30:59
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, okay, so this is what people want.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: It was counterintuitive to me because I'm Eastern European,
31:04
SPEAKER_01: so I really wanted to do an app and suffer.
31:07
SPEAKER_01: And this was fun.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: So I was like, I can't do something as a job that is fun for me.
31:11
SPEAKER_01: How am I going to suffer every day?
31:13
SPEAKER_01: And so I had to like resolve that internally.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: And then I started reaching out.
31:19
SPEAKER_01: So I had a lot of proof of concept and I started just running it for free myself
31:24
SPEAKER_01: a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot.
31:26
SPEAKER_01: And by the time my two rounds came,
31:31
SPEAKER_01: I was basically doing the only such company that is surviving and thriving
31:37
SPEAKER_01: and growing and where the core idea never went away.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: But Balaji wanted me to turn it into a DAO.
31:47
SPEAKER_01: And for a while,
31:48
SPEAKER_01: every single text message that I exchanged with Balaji was like, hey, how are you?
31:51
SPEAKER_01: You should turn Interintact into a DAO.
31:54
SPEAKER_01: Okay, hey, how are you?
31:55
SPEAKER_01: Have you considered turning Interintact into a DAO?
31:58
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, is this a bot?
32:00
SPEAKER_01: Have you built a bot?
32:01
SPEAKER_01: I love Balaji.
32:01
SPEAKER_01: We are collaborating over the summer with the network school.
32:06
SPEAKER_01: But obviously a lot of my investors have a lot of ideas of what we should be doing.
32:10
SPEAKER_01: And I hope that I will have the scope to be able to try a lot of these ideas.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: He used to hate me.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: Really?
32:17
SPEAKER_01: Why?
32:17
SPEAKER_01: Clubhouse incident?
32:18
SPEAKER_00: No, I used to make fun of him on X because I think I said that his tweets were like,
32:27
SPEAKER_00: I forget what I said, something about sort of deranged fortune cookies.
32:32
SPEAKER_00: He would put out these.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: He's so smart.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: He definitely is on some things.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: He would put out these, you know, just his big proclamations and everything.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: He's the prophet, you know?
32:45
SPEAKER_00: Then he made fun of me for having a female name.
32:49
SPEAKER_00: And then he blocked me.
32:51
SPEAKER_01: That's very mature.
32:52
SPEAKER_00: But then he's come back.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: The last year, he sent me a DM.
32:56
SPEAKER_01: Only Taleb blocked me.
32:57
SPEAKER_01: I feel left out.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: He's a big blocker, I think.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: But then Balaji reached out.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: He's like just a couple weeks ago.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: You're doing great stuff.
33:07
SPEAKER_00: I should have him on the podcast.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: It'd be interesting.
33:12
SPEAKER_01: It's like couples therapy.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: Esther Farrell mediating.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: Trying to resolve this thing.
33:17
SPEAKER_01: I imagine he probably doesn't even know why he didn't like me originally.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: All right, pod friends.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: I am here to tell you about Send, Cut, Send.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: They are a manufacturing phenomenon.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: Whether you're working On your own car or you're a giant automotive company,
33:34
SPEAKER_00: a rocket maker,
33:35
SPEAKER_00: if you need metal cut, machine, or bent, you're going to Send, Cut, Send.
33:41
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33:45
SPEAKER_00: Go to sendcutsend.com slash Core Memory for a 15% discount on whatever you're trying to make.
33:52
SPEAKER_00: We love Send, Cut, Send.
33:53
SPEAKER_00: Go visit them today.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm going to change directions on you a little bit.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to set the stage.
34:00
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for being interested in my childhood.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: I really wanted to talk.
34:06
SPEAKER_01: I think it's really weird and interesting, but I'm like, are people interested?
34:09
SPEAKER_01: And then you are, so that's great.
34:11
SPEAKER_01: No, no, I'm into it.
34:12
SPEAKER_00: But then I just wanted to explore some ideas with you.
34:15
SPEAKER_00: And so I just want to kind of bring people up to speed,
34:17
SPEAKER_00: give a little flavor of where you're coming from.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: What would you say,
34:23
SPEAKER_00: given your journey and the role that X played in it,
34:31
SPEAKER_00: and then also your fascination with conversation and dialogue,
34:36
SPEAKER_00: how would you rate X in this moment in time in 2026 and its value to our world?
34:44
SPEAKER_01: I had a lot of conversations about this with my friends,
34:47
SPEAKER_01: and also in the internet, like Discord.
34:49
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people are extremely mad at Elon,
34:52
SPEAKER_01: and they find that, you know, ex-Twitter is no longer the same.
34:58
SPEAKER_01: I really like it.
35:00
SPEAKER_01: I feel like criticizing acts a little bit like criticizing New York City.
35:05
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's still the best place.
35:06
SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah,
35:07
SPEAKER_01: maybe this one theater closed or whatever subway line is now directed in
35:12
SPEAKER_01: a different direction.
35:14
SPEAKER_01: It's still unparalleled.
35:17
SPEAKER_01: My worry,
35:17
SPEAKER_01: actually,
35:18
SPEAKER_01: because,
35:18
SPEAKER_01: you know, you read up this quote by me where, you know, a 34-year-old woman who...
35:23
SPEAKER_01: Used to have a life and now she lost it and she's like building a new life.
35:27
SPEAKER_01: In 2018, you could go on X on Twitter and rebuild.
35:33
SPEAKER_01: Like it was a very meritocratic system.
35:34
SPEAKER_01: If you were interesting and you had something to say,
35:37
SPEAKER_01: you were hardworking and people saw that you were consistent and not super unstable
35:41
SPEAKER_01: or not beyond the pale at least.
35:43
SPEAKER_01: You could get a job.
35:44
SPEAKER_01: You could find your spouse.
35:46
SPEAKER_01: Interintellect in many ways was born out of Twitter communities.
35:51
SPEAKER_01: We just expanded it and gave it a different format.
35:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure you could do that anymore.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: Almost all my intellectual life these days that is not inter-intellect related
36:02
SPEAKER_01: in group chats.
36:03
SPEAKER_01: I think if you're a young person,
36:05
SPEAKER_01: maybe the way of winning today or entering is to get into a group chat.
36:10
SPEAKER_01: But even that is just like 200 people.
36:12
SPEAKER_01: The chances of being discovered there or going viral, there's just a much harder journey.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: Why is it harder now on X?
36:21
SPEAKER_01: Because the algorithm works differently because a lot of people left or they are inactive.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying that if you're hyper-talented at responding and getting in touch
36:33
SPEAKER_01: with people, you can still win.
36:35
SPEAKER_01: But I don't think that it is at the scale as it was for my generation entering tech.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: So you had a place where you could,
36:43
SPEAKER_00: show off is probably not the right word,
36:45
SPEAKER_00: but show what you could do,
36:46
SPEAKER_00: get a little bit of attention, and fast forward your life to some degree.
36:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like in the French cafe where you could hang out with Sartre and whatever,
36:54
SPEAKER_01: and if you said nice things in the cigarette smoke,
36:56
SPEAKER_01: then they would publish you or something.
36:59
SPEAKER_01: Twitter was really like that in the glory period when I was using it for this purpose.
37:05
SPEAKER_01: I think today that's probably Discord, which I know less about because I run our own, but...
37:12
SPEAKER_01: I spent last time on other Discords, but it's in group chats.
37:16
SPEAKER_01: And to get into a group chat, I mean, it's already a gated thing.
37:19
SPEAKER_01: You can't just fight your way in.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: You brought up Elon.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: How do you feel about Elon?
37:26
SPEAKER_01: I have to say, okay,
37:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm just sharing this because this is a public platform
37:30
SPEAKER_01: and why would I not share something really embarrassing about myself?
37:34
SPEAKER_01: I am a complete sucker.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: Are you about to tell me you have one of his children?
37:38
SPEAKER_01: If I do, I don't know about it.
37:40
SPEAKER_01: So well done, Elon.
37:41
SPEAKER_01: I didn't notice.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: I, as a linguist, I'm completely obsessed with men with good syntax.
37:50
SPEAKER_01: And Elon has an amazing syntax.
37:52
SPEAKER_01: Like his use of the English language is just superb.
37:55
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, it's a proxy for high intelligence and analytical skills, et cetera, et cetera.
38:00
SPEAKER_01: So I'm a little bit forgiving because You know,
38:03
SPEAKER_01: clearly he's doing some things that I don't agree with or I don't understand or
38:06
SPEAKER_01: that seem very kind of knee jerk reactions to things.
38:10
SPEAKER_01: I'm also not, you know, in the business of encouraging fascism to take over social media.
38:16
SPEAKER_01: So maybe he should be more careful there, Elon, if you're listening.
38:19
SPEAKER_01: But his syntax is to die for.
38:21
SPEAKER_01: Like we have to we have to give this to the guy.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: You're not wrong.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: You're refreshing my memory now.
38:26
SPEAKER_00: I remember when I was working on the book and I was always struck by his writing style.
38:31
SPEAKER_00: I was struck by his emails.
38:33
SPEAKER_00: They're very efficient.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: He hardly ever makes an error of punctuation.
38:40
SPEAKER_00: He actually gets really upset if somebody is writing to him, does make one.
38:45
SPEAKER_01: His subclause is A+.
38:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
38:48
SPEAKER_00: Consistently.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: He's got a very distinctive way of communicating and clearly takes pride
38:55
SPEAKER_00: in his writing when he writes those big master plans and all these things.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: It's a mathematical skill proxy.
39:02
SPEAKER_01: So if you listen to,
39:03
SPEAKER_01: I love watching interviews with great mathematicians,
39:05
SPEAKER_01: even sometimes their English is not extremely developed,
39:08
SPEAKER_01: like they have a limited vocabulary,
39:11
SPEAKER_01: but their syntax is so strong because it's a mathematical skill.
39:15
SPEAKER_01: That they will come across as really proficient English speakers.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: And so when Elon speaks,
39:19
SPEAKER_01: I feel the kind of numerical areas in my brain flare up because it's like
39:25
SPEAKER_01: the formula is perfect.
39:27
SPEAKER_01: And I really, as a private pleasure, I really enjoy that.
39:30
SPEAKER_00: So I think it was 2024,
39:32
SPEAKER_00: you wrote about this difference between the conservatives and the liberals,
39:40
SPEAKER_00: this view of...
39:43
SPEAKER_00: The liberals think the past was sort of bad and we want to head to
39:47
SPEAKER_00: a more glorious future, the conservatives.
39:48
SPEAKER_01: The public nostalgics.
39:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and the conservatives want to hold on to what was and times used to be better
39:54
SPEAKER_00: and how this had transitioned to this world where it's kind of like
39:57
SPEAKER_00: the autists versus, what was, what's the second group?
40:01
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I don't know if I remember.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: There was a two by two.
40:03
SPEAKER_00: The public nostalgics.
40:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: So, and...
40:08
SPEAKER_01: The argument was that a group that's or a dichotomy,
40:14
SPEAKER_01: a division line that's maybe more important right now in America than left
40:17
SPEAKER_01: and right is whether you're a public nostalgic or not.
40:21
SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of like,
40:22
SPEAKER_00: do you think the how do you feel about the future and tech and where we're heading?
40:27
SPEAKER_00: So I think that was from 2024.
40:28
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
40:30
SPEAKER_00: Is this still something, I was hoping to get into this if it's still top of mind to you.
40:34
SPEAKER_01: Yes, it was the conservatives were saying that the future,
40:37
SPEAKER_01: sorry, the conservatives were saying that the past was good.
40:42
SPEAKER_01: The public nostalgics were saying that the future will be bad.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: And then the artist culture was saying that the future will be good.
40:52
SPEAKER_01: And the wokes were saying that the past was bad.
40:55
SPEAKER_01: That was the two by two.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: Now I remember.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:59
SPEAKER_01: That was kind of shocking to me when I started coming to America a lot.
41:03
SPEAKER_01: And now I'm in the process of relocating and being based here primarily.
41:07
SPEAKER_01: I did not expect this much public nostalgia in America as I do.
41:15
SPEAKER_01: I remember going to these East Coast conversations where extremely healthy,
41:21
SPEAKER_01: wealthy,
41:21
SPEAKER_01: well-educated people who are clearly winners of the liberal world order They went
41:27
SPEAKER_01: to school.
41:28
SPEAKER_01: They figured out even if they had student loans, they have to pay them back.
41:31
SPEAKER_01: They have great jobs, a MacBook, an Apple Watch, a Tesla, whatever serves them.
41:38
SPEAKER_01: And they were extremely negative about the future and without being positive about the past.
41:45
SPEAKER_01: And I just felt that that's kind of shocking.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: I started being curious about the intellectual honesty of it,
41:53
SPEAKER_01: whether they can really think this or this is something with
41:56
SPEAKER_01: which you gain followers or get tenure.
42:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm still not fully sure.
42:01
SPEAKER_01: I find it very, very strange.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: Maybe this is a first world problem that you get to be bummed out about the future.
42:07
SPEAKER_01: You know,
42:08
SPEAKER_01: if you come from an up and coming country,
42:12
SPEAKER_01: all the good things for you are in the future.
42:15
SPEAKER_01: So you better work for it.
42:17
SPEAKER_01: It's definitely the most shocking thing to me about American culture.
42:22
SPEAKER_01: You know,
42:23
SPEAKER_01: types of philosophies that Europeans have long abandoned,
42:27
SPEAKER_01: like first generation Frankfurt School critical theory, are flourishing here.
42:34
SPEAKER_01: And people expect to read books written in 1948 as a trauma reaction to
42:39
SPEAKER_01: a massive unprecedented defeat and destruction in the Second World War and trying
42:44
SPEAKER_01: to live on.
42:45
SPEAKER_01: In that,
42:46
SPEAKER_01: in the aftermath,
42:47
SPEAKER_01: they are used in a flourishing America to try to interpret today's world.
42:53
SPEAKER_01: And it's just, it doesn't work.
42:54
SPEAKER_01: That was not why it was written.
42:55
SPEAKER_01: It's shocking.
42:57
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm really into this idea, and for a bunch of reasons.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: I guess as a journalist, you are supposed to be somewhat cynical or...
43:10
SPEAKER_00: Skeptical by nature.
43:12
SPEAKER_00: And I have all those bits and pieces.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: I get either celebrated or bagged on for being generally optimistic, though, in my coverage.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: I've always been an optimist at heart.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: It's just sort of where I'm at.
43:25
SPEAKER_00: I get fascinated by the people who are pushing things forward in interesting ways.
43:31
SPEAKER_00: I just am into people who are passionate about whatever they're working on.
43:36
SPEAKER_00: I don't really place a ton of judgment like when we made the movie on Brian Johnson
43:40
SPEAKER_00: or whatever,
43:40
SPEAKER_00: I was really less concerned about whether what he was doing made a ton of sense
43:48
SPEAKER_00: or not.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: I was just more into this person who had just gone all in on this big idea.
43:53
SPEAKER_00: I like living in other people's universes for bits of time and just seeing how that works.
43:59
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm always battling with this a little bit.
44:03
SPEAKER_00: I cover Neuralink a lot and it's a pretty good example where I think
44:10
SPEAKER_00: the average person, at least that I run into, defaults to like Elon's evil.
44:15
SPEAKER_00: Putting a chip in someone's brain is for sure evil.
44:18
SPEAKER_00: Elon putting a chip in someone's brain is like the...
44:21
SPEAKER_00: It's so cool.
44:23
SPEAKER_00: The height of evil.
44:24
SPEAKER_00: But then I hang out with these patients, you know, and you can see this technology.
44:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm bullish on
44:31
SPEAKER_01: all that.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: Just put the chip in.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: So I mean, but you know, like the general public is definitely not.
44:37
SPEAKER_00: They definitely are not bullish about AI or any of really the titans of this industry.
44:45
SPEAKER_00: And so I was very curious about like, yeah, where you're.
44:48
SPEAKER_00: Head was at on this.
44:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, isn't,
44:50
SPEAKER_00: is some of this justified because these people have proven themselves
44:54
SPEAKER_00: to be just like everyone before them,
44:57
SPEAKER_00: greedy and power hungry and controlling on things.
45:01
SPEAKER_00: And, and,
45:02
SPEAKER_00: and AI does obviously seem frightening in many ways,
45:06
SPEAKER_00: even by their own, you know, descriptions and admission.
45:09
SPEAKER_00: But I feel like this is a major, this is at this particular moment in time,
45:17
SPEAKER_00: My sense is that the United States is mostly very anti-tech and we happen
45:24
SPEAKER_00: to be living in moments where it could be like an alien intelligence coming to life
45:30
SPEAKER_00: in the midst of all this.
45:31
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I was kind of curious where you think people are at.
45:35
SPEAKER_01: That's so interesting.
45:35
SPEAKER_01: And I find myself having become even more of an optimist running inter-intellect
45:40
SPEAKER_01: in ways that I didn't think I would ever imagine.
45:43
SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously I'm Eastern European,
45:44
SPEAKER_01: but I come from a very proactive family that,
45:46
SPEAKER_01: you know,
45:47
SPEAKER_01: where I saw my parents every Sunday sit together with their film crew
45:51
SPEAKER_01: and just like build something and then go and shoot it and then it would be
45:54
SPEAKER_01: on everybody's TV.
45:55
SPEAKER_01: So I come from that level of thought, creativity, immediate action.
46:00
SPEAKER_01: Let's see what happens.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: Let's iterate.
46:03
SPEAKER_01: But, you know,
46:03
SPEAKER_01: I started Inter-Internet Act in a very tech negative moment when I You know,
46:09
SPEAKER_01: the AI question was not so much to the forefront in the public eye.
46:14
SPEAKER_01: It was within EA circles,
46:16
SPEAKER_01: obviously,
46:16
SPEAKER_01: and the rationalist circles and some other, you know, university departments.
46:21
SPEAKER_01: But as I mentioned,
46:22
SPEAKER_01: you know,
46:23
SPEAKER_01: I would have been pushed to build shields and blocking algorithms and stuff like
46:28
SPEAKER_01: that at the time.
46:29
SPEAKER_01: That was what other female founders at the time were, you know, raising money for.
46:34
SPEAKER_01: And I kept doing intrinsics and I was like, I'm sorry to say, but I think the press is wrong.
46:38
SPEAKER_01: Like I don't want to be beheaded about it,
46:41
SPEAKER_01: obviously,
46:41
SPEAKER_01: but I'm seeing this with my own eyes and I see that this is not how toxicity happens
46:48
SPEAKER_01: or is amplified.
46:49
SPEAKER_01: And I'm just building my own systems and it's working.
46:53
SPEAKER_01: And maybe I'm blind,
46:55
SPEAKER_01: but like I'm sitting here all day and looking at these things and it is working.
47:00
SPEAKER_01: And now I've been sitting and doing it, you know, for seven years in the same format.
47:05
SPEAKER_01: And it is working and it detached me greatly from like hype opinion of the moment.
47:11
SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of my personal framing about whatever to believe,
47:16
SPEAKER_01: you know, fearmongering coming from the press.
47:19
SPEAKER_01: I do think that with regard to tech optimism,
47:23
SPEAKER_01: I'm always unsure whether that's a very loud minority who has kind of Luditism as
47:32
SPEAKER_01: an instinct to things or that's really a widespread problem.
47:36
SPEAKER_01: I think anti-data center campaigning is widening the problem
47:40
SPEAKER_01: into like local communities in America and messing with local governance
47:45
SPEAKER_01: or is possibly messing with it.
47:47
SPEAKER_01: I really hope that we will have more stories like what you are doing,
47:52
SPEAKER_01: where here's this person,
47:54
SPEAKER_01: they had an idea,
47:55
SPEAKER_01: they were insane enough to actually execute on this,
47:58
SPEAKER_01: and now it's working and the world is better.
48:01
SPEAKER_01: Maybe not coming from Elon,
48:02
SPEAKER_01: like he has a whole,
48:03
SPEAKER_01: like a gigantic,
48:07
SPEAKER_01: you know, All rot to work with that is very positive for some people, very negative.
48:13
SPEAKER_01: But like,
48:13
SPEAKER_01: what about all these people here in Silicon Valley who just wake up every morning,
48:17
SPEAKER_01: go to work and build the future literally?
48:20
SPEAKER_01: Like you come here and you feel like you're 15 years ahead.
48:24
SPEAKER_00: On the data center stuff, you think that's misguided, this pushback?
48:29
SPEAKER_01: It's clearly an ambivalent area and you have to be very careful about it.
48:34
SPEAKER_01: But demonizing people Trying to give America a competitive edge in a multipolar world.
48:42
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's long-term good for America.
48:44
SPEAKER_00: I do wonder what people want us to make at all anymore.
48:48
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if we don't have factories.
48:51
SPEAKER_01: Brooklyn, a farmer's market and community dancing.
48:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
48:56
SPEAKER_00: If you listen to them.
48:57
SPEAKER_00: So it'll be,
48:57
SPEAKER_00: I guess it'll be very interesting what would happen to the country if we can't,
49:01
SPEAKER_00: we're not allowed to do anything.
49:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
49:03
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm,
49:03
SPEAKER_01: you know,
49:03
SPEAKER_01: the bridge between the humanities and academia in many ways and the tech world
49:08
SPEAKER_01: and I get the prejudices of both sides and I have to say that,
49:14
SPEAKER_01: you know,
49:14
SPEAKER_01: maybe the most optimistic thing I'm doing with my life is making tech more cultured.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: And just like feeding people Goethe and Hume and
49:27
SPEAKER_01: the arts and history
49:28
SPEAKER_01: and econ all day on the platform.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: And they come back for more and a lot of people make money hosting these.
49:36
SPEAKER_01: It is working and it's actually much harder to bring the humanities people on board.
49:41
SPEAKER_01: I think tech,
49:42
SPEAKER_01: because exactly what you mentioned,
49:44
SPEAKER_01: that people can come here and make their fortune,
49:46
SPEAKER_01: there is an inherent openness because Silicon Valley wants to win.
49:51
SPEAKER_01: They're like,
49:51
SPEAKER_01: whatever you're giving me that will make me smarter, faster,
49:54
SPEAKER_01: stronger,
49:55
SPEAKER_01: more empathetic, like more aware of like what people want, they will take it.
50:01
SPEAKER_01: And I'm practical in this way.
50:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think this is why I had to leave Europe.
50:04
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
50:05
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
50:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to ask a very, I'm going to ask a long winded question.
50:07
SPEAKER_00: I'll try to, try to.
50:08
SPEAKER_01: Is it an essay?
50:10
SPEAKER_00: Go for it.
50:11
SPEAKER_00: So my general working theory is that,
50:15
SPEAKER_00: call it since,
50:17
SPEAKER_00: I don't know, 1982,
50:18
SPEAKER_00: kind of like the arrival of Apple and Microsoft,
50:23
SPEAKER_00: we have been dominated by this world where the engineers have become
50:29
SPEAKER_00: the most powerful, wealthiest, influential figures.
50:32
SPEAKER_00: And so clearly you have Different generations where JP Morgan, the bankers dominate things.
50:38
SPEAKER_00: Different groups dominate.
50:39
SPEAKER_00: We happen to be in the one where the engineers have taken over.
50:42
SPEAKER_00: And not to generalize grossly across all these people, but I've interviewed many of them.
50:47
SPEAKER_00: There is a pretty good common bond of wanting things to go efficiently to shape
50:53
SPEAKER_00: the world in this.
50:54
SPEAKER_00: They all were really like Star Trek fans.
50:57
SPEAKER_00: They have this vision of where they want the future to go.
51:02
SPEAKER_00: Everything in our life from like Uber, you know, DoorDash, all these things.
51:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you see the world operating more and more efficiently in this image.
51:12
SPEAKER_00: It takes me back sometimes to Don Quixote, which was one of my favorite books.
51:17
SPEAKER_00: And there's like an argument you could make where Sancho Panza kind
51:21
SPEAKER_00: of represents this very capitalist,
51:25
SPEAKER_00: time is money type attitude that had taken over society and Don Quixote.
51:31
SPEAKER_01: Make it make sense.
51:32
SPEAKER_00: Yes, like very rational.
51:35
SPEAKER_00: And Don Quixote represents this figure lost in time who's trying to restore some of
51:41
SPEAKER_00: the magic and the uncertainty and the sparkle of the world.
51:45
SPEAKER_00: There's a book called The Re-Enchantment of the World that gets into some of these ideas.
51:49
SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, you know, and then I've spent all this time.
51:52
SPEAKER_00: I will shut up in a second.
51:54
SPEAKER_00: I spent all this time interviewing these AI people Leaders of our time,
51:59
SPEAKER_00: the people actually developing the models,
52:01
SPEAKER_00: they too are not only from this engineering class, but are autists in many cases.
52:09
SPEAKER_00: They are extremely mathematical, often child prodigies or doing these math olympiads.
52:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm not talking about just kind of like good at math.
52:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about the best.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know,
52:22
SPEAKER_00: you could make this argument sort of like Sancho where The world has tilted
52:26
SPEAKER_00: so far this one way to this engineered, mathematical, clinical sort of model.
52:34
SPEAKER_00: And we're just heading there even faster and more directly.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: And all the things that you really care about, plays and poetry and novels and comics.
52:45
SPEAKER_00: All this more artistic ways of thinking just give way and get lost in all this and
52:49
SPEAKER_00: the people who really have the power.
52:51
SPEAKER_00: I know you're saying they do care about this, but maybe writ large don't.
52:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know.
52:59
SPEAKER_01: I like to joke that I'm bringing the decadence to the table.
53:03
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, an intern tax salon is the last thing you will do on that day.
53:06
SPEAKER_01: It's in the evening.
53:08
SPEAKER_01: You can put your feet up and have a glass of wine and you're not rushing anywhere.
53:12
SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of the The relaxation level at which good insights and connections happen.
53:19
SPEAKER_01: And I'm very proud to do that.
53:21
SPEAKER_01: I think, you know, the best things in life kind of make no sense.
53:25
SPEAKER_01: They have no fixed timeline.
53:27
SPEAKER_01: Sure, there is a More efficient way of getting the core information out of
53:34
SPEAKER_01: the brothers Karamazov,
53:36
SPEAKER_01: but do you really want to do that or do you want to enjoy the time it takes for you
53:41
SPEAKER_01: to go through that journey?
53:42
SPEAKER_01: A little bit like when you visit a city,
53:44
SPEAKER_01: like sure you can like bingo card your way around Paris or you can just go there for
53:49
SPEAKER_01: a week,
53:50
SPEAKER_01: make sure that you see the important things,
53:53
SPEAKER_01: but the point is the time spent and that you will Be a new person by the end of it.
54:00
SPEAKER_01: And so I always felt that if I want to bring this respect towards our elders,
54:08
SPEAKER_01: which is culture, right?
54:09
SPEAKER_01: It's a type of respect towards our elders into technology, which by the way, I greatly respect.
54:14
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I live and work in this industry because I think this is the best industry to work in.
54:20
SPEAKER_01: But if I want to open them and loosen them to Be able to just admit curiosity about
54:28
SPEAKER_01: the classics,
54:29
SPEAKER_01: about the great mysteries of the human psyche or how language is not just formulaic,
54:35
SPEAKER_01: it has musicality to it.
54:37
SPEAKER_01: And humans do,
54:38
SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
54:38
SPEAKER_01: phatic communication and endear each other and put each other in the mood.
54:42
SPEAKER_01: Then it's kind of my responsibility to bring that.
54:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm very grateful and excited when tech people want to work with me.
54:48
SPEAKER_01: I mean, 60% of inter-intellect is engineers.
54:51
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people are there.
54:52
SPEAKER_01: They are reading very heavy books.
54:54
SPEAKER_01: They are extremely, you know, approaching everything with intellectual humility.
54:58
SPEAKER_01: Amazing conversationalists.
55:00
SPEAKER_01: Truly grateful, you know, to be able to be in the presence of the elders in that sense.
55:04
SPEAKER_01: But it's my responsibility.
55:07
SPEAKER_01: So I've never been one to sit around like, oh, maybe something will fall into my lap.
55:11
SPEAKER_01: I think that's like immigrant power.
55:14
SPEAKER_01: I have to preach the Gospels and show the work.
55:18
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I always say that interactive works because every event is good.
55:23
SPEAKER_01: Not all of them are great.
55:24
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, greatness is a different distribution.
55:27
SPEAKER_01: But you know that whatever you click on, it's going to be really good quality.
55:31
SPEAKER_01: And so people can just like drop in and they will have a great experience.
55:35
SPEAKER_01: It's like, I don't know.
55:37
SPEAKER_01: Great short form journalists like David Brooks, right?
55:41
SPEAKER_01: Like not every David Brooks is life changing,
55:43
SPEAKER_01: but you kind of know when you click on his thing that is going to be a certain level
55:47
SPEAKER_01: and a certain format.
55:49
SPEAKER_01: And I think in times of uncertainty,
55:52
SPEAKER_01: when we have literally no blueprint,
55:55
SPEAKER_01: even if you're super familiar with classical literature and history,
55:59
SPEAKER_01: you don't really know how to deal with AI.
56:02
SPEAKER_01: Then it's
56:05
SPEAKER_01: Joint conversation, group inquiry is what is going to put you into a more relaxed attitude.
56:15
SPEAKER_01: Like, okay,
56:16
SPEAKER_01: no individual perhaps understand what's going on and no amount
56:20
SPEAKER_01: of reading autobiographies of warlords of the past will enlighten you about it.
56:25
SPEAKER_01: But you can trust the community in this, the human community.
56:30
SPEAKER_01: That there are people working on the big things.
56:32
SPEAKER_01: They are also curious, in some sense lost.
56:35
SPEAKER_01: You know something I don't.
56:36
SPEAKER_01: I know something you don't.
56:37
SPEAKER_01: You can create a group of 10 people
56:39
SPEAKER_01: and everybody will bring completely unique knowledge to the table.
56:42
SPEAKER_01: And I see as my job the creation of these spaces where
56:46
SPEAKER_01: the 10 people are actually interested and willing to come.
56:49
SPEAKER_01: And then throughout a very inefficient amount of time,
56:53
SPEAKER_01: say 90 minutes or two hours,
56:55
SPEAKER_01: they are happy to actually share their ideas and listen to each other.
56:59
SPEAKER_00: So one way to look at LLMs is that we've mathematically solved language.
57:06
SPEAKER_00: Does that take some of the romance out of language for you?
57:12
SPEAKER_01: I love using LLMs.
57:13
SPEAKER_01: I use them a lot.
57:14
SPEAKER_01: We have great debates.
57:16
SPEAKER_01: I have learned stuff from them about language and how they use language.
57:22
SPEAKER_01: I see human language as a very physical language.
57:24
SPEAKER_01: So it's a very temperature vibes, resonation based affair.
57:30
SPEAKER_01: You know, language is something that shortens distance.
57:32
SPEAKER_01: Like I can tell you, Ashley, careful.
57:34
SPEAKER_01: And I don't have to actually go there and stop you from...
57:38
SPEAKER_01: By accident, stepping off a cliff, right?
57:39
SPEAKER_01: I shorten the distance.
57:41
SPEAKER_01: Some people take up space with their speech.
57:43
SPEAKER_01: Some people narrow it, get closer.
57:46
SPEAKER_01: We hurt and endear each other with words.
57:49
SPEAKER_01: It creates a sensation on your skin, a resonation in your ears.
57:55
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think LLMs,
57:57
SPEAKER_01: even if they become physically embodied,
58:00
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that they will be able to feel that.
58:02
SPEAKER_01: And so it's never mutual.
58:05
SPEAKER_01: This is theater, right?
58:07
SPEAKER_01: When you're installed by a play in the auditorium, that's a physical sensation.
58:13
SPEAKER_01: You're aligning Neurally with other people and you're like biochemistry changes in
58:20
SPEAKER_01: the moment responding to the language.
58:23
SPEAKER_01: And so I think that, you know, I'm exploring AI products.
58:26
SPEAKER_01: I think everybody working with language is building something right now.
58:29
SPEAKER_01: And that's amazing.
58:30
SPEAKER_01: And we all should,
58:31
SPEAKER_01: but nothing will replace physical proximity and language is physical proximity.
58:36
SPEAKER_00: Do you think, how do you, do you have a sense?
58:39
SPEAKER_00: Do you think the LLM, when I use them now, I mean, they're still...
58:43
SPEAKER_00: Very much lack this soul and character to the writing.
58:48
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I assume they will get much better, but I don't know.
58:52
SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's some sort of limitation.
58:54
SPEAKER_00: What's your... How do
58:56
SPEAKER_01: you use them?
58:57
SPEAKER_01: What do you use them for?
58:58
SPEAKER_00: All kinds of things.
59:00
SPEAKER_00: I will use them for research on stories for if I have a guest coming on the podcast.
59:08
SPEAKER_00: Extremely helpful if I'm writing A long story in something like biotech and I need
59:14
SPEAKER_00: a refresher on how induced pluripotent stem cells work or,
59:19
SPEAKER_00: you know,
59:19
SPEAKER_00: something like that where, yeah,
59:20
SPEAKER_00: I'm not using their language,
59:21
SPEAKER_00: but I'm definitely borrowing a little bit just from it's much quicker to get back up
59:26
SPEAKER_00: to speed.
59:29
SPEAKER_00: Excuse me.
59:30
SPEAKER_00: I created agents to...
59:34
SPEAKER_00: To be editors for my work, I have the luxury of being able to put entire books into the LLMs.
59:42
SPEAKER_00: And so they can train on a lot of my writing.
59:46
SPEAKER_00: And if you're honest with them,
59:48
SPEAKER_00: I think I try to tell them my foibles and to watch out for those.
59:52
SPEAKER_01: Don't let me do that.
59:54
SPEAKER_00: Well, because now since starting my own company, I don't have a team of editors, but I do.
59:59
SPEAKER_00: Do you have 20 years of them reprimanding me for certain things?
1:00:02
SPEAKER_00: And so so I can put that in.
1:00:04
SPEAKER_00: So a bunch of things like that.
1:00:08
SPEAKER_00: All kinds of stuff like at home and everything.
1:00:10
SPEAKER_00: But it's on the writing where Claude is actually quite good at now.
1:00:16
SPEAKER_00: It keeps getting better and better of writing things that are like not grossly bland.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_00: And but I don't see any of that sparkle.
1:00:24
SPEAKER_00: I can tell.
1:00:25
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have the feel of a great writer or anything like that.
1:00:30
SPEAKER_00: And I still am not convinced it will as such.
1:00:34
SPEAKER_00: But I had Sam and Greg here.
1:00:36
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, if I talk to Dario, I think they're 100 percent convinced it will in short order.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_00: When you talked about Elon's syntax, you know, it's like.
1:00:44
SPEAKER_01: Oh, my God.
1:00:45
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:00:45
SPEAKER_00: But like, yeah, is it going to.
1:00:47
SPEAKER_01: Man with good syntax.
1:00:48
SPEAKER_01: That's like unparalleled.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:00:51
SPEAKER_01: It's really interesting.
1:00:52
SPEAKER_01: So I sometimes try with Claude to imitate my writing style.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_01: Like I have a lot of essays and stuff.
1:00:58
SPEAKER_01: I haven't yet written a book in English.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_01: It's coming.
1:01:01
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, there's some kind of textual data and it never works.
1:01:06
SPEAKER_01: Like I can't get caught.
1:01:06
SPEAKER_01: Claude to write a full inter-interact salon listing, even though that's like three paragraphs.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_01: Because it will just be a little bit off.
1:01:13
SPEAKER_01: And I would feel like, oh, I would be embarrassed if people thought that I wrote this.
1:01:17
SPEAKER_01: So using that adjective, that's way over the top.
1:01:20
SPEAKER_01: But one thing that I felt, I had a recent experience where I was like, oh my god, wow.
1:01:26
SPEAKER_01: That was with the new Opus.
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: Where I wrote a piece on my Substack, American Innocence, called Radical Common Sense.
1:01:36
SPEAKER_01: This is something I'm very, very interested in philosophically.
1:01:39
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
1:01:40
SPEAKER_01: as I work with a lot of authors,
1:01:42
SPEAKER_01: I'm seeing that some of them have an ambition to create
1:01:46
SPEAKER_01: a radical common sense driven book or idea.
1:01:49
SPEAKER_01: And some don't care.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_01: And so I was exploring this idea and kind of ended up back at Aristotle.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: And it was very interesting that And I used Claude to proofread it.
1:01:58
SPEAKER_01: So I'm a very big typo maker and I will put a typo into a one letter word.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_01: No problem.
1:02:05
SPEAKER_01: Give it to me.
1:02:06
SPEAKER_01: As I was like, Claude, please clean this up.
1:02:09
SPEAKER_01: Don't change it.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_01: Just tell me what I, you know, messed up.
1:02:11
SPEAKER_01: And then it gives me like a two kilometer long list.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_01: But then after it was done and I published it,
1:02:18
SPEAKER_01: I was like, OK, Claude, translate this into Hungarian.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_01: Just like, I don't know, I was just curious.
1:02:23
SPEAKER_01: And it was like 4 a.m., you know, I had been just writing and publishing it.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_01: I was just like, whatever, let's do it.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_01: And it gives me back this text.
1:02:31
SPEAKER_01: Like an attached doc that I had to download saying, okay,
1:02:35
SPEAKER_01: so I went and translated it into Hungarian,
1:02:37
SPEAKER_01: but I was trying to like match how you would use the Hungarian language.
1:02:43
SPEAKER_01: And so it make it a little bit erudite and like some big words, but like not super douchebaggy.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_01: I was like, okay, thanks for thinking there about me.
1:02:49
SPEAKER_01: That's relaxing and comforting.
1:02:51
SPEAKER_01: And they gave me this text without ever hearing or reading me in Hungarian ever.
1:02:56
SPEAKER_01: That really felt like I,
1:02:59
SPEAKER_01: as if I had written it, but then it was edited by like a really good editor.
1:03:04
SPEAKER_01: And they were like maybe, you know, five page document.
1:03:07
SPEAKER_01: There were,
1:03:08
SPEAKER_01: let's say six instances where I would have changed the language because it was
1:03:12
SPEAKER_01: a bit archaic or too slangy.
1:03:14
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:03:14
SPEAKER_01: Hungarian is a very small language,
1:03:15
SPEAKER_01: so they just don't have enough stuff on the Internet to train with.
1:03:20
SPEAKER_01: But it was astonishingly good.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_01: When I was teaching at university in Budapest,
1:03:27
SPEAKER_01: if a student had submitted this,
1:03:28
SPEAKER_01: I would have thought that this is a 70-year-old great journalist cosplaying
1:03:34
SPEAKER_01: in some kind of a Drew Barrymore move, trying to fit into this classroom.
1:03:39
SPEAKER_01: It was very good, and then edited well.
1:03:42
SPEAKER_01: I had a physical reaction when I opened that text, like, oh my god.
1:03:47
SPEAKER_01: In Hungarian, this is a very big deal.
1:03:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay, but I mean, you're so into literature and... Yeah,
1:03:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm a tough audience for it.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_01: I asked it, like, how do you talk to me?
1:03:57
SPEAKER_01: Like, how do you see my language?
1:03:59
SPEAKER_01: And it gives some very interesting feedback, yeah.
1:04:01
SPEAKER_00: And this excites you or this frightens you?
1:04:06
SPEAKER_01: I only ever get frightened of LLMs when I consider the privacy implications.
1:04:14
SPEAKER_01: Like, you know,
1:04:15
SPEAKER_01: I feed everything I eat into ChatGPT to calculate my calories,
1:04:20
SPEAKER_01: which maybe it's unhealthy.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_01: And please,
1:04:21
SPEAKER_01: if you're listening and you are concerned for me,
1:04:23
SPEAKER_01: find me on Axe and, you know, I'm open to suggestions.
1:04:26
SPEAKER_01: But it knows how much cottage cheese I had at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday.
1:04:32
SPEAKER_01: Is that good?
1:04:32
SPEAKER_01: Where does that go?
1:04:33
SPEAKER_01: I think that's the stuff that is not yet ironed out.
1:04:38
SPEAKER_01: And we are very much ahead and rushing ahead in how much we trust these systems.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_01: And we haven't had those big fallouts yet in society that all
1:04:45
SPEAKER_01: the other communication systems had to solve through intense political scrutiny.
1:04:50
SPEAKER_00: I always immediately default to going all in on everything.
1:04:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, me too.
1:04:55
SPEAKER_00: It's got my DNA already.
1:04:57
SPEAKER_00: It's got like all of my tax records.
1:05:00
SPEAKER_00: It's got everything.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm already fucked.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you're like, whatever.
1:05:03
SPEAKER_01: Let's see what happens.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm like that too.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_01: And cottage cheese because I'm Eastern Europeans.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_01: I love sour cream and cottage cheese.
1:05:08
SPEAKER_00: I just want to know what it can do.
1:05:12
SPEAKER_00: Since starting this company,
1:05:13
SPEAKER_00: I have paid way more attention to
1:05:16
SPEAKER_00: the metrics around things like how many people are watching our YouTube videos
1:05:20
SPEAKER_00: for how long and looking at YouTube shorts and Instagram and TikTok
1:05:25
SPEAKER_00: and all these things that I really didn't have to pay that much attention to before.
1:05:28
SPEAKER_00: I would just make them and then it was up to Bloomberg or whoever to see
1:05:33
SPEAKER_00: if they were successful or how the metrics were.
1:05:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:05:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're doing amazingly.
1:05:38
SPEAKER_00: It's huge.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_00: That's very kind of you.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_00: The depressing thing that I discovered is that we're definitely not heading towards
1:05:46
SPEAKER_00: a time where people are spending more time thinking about things for reading books,
1:05:52
SPEAKER_00: watching long movies, watching... Just wait, Ashley.
1:05:55
SPEAKER_01: Just wait.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_01: I'm here.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_01: Convince me.
1:05:57
SPEAKER_00: Convince me.
1:05:58
SPEAKER_00: Convince me.
1:05:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean, everything I see is quite alarming.
1:06:02
SPEAKER_00: You know, we spend...
1:06:03
SPEAKER_00: All this effort making these documentaries and people don't stay for
1:06:09
SPEAKER_00: the first 30 seconds of the video.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_00: YouTube just obliterates it with the algorithm and you're out.
1:06:15
SPEAKER_00: So if I want to do some,
1:06:18
SPEAKER_00: if we want to do,
1:06:18
SPEAKER_00: our team is a lot of quite renowned documentary filmmakers and we like to do artsy,
1:06:26
SPEAKER_00: different.
1:06:26
SPEAKER_00: We don't like the episodes to be the same all the time.
1:06:28
SPEAKER_00: We like to express ourselves and The algorithm is brutal on you.
1:06:33
SPEAKER_00: You need to immediately tell somebody exactly what this episode is about
1:06:37
SPEAKER_00: and just keep on moving.
1:06:39
SPEAKER_01: For narrative movies, that's terrible news, right?
1:06:45
SPEAKER_00: Where is a good screenplay, right?
1:06:49
SPEAKER_00: The deeper I've had to be in it as a result of running a business, the more alarming it all is.
1:06:56
SPEAKER_00: I see my kids...
1:06:58
SPEAKER_00: One of them's a big reader.
1:06:59
SPEAKER_00: The other one's not.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_00: I see for the younger one,
1:07:02
SPEAKER_00: I don't think people, Gen Z,
1:07:06
SPEAKER_00: these kids,
1:07:06
SPEAKER_00: they barely, honestly, I sound like an old person, but they don't read books.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_01: We are old.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they don't, they don't, I feel like book, I write books.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_00: I think books are like dying.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm also about to write a book, so I think a lot about this.
1:07:24
SPEAKER_01: I've noticed that a lot of times people have a dip in culture about something and
1:07:29
SPEAKER_01: then we proclaim that that thing is forever.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_01: When I was younger,
1:07:35
SPEAKER_01: the narrative was that we are going to be just super seismic country
1:07:40
SPEAKER_01: and everybody will be eating seven burgers a day and we will all die at age 45
1:07:46
SPEAKER_01: because our brains will explode with all the fake meat that we stuffed into it.
1:07:51
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not really seeing that happening.
1:07:52
SPEAKER_01: I don't know about you.
1:07:53
SPEAKER_01: I...
1:07:58
SPEAKER_01: Let's see what happens.
1:08:00
SPEAKER_01: I think that there is a time and place for what I call seated knowledge or seated dinner.
1:08:10
SPEAKER_01: There is a time for eating, standing up from the fridge directly.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_01: And that's also great.
1:08:14
SPEAKER_01: And I want people to have that in their lives because otherwise it would be very,
1:08:18
SPEAKER_01: you know, hard to manage modern life.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_01: And then there is also a time when you sit down and actually want to have
1:08:22
SPEAKER_01: a conversation with somebody and want to hear what's up with them
1:08:25
SPEAKER_01: and what they're working on.
1:08:27
SPEAKER_01: A book is a longer encounter.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_01: We are clearly constantly trying to find the time for it.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_01: But at the time when A new TV series comes out on Netflix,
1:08:37
SPEAKER_01: and if it's good, people will literally sit down and watch it for 17 hours.
1:08:42
SPEAKER_01: I'm not really easy to convince that people don't have sustained attention.
1:08:48
SPEAKER_01: So I'm curious how in the arms race between the creators and the audience,
1:08:53
SPEAKER_01: which has been,
1:08:53
SPEAKER_01: I'm pretty sure Hammer was like,
1:08:56
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:08:57
SPEAKER_01: depressing over the campfire,
1:08:58
SPEAKER_01: that people are not really listening these days about the part about the women,
1:09:02
SPEAKER_01: only battles.
1:09:03
SPEAKER_01: They only want the battles.
1:09:04
SPEAKER_01: Okay, guys, let's skip Clitamnestra and we just like go right to the head bashing.
1:09:10
SPEAKER_01: You know, we're constantly trying to find a place for culture.
1:09:15
SPEAKER_01: As a culture maker, I think it's my responsibility.
1:09:18
SPEAKER_01: So instead of, you know, moping about and being like, oh, people are not reading a la la.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_01: You know, I was also a generation, millennials, we were supposed to murder culture.
1:09:27
SPEAKER_01: You're welcome, by the way.
1:09:30
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, just me bringing up that we also built Airbnb is not always helpful.
1:09:34
SPEAKER_01: So I'm curious how...
1:09:36
SPEAKER_01: Gen Z will get the seated knowledge because that's just a necessary component of human life.
1:09:44
SPEAKER_01: Like you will get it from somewhere.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_01: And I want to see where they go.
1:09:47
SPEAKER_01: There are a lot of Gen Z are on inter-internet.
1:09:50
SPEAKER_01: I gave a talk here in SF a couple of days ago.
1:09:53
SPEAKER_01: It was fully sold out, mostly with Gen Z people.
1:09:58
SPEAKER_01: I'm doing a festival in two days here in San Francisco again.
1:10:02
SPEAKER_01: 70% of signups are young people.
1:10:05
SPEAKER_01: So clearly there is some kind of hunger for long form,
1:10:11
SPEAKER_01: for sustained attention,
1:10:13
SPEAKER_01: for longer journeys,
1:10:15
SPEAKER_01: whether that's a computer game or a really long TV series or,
1:10:20
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, reading War and Peace.
1:10:23
SPEAKER_00: Having this like outsider's view on the United States.
1:10:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_00: Along those lines.
1:10:29
SPEAKER_00: I mean, do you think we're on the... No Pop-Tarts.
1:10:32
SPEAKER_01: No Pop-Tarts.
1:10:33
SPEAKER_01: If I tweet that I'm having a Pop-Tart, I was kidnapped.
1:10:37
SPEAKER_01: I'm in North Korea right now.
1:10:39
SPEAKER_00: That's my one rule.
1:10:40
SPEAKER_01: No Pop-Tarts.
1:10:42
SPEAKER_00: Do you think we are... You write sometimes about complacency, about the luxury of...
1:10:51
SPEAKER_00: Like we talked about earlier, getting to complain about the future.
1:10:54
SPEAKER_00: She's so great.
1:10:55
SPEAKER_01: You want a world so peaceful that people can be complaining.
1:10:58
SPEAKER_00: So that part, I think, is good.
1:11:01
SPEAKER_00: And then you have this other element going on where there is this major backlash
1:11:05
SPEAKER_00: against AI in the tech world.
1:11:08
SPEAKER_00: And maybe this thing, Sam Altman...
1:11:12
SPEAKER_00: Had his Molotov cocktail thrown at his house and a bullet.
1:11:16
SPEAKER_01: And people published a photo of his house, which was completely shocking
1:11:19
SPEAKER_00: to me.
1:11:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:11:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know,
1:11:22
SPEAKER_00: one could suspect that's the beginning of a bigger backlash that has more oomph
1:11:29
SPEAKER_00: to it.
1:11:29
SPEAKER_00: You've lived through a country and a part of the world that has gone
1:11:34
SPEAKER_00: through these sorts of things.
1:11:35
SPEAKER_00: What do you kind of like expect the next...
1:11:38
SPEAKER_00: Do you think Gen Z,
1:11:41
SPEAKER_00: maybe it's not Gen Z,
1:11:42
SPEAKER_00: do you think some portion of the population actually has the energy
1:11:45
SPEAKER_00: to express themselves on their techno fears?
1:11:50
SPEAKER_00: Or do you think we're all too complacent and things are going to just move along quite smoothly?
1:11:55
SPEAKER_01: One of the positive things that I'm seeing is social media
1:11:58
SPEAKER_01: for younger people becomes very old coded.
1:12:02
SPEAKER_01: So, you know,
1:12:03
SPEAKER_01: in my work,
1:12:04
SPEAKER_01: I speak to a lot of authors and they sometimes some of them,
1:12:07
SPEAKER_01: you know, investigate these questions.
1:12:10
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know,
1:12:10
SPEAKER_01: like Pamela Pavliszek,
1:12:11
SPEAKER_01: who investigates Internet native emotions and how human emotions are changing
1:12:17
SPEAKER_01: by being online, by texting with people.
1:12:18
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:12:19
SPEAKER_01: she has three daughters who are,
1:12:22
SPEAKER_01: I think, late teens and they don't use social media for them.
1:12:25
SPEAKER_01: Instagram is millennial and millennial.
1:12:27
SPEAKER_01: For them, it's old.
1:12:29
SPEAKER_01: It's like 40 years old grandmas.
1:12:31
SPEAKER_01: Like the same way as Gen Z wouldn't go on Facebook.
1:12:35
SPEAKER_01: So there is this healthy rebellion from every new generation
1:12:40
SPEAKER_01: against whatever was happening to the generation beforehand.
1:12:46
SPEAKER_01: Maybe blatant anti-AI sentiments that spread on social media and
1:12:52
SPEAKER_01: the emotional contagion will become outdated that way.
1:12:56
SPEAKER_01: I am a very big proponent of taking responsibility for what is your responsibility.
1:13:03
SPEAKER_01: For me,
1:13:03
SPEAKER_01: that's bringing culture into tech and winning more people over to seated knowledge
1:13:10
SPEAKER_01: and the life of the mind.
1:13:12
SPEAKER_01: For AI builders,
1:13:13
SPEAKER_01: it's to explain to the public clearly what they are doing,
1:13:16
SPEAKER_01: what the social benefits are.
1:13:18
SPEAKER_01: If they are anticipating major labor market disruptions and needs for retraining
1:13:23
SPEAKER_01: for vast segments of the population, Well,
1:13:26
SPEAKER_01: we hope we won't have a world war where we can just channel young men into
1:13:32
SPEAKER_01: the horrors of war,
1:13:33
SPEAKER_01: which is what happened during the last big retraining in this country.
1:13:37
SPEAKER_01: So they better think ahead.
1:13:39
SPEAKER_01: Everybody knows how much money these people have, which is, I think, good.
1:13:42
SPEAKER_01: They are building something very important, and that's how the market responds.
1:13:47
SPEAKER_01: But then do your social duty.
1:13:49
SPEAKER_01: Not everybody is responsible for everything, but they are definitely responsible in how...
1:13:55
SPEAKER_01: Their completely unprecedented creation will meet the world.
1:14:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:14:02
SPEAKER_00: I don't think they're very good at that.
1:14:04
SPEAKER_00: For the reasons I talked about before.
1:14:05
SPEAKER_00: Well, let's
1:14:07
SPEAKER_01: teach them that.
1:14:09
SPEAKER_01: I think my mantra,
1:14:10
SPEAKER_01: and this is the same for helping people to learn how to read books
1:14:14
SPEAKER_01: and bringing them this kind of togetherness that comes with the seated knowledge,
1:14:19
SPEAKER_01: is what is the alternative?
1:14:21
SPEAKER_01: In almost all cases, alternatives is terrible.
1:14:24
SPEAKER_01: So we might as well do the job.
1:14:25
SPEAKER_00: I think this is what I was getting at a little bit in my long-winded question,
1:14:29
SPEAKER_00: is that when I made that New York versus Silicon Valley comparison
1:14:33
SPEAKER_00: and this engineering mindset,
1:14:36
SPEAKER_00: I think it's hard to sometimes get these people interested in things
1:14:40
SPEAKER_00: that they Cannot quantify and immediately attach an exponential to.
1:14:47
SPEAKER_01: I brought Sam Altman a 2,000-page logbook the first time I met him.
1:14:51
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, there is something everybody can do.
1:14:54
SPEAKER_00: Sam's actually pretty good.
1:14:55
SPEAKER_00: I know, I know, I'm joking.
1:14:56
SPEAKER_00: Well, and like Patrick Collison.
1:14:58
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I see people on Twitter saying they just caught him in a...
1:15:02
SPEAKER_00: Bookstore with like Jane Austen's entire collection.
1:15:05
SPEAKER_00: But when I say...
1:15:06
SPEAKER_01: Imad also, Amjad,
1:15:08
SPEAKER_01: like a lot of great founders are absolutely pro-culture
1:15:11
SPEAKER_01: and they take it very seriously.
1:15:13
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, if I go and I'm like, I want to make a documentary on Frances Arnold.
1:15:17
SPEAKER_00: She's a undercovered Nobel Prize winning scientist in...
1:15:22
SPEAKER_00: You may or may not get your money back.
1:15:25
SPEAKER_00: It won't even be that much money.
1:15:26
SPEAKER_00: It'll be like $2 million.
1:15:27
SPEAKER_00: It'll be like, oh, well, why would I do that?
1:15:30
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
1:15:31
SPEAKER_01: Well, I heard about these things called non-profits.
1:15:34
SPEAKER_01: I heard that that's very good for culture.
1:15:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yes, yes, yeah, yeah.
1:15:38
SPEAKER_00: I just, yeah.
1:15:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think you're
1:15:41
SPEAKER_01: probably getting an interesting question.
1:15:43
SPEAKER_01: I don't know how much time you want to spend on it,
1:15:44
SPEAKER_01: but clearly,
1:15:46
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:15:46
SPEAKER_01: Europe has a very different way of financing culture,
1:15:49
SPEAKER_01: and a lot of it goes through the government and And especially
1:15:52
SPEAKER_01: in bigger European countries, local government.
1:15:56
SPEAKER_01: So if you're a German, you can apply to your own Bundes.
1:15:59
SPEAKER_01: Say you live in Bavaria and you want to shoot a movie in Bavaria,
1:16:02
SPEAKER_01: there's an actual parliament that you can go into and get Tens or hundreds
1:16:07
SPEAKER_01: of thousands of euros if you win whatever tender there and shoot your movie there.
1:16:13
SPEAKER_01: And then you can co-produce it with somebody from Saxony and combine your money with them.
1:16:19
SPEAKER_01: In America,
1:16:20
SPEAKER_01: obviously,
1:16:21
SPEAKER_01: private philanthropy is a really,
1:16:23
SPEAKER_01: really, really big part of cultural production and output.
1:16:27
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of culture is not profitable, and that's great.
1:16:32
SPEAKER_01: You can argue and build a symposium discussing why people are less willing to pay for culture.
1:16:38
SPEAKER_01: Well, because good cultural producers,
1:16:41
SPEAKER_01: artists, writers are doing kind of, you know, unpricable amounts of talented work.
1:16:50
SPEAKER_01: It would be impossible.
1:16:51
SPEAKER_01: You don't want to go to a symphony, I don't know, and pay money.
1:16:55
SPEAKER_01: $5,000 for two-hour concerts.
1:16:57
SPEAKER_01: But if you really calculated it per person,
1:17:01
SPEAKER_01: that's how much everybody should be paying because you're listening to maybe
1:17:05
SPEAKER_01: the best violinist in the world.
1:17:07
SPEAKER_01: And so we need bigger institutions,
1:17:09
SPEAKER_01: cultural institutions that have financial stability that is at least in
1:17:14
SPEAKER_01: a delayed relationship with the market, if not completely cut off from it.
1:17:18
SPEAKER_01: And I hope that people like Patrick, Sam,
1:17:21
SPEAKER_01: et cetera,
1:17:21
SPEAKER_01: et cetera,
1:17:22
SPEAKER_01: will understand Actually stabilize these institutions,
1:17:25
SPEAKER_01: pull a lot of capital there and invest in the long term future.
1:17:29
SPEAKER_01: I think one good thing that the tech industry is learning from AI,
1:17:33
SPEAKER_01: and this is completely under discussed, is that it gives us long term thinking.
1:17:38
SPEAKER_01: When I was younger and I first entered into technology, nobody was thinking long-term.
1:17:42
SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is the Alex Karp mantra.
1:17:45
SPEAKER_01: Everybody was just like, next, gambling app or whatever.
1:17:48
SPEAKER_01: Then entered the EA,
1:17:50
SPEAKER_01: entered the rationalist movements into building AI,
1:17:54
SPEAKER_01: and suddenly you have people who are reading Derek Parfitt and trying
1:17:57
SPEAKER_01: to fix what happens in 300 years.
1:18:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm also building Interintellect to be kind of the Royal Society of the Arts
1:18:03
SPEAKER_01: and exist for hundreds of years.
1:18:05
SPEAKER_01: That is patient capital.
1:18:08
SPEAKER_01: I think,
1:18:09
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:18:09
SPEAKER_01: all of us here in Silicon Valley,
1:18:11
SPEAKER_01: we are working on building these long-lasting cultural institutions.
1:18:15
SPEAKER_01: So nobody cares how much money your documentary makes.
1:18:18
SPEAKER_01: They see it as an objective public good that it should exist.
1:18:23
SPEAKER_01: And they have plenty of other ways of making money.
1:18:25
SPEAKER_00: You're way more optimistic on this part than I am.
1:18:28
SPEAKER_00: I don't think you should leave New York for Silicon Valley.
1:18:31
SPEAKER_00: I don't think Silicon Valley is...
1:18:35
SPEAKER_00: This is mine is that open to the arts.
1:18:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is not Florence for a number of reasons,
1:18:43
SPEAKER_00: but if you go look at San Jose and San Francisco during the last 30 years
1:18:48
SPEAKER_00: of all these billionaires coming to life,
1:18:50
SPEAKER_00: you'll notice that, you know, the opera houses and theaters are not...
1:18:56
SPEAKER_00: Are not exceptionally different.
1:18:57
SPEAKER_01: Let's give them this as homework.
1:18:59
SPEAKER_00: Guys, get to work.
1:19:02
SPEAKER_00: Keep an eye on time.
1:19:04
SPEAKER_00: When I was researching you,
1:19:08
SPEAKER_00: And yes,
1:19:09
SPEAKER_00: I do kind of like use,
1:19:10
SPEAKER_00: you know, I do my own thing and then I... What did Claude say about me?
1:19:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, Claude really
1:19:14
SPEAKER_01: wanted me...
1:19:15
SPEAKER_01: I want to see if it says the same.
1:19:16
SPEAKER_01: By the way,
1:19:17
SPEAKER_01: most people who end up now in inter-intelligence in the community tier,
1:19:20
SPEAKER_01: they come from ChatGPT.
1:19:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:19:22
SPEAKER_01: So thank you ChatGPT for recommending us.
1:19:24
SPEAKER_01: I really, really appreciate it.
1:19:26
SPEAKER_01: They're making us some good business.
1:19:28
SPEAKER_00: They kept pushing me.
1:19:29
SPEAKER_00: You must have written an essay about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.
1:19:32
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah.
1:19:33
SPEAKER_00: I adore that play.
1:19:34
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:19:35
SPEAKER_00: Because it kept pushing me there.
1:19:37
SPEAKER_00: I remember...
1:19:38
SPEAKER_00: Reading that as a teenager and I remember going to see it in New York.
1:19:42
SPEAKER_00: I adore Tom Stopper deeply.
1:19:45
SPEAKER_00: I'm at this like stage of my life where I read so much as a young person,
1:19:52
SPEAKER_00: like everything, but I can't remember like.
1:19:56
SPEAKER_00: Almost any of it now is really quite depressing.
1:19:59
SPEAKER_00: And I remember loving Arcadia.
1:20:01
SPEAKER_00: All I remember from it was this like mix of timelines through history
1:20:05
SPEAKER_00: of these people in this house inhabiting sort of like the same world
1:20:09
SPEAKER_00: from different perspectives.
1:20:10
SPEAKER_00: But why is Arcadia?
1:20:12
SPEAKER_00: Why do you love it so much?
1:20:13
SPEAKER_00: People should read it.
1:20:16
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:20:16
SPEAKER_01: First of all, yeah, people should watch it.
1:20:18
SPEAKER_01: I think there's a
1:20:19
SPEAKER_00: new production right now.
1:20:20
SPEAKER_01: You should see it in the theater, but obviously that's not available for everybody.
1:20:24
SPEAKER_01: If you live in London and you're listening to us,
1:20:26
SPEAKER_01: you can go to the National Theater and watch not the original 1993 production,
1:20:30
SPEAKER_01: but 1994.
1:20:32
SPEAKER_01: And you can see the production book and they can take care of you at
1:20:36
SPEAKER_01: the archives very beautifully.
1:20:38
SPEAKER_01: Arcadia is one of the funniest things I've ever read.
1:20:42
SPEAKER_01: I first read it on a double-decker in London.
1:20:44
SPEAKER_01: I was sitting upstairs and I was laughing so much and like weeping on the book,
1:20:49
SPEAKER_01: like tears of laughter that one other person I'm sitting there came up to me.
1:20:53
SPEAKER_01: I was like, I'm saying, what are you reading?
1:20:54
SPEAKER_01: Like, I want to read this too.
1:20:56
SPEAKER_01: It was like a Harry and Sally situation just with laughter.
1:20:59
SPEAKER_01: I was like, yeah, this is Arcadia.
1:21:00
SPEAKER_01: You should read it.
1:21:02
SPEAKER_01: It also happened to me with...
1:21:05
SPEAKER_01: Ferenc Molnar play at the castle.
1:21:07
SPEAKER_01: I was hysterically laughing similarly.
1:21:09
SPEAKER_01: I really, really love comedies.
1:21:11
SPEAKER_01: Arcania is a play investigating the scientific concept of probability and predetermination.
1:21:20
SPEAKER_01: It came out of an epiphany that Tom Stoppard,
1:21:24
SPEAKER_01: who had a lot of private inclinations toward science and mathematics,
1:21:28
SPEAKER_01: he was reading James Gleick's 1988-87 book, Chaos.
1:21:33
SPEAKER_01: And became super, super interested in this.
1:21:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm good friends now with James Gleick, and he's still the biggest Arcadia fan.
1:21:39
SPEAKER_01: And it's just so amazing for him that both Mike Lee's 1993 movie,
1:21:43
SPEAKER_01: Naked, and Arcadia, same year, were inspired by the book Chaos.
1:21:48
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's cool.
1:21:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a big book.
1:21:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's a pop-sci book.
1:21:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:21:54
SPEAKER_01: Created two classics inadvertently and indirectly.
1:21:57
SPEAKER_01: So Arcadia opens in the early 1800s.
1:22:02
SPEAKER_01: So we are at the time of Lord Byron and Goethe.
1:22:06
SPEAKER_01: Women are not really wearing corsets right now.
1:22:08
SPEAKER_01: And that leads to all sorts of private life complications because this like obstacle is removed.
1:22:14
SPEAKER_01: And it's like a country house.
1:22:16
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
1:22:16
SPEAKER_01: everybody's a little drunk all day because they start drinking wine in the morning.
1:22:19
SPEAKER_01: And there are like picturesque sceneries outside with lambs and whatever.
1:22:24
SPEAKER_01: So things happen.
1:22:26
SPEAKER_01: And in the kind of cavalcade of it,
1:22:27
SPEAKER_01: we sometimes switch to current era,
1:22:30
SPEAKER_01: which at the time was 1993,
1:22:33
SPEAKER_01: to the lives of literary researchers investigating that period.
1:22:39
SPEAKER_01: So you start this very exciting journey,
1:22:41
SPEAKER_01: jumping back and forth between the researched and the researchers.
1:22:47
SPEAKER_01: Where, you know, you just burn a letter and change history.
1:22:50
SPEAKER_01: And constantly,
1:22:50
SPEAKER_01: like in A.S.
1:22:51
SPEAKER_01: Byatt's masterpiece,
1:22:53
SPEAKER_01: Novel Possession,
1:22:54
SPEAKER_01: they are investigating written relics that are incredibly vulnerable,
1:23:00
SPEAKER_01: even in a country house where they keep rigorously the library.
1:23:05
SPEAKER_01: And it's hilarious.
1:23:06
SPEAKER_01: There is a young mathematical genius girl modeled on Ada Lovelace.
1:23:12
SPEAKER_01: There is Lord Byron,
1:23:14
SPEAKER_01: who has a crush on Too many people at the house and the too many is N plus anything.
1:23:22
SPEAKER_01: It's phenomenal.
1:23:23
SPEAKER_01: It's very funny.
1:23:25
SPEAKER_01: It is a perfect Exploration of literary theory and the ridiculousness of it, if I may.
1:23:33
SPEAKER_01: And metigmatical invention and how difficult it was to invent at the time when
1:23:38
SPEAKER_01: a compute was not there.
1:23:39
SPEAKER_01: There's a famous sentence in the play where they are asking how come
1:23:45
SPEAKER_01: the girl came up with this algorithm, but she couldn't finish it.
1:23:49
SPEAKER_01: And the scientist character in the 1993 plotline says,
1:23:53
SPEAKER_01: you cannot open a door until there is a house.
1:23:58
SPEAKER_01: And it gives you this,
1:24:00
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:24:01
SPEAKER_01: certainty about why certain timelines in scientific invention were as they were.
1:24:08
SPEAKER_01: You needed precedents and previous inventions to enable future inventions.
1:24:15
SPEAKER_01: It's a very deep and beautiful play, ultimately about love.
1:24:19
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
1:24:19
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:24:21
SPEAKER_00: Tom Stoppard and Kurt Vonnegut, they were great.
1:24:23
SPEAKER_00: Hit me at sort of the same age.
1:24:25
SPEAKER_00: And I just love the mix of humor.
1:24:28
SPEAKER_00: Vonnegut.
1:24:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:24:31
SPEAKER_01: I love him too, yeah.
1:24:32
SPEAKER_01: Physicist also.
1:24:33
SPEAKER_01: A physicist turned into novelist.
1:24:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:24:36
SPEAKER_00: And just super
1:24:39
SPEAKER_00: clean and not overriding and just very funny and to the point and satirical.
1:24:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:24:49
SPEAKER_00: Stoppard.
1:24:50
SPEAKER_00: For a while, I read everything.
1:24:51
SPEAKER_00: I just love him.
1:24:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Rosencrantz at Guildenstern.
1:24:55
SPEAKER_00: That is one of my favorite movies, too.
1:24:56
SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
1:24:57
SPEAKER_01: Also mathematical, right?
1:24:58
SPEAKER_01: It starts with the toss of the coin,
1:25:00
SPEAKER_01: and it's just the first 200 lines of the play just head, head, head, head.
1:25:05
SPEAKER_01: And then the guy turns into the stage and says, there is an art in the building up of suspense.
1:25:14
SPEAKER_00: So good.
1:25:14
SPEAKER_00: So good.
1:25:15
SPEAKER_00: And Stoppard was Czech, right?
1:25:16
SPEAKER_00: At least a little bit.
1:25:17
SPEAKER_01: He didn't know he was a Jewish refugee.
1:25:21
SPEAKER_01: The parents did the unthinkable and put him on a boat to save his life during the Holocaust.
1:25:27
SPEAKER_01: And he grew up more British than the British.
1:25:30
SPEAKER_01: And in his work, there is this very interesting, exciting tension that he's the outsider.
1:25:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:25:38
SPEAKER_01: He's the outsider.
1:25:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:25:41
SPEAKER_00: Okay, this has been amazing.
1:25:42
SPEAKER_00: I'll leave you with just like one last question then.
1:25:45
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so you're thinking about...
1:25:47
SPEAKER_01: You're thinking that I'm too optimistic.
1:25:48
SPEAKER_01: I love it.
1:25:49
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
1:25:50
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't actually.
1:25:51
SPEAKER_01: I mean bits of it.
1:25:55
SPEAKER_00: But not really large.
1:25:56
SPEAKER_00: So you're thinking of moving possibly from New York to Silicon Valley.
1:26:00
SPEAKER_00: And there isn't a bit of...
1:26:04
SPEAKER_00: If I go to New York or Los Angeles, I do like that it's not tech all the time.
1:26:10
SPEAKER_00: You can tip in and tip out.
1:26:12
SPEAKER_00: It can be oppressive here,
1:26:15
SPEAKER_00: but what would you be seeking if you were to move here over in New York,
1:26:20
SPEAKER_00: just being right in the thick of it all?
1:26:23
SPEAKER_01: I would make tech more cultural.
1:26:27
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:26:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I feel like we should do this.
1:26:29
SPEAKER_01: I think so.
1:26:31
SPEAKER_01: I have a very concrete plan on how to do this.
1:26:35
SPEAKER_01: Optimistic, but also very pragmatic.
1:26:37
SPEAKER_01: I'm very pragmatic.
1:26:38
SPEAKER_00: Are you still doing movie stuff?
1:26:41
SPEAKER_01: The last piece I wrote was 10 years ago.
1:26:46
SPEAKER_01: I adopted a novel into play.
1:26:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, we're trying to make documentaries and scripts and stuff.
1:26:51
SPEAKER_00: I would love to help.
1:26:53
SPEAKER_01: I really, really miss it.
1:26:54
SPEAKER_01: And actually one of the...
1:26:57
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you know that as well,
1:26:58
SPEAKER_01: running Core Memory, I mean, enter into that kind of eats my entire life, right?
1:27:03
SPEAKER_01: And it's even a challenge to write an essay,
1:27:05
SPEAKER_01: but I really miss it,
1:27:06
SPEAKER_01: and I think a little bit of social pressure would tilt the question
1:27:11
SPEAKER_01: toward more writing.
1:27:12
SPEAKER_00: Do you know who Emma Goldman is?
1:27:14
SPEAKER_01: The writer at NY Times?
1:27:16
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, no, no.
1:27:17
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's Emma Goldberg.
1:27:18
SPEAKER_01: You mean the ancient socialist?
1:27:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:27:20
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:27:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:27:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:27:22
SPEAKER_00: Anarchist, socialist.
1:27:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:27:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:27:24
SPEAKER_01: I just wrote an essay on Racktime, the book, and she's a main character in it.
1:27:28
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:27:28
SPEAKER_00: We have a screenplay on- About her?
1:27:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:27:31
SPEAKER_01: Which I would like to- And you want somebody who was born in a socialist country
1:27:35
SPEAKER_01: and has a very specific opinion about that to take a look.
1:27:38
SPEAKER_00: I'd be happy to.
1:27:39
SPEAKER_00: Happy to.
1:27:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:27:41
SPEAKER_00: She's one of my favorite figures in history.
1:27:44
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, Emma Goldberg, NY Times journalist.
1:27:46
SPEAKER_01: We love you.
1:27:48
SPEAKER_00: Coins of it.
1:27:49
SPEAKER_01: I think it's because you said you worked at NY Times and I was like,
1:27:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure that what he means, it cannot be
1:27:53
SPEAKER_00: Emma Goldberg.
1:27:55
SPEAKER_01: But it is.
1:27:56
SPEAKER_01: Ashley Vance, everybody.
1:27:59
SPEAKER_00: Anna, thank you so much for coming.
1:28:01
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
1:28:02
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, well, if you move out here, hopefully we'll see you more.
1:28:06
SPEAKER_01: We'll celebrate.
1:28:07
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:28:08
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:28:08
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:28:11
SPEAKER_00: The Core Memory Podcast is hosted by me,
1:28:14
SPEAKER_00: Ashley Vance, and or Kylie Robison, or both of us together.
1:28:18
SPEAKER_00: It is produced by me and David Nicholson.
1:28:22
SPEAKER_00: Our theme song is by James Mercer and John Sortland.
1:28:26
SPEAKER_00: And the show is edited always by the John Sortland.
1:28:32
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much to Brex and SendCutSend for all your support.
1:28:36
SPEAKER_00: And thank you most of all to everybody for listening.
1:28:40
SPEAKER_00: Thank you and we'll see you again.