Samo Burja & Auren Hoffman on the Decline of Fertility Rates and Institutional Trust

0:00 hey Upstream listeners today we're releasing a conversation from the podcast world of Das with Orin Hoffman Orin sits down with samura who you may know from turpentine's show Live players and they discuss the future of cities the decline of trust in Elites falling fertility rates and more please enjoy [Music] [Music] hello dated nerds my guest today is s buya s is the founder and president of bismar analysis a research and consulting firm he currently chairs the editorial board of pum magazine and he's

0:45 an allaround super intellectual so welcome to World of n wonderful to be here I now you're one of the things you're kind of known for is this idea of this great founder Theory where kind of a small number of really extraordinary people great Founders are kind of responsible for driving civilization forward can you break down that theory a bit for us it is very close to a whole family of theories of history that is sometimes called great man history right this approach I think has been sort of unfairly disregarded by academics in the last hundred years sometimes people say well this would have happened anyway if Lenin wasn't around it still would have happened if Napoleon wasn't around it still would happened Hitler was like they kind of go through all these

1:32 different things all of these reasons right and like partially the strongest reason that they sort of uh have against this approach is the argument that the individuals themselves are a product of their times which in a strict sense is true but it doesn't mean you can predict anything concrete about the individuals the individuals are too stochastic right and there's nothing deterministic about it like you have many many people who say grow up in very similar circumstances and you will only have a few individuals that stand out there's no way to predict what those individuals are going to be like just from the society that they came from and I think that's a stronger and harder to defeat argument than the counterfactual because the counterfactual it's just like it's just

2:17 too ridiculous if you look at the life of Napoleon it's sort of like when he escapes the prison on the island of Elba and the French government Falls and he's restored again to power I guarantee like there's just it is so implausible that the government of France would have fallen and it's so implausible it would have had a war again with the British and so on now of course Napoleon lost that you know that return was a hunger days in power it was a temporary return but it still shows how pliable history still was to his uh agency and his influence on it but here I will also point out how great founder Theory and you know there's a manuscript online that I released years and years ago uh

3:04 you know the audience can read if they're if they're curious uh it differs from some of the great man theories right because I think a lot of the great man theories posit the amazing and tremendous events in the world are sort of initiated or driven by the exceptional individuals and while I think that is true uh the counterargument of this like long-term trends like things like economic growth rule of law Etc you know religion all of those forces they're these almost like glacial forces that sort of like transform the landscape so maybe while you have a big you make a big splash 50 or 100 years later your effect is washed out now in great founder Theory I propose that

3:51 these forces actually have a human origin too I think that great Founders create these exceptional instit tions that come to shape our history so this means that perhaps you know it's not just the Conquering General that's interesting even more interesting is perhaps the general that reforms how the structure that commands structure of a military changes the model of the military right um perhaps has something like you know what we today think of as the modern officer system or perhaps changes how conscription is done or perhaps you know you have people who create new St States who create like you know America's founding fathers or Charlamagne taking what's basically still a tribal Coalition and forging

4:37 something we could recognize as feudalism that then like defined medieval European civilization for 600 years but it can also be you know the profits of History right if you take like a if you take like a bismar or somebody you know so in some way it's like Germany was already kind of on the rise when he was there but like maybe wouldn't have unified maybe there's another maybe there's an alternative history where it wasn't like H how much of Germany's rise was inevitable versus how much was driven by like this very obviously clearly capable person bismar well let's break it down all of the key challenges of if we look at specifically bismar at his career Aon bismar I think that it is plausible that

5:23 Prussia would not have actually succeeded in unifying Germany on exact the same time scale or would have done so in a more decentralized way engineering for the French to be baited into a war that they lose that resulted in a much more centralized Germany than what would have happened otherwise much less a needed to bait uh was that was it 1871 or somewhere around that he needed to bait France to ATT Napoleon specifically Napoleon theii right who also sort of uh you know was perhaps a genius politician uh but was not you know a genius military commander or a strategist like Napoleon the first was um so really it was a situation where

6:09 France couldn't help but intervene now I think that it's possible to try to carry out such a strategy where it completely fails had you failed to get the Coalition forces prior to the war of all the German states on your side if say some of the German states went with France and if enough of them went with France you'd basically be engaged in a hostile occupation of these count could they have aligned with other could have broken up and have aligned with you could see a lot of different alignments potentially that could have happened right exactly actually that was normal German history if you look at uh even the 30 years war or the wars of religion you would have powers like you know uh you had the habsburgs contesting you had the swedes intervening in the war you

6:55 have the Catholics and Protestants you like each other exactly like whenever you have an area that has many small states uh the default isn't that they all band together and they go fight an external foe that's kind of the exception in world history what normally happens is that the local conflicts are you know inflamed or used by external powers and they're divided against themselves right now how do you like when you look at the founding of the US like there's these Extraordinary People some of which I think like if they didn't didn't exist like the US would still be amazing today as a true country but some of which like maybe they put it on the trajectory um and it's so hard to know like was did Washington put it on the

7:40 trajectory because he stepped down and he wasn't a dictator and he he modeled the right way to be a president but then like was Jeff Jefferson while he's brilliant was he really necessary like like I don't know like or Hamilton was he really necessary like so I i' love to get your thoughts on like how would what's the alternative history if one if if if a few of them didn't exist would we still have the America we known today or do we need a whole lot of them not to exist for not to have the America not today well each of them is almost a great example of how a country can have you know how an individual can have a long-term Legacy in the country so let's look at Alexander Hamilton I think without Alexander Hamilton America America's basically running an industrial policy morean right it would

8:28 be much more agrarian concrete views on Trade Concrete views on banking uh financing Adventures but also and this is the funny part which you know I think some of my American friends don't know today we think of China as stealing a lot of Western IP well the US was stealing a lot of British IP certainly throughout the 1800s it was quite good at that yes exactly because Britain was ahead technologically right that's like important to know uh the colonies were ahead in some spaces like you know maybe they had better guns uh than the British but really when it came to the industrialization there was one country in the world uh that had the IP and that country was Britain and all the other countries like you know the United States Germany Belgium they were all

9:14 trying to steal as best as they could the IP and rebuild industry there so without Alexander Hamilton a much slower industrialization now it's still happens New York is kind of like you know already on this trajectory of becoming rapid growing city being a center of capital being a gateway to the Great Lakes region the geography of the Great Lakes region is beautiful there's these vast coal reserves you know Appalachia there's like immense mineral wealth there's like cheap labor it's all set up for industrialization but for example if the US is slower to industrialize might the Civil War last longer before the north winds for example right I don't think you can rig it without ham without just Hamilton I don't think you get a situation where like the South Winds or

10:00 anything crazy like that but can you have a longer War oh yes and if we assume that say Benjamin by the way they don't have to win they could at some point like if the war was four years longer like people would have it's you they already had riots in New York you already had all these other things going on during the Civil War where people didn't want to go to die there you know they you know you could see an uprising just saying like Okay just let the South have their like who cares like they they'll have their own country we'll have ours ours is better but like we don't need to go fight with that right you could have seen that scenario if the war went on a little longer of course and of and here's another funny one about New York uh there were pamphleteers arguing that actually New York should declare independence from the union and just be neutral in the union versus South conflict so they be

10:47 immensely successful as a city state you know uh you know Manhattan is an island it's not quite benis but it is an island yeah so uh alternate history independent New York but for Alexander Hamilton specifically undeniably he accelerated American industrial technical development he he on the other hand also accelerated the strength of the federal government so you know all else equal uh you know the the country would have been more devolved and more you know in the political sense of devolution it would have been more decentralized right uh and then if you look at someone like Benjamin Franklin you know I think there's a very subtle effect where the concept of an American genius sort of starts with Benjamin Franklin the idea

11:33 that there's an American polymath or an American inventor and so what I like about Franklin it was like it was a worldwide phenomenon he was not know just known in the US as the American genius but all of a sudden it became known there are American Geniuses like when he goes to France which was like probably like the most you know one of the most furthest along countries they were like oh wow he is a genius like when the French say someone's a genius then they really think this person is a genius they truly respected him he was completely the right Ambassador for France like a great intellectual also someone that was very good at flirting someone who was very socially uh you know he was exceptional in making friends right you can just read his writing read his biographies and I think that without his assistance the diplomatic relations with

12:19 France would be worse that's very important right French support at various times and at other times French neutrality was crucial for about like at least a thirst the first 30 years of American History not just their interventions during uh the Civil War uh sorry not their interventions during the Revolutionary War uh but also them being willing to lend support and being kind of a counterbalance still uh to the British in a variety of contexts we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors even if you think it's a bit overhyped AI is suddenly everywhere from self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency if it's not in your industry yet it's coming fast but

13:04 AI needs a lot of speed and computing power so how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud Oracle Cloud infrastructure or oci oci is a blazing fast and secure platform for your infrastructure database application development plus all your AI and machine learning workloads oci costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking so you're saving a pile of money thousands of businesses have already upgraded to oci including vone Thompson Reuters andso AI right now Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to oot for new US customers with minimum Financial commitment offer ends March 31st see if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com turpentine that's oracle.com

13:57 turpentine most of you probably know how much the turpentine team loves notion the sponsor of today's episode we use it every day for editorial planning transcript markups project managing knowledge sharing and it's where I drop random 3: a.m ideas that turn into episodes now it has the power of AI built right inside of notion and woven across our entire workspace it's been a total game changer for our productivity and focus we just used it the other day to architect the content schedule for next month across our Network notion combines your notes docs and projects into one space that's simple and beautiful designed the fully integrated notion AI helps you work faster write better and think bigger doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds try notion for free when you go to notion.com Upstream pod that's all lowercase letters notion.com Upstream

14:44 pod to try the powerful easy to ous notion AI today and when you use our link you're supporting our show that's notion.com Upstream pod assume you believe like it would be great if we had more great Founders right there's a yes you could you could you could you could you can make an argument so if that's true like how do we do that like how do we get more great Founders how do we double how do we 10x the number of great Founders that are there well I I I think it's very like I said at the start it's very probabilistic I don't think we have a science of human psychology or biology or Spirit or whatever it is that is sufficient for us to produce truly unique genius I even would go as far as say that you know if we dig up and clone

15:31 clone say a fun noyman who's a great scientist right we'll certainly get very good physicists but I'm not completely convinced unless you get the upbringing just right that you would get this unique genius after all there are many many smart people who do very little with their lives yeah you a high you can have a high you can have an IQ of 160 and really do very little and part of it is I think if if I were to venture to guess what our society might be say lacking to certain other societies that I actually think had a higher density of great Founders than we do to give examples I give the example of the Roman republics almost overflowing with exceptional individuals that like routinely reform armies s uh social systems land

16:17 redistribution uh etc etc legal institutions new cities and you know produce uh the rumans like routinely produce conquerors on the level of Alexander the Great okay like it's like M pompy pompy Magnus and Julius Caesar and crus these are like if any of those individuals show up today they're Elon Musk here immediately right like let's remember crus for example it's like he made his wealth right he was like a Real Estate Mogul Real Estate Mogul comes to be political political Big Shot runs a a attempt to conquer Persia now he dies early in it but if he didn't die maybe he'd even succeed so what did they have they had a appreciation for ambition they had an appreciation for this view

17:03 that if you do something amazing in society if you in a way even if you elevate yourself but if you do a good enough job in the self-elevation that it's Not Mere self-promotion but it is great accomplishment that you crave that that Glory yeah that Society benefits the Romans are like oh you know Caesar of course is full of himself but Caesar is also for the people right and they had this intuition that human greatness is excellent and I think America used to have that right early 20th century uh you would get like you would still get a parade as a Victoria General right and you would still get a parade for at least the NASA astronauts that landed on the moon like Neil Armstrong got a parade in New York course was exactly of

17:50 course it was like a big bureaucratic NASA behind it but that was the man that risked their life went to space that's the man who the president would mourn in a speech do you ever read the unpublished Richard Nixon speech uh for if the astronauts died no the moon wow it's worth reading right it's like now just there in the archives and it's a you know it kind of has a grim determination it's like oh these astronauts they're like stuck on the moon they're going to run out of oxygen in 7 two hours we can't do anything for them we like salutes their sacrifice and like they're gonna be forever a real possibility yeah yeah look look how in the world are you going to incentivize like risking your life in any way or even risking your fortune if there's not

18:36 upside yeah and I think in our society as soon as someone who is prominent fails in any way even a small way we immediately attack them we turn on them and it's almost opposite though I feel like when they fail People Are People kind of like almost celebrate them but it's when they succeed is when they attack them in our society okay that's that's an interesting take well I think we're not comfortable with anyone being quote unquote too powerful or too wealthy yeah they always been true right people are always been conspiring against people who are too wealthy and too powerful but um but there was the sense but there was the sense that we needed yes like in previous eras The View was that okay we don't want too many people being too powerful too successful but you know our country

19:22 really has these problems we really need this individual to succeed I think maybe we're getting a little bit of that back right now it sort of feels that you know let's say in the last two to three weeks I think on net the Country Now sort of wants Elon to succeed and they sort of wanted him to fail two months ago yeah now succeed at what is a different question right going to Mars I think they would be way happier with him going to Mars now than if he was going to Mars under say a different Administration or under different cultural moment right since this I think is not a narrow party issue I think you can't actually vote your way to a great society to an amazing Society um but I think that we have to develop some sort of public

20:07 counterbalance to the feelings of I think Envy and Spite and frustration I feel like we do feel we're okay with like people in their Lane so it's like I think people always love like Elon Musk like building rockets and going to Mars like most probably the 80% of Americans probably love that and and hope that he's gets fabulously wealthy from that or they they love that Taylor Swift gets fabulously wealthy for our singing songs you know or you know or just think of um Patrick Mahomes being like just this incredible quarterback and getting fabulously wealthy that because he entertains so many people and and so I think I think the but but sometimes Americans don't like when they like slightly change their Lane like if all of a sudden Patrick Mahomes is gonna be like a business mogle or Senator or something may be like whoa who who whoa

20:53 you're a great quarterback but you know so they have this kind of like odder feeling for some reason I don't know why when somebody like slightly deviates from The Narrative of the of who they are well when Arnold Schwarzenegger went from bodybuilding being an actor people said he's no actor he's just a a muscle guy when he became a politician people finally said well he's an actor he's no politician so at least they didn't you know they acknowledge the achievement of being an actor after there was a third lane he crossed into but I think the truth of it is that if you have you know people who are truly amazing well we mentioned Napoleon earlier uh you know there's there's a math theorem named after Napoleon I didn't know that because he just he was just corresponding with the plots and I think you know the the famous French

21:39 mathematician and he wanted to troll him a little bit and just send him some fine math sort of to demonstrate you know in uh this metaphorical way you know if I was not Alexander maybe I'd be diogenes uh the classic encounter you know when Alexander the Great meets diogenes and you know he like hey I can do anything for you and this philosopher and Barrel is like well move away uh from you know move away from the Sun leave me uh stop stop throwing shade on me and uh he he says that you know if I wasn't Alexander I'd want to be diogenes and diogenes is like if I wasn't diogenes I'd want to be Alexander so a lot of these people have in them the capacity for many different amazing lives they're not insects they're not super specialized

22:24 and I think that perhaps that you're correct I think you're actually right in that very narrow accomplishment is okay with us but the jumping to something else is is something we have grown less comfortable with let's note no one took Eisenhower's military record to be a reason that he shouldn't run for president right great military achievement yeah followed by great political achievement um and you know I think that people were sort of holding the businessman background against Donald Trump back in let's say 2016 when the campaign started now everyone thinks of him of course as a politician like that's what he is now in people's minds um but I think that there's something about it

23:10 where the the more you can do the more sorry the more you do the more you can do and I think this just never never stops being true I think it just keeps being true to very uncomfortable levels where we kind of have to face a very inegalitarian conclusion we can't tell ourselves the story that you know if only I trained as much as Mike Tyson um you know I would actually be Mike Tyson yeah that's that's not true if only I dedicated my life to music as much as Taylor Swift I would be Taylor Swift it's not true I mean you can be something else that's amazing right but uh some a lot of these it's like in some ways it's freeing oh I just like I focused on the wrong thing I just I spent so much time boxing but actually could be great in some other

23:55 area and maybe you know there's like there's like a a line that maybe everyone can be great if they just found their their calling but then that's probably also not true either right um it's a it's now how do you think like there thing of these like you know you talk a lot about these Live players most of the world are these these NPCs these non-player characters that exists um for many there might be some NPCs that have agency and when they want to become Live players how does that work like how does how does one move from one to the other I think uh the concept of a live player that I introduced in a I think 2017 essay um has been picked up is tied to the ability to go off script so every time you have every industry every sort

24:44 of established field Of Human Action right be it academic or otherwise has sort of a predetermined script of how things are supposed to be okay this is what a successful academic career looks like this is how many times a year you publish this is the kind of topic you publish on this is how you treat your doctoral adviser this is how you treat your grad students this is how you interact with you know student protests if they show up this is how you answer email it's a lot and it's received wisdom and people will not be able to deviate from it in the moment they won't be able to improvise on the spot and a live player will so in the academic context you know maybe actually say back in the day you know Richard Hamming was like breaking social script by showing up and like asking people I have no idea

25:30 who Richard Hamming is who is that okay um have you ever heard of the Hamming question no okay the Hamming question is he's a mathematician uh his name is Richard Hamming he was quite accomplished and he would ask scientists in other fields what are the most important problems in your field and then he would follow up with the very provocative and rude question why aren't you working on them so it's kind of funny it's it's an interesting question now you can of course answer it oh comparative advantage you know maybe uh maybe fluid dynamics is the most interesting area but I'm not really talented for that so I'm doing this other thing that's also very good and we're looking at how ice crystallizes and all of that stuff but I

26:15 think people usually don't have the answer I think people usually are like oh it's not really my place well whose place is it and like who gets to have a shot at solving the most important questions in a field so I really want to emphasize this doesn't just apply to like oh this person rewrote the book on how to do a tech company right or oh this person totally changed French politics it's can also be this person totally changed the field of physics be yeah going around and and asking uncomfortable questions and it's not you know that the uncomfortableness is itself super good it's just that you're not tied to the script and when it doesn't make sense you don't do the thing that doesn't make sense and you do instead the thing that makes sense even if you're the only one doing it think you could percentage of identifying Live

27:04 players when they're 16 like do you think you could like I don't know somehow interview 16 year olds and have a very high likelihood of of picking or do you think it'd still be very very hard to pick Live players I mean you know I think that for young people it is actually quite tricky um because what you can see what you can see is that you can see intelligence you can see sort of maybe confidence like you can some drive you can sometimes see very early signs of like a savant a very high accomplishment and you can certainly see when someone is Spirited but you know okay why do I may a little bit of a rule breaker or something exactly but you know how much of that is

27:49 useful testosterone everyone's a rule breaker at 17 or 16 to some extent our culture encourages it 26 fewer 36 oh very few people right so a lot of this in a way is almost more like a marathon than a Sprint yes in our society for example in mathematics it happens to be true that person has to be a very young brain to win the academic races and do all the mathematical accomplishments but even historically that wasn't true like gaus was producing World transforming math in his 50s so I do have to ask whether it's actually true or whether we've just decided it only like people very early in their career can do math and once they accomplish something exceptional get a Fields medal they kind of lose the drive to do more and no one

28:35 expects them to do more and they can retire so I would say that we could sort of spot people I think by the time they're like 23 I think 2 is like a very good age because if they've been Live players if maybe they say started in high school or if they only sort of broke with like for example broke with the implicit expectation of their parents in like the college era that still gives them time to have successfully Switched at least once something important about what they're pursuing right so maybe they start being super intellectually interested in mathematics yeah they figure out something interesting and they're like you know what actually this would be a great company or maybe they start off interested in biology and then they realize wait actually uh you know

29:21 actually I Academia is just so messed up I'm going to go reform how science is funded that's the real problem that's what I'm going to do and they start doing well right away so I would look at someone who has done at least two things extremely well and ideally they're somewhat unrelated they can be adjacent it can be still a logical jump but it should be the Mastery of a totally new set of skills in a way that's too fast to have been preparation like a lot of people can be raised to be a doctor or raised to be a lawyer but that just means you've learned a very high functioning script very well no one can like go and do amazing things in a new field two years in if they're not writing their own script now I I know when back in the 90s

30:07 like an internet 1.0 I I happen to meet a lot of people who had who looked at the time a lot like Elon Musk did um they had very similar types of exits they were very they seem to be very ambitious um and literally none of those people even they're all young at the time they're all in their 20s at the time literally none of those people you have ever heard of um there's not one of those people who I knew back then who you have heard of today they're all you know they're still wealthy um but mostly they're they created a winery or something like that and they just they kind of fell off the ambition path so how would one know and I think if you looked at them they seem like the rule breaker they're starting the companies they were successful they but some at

30:55 some point they just kind of fell off the path maybe because were a little just a little bit too normal um or they were just too optimizing for happiness or I I don't know how how would one know if they're going to fall off the path or not I think it's a very interesting question as to why does that happen so often I think for many people it's sort of like um I think that there's something interesting that happens which is like okay I've made my money so it's time to retire and often it's like it's a big amount of money by any objective measure but it's not often even a Silicon Valley large amount of money right it can be like just a relatively low bar something like okay I can now be upper middle class for the rest of my life and never

31:40 worry about earning any more money or maybe it's time for a family it's time for kids or or something like this and I think if we were to drill into it if we were to be able to like talk to them very very deeply and they might not trust you I think every single live player has a very esoteric and strange view of the world under many layers of normality they have some like crazy thesis they're like okay I mean now this is no longer a crazy thesis but 20 years ago if someone shows up it's like you know the human era is about to end in 25 years and we are like at the cusp of the singularity yeah that was a way more interesting person to talk to than if someone shows up right now and says we're 5 years away

32:26 from the singularity of the the human era is near it's a totally different filter because I think this is when kind of almost a worldview or like a philosophical position but it has to be an embod an embodi philosophy right it has to be motivating animating that's why I often use this term of Spirited I mean if you were uh superstitious maybe you call it a possession or an obsession at the very least if it enters late in your life where you're sort of like you know it's like all your layers of Personality are developed you look around okay turn turns out AI is the thing that's very different than okay you think about intelligence and you read some science fiction and you grasp wait but if we had an artificial form of intelligence that would change everything and you get like very excited and you think about the world and you're like wow okay this is going to Define my

33:13 life this is what I'm going to do with the next 30 Years you know I'm going to say like of and many of prominent people today have this element of almost the Mystic to them to give an example of someone who's like pretty obvious who almost doesn't hide it at all even shows it I think actually I Ilia Suk is like he's practically a Mystic of AI sure if you like listen to him talk about oh models want to learn or like the UN intelligence of the universe for eum like he really does seem like like that the the you know some like the the whole crypto thing is kind of interesting to me because there's this these these like series of Founders there that are somewhat DD like right I'm starting with Satoshi who we don't even know if it was a person or a group of people um or a

34:00 man or a woman we really just don't know anything about Satoshi and so te or right right it could it could have been exactly but we can we then can um because of that we can project onto Satoshi what we what we want um he or she this deity to be um and because it's a deity and not a real person it doesn't have flaws uh it's not like you know cheating on their spouse and doing all this other you know stuff like the normal you know uh people that we know of do so like it's it's it's it's perfect right in some ways and then we have vitalic who's kind of the next deity and then it seems like he is pretty perfect like in a very weird way he seems like he actually is a good person right like of all the tech people

34:45 I mean he's like he probably like the least evil in him if you had to like score evil stuff right he just seems like actually a genuinely good person now like maybe he is a secret Evil Genius I don't know but like that's part reason person but but you know ironically no matter what the mechanism of ethereum is the fact that he's such a trustworthy person and such an original thinker and just basically does what does what he perceives to be the right thing that in itself should make someone more bullish about ethereum of course yeah yeah yeah and I think it's not irrational to it's kind of funny right because crypto had for a long time this theory of a trustless you know how important trustless systems are but let's be real at the end of the day

35:31 trust in those Founders we're trusting matalic right and then then Satoshi may be dead we don't even know so it's like they we trusting this other thing out there exactly I mean currently anyone who's participating in the crypto Bull Run is like sort of trusting that the Trump Administration will like restrain the uh overregulation of crypto that was perhaps otherwise in the cards um so they're at least trusting the administration in some way or trusting at least to not do certain things even if they don't trust it to do certain things we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors every time I hop on the 101 freeway in SF I look up at the various Tech Billboards and think damn turpentine should definitely be up there

36:17 and I bet I'm not alone in a world of endless scrolling and ad blockers sometimes the most powerful way to reach people is in the real world that's where adquick comes in the easiest way a book out of home ads like Billboards vehicle wraps and Airport displays the same way you would order an Uber started by instacart alums adquick was born from their own personal struggles to book and measure ad success ad Quick's audience targeting campaign management and analytics bring the Precision and efficiency of digital to the real world ready to get your brand the attention it deserves visit adquick dcom today to start reaching your customers in the real world again that's adq ik.com hey everyone Eric here in this environment Founders need to become

37:03 profitable faster and do more with smaller teams especially when it comes to engineering that's why Sean Lenahan started Squad A specialized Global Talent firm for top Engineers that will seamlessly integrate with your org Squad offers rigorously vetted top 1% talent that will actually work hard for you every day their Engineers work in your time zone follow your processes and use your tools squad has frontend Engineers excelling in typescript and react and nextjs ready to onboard to your team today for backend Squad Engineers are experts at node.js python Java and a range of other languages and Frameworks while it may cost more than the freelancer on upwork billing you for 40 hours but working only two Squad offers premium quality at a fraction of the typical cost without the headache of assessing for skills and culture fit

37:50 Squad takes care of sourcing legal compliance and local HR for Global Talent increase your velocity without amping up burn visit chw squad.com and mention turpentine to skip the wait list speak of trust like there's been this decline of trust in Elites in a society um are are Elites less good today than they have been in the past like is that trust warranted well I think trust has to be earned yeah and I think we should not be developing uh let's put this way we should not be delusionally trusting because misplaced trust will be abused and eventually will be broken anyway because no matter how much you might exhort people to sort of like you know

38:36 have faith in their government they're some bad people but you know it's good on net uh behave in a good trust way to to the universities to your HR manager like it has positive externalities if you act that way but in another way no actually low trust is a healthy immune response to institutions and individuals who are no longer worthy of receiving like we we have like it seems like we have lower trust in institutions but we still have like a fairly High trust Society like we still kind of trust that no one's out there like gonna Rob us and stuff and we still like we're still generally like we interact with people I'm wiring money you know to

39:21 people all the time like don't I still fairly High trust are not going Tosca with it to you know as well and you know what like we're we're we're still like in in business it's it's very in like the US is very high trust in business like extremely high trust that's true like you know just a trust like a complete stranger you know and if you think of venture capital complete stranger shows up with an idea and you're like great here's a million bucks you know you know it's like so it's uh it's like kind of crazy that we do that but we we do that because because it actually generally it can it works out like they usually upscan like they're not like bad they're usually not bad actors that are out there so how do you Square this kind of like lower trust was was still like bar fairly High Trust of of everyone in society I think we we we are uh

40:07 declining from a very high Baseline of trust okay I think there used to be a very high Baseline of trust in um business and politics well in in politics it's pretty straightforward like the general Society survey uh if you compare results from today versus the 1950s I think the only Institution that is still trusted at 1950s levels is the US Military and even that's losing points con way down from where it used to be um the last two years especially I think the military has been going down every year for I mean you know obviously Vietnam it took a hit but then the Iraq War took a hit and Afghanistan took H the presidency and Congress and the federal agencies actually lost the trust

40:52 even faster so it's sort of a question of like what is the last man standing right what is the most trusted organ of government I will note that you know I don't think the us is going to have a coup anytime soon but you know in countries where the only trusted organ of government is the military tend to not be the happiest countries so the the result isn't now to blindly trust a government that is demonstrably failed you say a government that that that try to block through a variety of policy measures say open and free discussion of the realities of the covid virus and the realities of the covid vaccines which you know I'm in favor I'm in favor broadly of the vaccines but I thought it was insane the amount of information control Western governments try to exert over the Internet it's like why it

41:37 didn't make any sense well I think that's actually what created the distrust yeah was that so sometimes this over reg this over kind of Regulation was the what creates distrust on certain types of things you clearly have something to hide if you're not going to allow people to debate right or you're trying to nudge people or manipulate them to behave in ways that are against their individual self-interest and there's so many tells when you as policy try to encourage the individuals in a large country to behave in a way that is maybe collectively good and individually bad and you lie to them that it's individually good for them they can tell so there's a certain amount of lying that the government can get away with in fact here's I'm going to be a little cynical I think people want their

42:22 government to be able to lie to them a little bit because if if the government can't lie to you little bit means it can't lie to your enemies and then you want the government to keep you safe from like the scary enemies in the world out there so but there's a tolerance Zone and the government's way out of that tolerance Zone and the politicians as individuals people don't even trust that they're doing their work in government well so it's not just trust of abstract systems it's like trust in okay will this representative actually be a representative will they actually be more than just a social media personality I think we're we're losing that because the class of politicians is worse and we're losing trust in the bureaucracies because the bureaucracies are so broken compared to when they were built I don't think we can get away with

43:08 having a society with no bureaucracy actually by the way I think bureaucracy is like markets right bureaucracy is amazing it's a great machine where you you string together 50 people following rules and together they almost do as good a job as a single genius would and that's like very fortunate because you know we have uh probably 50 or 500 or 5 million people per genius so it's a really good tradeoff it's like we have so many millions of people you can get 50 of them to do the job amazing right but over time they become cancerous they become out ofd people like ex expand headcount uh they find creative ways to reinterpret what the mission of the bureaucracy is so on paper it's achieving it in actuality it doesn't all these normal effects and this has this has truly added up now you said that we

43:53 still trust people but you know if I he in San Francisco if go to a store you know the Shaving creams locked up yeah what's the point of An Inconvenient convenience store at that point I truly shouldn't go out in the street I should truly just order it on Amazon yeah what you do of course yeah which I do more and more but then that's kind of a death spiral for the whole concept of a city and at the end of the day do I prefer living in like let's call it Universal La where I drive everywhere and I have everything delivered to my home and I never take a stroll down a street with some storefronts and I never just like explore a physical world with lots of bustling people around I I don't like that I actually like I I prefer us being able to use these physical spaces I I

44:39 think Manhattan's great for the world uh big cities are great for the world they make everyone more productive they make everyone more social they socialize them in a deep way but no no one actually like forms their opinion on everything on first principles like that would be impossible because it takes so long to go down the first principal rabbit Hall like maybe so maybe people we know like pick like a few topics a year to go and first principles on and form their opinion of but like I don't even know hon I've never even gotten first principles of whether the world is round or not like I just kind of trust the I trust the the quote unquote experts whoever these people may be that it is around I don't know um I'm just kind of making like I've never like gone down

45:24 the rabbit hole of whether we fake the moon landing I'm just kind of like rusting that we did it and that people like Neil arming as you said earlier actually landed on the moon and then actually came back but like who knows like I'm not I'm not like so I you you can you can't go down on everything you have to decide and then of course if you're trusting the experts you're you're picking the experts you trust so everyone is trusting some expert somewhere on something right they're going on the internet it could be on the internet and they're looking at some YouTube influencer who's an expert on your health and they're trust they might be trusting that person over the quote unquote medical establishment but everyone is looking to an expert to trust on almost every single issue and then rarely ever going on first principles on anything um so a lot of us

46:10 is a lot of the decisions is just deciding which expert to trust and hopefully that person went on the first principles on it and we are going to trust that they did a good job doing that right or is that is that kind of like in the end what we're doing and we're just so now it's not that we're trusting experts less it's just we're trusting different experts I think that's correct because it's not like there's generalized skepticism but for example you might not trust the FDA but you trust the bodybuilder Twitter account that you follow correct when figuring out your diet and how to lose weight right you don't follow the food why would you trust you know it's like because at some point you're like the food pyramid was been wrong right this idea of this food pyramid who knows how that no one even knows there no one even knows how actually that even came up like it's not

46:55 even clear so it's like okay well they've been lying to me all this time they don't maybe even know why they're lying to me they may even not know they're lying so I'm going to find another expert who maybe hasn't maybe is lying to me but I don't know that they're lying to me yet so I'm gonna go to that person because like you know fool me once sh on me fool me twice you know for on me sorry yeah yeah no no it's exactly the case and I think it's it is as you explained it is impossible for us to rethink absolutely everything it's just a question of whether we are capable of occasionally rethinking things and that's actually very difficult right you you are immediately very strange if you're like the first person to trust the anonymous dieting guy over the fda's recommendation or you're the first person that sort of

47:41 like is like you know I think I'm going to inject myself with this oek stuff I think it's pretty good actually I've read the papers and everyone's like what are you doing like what well there's safety in numbers too so if you have enough friends or people you like who trust this person you're more likely to trust this one yeah yeah and I look I think that there's perhaps let's put this way as long as we have the mechanism in society to update eventually the legal recognition of who are the best available experts in our society uh this is actually a pretty healthy process yeah because over time people will you know I think if given enough time people will cohere and find the new expert

48:27 now whether these experts will be accreditated like will will they be credentialed will they be recognized by the government or by big companies in their official decision-making that's another problem so I think there's like individual trust like on that level the whole internet has been slowly rerouting to new sources of trust like New Media platforms new writers um new new scientific Authorities on all sorts of topics some of these are of course bad they're like you know Medical misinformation is Rife uh both among so-called experts and among the contrarians but on on net I think individuals will like find their way uh but the laws will be the same and then everyone will be like well I figured out my entire treatment plan online and I

49:14 figured out I you talk to everyone about what I need to do okay the only thing I now have to do is go to an office with this person who's technically my doctor and convinced them to sign off on my internet assembl treatment plan it's like I'm like why do you need that person in that office how long are we going to do that like because that's in way a misred denti right that's a I mean the person might even be a great doctor they just literally don't have time for you yeah and and we need to open bureaucracies to accept the input of hey this person that's like or or or this organization has come up with this treatment plan Insurance Company this is just as valid as if a doctor did it and there's no laws preventing you from from you know reimbursing them right for

49:59 example if you even were to use insurance for that but but there's there's like a deeper problem here because you can have a bureaucracy that's stupider than the sum of its parts because sometimes the sum of its parts just know things that are inadmissible in the official record now even for for policy if you print it out like a blog post from like a really insightful commenter on geopolitics and you show up and it's like a state department meeting yeah I don't think that works now maybe it works in the Trump admin even there I don't think it's been um yeah well I I I think for the the US foreign policy I think some other countries are quite good at it but US foreign policy in some ways has been so discredited over the last 25 years the experts have just been

50:46 so wrong at almost every big issue they're maybe right on a lot of the small ones or whatever but at least on the big issues theyve been wrong on almost everyone um that that I think it's much EAS easier to do today uh yes but still amazing how much power the these quote unquote experts have when they've been wrong so much um right imagine investors who just been wrong on literally everything for 25 years like they probably would not be the ones in power anymore um if that was the case because they would have lost all their money um so it is kind of interesting to me that um that even though we've essentially lost the C like you run all these big bets and you're wrong you you invaded Iraq whatever the big bet for that were completely utterly wrong where you and were were disastrous uh things

51:31 yet you still have lots of power which is kind of funny to be um now if if if we're in a like there used to be a scenario where like there really weren't any live Players let's say after the age of 80 or something I mean it was just like you know maybe historically there was maybe one or two but it's extremely it would be extremely rare where that would have ever happened either they died before then or like they just were just not fun as a live player um but we're we're we're moving to a world and maybe even 70 for you know many cases that was probably the case you now we're moving to a world where like they clearly going to be Live players after 70 there's clearly going to be Live players after 80 um there may be Live players after 90 may live players after a 100 um like how does that because now we're just gonna have

52:17 like the the the life someone it will be a quote unquote life player for much longer um you Napoleon was really not that much of a life player for that long um his bre yeah yeah um yeah and you know so he's briefly a live player um and you know people are gonna span a much longer life cycle of being aive like how does that change things you know I've had this discussion with related to life extension before and let me propose that actually very long lifespans will be a boon for True Merit not a detriment to Merit let me explain politicians over time people will learn people will change and especially we

53:02 should not conflate old incumbent powerful people with Live players right there are many people who in America it's practically a seniority system but the average age of Congress goes up by a year almost every year so that's kind of wacky we are now about and I think the average age of Congress this is a depressing one I think it's the average age of Congress right now is like about 10 years older than the poit Bureau in the 1980s the poit Bureau of the Soviet Union and we call that gerontocracy back then right because America wasn't the Senate the Senate is very old the Senate is very old right and to be fair the word does mean old right Senate is sort of senior and the Latin Etc but it's not supposed to be that old okay it's not supposed to be that old yeah um even

53:47 even the Romans would be like what are you guys doing um so I I do think that you know if Ben this way no no just if Benjamin Franklin had access to Tik Tok I think great things would be happening I think it would be tremendous I think he'd figure out how to do it I think he'd probably even figure out like new little viral dances but also he'd probably educate you about science and he'd come to his own bespoke opinion on vaccines yeah and of course maybe occasionally he'd have to defend a statement he made in 1820 but by that point theyd be so many other people around who made like a statement in 1820 that is like now racist or sexist or whatever that the actual statement of hey I was very young it was a different era I've learned better here's the things I've

54:33 done in the last 100 or 200 years where I've changed my social views I think that we would be better off like wouldn't you feel better if in modern politics you had some of the greatest politicians of the last 200 years competing together on an even playing field I think that would actually result in uh mere seniority decaying because let's put it this way I think that you know a uh even a young like let's put this way a 30-year-old Alexander Hamilton would certainly outmaneuver in politics a 150 year old Cromwell if he was forced to compete with him so I think there will always be new Geniuses new young people who will come to succeed and who will come to like

55:19 compete with the old life players now gerontocracy as a whole though is a massive problem as we move into a low fertility regime where even the United States is a low fertility country it's just masked by immigration we literally have European tier fertility in this country now it's like TFR 1.6 it used to be the case that elitist games in all human Societies in all places favor the old and Democratic games tend to favor the young but what happens when the median voter is old then you have a world where both like populism isocratic and both El and elitism isocratic too and of course your bank account keeps going up if let's say the economy is growing and like you're invested in the stock market and the stock crash is never in Corrections

56:04 never happen so compound interest also works in your place so I don't know we're gonna have to do something to empower young people systematically like I think let's click on the fertility stuff because I know that's like a that that's something that you're super interested in I mean we now have like Japan is kind of like a mid fertility country we used to think of it as like a super low fertility country but it's kind of flat for a long time I think what are they TFR 1.3 or something like that they in that range okay so like that's actually pretty good that's better than like it seems like most of Europe now right certainly better than most of all most ofast Asia right um sort way better than China way better than then Korea um um Etc well Korea is what 0 6.7.8 in that range um yes I mean

56:50 which is insane right uh I assume China's in that same kind of range as well um and uh uh which is which is which is crazy espcially especially in the cities right if you look at Hong Kong or Singapore or if you look at shenen the official statistics for China One the official ones for China are like a little above one but they might be inflating them right I we've entered the point where countries are going to hide how much their population is declining for example a polit a census in a country in a European country like Romania or even Ukraine is politically super explosive because then you have to admit that during see the last 10 years 20 or 30% of the population moved out right and what does the census even mean because you might still be counting people that that that that moved out

57:37 don't live make babies in the country to Poland or they move to the UK or they move some other place or you know something like that like at least in the US like people aren't leaving the US usually it's pretty rare for someone to leave the US for another country um we're we're we're not that much of an exporter of people um to other countries but yeah when you think of some of these other places like you've got this like Doom Loop that they're eventually kind of exporting folks outside of it but like what is what is a country can like do you think so many things have been tried to increase fertility it doesn't seem like anything has worked um and it seems like fertility is going down everywhere I think you had mentioned it's even going down in Iran like massively so yeah it's like it's not like religion solves it or something um

58:25 and um you know people make a big stink like okay the the only um you know first world country that has you know relatively high fertility is Israel but like who knows why like there's just like it's such a unique and small country that it's like it's hard to generalize that to anything um my dispiriting prediction for Israel is that Israel's fertility will come to decline as well it's an outlier in that it's like perhaps a bit slower but it's on the same trajectory yeah if we were talking 10 or 20 years ago we would actually be talking about America as a high fertility country right and America is a very religious country but if you today look again at the self-identified religiosity of teenagers and people in their early 20s America and Europe have

59:12 converged America is actually in the young Generations about as secular as Europe and the fertility is again sort of comparable so a lot of the time when you when something seems like an exception it's sort of like the last data point that's like straggling before it joins this cluster that's all going the same way in America like I have this theory that like okay it's well the you know there there's a certain expectation of how you want to live um and you know you know back in the day we maybe had okay with like cramped apartments and kids running around but like we have a certain expectation so if you're like not wealthy well it's like it's hard to afford having more than two kids or something right and then if you are wealthy then there's this whole other

59:58 kind of weird Loop In America which is kind of somewhat unique to America which is that the people are investing so much in their children everyone has a multiple you know if they have multiple kids they're both on two crazy travel teams and they're traveling every weekend so well if like you have two parents you can't even have more than two kids it'd be like functionally almost impossible to be like on the Travel team you know you would need you would need like this whole staff of people and stuff um and so it's like only billionaire now can have like lots of kids or you know or something so even if you have the space in the house to to go do that it seems it still seems harder for people to go and then of course A lot of them are playing for private school so you know these costs kind of like go up pretty significantly over time and and I think certainly

1:00:44 that's been true in Korea where people are putting so much um into their kids they're spending so much time with their kids that in their case I think it's even harder to have more than one because they just spend so much time and because they're going into so much tutoring and they they're really investing so much in them do you think there's any truth to any of this I think it is and but also to say the kids are not happy with it in Korea oh yeah all this terrible they hate the test props test prep Kore for sure yeah in Korea and I feel like American kids are pretty happy yeah well I I feel like America like is um I I I I think that the ideal of a happy childhood is more important in the United States than it is in Korea so I think in both cases you have a

1:01:31 fertility reducing power here at work with the parents basically competing with each other in America in a way it's like you get your kids the most enriched childhood even if it means you have like very few of them and um in Korea it's like you your kids will be well educated because it's good for them and also means you're a good parent because you got your kids to become like a doctor an engineer and they they went top of their class they have a perfect score it still is tugging on the same heartstring of like caring about children just the view of what is good for children it's like in

…