51: Nan Ransohoff - Power Laws for Philanthropy

[00:00] I kind of get nerd sniped by problems that are important for the world. And when I get down the rabbit hole and I'm like, okay, who's working on this? Who feels that it's their job to see this problem through? And I don't find anyone. I kind of panic. I read the 2018 IPCC report in 2019, relearning the climate math. Saw we need a lot of carbon removal. It took me like three weeks to talk to everyone in the field, which freaked me out. And it was like, okay, I'm gonna quit my job and work on this. In basically all of the cases, I am not the best person to work on it. [00:30] a war with the army you have. The first wave of philanthropy was the Carnegie's and the Rockefeller's. But the second wave of philanthropy is very measurement oriented. It was sort of like dailies and cost benefit analysis. In my opinion, a lot of the questions that we're going to be grappling with now from a public sort of goods and moral perspective are harder to quantify. What does meaning look like? What does good look like? What does beauty look like? They don't lend themselves very well to cost benefit analysis. I would definitely have like self described as like, [01:00] You know, I was good at the gold stars and the sort of fear around getting off the path was incredibly overwhelming for me. If you step off the path, like nobody really cares that much and nobody's really paying attention. And it feels better because it feels more you. Welcome to Dialectic episode 51 with Nan Ransahoff. Nan is the head of climate at Stripe, and she is also the founder of Frontier,

[01:30] of a billion dollars of carbon removal before 2030. Nan is also working on a recently announced effort to target and eliminate respiratory illness. Her ambition when it comes to what you would call public good or philanthropic efforts rivals that of some of the most ambitious founders in technology in Silicon Valley. What I was most interested in talking to Nan about was not only her work here at Stripe and on Frontier, but how we might have more Nans, [02:00] more GMs as she calls them, focused on some of the world's most... [02:04] important and pressing challenges that don't currently have owners. Nan suggests that we ought to take an approach more like founders and company building to attacking these problems, not just by slice, but as a whole, and have some of our smartest people break them apart and... [02:19] systematically target them and track them down and make real progress on them. I think we tend to assume that there are adults in the room who are going to solve these things. And in many cases, there isn't. We also talk about Nan's recent post on the third wave of philanthropy, as she calls it, essentially the near $40 billion of philanthropic funding that is about to come into the ecosystem. Keep in mind, I think modern American philanthropic funding annually right now is about $600 billion. [02:49] something like $40 billion a year, fairly conservatively. And so this money is going to have to be allocated by people. It's going to have to go to ambitious efforts, and we're going to need a lot more. And Nan, I think, has been really thoughtful about the way that this is going to look different from previous areas of philanthropy and the level of ambition and entrepreneurial people we're going to need. It was really fun to talk to her about it, and I hope you enjoy the conversation. You can find all the links and references for the episode

[03:19] you into the episode, I'd like to thank Notion Dialectics presenting partner. Notion has reinvented itself for the AI age and built the product from the ground up around combining all of you and your team's work documents context with the new capabilities that are possible thanks to AI and agents. This takes a few forms, including Notion's primary AI, which allows you to use any model within their harness to custom agents, which allow you to have little guys in your workspace who are [03:49] which are part of Notion's developer platform, which allows you to have maximum leverage, flexibility, and customization in building cloud-hosted service providers who can work for you and your team. It's been fun to have a front row seat to Notion's transformation over the last several months as we've been working together and the founder's absolute commitment to both transforming the company for the era that is to come and ultimately being disciplined and [04:19] on the ways that AI can be a part of our work without automating the, [04:24] human parts. Ultimately, Notion's goal is to help us think together [04:28] both with each other and with the range of new intelligences that are now at our disposal. You can learn more at notion.com slash dialectic. And if you haven't checked out Notion in a while, I would strongly encourage you to check out particularly the way that AI has been embedded into Notion in a way that feels intuitive and obvious and also deeply, deeply useful. With that, here's my conversation with Nan. All right, Nan Rantzahal, thank you for joining me. This is so

[04:58] time in the, uh, in the, there were some interns walking through and they were like, this is where they make the videos and it's, we're doing it. We're here. Uh, I want to start with a question that you might find slightly annoying, but I'm going to ask it anyway, which is when I first met you, we had a conversation about some of what you do, less so the frontier stuff and more of the [05:16] stuff you've been writing about a little bit lately, GMs and new philanthropy and so on. [05:20] And one of the things I wrote down was, we need to figure out how to have more NANs in the world. And in some sense, I think part of what you've been writing about, or at least thinking about, is a little bit of GMing the GMs. How do we have more of these people? [05:35] And so if you'll indulge the kind of silly frame... [05:39] What is an Anne? What is it that you kind of have found yourself doing? And... [05:45] Thank you. [05:46] Why do you think this sort of shape is fairly unusual? [05:51] I kind of get nerd sniped by problems that... [05:56] are important for the world and... [06:00] I go down a rabbit hole because I'm just interested in the thing. And when I get down the rabbit hole and I'm like, okay, who's working on this? Who feels that it's their job? [06:10] to see this problem through, [06:12] and I don't find anyone, I kind of panic. And [06:16] It's that just seems to be like... [06:20] a pattern for me. And that is exactly what happened with carbon removal. I read the 2018 IPCC report in 2019, was learning about

[06:30] sort of relearning the climate math [06:32] Saw we need a lot of carbon removal. It took me like three weeks to talk to everyone in the field. [06:38] which freaked me out and was like, "Okay, I'm gonna quit my job and work on this." So, and that's again happened with this new thing on respiratory infections, which we can talk about. I think I basically find a problem that seems important to the world. I can't get out of my head. [06:52] And, [06:53] In basically all of the cases, I am not the best person to work on it. I was not an expert in carbon removal. I'm not an expert in respiratory infections. But... [07:03] It's kind of like you go to war with the army you have. And like, if no one else is going to take responsibility for it, I just find myself like I want to work on this. And that's not to say there's lots of other people who also can take responsibility for it. It's just this sort of like almost feeling of like. [07:18] Yeah. [07:20] like shock or outrage or like awe that like these big problems are going unmanned and wishing I could work on all of them, but like not being able to. So picking a couple of them and then you realize, OK, well, geez, there are like so many different problems to work on. So how can we get more people thinking about this? [07:39] Finding a really big problem and taking ownership over it. And not just working on the problem, but like really obsessing about the outcome. How do I deliver the outcome? [07:47] for the world. And that can exist at a lot of different altitudes. It can exist at like, really big ones and more micro ones. And all of those are fair game and finding the right problem and defining it the right altitude is a whole thing. But yeah, I think when you say GMing the GMs, I...

[08:01] I think a thing that gets me really excited is how do we like identify these big problems that should have people working on them and find awesome people and match those sort of problem people together and do that increasingly. [08:14] larger and larger scales. [08:16] There's an element of this that's like, surely the adults in the room are working on this. Most people sort of bounce off these intractable problems. Most people, when they learn about [08:30] whatever you have some math somewhere. It's like the trillion dollars for the terror trillion dollars a year of spend to remove a terror ton of carbon. Most people don't go spend three weeks talking to everyone in the field. [08:43] Um, [08:45] and maybe you're just super high agency and la la la, and you clearly are super ambitious. Perhaps the problem is that most very ambitious people work on other types of problems. But do you have any sense of like either... [08:56] Was that always the case for you when you've seen it in other people? Like what trait wise causes you to be attracted to these types of problems that normally go? You talk about it like they they're orphaned or they're invisible or they're just like so large that there's not even a finish line in sight. So it seems really hard. [09:13] Thank you. [09:14] Hmm. [09:16] Thank you. [09:17] I don't know. I don't know... [09:21] I feel like I've become progressively more that way over time. Yeah. Um, [09:25] So, [09:26] And I am trying to sort of think about why that might be the case. I think, um,

[09:32] Yeah. [09:33] I think maybe some of it is just like natural career progression. You kind of like start working on a project and then you're working on a product and you're trying to build a company and now we're trying to build an ecosystem and now we're trying to build an ecosystem on top of an ecosystem. It's sort of like... [09:45] In my head, that is a little bit how it ladders up. So I don't think I've like... [09:51] always been thinking at the scale that I am. And I hope that I'm thinking at a bigger scale. And, you know, the future future version of myself is thinking at a bigger scale. But I think I think maybe another piece is like, [10:03] I don't feel actually that I let myself kind of follow my... [10:07] own interests and curiosities for a really long time. And I've increasingly let myself do that. And they've led me in more interesting directions that feel more authentic to, um, [10:17] who I am and what I want to be thinking about and what lights me up. But I, that was a muscle that I had to build over time. And I don't feel that for the first, like, I, [10:27] 25 to 30 years of my life, I did a very good job. [10:30] building that. And now I've just like, yeah, I've given a little bit more space. It's a bit of a woo answer, but I think that is, is part of it. [10:39] You've always been ambitious. Was there an element of this that was... [10:44] these problems are lower status or like, that doesn't seem quite right, but like, I think it was maybe more historically was sort of like a little bit chasing the things that one is supposed to do. And was probably more, a little bit more box checky. Like I did the whole PM thing and, you know, um, I did consulting after a hundred grand minute of the PM thing. And those are great. Um, but I think I just got a little bit bored with that. Um, and now, um, I,

[11:11] Which came first, by the way, getting bored and then finding the climate thing or finding the climate thing and making it realize you were bored with the other stuff? I did consulting for a few years after undergrad and got, I was like interesting on a, [11:23] skill level, but then boring on a why am I working until two in the morning on like a random. But maybe Uber, like you then went to Uber, which is less boring. Not boring, for sure. [11:35] Yeah, I don't know. I guess I felt maybe I like I got like more confidence to diverge from a more traditional path or something like that. Like, [11:44] I, [11:45] Genuinely, when people ask what I do now, I sometimes struggle to describe it like it is a little confusing even to me. And the fact that I work in a version of philanthropy is not in line with like where. [11:58] I ever expected I would be like, I feel that I actually kind of was a little dismissive of it historically and am still in some capacity. And like, it doesn't quite match my mental model of myself. But I think it's where important problems and interesting work are. And if you can come up with creative mechanisms to do the to sort of do that work, then I'm [12:19] it's a really fertile space. Yeah, there's something about just getting more comfortable with, [12:26] More off the beaten track stuff that has maybe come with age and other facts of life that is like, let me pay more attention to what I'm actually interested in solving rather than like what I should be working on. [12:38] There's an element of this that I think, and you have an amazing post on this GM idea, but there's an element of this...

[12:45] that is part problem selection, which I want to talk about, but it's also part like seeing the chessboard. [12:51] Um... [12:52] Maybe unlike, and not all of technology is like this, but a lot of tech startups, like the Y Combinator tech startup is very much like find one loose thread and just pull that thread. And don't worry too much about the chessboard. It doesn't seem that, [13:06] carbon renewal is that type of problem. It is like very much like seeing holes and understanding coordination problems and understanding market forces and figuring out how to induce demand where there isn't demand. Is that skill set something that you developed like aspects of in other jobs? It's something you kind of had to learn on the fly. Is it something that's kind of intuitive? Part of the reason I'm asking is I'm curious about like other types of people who would be good at this type of problem. Like where might they be coming from? [13:33] I [13:35] I think that the, maybe like a difference between... [13:39] a YC type of approach and like a GM type of approach is in a GM type of approach, you are obsessed with the outcome that you want to deliver and you're working backwards from the outcome. Whereas oftentimes in startups, you're sort of like, yeah, as you said, starting somewhere and like pivoting your way to the outcome, but you're maybe less, you're less specific or you care less exactly where you end up. It's more emergent and you're more bottom up. Exactly. It's more bottom up. And I think that for GM type of outcomes, you're sort of like, this is the

[14:09] What I do is everything else. Everything else. And I think that people but I actually think that the traits that you need for both of those different things are are maybe quite similar because in founder, you know, when you're starting a company, you often have to play. [14:25] a lot of different roles. You're wearing a lot of different hats. You're like a policy person one day and you're an engineer one other day and you're a designer another day and you're taking out their hash another day. And the case of, you know, a GM, it's very similar. You're kind of pulling whatever lever you need to pull. And, you know, [14:40] And you're like obsessed with... [14:44] a thing, however you define that thing. And so I think that those traits and you're sort of like, because in both worlds, you're sort of having to respond dynamically to the environment around you and to the world around you. You have to adapt quickly. You have to be really nimble. You have to reason through things on the fly when you get new information. And those are traits that I think are quite similar to both in both cases, but [15:10] Which is all to say, I think there is a huge potential for the shapes of people that would sort of otherwise be founders to make for really good GMs. And [15:20] That is a bit of a paradigm shift in... [15:23] how we think about [15:25] people working in philanthropy because and also ambition and broadly what's the same more about that um [15:31] You started to allude to this when you were talking about kind of the feeling you had towards philanthropy, which is sort of like –

[15:39] Serious people work on companies. Totally. Which is obviously, that's not true in every part of the world. That's probably broadly true in San Francisco and especially in the kind of like, [15:49] high tech startup kind of ambition part of the world. And so there's an element of this that's like, [15:54] Being able to... [15:57] take the force of ambition and also just like all the other things associated with it, the opportunity and the status and the challenge and the maybe the opportunity to get rich and all these other things that often aren't. [16:09] Connected. Yes. I... Okay, two things. One... [16:13] I a little bit even still now bristle the word philanthropy because I think the thing that we want to deliver is good outcomes for the world. And that are sort of like we want to think about public goods or. [16:23] They don't even have to be public goods, but like things that... [16:25] - What are public goods? - I think they're broadly speaking, they're like things that benefit [16:33] many or most people. And so is scale critical to that? [16:38] Thank you. [16:39] What would an economist say? I think it's part of it, but I don't think it's like it doesn't have to benefit every single person. But like a canonical public good would be carbon removal, which does benefit everybody because we all share the air. Maybe the most important. Yeah, it's a big one. But I think that like we should choose the most capital efficient mechanism to solve the problem. So if you can deliver a great outcome for the world and make money from it and build a business around it. Great. Do that. Only do we sort of move into like pure philanthropy if you can't figure out. [17:09] So I just want to say that I'm like, I think that like capitalism is great. And if we can build great companies to solve world problems, we should do that first.

[17:19] Yeah, so philanthropy is sort of a subset of building good things for the world to sort of like, yeah, improve the world. I think that's a... [17:28] Maybe an important point because there's a lot of different kinds of companies in between pure philanthropy and business. [17:33] you know, [17:34] maximizing profit. And I think those are all should be, in my opinion, on the table and considered and just like move down the stack. [17:40] as needed, but like start by trying to make money. Yes. There's also a, I would, I would, the tech world, I think tends to barbell, which is either like most ambitious possible version of a company or like pure nonprofit philanthropy thing. That's like charity basically. Totally. And I think that like, there's a really interesting space in the middle where, [17:58] But that needs creative funders and that needs people who are going to consider the [18:04] allocating capital in this sort of like squishy middle. Anastasia Gomic has written a bunch about this. These sort of like companies that should exist that don't because the sort of risk reward doesn't fit into venture or private equity or philanthropy. And they kind of, so they go on sort of unworked on. But I think that that's like an also... [18:22] important space to hunt. Sort of like a philanthropic lifestyle business. Yeah, totally. Yeah, exactly. It's not venture scale returns, but it's also not a grant. [18:32] The big idea here, I think, for both the GM thing [18:35] And the broader point is... [18:37] all of these things, the type of, whether it's a business or a nonprofit, the approach, whatever it might be, is downstream of like, what is the best way to attack this problem? Yeah, yeah. And the GM orientation is like less about, I'm going to start, if a founder is oriented around a company, the GM is oriented around the problem. Yes, that's a really...

[18:54] pithy and good way to describe it. [18:55] What makes for good taste in problems? [18:59] Thank you. [19:01] One of the things you write about is like, it's, [19:04] there's an interesting sort of spectrum of... [19:07] problems that tend to go unsolved. And it ranges from things that we don't really see because they're kind of illegible to like... [19:14] climate, which is just like impossibly big to things that surely other people must be working on. You even have a point where you say some are perhaps better described as things we want to be true rather than problems. Right. [19:25] I have some experiences, but not a ton of experience in this. I would like more. But yeah, I think that there are, I think like a good... [19:33] A good forcing function or, like, a good prompt for people to sort of think about is, like, [19:39] in what way would I like the world to be different? Like, what do I look at in the world and say to myself, like, that is crazy that we're still dealing with that. Or like, I cannot believe, like, the just sort of, [19:50] Yeah, this sort of like shock and awe that it is, that the world is a certain way. That's like a good place to start of like kind of – and you can kind of feel it in yourself. I think part of important problem selection is does it light me up? Like does it get me fired up? Yeah. And that's maybe like an initial good filter. [20:08] which requires, by the way, to even get to that point, I think, like, [20:13] at... [20:14] kind of like dialing up our Larry David sort of annoyance with things or something like that. You have to see the water on the... To go back to climate, my presumption would be that you had some

[20:24] care or thought or interest in the climate stuff. And then there was some ignition point, either in reading that 2018 data or something else that like caused it to be a hair on fire problem. Whereas for me, I'm like, I intellectually know the climate stuff matters, but I like, nothing's burning. It doesn't do anything for you. [20:40] What are examples of problems that elicit that reaction for you? Well, I think part of the interesting thing about this is that we are... When I was listening to you, you hear you talk about we are... [20:51] trained to, like, we grow to not see the water on some of these types of things. I think, maybe this is too meta, but I probably tend to orient towards most of my interests through people. So, like, if I met someone who was firing up, like, I wasn't that interested in philanthropy, frankly, until I met you. And there was an articulation of it that, like... [21:11] partly was your energy, partly was your articulation, partly maybe it was framed. It's framed around GMs, which are the people who are going to solve these problems. So it's like, it was a receptacle for me. [21:22] So maybe, I guess there's two ways to ask the problem taste question, which is like, actually, just what are the types of problems that are really important? And maybe there's a separate thing, which is like, [21:33] Yeah, the problem matters, but also choose a problem that fits you. Yes, right. There's like there. Yeah, I think there's like there are different ways into the problem piece and maybe to sort of finish laying out. It's not really a framework, but like good proxies for this is like the thing that kind of gets you upset or riles you up is like a is a good lens. I think that the the tractability piece is a really tough one to assess because there

[22:03] but like how... [22:04] how to tackle, like figuring out the right altitude to define the problem at and come up with some solutions to, you know, [22:13] actually move the ball forward is really tough. So in that category of thing, I think that's where like, [22:20] Either one is already an expert and they can sort of see the levers to pull or you become an expert or you talk to experts and try to ramp yourself up to see if there's a there there. And then I think another bucket here is the kind of neglected piece. Like, is there a. [22:34] Anybody else working on it? And if so, like kind of in some sense, yeah. [22:39] If there's already someone great working on it or you can find someone great working on it, like get them to do it. Like it's sort of I don't know. Or go help them or help them. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like oneself is last resort or something like that. Yeah, some combination of like, yeah, is the problem big and important? Does it light you up? Is it tractable? [22:58] you know, the neglectedness. [23:00] piece of it. I kind of sneaky think that most people don't even get to the second two because... [23:06] They're [23:07] It's. [23:09] I think we can all pay more attention to the kinds of problems that – pay more attention to, like – [23:16] defining more in a more normative way, like our vision for the world and like, what do we want to see the world look like? And that can be in so many different domains. But I think that exercise that we are very. [23:29] quick to be able to critique the world. And it is harder to establish a vision or to ask a question that is sort of like, what is the way that you want the world to be? What do you want to be true? Yes. Yes. There's an interesting...

[23:41] I've talked about this with a few runs. There's a lot of people with very specific negative orientations in the world, specific and pessimistic. And a lot of people who are vague and optimistic. But the part of that matrix that's rare is optimistic and specific. Totally. I think that's a really I think that's a really important point. Um. [23:58] And I think that specificity is like what... [24:01] makes it believable that something can be solved. [24:04] Hmm. [24:05] Yes. And it certainly makes it much easier for someone to join you, which is one of the things that the startup world has gotten really good at. It's like, how do we engineer the gravity and interest? Um, [24:15] Speaking of vision, you have a great older post on... [24:19] like which moral virtue is in short supply, and you're talking about vision? [24:25] either what makes for really... [24:27] compelling visions and or... [24:30] if that's not the right question, like who's good at this? I think we can all be better at it. I think that is like my honest take. Or how does one get better at this? [24:40] Vision can, in my opinion, can exist at... [24:44] you know, it sounds like this big, bold thing, but, and it is, but I think it can exist at the level of like the world. It can exist at the level of a family. It can exist at the level of a self. [24:55] What imagining what oneself looks like in 10 years, imagining what one wants their relationship with another person they care about to look like in 10 years, imagining what one wants carbon removal to look like in 10 years or the city of San Francisco. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to scope that, but we can see.

[25:15] practice on maybe like [25:16] I think practice at the level that you feel most comfortable with is maybe a way to think about it is – [25:23] I was sort of thinking about this in the context of like we were asking ourselves at our at the lunch table for on the climate team, you know, a couple of months ago, like, how would you spend if you had like a billion dollars to spend unrestricted on. [25:36] good things for the world, what would you do? [25:38] And I think that kind of prompt, like, reveals a lot of not knowing in all of us of like, how would I spend that? Like, what are the things that I care about? And how would I allocate capital towards those things? [25:52] Or practicing it on the level of San Francisco, like, or the city that you live in, sort of like, I love this city. Okay, what would I want it to look like in 10 years? Okay, well, what does good look like to me? How would I sort of reason through that? And maybe it's talking through it with your friends, but... [26:07] Lots of ways to skin the cat, but I think those prompts for me are like really expansive and force a lot of questions around like, [26:15] both, [26:15] the values that [26:17] would drive the end vision and then also like... [26:20] tactically and specifically to your point, what are the levers that you can pull and like things you can do? [26:26] I don't know, does that resonate at all? - Yes, you had some prompt somewhere where it was like, [26:31] what would you do if you were mayor of San Francisco? Yeah. And it's, and you also are somewhere else that like most politicians actually don't have a vision. Like we don't really exercise this muscle. [26:42] Yeah. Well, why is that? Why aren't we as citizens demanding this of...

[26:47] Like the fact that we're electing people in any, I mean, not to say nobody has vision, but I'm just like, if one asked me, [26:54] if somebody asked me to like clearly articulate, like, [26:57] what was the vision for the last ex-presidents about where they wanted America to be at the end of their term? I couldn't do it. And this is not the area that I'm most educated in. So maybe other people could do it. [27:09] don't we think that the average [27:11] citizens should be able to repeat that. [27:14] back. I [27:17] - Yeah, why is vision in short supply? I don't really know. - It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend, I then talked about on an earlier podcast this year, which is she had asked me, [27:27] What do you really want? [27:29] And I couldn't answer. [27:32] - Yeah. - And there was an element of it-- - How do you define that? - Well, one of the mental images that we had, and one of the conversations was like, [27:39] it's sort of like when a kid really wants ice cream. Yeah. This sort of like, you can feel it in your body, you're bouncing, you're bounding down the street. And so I almost wonder if part of this is like in adulthood, [27:50] Society definitely trains you to critique and it doesn't really train you to be like, that thing is over there and I'm going to go get it. Yes. Which is a sort of silly version of the agency thing. And I almost wonder if there's some aspect of that that is this, which is like, to your point, [28:04] Being able to even say, and maybe it takes some silly prompt, like, there's a billion dollars. [28:11] It's funny. This makes me think... [28:13] there's the classic question, which is like, what would you do if you had a billion dollars? And I think it's Jeremy Gaffan or Davidson, or one of the two has this inversion of that prompt, which is what would you not stop doing for a billion dollars? If I offered you a billion dollars to stop doing everything you do, what would you not stop doing? It's easier for people to answer that, which almost is pointing at like some of the...

[28:30] And so I think... [28:33] I almost wonder, like, were you someone who, are you someone either growing up or now, like, were you someone who, like... [28:40] does annual planning or like set annual goals or like any of these types of things? I do a version of that now, but it's not like... [28:48] an OKR thing. It's more like, it's like squishier than that, I guess. But yeah, I do sort of [28:55] I do now try to force myself to like think like, what do I want to be true by the end of the year for myself? And like last year I had a section on like, [29:03] there's like a few projects and like things, more specific things I wanted to do. And then some of them were kind of, [29:08] Like, like, [29:09] more vibes or more like character development kind of things. But I do think that just articulating that is helpful. Like that is some version of like manifesting or something is just being able to like, you know, [29:25] Athletes do this all the time, right? That is like they're sort of picturing themselves in – [29:30] the sort of winning state or their pick and they're picturing like Michael Phelps, he's picturing himself, all the things that could go wrong, his goggles, you know, get water in them. He's still swimming his suit rips. He's still swimming. He's sort of going through all these scenarios so that when he's never surprised and I'm sort of. [29:47] There's something to the visualizing of... [29:52] of a future scenario that... [29:55] makes it more likely to happen. Michael Phelps has the advantage though, and this, maybe this goes to your example. Um, in your work life, you have very specific, some aspects of it are complex, but, um, there's aspects of it that can be a finish line. And that's what Michael Phelps has. Um, whereas maybe like emotional goals for your life or your relationships are hazier. And so I almost wonder if part there was, um, you mentioned Anastasia, um, Anastasia, Anastasia, one of the points she makes in, in, in at least one of the

[30:25] And it feels like that is also very critical to the GMing thing broadly. It's like somewhere you say like it's not like a slice of the problem. It's the thing. It's the outcome. And so maybe the challenge is like when we don't – sports has an easy finish line. I always give an example. Last year I had two very – not very big goals. I had two goals, which is one was – [30:44] to do 21 episodes of this podcast before I could quit halfway through the year. And the other was run the New York Marathon. Okay. And like... Yeah, those are very clear... Clear finish line were way better for me than like, I want to run more... Any of these hazier things. [30:57] What... [30:58] Um... [30:59] When it comes to, like, maybe it's worth using either the Frontier example or the new respiratory example, like, [31:06] Carbon removable of all the things that can have like an impossibly large finish line. It's probably, uh, it's among the biggest, um, [31:14] Maybe like making sure the AIs don't kill us. [31:18] When it comes to a problem like that, a respiratory illness, presumably you have some big finish line in the future, which is the taraton of carbon removed. Are you then like breaking off little other finish lines? And if so, like how does that work? Like what makes a good finish line? Yeah. I mean, so we... [31:35] You know, talk about planning, but basically we have, you know, for Frontier, which we started in 2022, we have this sort of like end goal, like you said, in 150 years, we need to do a trillion tons of carbon removal. [31:46] roughly in 100, 150 years. And then you say, okay, well, how much money is going to be needed to do that? Okay, it's between this and this much. And then you kind of work backwards. So you don't,

[31:55] I don't think one needs the [31:57] specifics of the whole plant. But very, very tactically, we have the kind of [32:01] End goal. Then we have, when we started, a vision for where we wanted the field to be in 2030. So we wrote a set of statements of what do we want to be true. That was almost the real finish line. Like, yes, the other one, but that 100 years. Yeah, I mean, maybe it'll be a lot. But yeah, it was sort of what do we want to be true in 2030? That was the kind of vision. Then we have a strategy, which is our best guess at any given point in time of like, [32:24] how we think we are going to get there or what we're going to do versus letting other people in the field do things. That breaks down into an annual plan. So we do annual OKR planning. And when the world changes, we will change the plan. Then that translates into what we call ships. And then that translates into a weekly plan. [32:43] it's very concrete and tactical of like just reasoning backwards from the outcome. And then the world changes and it gives you new information and your plan changes. And that's okay. That should change. That is fine. But like, [32:56] If you don't have a plan, it's pretty unlikely you're going to do it. How did you... [32:59] - Very broad strokes, how did you arrive from like, you joined Stripe in 2020? - Yeah. [33:04] from 2020 to [33:07] 2022 that [33:09] vision and plan. Like at some point, because presumably there's a mix of like, like, [33:14] What is actually the right finish line and goal? What is the right way to, we haven't even talked about, like, advanced market commitments and all the sort of structural things. Again, to maybe go back to the original point, which is, like, everything is downstream of problem solve. But, like, how does that, I think part of the reason this is so hard is, like, we have a lot of templates of what this kind of looks like in a company building. And this feels like going from, I mean, yes, it's amazing you did it. And you've published a lot of this. So people could go back. But, like.

[33:40] compressing that [33:42] you could see how someone would bounce off it. I don't think it's that different from the company perspective. [33:50] planning piece like [33:52] I think maybe it's different from, you know, [33:57] For a mature company that has a, or like a, [34:00] growth stage startup. There are, they have, you know, most companies have, well-run companies have like, [34:08] a vision of where they are, the things that they want to be true, where they want to be in X years. And the OKR planning process or whatever planning process one decides to use is a way to take that [34:20] sort of end goal and work backwards from that. Maybe this is where I'm getting hung up actually, which is, [34:26] Thank you. [34:27] In this case, and granted, you were doing it from a very strong foundation in your case, which was Stripe. Yeah. So we made it, in that way, it wasn't like a startup. Yeah. But in other ways, it's actually a lot more... [34:38] like going zero to one, you have to do both things. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, you do. - The best comp would be like Elon's Tesla master plan, or the SpaceX master plan, which is like, you have to go zero to one a whole bunch of different times and do all the like, OKR level strategic planning that a mature company would do. And so that's why it feels so big. - That's fair. [34:56] I think that's fair. And you're just like, well, be more ambitious. Well, I mean, I just like, I think that more... [35:04] I don't think it's rocket science. I just don't. Like, I think that, like, um. How hard was it to become an expert in this if you presumably talk to all the experts in three weeks? Because that would be, maybe that's another part of this, which is like, oh, like, I'm learning about climate in 2018. Like, this, it would take me five years to even get up to speed. You don't have to learn the whole thing. Like, I think it's like you're scoping the thing that you are learning. And for me, a very motivating thing. And to be clear, there were other people working in the field. There was, you know, this is not just, um, uh, just me by any stretch.

[35:34] part of a really motivating thing is like, [35:37] Who else is going to do it? And that is a real take. It's specifically this slice of. This slice of it. [35:43] How early was the... [35:45] And maybe this is an opportunity to go a little more specific. Another frame of sort of what you do is like, [35:50] it may not everything you do, but part of what you do is identifying areas where, [35:55] market forces or market demand would be really valuable, but there isn't, [36:01] any yet, or there isn't enough of it yet. And so in that sense, it was maybe a vertical, a specific kind of cut on the climate problem, which is like, I'm not going to solve all the climate, but there's a specific opportunity or the specific wedge. What did it look like to arrive on that? And why is this sort of like orientation around what an advanced market commitment, like, how did that become this sort of like elegant opportunity? [36:22] blade or tool in this problem? The short answer is that I think it's just to the point of what's the end goal that we're working on and how do we reason our way back from it? That is the compressed version of it. The longer version of it is... [36:39] Okay, so with carbon removal, [36:41] It is the canonical public good. You're sucking CO2 out of the air. You're storing it somewhere. Nobody wants to pay for that because the customer doesn't get a benefit from it. [36:51] And... [36:52] When you have no market of customers, you have very few companies that want to build anything because who they're going to sell their product to. You've got very few investors because who they're going to invest in. So then you say, okay, well, who's responsible for solving public goods? Well, it should be governments. But I'm not a policymaker. So I was like, I probably can't do anything there. In the end, it's going to be really important, but that's not where my –

[37:12] skill set is. You weren't a... [37:15] public goods philanthropist. I was working self-driving at the time. [37:19] I see. Yes. So there was enough similarity. It felt you shaped enough. Well, the policy did not feel me shaped. The thing I was trying to reason through was... [37:29] you read the IPCC report and you're like, okay, we're going to need like, [37:33] gigatons and eventually a teratron of carbon removal, who's going to do that? Okay, well, why doesn't it exist? Well, who's going to pay for it? There's nobody to pay for it. Can we get governments to pay for it? Okay, I can't because I don't know how to do that. So who's the next best thing? Well, it's individuals or companies that have disposable income. [37:50] who has disposable income while SaaS businesses have pretty good margin. And at the time, Stripe had published this blog post, Buy Carbon Rule for a Million Dollars. Cool. [38:00] How much? A million dollars. Very small. [38:05] - A thread. - A thread. And the theory of change around that was the right theory of change. Christian Anderson, who started Watershed, wrote this post at the time. [38:13] My friend Clay at lower carbon was like, okay, like watching me go down the rabbit hole. And he was like, you should talk to these guys. [38:20] And... [38:22] The interesting thing about Stripe was, yes, a million dollars is a good start, but Stripe has millions of businesses all over the world that are high-margin-staff businesses, so the distribution is there. And if you can convince them to give a small fraction of their revenue to carbon removal, you can potentially aggregate a lot more and use that to buy even more carbon removal down the cost curve. So that was my logic through – You're squinting and seeing the flywheel. Totally, totally.

[38:52] the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of interesting stuff here. When I joined Stripe, I did not know what an advanced market commitment was. [38:58] That was not a pre, I could see the Stripe climate piece of how do we make this a product for Stripe businesses. That was the thing that got me really excited. Hmm. [39:07] But we did that. [39:08] And it went really well. We got to tens of millions of dollars. And then we all sat in a room and we're like, okay, well, what do we do next? Like, that's nice, but we got to get this, add another zero to this thing. [39:18] And so... [39:19] AMCs, Advanced Market Commitments, had been, is a concept that was developed in the context of global health. And the sort of general idea is... [39:28] There's a thing that you want to exist. And part of the reason that it doesn't exist in the case in the original case, it was for the pneumococcal vaccine for low and middle income countries. And we wanted pharma companies to work on this, but they didn't because who's going to pay for that? [39:40] There are poor people in countries that won't have enough money to actually pay for it. And so the idea behind the AMC was – [39:47] to pull a bunch of money from, in this case, [39:50] the Gates Foundation and a bunch of other countries to say, hey, pharma companies, if you can... [39:56] Make a vaccine to spec. [39:58] There's a billion and a half dollars waiting for you. Yeah. And it works. And so I cold emailed the economists who... [40:06] worked on [40:07] The original AMC, Michael Kramer, Rachel Glenister, Chris Snyder, Susan Ape. There had just been one. [40:14] Basically? There had been one and a half. So that was the first one. And then there was sort of part of Operation Warp Speed that was also an AMC. And those same economists also worked out. And that was a different shape problem in that –

[40:26] There was obviously... [40:27] lots of dollars for that vaccine, but there's this risk of... [40:31] Pfizer develops it first. That's exactly right. But it's all about this sort of like playing with, it's like helping markets sort of, [40:38] Collate on this equilibrium or something. No, exactly. It's fixing it saying, OK, we want this thing to exist. It doesn't because there is some incentive problem around the demand. And what is the intervention that will fix the incentive problem to get the suppliers or the developers to build the thing we want them to build? Yeah. [40:58] And everyone is exactly like you said, it's a little different. Like the original AMC was different. Operation Warp was different. Frontier is a little different. And [41:06] That is... [41:08] I think just goes to show that, like... [41:11] You just have to study your problem and make a solution that works for your problem. And if it's like the sort of theory and practice are very messy and that's OK because problems are messy. Yes. But I think that's the that's sort of what we tried to really workshop with Frontier is like in what ways does it differ and how do we modify the core model for. [41:34] The problem at hand. [41:35] So speaking of messiness, what is... [41:40] This... [41:42] maybe to go back to the sort of mature company versus early stage company comparison, in a new company or a small company, the only thing that matters is focus on a single thing. Get the product market fit and then grow it or whatever. Obviously Patrick Collison has a lot of different areas of focus.

[42:00] In some sense, your problem, especially in the early days of a new effort like this, is probably closer to the early startup founder. But the set of possible things to do, [42:11] is closer to like mature Patrick Collison. Yeah. And so I'm curious, even now, like with frontier and some of these other efforts, like, [42:18] What does "focus" mean? [42:20] you somewhere else you talk about like making sure all of the most promising ideas are being worked on, which is like, [42:26] knowing the unknown unknowns, which just feels very... Broad or something. Yeah. There are theoretically an unknown amount of important aspects of the... [42:38] climate stuff for you to be working on right now. Okay. Well, when we say all the most important problems, I think in that context is probably in the context of carbon removal. Yeah. And yeah, let's say carbon, let's make it a little more narrow. [42:51] So I've been working on carbon removal since 2020. [42:54] And we've been working on Car Frontier since 2022. So like that is... [43:00] in some sense, a lot of focus. It's been six years of figuring out what this thing is and getting it off the ground. We now have an incredible team. [43:08] The team is like cruising. And there's a, maybe not a playbook, but there's a... [43:13] There's a coherent strategy that needs to be updated, but it is moving. It has momentum. Totally. It has momentum, and there are still, not to sort of discount, a ton of [43:24] kind of open existential questions and largely on the side of, um, [43:29] getting governments involved at the scale and speed that they are needed to be involved in. But like, yeah, carbon removal is, is doing really well. And this woman on my team, Hannah, who basically founded Frontier, you know, we found a Frontier together. She's amazing. She's been, you know, we've been working on this for five years. She's basically running Frontier at this point. So like she, and, and has been for, you know, for a little while. So like, I think part of the reason that I can think about other things is because I

[43:59] she's jamming it. She's really, really good. And [44:04] as is the rest of the team. [44:07] Only when those things are true [44:09] does one like earn the ability to think about other things? And I think that that would be true for most leaders. Like, you know, yeah, like Stripe is doing, you know, is run amazingly well. And so like that affords one the ability to like, [44:23] poke around in other areas, but you've got to get the core thing done. [44:28] Humming first. [44:29] I don't know if that answers your question. [44:32] I think I was trying to ask a slightly different question, but that is actually very helpful. I was sort of trying to say, and maybe it's worth jumping ahead, which is like, [44:41] part of what seems like you're good at, and you even talk about this in the new philanthropy context too, which is like one of the single highest leverage, if not the single highest leverage thing you can do with dollars, and ultimately usually a relatively small amount of dollars, is get the snowball rolling. Yeah. Is the ignition piece of it. Yeah. And so I was actually asking the question about like focus on the ignition piece. Like maybe it's worth using some of the respiratory stuff as an example. Yeah. [45:07] I know we're rehashing it, but again, it's like a really big problem. You're sort of like surveying, you're patrolling the waters and looking for a place to go deeper on. [45:17] But again, with a company, it's sort of like find some area of product market fit and then just like pull on it for a long period of time. Whereas this, it's like it feels like you have to have a constant awareness of other better strategies, especially in an area like maybe showing my ignorance here. But in an area like respiratory illness, presumably the field is changing.

[45:37] biotech's evolving, like there's all these new AI, like, and so it was kind of a question about like focus in that sense, which is like knowing... [45:46] Um... [45:49] Knowing where to best allocate resources in this continuous way, it's almost like you have to be way more paranoid. Yeah, but again, I don't know if that is like... [45:58] I'm just like pushing back because I don't know if that is like that different from... [46:02] a company like the payments world is changing a lot right now too with ai and agents and it's like you know there's a ton of paranoia and um you know this is not my all my area of expertise but like everybody's having to adapt and and sort of [46:17] in every business, like how do I pivot my or how do I sort of adapt my business to – [46:24] AI and the way the world's changing. So I don't know if that's so unique to... [46:29] Yeah. To this, I mean... [46:32] I think the difference, I guess like a difference maybe in some areas is, [46:37] like carbon removal, is like... [46:40] But [46:41] And maybe this is more you're getting at. Like in carbon removal, carbon removal is a specific problem in that it was – [46:47] Kind of starting from zero, like nobody in the world realized that this was a thing that we were going to have to do at the scale we needed to until the 2018 EPCC report came out. So you're like, okay, sorry, we have to get from zero to what? And how what? And so you're trying to figure out. And all of those people are like, okay, we need to think about supply and we need to think about demand. And we had to think about the markets that bring them together. And the thing that maybe feels overwhelming is the ecosystem. This is what I'm trying to get. It's structurally overwhelming.

[47:17] you're giving examples of respiratory illness, some of the stuff, some of the ideas Jacob has on, but like, it's just like, oh my gosh, how do I even have a chance of starting? [47:26] Yeah, and I think it's a great question. And I think a lot of them, in some sense, it's easier to, in my opinion, it's easier to start with a problem that has nothing because nobody's entrenched in any worldview. Like carbon removal was a little easier in that sense. In some sense, like the respiratory infections piece is a bit harder because you have different people who have different sort of fundamental beliefs. Or this has been tried. Yeah, exactly. And like, this is sort of like carte blanche. Like, yeah. [47:54] We'll see what happens. [47:57] So, [47:58] Yeah, and I think that's actually like a really fun creative exercise of like, how do you decompose the problem into its component pieces? It's like, there's a supply piece, and there's a demand piece, and there's the ecosystem piece. And so each year, we have OKRs in each of those buckets. But like, I think that one can... [48:14] That to me seems like the central GM skill, by the way. It's like the decomposition of messy problems. It's like slicing it up. Yeah. I think that's a good point. Like bringing – yeah, I think bringing structure to the messiness of these problems and making them feel tractable because I think a lot of problems – [48:33] big problems you see and you're like, okay, yeah, I'm going to write this off because it's impossible. But if you give somebody a [48:39] even yourself, a sketch of like, just sketch it out. This goes back to our vision conversation. Yeah. It's almost like if you could have a perfectly written memo, 20-page memo on any problem in the world, like it would be way more likely to be solved. Totally. I think that's, yeah, I think that's, I think that's a really good, I think that's a great point. And there's a rule for, I think people, I think there's probably a rule for more people who are doing the sketching. Yes.

[49:09] always be the same people. So like, people who know a field and see are good at the decomposition piece, and are good at sort of setting out what should the world look like, and what's a rough path to get there. And maybe it's wrong, but it gives people something to react to, right? [49:23] Right, right. [49:25] Also, just frankly, even in companies, [49:27] Amazing tacticians and strategists are... [49:31] Often not the people with grand visions. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing if you can find them in the same people, but sometimes they're not. And, you know, it's okay. Is it important for... [49:41] people like this to... [49:44] for lack of a better way of putting it, be a mascot for it. Increasingly, you have... [49:49] You have dialed up how public you are about some of this. And frankly, some of your other work around more recently on philanthropy and GMs, like... [49:59] Maybe it may be a different way of asking the question, but how important is like, [50:02] the legibility aspect of it. [50:04] Which was the legibility of which part? [50:06] A problem having a flag bearer who's doing... Part of this is the person who wrote the memo. Like the Lewis Bollard of ending factory farming or something like that. [50:17] Are you going on enough podcasts is a silly way of asking this. [50:23] I... [50:24] Think that it depends on... [50:27] The like... [50:29] I don't mean for us to be caught by, but I think it's just sort of like working backwards from what is the thing you're trying to do? Yeah. [50:36] is going on podcasts and is like... [50:39] the comms and marketing piece a really important piece of it. I would argue in the case of like, you know,

[50:45] factory farming or something, getting more broad... [50:48] sort of like, [50:50] individual support and political support for that cause is a part of the strategy. Yes. Does that matter as much in carbon removal? [50:59] I don't know. Does it matter in getting more people working on interesting problems? Yes. The thing that motivates me to write is usually when... [51:07] I think there's like, yeah, there's like a thing I want to happen because of it or something like that. And I think a thing I do feel really fired up about sort of these days right now is finding really awesome people to work on, like more important for the world problems. There's so much money coming in to philanthropy in general. And I think we are really short. [51:28] founder-shaped GM people to man those problems. And so I feel... [51:34] more urgency to bring attention to that because I want more great people working on more great problems. But it's not from a... [51:42] I guess it's the legibility, I think, is downstream of... [51:47] The... [51:48] problem or something. Um, [51:52] I guess part of the thinking behind my question is like Silicon Valley is quite good at [51:56] Take someone like Mark Andreessen. Yeah. One of Mark's centrally, singularly great skills, may not singularly, but rare and important is his ability to create a meme around a thing. Software's eating the world, American dynamism, whatever. And you can make a pretty strong case that Mark's often not first to these things. Like Founders Fund was investing in whatever. But he's good at creating this gravity engine around it, even something like...

[52:22] The term GM, which obviously you didn't make up, but like has in a little corner of the world has a little more buzz. And so, like, my sense is there's something. One of the reasons one of the main reasons we don't have more people working on these things is because there are less legible. Yeah. [52:36] famous examples of people who are doing this in an awesome way. [52:42] And that like, if you could point to you, if you, the average 25 year old in Silicon Valley can name 10 founders. So they want to be like, right. But they're not like, oh my gosh, Henderson eradicated smallpox. I want to be just like him. Yes, for sure. Did you feel like you had to lower your ambition to work on public goods? [53:01] I think when I joined [53:04] stripe to work on climate initially my friends were like excuse they're sort of like what's going on um yeah [53:11] But I think that I and mostly just because like I was doing, you know, I was working self-driving and I was working. [53:18] doing product stuff and... [53:21] Um, I think it's a, I personally think it's a, it's an increased ambition because I, I [53:29] think you are taking on more consequential... [53:32] In some cases, more consequential problems. [53:35] And, um, [53:37] They're harder. [53:38] Yeah. [53:39] Yeah. [53:41] No, my implication was not that it's less ambitious, but... [53:47] paradoxically, like, there is something about it that's like, if it works, it's way more ambitious. Yeah. Or if you make a real dent on it. But otherwise, like... But that's true in startups. Lots of people fail in startups. It's true. Hmm. Hmm.

[54:00] Like, I think we we sort of take like we love a good power law applied to startups, but we don't do it for philanthropy. Almost because we don't believe it. Yeah. I think I mean, really, at the root of it, I think is probably like. [54:13] what are you going to do? Like extract a taraton of carbon? Yeah. Good luck to you. Um, [54:19] Yeah, I think it's sort of this odd... [54:22] like discontinuity or something like we are very comfortable with hits businesses, like with sort of a hits based approach in business. [54:30] VC in the private sector, but we don't take that approach in the philanthropic sector. And as a result, we probably don't. [54:36] get the kind of outcomes that we want to get. [54:38] You wrote a great piece on [54:40] modeling kind of a third wave of philanthropy. And really, I think is so compelling about it is you borrow from Silicon Valley. You have this kind of triad of, in the startup sense, LPs and VCs and founders, and in your sense, funders, allocators, and builders. [54:56] Our conversation was really helpful, actually, in helping me sort of like... [55:00] piece that together. So I'm very appreciative of that. I'm glad. Yeah. Um, [55:05] in some sense... [55:07] you're sort of trying to pull all of those forward. [55:11] And it's like a little bit of a three-body problem or like a three-part chicken and egg problem. [55:17] Thank you. [55:18] Maybe the first question would be, like, does the GM frame apply to all three of those... [55:24] Rolls. [55:24] I think, probably. [55:26] You were kind of two of the three of them. [55:29] if I understand correctly, which is you are both an allocator capital and a builder. Is that right? Or do you think you're closer to just an allocator?

[55:36] *sigh* [55:39] I think that we are... [55:42] Yeah, I think the GM, GM's sort of a mindset. I think it's, I think it's, I think it is a mindset. I think like, you know, we are... [55:52] We kind of straddle. I think we are technically in the role of the capital allocator. If you had to put us in one... [55:58] at Frontier, that is where it would be. [56:01] But [56:03] I... [56:06] I think we do wear lots of different hats. Like we are spending a lot of time trying to get more capital. [56:11] by talking, you know, by working on the policy pieces to get more policy-driven demand. We're working a ton. If we find really promising carbon removal areas that we don't see worked on, we're trying to get them going ourselves. [56:25] I think our primary role is that of a sort of customer in the form of a capital allocator. It's a lot like the most ambitious VC firms, though. They're going to incubate companies. Mark Andreessen is spending all of his time fundraising all across the world to figure out how you can have a... [56:40] $20 billion fund versus the tent, whatever. Yeah. Maybe to ask an obvious question, but what are the builders in the, like what is the typical builder in the, [56:49] In the frontier context. Companies working on carbon removal companies. So that's direct air capture company. That's a surface mineralization company, an enhanced weathering company. There's lots of different pathways. And so it would be a company saying, you know, we have an approach that we think can be really big and really cheap.

[57:07] We sell carbon removal. Who's going to buy it? These are primarily companies, though, not nonprofits. They're companies. Yeah. [57:12] And is that... [57:15] Do you think that most of these types of problems are more likely to shape that way? Is that something due to the kind of market shape of carbon renewal? Is that because of the advanced market commitment aspect of it? Like, if you were to try to generalize to the broader... [57:28] kind of like new philanthropy orientation. [57:32] Presumably most of the things OpenAI Foundation are going to be funding aren't going to be companies. [57:36] Yeah, I don't feel, I feel it's so... [57:40] area specific, so I don't know what the... Maybe a better question would be like, why is... [57:44] Why do you, like, structurally, why are most of these people working on the climate stuff, carbon removal stuff, [57:51] companies. [57:52] Well, you know, they're like it's kind of like in sanitation. [57:57] Like, you need people to [57:59] you know, [57:59] take out the like pick up the garbage for your city. But like those are companies that you pay to do a service. And this is sort of like we need a lot of [58:08] sanitation companies, but for the air is sort of one way to think about it for carbon removal. But there's like a supply and demand element of this in carbon removal that may or may not be the case for other problems. So if it can be a company, it probably should be a company. Yeah, I think so. I think that's the right way to think about it. And the only way that there can be companies is if somebody is buying their product. So that was the market. [58:29] sort of mechanism that we were sort of fixated on. But I think that every... [58:35] it's not that generalizable. Like if you're working on, you know, biosecurity or AI safety, you know,

[58:42] is it a supply and demand problem or is it a policy or regulatory thing? Is it a sort of evals thing? I don't like, it's so specific to that problem. I don't think that it's that useful to generalize. And there's probably an element too of like, [58:58] the [58:59] thing you're trying to do is actually very clearly targetable and measurable [59:04] I think. [59:05] in carbon removal. Like, we know exactly what we're talking about. I mean, maybe not quite exactly. Versus something... [59:13] more ambiguous, something more philanthropic that's like, we want to increase the beauty of cities. I mean, that's an extreme example. Yeah, yeah. [59:23] I think. [59:24] I [59:26] I think that this is one of the... [59:29] Things that we're going to collectively struggle with this round of the sort of third wave of... [59:36] philanthropy. So part of the way I was thinking about it was like the first wave of philanthropy was the Carnegie's and the Rockefeller's. The second round of philanthropy was the sort of Gates's of the world and, and, and to some extent, parts of EA, although that sort of bled into this third, third wave as well. But the second wave of philanthropy is very measurement oriented. It was sort of like, you know, dailies and, you know, [59:59] cost-benefit analysis and how do we do the thing with the highest ROI. And that has generated, you know, that's a really important tool. [1:00:07] that has generated a huge amount of good for the world. And we should... [1:00:11] You know, we should be very grateful for that sort of skill set that we got from the second wave of philanthropy.

[1:00:19] In my opinion, a lot of the questions that we're going to be grappling with [1:00:22] now from a public sort of goods and moral perspective are harder to quantify. They are questions of, you know, there is a lot around AI safety and how do we navigate this transition differently. [1:00:34] um, [1:00:36] through AGI [1:00:38] If we do get, you know, successfully through that, what's our vision for the world? What does meaning look like? What does good look like? What does beauty look like? I think these are maybe not the most urgent questions right now with, you know, at least for some of these funders, but they will become important questions and they don't lend themselves very well to cost benefit now. [1:01:08] really like... [1:01:09] that we're familiar and comfortable with those [1:01:13] those tools, but those tools are not quite the right fit. And I'm very, I think that those things, the types of things in that bucket are going to take... [1:01:23] We're a little anemic there. I think we're going to fumble around for a while to try to figure out, like, how do we even... [1:01:30] jumpstart. Like, [1:01:33] answering those questions in a substantive way and, uh, [1:01:38] My, I guess, a hope that I have is that we we don't just do the safety stuff in the next, you know, [1:01:47] one to 10 years, we also start to give this sort of second bucket of stuff more attention, because I think it's going to take us some time to kind of get our sea legs and figure out which way is up.

[1:01:57] Do you think it's fair to slice that as sort of like... [1:02:01] The – [1:02:04] last round of philanthropy and probably also stuff like carbon removal to some degree, or even AI safety is more about like floor raising. [1:02:10] Yeah. Or downside mitigation. And this other bucket you're describing is much more about raising the ceiling. Right. [1:02:16] Yeah, I think that that is... [1:02:18] And granted, there are probably a lot of people who would be like upside problems like... [1:02:23] We'll deal with those later. Like people are dying. [1:02:26] Yeah. Or the earth's... Like, another thought I had is, like, in some sense, the carbon removal problem... [1:02:35] despite the fact that a lot of progress wasn't made on it, is actually more of a wave two of philanthropy type problem that it would be good at solving. Yeah, I think that's right. [1:02:43] And for whatever reason, intractability or whatever, like it wasn't. [1:02:48] Not a lot of progress is there, but we're going to increasingly have a new set of problems, which are like, what do we want life to look like? And should philanthropic dollars even be the type of way we... [1:02:56] we improve them. I think that's right. And I think like, how does one answer, how do we answer the question of whether philanthropic dollars are the right [1:03:03] place to start. Well, what I think it kind of comes back to the vision piece of like, what do we want the world to look like here? What does what how do how might we imagine what great looks like for humanity and for ourselves and for our city and in some period of time, working backwards from that and saying like, okay, are these companies are these, you know, are these funding more writers? Are these funding more artists? Are these figuring out what is the next

[1:03:33] them. [1:03:34] And not EA, but a third thing. Like, what... Yeah, I think these are sort of big, squishy questions that... [1:03:42] that are, yeah, are just going to take time for us to figure out. So I'm, I'm, I'm kind of eager to, [1:03:48] get cranking on some of them. [1:03:49] Yeah. [1:03:50] In some sense, we'll just kind of come down to like, [1:03:53] the moral hierarchy of the rich people and the open AI foundation. [1:03:58] I think... [1:04:01] And, and slash, sorry to interrupt you, like Ross Douthat wrote an interesting response to your piece and he, I thought it was cool. He made a strong case for like making more beautiful things in the world. And yet it's also like, well, that's great, but we still have crazy amounts of poverty in the world. [1:04:15] like, [1:04:17] And presumably, I don't know, some anthropic employees listening to this, trying to decide where to spend their new fortune. [1:04:23] uh, [1:04:24] I suspect it's probably pretty hard to... [1:04:27] in earnest be like, I'm going to spend it on beautiful buildings when... And maybe this is too EA of a mindset or whatever. It is very EA mindset. And there's a lot to love about that. I don't know if the answer is, I guess, the answer to that question. But I guess I just wonder... [1:04:46] If there's a little bit more room for... [1:04:50] Um... [1:04:52] a portfolio of approaches here. And if we have to so... [1:04:57] strictly adhere to sort of like a single I think it feels a little bit hubristic or naive to think that like everything is captured in a cost benefit analysis that we can sort of put into a spreadsheet and a lot is so I don't want to minimize that at all. But I think it's like

[1:05:16] I think we can all kind of feel it, that something isn't quite always captured in that lens. And that's not to say we shouldn't fund all that stuff, but there's probably a bit more space for some of the squishier stuff. And whether that's 5% or 10% or 30% of the [1:05:31] portfolio funding. I don't know, and it's not my decision to make, but, um, [1:05:36] I'm like, what? [1:05:37] you know, [1:05:39] should we be a little bit more kind of experimental in thinking about that, especially and acknowledge that some of the questions are, [1:05:48] are just different. Like, um... [1:05:52] I guess one way to like, how would, if somebody was really set on the cost benefit piece, maybe one way to sort of like reason through that with them would be. [1:06:00] You know, one would might believe it and sort of post AGI, we're like living in this age of abundance. And in that world, we have. [1:06:08] ticked through a lot of the things on the top of the spreadsheet, so to speak, or most of the things on the spreadsheet. But the squishier things are just going to take more time to sort of figure out. So let's use that the time we have, you know, now to our advantage and like start to get some of that going. Like, I don't think that I'm not sure that those problems can absorb. [1:06:29] so much capital right now, even if we wanted them to. I've not looked at it, but that is my intuition. And so you need some kickstarting, some snowball rolling. Yeah, exactly. So like, and that's probably not that expensive. So like, maybe we should just do those things. And then like, at least we have the option down the line to like, expand them or something. There's like a time element. Yes, maybe.

[1:06:50] This is slightly tangential, but I think it is quite related, which is inside of this is actually like philanthropic dollar spend typically tends to be far more risk averse than venture capital or other forms of investment. [1:07:06] And one, I think there are a million reasons for that, um, bureaucracy, all these other things. But one reason might actually be that like, people don't want to spend their money. People don't want to be criticized for spending their money on beautiful buildings when they could have spent it on malaria nets or whatever. And so on some level, it actually is going to require like, which is a shift by the way. Cause like philanthropy used to be funding your public library. Yeah. Yeah. So it actually, that's a, that's an interesting point, which is like, there is a resistance to being divergent to, to being in the same way that I'm sure, by the way, [1:07:36] right now in 2026, if you're not funding AI, you better have a pretty good reason. And by the way, I would probably argue that... [1:07:45] you're probably more likely to find something really interesting outside of AI now. Maybe not more likely, whatever. Because everyone's looking at that. Right, right. So anyway, there's a- It's like a non-consensus. There's a pressure to be super consensus in philanthropy. One question, and this may be silly, but one question I kind of found myself thinking about and asking is, your setup has two scarcities. [1:08:06] You and Patrick, basically. And that's doing a lot of extra work. But, like, basically the allocator, or excuse me, the funder, and the ambitious person that could probably go be working on something else or starting a company or whatever. I think it's in the GM piece. You had laid this out for part of why at least the –

[1:08:23] The funder dynamic is scarce. You say, in practice, this means funders who, one, back an ambitious problem and want to solve the whole thing versus a slice of it. Two, resource it well. Three, give their leaders genuine autonomy to do whatever is needed to solve the problem. Four, compensate these leaders competitively. And five, commit to sticking with the problem for a very long time. [1:08:43] Again, the pithy question is like, which of those two roles do you think is actually more scarce in this ecosystem now? People like you or funders like Patrick? And then I think there's a lot of follow-up questions. I don't know the relative scarcity, but I think they are both really scarce. [1:09:01] We have a really unique setup. [1:09:03] in the context of our, like, public goods work at Stripe. Like, um... [1:09:08] All of the things there are true. And like that... [1:09:11] The question I get most when we're hiring a new person on the team is just like, [1:09:17] skepticism coming in and being like, is this real? Like what is going on here? And like, um, or could Patrick just get bored or distracted or get the board tell him? Yeah. Are you going to shut it down? Go public. They're like, why are you doing this? Totally. Are you going to shut it down? Um, uh, yeah. Well, will priorities change? Like it's not the core business. Like, are you sure you're not like spending all of your time jumping through bureaucratic hoops and like [1:09:41] I get the skepticism because I think at most organizations that is true. And it is not the case at Stripe. So I think we've just like, yeah, Patrick and John have just created a really, like, [1:09:51] I feel really lucky because we have sort of like these perfect conditions to take on really long term projects in really sort of higher than usual risk appetite ways. And we have...

[1:10:03] I think in part because we've executed well, like consistently over a long period of time, have like earned the trust to continue to do that. But I think the piece like the generalizable piece, in my opinion, is that. [1:10:17] This is replicable. It's not – like you can – like more companies, I think – [1:10:23] could house organizations like Frontier and like this new respiratory infection initiative. And the sort of, you know, when we were starting Frontier, [1:10:33] My instinct was to spin it out of stripe. [1:10:35] Because I'm like, this is getting really big, bringing money from other companies. [1:10:40] We shouldn't do this in the straight. [1:10:45] Patrick was like, I think we should keep it in strip. And one of the reasons was we want to shepherd this for the long run. And the other reason was that we can pay people. [1:10:55] tech salaries while working on this. And so we're going to be able to attract better people. And I think that like... [1:11:01] Those are very non-consensus. [1:11:03] things to like approaches to philanthropy and they really make a difference. Like those are kind of, I think, sneaky advantages that we have. [1:11:14] And I think those are replicable by other companies. So those are, in theory, things that I think leaders at other organizations could decide to do. They could decide to say, like... [1:11:25] We also want to take on really big problems. We're going to pay people who work on these public goods like other people at our company. And we are going to protect them from sort of any, you know, having to – they are different from the core companies. We're going to protect them from –

[1:11:44] processes that don't apply to them and we are going to pay them reasonably well. And I think that's like a sneaky, huge arbitrage for companies. [1:11:51] Two thoughts. One is, [1:11:53] I think it's telling that [1:11:54] Patrick's done this in different forms, which is all of this is a part of Stripe. Arc's a separate thing. He's doing this stuff with Tyler or whatever. [1:12:02] which is another nice example of sort of like downstream of the problem, figure out whatever. [1:12:08] Why? And I don't want you to speak for him or whatever, but like... [1:12:12] I understand the point you're making when you say it's replicable. [1:12:15] On the other hand, it's like, this happens because out of the goodness of their heart, more or less. [1:12:21] I think is there a is there a real business case for this stuff in the really long run? Yeah, we are interested in economic growth and climate change is a threat to that. People getting sick from common respiratory infections is also a threat to that, like probably half percent to a percent of GDP every single year. So like that is not trivial. Um, [1:12:43] But that's a really, over the really long term, that is true. So I... [1:12:49] In the short term, you know, these are revenue destructive. You know, these are not – we spend a lot of money on carbon removal that we do not recoup. We spend a lot of money from – Maybe it's brand. Like it improves Stripe's brand. You know, I – [1:13:04] I've never been asked that, like, that has never come up in a conversation. [1:13:11] I just like, don't, but, but I think you're right that like these like,

[1:13:14] hyper smart, conscientious people [1:13:17] wanting to sort of like... [1:13:19] S- [1:13:20] souls-oriented in a good direction. Those are... [1:13:24] Yeah, there's there's those are they're hard to find people to go back to the scarcity question. Do you think that there's any world where you could be doing something like this somewhere else? [1:13:33] I think that the tectonic plates are shifting right now a lot in philanthropy. And so I hope the answer to that question, whether it's for me specifically, [1:13:41] Yeah, I'm asking for NANS 2 through 100. Yeah, I think that there, I hope there are. And I think that there definitely could be. [1:13:50] So when we think about how philanthropy is changing, one of the sort of – [1:13:56] One of the reasons for the change is that there's a lot of money coming in from... [1:14:01] by the OpenAI Foundation, from Anthropic founders who pledged to give a huge amount of their money away, and Anthropic employees who have taken advantage of this really epic... [1:14:14] employee matching program that the founders put in place. There's also lots of other money from people who are sort of like second order benefit from that. Maybe SpaceX folks end up being sort of philanthropically minded. But the point is that like, there's a lot of money coming, new philanthropic money coming into the space. [1:14:27] And the... [1:14:28] Types of funders who are behind the money grew up in Silicon Valley. They grew up kind of like like their orientation is like we want really smart, fast, nimble hustlers to like own a problem and like deliver results. And. [1:14:43] And that has the potential, the combination of the funding and their orientation around

[1:14:48] that talent is, [1:14:49] and the fact that the problems that they're worried about are very time-sensitive. Their worldview, by the way. It's actually not software people as much. It's AI people, which is almost a different genealogy there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, exactly. And the worldview of that. [1:15:03] type of person is like, okay, we gotta move fast. And so all of those things, I think, have the potential to come together to like... [1:15:11] Um, um, [1:15:14] embolden and fund and catalyze this whole new wave of... [1:15:20] philanthropic founders. Make Patrick less scarce. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. In that piece, you basically, to put some numbers on it, you say, I think your conservative estimate is like almost $40 billion a year of new philanthropic dollars that are going to come in. I think the total number now is about 600 a year. Yeah. Um... [1:15:37] 600, yeah, 600 a year in the U.S. [1:15:42] you have all these great, let's like whatever, 5,000 IFPs and however many ARC institutes and so on. Like, um, [1:15:48] realistically [1:15:50] There's just no way that we're going to have enough things to fund. [1:15:54] Um... [1:15:55] Like that? Yes. So what do you actually think is going to, I mean, part of this is the reason you wrote the post, but like, what do you actually think is going to happen over the next two years? Let's say. [1:16:04] Well... [1:16:05] I think that, like... [1:16:07] Without significant intervention, I don't know. Yeah. I think the thing that... The money just won't get spent. Yeah. I think the default is that, like, yeah, the funding doesn't materialize, but doesn't actually... [1:16:17] go anywhere because funders are like, I'm not finding these like amazing projects that I want to put the money towards.

[1:16:23] But part of that is in our control to fix it. So like what I hope happens is that we can sort of see this tidal wave of funding coming down the pike and we. [1:16:37] figure out how do we better characterize the problems that these funders want to fund and that we sort of [1:16:43] the world quote unquote should solve. What is the pipeline of talent from, you know, people working as a, as a tech PM that maybe they want to get into a different type of thing, or they're sort of attracted to, um, uh, [1:16:57] these hyper-ambitious kind of public goods, good for the world-shaped problems, and now have a path to actually being able to work on them unencumbered. But it's your sort of speedrunning saying it's like the cultural aspects of this are like venture capital in the 1980s, and we're about to have the funding level of the 2010s. It's going to happen fast. Yeah. Well, okay, I think it will happen fast, but also it's going to take the funders' time to build the muscle to spend. Yeah. [1:17:24] the money. Like, [1:17:26] It's a lot of money to move. So it's not going to ramp up immediately. That's going to take time. And I think there need to be capital allocators to, like, help facilitate the deployment of capital. That's, like, a whole shape of founder that needs to exist in addition to the builders. Yeah, yeah. But I think the thing to take away here is that, like... [1:17:45] There's a lot of money that is going to be pointed at [1:17:49] Really interesting and important problems for the world. And the thing that is going to be needed is really talented, amazing people to understand

[1:17:59] GM the problem and to figure out the path forward. And I think that the job, what funders I hope do is like give these, [1:18:07] founders, the space and the breathing room and the like non-administrative like. This is the quote I read about Patrick, right? Yeah. Like, I think like if the thing that I am like most would be most anxious about any of these cases is like. [1:18:22] I don't want to work in an environment where like I'm going to be hamstrung by having to like produce random reports all the time. Right. Like that is the most like I would take a crazy pay cut to not have to deal with ambitious people of autonomy. [1:18:35] that's on the funders to figure out how do I like make sure, because that's the pull is always in that direction. So like how do as funders, we are sort of self-aware of saying like, okay, I'm going to push back against that. Like, [1:18:47] Yeah. [1:18:47] That and also I'm going to fund the weird stuff. And I'm going to fund the weird stuff. I think there's going to be natural interest in funding the weird stuff from this set of funders. Because of the type, yeah. They like the weird stuff. [1:18:57] you know, anthropical IPO, I don't know, in a year or something like that, or maybe later this year, and then there's a lockup period and blah, blah, blah. So maybe funding becomes available in the year. [1:19:06] *sniff* [1:19:07] It's going to take... [1:19:09] You know, if I decide today that I find a problem that I want to work on, I have to quit my job, [1:19:14] I have to learn about that problem. I have to ramp up on that problem. I have to figure out what is my strategy. [1:19:18] To find funding for that, to find a team for that. [1:19:21] I have to figure out how to work with my team. Like that's going to take a year to like build up some basic capacity. [1:19:28] We got to start that now. Like the time to get going on that is now so that in the next couple of years there is. Well, and the exciting part maybe is if you're the entrepreneurial person is like the funding is.

[1:19:39] in a way that it hasn't really been before, going to be there. Yeah. In this very, very... Exactly. Not low-hanging fruit. That's probably like a little bit... [1:19:45] of a silly way of putting it, but much more. It is kind of like the grants are out there. - Yeah. - It's like yours for the taking. - Yep. - Maybe it's just a few miscellaneous questions on this stuff. Back to the snowball idea. Usually actually the highest leverage thing is spend a small amount of money on getting something rolling. When does the size of the amount of funding [1:20:05] really matter. [1:20:07] Presumably, one other way this could be shaped is like, [1:20:11] We're talking orders of magnitude, billions of dollars being given away, um, [1:20:16] possibly to individuals, like who knows, or at least hundreds of millions. Like maybe it's the coefficient giving thing, it's really small or whatever. [1:20:24] when does a large amount of capital really, even for something like what you do, like when does it really move the needle? Presumably something like Frontier is a dramatically different orientation than the $10 million Stripe is giving away. But is it about a proof point? Is it about a repeatable kind of funding mechanism? I think it's too problem specific to like answer that. But I think the generalizable thing is like, [1:20:48] In most cases... [1:20:50] a new problem isn't going to be able to absorb like $10 billion right off the bat. So like you can't eat. It's another reason you have to get started sooner. Exactly. Got it. Exactly. [1:21:01] Any sense on the types of problems that are better served funded by people? [1:21:05] private philanthropy versus government. [1:21:07] That's a question I feel that I need to have a better...

[1:21:11] answer for for myself. I don't know. Like, in some sense, I do feel that carbon removal should never have been [1:21:21] private sector driven. I think that that is like a little insane. [1:21:25] Yeah. [1:21:26] But you go to war with the army you have. And I guess like in theory, not all philanthropy is sort of like in the general, there's like a scalability, like how... [1:21:36] How broadly might it serve the public? [1:21:39] public's interest. Maybe philanthropy is sort of better positioned for like more [1:21:44] I don't know, like specific or like hyper local things or something like that in a way that like governments are bad. I don't know. Do you have an answer to that question? Well, I guess that. [1:21:53] uh, [1:21:54] Some political view response to this would be like, [1:21:58] these people shouldn't even be as rich and like, you should be taxed way more and more. Like the government's job is to do philanthropy. The private sector shouldn't even be doing it. I think a very strong counter example would be something like frontier, which is like, [1:22:13] Turns out the government doesn't always solve the problems we have. Um, [1:22:18] I'm sure there are people who think that the Open AIF Foundation should be deployed by the government. Yeah. [1:22:23] I think that is... [1:22:28] Not the case. Like, I think it's like, okay, that might be true. And I am not one to speak about kind of what is the fate of these AI companies in reality. [1:22:40] the long run. But I...

[1:22:45] Yeah, the more interesting question, to be clear, I think is about... [1:22:49] the types of [1:22:51] The government is good at funding certain types of things, and it's not as good. And part of it is just whatever the government... Maybe the answer is actually as simple as just like, what are the areas that the government is not funding enough? [1:23:00] Like, go nuts. [1:23:03] But that's different. I feel like there's a difference in the question of like, what should the government be funding? And like, what does the government fund? And I think that like, in reality, it's a different way. [1:23:11] a lot of the philanthropy that we're seeing is like going to fund the [1:23:15] gaps that the government is not doing. Now, I think that like, in theory, the government, like both philanthropy and governments, [1:23:23] are in theory interested in the interest of the public. They're interested in sort of like how do we better – [1:23:29] serve people and the world. So like in principle, they should maybe be interested in very... [1:23:35] similar things. Now, maybe there are differences because [1:23:39] individuals might have different worldviews of what does serve the public. And so like, the government has one worldview. And so a philanthropist might think, well, I don't agree with that. And so I want to do this other thing. And I value this a lot. And the government doesn't. But they're both [1:23:51] broadly aligned towards serving the public. I think another... [1:23:54] Maybe the way that they differ is that [1:23:58] philanthropies are smaller than the government. So like what are [1:24:02] There are probably things that the government can fund that, like, [1:24:06] Right. Individual philanthropists can ever do. Now. [1:24:10] OpenAI Foundation has a lot of money. So like... It's more government... Right. This is the tension, I think. Now you're kind of getting... Like because some of these... Some of the dollars...

[1:24:20] depending on where, you know, AI... [1:24:22] company valuations go could get really, really big. I think that there is this question of like, [1:24:27] I don't know, maybe... [1:24:28] Is that maybe they? [1:24:30] could start funding things. Right, right. If Antropoc gets to a certain size, should they be doing the UBI? [1:24:36] I mean, yeah, you guys. Yeah, I don't know how to think about that. But it is it is that kind of like at some point you get to a level of scale or health care or whatever it might be. [1:24:44] Hmm. And I think that like, you know, this really like the sort of worldview and orientation and like the character and morality of these. [1:24:55] funders and organizations because of the potential scale here. [1:25:01] And because of how concentrated it is, like end up mattering quite a lot. Do you think we'll ever get the level of ambition required to, [1:25:09] If there isn't a clear path for quote unquote philanthropic founders to get [1:25:14] Anywhere near as rich as... [1:25:16] Um... [1:25:17] Non-philanthropic founders? I think that's a really good question. [1:25:24] Yeah. [1:25:26] Conceptually, I think it is [1:25:28] sort of silly and a little crazy that we like, we're like, okay, if you solve this like amazing thing for the world, we still expect you to take a... [1:25:36] huge pay cut. Right. Like, [1:25:38] If one delivers a great outcome for the world, like, we should make them rich. [1:25:42] That's great. And I think that like that is a I don't really actually know where the whole one has to self sacrifice in so many areas to do philanthropy came from. I don't know if it's that. I think it's actually the inverse, which is just in companies. I mean, the reason Silicon Valley has created so much wealth.

[1:25:59] in a way that's even distinct from finance or whatever, is ownership. [1:26:03] Like, [1:26:04] Larry Page made Google and as a result of it owned an ultimately fairly small part that's worth a ton of money. [1:26:14] Maybe there's something like an advanced market commitment as a bounty. [1:26:19] Like somehow, but it's actually, it's closer to the advanced market commitment problem, which is like, there isn't enough demand. [1:26:25] Well, you want to pay for outcomes is sort of what you're getting at. Yeah, I think that like... [1:26:34] You know, you talk to some folks in AI and they're sort of like, okay, eventually, like, an ASI will allocate sort of – there will be like a – you know, will allocate sort of rewards based on people's contributions. Reality. Yeah. Or, yeah, societal contributions. And I think that, like, that is a – maybe on one end of the sort of extreme, I think another – [1:26:54] way to think about this is like [1:26:57] You know, companies, let's look at the typical company, a company. How do companies compensate for performance? Well, there's like a base salary. [1:27:04] But there are oftentimes performance incentives, like you're getting a cash bonus or you're getting you're rated. You're you're sort of often like rated based on how well you've done in a given year. And some of that is outcome based, but some of it's a little squishy, but it kind of works like people, you know, it's a. [1:27:22] half objective, half subjective measure. It works for companies. I'm sort of like... [1:27:27] Why can't we do the same thing for... [1:27:29] Philanthropies, like if the funders determine that like a founder is killing it, can we pay them more? I think another interesting dynamic and a very unique dynamic about this round of philanthropy.

[1:27:43] this wave of philanthropy is that the... [1:27:47] Money coming in is currently sitting as equity in the most, you know, some of those valuable companies, the most coveted equity in the world. And so. [1:27:57] Can we use that to sort of like the advantage of these problems to say like, OK, if a founder kills it, can we give them can we pay them a performance bonus in the form of Anthropic stock? Yes. Like, I think that's like a sneaky, cool, unusual piece. Like I like part of me like wants to just. [1:28:16] This is not the first time people have had a version of the like, we should... [1:28:20] change performance incentives in philanthropy. So like part of me thinks this is a dead end and part of me wants to hire like a cracked out lawyer to like figure out how to do this. It's not that I mean. [1:28:29] you don't have to confirm or deny it. Presumably you have equity in strife. Yeah. And that is a really good incentive for someone who would, yeah, right. [1:28:36] And I think there's like a version of that. Yeah, there's like a generalizable version of that. Now that we have the funding that's sitting in equity and [1:28:43] And it's a lot of money. [1:28:45] Huh. Yeah. Conversely, though, it probably you still have the ownership problem. It probably looks [1:28:52] closer to like a highly competitive, high frequency trading bonus structure. Part of the challenge too is you just need more competition, which is like currently, [1:29:02] Uh... [1:29:03] These funders don't have to pay out. [1:29:05] that much in philanthropic outcomes because the most ambitious, like, yeah, it's, wait, say, say more about the, um, like the reason the bonuses are so high in HFT is because there's a hell of a lot of competition. Yeah. And,

[1:29:18] In this domain, there's a lot less competition. And so the best people are in less demand. And as a result, you're like, oh, cool. You did a good job on your nice philanthropic thing. Here's an extra 100K. Yeah, yeah. Again, part of this is that you're never going to get a bonus at the level of startup equity. Yeah. So it's like there is the ownership thing that maybe you solve. It's a cool area to – I mean, the other way you solve this is you just have more – [1:29:40] you [1:29:41] Bill Gates was quite innovative in terms of how he thought about philanthropy. And you could have – we're going to have some really rich people. And they could be quite creative for how they think about – Totally. Like, if somebody solves this problem, here's $100 million. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that – okay, so there's, like, the bounty or the prize model. I think the challenge – Yeah, yeah. With that is, like, yeah, if it takes you, like, 20 years, you have to sell funds during that time. And also, who do you – yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I – my instinct is that, like, there is some – [1:30:11] there's like something here around the pay piece that like, [1:30:15] we do have to look at this right now. If we want the best people working on the most important problems for the world, we are going to have to get creative about how to compensate them. Now, I don't think we need to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here, where – [1:30:29] we can borrow a lot from the private sector. Like we can borrow a lot about performance incentives and bonuses, et cetera. Like we don't, I'm not convinced we should like totally reinvent the wheel. [1:30:39] Yes, and yet you're currently relying on [1:30:44] someone like Nan Rancihoff being like, I'm going to...

[1:30:48] Ultimately, I mean, I don't know. Ultimately, yeah, and I think your decision to pivot to Stripe was a good one. Yeah, same. In lots of ways. That was probably not that obvious back then, especially when it came to like, you're going to have to have people take the gambit that like, [1:31:05] One, I'm going to maybe sacrifice my total earning potential. [1:31:08] And maybe this is going to evolve in a new way. Like these, these, these pieces are all going to have to be. It's kind of like a trust fall kind of vibe. Yeah. I mean, I think that there, but, but I think that that is also a tractable problem in and of itself. Like imagine like, what does a sort of YC for philanthropic founders look like where there is some sort of, even if it's a small batch, you're sort of saying, okay, like for the best folks who come out of this, there's this much funding reserved for you in the [1:31:38] a bit more... [1:31:40] And you don't have to fund everybody. Like, YC doesn't fund everybody. [1:31:44] I talked to a few people before this conversation, and speaking of maybe the... [1:31:48] the pivot and transition, I think you're someone who... [1:31:53] Like... [1:31:54] very much inflected your life in a non-obvious way, not that early. Like you weren't like in your early 20s. [1:32:04] Thank you. [1:32:04] And maybe to set the tone, you were talking about the marriage question and why it was meaningful to you. And you said, but if I had to summarize the net effect of this book on me, it was a massive infusion of courage to not snap to grid by default for big life choices. In talking to other people about you, I think that there's just overwhelming sense of like...

[1:32:24] Someone who is like super ambitious along like a static ladder and then like [1:32:30] somehow you got off the main highway. [1:32:34] Maybe two questions. One, what did you have to sacrifice? [1:32:37] Or did it feel like... [1:32:38] it was actually sacrificing something. And then two, uh, [1:32:43] For other people out there who probably have like... [1:32:46] Some semi-conscious or... [1:32:48] like partly conscious feeling of like, "Yeah, I'm doing pretty well. I've done the thing." You talk about this in the context of millennials really well, which is like, "Chase the gold stars." [1:32:57] What advice would you give them to the people who know that maybe there's some other path out there, but it feels like they're too far along or whatever? [1:33:07] Okay. [1:33:09] *sigh* [1:33:10] Yes, I would. Yes. Yeah, I would definitely have like self described as like a, um, [1:33:19] I was, like, really good at playing the game. I, like... [1:33:22] You know, I was good at the gold stars. I was good at school. I like kind of did... [1:33:29] like life as I was supposed to do it. Um, and, you know, gotten to good schools and got good jobs and, you know, got married and got a house. And then there was sort of a series of things that happened in my life, including a sick parent and, um, uh, a sort of 15 year relationship and marriage coming to an end that end COVID that sort of like all ended up coinciding, um, around the same time. And, um,

[1:33:57] Those... [1:34:00] sort of [1:34:02] like some combination of like, yeah, the combination of those things, [1:34:08] shook kind of the foundation of everything, I think, in some sense for me. [1:34:14] And, and, [1:34:15] I was like... [1:34:19] I think there was a lot going on during that time, and it was very fear-inducing for somebody who is... [1:34:27] you know, was very much like kind of on the path and the sort of fear around getting off the path was, [1:34:35] incredibly overwhelming for me for many years. And I think that that, um, [1:34:43] getting through to the other side of that and realizing that like my life didn't fall apart. [1:34:48] And [1:34:50] you know the some things that i was really scared the the things that i imagined that was going to be the worst things ever did not materialize our brains are very creative in that way yeah yeah um and then realizing that like the space that i cleared like the space that was cleared from um from like this sort of new phase was an opportunity for all this new stuff to grow and for part of what we talked about earlier and like developing confidence that to like listen to my [1:35:20] listen to my own interests and curiosities a bit more. [1:35:24] like happened through that process. Yeah, I think I think that the combination of those things, while in like deeply painful at the time, were very important for my growth as a person.

[1:35:34] If you step off the path, nobody really cares that much. And nobody's really paying attention. And it feels better because it feels more you. I think I've up-weighted my... [1:35:47] I've up weighted how much I'm trying to like understand and live in accordance with my own values and self and less what I'm like supposed to be doing. But that was a real unlearning process that I think. [1:35:59] You know, I have great parents and they did amazing. You know, they're amazing. And I think I just kind of also got caught by the... [1:36:05] system that many of us get caught by. But I, you know, I look at people like [1:36:09] Like, [1:36:12] There are so many people, especially in San Francisco, who I feel like have... [1:36:17] gone their own weird, zaggy ways really early in their lives. And I feel some... [1:36:23] envy of them because I'm like, I wish that I had like gotten there sooner, but like I didn't. [1:36:31] But you could still get there. There's hope yet. There's hope yet. [1:36:34] I think I was so fixed on the path that like things needed to get a little bit messy before I could like really kind of get there. But other people may not be as well. I think the hard thing is the it compounds. Yeah. Like the long the reason it's the reason most people don't ever get there is because after a certain age, you kind of just stop assuming that like. Yeah. And there's a thing. [1:36:57] Another maybe related part of this is just like lots of people who describe you as like, [1:37:02] Um, super hardcore and fun. Oh, that's nice.

[1:37:08] Uh, and just like lots of dimensionality. I'm sure part of it is, is related to what you just said, but. [1:37:14] Um... [1:37:17] Maybe a theme that has come up in lots of my conversations with people I admire is like, [1:37:20] managing to hold both like deep seriousness and intensity and lightness. And like, I'm curious if there's anything that comes to mind for, for, [1:37:31] how you create that or foster that. Like, by the way, like maybe, maybe there's some feeling of like, Oh, I wish I had whatever found my weirdness sooner or something, but like, [1:37:42] I think part of what makes you you is also your seriousness and intensity. And maybe part of that came from striving, but... [1:37:50] Thank you. [1:37:51] Yeah, I think that's... [1:37:54] I don't know. It's so hard to know what my life would have looked like had I taken a different route. I think I've become like less rigid and probably more fun over time in part because... [1:38:03] More fun. I don't know about that. But definitely less rigid over time and maybe more... [1:38:08] Okay, we all take Myers-Briggs. We're all forced to take Myers-Briggs at some point in our lives. And I used to be a really strong J. [1:38:15] And I've like become... [1:38:17] like a soft P now. And I, well, and whatever, this is all kind of, [1:38:22] One of your friends described you as the only person they know is going from Kiki to Booba in their 30s. Yeah, yeah. No, for sure. I think that's true. The baddest scientific is Myers-Briggs. Yeah, I think that's a great that's a great summary. [1:38:37] And part of that was, I think, just the exhaustion with the kikiness of it all. Like, I think I just kind of was like, this isn't that fun for me. Like, I've kind of been there, done that. And...

[1:38:49] There were people that I did encounter [1:38:52] So Ryan Orbach, who we worked together early days on Stripe Climate, he was like one of, even though I lived in San Francisco for a long time, I like interestingly didn't, I was in a very different part of San Francisco. [1:39:07] Ryan, I think, is one of those people who like, he's just always following his curiosity. And he's like, [1:39:13] sometimes a little disorganized, but like in a really fun way. And I think that that was a very [1:39:18] sort of shocking to me at the time. And I was like, [1:39:21] That is a way to be. [1:39:25] in a very helpful way to see. And I now, you know, I think I actually have many friends that are like, sort of versions of that, but it was very helpful to sort of see what that looks like and, you know, [1:39:36] sort of permiss myself to... [1:39:39] you know, not be as... [1:39:44] Yeah, I just kind of loosen the grip on things. [1:39:47] Thank you. [1:39:47] Speaking of Ryan, he told me to ask about a lost drone exploring carbon removal projects in Iceland. Okay. Oh, yeah. We went to Iceland to look at some carbon removal projects in like 2021, maybe something like that. [1:40:03] We were driving around, there was a film crew we were bringing with us at the time. And Ryan... There was a drone. They wanted to fly a drone over the car as we were driving. But the guy who was controlling the drone lost service with the drone. And it ended up going down in this massive field of identical rock and moss. So you just... It was like the perfect camo conditions for a drone. So for like two hours, we're parked on the side of the road and...

[1:40:31] And I was like, let's just get a new drone. But you're in Iceland, so can you get a new drone on time? I don't know. And so we were just all out. [1:40:39] out you know we're all like walking around this field we did end up finding it but it was like truly so it was so random um it's a normal day on the job it's a normal day on the job yeah straight climate um [1:40:51] Why do you think Patrick and Stripe care so much about... [1:40:56] funding things like this or Stripe Press or any, like what about him? [1:41:02] Okay. [1:41:03] He's not unique, maybe, but he's certainly unusual for his peer set. [1:41:08] I keep going back to like their souls are pointing in a good direction. Like they want... [1:41:13] the world to be better. And I think they have pretty... [1:41:16] non-normal, like... [1:41:18] expansive views of what that can mean. [1:41:22] They're very long termist. [1:41:25] and they have unusually high appetites for [1:41:30] weird, risky or off the beaten path ideas. Yeah. Um, [1:41:37] And I think the combination of those traits... [1:41:40] is unusual. [1:41:44] And I think like actually a thing, you know, to the thing we were talking about earlier. [1:41:49] Like, [1:41:50] They're not... [1:41:52] I have not observed them to be like ROI obsessive in the... [1:41:57] in the sort of like works in progress press, um,

[1:42:01] frontier [1:42:03] side of the world. [1:42:07] they're not asking questions like, [1:42:09] what's the brand benefit of this and can you quantify it? They're sort of like a little bit more of this like, [1:42:15] intuition and judgment and belief of like, this is like ideas for progress, like ideas are a way that we spread good things in the world. So like we should have, we should have, you know, how do we distribute more great ideas? [1:42:27] You know, also probably a lot of trust in the people running these things. They also have that. Yeah. I think they I think that they care a lot about, yeah, finding people, finding great people and then working with them for like really long periods of time. And that like trust. [1:42:41] does compound over long periods of time. [1:42:44] Why do you love scones? The dirty little secret is that I don't actually love scones that much. Um, uh, yeah, basically I was on, um, a trip maybe like five years ago with, um, a bunch of people, including my sister and my best friend, Sarah, both their names are Sarah. And, uh, [1:43:03] I don't... Like, we were... [1:43:04] We were like eating a really good scone and then we came up with the name scone heads and then we were like we should start. [1:43:12] a scone rating account called scone heads but we just like thought the pun was funny and now five years later we're like still rocking yeah i would say that we need a bit of a brand refresh okay i would say we've gotten a little lazy in our day but there's a but you know scone dash heads dot com [1:43:29] Take a gander. See what you find on that website.

[1:43:33] I think it's like a fun project for... [1:43:36] It's like a fun example of making stuff with friends. And that has been, it's just like a silly, a silly side hustle with friends. It has been a real treat. [1:43:45] You have a great little old essay on relationship primitives, speaking of making things with friends. [1:43:54] updated your thinking or had any more creativity on the ways that sort of maybe one of the points you make there is that friendship, I think, is an especially under explored category of ways that you can have unique relationships with people and the things you can do with your friends, including... [1:44:13] the lack of commitments and all these other things. Um, I think that was probably three or four years ago. Yeah. Brie and I wrote that together. Oh yeah. Right. Right. Um, [1:44:21] Any updated thinking? [1:44:25] I mean, I still think that... [1:44:28] I still think that friendship is like the kind of under, is like the... [1:44:34] Thank you. [1:44:35] It kind of gets the dregs. Yes. Right. Right. We don't make like we make things with coworkers, but we don't make them with our friends as much. There's no default together time. There's no default together time. And I feel like that actually crystallized for me when I was... [1:44:51] I did some work on my house a couple of years ago and I ended up moving in with some friends, with two friends and their three kids. Now three kids, it was two at the time. And we lived together for three months. And I got, you know, I was friends with them before, but not like super close with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was just like a really magical experience. How often do you get to live with...

[1:45:10] friends as adults. And, you know, we're always joking, like, we're meeting in the micro kitchen for a snack break or whatever. And it's just, it's a real joy. And the closeness that you get from that sort of spontaneous reaction, I think is... [1:45:25] You have that with a partner. You have that with family growing up, but like it is hard. [1:45:30] to sort of like replicate with friends. And this is why, you know, the Phil Levins of the world are like, you should live near friends and that's the whole thing. And that's really amazing if you can do it, but it's hard to sort of execute in practice. [1:45:41] Yeah, friends, we don't go to therapy with friends. Not that one has to go to therapy at all, but like... [1:45:46] It's just interesting to me the things that we unconsciously [1:45:50] bucket into certain types of relationships. We do this activity with this type of person, but not with this type of person. [1:45:58] Why is that? [1:46:00] And I don't think you have to do anything with anybody, but it's more just like see the boundary. Yeah. Make a choice. [1:46:06] You were talking about the John and Paul book that Ian Leslie wrote, and you wrote that... [1:46:12] uh, [1:46:13] It's deeply romantic, but not sexual. [1:46:15] What does that mean? [1:46:16] What do you mean by romantic, specifically? I guess is my question. What do I mean by romantic? It's like, I can feel it, but I can't put it into words. It's like... [1:46:26] It's like a soul conversation or like a seeing each other deeply or a, um, a, [1:46:36] an appreciation for one's like being or something like that, that is like,

[1:46:42] more, it like feels more like holy or something than, uh, [1:46:48] than like just a friendship. [1:46:51] I think that reading that book made me feel... [1:46:54] Like we are, I'm even struggling to find the words now. And I think that that's because we're impoverished for the language to describe these different kinds of friendship. Do you think that's specifically because... [1:47:04] It was a creative relationship. I suspect that had a lot to do with it. I think that the sort of melding of the minds and the melding of the artistic spirit of folks, like making something with anybody is an intimate act. [1:47:20] Right. Like, yes. And like, you know, the most intimate version, I suppose, is like the raising of the children together or something like that. But like creative projects. [1:47:29] whether it's art or music or getting a new thing off the ground with somebody like a co-founder scone heads it's great i love this is organic marketing for scone heads um the the uh [1:47:41] The lake... [1:47:42] co-founder relationship. That is a marriage of sorts. And I don't think all of them... [1:47:48] all of them trend into romantic territory. But I think that the creating of something creates some conditions for... [1:47:59] Does that resonate? [1:48:01] It's funny, there's something like there's... [1:48:04] You were pointing, there's almost like a sacred element of it. Yeah. I don't know if it's... [1:48:10] it feels most resonant in the creative because like, uh, you, you hear, you look at, um, Johnny Ive talk about Steve jobs, like the same thing. There's some, or you, you even somewhere reference, like all these creative duos. Um, yeah,

[1:48:22] That's the part. And so I do wonder if it. [1:48:25] if it's possible without the creative part, but... I mean, it must be because, like... [1:48:32] I guess if you think about like relationships or partnerships, like is, it's like a, how many soulmates do you have? It's like that. [1:48:40] Yes, but if you specifically think about the creativity, if romance is conditioned on sort of a creative endeavor, in what way is marriage a creative endeavor? I think it's a creative endeavor. I haven't been married, but... [1:48:55] or raising kids or sort of like, but I guess it's like it can take, maybe that can take a... [1:49:01] the creativity and the making things can take... [1:49:03] A lot of different forms. I think part of it is obligation. [1:49:06] Hmm. [1:49:07] One of the things about friendship that's funny is like there's no technical obligations at all. Yeah. You're allowed to walk away at any time. Yeah. And that's not quite the case with the creative partnership or the marriage or with whatever. But I ask about soulmates because I've had dinner party conversations about this and like – [1:49:23] How many... [1:49:24] I think some people would say, "Yeah, I have one soulmate and it's my wife," or whatever. And then other people would be like, "I've had seven, and two of them were sexual," or whatever. [1:49:35] So there's clearly you're pointing at something. [1:49:37] And [1:49:39] Uh... [1:49:40] A great old deep cut, the syllabi site. Do you have any requests for syllabi? You know, I've kind of deprecated that project because... [1:49:50] I think that you can create great syllabi now for yourself on...

[1:49:54] I totally disagree. Okay. I care specifically that it's Devin's Eagles City City. [1:50:00] That was a good one. Curation. Okay. Like, I don't want... [1:50:04] a generic, uh, [1:50:06] Like I don't want the internet's average. Right, right. You want like the tippy top. Or like somebody's cut on it. Mm-hmm. [1:50:15] What... [1:50:17] what syllabi would you like? [1:50:19] if we revive the project properly. [1:50:21] Mmm. [1:50:27] I mean, I actually don't think it's the right answer. Like based on what I was just saying, it's like, [1:50:31] guides of cities and, and like very, very like specific cuts on somebody's taste of it or the way that they experience a thing. But to the spirit of the original project is about learning. Um, yeah. [1:50:43] I don't know. Like, I mean, this is a total cop out, but like, [1:50:48] If I had to learn anything, I would. [1:50:50] finding out that somebody I was friends with knew a ton about it and was going to like... Guide you through it. Not even if they were going to tutor me. Like even if they were just like, here, I'll put together... It's very similar to like, I'm going to Tokyo. It's like, I can go look up the average, like top takes, or I can get a specific friends list. And maybe if I'm lucky, they might even add it in a few tweaks for me. Yeah. And so like that, I just think what a beautiful way to learn. Do you... Does it matter to you that you know the person or just that you like... [1:51:19] - You respect their taste in that area. - I think it's more, especially if it's about learning, I actually don't think it matters quite as much than any other person. That's an extra nice thing.

[1:51:29] But I'm... [1:51:31] I want... It's the same reason having a great professor... [1:51:34] Yeah. Is much more interesting. Or a great reading list. Somebody's reading list is way more interesting than, like, the list of the best books. How much do you think, though, that, like, the... [1:51:44] Because one of the things if you're like snapping to a person who's... [1:51:48] curating the syllabus is you are, they might have slightly different interests than yours. [1:51:54] But it's a syllabus. To use your definition, it's like, how should I spend the first five hours learning about this thing? The goal would be that I get deeper into the pool and then I can swim for myself. Yeah. The introduction to the topic. Right. And it's like, I'm in good hands here. I know that Devin's going to, or whoever's going to give me a... [1:52:13] It actually hilariously goes back to what we were talking about earlier in the conversation, which is like, this thing is, like, when you don't know anything about something, you don't know where to start. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's like a helping hand that says, like, you're okay here. Like, here's the map of the territory. I don't want the AI version of that. And if it's AI, I want it to be a specific AI. I want it to be, maybe Claude's going to have a strong point of view. I don't know. Okay, so the original prompt for that, the original thing I wanted to do with Sylvia before it became the current version of it was, yeah. [1:52:41] The thinking was... [1:52:43] There are like a category of topics that we [1:52:46] um, [1:52:48] that are really important and consequential to [1:52:52] how [1:52:53] We live our lives. Friendship. [1:52:55] partnership, conversation, squishier, things like that, that we don't really study. If you think about how do you learn a topic, you can study it or you can experience it. And in academic topics, I think we probably tend to overstudy and under-experience. And in life topics, we probably over-experience and under-study. And so what I originally wanted to do was like, okay, I want the syllabus on friendship. I want the syllabus on X, Y, Z. But finding a person to write that

[1:53:24] Couldn't crack it. So I pivoted to something easier. One of my favorite things I found in this prep is... [1:53:33] Art is Foreseeing Evil by Agnes Klaar. So good. You read it. I read it. I read it in bed last night. Did it blow your mind? It blew my mind. It's really like if I could recommend it. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. And ironically, the start of that piece, she's like, I'm teaching a class on death. And this is part of the syllabus. Yeah. I know. I would like – we should just reach out to her and get her syllabi for that stuff. That would be good. That would be cool. Oh, my gosh. That piece is incredible. Okay. It's such a good piece. She was actually going to like – [1:54:01] I read somewhere, maybe I'm making this up, but I think she was going to do a class on... [1:54:07] like partnership or marriage or something like that. She's driving that in this piece. Okay. And that was in this piece. Okay. And I, I'm like, what'd it take? Would be so interested. Cause I think another piece about like the squishier, um, um, [1:54:20] life topics is that we have like... [1:54:24] We look at friendship or marriage or raising kids from the lens of our geography and [1:54:30] And, [1:54:31] Yeah. [1:54:49] In my head, it's sort of a hack for how do you [1:54:53] get out of the

[1:54:55] default snap to grid. [1:54:58] My sense is the big reason... [1:55:02] that's not really the case, is there are a set of things where it's like, you don't want to trust general wisdom at all. [1:55:08] I don't know, aspects of science. Like things are changing. And the list of things you just described... [1:55:16] Um, [1:55:16] on a relative basis, you want to trust your grandma. [1:55:20] about marriage or whatever. It's not changing that much. But because of that, we sort of default to the like, yeah, you should never like fully even inspect this thing. [1:55:32] And you should just learn it passively? Like you shouldn't learn it actively? Right. Right. [1:55:36] I think it's the passive active thing that feels odd to me, where it's like, we're so... [1:55:44] open-minded and active in other parts, in, like, the, like, less emotional domains. And then in the emotional domains, we sort of, like... [1:55:54] We don't... [1:55:55] like yeah we don't study it in the same way and [1:56:01] Is there something to... I read this anthology a couple of years ago called... [1:56:06] wing to wing, or to or, and it's basically a syllabus. It's like an anthology that Leon Cass and his wife put together about marriage. And, you know, it's like, it's, it's excerpts from the Bible, it's excerpts from the Greeks, it's excerpts from Shakespeare and literature and Darwin and philosophers. And like, it's a really neat, it was sort of the closest thing that I ended up

[1:56:30] It's that. It's a tone. And I didn't read the whole thing, but you used to poke around. But it was sort of the closest thing that I found to like... [1:56:38] a course catalog. [1:56:40] on... [1:56:42] on, you know, a big squishy topic like that. And I'm eager to read more of those. Maybe we're afraid of like... [1:56:49] how dare you claim to have some objective view on marriage? So like, you're not allowed to write a syllabus on it, but this goes back to like, I don't want the objective syllabus. I want somebody's perspective. Totally. [1:57:01] There was a, [1:57:02] this words that matter, uh, recommendation thing you did pulling from that on a few points. Um, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but you're talking about Ted Gioia, Gioia. Um, yeah, [1:57:13] And he, uh, he was making a point about inputs creative, creatively, primarily, um, [1:57:19] My sense is you're someone who's fairly consistent. Are there any... [1:57:24] critical inputs that have been very consistent for you. I actually think this is not an area of consistency for me. And this is a muscle that I'm like actively trying to build. Yeah. So I'm going to dodge the question, which is to say, I am trying to make... [1:57:40] the like input piece a better habit for myself. [1:57:44] One of my problems is that when I get obsessed with something, I just like... [1:57:49] is really, my blinders are on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm just like, every incremental, you know, moment should go towards that thing. And I kind of starve other areas of my life. So I go through kind of spurts, which is like, I do a lot of my reading, for example, on vacations and over breaks and in transit and...

[1:58:08] I would like to change that. You know, I think like that is. You think we can change these things about ourselves? Yeah. You do. [1:58:15] Yeah, I think I've gotten better at it for sure. [1:58:17] I think it's a muscle. I wonder if I'm ever going to be someone who can do things with incredible earnest long before they're due. [1:58:25] Okay. [1:58:25] I bet you could. [1:58:27] I've been trying for a while. I don't know. Okay, interesting. And sometimes I wonder, should I just like accept it? Lean into it. Yeah. [1:58:34] Part of the point is especially on inputs. It goes back to my marathon thing. Like, every year I'm like, I'm going to try to run a little bit more. Like, I guess there's some aspect of running that's autotelic. Like, I like to run. And then I decided I was going to run a marathon, and my level of serious amount running totally changed. And so, like, having a great output goal was really critical. Yeah. [1:58:56] And so, like... [1:58:57] Yeah, I don't know. [1:59:01] I would love to become this idealized version of myself that has all the best inputs. Well, I feel like that, but I mean, in that example, I feel like your hack is just like you, the trick to getting you to do better inputs is just framing it as a goal or something. Maybe that's the answer. So you need maybe more like mini marathons or something. I'm reading inputs is like almost like, [1:59:23] you're, [1:59:24] Practice. [1:59:25] Yeah, specifically, like, I don't need to care about the output. [1:59:29] I... [1:59:31] Okay, I mean, I think that's like, yes, and... [1:59:35] Here you gave a good example earlier. You were like, I'm going to do 21 podcasts this year.

[1:59:40] Okay, I'm going to read for an hour a day for three weeks or something like that. What's the, what's the, yeah, there's, I think there's, there's maybe like you can, whatever, gamify the inputs or something if one must. Yeah, this is a romantic idea of the person who's just all inputs and trusting themselves and it's all intuition. I think probably it's the kind of thing though that like, for me, it's the kind of thing where like when the muscle has atrophied, it's the startup costs are hard and you're like, oh, this is not fun. But then when you trust yourself. [2:00:09] And it feels more fun again. I feel like there are periods, and I hate to admit it, but there are periods where I'm not reading that much, and reading feels... [2:00:17] Like, [2:00:18] I want to check my phone. I want to like do other things. And, [2:00:22] Then I'm like, ugh, I'm never going to get this back. But then if you just force yourself to- Fake it till you make it. Fake it till you make it. Yeah. It's real truth to that. [2:00:32] a great line to, [2:00:34] from one of your blog posts. We've all lost days to ennui, so did Mark Twain. What Mark Twain never lost was a day to YouTube shorts. I got to credit that one with Jacob Trefasso. [2:00:46] Uh, GLPs for attention, um, [2:00:50] is where that post comes from. Maybe it's kind of like the input thing, but like reading that post, I had talked with a bunch of people about this idea. Like, I was epic for TikTok. Could it really work? And, [2:01:01] Similarly, it's like... [2:01:05] Is it cheating? [2:01:07] Does it matter? So this is the question. I don't know. I really don't know. There are certain things where I'm like, if I have to force it, am I –

[2:01:15] Am I, like if you need Adderall to do your job, to really be focused on your job, and I don't know, this is maybe the wrong example, and too loaded of a question, but like one of the things that I... [2:01:26] I'm like, I always joke, like, I don't really totally believe in willpower. Like, if you really have to grit and bear it, like, you might be doing the wrong thing. [2:01:36] Yeah. [2:01:37] And yet you give... I love the metaphor of dieting. It's like... [2:01:41] I... [2:01:42] if I really just was hedonistic, I would eat candy all day. And I don't eat candy all day. I don't drink alcohol all the time. And like, but for some reason, there's some attention. It's like... [2:01:52] And I worry about this so much. I mean, I think it's the talk about a thing that would be like we solve all our problems and we all just like we live in this abundant world and we sit on like algorithmic vision pros like. [2:02:04] Well, what feels icky to you? Like, what is the thing that feels? Do you feel that way about? [2:02:09] GLPs themselves. [2:02:11] Do you feel like there's like a cheating thing there? [2:02:15] No, but I don't... [2:02:18] Um... [2:02:20] I don't struggle with overeating. So it's like a little bit hard for me to know. But do you feel that way about when other people take them? [2:02:28] But, yeah, it's like... [2:02:31] it sort of feels like I'm giving up the game to algo capitalism and I'm not strong enough. And maybe that's just such a... [2:02:38] I don't know. I don't feel that way about caffeine. But I suspect if you ask people about this, like I'm going to give you a drug that just allows you to focus on whatever you want to focus on.

[2:02:46] Maybe this is a very silly thing I'll look back on in 20 years and be like, oh my gosh, I was just playing on hard mode. If this existed, would you take it now? Yeah. [2:02:56] Okay. I guess I... Maybe I have a thing where there's no free lunch in the universe. [2:03:02] And, you know, [2:03:03] And it's just all trade-offs. Yeah. Yeah. There's downside of caffeine and I'd take it anyway. [2:03:08] Yeah, yeah. [2:03:09] Okay, well, like, I mean, I think then one would need to weigh the down, like, what everybody needs to weigh the downsides of GLPs in their context or whatever. But I guess in this case, like... [2:03:23] I think for like, it is the hypothetical drug that does not exist for GLP ones for attention that we are discussing. If you if it did exist, what are [2:03:34] the do the benefits outweigh the costs and like if that lets you focus on the things that you want to rather than scrolling instagram or tiktok or whatever all day and get good things done for the world and do things that are meaningful to you and it makes that easier yeah [2:03:48] Like, you know, [2:03:51] Okay. Sure. It's like a Luddite style, natural, like, uh, it's not natural. Yeah. Yeah. No, I know. And I, I think like we all have that little, little glimpses of that. And I don't, yeah, it's a good thing to interrogate, like kind of where that comes from. Like there, there, there is something in, in struggle generally, like you get something out of struggle. There, there's something that makes us, it builds character and when is struggle good and when is struggle bad? I don't, that is what I'm grabbing. Yeah. I think that that's an important question. Um,

[2:04:18] But I guess in this case, like for many people, the... [2:04:23] is this struggle of like... [2:04:27] So combating spending all of your time [2:04:31] trying to like not think about food? Is that really that yielding that much benefit? Like, I don't, I don't know. Totally. Um, what, [2:04:39] did you learn from interviewing your dad? [2:04:43] Oh, yeah. [2:04:45] Okay, well, so okay, the context is that I was up with my dad in our cottage in Canada one year, it was just the two of us. We go there every summer. I basically decided to like, turn a bunch of our conversations into podcasts. So I just throw it on the phone, I would pick a couple different topics, and I would... [2:05:03] Ask him questions about a certain period of his life or music, big classical music guy, or... [2:05:12] relationships, or, you know, etc. This is a kind of going back to the relationship primitive thing. [2:05:18] And [2:05:19] If like if you approached your family member the way that you would approach a work interview or a like with the same intentionality of like approaching a conversation that you would prepare for. [2:05:30] There's a lot of insight in those in those in those family members of ours. And there's a lot of experiences that you don't know about because you haven't interrogated them intentionally in those ways. So, yes, that is the thing that I walked away from is sort of being like there are like these treasure troves of cool stories and history all around us that we I think bringing the like borrowing a lens from the workplace and applying it to your family member, applying it to your spouse is like a.

[2:05:54] is a neat mix and match. Yes. There's some implicit thing, which is like, you're not supposed to like, think about it that much. Yeah. Or like, it's just supposed to be free flowing. Right. This goes back to the point you were making about the syllabus for some of these software topics too. It's like these things you're just, yeah. Right. Like these ones are supposed to just come naturally and you're just supposed to feel them out. But like, and I think that that's fine also. Like that's great. Like people should shoot the shit with their friends and that's awesome. And sometimes if you haven't seen a friend [2:06:24] of like, I really want to understand, like, how are they doing on this thing? Or what's going on in this part of their lives? [2:06:30] And... [2:06:31] Again, it doesn't have to be [2:06:33] 100% of the time, but I think infusing like 10% more of that like intentionality into the relationships. It's intention. Yeah. That's what it is. It's quite interesting. And we don't love... [2:06:44] This is something that's funny. It's like, it's very SF and even stronger. It's very autistic to say the quiet part out loud. And it's delicate. And you can definitely go too far. But sometimes San Francisco can be, culturally, can be kind of charming in that people will like... [2:07:00] Say the quiet part out loud, see the water on the intentionality part and play with a little bit in ways that can be really great and lovely. Again, I think there can be other times where you're like, you don't need to say this part out loud. So it's it's it's challenging. [2:07:13] my last thing, uh, [2:07:16] You reference this amazing little obituary on your grandmother, Regine Weiss-Ranzoheff, the Lives They Live Together piece. And it's your aunt had written it.

[2:07:27] You say you can feel how fierce, principled, irreverent, brilliant and witty she was, even in just a few short paragraphs. And then it makes me wonder what my hypothetical daughter would write about me. Mm hmm. [2:07:40] What would you hope that hypothetical daughter would write? [2:07:44] You know, if I get an obituary that is similar to my grandmother's, I'll be a happy camper. Yeah. [2:07:50] I... [2:07:52] I did an exercise actually like this when a couple of years ago, probably five years ago when kind of – [2:07:59] I was trying to figure out which way it was up was like, [2:08:03] kind of sketch out an obituary of yourself and use that as a bit of a guide to like, are you... [2:08:11] roughly headed in the right direction. I think, like, I don't know exactly, but a couple of things that I hope [2:08:17] will be in there or that I aspire towards are like, [2:08:21] doing good things for the world and like trying to use what I have to make the world better in some capacity. I think another big one is like, [2:08:29] helping... [2:08:31] the, [2:08:31] people I care about in my life be like, [2:08:34] the [2:08:35] the best version of themselves and like become the best versions of themselves. And so like, I think that the people who have, [2:08:43] held up versions of me and like helped me see those when I wasn't able to see them have been really, um, [2:08:51] There's all these studies like kids who are told that they're great at something early on end up being great at that. And like whether or not they have that innate ability. Yeah. It's easier to believe in that when sort of someone else is holding is helping you hold that for yourself. And so those are. Yeah, I think that I don't always hit the mark on that. But that is like something that I aspire towards and doing that for myself and doing that for the people around me. And then I think there's like, yeah, there's like the zag piece that like I made my own decisions and like.

[2:09:20] If you don't like them, you know, make your own art kind of thing. Like do things the way that feels right for me at the, you know, and aligned with myself. [2:09:30] And then I think, like... [2:09:32] Have fun doing it. Like, I think that the fun piece is... [2:09:37] a important thing to lean into. And, you know, we're not here for that long. Maybe we'll be in the future. So maybe we'll be here forever. But I think in the meantime, and great, more fun, if that's the case. The advanced market commitment bounty for living forever. Yeah, I know. I think somebody's working on that, though. People are on that. [2:09:52] But something about, yeah, just kind of enjoying it as it happens. [2:09:55] Thank you, Nan. Thanks so much. It was a really fun conversation. Thank you for listening or watching to my conversation with Nan. And if you enjoyed it, the most impactful thing would be sharing it with someone you think would love it too. You can also rate, like. [2:10:09] Subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. Every little bit helps. I'd also like to thank Notion again for presenting Dialectic. Notion is a collaborative workspace for your life's work that allows you and your team to have access to all of the world's frontier AI models and use them right where you do all of the rest of your work. That doesn't just include your documents and databases and all of your team's context, but also custom agents and AI that work inside your workspace with you, [2:10:39] have more leverage, and think more deeply, work more quickly, and do far more together. I'm super excited about Notion's new developer platform. There's a video that explains all of what's possible thanks to it and workers, which are cloud-hosted agents that are maximally flexible and customizable and will work with any other software you're using. I'm only scratching the surface of what's possible now, but it has really truly made Notion a first-class,

[2:11:09] Learn more at notion.com slash dialectic. Finally, Notion's team is growing. So if you're interested in working with them across product, brand, storytelling, engineering, or otherwise, please let me know. You can reach out at work at jacksondall.com or reach out to Notion directly. Thank you, as always, for listening. [2:11:28] And I will see you next time.