YouSaid · the spoken record

Byrne Hobart

lines on the record: 77
first: 2022-12-01
most recent: 2022-12-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“As a sort of operation paperclip with no connotation about the political views of the engineers involved, but operation paperclips, all the best TSM engineers out to Arizona and has them all work on building those chips in the US, in which case TSM is still a play, although it's certainly lost some valuable assets. But that's a very tricky question. And it may be one of those things where it's kind of hard to hit. There are sufficiently bad things. There's not really a good meteor hedge. In the minutes before the meteor hits us, maybe treasuries do outperform equities, but you don't really care.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Measure that as a result of copper mining, and so we can see how much copper mining changed year to year throughout history. And we do actually see like it was rising during the Roman Empire and then peaked and then went down and then didn't come back for like a millennium. So yeah, sometimes there is a really unfortunate geopolitical inflection in underlying technology. But if you think about what that means in the real world, what it probably means is the end. Your big concern is not your portfolio in a world where an invasion causes AI is the reason AI does not happen. So yeah, I would separate the invasion bet from the AI bet and then I guess next best thing would be, I mean, the sad answer is Intel is maybe Intel and TSM are sort of America's last hopes on this. I think you can tell a story where invasion becomes more and more likely and the U.S.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, that's really hard. Like, I guess the next best thing would be looking at the Korean fabs because they're close, but I guess they don't produce the same chips. But I guess the bet would be that Korea is the country most likely to catch up to Taiwan in the event that, or most likely to catch up to where Taiwan is today if Taiwan is no longer an option. But I think if you're betting, if you're trying to make the AI bet conditional on Taiwan bet, I think a lot of what you want to do is actually think about how you underwrite the Taiwan invasion bet, because that's probably the thing with the bigger long term impact. Maybe not. It's tricky. Sometimes geopolitical changes can just lead to these permanent inflections. We have the data on there's some kind of emissions that you can”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot more money was made by people in 2003 and 2004 saying this didn't actually discredit the internet. It's still a good technology. And it's not like we fundamentally can't make money online. It's that you can't make money online if you don't know what you're doing and you massively overspend and there just aren't that many people online and no one's spending money online yet. So a lot more money was made by people who were able to take advantage of the overshooting in the opposite direction rather than the people who figured out from first principles that the bubble had bubble characteristics and was eventually going to pop. And that just, it requires a lot more of this micro level analysis. So a lot of macro people are looking at what individual companies are doing and what they're saying and how consumer sentiment is changing month to month and all these other very low level indicators where the indicators are not a thesis, but the indicators tell you something about when your thesis will become true.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, usually, the way one of the ways you get around that is like you have the high level theory, you say, okay, here's what's actually going on in the world, like here's what people don't understand, but you also have to have this lower level theory of, here's what they think is going on, here's why things keep moving in keep ratifying the theory that they have. And then the next step is, okay, what actually breaks down that causes reality to collide, like perception to collide with reality. And then the other question of like, can perception actually undershoot in the same direction? So a lot of money was made by people who looked at the tech bubble in the late 90s, said this is going to blow up, and we're going to figure out when to short it. And then we'll short it. We know it'll just keep going down for a while, that it's not, you know, it wasn't that the dot-coms were 20% too expensive. It's that most of them were worth zero. So those people made a lot of money by shorting after things started declining, knowing they would keep on declining.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theories are you look at some part of the economy and you say this is obviously unsustainable. And then the problem is you can say that at any point during its arc and it can look sustainable to other people for a very long time. So like one of my favorite examples of this is that there's this snappy one-liner that is something, it's like looking at housing and it's like a subprime borrower who didn't put that on a down payment is basically just a renter with you know with upside or something. It's like some some line about how the economics are the same in like you know these these people are not actually safe borrowers but the paper that it came from came out in 2001 and so if you had read that had been like American housing market is broken people are massively overpaying for houses they're all over levered it's going to collapse you could have shorted housing stocks and then lost you know 400 of your money as home builders soared over the next four or five years”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We rebalance between stocks and bonds on the first day of every quarter. And if you know that these investors who have that policy control X trillion dollars of assets and you know how they'll rebalance, then at the end of every quarter, you know money sloshing between stocks and bonds and that's predictable. So a lot of the quantitative strategies that have those theories behind them tend to blow up more rarely because they sort of know why the strategy works and then they know why it'll stop working. Data mining is always a risk. If you find an anomaly and there's no explanation, but it keeps repeating itself, one of the explanations is other people found the anomaly too and they are exacerbating it by trading it. Then I think on the other end like if you have these just totally theory driven views, usually what kills these totally abstract theory driven views is time because a lot of the best abstract”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think typically the greats have some synthesis of the two, and it probably leans more towards big worldview than towards micro-level observations. I think one way to divide things is to say that the quants are all these micro level observations. You could be a quant who does not actually know what the numbers mean, doesn't know what the product is, doesn't know the timescale, is just looking for patterns and finds them. People have done it that way. But it seems like quantitative strategies get more successful when you're doing that. You find some anomaly, and then you find an explanation for the anomaly. And the explanation might be some psychological factor you've identified and maybe you find studies indicating that loss aversion is real and this affects how fast stocks go down versus how fast they should opt to go down and that gives you a trading strategy. Maybe it's something more mundane. Like maybe there is some large investor who has some policy.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Like it was good to have like it's and it's important to note it's good to have it's better to have some level of fanaticism than no fanaticism. Right. Like an optimal amount of the most, and there's like an optimal place for it. But I think, yeah, from a totally cynical perspective, most demonic people, maybe they are at the front lines doing things and taking risks, but also not making the decisions about who goes to the front lines. Or I think the other thing is making sure that the person deciding where the front lines are and saying, you know, the front line is like we keep France safe from the invaders and not the front line is Moscow. So get to Moscow and burn it down, which there's the book, The Minor New Holder, or there's a recent Napoleon biography that I'm also in the middle of. It's been a good year for reading about power tripping people. It does point out that technically France was actually declared, Napoleon had more countries declare war on him than he declared war on. So on average, on average, France was fighting defensive war.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the founding, I mean, well, founding fathers, I was going to say a lot of them were wordsmiths and we basically had whole collections of a non-splaming each other through pamphlets, the federalist papers. In one sense it was a nation of nerds. On the other hand, Washington didn't, as far as I know, did not have huge contributions to that literary corpus. So maybe that is actually the model. You want the nerds, you want them to debate things, you want the debates to either reach interesting conclusions or at least tell you where the fault lines are, like what are the things nobody can actually come to a good agreement on. And then you want someone who is not quite that smart, not really into flame wars to actually make the final call.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unfriendly EA. So that's good. But yeah, it is a problem that you come up with. You see it a lot and you see a lot in different societies and they do tend to have some kind of safety valve. If you really think that praying all day is the thing you should do, you should go do it somewhere else. And you shouldn't really be part of what we're doing. And I think that's healthy. And I think in some cases it's like a temporary thing. Like you do that. you get it out of your system and either you come back as totally cynical person who doesn't believe in any of it or you come back as someone who is still deeply religious and is willing to integrate with society in a productive way and i think even like even within the the monastic system you do have different levels of engagement with the outside world um and just yeah different different levels of interaction so i i think that that's something that take seriously as an”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you shove the fat man in front of the trolley, why do you think the trolley would stop? The trolley would just kill him too. Like, this is dumb. And I think that is like, it is useful to keep in mind that the thought experiments are designed to be impausible and they are supposed to be these intuition pumps. But the more you get this complicated, highly abstract economy where an increasing share of it is software interacting with software, well, software doesn't have that common sense break on behavior. If you have this very composable economy, you can find cases where first principles thinking actually is action guiding and can guide you to extreme behaviors. Fortunately, those extreme behaviors are things like trading cryptocurrencies with lots of lots of leverage. And we have like it's maybe merciful that the atoms to bits interface has not been fully completed while we still have time to deal with malevolent”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like I think it's a useful pattern to observe because it goes back to that point that human nature just doesn't change all that fast to the extent that it ever does and that we've had the problem. Different civilizations have had this problem of, okay, we've got some rules and we've got these beliefs and they're generally going to guide people to behave the right way, but they're going to guide people to be the right kind of normal person and not to be someone whose life is entirely defined by this incredibly strict, rigid moral code and by whatever you get if you take the premises of that and just extrapolate them linearly as far as they can go. And I think that gets especially dangerous with really smart people because you can give them a set of first principles and they can ask really, really interesting questions and come up with edge cases and sometimes like I think for some people like the first philosophy class where they encounter these edge cases they just reject it as stupid and say things like, you know, I”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the country to significantly recover from that and other countries that also had this massive catch-up growth where they went from very poor subsistence level or even below that in some cases to actually being middle income or even fairly rich countries.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, there's this book called The Reckoning about the US car industry and how it dealt with the rise of Japanese exports in the 70s and 80s. And when it's talking about the post-war recovery of Japan, there's this bit where I think the character they're following works for a bank. And he in the bank's office in some city in Japan, he likes to work in the room where there's a fire because there's like a fire with this big pot of stew and the stew is the food that the employees will eat at the bank as part of their benefits package. And that's the only room in the bank that is warm enough that you can actually work. And that's just a level of material austerity that is inconceivable to me. And I can't, you know, I don't know anyone who grew up in such poor circumstances. I can't imagine it. And then it did not take very long at all.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of companies in Japan, their modern structure dates back to the wartime period. Sometimes the post-war, but sometimes literally the wartime period, including the biggest advertising agency in Japan was apparently this wartime or immediately pre-war attempt to agglomerate all the smaller ad companies into one big, more efficient company that would free up resources that could be used for building battleships and other stuff like that. So yeah, it's kind of the same story just being expressed in a bunch of different ways. And I think you can look at other countries and try to see what threads of continuity there are between the post-war and between the pre-war and post-war order. Tony just post-war book is a really phenomenal look at that question. And in a lot of cases, there's a surprising level of continuity. There are some things that totally broke and had to be totally reformed. And there are some things that just kept going exactly the way they've been going before.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, basically, same end goal and very, very different external facing view of that goal. But yeah, same ultimate idea. There's this book called Princes of the Yen, which is mostly about Japanese central banking policy, but it has some early bits about how the structure of Japan's economy works and the way the author describes it is that Japan post-war Japan had a war economy in peacetime with lots of centralized control and suppressed consumption and lots of heavy industry heavy manufacturers.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the same historical process that continued post war, which is Japan wanted to be economically self-sufficient and independent in a country that could determine its own fate and during the last gasp of imperialism, one way to do that was invade countries with lots of natural resources, take those resources, and then manufacture things at home. But when that became untenable, then the next best option was be within the sphere of influence of the most powerful military in the world and be very closely tied to their import and export markets and then import everything you need under the protection of the US military and then export things to the US in order to pay for those imports and basically run the same strategy just with someone else doing a military part. So in one sense that was like a total defeat of the imperialist model. In another sense it was like this strategic realignment but”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're hardier for it, and the country has accumulated a lot of social capital. And you had to get really good at organizing and building things. And then maybe there is some level of suffering from conflict where you've just totally had enough and you're never doing anything like that ever again. And you're done. And then I think one of the interesting things to consider is the extent to which different countries fit into that model. One of my, I'm very interested in Japan and Japanese industrial policy and how the Japanese post-war recovery went. And one of the annoying things about that is I thought that was the question was how did Japan have this wonderful post-war recovery? But when you look at a lot of the institutions involved, they don't start in 1945 or 1951 or whatever. They actually start before World War II. And so you can actually sort of see World War II as part of this arc.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that's sort of out of the US was that in a lot of terms of material consumption, the US wasn't really that much didn't really look like a country going through a war. In most other countries, you saw this decline in literally how much food people had to eat and especially how much protein and fat they had to eat. And so I think a lot of places calorie intake had dropped by like a third by the end of the year or by the end of the war. And then in the US, calorie consumption actually went up. So U.S. was like on the home front was inconvenienced by the war and things like gas and tires were hard to get, but people were still eating well, whereas in a lot of other parts of the world, people, they were literally going hungry so that their country could continue to fight the war. So maybe there's like, you know, there's some level of hormetic response where you suffer a bit because your country is contributing to this.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like part of, I think, part of having that kind of Thermos and thirst for glory should be that you can't actually habituate your, you can't be so habituated to a life of ease and comfort and lack of difficulty that you just you won't actually respond appropriately when there's an external threat that you need to respond to. Then maybe you weren't first man material after all if you can and you just want to stay on your couch. So yeah, I'm sure we can sort of deplete that reserve and there were, I think definitely like post-World War II US was definitely a country where there were a lot more people who had taken very serious risks. They'd gone through a lot of hardship. On the other hand, I recently read that book, The Economics of World War II, which was comparing a bunch of countries and how their economies performed in World War II.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can eradicate that thirst for glory and that ability to rise to the occasion. It's hard to think of, I mean, unless you think there's like microplastics or something, maybe that does constitute the end of history, in which case, you know, hopefully we export enough microplastics to make sure that we don't have any last pockets of Thumos. Sort of like the Scott Alexander Riff about the Step Nomad invasion risk where it's an existential risk that comes along every couple hundred years. Yeah, you want to avoid that. Risk that comes along every couple hundred years”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I suspect they are. I think Tolkien gets it right that just because someone is born in a hobbit and they live in a hobbit and they have this nice comfortable life, they still have that capacity for and yearning for adventure and that in the right circumstances they will rise to the occasion and go ahead and do it. And this seems to happen with a lot of countries when they face these great stresses. sometimes a civilization just can't withstand it and it collapses and you know the sea people just take everything and then you have no civilization left and you're all just back to subsistence farming but in a lot of other cases they even if they ultimately don't survive they go through a very long decline because they do fight to fight to maintain what they have for for an extended period so i think um yeah like even trying to determine a mechanism by which you can”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than it was under Calvin Coolidge. And under Coolidge, it was a lot more of like there's this institution, there are a bunch of rules. People follow the rules.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bust rule as this more personal monarch. I think it speaks to this question of legitimacy. And why do they trust sites to operate in the way that they do? And you can either say these are really high quality institutions. So you can take the discourses of Oglivia approach and say we built these systems such that anyone can be dropped in and can do a reasonably good job. It's very hard for bad people to do a very bad job because there are so many checks and balances or you could say, no, we actually trust this one person to do a really exceptional job that nobody else can do and we don't want institutional constraints on them. Those philosophies go in and out of fashion. And like even within systems that nominally don't change the US was a lot closer to that kind of centralized system with personal legitimacy invested in one person under FDR.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's nothing lower status than someone arguing with someone in authority about how seriously they should take your jokes. It's like a weird component of, and it works both ways. So there's I think I started noticing this years ago because there are these underscore TXT Twitter accounts where they're just posting out-of-context comments from some niche community and the comments always sound deranged. In a lot of cases, to me, the comments read as someone who is doing a bit, they're playing a role, they know it's funny, they're exaggerating for their friends, and then you take it out of context and read it as totally seriously, and then you get to say these people are all like this and they're all crazy. But it is a marker of high status to be able to not get jokes and to be able to be righteously angry at someone because they made a joke and if they'd been serious, that would have been an appalling thing to say. But they obviously weren't. If you can get away with saying, no, I actually don't think it was a joke at all. These people are humorless and they must have been totally serious, then that's actually cool. That's high status. Makes you impressive. But yeah,”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that the pursuit of fun is not to be discounted. If you're super rich, you can afford to do all sorts of things, varying levels of entertainment, but it may be that the only thing that is actually truly novel, thrill-seeking, fun opportunity is something like buy Twitter and then turn it into what it is. And it is like there's, I think Ross Doughty, this point about how the nature of Twitter's legitimacy has changed and that now it is under the rule of a single monarch instead of ruled by these sort of faceless bureaucracies. So now, you know, if something, if Twitter does something you don't like, there's actually a specific person you can blame. And because you have Twitter, you can actually yell at that person and potentially get an answer. Whereas if Twitter bans you because you made a joke and the joke looked like it was serious, there's no recourse.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or how to increase Twitter's free cash flow and how to pay down the debt and make it a more profitable company. Maybe he just had that sense that it was overstaffed and that it should survive with a smaller headcount. And if you cut headcount enough, then you end up with a profitable business. It could also just have been fun and seems fun so far.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a lot of cases that are actually still ambiguous. So, like Alexander conquered most of the known world, at least most of the world that people knew of around where he grew up. And then just So maybe that's another way to constrain it, but then you end up naturally selecting for less ambitious people. It's like one way to have these guardrails on your behavior is just don't have very big ambitions. So you might, and in that case, those people are also stuck responding to circumstances. So maybe you just end up with many different iterations of the same thing on different scales where everyone is stuck in certain historical circumstances. They have their skills. They have their opportunities. They can go after some things. Maybe they achieve great things. Maybe they completely fail. But either way, eventually their luck runs out or they run out of ideas and then there's nothing to do except go home or just keep trying until keep being bolder until you eventually fail. On Musk particularly, I don't really understand it. I think there's like a remote possibility that he actually has a bunch of specific concrete ideas.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the cynical answer is you wait about 200 years and then you write about how it was obvious all along. Like, yeah, you really don't, and I mean, even”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Read about whereas, like, you know, you can read about things like board spending too much money on the Edsel and it not working out or IBM investing a ton in the 360 and not working out very nicely. But you can also go back to the Iliad and read another case where sunk cost fallacy dominated rational, strictly rational decision making and only divine intervention could ultimately lead to a good outcome for the attacker and even then maybe not such great outcome all things considered.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, you know, technology changes a lot, humans change very slowly. So if you want to understand technology, you do have to study the specific object level case of what is this thing, what does it do differently, what is it a substitute for, what are the complements to it, et cetera. But if you're trying to understand things like why did this company do X? Like why did they fire this person and not that person? And why did they choose to acquire this other business? Why is the CEO dumping tons of money into this thing that seems like it doesn't make much sense? Well, you can find lots of historical examples of people in power making these decisions that just get continuously worse and continuously more costly and they refuse to back down. Sometimes they turn out to be right, sometimes they turn out to be very, very wrong. But you'll find more examples of that if you go back further in history. And they're often just a lot more fun to do.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hope, and I might be projecting things about my own attention span onto Pero when I say that you can't just set out to do a million words on topic X and then do it. But I do think I hope that I am by increments producing something that is a lot more than the sum of a bunch of business profiles and a bunch of strategy breakdowns and things like that. And that's one of the reasons that I've spent time on things like reading Machiavelli and thinking about how Machiavelli's thoughts not just the totally cynical amoral stuff, but the other stuff he read at the same time, which he may have met more seriously about how to build a sustainable and good republic rather than how to be a completely amoral monarch. I try to read that kind of thing because I do think that it's valuable to have that more rounded view of the human condition. And I think that it contributes a lot to writing about these individual companies.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emails me and says you have a mandate to make Google Finance good, I'd be tempted. But I think thinking of what industries would have that kind of pull for you and then what can you do to really dig into those industries, you probably find the proto-successful people in spaces like that versus trying to optimize in advance for, well, if I were someone who thinks like nobody else thinks and we're a true natural contrarian and also had spent several years learning about different opportunities, which one would I have ended up picking? Because then you're sort of magicking away all of the things that actually make the person you're looking for worth looking for. So, yeah, can't quite be done that way.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe it is harder to optimize for what area do you look for? Maybe it's actually easier to do the meta optimization of identifying the things you would quit podcasting and go work on given the opportunity. And it's like good to have that sort of dread list. I had that mental list of like, you know, if someone at Spotify ping me and they're like, we really need a product manager who can help us display classical music such that we don't list tons of redundant information in the first 50 characters of the track name and the actual incremental useful information in the 10 characters that you have to wait for it to scroll through unless it doesn't actually scroll through. Like if someone pinged me, it was like, we really need someone to fix that. Can you come and do this? I'd be sorely tempted. Feel the same way about Google Finance. Like if someone”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, maybe the layman answer is we don't actually know because Paul Graham has that essay about the trope of startups starting in garages and I think it's called The Power of the Marginal. And it's all about how the really interesting projects are the ones that can barely get off the ground because they're so weird and so out there that there is no infrastructure to support them. And what that ends up doing is selecting for people who are extremely passionate about that project and also people who are extremely willful and will get impossible things done. It's hard to just rattle off a bunch of examples of that because your hit rate would be like 99 things out of 100 are just like things you read one fun blog post speculating about and they're actually never going to happen and then you know one of them maybe maybe you're right but it's very hard to tell which one it is and if it were if it were easy venture capital would not have such skewed returns so yeah”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's likely Kiro debating with his subject and interrogating his subject and partly Kiro debating with himself and asking these very longstanding questions about whether or not justify the ends and would it be worth it to not have a great society in exchange for not letting LBJ steal an election in 1948. And I don't think that if he's good at his writing, he shouldn't be coming to firm conclusions on that and he should be presenting this very, very mixed picture where you really only get the things you really want if you also accept that there are some very bad things that come along with that as long as the things you want come from powerful, ambitious people who will do anything to win.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The carol books do seem partly to be this cross examination of who he's writing about. And often he seems to have very mixed feelings. I think one of the really interesting things in the years of Lyndon Johnson is the Carroll's description of Coke Stevenson and how he contrasts him with FBJ, because it's really clear that Kairo's politics are completely opposed to Coke Stevenson's and that when Kero is writing about LBJ, there's like the good stuff he did, which is the great society and his participation in the New Deal. And then there's the bad stuff, which is anything that wasn't bad. And so he clearly likes what LBJ accomplished and despises the person and then really likes the person of Coke Stevenson and kind of wishes him well, but also doesn't actually want people like that to be in charge of anything.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the external coverage of what people said about Moses at the time. And then you start talking to people and you realize, here are things that we got completely wrong. Like we thought Moses didn't want X to happen. And it turns out that he kept scheming and plotting to make X happen and just wanted to pretend that it wasn't his doing. I think that, but what happens is you build this ongoing motivation and then you can make something that you just wouldn't be able to make before. I think if you start out saying I'm going to write a million words about how cities are run, you will probably fail. But if you keep writing another 500 words a day about how Robert Moses operated and what he did, and you have some reflections throughout that on what that means for cities, then maybe you actually get there in the end. And maybe some of this is like you want to have an adversary. Like a lot of these.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, it actually kind of looping back to the parental influence thing. I think part of what happened was that the more Kero dug into it, the more he realized this is actually a big and compelling project. And there's this kind of fun phenomenon that you can get when you're researching something where you've read enough that when you read something new and you see that there's a footnote, you actually know what is going to be cited in that footnote and maybe you've also read the thing about how the thing in that footnote is wrong and here's why. And you're picking up information a lot faster. You get that nice convexity where you can skim through the stuff you know and everything you read is new information and challenges something about what you previously knew. And that's just a really intoxicating feeling. And I can imagine that it's even more fun if you're actually digging up the primary sources. So if you're Caro, you've gone through the New York Times Archives, you've read through all of the”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Debate team coach days. His line was if you do everything, you will win. And Caro does everything So, I think probably the population of Keros is smaller than the population of LBJs because the people who have that skill set probably have ambitions other than writing the canonical book about one particular person or writing two canonical books, two canonical works on two important people. But maybe a lot of those people are just doing things other than typing.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“LBJ archetype. Now, the other half of this question is the Kuro archetype. And part of what I found fun about this was that I felt like Kiro had this kind of, he was kind of disgusted with himself when he realized how similar some of his methods were to LBJs because he's writing this story about this guy who's will do anything to make a sort of friendship, but it's really a fake friendship just to accomplish his goals. He's constantly doing the reading that other people aren't doing and doing the work and making the calls and reiterating and reiterating just endless patience. And then you read about how Kara works and he does things like moves to DC for a while, talks to everyone in DC, befriends people, boost to Texas, talks, you know, moves to the hill country and gets to know people there. He has these anecdotes in the book because the book is like, it's sort of, has these hints of Gonzo journal.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decade, for example, because the industry was like whatever this institution was was too risk averse, you get to take all of those opportunities at once. So you have tons and tons of low-hanging fruit when that shift happens. So I think that's the other thing to look for is look for cases where there's some institution, some part of the economy or society that has just been slowing down for a long time, clearly getting to the limit of whatever its current operating model is hasn't found a new model, and there's someone young and disruptive who's just entering it. So, I mean, maybe the place to look for the next LBJ is someone doing independent films and someone who looks at the top box office results and sees that everything is a spinoff of a spinoff of a spinoff and it's 50% Marvel and says this is disgusting. We have to destroy it and avoid to build something completely different. Like maybe that person is actually the kind of”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In positions of a lot more power, whereas the way that that worked a decade and a half earlier was in the 1930s, there just weren't a lot of organizations that were hiring heavily and looking for really ambitious young people who were going to shape things up. But the US government was. So that's how LBJ got in and started on its path was that the New Deal created these big programs like the National Youth Administration. And they needed people like Johnson to run them. So when you look at an industry that is aging, it's usually an industry where ambitious people stay away from it. Like they recognize it's becoming more seniority focused and there's just less going on, but there becomes this huge opportunity when the aging stops because a bunch of people either retire or they get discredited and have to leave. And suddenly the average age of the industry ratchets down and you can basically look at the set of opportunities that were missed over the previous”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Force you can exert, so you kind of see a figure with exactly that kind of personality trait in a case where there are big institutions that have slowed down somewhat. And this is another interesting point that is raised early in the Master of the Senate is that the Senate was getting old. And if you look at these long-term charts of average age of politicians, we're definitely in a bull market for extremely, extremely old politicians in the US right now. But we've gone through cycles before. And one of the things that tends to cause a reset is the war, where wars, among other things, cause this huge reset in social capital. So the people who made mistakes in the early stages all get discredited and then the social bonds that people forge from actually fighting alongside one another and the prestige you get from actually being part of the winning side, that is very hard to replicate. And so you end up with much younger people in much”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could make them more powerful. So I'm about a third of the way through Master of the Senate right now. So it's just getting to the point where he's really getting cooking and really making the Senate more effective than it used to be and also making it an organization where someone with less seniority based. You need to be attached to something much bigger than yourself for that particular skill set to work really well. That said, you could have really big impact because it's another form of leverage. So if you are one of 100 senators or I guess at the point at that point it has 96 senators and you're able to exert a lot more influence and be the equivalent to 40 senators, for example, then you can get a whole lot done because it's the US Senate. But if you have that same kind of skill set and you're the CEO of your company, well, you're already in front of the company. There's only so much extra.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of people who are close to that tier and have some of the same personality types are in sales and corporate development and stuff like that where they're building a big network. They are constantly building out this giant levered balance sheet of favors owed to them, favors they owe to other people. And like all forms of leverage, it does allow you to grow a lot faster, but you occasionally run into these big blow-ups. That's one place I would look. I think if you try to look at the more pure executive founder types, then it gets harder to find someone who would have exactly that kind of personality. It's like part of what made LBJ's methods work was that he was adjacent to a bunch of these really big institutions and he could sort of siphon off some of the power that these institutions had and in some cases”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who is begging for money because they are pulling at 49% and with a little bit more money for newspaper ads, they'd get to 50.1% versus someone who just wants the money or just is constantly freaking out by their nature. So it requires a lot of the same character traits, but 1930s were just not a great time to go to Wall Street. Maybe if LBJ had been born into slightly different time, that's just what he would have done and he would have been a very successful private equity executive or something. But sometimes these general skills, they can translate into a lot of different areas and they get honed into very specific skills through deliberate practice in those areas. So if you have that combination of natural tendency and some level of motivation, which in LBJ's case, his dad is also a politician. So he had this example of this is part of the life script. You can't do it. But he also had the example of his dad was broke after a while. And so he had this example of what”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I guess one interesting example of that, then reading the Robert Carroll LBJ biography, and there's this bit towards the end of the first volume where LBJ is put in charge of this fundraising organization for Democrats in Congress. And when you read about it, he sounds like a trader. He sounds like someone who was just born to be slinging currency derivatives or something because he is constantly on the phone, constantly picking up rumors, constantly sending money here and there and everywhere else. And he's always sending money overnight and then sending someone a telegram the day before saying they're going to get a package from Lyndon Baines Johnson and you're welcome. So he's like, he's doing this thing where he's constantly relentlessly optimizing every little tiny detail of some very complicated process, clearly requires enormous working memory, requires a very strong, basically a very strong poker face. He has to be able to differentiate between someone.”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then it becomes the thing that they work on for their entire career. Obviously, that has to be fairly new because it's not like they're from anyone who was born before 1970 just had this constant yearning to program computers and could never satisfy it. Those kids found something else to do maybe a generation before it was repairing transistor radios like mine did when he was a kid and maybe a century before that it was experimenting by building little internal combustion engines and seeing whether or not they explode like Henry Ford did with his friends at school. And maybe before that the earlier you get, the harder it gets to really map these activities to anything concrete that we understand and can relate to. But this probably some extent to which you can sort of direct kids into whatever the modern instantiation of this long-term enduring”
2022-12-01 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Byrne Hobart - FTX, Drugs, Twitter, Taiwan, & Monasticism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source