YouSaid · the spoken record

Nadia Asparouhova

lines on the record: 96
first: 2022-12-15
most recent: 2022-12-15
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

“Just a fact. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure I have something. I think I'm a very shameful person. I don't know that I have, yeah, I'm not the best at any shape. Yeah, you're gonna have to ask a friend to tell them to tell you what I'm most shameless about.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that I, um. Oh, man. I wish I had a really good juicy answer. You have to have someone else that knows me. What am I most shameless about in publishing?”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Finding meaning that is how people are finding community. So I don't know there it is. There's a religion. We may not literally have like actively practicing Christians in America or something. And there's the question of what else does religion need to fulfill that it's not through something like climate. But I also think that religious practice is very like active and around us everywhere. And I don't think that's like sad or bad. I think that's just like how it's evolved.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we take a broader view of how does religion factor into our day to day life, I feel like it's a weirdly like people ask this question more than they need to ask it or something, like where like, you know, everyone just sort of says, oh, like, you know, people aren't religious anymore. They're not going to church. They need to find meaning. Like, how do we like create new religions today? And I just, I feel like people are religious. They're just religious about different things. And that was sort of one of my conclusions with climate is like In the early 2000s you had Michael Creighton criticizing environmentalism as a religion and saying that it's distracting people from the science and maybe we shouldn't treat environmentalism as a religion. We should really get back to the science. Whereas I think like 20 years later, it's like, I think it just is a religion for a lot of people. And why not just lean into that and say, like, I don't like that is how people are.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, DBD. I think like the new right is bringing at least some of those underlying like Christian religious values back. Maybe they're not like literally funding churches or something. But, like, how do we sort of like, yeah, bring Christian values back to public society? I think there's a lot, there is a lot going on there, even if it's not explicitly called religion. And then, so yeah, I mean, that's one question of like among elites that are explicitly religious, how are they sort of like encoding those values into public institutions? I think that is sort of happening on that front. I also just think like.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kind of like that. There's some parallel with this for Content creators, too, and I will cringingly put myself in that category Orange, and it's like, there's also this grouping of people where it's like, I don't really know why, like they are kind of just like bodies in a room, again, myself. If not this, at least there's a way to like kind of make money in this. But it's like a much more amorphous and non-coherent industry than trading. Different set of people.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, I don't know if that helps at least somewhat. And probably the simplest non-overthinking it answer for why it is like advertising and training attracts so many people is just because you can make a lot of money in it. And that's that simple.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, like, same with like climate, where, I mean, depending on how literally you take sort of like climate doomer predictions or whatever, but if you don't think the world was going to end in 30 years, like then why is everyone so focused on this one specific thing when they could be working on like lots of different things? And so, yeah, in both cases, it feels like they kind of like plop in there somehow. I did put in that addendum and just sort of thinking about like, what is the shape of a doomer industry? Like, I think one of the under discussed aspects of it is that it is like adjacent to some kind of like commercial opportunity. So like the reason why everyone doesn't just go off and work on like global poverty is because there's like no money to be made in working on that. But like if you think about like misinformation and the thread of like deep spakes or something upending democracy or you think about AI safety or climate or whatever, like they are adjacent to commercial industries where you can actually like make a real salary and feel like relevant to the business world or whatever or to like all your peers while still also working on the social cause area”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it just seems like. Yeah, I don't. There's just something about these, like all these sorts of industries where it's like if they were starting with a blank slate, they could be doing like anything. And for some reason, they just all end up in these sort of like non-obvious places. Like, why is, like, why are there so many people that work that end up in trading? Like, it's just like so specific when you really think about it.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. And maybe there are different crowds. Like, I, yeah, and that's why I just stuck it in a footnote because I was lazy and I was like, I don't know what to do with this thought, but I need to put it somewhere.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Video games, I don't really know if that's like an industry, but like. That mindset of like those people end up like that some shared set of skills across all those different industries or practices that attract smart talented people. Like, why do so many smart talented people just go into like trading? And I wonder if there's some other sort of similar gravity well effect there that is also attracting smart talented people into like climate, maybe from like a different crowd or whatever. But so I wonder maybe if like before the last five years or whatever, like maybe there was maybe that was where everyone was dumping into. I don't really know. Yeah.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have no defense as to why I write all day. Like, it's just like what I have to do. I cannot defend it as like. The most like, you know, needle moving thing in the world or whatever. I don't really relate to this sort of need to have like a doom or narrative. There is no doom or narrative attached to why, right? I just write because like I think it's important and I think I have like ideas that are like questions I want to answer. And to me, that is how I define impact though. Like to me, like that matches my model of like what I think is most impactful thing in the world. If I didn't have that model, then yeah, maybe I would try to say, okay, like what is the most impactful thing to be doing in the world that is like sort of external to my own personal curiosity or whatever? And I think that's where those sort of like doomer narratives come from. I am, I did vary in another footnote at the end of that post, this question about like, okay, like if we think maybe like early 2010s or something, I feel like there was always like there's this other grouping of industries that's not Doomeresque, but also attracts smart, tallowed people. So you have like advertising and trading.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And coming out of sort of like World War II. And yeah, just sort of like manufacturing chemicals, like whatever. Suddenly people are just grappling with the after effects of that. But like that doesn't explain sort of like in the last five years or so where it's like it's not like a weird activist-y thing to work in climate. It can even be like a very boring thing for people to work in climate. But it's like all connected to this idea of like this is the most important thing I need to be working on. And so I think like maybe in the absence of having some like bigger narrative that is like all consuming for everyone, you kind of have to make your own meaning somewhere. But it is funny to me that like we don't just say, again, I mean, you go back to, you know, we talked about like writing. It's like.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it is pretty new, and that's why it's kind of gnawing at my brain a little bit. Like, I think it's really new like last five years it showed you. Yeah, well, and so I tried to sort of track those a little bit. And I'm not super high confident all this, but like there's this one, you know, sort of theory around, okay, we used to have sort of like shared broader narratives that were actually doomoresque. So we had World Wars, we had the Cold War or whatever. And so like, you know, super smart, talented people that need to be pointed in a direction somewhere. They're going to go work on those kinds of problems. And like there's a shared understanding that like we really are saving our country or protecting our country or whatever by working on these different things. And so yeah, I don't know, like STEM talent in the Cold War or whatever. And then you see, okay, after the Cold War now, we're not so like, you know, we don't have these like deep existential threats anymore. So we have to find them somewhere else. And that's where environmentalism kind of became much more alarmist, whereas in the past it was kind of like this niche social cause. It became much more like we need to save the planet.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the sort of like mirror mindset is equivalent to the Dumer tribe that I identified in climate where it's like that is one specific tribe, but there are a lot of other people that are really interested in climate that don't feel doomery at all, even though that's sort of like the most flashy media friendly kind of version of it. So yeah, I mean, other than saying like as more people interacts with AI, I imagine there will be more philosophies emerging there. I think it's still too early to say what what that will be. AI is still kind of like a big history box to me right now.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, I think it's definitely just too early to say. And I know that sounds like a cutbell, but I don't want to say things that I don't feel confident about. I think it's too early to say. Even within like AI, though, like if you think about, say, I had these sort of like different tribes that are influencing the climate discourse today, there's some parallel version of that for AI, for AI more broadly, I think, where Because right now I feel like AI safety gets really constrained to sort of like, I don't know, like mirror or something, like very, very specific. I imagine as AI becomes more widespread and more people have experiences with it and have opinions on it. Then that might sort of like lead to other philosophies kind of forming around that where like, and then we'll kind of see this one very narrow view of like.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think people really undervalue this, like my sort of like personal pet peeves, like founders will always talk about like building and like startups was like so important or whatever. And like, what are all of them doing their spirit of time? They're like reading books. They're reading essays. And then those books and essays influence how they think about stuff. And so it is very indirect sort of influencer. I just feel like, you know, you can't sort of have out of one mouse saying like the only important thing in the world is like starting startups and then at the same time talk about like the cool new book you read at a cocktail party like both those things are important in different ways right”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Read it. And hopefully, you know, and I make my essays public because I hope everyone reads them. But when I think about sort of how do I measure my impact, it's not like how many page views that I get on an essay. It's more of like.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want my ideas to be heard by people that I think can do something about them. So in other words, like I care much more about quality than quantity. I'm not very active on Twitter. I don't really focus on like needing to reach some kind of like mass mainstream audience when I published my book. I told myself I really like the people that need to hear about how open source works are people that work at tech companies, software developers that use open source software like it mattered less to me that there's like this is not the kind of book that needs to be in like an airport bookstore or would print. It seems like essays and stuff. I think it's much more important to me that people whose opinions I care about.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you would think like, why do you do this thing that makes me miserable? But it's just like, it's the thing I know how to do. And I don't think there's anything glamorous about it. I don't think there's anything special. It might not be the best thing to do. Like there's probably more impactful things I can be doing with my time. But like, it's the thing I have to do. And I think everyone should just be doing the thing that they like absolutely have to do, whatever that is. That would make me happy in the world is if everyone's just like, yeah, leaning into their obsession. So that's my obsession. I do think like when I think about my own impact, I don't know how you think about it, but like I think about, I want to.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How Yeah, you know, I'm like very, I only know how to do a handful of things in this world. Or like, I feel like I should be doing the thing that I Cannot help myself, but I have to do all the time. Like, I don't really think, I don't have a very Rosy relationship with writing, to be perfectly honest, I hate writing. Writing makes me crazy. Like it's like, I don't find it to be enjoyable. It's always enjoyable once it's over, but mis”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do we bring back the Medicis? How do we bring back this model of patient age? It's already happening, I think, in a lot of ways. It's just that people don't talk about it. People don't, you know, unless you're being funded on Patreon or you have subsite subscriptions or there's something, some very legible way to point out like how you're making money, like there's so many people that are just being quietly funded that just don't talk about it. Well, I do actually think like the model efficient is very alive and well right now. It's just not super obvious.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm pretty excited about and like can only really speak within my relatively narrow sort of like tech and tech adjacent creator world, but I definitely have noticed as someone who's been sort of Independently or weirdly funded in a lot of ways for a while now. Like it feels like that was extremely uncommon when I started and now I meet a lot of people that are like me. I don't know if that's just because I meeting more people like me or if that's really a shift, but I thought, yeah, you know, five years ago, even it was like hard to identify a lot of people, that kind of situation. And so, yeah, I think it's a really cool, like people talk about like.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Freedom, a little bit more creative freedom to experiment. But I think like, yeah, science doesn't really have any easy answers. I spent a bunch of time trying to understand it this summer. And yeah, I think because government funding of science became a thing right around the middle of the 20th century after sort of like World War II. um like the way that science ran before then where there was very little government funding and very little involvement to where now like the fact of the matter is that like a lot of it is government funded or most of it is government funded just means that it's like yeah completely different kind of ballgame”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think within the realm of science specifically, the sort of gentleman scientist era, you know, the Charles Darwin type era, it feels a little bit bygone in the sense of. Yeah, I don't know. It feels like there was a lot of low hanging fruit then that maybe science is just so much bigger. It is funded in a completely different way that is sort of unrecognizable from where it was before. I think when people talk about problems in science, they like to romanticize the past. That's probably true for any sort of institutional problem of just, you know, why can't we just have it the way that it was like 100 years ago or whatever? And, you know, there's usually good reasons why we don't. things don't run the way they did before um And like I always try to think about like, how do we actually take the conditions that we're in right now and like come up with something new? That being said, like even if we don't have sort of like a return to, you know, the literal gentleman scientist as default way of doing things in science, there's, you know, ton of room to go from the current model of how science is funded and this sort of like extremely constrained environments that people have to work in to like giving people a little bit more academic.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm yeah, much more on the nuanced side, but like I like, I think the trade-off of that is like, it just doesn't necessarily have mainstream appeal always because you don't have these really simplified messages. So yeah, if you think about sort of like institutions need to have like simplified messages that they pass on to people and those simplified messages work much better when they are things that make people feel good about themselves and you're always going to have that kind of more or less word word drift”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thoughtful people, I know, are often concerned, like there is a strong intellectual conservative movement, but I think people that love nuance were, you know, where there is no like, there is no mindless playbook that you can use to just sort of like the answer is not always like direct democracy or peace or whatever if that's not your like guiding star and you are actually interested in like a fair bit of nuance, like you're not going to really run institutions. And I say that as someone.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“have to ask Curtis that I mean, I don't know that I have, I think we can observe that that is maybe what is happening. I don't think I have an amazing answer to that. I think. I mean, my best guess if I had to come and answer is I think the values of Democracy and peace and freedom and whatever. There's a set of sort of like passifying social values that are very hard to disagree with. And so there's always this sort of like natural drift towards that. I do find that like I think the most”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thoughtful, somehow select for like thoughtful people. But, like, how to determine, like, I wonder if there's like a committee that short appointment terms and then like there's some committee that can like run a contest or something to determine like who gets to run this money or distribute this money every generation or something like that. I don't know. I'd have to come up with something pretty crazy like that. But yeah, that would be the biggest challenge, I think.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do I make sure that whomever manages that endowment actually shares my views? One shares my views, but then also like, how do I even know what we need to care about in a thousand years? Because like, I don't even know what the problems are in a thousand years. And this is why I think like very long-term thinking can be a little bit dangerous in this way, because you're sort of like presuming that you know what even matters then. Whereas I think like figure out the most impactful things to do is just like so contextually dependent on like what is going on at the time. So I can't, I don't know. And there are also foundations where, you know, the donor like writes in the charter like this money can only be spent on, you know, X cause or whatever, but then it just becomes really awkward over time because it's like, I don't know, they're spending money on like lighthouse keepers or something like that. It's like, you know, like this is just like not a thing that actually really like, you know, should be the main focus anymore. So yeah, I don't know. I think I would probably try to figure out a way to like select for like.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of like their views or anything like that, it's just much more of like, you know, you had the intent of the original donor and then you had like, who are all these people that like suddenly just ended up with a giant pool of capital and then like decided to spend it however they felt like spending it. And the grandson at the time sort of like famously resigned because he was like really frustrated and was just like, this is not at all what my family wanted. And like basically getting like kicked off the board. So anyway, so that is the question that I would like figure out if I had a thousand year endowment is”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what we're doing to like how's this wealth over here and then, you know, passed away, son passed away, and grandson ended up being on the board. But the board ended up being basically like. A bunch of people that Henry Ford certainly would not have ever wanted to be on his board. And so, you know, and you end up seeing the Ford Manager end up becoming huge influential. I have received money from them. So not at all an indictment of.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd worry much less. The question for me is not about how do I make sure that there are assets available to distribute in a thousand years because I don't know, just put in the stock market or something. It is a pretty boring thing to just like, you know, ensure your assets grow over time. The more difficult question is, how do you ensure that whoever is deciding how to distribute the funds distributes them in a way that you personally want them to be spent? So Ford Foundation is a really interesting example of this, where Henry Ford created a Ford Foundation like Charlie Forehe died and just pledged a lot of Ford stock to create this foundation and was doing it basically for tax reasons, had no philanthropic.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, I mean, I've definitely found like if you just Cold emailing people and talking to them. People are often surprisingly very, very open to being talked to because I don't know. Most people do not get asked questions about what they do and how they think and stuff. So, you know, want to realize that dream.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or people should just be talking to like, I don't know, like Kara's just like just talking to like open source developers turns out you can learn a lot more from that than just sitting around like thinking about what open source developers might be thinking about.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them just like observing what they see, and then trying to write about it. And I just, yeah, that's the style that I really want to emulate.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For open source, I was definitely really influenced by Jane Jacobs and Eleanor Ostrom, who I think. Both had this quality of, so yeah, Eleanor Ostrom was looking at examples of common pool resources like fisheries or forests or whatever, and just like going and visiting them and spending a lot of time with them and then saying, like, actually, I don't think Tragedy of the Commas is like a real thing, or it's not the only outcome that we can possibly have. Sometimes commas can be managed perfectly sustainably, and it's not necessarily true that everyone just treats them great abstractively and just wrote about what she saw. And same with Jane Jacobs sort of looking at cities as someone who lives in one, right? Like she didn't have any fancy credentials or anything like that. She was just like, I live in the city and I'm looking around and this idea of like top-down urban planning where you have like someone trying to design this perfect city that like doesn't change and doesn't yield to its people just seems completely unrealistic. And the style that both of them take in their writing is very, it just starts from.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“50 years or 20 years or 10 years and have that be the legacy versus your name kind of getting besmirched over over a century of institutional decay and decline. So, yeah, I don't like If you have a community that lasts for maybe only last 10 years or something like that, and it's funded for that amount of time, and then it kind of elbows its usefulness and it winds down or becomes less relevant. Like I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. Of course, like in practice, you know, nothing ever ends that neatly and that quietly. But yeah, I don't think that's a bad thing”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rockefeller Foundation right now, actually, many different Rockefeller Foundations, but like, why does that even exist? Like, why did that money not just get spent down? And actually, when John D. Rockefeller was first proposing the idea of foundations, he wanted them to be like, to have like a finite end state. So he wanted them to last only like 50 years or 100 years when he was proposing this federal charter, but that federal charter failed. And so now we have these state charters and foundations can't just exist forever. But I think if we want to improve upon this idea of like, how do we prevent meritocratic elites from turning into aristocratic elites? How do we actually just like try to do a lot of really interesting stuff in our lifetimes? It's like a very, it's very counterintuitive because you think about like leaving a legacy must mean like creating institutions or creating a foundation that lasts forever and 200 years from now there's still like the nadiasporova foundation out there but like if i really think about it's like i would almost rather just do really really really good interesting work and like”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, like Dustin Moscovitz, for example, has been funding EA for a really long time and hasn't walked away necessarily. I mean, on the flip side, you can see SPF carried a lot of risks because it's Europo point. I guess like, you know, you end up relying on this one funder. The one funder disappears and everything else kind of falls apart. I mean, I think like. I don't have any sort of like Preciousness attached to the idea of like communities lasting forever. I think this is like, again, if we're trying to solve for the problem of like what did not work well about 51c3 foundations for most of recent history, like part of it was that they're, you know, just meant to live on to perpetuity. Like, why do we still have like”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long term, I don't know. Like, is that just sort of like a temporary state that we're in right now where no one really knows what the next institutions will look like? Or is that really like an important part of this generation where like we shouldn't be asking this question of like, how do you build a new media network? We should just be saying like the answer is there is no media network. We just go to like all these individuals instead.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“human history tells us that eventually all individual behaviors kind of get codified into institutions, right? But we're obviously living in a very different time now. And I think like the way that the Davosli managed to really codify and extend their influence across all these different sectors was by taking that institutional mindset and thinking about sort of like academic institutions and media institutions and all that stuff. If the startup mindset is really inherently like anti-institution instead of like, we don't want to build the next Harvard necessarily. We just want to blow apart the concept of universities whatsoever or we don't want to create a new CNN or a new Fox News. We want to just like fund like individual creators to do that same sort of work, but in this very decentralized way. Will that work?”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they're trying to like take that Will not really talk to mainstream anymore. They will not get an interview to the New York Times, but they will go to like an individual. Influencer or an individual creator, and they'll do an interview with them. So, like when Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta, like he did not get grant interviews to mainstream publications, but he wanted to talk to like Ben Thompson at Strategory. And so I think there is like, it fits really well with that. Incredibly mindset of like we're not necessarily institution building, we're going to like focus on power of individuals who sort of like defy institutions. And that is kind of like an open question that I have about like what will the long-term influence of the tech elite look like because like, you know,”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But like you can see, there's like two clear generations within the same family, like one has this sort of like local wealth mindset and one of them has the more like elite wealth mindset. And yeah, you can kind of like ask yourself why did that switch happen? But yeah, it's clearly about more than just money. It's also about intention.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think like a lot of wealth might just fall into that category. My favorite example, by the way, is the Koch family because you had the Koch brothers, but then like their father was actually the one who kind of initially made their wealth, but was like very localized in sort of like how he thought about philanthropy. He had his own family foundation was just sort of like doing that sort of like, you know, Texas billionaire mindset that we're talking about of, you know, I made a bunch of money. I'm going to just sort of like, yeah, do my local fund door activity. It was only the next generation of his children that then like took that wealth and started thinking about like, how do we actually like move that onto like a more elite stage and thinking about their media?”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lose all that power. So I think that needs to sort of like defend one's power and kind of like prompt that sort of action. The other aspect I'd highlight is just like I think a lot of elites are driven by these like technological paradigm shifts. So there's this scholar Carlotta Perins who writes about technological revolutions and financial capital. And she identifies a few different technological revolutions over the last whatever plus years that like drove this cycle of you know a new technology is invented people are kind of like working on it in this smaller industry sort of way there is some kind of like crazy like public frenzy and then like a backlash and then from after that then you have this sort of like focus on public institution building but she really points out that like not all technology fits into that like not all technology is a paradigm shift sometimes technology is just technology and and so”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also for the Gilded Age cohort of wealth. And so, yeah, when you have sort of, you're kind of like, you know, building in your own little world and like, you know, we had literally like Silicon Die where everyone was kind of like sequestered off and just thinking about stirups and thinking themselves of like tech is essentially like an industry just like any other sort of you know entertainment or whatever. And we're just kind of happy building over here. And then it was only once we're like the panopticon like turned its head towards tech and started and they had this sort of like onslaught of critiques coming from sort of like mainstream discourse where they went, oh like what is my place in this world? And if I don't try to like defend that, then I'm going to just kind of, yeah, we're going to.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think you're right. Yeah, I would make a distinction between being wealthy is not the same as being elite or whatever other term you want to explore. And so, yeah, there are definitely like pockets of what's called more like local markets of wealth. Yeah, Texas oil or energy billionaires that tend to operate kind of just more in their own sphere. And a lot of, if you look at any phone compact, like a lot of them will be filmthropically active, but they only really focus on their geographic area. But there's sort of this difference. And I think this is part of where it comes from the question of like, you know, like what forces someone to actually do something more public facing with their power. And I think that comes from your power being sort of like threatened. That's like one aspect I would say of that. So like tech has only really become a lot more active in the public sphere outside of startups after the tech backlash of the mid-2010s. And you can say similar thing kind of happened with the Davos elite as well.”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think this thing I see of people trying to lobby for effective algorithms to care about their cause area, but then it's like you could just start a separate. Like if you can't get EA to care about, then why not just like start another one somewhere else?”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, those are some of the bigger ones that I see right now. I think there is just so much more potential to do more, but I wish people would just think a little bit more creatively because, yeah, I really do think like effective kind of becomes like the default option for a lot of people, then they're kind of vaguely dissatisfied with it and they don't like think about like, well, what do I actually really care about in the world and how do I want to put that forward?”
2022-12-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source