YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Graham

lines on the record: 85
first: 2023-08-09
most recent: 2023-08-09
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

“And they were so dirty. It was hard to tell the paintings actually looked like. But I'm going to go look. I'm going to go look and see if they seem freakish.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, I'm now going to look. I'm now going to look. I never thought about this, but I was just looking at some Tintorettos. I was just in Venice looking at the squala grande San Marco, perhaps? Squola Grande or something where all those Tintorettos are.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you have a thing about the Medici clearly. He said that Tintoretto was too independent minded, that Tintoretto was the sort of mad genius, and that he would have been better if he had constrained his creativity and stayed within the limits of proper art. You know what I mean? Very Florentine sort of idea. I think Tintoretto would have looked down on Vasari as a minor league artist. But that was interesting. That was interesting to learn that's how at least some of Tintoretto's contemporaries viewed him, and Vasari in particular.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because everybody Basically, anybody outside Silicon Valley who wants to blame Silicon Valley for something, who do they blame? They've never heard of the people who are actually powerful in Silicon Valley. They only know a handful of people who have consumer brands, me among them. So basically the world sucks because of tech and tech sucks because of Paul Graham because they've never heard of any of the other people. I don't seem to get quite so much of that anymore. I don't know. I'm glad about that. But with YC definitely, I didn't know how prominent YC was becoming and how many people would be out to get us as a result.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not aware. Famous people don't know how famous they are unless they're experts on it, like movie stars or something like that. They're always basically taken by surprise. And so we were especially taken by surprise. Because the thing is, the companies we funded would grow until they had thousands of employees. But YC itself didn't grow, like the value of the portfolio grew with these giant companies, but we didn't see it. We were still just a few people doing the same thing we'd always been doing. So how could we be famous? But I discovered like that was one of the biggest mistakes I made with YC. I didn't realize how many people were watching us. I thought we were just, we could just keep doing what we were doing and nothing really mattered.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I don't know. That's the thing. Sounds very arrogant, but I realized this with Y Combinator. I realized. Y combinator had become famous. Long after it had become famous because as far as I was concerned, I was just doing what we'd always been doing. We would every six months, we would get all these applications. We'd have to find the needle in the haystack, right? Get all these startups, help them grow, find investors for them, and then it would start again. It didn't seem like YC was any different. It was the same building, the same people. We would get more startups, right? Meanwhile, YC was starting to be considered as this giant gatekeeper for Silicon Valley or something like that. Jessica.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the optimal level of fame? I suppose it's when you can get resources you need or something like that or if there's someone you need to talk to, they'll talk to you. So I can now talk to most people. I need to talk to you if I want to talk to somebody. I can find somebody who will introduce me. So that must be enough”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, one is that sound comes through holes, and so it doesn't come through your walls. It comes through your windows, probably in most places. And so if you fix the holes, you fix the noise problem. The other thing I've learned is that the solution to sound, basically the solution, if it's not either multiple layers in the case of Windows or simply mass, you make some big thick door and make it have hinges that make it sink down. That's what recording studios have. So when the door opens, it rises up a little bit. And when it closes, it goes right down onto the floor. So great big, heavy doors, multiple paned windows, and weirdly enough, I've noticed I've managed to soundproof some places so effectively that I've noticed this phenomenon you only notice with soundproofing. All kinds of things make annoying noises that you never noticed. That's right.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't know Gazebo where I was this morning. I think it's good to always walk in the same place. You don't want to see things that distract you, right? If you're trying to have ideas, you're not going to get ideas from things you see. Probably not, not relevant ones. And so you want to walk in the same place, and it should be something where there's no distraction. So I would think the countryside, where I go walk is on this common, this preserved medieval common. To an American, it would look like a large park. And it's the perfect thing. I just always take the same route. There's not much on it. So I see grass and trees. That's about it.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Walking makes all kinds of thinking better. I've seen images, like MRI images or something like that of brain activity. I don't know how they do MRI images, but some kind of images of brain activity. And your brain is definitely more active when you're walking. So YC office hours, classic YC office hours We're to walk down the block and talk as you walk, which also has the side benefit that you're side by side and not looking the other person in the face, which I think may be better. It's certainly better.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah well ideas about whatever you're thinking about until a few years ago I was working very intensely on programming and so I had the problem I was working on loaded into my head and whenever I was doing something without any interruptions I would start to think about that so I think it's good for whatever you happen to be thinking about like mathematicians apparently walk a lot”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to say. It's hard to say, right? It's good to be able to take ideas and flip them around like a Rubik's Q. The same shape or something like that. But I don't think I actually learned that in philosophy classes. I think you would have learned that in classes about anything hard. I mistakenly thought that you could just go and learn the most abstract truths. It sounds great to high school student. Why do I have to learn all this specific crap? I'll just learn the most general truths. And needless to say, that's one of those things sounds too good to be true, and it is. Because if you go and look in philosophy classes, I remember when Clinton, Bill Clinton was saying, you know, it depends what the meaning of is, and I'm like, hey, that's what I majored in what the meaning of is, literally.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you think about what it's like in schools, kids are constantly been in. Interrupted, and they always have been. So whatever the answer is, it's not going to be kids these days. It will be a statement about school for centuries. Kids have such short attention spans. The one thing they can't do is things that are big and long. I think if you said okay, you have five hours to sit in a quiet room and build something, I don't think they'd be up to it anyway.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not as much, in my experience, not as much. You don't have to think ahead as much in painting. It's annoying to be interrupted no matter what, but it doesn't absolutely destroy you like it does in the middle of writing a program or something. You don't build a big mental model of something in your head when you're painting. That's what it is. It's when you've got this giant house of cards in your head. That's when you get destroyed by an interruption.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was some research paper recently where they trained in AI on the output of AIs and it converges on crap. Maybe there will be some solution because it's a very rapidly evolving field, but I think you have to have a large corpus initially of examples written in the language.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In front of people's front door, they'll go off to the left, and then they won't go right back in front of the container and resume their original path. No, they'll take this other path that goes like miles out of their way just because of that one block in front of their front door. And so the syntax, the reverse Polish notation puts people off.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Closure is a dialective lisp, but enclosure is very successful. So it's been successful in that respect. And there's another way it's been successful. Some languages that are not considered dialects of Lisp, like JavaScript, if you showed JavaScript to people in 1970, they would say, this is a Lisp, except for the syntax, this is a Lisp. So closure is literally successful through closure. It's de facto successful through JavaScript. But why doesn't everybody use, why doesn't everybody use Clojure or some other dialect of Lisp? Because the notation's frightening. There's an initial hump with the notation. And if you give people an initial hump, like if you put, you must know about this. There must be names for this in economics. If you put some sort of obstacle, like a container.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably which aspect of the problem they choose to focus on. You could focus on either one. And so if you focus on how it could be good, there's all sorts of exciting things to discover. And you discover lots of genuine ways it could be good. And if you focus on how it could be bad, it's true there too. So it could be either. I managed to keep both thoughts in my head simultaneously. I simultaneously think there will be all kinds of good things and all kinds of bad things and that both will be they will be unimaginably good and unimaginably bad. So it sounds like that produces oscillation, doesn't it?”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so secure operating systems are like that. And so I'm worried about AI because whatever the regulations are, they'll be wrong. I'll tell you that. They'll be over-regulated in some ways and miss and have huge holes in others.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell you one meta fact though. There was a guy on Twitter. I think his name was Rob Miles, who said that trying to make safe AI will be like trying to make a secure operating system. And that is absolutely true. And therefore, frightening, because the way you make a secure operating system is not by sitting down and thinking at a table with a piece of paper about the principles for making a secure operating system, more like you try and make such principles and then someone hacks your operating system and then you think, oh, okay, sorry, and you patch it, and then they hack that. Making a secure operating system is like making a fraud-proof tax code. It's basically a series of patches that were based on hacks, successful hacks, right? Is it melon? They say the U.S. tax code is basically a series of responses to things melon did.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's how far away I am from being able to answer that question on the spot. I couldn't even figure it out in a day.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's not true. That is not true. I really have no idea what AI regulation will look like or even should look like, which is an easier question”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reason San Francisco fundamentally is so broken is that the supervisors have so much power. And supervisor elections, you can win by a couple hundred votes. So all you need to do is have this hardcore of crazy left-wing supporters who will absolutely support you no matter what and apps and turn out to vote. And everybody else is, oh, local election doesn't matter. I'm not going to bother. It's a uniquely weird situation that wasn't really visible. It was always there, but it wasn't visible until Ed Lee died. And so now we've reverted to what that situation produces, which is a disaster”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no, politics, politics, the problems with San Francisco are entirely due to a small number of terrible politicians. It's all because Ed Lee died. The mayor Ed Lee was a reasonable person, an up till the point where Ed Lee died, San Francisco seemed like a utopia. But it was like when Gates left Microsoft.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at some point, you don't have anymore. When things get bad enough, they fix things. This place is not run by the kind of Yahoos that America is. It may be a small country, but people running things, you know, they're not just like boneheaded political appointees. Like when things are wrong, they notice they're wrong and they fix them. This is a very old country. That's another reason. It's not going to tank. They've been through some bad stuff before. There have been ups and downs.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the NHS is run by the government, so things run by governments are often bad. Although the NHS seems to be pretty good, even though people attack it, it's a lot more civilized than the American system.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think Mississippi is probably already up as close to its full potential. I don't know. I've never actually been there, I shouldn't say things like that.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“HMRC is the British IRS Okay, the reason I'm optimistic about Britain. I was just thinking about this morning is because people here are not slack. They're not lazy and they're not stupid, and that's the most important thing. So eventually non-lazy, non stupid people will prevail. And I funded a couple startups here. You can see, like, when you introduce these people to the idea of trying to make something grow really fast and have these really big ambitions, it's like teaching them a foreign language. But they do learn it. They do learn it. It's not like English people are somehow genetically inferior to Americans. So I think they have all that potential still to go. I'm astonished when I see statistics like I think GDP per capita in the UK is only two-thirds of what it is in America.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am optimistic because they still have a gear that they haven't shifted into. I suppose I'll really have gotten native when I say we instead of they”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For Europe at least. People, I'm sure people didn't think so at the time. I'm sure people were thinking at the time it didn't have to be this bad. I don't know. Neither of us knows about this kind of thing.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe, maybe, I don't know two thousand years is a long time or even seventeen hundred years, right? Because China never decent until 200, so 1,500 years. But fifteen hundred years, things could have changed a lot.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the reason I'm interested in medieval Europe is it's because where our world came from, right? Yes. The clocks we use, the writing system, all the clothes eventually evolved from that. So the reason I'm interested, I long ago realized That the medieval period wasn't a dip. It wasn't like there was this high level of civilization and then it dropped down for a while and then it rose back up again. It was more like there was one civilization that was high and went down and another civilization based in the north that rose up. And so in a sense, it was the beginning of everything, right? That's why I want to know what the hell was going on in six or seven hundred.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Provence Provence six hundred What was going on? What was going on in Provence in six hundred? I would be very interested to see that. But almost like morbid curiosity. I wouldn't learn as much as I would from going to Athens, but I just really want to know what was going on. I'm a big fan of more than 100.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's so few records. Nobody knows how things happened. Like, I would be really interested to know when barbarians infilled the Roman Empire, but there were still big Roman landholders, and they had to give a large percentage of their estates to these new barbarians who were, in a sense, running things, and yet they were in the cockpit, but they didn't know what the buttons did.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are things where I am obsessed with the mystery of what the hell was going on in Dark Age Europe. I'm deliberately using the term Dark Age because they're trying to outlaw it. It's correct, I think. If the term Dark Ages hadn't been invented already, that would be a fabulous invention to describe that period. Yeah, sure. New things were getting invented. Some people were doing good things, just like always happens, but it was as bad as things have been.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sadly, the way I think about it is I keep trying to escape from the obvious answer and I don't manage to because the obvious answer that Athens, which is that's where everyone would pick”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone is building some good houses somewhere. The point is, you don't really need to, and so it only happens by accident, right? Developers mostly are thinking we need to just turn this land into houses as soon as possible.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Palestine. No, in Palo Alto, there's a neighborhood of houses built by this guy called Eichler, this developer who hired some of the best mid century architects, and arguably those neighborhoods are good, although they messed up the trees.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A country house has got to have a certain amount of land around it. You can't just have them plastered down a street. It would look wrong. You want a different style of architecture for something like that. There is a place where they build big houses. You know what it is? It's like when the Macintosh appeared and you could have whatever font you wanted, right? Most people have bad taste. In the old days, you had to have a classical looking house because that was the only way to build houses in the Victorian period, actually, was when things went wrong. You could have an Italian villa. Or wait, no, it could be a Greek temple or something that looked like it was from the Tudor period. Take your pick, mix them together, Greek temple with Tudor bits. And it was all over from that point on, really.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the reason it looks so nice here. They had America's zoning rules here, the entire countryside would be plastered with houses. You wouldn't have any fields left at all, because the difference in value between agricultural and building land, it's like God, 100x or something like that. And this place is small.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, except they're planning people. You can't. Do you know anything about building houses in England? You just cannot build.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamentally, what went wrong? You invent some shtick and then technically it's called a signature style. So you paint with this special. If someone can get some sort of ball rolling, some speculative ball rolling, which dealers specialize in, then someone buys the painting with your stick and hangs it on the wall in their loft and tribeca, and people come in and say, oh my goodness, that's a so-and-so, right? Which they recognize because they've seen the stick.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, oh, I can explain this very briefly Brand and Craft became divorced. It used to be that the best artists were the best craftspeople. And once art started to be reproduced in newspapers and magazines and things like that, you could create a brand that wasn't based on quality.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so I know, because I buy'em, but I used to be annoyed by this, and now I think it's the most delightful thing in the world because there's all this loose money sloshing around and so-called contemporary art is like this sponge that just absorbs all of it. There's none left. Some of the things I buy, I'm the only bitter. I get it for the reserve price. No one else in the world wants it or even knows that it's being sold. So I am delighted about this. So the answer to your question, which artists are undervalued, essentially all good artists. The intersection between the very, very, very famous artists. Like Leonardo, I would say, is probably not undervalued, except for the artists who are like household names, every elementary school student knows their names. They're all undervalued.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Annoyed by this, now that I buy a lot of art at auction, I'm delighted because it means there's all this money Andy Warhol screen prints selling for ninety million dollars, right?”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, wow Boy there is a topic I think about a lot. So there's a bunch of different reasons people can be underrated. Almost all good artists are underrated. It sounds weird, but if you look at where the money is spent at auction, it's almost all fashionable contemporary crap because if you think about how prices in very high end art are set, they're auction prices. How many people does it take to generate an auction price? Two, just two, right? And so you have boneheaded Russians who want to have a Picasso on their wall so people will think they're legit or hedge fund managers wives who have been told to buy impressive art to hang in their loft so when people come over they'll say oh look they've got a Damian Hearst the way art prices at the very high end are set is almost entirely by deeply bogus people which is great actually when I was an artist I used to be”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This whole thing about what's art and what isn't, I think it's all a matter of degree. Like my crap carnation coffee mug is art. It's just not very good art. So there's not like some threshold where above this threshold it's art. Everything people make is art just to varying degrees of goodness. But I can tell you some of the things I've seen that were AI generated. I'd be impressed if a person made them. So that probably is over your threshold.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see all these AI generated images. I don't know which ones are from mid journey and which ones aren't. So I can't say for sure about mid journey, but I've definitely seen some AI generated stuff that looks amazing, that looks truly amazing.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was saying when I said programming was like painting they're both building something, right? And you're not building something anymore with AI than when you were writing. So, I would guess not. I would guess not.”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God, what a question. How do you make these questions? Does AI make programming more like painting? I have no reason to believe that It might be true. It might be true”
2023-08-09 · Conversations with Tyler · Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source