YouSaid · the spoken record

Samo Burja

lines on the record: 70
first: 2023-08-01
most recent: 2023-08-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Likely, that's luck. And it's very unlikely that they're using the same recipe or the same insights for all three domains. And I think that's sort of the strongest evidence that some individuals can recreate patterns of behavior and improvise essentially in a way that's basically just very deep, very groundbreaking. And I think the total number of live players in the world probably right now is closer to about 50,000 or so. So it's actually still extremely rare. A fun historical example might be Arnold Schwarzenegger who rebrands from being a weightlifting champion to being an actor to being a politician. Well, look, while he was an actor starring in blockbuster movies, people said, oh, he's not really an actor. As soon as he became a politician, people said, he's not really a politician. He's just an actor. So it's that kind of jump to a different activity that demonstrates.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be anything. It can be a very successful script if I am a surgeon and I work exactly as I was trained, I'll be doing a fairly good job. And I can repeat this exact program, this recipe that I've been taught, and of course apply it in my domain with some creativity. And society basically functions on the top of such roles, on surgeons, engineers, plumbers, but also lawyers, politicians, priests. A live player though is someone that can on the spot improvise, develop, and create new social roles. And one of the surest indicators that someone is a live player is the ability to jump multiple industries. So if you see someone that succeeded in one industry and gone to a totally unrelated field of activity and succeeded there as well, and then gone again and succeeded as well, it's very unlikely.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so on. So then let's say that about 30 civilizations, some of them still relevant, some of them ancient history, each of them having probably something like 10 or so great founders. So I think for all of human history, if you were to chart the impact of these individuals, and again, I want to emphasize sometimes it's a small group of people. It might be an individual plus a few very close allies, or it might be a partnership of two lawgivers or anything like this. such small human clusters, you think we're talking about 500 people at most. 500 people at most for human history. And then for the term live player, all great founders are live players. Not all live players are great founders. A live player is someone that is not operating off of an inherited script. An inherited script might be something like professionalism, political tradition.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When exactly you know the forest transform into Savannah or something like that, we can have those discussions, but it is true that some institutions, vastly more influential than others. So having said that, how many unique pieces of, let's think of it as social technology or unique civilization defining institutions are there per civilization? Well, I think that most civilizations have sort of like five to maybe eight unique things that they're doing. So the total number of distinct in this macrohistorical sensibilizations for human history that we know of, I would say that it's about 30 or so different civilizations, most of them of course long gone known. No one is very much interested in Sumerian civilization except as a historical case study today. It doesn't impact us in any preferential way except perhaps in some ways influencing biblical myths of the great flood.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I think every time a founder creates a new organization, this is a singular act of social creation, even if it's something relatively boring, like a technology company or a nonprofit organization, their peculiarities in who they pick as staffing, want their decisions that they're making are. Similarly, what the great founder be, well, they're the creator of a key new social institution. We think one way to think of civilizations is that civilization isn't a single organism. It's less a tree and more a forest where any individual institution can be replaced and it still is recognizably the same civilization, the same ecological pattern. Say if you were to look at Western civilization and observe that, I don't know, say the Catholic Church is much less important now than it was 100 years ago just because society secularized doesn't mean it's a different civilization yet.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since while fewer people are born, previous generations are still alive and working, eventually start to see a decrease in population in one year is the population shrinking by 100,000 in a few years might be two, three, four million just because it's already baked in so deeply. These are all compounding effects. So ultimately, that demographic headwind is something that only the United States is outrunning A little bit with the help of immigration. However, mostly it's from rising productivity in the tech sector. And then the tech sector itself, it's making a big bet on AI if AI doesn't work out. That is the big economy transforming bet. I think the US will also slip into this kind of decaying state.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And lots of the developed East Asian economies and some semi developed ones like that of China are experiencing a massive demographic transition. And some of these things are very much exponential where, for example, when your population starts aging at first,”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In addition to this, outside of artificial intelligence, software companies and tech companies have experienced a real slowdown, the reason that so much capital flowed into AI wasn't just because AI was wonderful and exciting, it's because there was nothing else around. There's a real genuine breakthrough with ChatGPT. But what else is happening? What happened to cryptocurrencies? What happened to software is eating the world. All of that those mantras that created many, many new companies value the economic out of those companies was smaller. U.S. economic growth, I think, is somewhat overstated, but real. Meanwhile, in Europe, I think we are already seeing the beginnings of just a contracting economy. In some ways, fan is a good example of where our future is going. Both the United States, Europe,”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The United States has some similar problems to Europe. It just has them to a much lesser degree. There's some discussion recently of American dynamism, of re-industrialization, of things like the Chip Act. They're supposed to reshore certain kinds of manufacturing in the United States. Obviously, the U.S. has relatively healthy startup scene. Obviously, artificial intelligence is advancing most rapidly. It's advancing most rapidly in the United States, here in the Bay Area. But I think ultimately core problems of the US government have not been resolved. The US government is less functional, is less competent, is less cost effective than it was 40 or 50 years ago. Whatever we think of other social changes, it is hard to deny that a government-run project will just be run worse than it would have been in 1960 or 1940.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In any position of power in Europe, in the European system, be it in the economic domain, there are a few exceptional new companies. There's a reason that European tech stagnates so profoundly. Russia has more unicorns than Germany, and Russia is not a well-functioning economy, but for whatever reason, it's easier to create a tech startup in Russia than it is in Germany, choir like a large market and so on, large user base. Unless someone actively refounds European governments, the EU supranational bureaucracy, or even something like the key industrial sector in Europe, Europe will continue to lose out of like one or two percentage point a year way where at first it's imperceptible, then 20, 30, 40 years on, it just seems a vastly different place. I think thinking of Europe as the formerly developed world will become common.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relatively directed, well governing if they continue to a genically adapt to economic changes. It's the same kind of transformation that perhaps we saw with Singapore over 50 years after its initial independence, after Lee Kwan Yu, where he sort of broke the mold in a whole variety of ways. And the usual advice for how a country should develop was ignored. And most of the countries that followed that advice didn't develop, meanwhile Singapore did. The other important one is that I think that the European institutions will decay much more than people are even now assuming. I think that significant chunks of Europe might become somewhat impoverished. And the key reason for this is that there are very few live players that is exceptional, exceptional people who can adjust to their circumstances.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some interesting surprises where most of the Middle East will probably fail to properly industrialize and develop any sort of high-tech energy, any sort of transition away from oil. However, an interesting exception to this might be the United Arab Emirates. People a few years ago were surprised that there was an Emirati mission to Mars. Now, of course, this was mostly done by the Japanese space agency, yet significant partnership existed within UAE. People also might be surprised to learn that they are building nuclear reactors for civilian use. They also are starting to manufacture all sorts of other equipment within the country. So UAE might be very successful, highly developed country 50 years from now, if basically the current monarchs, the successors, continue to be”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some tweets as to what's happening in organizations not taking it for granted that they will persist, that's a very important difference in worldview. I think it prepares us for a vastly different world. I think 50 years from now, we shouldn't expect a world that is like the present but more so. I think we'll have deep institutional change within the Western world. The way, say, social media refactored the way we approach politics, that's going to have deep consequences, deep changes. And there's no deterministic way to figure out how that's going to play out. Say the introduction of social media in the West results in polarization. And in China, it resulted in a very intense regime of censorship. So the same technology, the internet with social media on top, results in two very different political phenomena.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for starters, people in the early 2000s would have not assumed that China will become a democracy just because it's becoming wealthy. That was, in a way, now, 2023, it's an acknowledged blunder of U.S. foreign policy and an example of wishful thinking. The more constructivist view, a more great founder theory view would say, oh, let's examine the Chinese Communist Party, let's examine how it's different or similar to the Soviet Union. Let's examine how well the machinery of the party works, and then we'll make up our mind if this thing is going to stay in power or not as China grows wealthier. Now, it's still probably on net, the thing that China became wealthier, but I do want to say that policy at the highest level, and not to mention investment decisions, are often made on the basis of long debunked historical theories. And looking”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chinese civil servants, will it coherent to a new organized religion? Will it cohere into a concrete Frankish Empire? I think there's nothing over determined about that because it's not just knowledge, it's creation of human organizations that transfer this knowledge. That's why I talk about the creation of institutions as such.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To some extent, there is knowledge which is overdetermined and which just will be Parle discovered. There are many examples of this, right? We could even go much further than your analogy with Newton about the same time traditional Japanese mathematics. So in the 17th and 18th century, was in a way completely unrelated to European mathematics, basically discovering calculus. So sometimes these parallels go even across totally different societies. It is the case that some knowledge is like that, but I want to caution here that human organization isn't just knowledge. So the idea of monotheism or religious law or meritocratic bureaucracy, these are ideas that might be scubbered independently, derived independently. But will that particular knowledge, that particular time, hear into new class?”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or Confucius thought out the full effect of their reforms on society for a thousand or two thousand years. It's just that it did shape human civilization for the next 1000, 2,000 years. And if you removed any of them, history would have gone quite differently, not necessarily because of their personal impact winning this or that battle, but from the perspective of reshaping the instituteness that it set the probabilities for these events.”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Muhammad reorganizing the tribal Arab societies into a cohesive unified whole ends up expanding and conquering most of the Middle East. It might take the form of, say, Confucius, who has this relatively modest social reform program, but ends up teaching something like a hundred bureaucrats who travel the country and try to spread the social philosophy of a reforming the dysfunctional Chinese states during the warring states period and eventually that comes to dominate their education system for the next 2,000 years. Or it might be Charlemagne refounding what is basically a tribal structure into something that ingests Roman law, creating the Frankish Empire as we think of it and linked groundwork for medieval European feudalism. It's not the case that Charlemagne or”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“for the next few hundred years is not people observe society and they come to alter it exceptional individuals great man's theory of history sense and perhaps don't determine everything to how things transpire but i think almost all of the exceptional institutions that have shaped human civilization anything you can think of be it organized religion technological companies political systems They usually have an individual or a small group of people who deviate from the previous social norm, create a new type of organization, a new type of institution, or honestly just a new way of doing things as the old society fails. And we see this over and over again. Again, to give historical examples, it might take a very religious and legible form, such as creating, founding a new organized religion. Say, for example,”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, it seems that most of social science for the last hundred years has been focused on trying to find these macro deep patterns of human behavior, human history, sometimes being as hubristic to try to find immutable laws of history, such as the case in the early and the middle of the 20th century. And while it certainly is the case that there are deep patterns that are worth studying in the nature of all civilization from the advent of agriculture to today and while it certainly is true again that there is a deep current that's changing our society that started with the industrial revolution to 100 years ago, none of these patterns were seven stone, none of these patterns are fixed. So I think none of them really rise to the level of sociological laws. And the reason why we can't just predict future history”
2023-08-01 · Invest Like the Best · Samo Burja - The Great Founder Theory of History - [Invest Like the Best, EP.339] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source