Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent

25:16When I was an artist, I used to be annoyed by this. Now that I buy a lot of art at auction, I'm delighted, because it means there's all this money. You stand you wore all screen prints selling for $90 million, right? Yes, and old masters can be, I wouldn't say cheap, but I would say radically underpriced. A couple hundred thousand. Or even for some good ones. Yeah, and so I know, because I buy them. 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.

25:54There's none left. Some of the things I buy, I'm the only bitter. I get it for the reserve price. know what 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 very, very, very famous artists. Like artists famous enough for Saudis to have heard of them. 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. If you think that something has gone wrong in the history of art and you tried to explain that in as few dimensions as possible, what's your account of what went wrong?

26:41Oh, oh, I can explain this very briefly. Brand and craft became divorced. It used to be that the best artists were the best crafts people. 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. So you think it's mass media causing the divorce between brand and craft? It certainly helps. And then talents responding accordingly. So you fundamentally went wrong. You invent some stick and then technically it's called a signature style. So you paint with this special stick. If someone can get some sort of ball rolling, some speculative ball rolling, which dealer specializes in, then someone buys the painting with your stick and hangs it on the wall and they're loft and try back at it and people come in and say, oh my goodness, that's a so -and -so, right?

27:40Which they recognize because they've seen the stick. But say if we have modernism raging in the 1920s and the 20s mass media's radio for the most part? No, newspapers were huge modernism was well for showing paintings. There's no color in the papers It was you have to be and the 90s were good enough to make Painting like sazon fashionable. So it was just about getting going in the 1920s Why can't we build good British country homes anymore? Or do you think we can there's nothing stopping you? But it doesn't have to accept the planning people. You can't. Do you know anything about building houses in England?

28:16You just cannot build it. It's impossibly difficult. It's one of the worst countries. It's the reason it looks so nice here. Yes. If 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, a hundred acts or something like that. And this place is small. Yeah, but there are new buildings saying in Cambridge many other parts of Britain and the new buildings are not country homes. Yet everyone on average is wealthier and why the Jailier than where?

28:48Oh, the New York Times. Well, the New York Times. And in the old days. Even before the railway, you have large numbers of country at most, country homes being built. When living standards were pathetically low, 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. And 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.

29:18In the old days, you had to have a classical looking house because that was the only way to build houses. And in the Victorian period, actually, it was when things went wrong. You could have an Italian villa or a wait. No, it could be a Greek temple or something that looked like you was from the tutor period. Take your pick, mix them together. There are Greek temple with tutor bits. It was all over from that point on, really. In which way, if they - It's not like they build good houses in America either. No, and neighborhoods are worse. Yeah, there are nice individual homes. But is there any truly beautiful neighborhood built after 1950?

29:51Where would it be in any country? In Palo Alto. In Palo Alto. There's a neighborhood of their neighborhoods 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. When were those built? 50s and 60s. Okay, but that's 70 years ago now. You haven't done anything in 70 years? I'm sure there's a lot of that. What's your model of that? 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.

30:30The buyers don't have any taste. We don't need to sweat that. So we'll just build random houses that look big and have large master bedrooms people will buy them We'll get our capital back and go on and do the next one. They don't need to be good houses don't need to be good They didn't need to be beautiful in the old days either It was just technology was so constrained you didn't have any choice You get to go back in time your health is guaranteed and you know whichever languages you might need and you spend six months somewhere safe your safety's guaranteed where do you choose? I often think about this question.

31:03You seem like someone who often thinks about this question. Yeah, sadly. The way I think about it is that I keep trying to escape from the obvious answer and I don't manage to because the obvious answer is that Athens, which is that's where everyone would pick. It's not what I would pick, but what's your choice number two then? I'll tell you mine, I think. 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. But 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.

31:38Yeah, sure. New things were getting invented. Some people were doing good things, just like always happens, but it was as bad as things had been. 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. So you want to go to Northumbria and Northern France? No, no, no, no. You know, dark ages, you've picked the hour and now give us the spot.

32:15Like Provence. Provence. Provence in 600. What was going on? What was going on in Provence in 600? 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 morbid curiosity, by the way. Yeah. That's kind of curiosity, in many cases. I can tell. I would pick the Aztec Empire before the Spanish arrive. So I feel I have vague glimpses of what ancient Athens was like. There are still Greek ruins. but the Europeans marveled at the cities they saw and they burnt all the books.

32:57And I think I would learn more by somewhere more strange. Maybe. The reason I'm interested in medieval Europe is it's because where our world came from, right? Yes. So 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 the drone Have to fall or can you imagine a path where Rome has an industrial revolution and we save ourselves 700 or however many centuries of time Like, you need the fragmentation to get the competition.

33:51Maybe. For Britain to become significant. Maybe, maybe. I don't know. Ah, 2 ,000 years is a long time, or even 1700 years. Right. China never solves. It's a decent until 200, so 1500 years. But 1500 years, things could have changed a lot. But did they in China? Chinese Empire never collapses. It takes many forms, many dynasties. But it ends up stalling. So maybe the collapse of the Roman Empire was one of the best things that could have happened for Europe at least people sure People didn't think so at the time. I'm sure people were thinking of the time. It didn't have to be this bad I don't know neither of us knows about this kind of thing Looking forward how optimistic are you about the future of the UK?

34:32No real wage growth since 2008 No real productivity growth for as many years What's up? And what's the path out of that? 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. Because you grew up in Pittsburgh, right? Yeah. Near Pittsburgh. Yeah. But I'm British by birth. Does that count? Are you really British or like your parents were diplomats here? No, yes. So you're really British. Yes. Okay. Yes. Just ask HMRC as far as their concern I never left. HMRC is the British IRS. us. Okay, the reason I'm optimistic about Britain, I was just thinking about this morning, is because people here are not slack.

35:18They'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've 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.

35:59To bet the same is Mississippi. It's preposterous! I know. So imagine the potential there. Imagine the potential. But you don't feel that way about Mississippi necessarily. No, I think Mississippi is probably already up close to its full potential. I don't know. I never actually did there. I shouldn't say things like that. But why and how did so many things here end up under capitalized? So the water utilities, the NHS, it seems to be a consistent pattern. That could make us more pessimistic because the flow numbers don't reflect the fact that capital maintenance is even worse than we had thought.

36:32I don't know. You're an economist. I don't know what the term capital maintenance is. But you're a British person, I'm fault. Undercapitalized, I don't know what these things mean. They've been postponed. 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. But how long it takes an ambulance to arrive, if you've gone on? Well, that's only recently got bad. That's what undercapitalization means. You keep on borrowing against the future. You don't plow resources back in.

37:01So 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 Yahoo's that America is. It may be a small country, but people running things, you know, they're not just like bone -headed political appointees. And like when things are wrong, they notice they're wrong and they fix them. There's 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. Are you an optimist about the city of San Francisco? Not the city. because there are all sorts of things happening behind the scenes to fix the problem.

37:39In politics, you mean? Or in text startups? 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 and things rapidly reverted to the mean. Although in San Francisco's case, way below the mean. And so, didn't take that much to ruin San Francisco. It's really, if you could, if you just replaced about five supervisors, San Francisco would be instantly, a fabulously better city.

38:18Isn't it the voters you need to replace? Are those people got elected, reelected? The 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 hard core of crazy left wing supporters who will absolutely support you no matter what and apps and turn out to vote and everybody else's oh local election doesn't matter I'm not gonna 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 Now we're in 2023 so two or three years from now Now what do you think the regulation of AI will look like?

39:02Oh God knows. Well you keep asking me questions. I have no idea about it. You have plenty of idea. You know as much as anyone. I suspect. No, that's not true. It's not true. I really have no idea what AI regulation will look like or even should look like, which is an easier question. Here's an easier question yet. So there's broadly a tech community in the Bay Area. Like if you said, I had to make up the regulations for AI this afternoon. It would be really hard. I agree. 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.

39:34Like when it should be modular or when there should be a regulation on AI is a thing that itself is intractable. I'll 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.

40:14Making 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 US tax code is basically a series of responses to things melon did some parts of it. Yes. 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 There's a Bay Area tech community, at least in the not too distant past. They agreed about many things.

40:52But very recently it seems on AI there's quite a divergence of views. People who are very worried, oh it's going to kill us all in the world. People who say, oh there's problems, but this is going to be great. In as few dimensions as possible, what accounts for that difference in perspective from people with broadly similar backgrounds and who used to agree on many things? Is it temperament? Is it genes? Is it like a snakebit? it's probably when they're... When they're... Which aspect of the problem they choose to focus on, right? 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.

41:26And 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 manage to keep both thoughts in my head simultaneously. I simultaneously think there are 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? Yes. That's worrying. That in itself is worrying, right? Why hasn't Lisp been more successful? Or do you think it has? Closure is a dialective Lisp, and closure is very successful.

42:03So 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 through successful through JavaScript. But why doesn't everybody use, why doesn't everybody use closure or some other dialect of Lisp? Because the notation 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.

42:44There must be names for this in economics. If you put some sort of obstacle, right? Like a container 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. So is AI generated programming going to indicate you on list over time or cousins of list? No. Because the AI doesn't care about the notation, right? It does.

43:17It does. Because it's trained based on the amount of code that's out there. But you could train it on something more like list. If you want to do it. Can't you have trained on actual examples? People have written. But you have AI write some code in the kind of perpetual motion machine, train other A .I .s on that code and converge to something better, better, better. No? There was some research paper recently where they trained an A .I. on the output of A .I .s and it converges on crap. Maybe there will be some solution because it is a very rapidly evolving field. But I think you have to have a large corpus initially of examples written in the language.

43:50Other than hackers and hacking, what other human activities are what you have called high cost interruption. That is, if you're interrupted, you lose your train of thought, have to start all over again. Oh, math, I think must be like that. I think anything. Painting, yes or no? 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.

44:23That'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. Do you think kids today spend too much or too little time learning high cost interruption activities? Do they spend too much or too little time working? Like are we under investing in high cost interruption activities? Well, if you think about what it's like in schools, kids are constantly been and of course are up to them. They always have been. So whatever the answer is, it's not going to be kids these days who will be the statement about school for centuries. Kids have such short attention spans.

44:57One 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. Our last segment is what I call the Paul Graham production function, which is how you got to be Paul Graham. Would you major in philosophy again at what Cornell? If you were knowing it all over? No, I would not major in philosophy. And why not? Didn't it allow you to think at a very general level? Well, 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 cube and take them apart.

45:31Notice the two parts are the same shape or something like that. But I don't think I actually learned that in philosophy classes. I think you would have, I would have learned that in classes about anything hard, I mistakenly thought that you could just go and learn the most abstract truths, right? 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 it 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 is.

46:12And I'm like, hey, that's what I majored in. What the meaning of is is, literally. Which kinds of ideas come more naturally to you while you're walking? Which kind? Yes. So maybe not painting ideas, but some kind of ideas, because you're written about how using walking to learn ideas is a good thing. But which kinds of ideas? This cross -sectional variation, right? 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.

46:56So I think it's good for whatever you happen to be thinking about. Like mathematicians apparently walk a lot. I find it best for learning from what the other person knows. Not so good for my own ideas. So we're with someone else. With someone else and I'm talking with them. And I learned from them better. I don't find that I'm very generative when I'm walking. 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. Just some kind of images of brain activity. And like your brain is definitely more active when you're walking.

47:30So YC office hours, classic YC office hours, were 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 a reflection of gardening, right? It's like confession in the church. You don't see the priest or you're on a therapist's couch. Probably you're not looking right at them or if I put in vice versa. Or you're driving your kid back to boarding school. And they'll say things they would not otherwise have told you. Or talk at all. Yes. What are the best environments for learning while walking?

48:06urban British countryside or like how do you optimize this dose? Okay. I actually have you know. I think Britain is wonderful for learning while walking because it's never too hot. So you heat up while you're walking. It doesn't pour with rain on you like it did today. I was drenched today. It ends in four minutes right. You can bring an umbrella. You run to the gazebo. But there is a gazebo. It wasn't no 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.

48:43And 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, a 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 root. There's not much on it. So I see gras some trees. That's about it. What's the most important thing you've learned about soundproofing? Boy there's a good question. I've learned a few things about soundproofing. Can I only say one thing? One thing is fine. You said what's the most nice thing?

49:16Oh you can say more than one. 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, it's either multiple layers in the case of windows or simply mass. But 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.

49:52So great big heavy doors, is multiple pained 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. You never noticed. That's right. And the more evetration of sorts. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Soundproofing is worth it though. Quiet is really good, at least for me. There's an optimal level of fame. Do you feel you have too much or too little? Well, what is the optimal level of fame? I suppose it's when you can get resources you need or something like that.

50:29Or 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. If I want to talk to somebody, I can find somebody who'll introduce me. So that must be enough. But are you past the optimum? I don't know. I don't know. That's the thing. This sounds very arrogant. But I realize this with Y. I realized that why a commonator 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?

51:06Get all these startups, help them grow, find investors for them, and then it would start again. It didn't seem like Why see was any different? It was the same building, the same people, we would get more startups, right? Meanwhile, why see was like starting to be considered as this giant gatekeeper for Silicon Valley or something like that? Just like a new one was different, right? 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.

51:47But why see 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 why see. I didn't realize how many people were watching us. I thought we could just keep doing what we were doing and nothing really mattered. And why was that a mistake per se? Maybe it was better being oblivious. No, because everybody, when basically anybody outside Silicon Valley who wants to blame Silicon Valley for something, who do they blame?

52:24They'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 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. Very last question. In my view a life properly lived is learn, learn, learn all the time. That's what Charlie Yes, what have you recently been learning about?

53:01Oh Other than soundproofing. Tintoretto And what are you learning? Visari had a very low opinion of him. Visari is unreliable and most things, right? I don't know. I don't know. He way overrated his patron, Sennadici. Yeah, you have a thing about the Medici, clearly. He said that Tintoretto was too independent -minded. The 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 flarring, kind of idea. I think Tintoretto would have looked down on Vassari as a minor league artist, but that was interesting.

53:44That was interesting to learn that's how at least some of Tintoretto's contemporaries viewed him and Vassari in particular. And a Y -combinator co -founder is not going to buy that argument, is he? Which was... I'm sorry, I was wondering. That he was too radical and too off on his own. Oh, I thought Eman Jessica wasn't going to agree with me about Tintoretto. There's two of you, but neither of you would agree with Visari. I don't know. I'm now going to look. I'm now going to look. I never thought about this, but I was just looking at some Tintoretto. I was just in Venice looking at the Squalagrandeidesan Marco, perhaps, Squalagrande, or something where all those Tintorettoes are.

54:22And they were so dirty. It was hard to tell what the paintings actually looked like. But I'm going to go look. I'm gonna go look and see if they seem freakish. Paul Graham, thank you very much. Thank you. Boy, that was so many hard questions.

54:59Tyler Cowan and the show is At Cowan Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.