51: Nan Ransohoff - Power Laws for Philanthropy

16:26Charlie Petty:What are public goods?

16:28Nan Ransohoff:I think they're broadly like broadly speaking. There are like things that benefit many or most people. OK.

16:35Charlie Petty:And so is scale critical to that?

16:39Nan Ransohoff:What would an economist say? I think it's part of it, but I don't think it's like it doesn't have to benefit every single person. But like a canonical public good would be carbon removal, which does benefit everybody because we all share the air.

16:50Charlie Petty:Maybe the most important problem.

16:51Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, it's a big one. But I think that like we should choose the most capital efficient mechanism to solve the problem. So if you can deliver a great outcome for the world and make money from it and build a business around it, great. Do that. Only do we sort of move into like pure philanthropy if you can't figure out.

17:08Charlie Petty:I see.

17:09Nan Ransohoff:So I just want to say that I'm like I think that like capitalism is great. And if we can build great companies to solve world problems, we should do that first. And yeah, so philanthropy is sort of a subset of building good things for the world to sort of like, yeah, improve the world. I think that's maybe an important point because there's a lot of different kinds of companies in between pure philanthropy and, you know, maximizing profit. And I think those are all should be, in my opinion, on the table and considered and just like move down the stack as needed. But like start by trying to make money.

17:43Yes.

17:44Charlie Petty:There's also a, I would, the tech world, I think, tends to barbell, which is either like most ambitious possible version of a company or like pure nonprofit philanthropy thing that's like charity, basically.

17:54Nan Ransohoff:Totally. And I think that there's a really interesting space in the middle, but that needs creative funders and that needs people who are going to consider allocating capital in this sort of like squishy middle. Anastasia Gomic has written a bunch about this. These sort of like companies that should exist that don't because the sort of risk reward doesn't fit into venture or private equity or philanthropy. And they're kind of – so they go on sort of unworked on. But I think that that's like an also important space to hunt.

18:23Charlie Petty:Sort of like a philanthropic lifestyle business. Yeah, totally.

18:28Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, exactly. It's not venture scale returns, but it's also not a grant.

18:32Charlie Petty:The big idea here, I think, for both the GM thing and the broader point is all of these things, the type of, whether it's a business or a nonprofit, the approach, whatever it might be, is downstream of like what is the best way to attack this problem. Yeah, yeah. And the GM orientation is like less about I'm going to start. If a founder is oriented around a company, the GM is oriented around the problem.

18:52Nan Ransohoff:Yes, that's a really pithy and good way to describe it.

18:56Charlie Petty:What makes for good taste in problems?

19:02Charlie Petty:One of the things you write about is like, there's an interesting sort of spectrum of problems that tend to go unsolved. And it ranges from things that we don't really see because they're kind of illegible to like climate, which is just like impossibly big, to things that surely other people must be working on. You even have a point where you say, some are perhaps better described as things we want to be true rather than them problems.

19:25Nan Ransohoff:I have some experiences, but not a ton of experience in this. I would like more. But yeah, I think that there are, I think like a good, a good forcing function for, or like a good prompt for people to sort of think about is like, in what way would I like the world to be different? Like, what do I look at in the world and say to myself, like, that is crazy that we're still dealing with that or like I cannot believe like the just sort of yeah that this this sort of like shock and awe that it is that the world is a certain way that's like a good place to start of like kind of and you can kind of feel it in yourself I think part of important and probably problem selection is does it light me up like does it get me fired up yeah and that's maybe like an initial good filter um which requires by the way to even get to that point I think like kind of like dialing up our like Larry David sort of annoyance with things or something.

20:19Charlie Petty:You have to see the water on the, to go back to climate, like my presumption would be that you had some care or thought or interest in the climate stuff. And then there was some ignition point either in reading that 2018 data or something else that like caused it to be a hair on fire problem. Whereas for me, I'm like, I intellectually know the climate stuff matters, but I like nothing's burning.

20:39Nan Ransohoff:It doesn't do anything for you. Well, what are like examples of problems that elicit that reaction for you?

20:44Charlie Petty:Well, I think part of the, part of the interesting thing about this is that like we are, when I was listening to you talk about, like we are trained to, like we grow to not see the water on some of these types of things.

20:56Nan Ransohoff:Yes.

20:57Charlie Petty:I think maybe this is too meta, but like I probably tend to orient towards most of my interests through people. So like if I met someone who was firing up, like I wasn't that interested in philanthropy, be frankly until I met you. And there was an articulation of it that like partly was your energy, partly was your articulation, partly maybe it was framed, you know, it's framed around GMs, which are the people who are going to solve these problems. So it was like, it was a receptacle for me. So maybe, I guess there's two ways to ask the problem taste question, which is like, actually just what are the types of problems that are really important?

21:30Charlie Petty:And maybe there's a separate thing, which is like, yeah, the problem matters, but also choose a problem that fits you.

21:35Nan Ransohoff:Yes. Right. There's like there. Yeah, I think there's like there are different ways into the problem piece and maybe to sort of finish laying out. It's not really a framework, but like good proxies for this is like the thing that kind of gets you upset or riles you up is like a is a good lens. I think that the tractability piece is a really tough one to assess because there are lots of problems that are really important and make people frustrated and upset. But like how to tackle, like figuring out the right altitude to define the problem at and come up with some solutions to actually move the ball forward is really tough.

22:17Nan Ransohoff:So in that category of thing, I think that's where like either one is already an expert and they can sort of see the levers to pull or you become an expert or you talk to experts and try to ramp yourself up to see if there's a there there. And then I think another bucket here is the kind of neglected piece. Like is there anybody else working on it? And if so, like kind of in some sense, if there's already someone great working on it or you can find someone great working on it, like get them to do it. Like it's sort of, I don't know. Or go help them or whatever. Go help them. Yeah, exactly. It's sort of like oneself is last resort or something like that.

22:51Nan Ransohoff:But yeah, some combination of like, yeah, is the problem big and important? Does it light you up? Is it tractable? And, you know, the neglectedness piece of it. I kind of sneaky think that most people don't even get to the second two because they're it's. I think we can all pay more attention to the kinds of problems that pay more attention to like. So defining more in a more normative way, like our vision for the world and like, what do we want to see the world look like? And that can be in so many different domains. But I think that exercise that we are very quick to be able to critique the world.

23:31Nan Ransohoff:And it is harder to establish a vision or to ask a question that is sort of like, what is the way that you want the world to be? What is what do you want to be true?

23:38Charlie Petty:Yes, yes. There's an interesting, I've talked about this with a few runs. There's a lot of people with very specific negative orientations in the world, specific and pessimistic. And there's a lot of people who are vague and optimistic, but the part of that matrix that's rare is optimistic and specific.

23:54Nan Ransohoff:Totally. I think that's a really, I think that's a really important point. And I think that specificity is like what makes it believable that something can be solved.

24:05Charlie Petty:yes and it certainly makes it much easier for someone to join you which is one of the things that the startup world has gotten really good at is like how do we engineer the gravity and interest you have a great speaking of vision you have a great older post on like which moral virtue is in short supply and you're talking about vision either what makes for really compelling visions and or if that's not the right question like who's good at this

24:34Nan Ransohoff:I think we can all be better at it. I think that is like my honest take.

24:38Charlie Petty:Or how does one get better at this? Vision can, in my opinion, can exist at, you know, it sounds like this big, bold thing,

24:46Nan Ransohoff:but, and it is, but I think it can exist at the level of like the world. It can exist at the level of a family. It can exist at the level of a self. Like what, imagining what oneself looks like in 10 years, imagining what one wants their relationship with another person they care about to look like in 10 years. Imagining what one wants carbon removal to look like in 10 years or the city of San Francisco. I mean, I think there's a lot of ways to scope that, but we can practice on maybe like, I think practice at the level that you feel most comfortable with is maybe a way to think about it is, I was sort of thinking about this in the context of like, we were asking ourselves at the lunch table on the climate team, you know, a couple months ago, like, how would you spend, if you had like a billion dollars to spend unrestricted on good things for the world, what would you do?

25:38Nan Ransohoff:And I think that kind of prompt, like, reveals a lot of not knowing in all of us of like, how would I spend that? Like, what are the things that I care about? And how would I allocate capital towards those things? Or practicing it on the level of San Francisco, like, or the city that you live in, sort of like, I love this city. Okay. What would I want it to look like in 10 years? Okay. Well, what does good look like to me? How would I sort of reason through that? And maybe it's talking through it with your friends, but, um, lots of ways to skin the cat. But I think those prompts for me are like really expansive and force a lot of questions around like both the values that would drive the end vision.

26:18Nan Ransohoff:And then also like tactically and specifically to your point what are the levers that you can pull and like things you can do together i don't know does that resonate at all yes you you had some prompt

26:30Charlie Petty:somewhere where it was like what would you do if you were mayor of san francisco yeah and it's you also are somewhere else that like most politicians actually don't have a vision like we don't really exercise this muscle yeah well why do you why is that like why aren't we

26:44Nan Ransohoff:is like citizens demanding this of like the fact that we're electing people in any I mean not to say nobody has vision but I'm just like if one asked me if somebody asked me to like clearly articulate like what was the vision for the last ex-presidents about where they wanted America to be at the end of their term I couldn't do it and and I'm that this is not the area that I'm most educated in so maybe other people could do it but like don't we think that the average citizen should be able to repeat that back. Yeah, why is vision in short supply? I don't really know.

27:20Charlie Petty:It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend that I then talked about on an earlier podcast this year, which is she had asked me, what do you really want? And I couldn't answer.

27:32Nan Ransohoff:And there was an element of it. How do you define that?

27:34Charlie Petty:Well, one of the mental images that we had, in one of the conversations was like, it's sort of like when a kid really wants ice cream.

27:41Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

27:42Charlie Petty:this sort of like you can feel it in your body you're bouncing you're bounding down the street and so i almost wonder if part of this is like in adulthood society definitely trains you to critique and it doesn't really train you to be like that thing is over there and i'm gonna go get it yes which is a sort of silly version of the agency thing and i almost wonder if there's some aspect of that that is this which is like to your point being able to even say and maybe it takes some silly prompt like yeah here's a billion dollars or i it's it's funny this makes me think um there's the classic question which is like what would you do if you had a billion dollars and i think it's jeremy guffon or davidson or one of the two has this inversion of that prompt which is what would you not stop doing for a billion dollars if i offered you a billion dollars to stop doing everything you do what would you not do it's easier for people to answer that which almost is pointing at like some of the and and so i think i almost wonder like were you someone who are you someone either growing up or now like were you someone who like does annual planning or like such annual goals or like any of these types of things I do a version of that now but it's not like an OKR thing it's more like it's like squishier than that I guess but yeah I do sort

28:54Nan Ransohoff:of I do now try to force myself to like think like what do I want to be true by the end of the year for myself and like last year I had a section on like there's like a few projects and like more specific things I wanted to do. And then some of them were kind of like vibes

29:10Charlie Petty:or more like character development kind of things.

29:15Nan Ransohoff:But I do think that just articulating that is helpful. That is some version of manifesting or something is just being able to like, you know, athletes do this all the time, right? That is like they're sort of picturing themselves in the sort of winning state and they're picturing like Michael Phelps. He's picturing himself, all the things that could go wrong. His goggles, you know, get water in them. He's still swimming. His suit rips, he's still swimming. He's sort of going through all these scenarios so that when the situation, he's never surprised. And I'm sort of, there's like, there's something to the visualizing of a future scenario that makes it more likely to happen.

29:57Charlie Petty:Michael Phelps has the advantage though, and maybe this goes to your example, in your work life you have very specific, some aspects of it are complex, but there's aspects of it that can be a finish line. And that's what Michael Phelps has. Whereas maybe like emotional goals for your life or your relationships are hazier. And so I almost wonder if part, there was, you mentioned Anastasia.

30:18Nan Ransohoff:Anastasia, yeah.

30:19Charlie Petty:Anastasia. One of the points she makes in at least one of the posts I read of hers is the importance of a finish line. and it feels like that is also very critical to the gming thing broadly it's like somewhere you

30:31Nan Ransohoff:say like it's not like a slice of the problem it's the thing it's the outcome and so maybe the

30:36Charlie Petty:challenge is like when we don't when like sports has an easy finish line i i always give this example last year i had two very not very big goals i had two goals which is one was to do 21 episodes of this podcast before i could quit before halfway through the year and the other was

30:49Nan Ransohoff:run the new york marathon okay and like yeah those are very clear clear finish line were way better

30:53Charlie Petty:for me than like, I want to run more, any of these hazier things. What, um, when it comes to like, maybe it's worth using either the frontier example or the new respiratory example, like carbon removable of all the things that can have like an impossibly large finish line. It's probably, uh, it's among the biggest, um, maybe like making sure the AIs don't kill us. Um, when it comes to a problem like that, a respiratory illness, presumably you have some big finish line in the future, which is the taraton of carbon removed, are you then like breaking off little other finish lines? And if so, like, how does that work?

31:32Charlie Petty:Like, what makes a good finish line?

31:33Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. I mean, so we, you know, talk about planning, but basically we have, you know, for Frontier, which we started in 2022, we have this sort of like end goal, like you said, in 150 years, we need to do a trillion tons of carbon removal, roughly in 150 years. And then you say, okay, well, how much money is going to be needed to do that. Okay. It's between this and this much. And then you kind of work backwards. So you don't, I don't think one needs the specifics of the whole plan, but very, very tactically we have the kind of end goal. Then we have, when we started a vision for where we wanted the field to be in 2030.

32:07Nan Ransohoff:So we wrote a set of statements of what do we want to be true?

32:10Charlie Petty:That was almost the real finish line. Like, yes, the other, the other one, but that a hundred years, like, yeah, I mean, maybe

32:15Nan Ransohoff:it'll be a lot, but yeah, it was sort of, what do we want to be true in 2030? That was the kind of vision, then we have a strategy, which is our best guess at any given point in time of like how we think we are going to get there or what we're going to do versus letting other people in the field do things. That breaks down into an annual plan. So we do annual OKR planning. And when the world changes, we will change the plan. Then that translates into what we call ships. And then that translates into a weekly plan. So like it's very concrete and tactical of like just reasoning backwards from the outcome.

32:48Nan Ransohoff:And then the world changes and it gives you new information and your plan changes. And that's okay. That should change. That is fine. But like, if you don't have a plan, it's pretty unlikely you're going to do it.

32:58Charlie Petty:How did you, very broad strokes, how did you arrive from like, you joined Stripe in 2020?

33:04Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

33:05Charlie Petty:From 2020 to 2022, that vision and plan. Like at some point, because presumably there's a mix of like what is actually the right finish line and goal what is the right way to we haven't even talked about like advanced market commitments and all the sort of structural things again to maybe go back to the original point which is like everything is downstream of problem solve but like how does that i think part of the reason this is so hard is like we have a lot of templates of what this kind of looks like in a company building and this feels like going from it i mean yes it's amazing you did it and you could you've published a lot of this so people could go back, but like compressing that, you could see how someone would bounce off it.

33:45Nan Ransohoff:I don't think it, I guess I, I don't think it's that different from the company planning piece. Like I think maybe it's different from, you know, for a mature company that has a, or like a growth stage startup, there are, they, they have, you know, most companies have well-run companies have like a vision of where they are the things that they want to be true where they want to be in x years yeah and the okr planning process or whatever planning process one decides to use is a way to take that sort of end goal and work backwards from that maybe this is where i'm getting hung up actually which is in this case and granted you were doing it from a very strong foundation in your case which was stripe yeah um so we made it in that way it wasn't like a startup

34:35Charlie Petty:But in other ways, it's actually a lot more like going zero to one. You have to do both. Yeah, you do. The best comp would be like Elon's Tesla master plan or the SpaceX master plan, which is like you have to go zero to one a whole bunch of different times and do all the like OKR level strategic planning that a mature company would do. And so that's why it feels so big.

34:55Nan Ransohoff:That's fair. I think that's fair.

34:57Charlie Petty:And you're just like, well, be more ambitious.

34:59Nan Ransohoff:Well, I mean, I just like, I think that more, I don't think it's rocket science. I just don't. Like, I think that, like.

35:08Charlie Petty:How hard was it to become an expert in this if you presumably talk to all the experts in three weeks? Because maybe that's another part of this, which is like, oh, like, I'm learning about climate in 2018. Like, it would take me five years to even get up to speed.

35:21Nan Ransohoff:You don't have to learn the whole thing. Like, I think it's like you're scoping the thing that you are learning. And for me, a very motivating thing. And to be clear, there were other people working in the field. There was, you know, this is not just me by any stretch. But part of a really motivating thing is like, who else is going to do it? And that is a real kick in the field.

35:41Charlie Petty:It's specifically this slice of it.

35:42Nan Ransohoff:This slice of it. Yeah. How early was the, and maybe this is an opportunity to go a little more specific.

35:48Charlie Petty:Another frame of sort of what you do is like, maybe not everything you do, but part of what you do is like identifying areas where market for you. or market demand would be really valuable, but there isn't any yet, or there isn't enough of it yet. And so in that sense, it was maybe a vertical, a specific kind of cut on the climate problem, which is like, I'm not going to solve all the climate, but there's a specific opportunity or the specific wedge. What did it look like to arrive on that? And why is this sort of like orientation around what an advanced market commitment, like, how did that become this sort of like elegant blade or tool in this problem?

36:24Nan Ransohoff:The short answer is that I think it's just to the point of what's the end goal that we're working on and how do we reason our way back from it? That is the compressed version of it. The longer version of it is, okay, so with carbon removal, it is the canonical public good. You're sucking CO2 out of the air. You're storing it somewhere. Nobody wants to pay for that because the customer doesn't get a benefit from it. And when you have no market of customers, you have very few companies that want to build anything because who they're going to sell their product to. You've got very few investors because who they're going to invest in.

37:00Nan Ransohoff:So then you say, okay, well, who's responsible for selling public goods? Well, it should be governments. But I'm not a policymaker. So I was like, I probably can't do anything there. In the end, it's going to be really important, but that's not where my skill set is.

37:13Charlie Petty:You weren't a public goods philanthropist. I was working and self-driving at the time.

37:19Nan Ransohoff:I see. Yes.

37:20Charlie Petty:So there was enough similarity. It felt you shaped enough.

37:24Nan Ransohoff:Well, the policy did not feel me shaped. The thing I was trying to reason through was you read this, you know, you read the IPCC report and you're like, okay, we're going to need like gigatons and eventually a tarot ton of carbon removal. Who's going to do that? Okay. Well, why doesn't it exist? Well, who's going to pay for it? There's nobody to pay for it. Can we get governments to pay for it? Okay. I can't because I don't know how to do that. So who's the next best thing? Well, it's individuals or companies that have disposable income. Who has disposable income? Well, SaaS businesses have pretty good margin.

37:54Nan Ransohoff:And at the time, Stripe had published this blog post, Buy Carbon Rule for a million dollars. And my friend - How much? A million dollars. Very small.

38:04Charlie Petty:A thread.

38:05Nan Ransohoff:A thread. And the theory of change around that was the right theory of change. Christian Anderson, who started Watershed, wrote this post at the time. And my friend Clay at Lower Carbon was like, okay, like watching me go down the rabbit hole. And he was like, you should talk to these guys.

38:21Nan Ransohoff:And the interesting thing about, you know, Stripe was, yes, a million dollars is a good start. But Stripe has millions of businesses all over the world that are high margin SaaS businesses. So the distribution is there. And if you can convince them to give a small fraction of their revenue to carbon removal, you can potentially aggregate a lot more and use that to buy even more carbon removal down the cost curve. So that was like a, that was my like logic through.

38:46Charlie Petty:You're squinting and seeing the flywheel. Totally, totally.

38:48Nan Ransohoff:It was through the lens of that problem that I was like, okay, this is like a really, this is the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of interesting stuff here. When I joined Stripe, I did not know what an advanced market commitment was. That was not a pre, I could see the Stripe climate piece of how do we make this a product for Stripe businesses. That was the thing that got me really excited. But we did that and it went really well. We got to tens of millions of dollars. And then we all sat in a room and we're like, okay, well, what do we do next? That's nice, but we got to get this, add another zero to this.

39:16Nan Ransohoff:It's around your arm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so AMC's advanced market commitments had been, is a concept that was developed in the context of global health. And the sort of general idea is there's a thing that you want to exist. And part of the reason that it doesn't exist in the case, in the original case, it was for the pneumococcal vaccine for low and middle income countries. And we wanted pharma companies to work on this, but they didn't because who's going to pay for that? There are poor people in countries that won't have enough money to actually pay for it. And so the idea behind the AMC was to pull a bunch of money from, in this case, the Gates Foundation and a bunch of other countries to say, hey, pharma companies, if you can make a vaccine to spec, there's a billion and a half dollars waiting for you.

40:00Yeah, and it worked.

40:01Nan Ransohoff:And so I cold emailed the economists who worked on the original AMC, Michael Kramer, Rachel Glenister, Chris Snyder.

40:13Charlie Petty:There had just been one, basically?

40:15Nan Ransohoff:There had been one and a half. So that was the first one. And then there was sort of part of Operation Warp Speed that was also an AMC. And those same economists also worked on it.

40:23Charlie Petty:And that was a different shape problem in that there was obviously lots of dollars for that vaccine. but there's this risk of Pfizer develops it first.

40:33Nan Ransohoff:That's exactly right.

40:34Charlie Petty:But it's all about this sort of like playing with, it's like helping markets sort of collate on this equilibrium or something.

40:41Nan Ransohoff:No, exactly. It's fixing, it's saying, okay, we want this thing to exist. It doesn't because there is some incentive problem around the demand. And what is the intervention that will fix the incentive problem to get the suppliers or the developers to build the thing we want them to build? and everyone is exactly like you said it's a little different like the the original amc was different operation warps was different frontier is a little different and that is i think just goes to show that like you just have to study your problem and make a solution that works for your problem and if it's a like the the sort of theory and practice are very messy and that's okay because problems are messy.

41:26Nan Ransohoff:But I think that's sort of what we tried to really workshop with Frontier is like in what ways does it differ and how do we modify the core model for the problem at hand.

41:36Charlie Petty:Speaking of messiness,

41:40what does,

41:42Charlie Petty:maybe to go back to this sort of like mature company versus early stage company comparison, in a new company or a small company, the only thing that matters is focus on like a single thing. Get the product market fit and then grow it or whatever. Um, obviously Patrick Collison has a lot of different areas of focus. Um, and in, in, in some sense, your problem, especially in the early days of a, of a new effort like this is probably closer to the early start startup founder, but the set of possible things to do is closer to like mature Patrick Collison. And so I'm curious, even now, like with frontier and some of these other efforts, like what does focus mean?

42:20Charlie Petty:somewhere else you talk about like making sure all of the most promising ideas are being worked on which is like knowing the unknown unknowns or excuse me, the unknown unknowns which just feels very

42:32Nan Ransohoff:broad or something.

42:33Charlie Petty:Yeah. Like there are theoretically an unknown amount of important aspects of the climate stuff for you to be working on right now.

42:41Nan Ransohoff:Okay. Well, when we say all the most important problems I think in that context is probably in the context of carbon removal.

42:46Charlie Petty:Yeah. Yeah, let's say carbon. let's make it a little more narrow.

42:51Nan Ransohoff:So I've been working on carbon removal since 2020. And we've been working on Car Frontier since 2022. So like that is in some sense, a lot of focus. Like that it's been six years of like figuring out what this thing is and getting it off the ground. We now have an incredible team. The team is like cruising.

43:10Charlie Petty:And there's a, maybe not a playbook, but there's a coherent strategy that needs to be updated, but like it is moving. It has momentum.

43:18Nan Ransohoff:Totally. It has momentum and there are still not to sort of discount a ton of kind of open existential questions and largely on the side of getting governments involved at the scale and speed that they are needed to be involved in. But like, yeah, carbon removal is doing really well. And this woman on my team, Hannah, who basically founded Frontier, you know, we founded Frontier together. She's amazing. She's been, you know, we've been working on this for five years. She's basically running Frontier at this point. So, like, she and has been for, you know, for a little while. So, like, I think part of the reason that I can think about other things is because she's GMing it.

44:00Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. Like, she's really, really good. And as is the rest of the team. only when those things are true does one like earn the ability to think about other things and i think that that would be true for most leaders like yeah yeah you know yeah like stripe is doing you know is run amazingly well and so like that affords one the ability to like you know poke around in other in other areas but like you got to get the core thing humming first i don't know if that answers your question but um i i think i was trying to ask a slightly

44:34Charlie Petty:different question, but that is actually very helpful. I was sort of trying to say, and maybe it's worth jumping ahead, which is like part of what seems like you're good at. And you even talk about this in the new philanthropy context too, which is like one of the single highest leverage, if not the single highest leverage thing you can do with dollars and ultimately usually a relatively small amount of dollars is get the snowball rolling is the ignition piece of it. And so I was actually asking the question about like focus on the ignition piece. Like maybe it's worth using some of the respiratory stuff as an example, like, I know we're rehashing it, but again, it's like really big problem.

45:11Charlie Petty:You're sort of like surveying the, you're patrolling the waters and looking for a place to go deeper on. But again, with a company, it's sort of like find some area of product market fit and then just like pull on it for a long period of time. Whereas this, it's like, it feels like you have to have a constant awareness of other better strategies that especially in an area like maybe showing my ignorance here, but an area like respiratory illness, presumably the field is changing biotech's evolving. Like there's all these new AI like, and so it was kind of a question about like focus in that sense, which is like knowing

45:49Charlie Petty:knowing where to best allocate resources in this continuous way. It's almost like you have to be way more paranoid.

45:55Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. But again, I don't know if that is like, I'm just like pushing back. Cause I don't know if that is like that different from a company, like the payments world is changing a lot right now too with AI and agents. And it's like, you know, there's a ton of paranoia and, um, you know, this is not my, all my area of expertise, but like everybody's having to adapt in, in sort of in, in, um, in every business of like, how do I pivot my, or how do I sort of adapt my business to AI and the way the world's changing. So like I think – I don't know if that's so unique to this. I mean I think the difference – I guess like a difference maybe in some areas like carbon removal is like – and maybe this is more where you're getting at.

46:42Nan Ransohoff:Like in carbon removal, carbon removal is a specific problem in that it was kind of starting from zero. Like nobody in the world realized that this was a thing that we were going to have to do at the scale we needed to until the 2018 IPCC report came out. So you're like, okay, sorry, we have to get from zero to what? And how what? And so you're trying to figure out. And all of those people, you're like, okay, we need to think about supply and we need to think about demand. And we had to think about the markets that bring them together. And the thing that maybe feels overwhelming is the ecosystem.

47:11Charlie Petty:This is what I'm trying to get. It's structurally overwhelming. Similar, most of all of these problems that you're giving examples of, respiratory illness, some of the stuff, some of the ideas Jacob has on, like, it's just like, oh, my gosh, how do I even have a chance of starting?

47:27Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. And I think it's a great question. And I think a lot of them, in some sense, it's easier to, in my opinion, it's easier to start with a problem that has nothing because nobody's entrenched in any worldview. Like carbon removal was a little easier in that sense. In some sense, like the respiratory infections piece is a bit harder because you have different people who have different sort of fundamental beliefs. Or this has been tried.

47:50Charlie Petty:Yeah, exactly.

47:51Nan Ransohoff:And like this is sort of like carte blanche. Like, you know, we see what happens. So, yeah. And I think that's actually like a really fun creative exercise of like how do you decompose the problem into its component pieces. It's like there's the supply piece and there's the demand piece and there's the ecosystem piece. And so each year we have OKRs in each of those buckets. But like I think that one can.

48:14Charlie Petty:that to me seems like the central gm um skill by the way is like the decomposition of messy

48:19Nan Ransohoff:problems it's like slicing it up yeah i think i think that's a good point like bringing and i yeah i think bringing structure to the messiness of of these problems and making them feel attractable because i think a lot of problems you know big problems you see and you're like okay yeah i'm gonna write this off because it's impossible but if you give somebody even yourself a sketch of like, just sketch it out. Yes.

48:43Charlie Petty:This goes back to our vision conversation. Yeah. It's almost like if you could have a perfectly written memo, 20-page memo on any problem in the world, like it would be way more likely to be solved.

48:55Nan Ransohoff:Totally. I think that's, yeah, I think that's, I think that's a really good, I think that's a great point. And there's a role for, I think people, I think there's probably a role for more people who are doing the sketching. Yes. And that can get the, get other, you know, the sketchers and the GMs don't have to always be the same people. So like people who know a field and see and are good at the decomposition piece and are good at sort of setting out what should the world look like and what's a rough path to get there. And maybe it's wrong, but it gives people something to react to. Right, right, right.

49:25Charlie Petty:Also, just frankly, like even in companies, amazing tacticians and strategists are often not the people with grand visions.

49:33Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, yeah. It's amazing if you can find them in the same people, but sometimes they're not. and, you know, it's okay.

49:39Charlie Petty:Is it important for people like this to, for lack of a better way of putting it, like be a mascot for it? Like increasingly you have dialed up how public you are about some of this. And frankly, some of your other work around more recently on philanthropy and GMs, like maybe a different way of asking the question, but like how important is like the legibility aspect of it?

50:05Nan Ransohoff:The legibility of which part?

50:06Charlie Petty:A problem having a, like, flag bearer who's doing – part of this is, like, the person who wrote the memo.

50:12Nan Ransohoff:Like the Lewis Bollard of, you know, ending factory farming or something like that.

50:16Charlie Petty:Yes. Are you going on enough podcasts is a silly way of asking this.

50:24Nan Ransohoff:I think that it depends on the, like – I don't mean for this to be caught by, but I think it's just sort of, like, working backwards from what is the thing you're trying to do. Yeah. And is going on podcasts and is like the comms and marketing piece a really important piece of it. I would argue in the case of like, you know, factory farming or something, getting more broad sort of like individual support and like political support for that cause is a part of the strategy. Does that matter as much in carbon removal? I don't know. Does it matter in getting more people working on interesting problems?

51:03Nan Ransohoff:Yes. The thing that motivates me to write is usually when I think there's like, yeah, there's like a thing I want to happen because of it or something like that. And I think a thing I do feel really fired up about sort of these days right now is finding really awesome people to work on, like more important for the world problems. There's so much money coming in to philanthropy in general. And I think we are really short, founder-shaped GM people to man those problems. And so I feel more urgency to make – to bring attention to that because I want more great people working on more great problems.

51:40Nan Ransohoff:But it's not from a – like I guess it's the legibility I think is downstream of the problem or something.

51:51Charlie Petty:I guess part of the thinking behind my question is like Silicon Valley is quite good at – take someone like Marc Andreessen.

51:58Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

51:58Charlie Petty:One of Mark's centrally, singularly great skills, maybe not singularly, but rare and important is his ability to create a meme around a thing. Software's eating the world, American dynamism, whatever. And you can make a pretty strong case that Mark's often not first to these things. Founders Fund was investing in whatever. But he's good at creating this gravity engine around it. Even something like the term GM, which obviously you didn't make up, but in a little corner of the world has a little more buzz. And so like my sense is there's something, one of the reasons, one of the main reasons we don't have more people working on these things is because there are less legible, famous examples of people who are doing this in an awesome way.

52:42Charlie Petty:And that like, if you could point to, if you, the average 25 year old in Silicon Valley can name 10 founders. So they want to be like.

52:50Nan Ransohoff:Right. But they're not like, oh my gosh, Henderson eradicated smallpox and I want to be just like him. Yes, for sure.

52:55Charlie Petty:Did you feel like you had to lower your ambition to work on public goods?

53:01Nan Ransohoff:I think when I joined Stripe to work on climate initially, my friends were like, excuse. They were sort of like, what's going on? Yeah. But I think that I, and mostly just because like I was doing, you know, I was working self-driving and I was doing product stuff. And I think it's a I personally think it's a it's an increased ambition because I think you are taking on more consequential, like in some cases, more consequential problems. And they're harder.

53:38Charlie Petty:Yeah. Yeah.

53:40Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

53:41Charlie Petty:No, my implication was not that it's less ambitious.

53:48Charlie Petty:but paradoxically, like there is something about it that's like, if it works, it's way more ambitious. Yeah. Or if you make a real dent on it, but otherwise, like that's true in startups. Lots of people fail in startups. It's true. Hmm. Like,

54:01Nan Ransohoff:I think we, we sort of take like, um, we love a good power law applied to startups, but we don't do it for philanthropy.

54:08Charlie Petty:Like almost cause we don't believe it.

54:09Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

54:10Charlie Petty:I think, I mean, really at the root of it, I think it's probably like, what are you going to do? Like extract a territory,

54:16Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. Good luck to you.

54:18Charlie Petty:Yeah.

54:19Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, I think it's sort of this odd discontinuity or something. Like we are very comfortable with hits businesses, like with sort of a hits based approach in VC in the private sector. But we don't take that approach in the philanthropic sector. And as a result, we probably don't get the kind of outcomes that we want to get. You wrote a great piece on modeling kind of a third wave of philanthropy.

54:42Charlie Petty:be. And really, I think, so compelling about it is you borrow from Silicon Valley, you have this kind of triad of in the startup sense, LPs and VCs and founders, and in your sense, funders, allocators and builders.

54:56Nan Ransohoff:You, our conversation was really helpful, actually, in helping me sort of like, piece that together. So I'm very appreciative of that.

55:01Charlie Petty:I'm glad. Yeah. In some sense, you're sort of trying to pull all of those forward. and it's like a little bit of a three body problem or like a three part chicken and egg problem. Maybe the first question would be like, does the GM frame apply to all three of those roles? I think probably. You are kind of two of the three of them, if I understand correctly, which is you are both an allocator capital and a builder. Is that right? Or do you think you're closer to just an allocator?

55:39Nan Ransohoff:I think that we are yeah I think that GM GM's sort of a mindset I think it's I think it's I think it is a mindset I think like you know we are we we kind of straddle I think we are technically in the role of the capital allocator if you had to put us in one at Frontier that is where it would be but I I think we do wear lots of different hats. Like we are spending a lot of time trying to get more capital by talking, you know, by working on the policy pieces to get more policy-driven demand. We're working a ton. If we find really promising carbon removal areas that we don't see worked on, we're trying to get them going ourselves.

56:24Nan Ransohoff:So I think our primary role is that of a sort of customer in the form of a capital allocator.

56:31Charlie Petty:It's a lot like the most ambitious VC firms, though. They're going to incubate companies. Mark Andreessen is spending all of his time fundraising all across the world to figure out how you can have a$20 billion fund versus a tent, whatever. Maybe to ask an obvious question, but what are the builders in the – what is the typical builder in the frontier context?

56:52Nan Ransohoff:Companies working on carbon removal companies. So that's a direct-to-air capture company. That's a surfacial mineralization company, an enhanced weathering company. There's lots of different pathways. And so it would be a company saying, you know, we have an approach that we think can be really big and really cheap. We sell carbon removal. Who's going to buy it?

57:09Charlie Petty:These are primarily companies, though, not nonprofits.

57:11Nan Ransohoff:They're companies. Yeah.

57:13Charlie Petty:And is that – do you think that's – like most of these types of problems are more likely to shape that way? Is that something due to the kind of market shape of carbon removal? Is that because of the advanced market commitment aspect of it? Like if you were to try to generalize to the broader kind of like new philanthropy orientation, presumably most of the things OpenAI Foundation aren't going to be funding aren't going to be companies.

57:37Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, I don't feel – I feel it's so area specific, so I don't know what the –

57:42Charlie Petty:Maybe a better question would be like why is – why do you – like structurally, why are most of these people working on the climate stuff, carbon removal stuff, companies?

57:53Nan Ransohoff:Well, you know, they're like, it's kind of like in sanitation. Like you need people to, you know, take out the, like pick up the garbage for your city. But like those are companies that you pay to do a service. And this is sort of like we need a lot of sanitation companies, but for the air is sort of one way to think about it for carbon removal. But that is a, there's like a supply and demand element of this in carbon removal that may or may not be the case for other problems.

58:19Charlie Petty:problems. So if it can be a company, it probably should be a company.

58:22Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, I think so. I think that's the right way to think about it. And the only way that there can be companies is if somebody is buying their product. So that was the market sort of mechanism that we were sort of fixated on. But I think that every, it's not that generalizable. Like if you're working on, you know, biosecurity or AI safety, is it a supply and demand problem or is it a policy regulatory thing? Is it a sort of evals thing? I don't like, it's so specific to that problem. I don't think that it's that useful to generalize.

58:55Charlie Petty:And there's probably an element too of like, the thing you're trying to do is actually very clearly targetable and measurable, I think, in carbon renewable. Like, we know exactly what we're talking about. Maybe not quite exactly versus something, um, more ambiguous, something more philanthropic. That's like, we want to increase the beauty of cities. I mean, that's an extreme example, but yeah,

59:22Nan Ransohoff:I think, I think that this is one of the things that we're going to collectively struggle with, with this round of the sort of third wave of philanthropy. So part of the way I was thinking about it was like the first wave of philanthropy was the Carnegie's and the Rockefeller's. The second round of philanthropy was the sort of Gates's of the world and to some extent parts of EA, although that sort of bled into this third wave as well. But the second wave of philanthropy is very measurement oriented. It was sort of like, you know, dailies and cost benefit analysis and how do we do the thing with the highest ROI.

1:00:03Nan Ransohoff:And that has generated, you know, that's a really important tool that has generated a huge amount of good for the world. And we should, you know, we should be very grateful for that sort of skill set that we got from the second wave of philanthropy. And in my opinion, a lot of the questions that we're going to be grappling with now from a public sort of goods and moral perspective are harder to quantify. They are questions of, you know, there is a lot around AI safety and how do we navigate this transition through AGI. If we do get, you know, successfully through that. What do we want?

1:00:42Charlie Petty:What's our vision for the world?

1:00:43Nan Ransohoff:Vision for the world. What does meaning look like? What does good look like? What does beauty look like? I think these are maybe not the most urgent questions right now with, you know, at least for some of these funders. But they will become important questions and they don't lend themselves very well to cost-benefit analysis. Yes. And I think that's going to feel really uncomfortable for many of us who grew up really like – we're familiar and comfortable with those tools. But those tools are not quite the right fit. And I'm very – I think that those things – the types of things in that bucket are going to take – we're a little anemic there.

1:01:24Nan Ransohoff:I think we're going to fumble around for a while to try to figure out, like, how do we even... I think it's a jumpstart, like answering those questions in a substantive way. And my, I guess a hope that I have is that we don't just do the AI safety stuff in the next, you know, one to 10 years. We also start to give this sort of second bucket of stuff more attention because I think it's going to take us some time to kind of get our sea legs and figure out which way is up.

1:01:57Charlie Petty:is it you think it's fair to slice that as sort of like the um last round of philanthropy and probably also stuff like carbon removal to some degree or even ai safety is more about like floor raising or downside mitigation and this other bucket you're describing is much more about

1:02:15Nan Ransohoff:raising the ceiling right yeah i think that that is and granted there are probably a lot of people

1:02:20Charlie Petty:who would be like upside problems like we'll deal with those later like people are dying

1:02:26Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

1:02:27Charlie Petty:Or the earth's, like, another thought I had is, like, in some sense, the carbon removal problem, despite the fact that a lot of progress wasn't made on it, is actually more of a wave two of philanthropy type problem that it would be good at solving.

1:02:42Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, I think that's right.

1:02:43Charlie Petty:And for whatever reason, intractability or whatever, like, it wasn't, not a lot of progress was there, but we're going to increasingly have a new set of problems, which are like, what do we want life to look like? and should philanthropic dollars even be the type of way we improve them?

1:02:57Nan Ransohoff:I think that's right. And I think like how does one answer – how do we answer the question of whether philanthropic dollars are the right place to start? Well, I think it kind of comes back to the vision piece of like what do we want the world to look like here? How might we imagine what great looks like for humanity and for ourselves and for our city in some period of time, working backwards from that and saying like, okay, are these companies? Are these, you know, are these funding more writers? Are these funding more artists? Are these figuring out what is the next moral framework that is maybe not Christianity or Judaism and not EA, but a third thing?

1:03:37Like what – yeah, I think these are sort of big, squishy questions that are – yeah, are just going to take time for us to figure out.

1:03:45Nan Ransohoff:So I'm kind of eager to get cranking on some of them. in some sense will it just kind of come down to like the moral hierarchy of the rich people and the open AI foundation i think and and slash sorry to interrupt you like uh ross douthat wrote

1:04:04Charlie Petty:an interesting response to your piece and he i thought it was cool he made a strong case for like making more beautiful things in the world and yet it's also like well that's great but we still have crazy amounts of poverty in the world like presumably like i don't know some anthropic employees listening to this trying to decide where to spend their new fortune uh i i suspect it's probably pretty hard to like in earnest be like i'm going to spend it on beautiful buildings when and maybe this is too ea of a mindset or whatever it is very yeah and and there's a lot

1:04:34Nan Ransohoff:to love about that yeah um yeah i don't know the answer is is uh is is i guess the answer to that question, but I guess I just wonder if there's a little bit more room for a portfolio of approaches here and if we have to so strictly adhere to sort of like a single, I think it feels a little bit hubristic or naive to think that like everything is captured in a cost benefit analysis that we can sort of put into a spreadsheet and a lot is. So I don't want to minimize that at all. But I think it's like, I think we can all kind of feel it that something isn't quite always captured in that lens. And that's not to say we shouldn't fund all that stuff.

1:05:23Nan Ransohoff:But there's probably a bit more space for some of the squishier stuff. And whether that's 5 % or 10 % or 30 % of the portfolio funding, I don't know. And it's not my decision to make. But I'm like, what, you know, should we be a little bit more kind of experimental in thinking about that, especially and acknowledge that some of the questions are just different? Like, I guess one way to like, how would, if somebody was really set on the cost benefit piece, maybe one way to sort of like reason through that with them would be, you know, one would might believe that in sort of post AGI, we're like living in this age of abundance.

1:06:06Nan Ransohoff:And in that world, we have ticked through a lot of the things on the top of the spreadsheet, so to speak, or most of the things on the spreadsheet. But the squishier things are just going to take more time to sort of figure out. So let's use that, the time we have, you know, now to our advantage and like start to get some of that going. Like, I don't think that they, I'm not sure that those problems can absorb so much capital right now, even if we wanted them to. I've not looked at it, but that is my intuition.

1:06:34Charlie Petty:They do need some kickstarting, some snowball rolling.

1:06:36Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, exactly. So like, and that's probably not that expensive. So like, maybe we should just do those things. And then like, at least we have the option down the line to like expand them or something. There's like a time element component maybe.

1:06:50Charlie Petty:This is slightly tangential, but I think it is quite related, which is inside of this is actually like philanthropic dollar spend typically tends to be far more risk averse than capital, venture capital or other forms of investment. And one, I think there are a million reasons for that, bureaucracy, all these other things. But one reason might actually be that like, people don't want to spend their money. People don't want to be criticized for spending their money on beautiful buildings when they could have spent it on malaria nets or whatever. And so on some level, it actually is going to require like.

1:07:21Nan Ransohoff:Which is a shift, by the way, because like philanthropy used to be funding New York Public Library.

1:07:25Charlie Petty:Yeah. Yeah. So that's an interesting point, which is like there is a resistance to being divergent, to being in the same way that I'm sure, by the way, the average venture capitalist right now in 2026, if you're not funding AI, you better have a pretty good reason. And by the way, I would probably argue that you're probably more likely to find something really interesting outside of AI now. Maybe not more likely, whatever. Because everyone's looking at that.

1:07:50Nan Ransohoff:Right, right.

1:07:51Charlie Petty:So anyway, there's a— It's like the non-consensus. There's a pressure to be super consensus in philanthropy. One question—and this may be silly, but one question I kind of found myself thinking about and asking is, your setup has two scarcities, you and Patrick, basically. And that's doing a lot of extra work. But like basically the allocator or the, excuse me, the funder and the ambitious person that could probably go be working on something else or starting a company or whatever. I think it's in the GM piece. You had laid this out for part of why at least the funder dynamic is scarce. You say, in practice, this means funders who, one, back an ambitious problem and want to solve the whole thing versus a slice of it.

1:08:31Charlie Petty:Two, resource it well. Three, give their leaders genuine autonomy to do whatever is needed to solve the problem. Four, compensate these leaders competitively. And five, commit to sticking with the problem for a very long time.

1:08:43Charlie Petty:Again, the pithy question is like, which of those two roles do you think is actually more scarce in this ecosystem now? People like you or funders like Patrick? And then I think there's a lot of follow-up questions.

1:08:56Nan Ransohoff:I don't know the relative scarcity, but I think they are both really scarce. Like we have a really unique setup in the context of our public goods work at Stripe. Like, um, all of the things there are true. And like that, you know, the question I get most when people, when we're like hiring a new person on the team is just like skepticism coming in and being like, is this real? Like what is going on here? And like, um.

1:09:22Charlie Petty:Or could Patrick just get bored or distracted or get bored? Tell him. Yeah.

1:09:26Nan Ransohoff:Are you going to shut it down? Go public.

1:09:28Charlie Petty:They're like, why are you doing this?

1:09:29Nan Ransohoff:Totally. Are you going to shut it down? Um, uh, yeah. Well, will priorities change? Like it's not the core business. Like, are you sure you're not like spending all of your time jumping through bureaucratic hoops? And like, I get the skepticism because I think at most organizations that is true. And it is not the case at Stripe. So I think we've just like, yeah, Patrick and John have just created a really like, I feel really lucky because we have sort of like these perfect conditions to take on really long term projects in really sort of higher than usual risk appetite ways. And we have – I think in part because we've executed well like consistently over a long period of time have like earned the trust to continue to do that.

1:10:12Nan Ransohoff:But I think the piece – like the generalizable piece in my opinion is that this is replicable. It's not – like you can – like more companies I think could house organizations like Frontier and like this new respiratory infection initiative. And the sort of, you know, when we were starting Frontier, my instinct was to spin it out of Stripe. Because I'm like, we, you know, this is getting really big, bringing money from other companies. We shouldn't do this in Stripe. And Patrick was like, I think we should keep it in Stripe. And one of the reasons was we want to shepherd this for the long run. And the other reason was that we can pay people tech salaries while working on this.

1:10:58Nan Ransohoff:And so we're going to be able to attract better people. And I think that like those are very non-consensus things to like approaches to philanthropy. And they really make a difference. Like those are kind of I think sneaky advantages that we have. And I think those are replicable by other companies. So, like, those are in theory things that, like, I think leaders at other organizations could decide to do. They could decide to say, like, we also want to take on really big problems. We're going to pay people who work on these public goods like other people at our company. And we are going to protect them from sort of any, you know, having to – they are different from the core companies.

1:11:40So we're going to protect them from processes that don't apply to them.

1:11:46Nan Ransohoff:and we are going to pay them reasonably well. And I think that's like a sneaky, huge arbitrage for companies.

1:11:51Charlie Petty:Two thoughts. One is, I think it's telling that Patrick's done this in different forms, which is all of this is a part of Stripe. ARC's a separate thing. He's doing this stuff with Tyler, whatever. Which is another nice example of sort of like downstream of the problem, figure out whatever. Why, and I don't want you to speak for him or whatever, but like, I understand the point you're making when you say it's replicable. On the other hand, it's like this happens because out of the goodness of their heart, more or less. Like, I think is there a real business case for this stuff?

1:12:26Nan Ransohoff:In the really long run, we are interested in economic growth and climate change is a threat to that. People getting sick from common respiratory infections is also a threat to that, like probably half percent to a percent of GDP every single year. So like that is not trivial. but that's a really over the really long term that is true so I in the short term these are revenue destructive these are not we spend a lot of money on carbon removal that we do not recoup maybe it's brand

1:13:00Charlie Petty:it improves Stripe's brand

1:13:02Nan Ransohoff:you know I I've never been asked that that has never come up in a conversation I just like don't but I think you're right that like these like hyper smart conscientious wanting to sort of like souls oriented in a good direction. Those are hard to find people.

1:13:27Charlie Petty:To go back to the scarcity question. Do you think that there's any world where you could be doing something like this somewhere else?

1:13:33Nan Ransohoff:I think that the tectonic plates are shifting right now a lot in philanthropy. And so I hope the answer to that question, whether it's for me specifically or just in general—

1:13:42Charlie Petty:Yeah, I'm asking for NAND's 2 through 100.

1:13:45Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, I think that there—I hope there are, and I think that there definitely could be. Like, we have—when we think about how philanthropy is changing, one of the sort of—one of the reasons for the sort of the change is that there's a lot of money coming in from OpenAI, by the OpenAI Foundation, from Anthropic founders who have pledged to give a huge amount of their money the way, and Anthropic employees who have, yeah, taken advantage of this, like, really epic employee matching program that the founders put in place. There's also lots of other money from people who are sort of, like, second-order benefit from that.

1:14:19Nan Ransohoff:Maybe SpaceX folks end up being sort of philanthropically minded. But the point is that, like, there's a lot of money coming, new philanthropic money coming into the space. And the types of funders who are behind the money grew up in Silicon Valley. They grew up kind of like, their orientation is like, we want really smart, fast, nimble hustlers to own a problem and deliver results. And that has the potential, the combination of the funding and their orientation around the talent and the fact that the problems that they're worried about are very time sensitive. Their worldview, by the way.

1:14:54Charlie Petty:It's actually not software people as much, it's AI people, which is almost a different genealogy there.

1:14:59Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. Exactly. And like the worldview of that type of person is like, OK, we have to move fast. And so all of those things, I think, have the potential to come together to like.

1:15:14Nan Ransohoff:Embolden and fund and and catalyze this whole new wave of. Philanthropic Patrick less scarce. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

1:15:24Charlie Petty:In that piece, you basically, to put some numbers on it, you say, I think your conservative estimates, like almost$40 billion a year of new philanthropic dollars that are going to come in. I think the total number now is about 600 a year.

1:15:36Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. 600, yeah, 600 a year in the US.

1:15:42Charlie Petty:You have all these great, let's like, whatever, 5 ,000 IFPs and however many ARK institutes and so on. Like, realistically, there's just no way that we're going to have enough things to fund. Um, like that. Yes. So what do you actually think is going to, I mean, part of this is the reason you wrote the post, but like, what do you actually think is going to happen over the next two years? Let's say.

1:16:05Nan Ransohoff:Well, I think that like without significant intervention, I don't know.

1:16:10Charlie Petty:Yeah.

1:16:10Nan Ransohoff:I think the thing that money just won't get spent. Yeah. I think the default is that like, yeah, the funding doesn't materializes, but doesn't actually go anywhere because funders are like, I'm not finding these like amazing projects that I want to put the money towards. But part of that is in our control to fix it. So like what I hope happens is that we can sort of see this tidal wave of funding coming down the pike and we figure out how do we better characterize the problems that these funders want to fund and that we sort of the world, quote unquote, should solve. What is the pipeline of talent from, you know, people working as a tech PM that maybe they want to get into a different type of thing or they're sort of attracted to these like hyper ambitious kind of public goods, good for the world shape problems and now have a path to actually being able to work on them unencumbered.

1:17:04Charlie Petty:But it's you're sort of like speed running saying like it's like the cultural aspects of this are like venture capital in the 1980s and we're about to have the funding level of the 2010s and like.

1:17:15Nan Ransohoff:It's going to happen fast. Yeah. Well, OK, I think it will happen fast, but also like it's going to take the funders time to like build the muscle to spend the money. Like it's a lot of money to move. So it's not going to ramp up immediately. That's going to take time. And I think there need to be capital allocators to, like, help facilitate the deployment of capital. That's, like, a whole shape of founder that needs to exist in addition to the builders. But I think the thing to take away here is that, like, there's a lot of money that is going to be pointed at really interesting and important problems for the world.

1:17:52Nan Ransohoff:And the thing that is going to be needed is really talented, amazing people to GM the problem and to figure out the path forward. And I think that the job – what funders I hope do is like give these founders the space and the breathing room and the like non-administrative like –

1:18:12Charlie Petty:This is the quote I read about Patrick, right?

1:18:13Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, like I think like if the thing that I am like most would be most anxious about in any of these cases is like I don't want to work in an environment where like I'm going to be hamstrung by having to like produce random reports all the time.

1:18:29Charlie Petty:Right, right.

1:18:29Nan Ransohoff:Like that is the most like I would take a crazy pay cut to not have to deal with that.

1:18:34Charlie Petty:Ambitious people love autonomy.

1:18:35Nan Ransohoff:That's on the funders to figure out how do I like make sure because that's the pull is always in that direction. So, like, how do – as funders, we are sort of self-aware of saying, like, okay, I'm going to push back against that, like –

1:18:47Charlie Petty:That and also I'm going to fund the weird stuff. And I'm going to fund the weird stuff.

1:18:51Nan Ransohoff:I think there's going to be natural interest in funding the weird stuff from this set of funders.

1:18:55Charlie Petty:Because of the type, yeah.

1:18:56Nan Ransohoff:They like the weird stuff. You know, anthropical IPO, I don't know, in a year or something like that or maybe later this year and then there's a lockup period and blah, blah, blah. So maybe funding becomes available in the year. it's going to take you know if i decide today that i find a problem that i want to work on i have to quit my job i do learn about that problem i have to ramp up that problem i have to figure out what is my strategy to find funding for that i have to find a team for that i have to figure out how to work with my team like that's going to take a year to like build up some basic capacity we got to start that now like the time to get going on that is now so that in the next couple of years there is.

1:19:35Charlie Petty:Well, and the exciting part maybe is if you're the entrepreneurial person is like the funding is in a way that it hasn't really been before going to be there. And it's very, very, not low hanging fruit. That's probably like a little bit of a silly way of putting it, but much more like it is kind of like the grants are out there. It's like yours for the taking. Maybe it's just a few miscellaneous questions on this stuff. Like back to the snowball idea, like usually actually the highest leverage thing is spend a small amount of money on getting something rolling, when does the size of the amount of funding really matter?

1:20:05Charlie Petty:And like, presumably one other way this could be shaped is like, we're talking orders of magnitude, billions of dollars being given away, possibly to individuals, like who knows, or at least hundreds of millions, like maybe it's the coefficient giving thing, it's really small or whatever. When does a large amount of capital really, even for something like what you do? Like, when does it really move the needle? Presumably something like Frontier is a dramatically different orientation than the$10 million Stripe was giving away. But is it about a proof point? Is it about a repeatable kind of funding mechanism?

1:20:42Nan Ransohoff:I think it's too problem specific to like answer that. Like, but I think the generalizable thing is like, in most cases, a new problem isn't going to be able to absorb like$10 billion right off the bat. So like, Right, right, right. You can't eat.

1:20:56Charlie Petty:It's another reason you have to get started sooner.

1:20:58Nan Ransohoff:Exactly. Got it. Exactly.

1:21:01Charlie Petty:Any sense on the types of problems that are better served funded by private philanthropy versus government?

1:21:08Nan Ransohoff:That's a question I feel that I need to have a better answer for for myself. I don't know. Like, in some sense, I do feel that carbon removal should never have been private sector driven. I think that that is like a little insane. But you go to war with the army, you have. And I guess like in theory, not all philanthropy is sort of like in the general, there's like a scalability, like how broadly might it serve the public's interest? Maybe philanthropy is sort of better positioned for like more, I don't know, like specific or like hyper local things or something like that in a way that like governments are.

1:21:50Nan Ransohoff:But I don't know. Do you have an answer to that question? Well, I guess that some political view response to this would be like, these people shouldn't even be as rich and like, should be taxed way more and more.

1:22:03Charlie Petty:Like the government's job is to do philanthropy. The private sector shouldn't even be doing it. I think a very strong counterexample would be something like Frontier, which is like, turns out the government doesn't always solve the problems we have. I'm sure there are people who think that the Open AI Foundation should be deployed by the government.

1:22:21Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. I think that is not the case. Like, I think it's like, okay, that might be true. And I am not one to speak about kind of what is the fate of these AI companies in the long run. But I...

1:22:44Charlie Petty:Yeah, the more interesting question, to be clear, I think is about the types of... the government is good at funding certain types of things and it's not as good. And part of it is just whatever the, maybe the answer is actually as simple as just like, what are the areas that the government is not funding enough? Like go nuts. Um, but that's different.

1:23:04Nan Ransohoff:I feel like there's a difference in the question of like, what should the government be funding? And like, what does the government fund? And I think that like, in reality, a lot of the philanthropy that we're seeing is like going to fund gaps that the government is not doing. Now, I think that like, Like, in theory, the government, like, both philanthropy and governments are, in theory, interested in the interest of the public. They're interested in sort of, like, how do we better serve people and the world? So, like, in principle, they should maybe be interested in very similar things. Now, maybe there are differences because individuals might have different worldviews of what does serve the public.

1:23:43Nan Ransohoff:And so, like, the government has one worldview. And so a philanthropist might think, well, I don't agree with that. And so I want to do this other thing. And I value this a lot. And the government doesn't. But they're both broadly aligned towards serving the public. I think another thing that maybe a way that they differ is that philanthropies are smaller than the government. So like what are – there are probably things that the government can fund that like individual philanthropists can ever do. Now, OpenAI Foundation has a lot of money.

1:24:12Charlie Petty:So like you're not – Right. Right. This is the tension, I think.

1:24:16Nan Ransohoff:Now you're kind of getting, like, because some of these, some of the dollars, depending on where, you know, AI company valuations go, could get really, really big. I think that there is this question of, like, I don't know, maybe they could start funding things at the size that governments fund.

1:24:33Charlie Petty:If Antropoc gets to a certain size, should they be doing the UBI?

1:24:36Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, UBI is, yeah, I don't know how to think about that piece.

1:24:40Charlie Petty:But it is that kind of like at some point you get to a level of scale or healthcare or whatever it might be.

1:24:46Nan Ransohoff:And I think that like, you know, this really like the sort of worldview and orientation and like the character and morality of these funders and organizations because of the potential scale here and because of how concentrated it is like end up mattering quite a lot.

1:25:05Charlie Petty:Do you think we'll ever get the level of ambition required? if there isn't a clear path for quote-unquote philanthropic founders to get anywhere near as rich as non-philanthropic founders?

1:25:19Nan Ransohoff:I think that's a really good question.

1:25:27Nan Ransohoff:Conceptually, I think it is sort of silly and a little crazy that we're like, okay, if you solve this amazing thing for the world, we still expect you to take a huge pay cut. Right. Like if one delivers a great outcome for the world, like we should make them rich. That's great. And I think that like that is a I don't really actually know where the whole one has to self sacrifice in so many areas to do philanthropy came from.

1:25:53Charlie Petty:I don't know if it's that. I think it's actually the inverse, which is just in companies. I mean, the reason Silicon Valley has created so much wealth, in a way that's even distinct from finance or whatever, is ownership.

1:26:03Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

1:26:03Charlie Petty:Like, Larry Page made Google, and as a result of it owned an ultimately fairly small part that's worth a ton of money. Maybe there's something like an advanced market commitment as a bounty. Like, somehow. But it's actually, it's closer to the advanced market commitment problem, which is like, there isn't enough demand. Who's paying, like.

1:26:27Nan Ransohoff:Well, you want to pay for outcomes is sort of what you're getting at. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that like, you know, you talk to some folks in AI and they're sort of like, okay, eventually like an ASI will allocate sort of, there'll be like a, you know, will allocate sort of rewards based on people's relative contributions. Or, yeah, societal contributions. And I think that like that is maybe on one end of the sort of extreme. I think another way to think about this is like, you know, companies, let's look at the typical company. A company, how do companies compensate for performance? Well, there's like a base salary, but there are oftentimes performance incentives.

1:27:07Nan Ransohoff:Like you're getting a cash bonus or you're getting, you're rated, you're sort of often like rated based on how well you've done in a given year. And some of that is outcome based, but some of it's a little squishy. But it kind of works. It's a half objective, half subjective measure. It works for companies. I'm sort of like, why can't we do the same thing for philanthropies? If the funders determine that a founder is killing it, can we pay them more? I think another interesting dynamic and a very unique dynamic about this round of – this wave of philanthropy is that the money coming in is currently sitting as equity in the most – some of the most valuable companies in the world.

1:27:55Nan Ransohoff:And so can we use that to sort of like the advantage of these problems to say like, OK, if a founder kills it, can we give them – can we pay them a performance bonus in the form of Anthropik stock?

1:28:07Charlie Petty:Yes.

1:28:08Nan Ransohoff:Like I think that's like a sneaky, cool, unusual piece. Like I – like part of me like wants to just – this is not the first time people have had a version of the like we should change performance incentives in philanthropy. So like part of me thinks this is a dead end and part of me wants to hire like a cracked out lawyer to like figure out how to do this.

1:28:27Charlie Petty:It's not that. I mean, you don't have to confirm or deny it. Presumably you have equity in Stripe. Yeah. And that is a really good incentive for someone who would. Yeah. Right.

1:28:36Nan Ransohoff:And I think there's like a version of that. Yeah. There's like a generalizable version of that now that we have the funding that's sitting in equity. And it's a lot of money.

1:28:46Charlie Petty:Huh. Yeah. Conversely, though, it probably you still have the ownership problem. it probably looks closer to like a highly competitive, high frequency trading bonus structure. Part of the challenge too is you just need more competition, which is like currently these funders don't have to pay out that much in philanthropic outcomes because the most ambitious, like, yeah.

1:29:10Nan Ransohoff:Wait, say more about the, what would you like?

1:29:12Charlie Petty:Like the reason the bonuses are so high in HFT is because there's a hell of a lot of competition.

1:29:17Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

1:29:18Charlie Petty:In this domain, there's a lot less competition. And so the best people are in less demand. And as a result, like, oh, cool, you did a good job on your nice philanthropic thing. Here's an extra 100K.

1:29:27Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, yeah.

1:29:28Charlie Petty:Again, part of this is that you're never going to get a bonus at the level of startup equity. Yeah. So it's like there is the ownership thing that maybe you solve. It's a cool area to, I mean, the other way you solve this is you just have more. Bill Gates was quite innovative in terms of how he thought about philanthropy. And you could have, we're going to have some really rich people. and they could be quite creative for how they think about. Totally. Like if somebody solves this problem, here's$100 million.

1:29:54Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that, okay. So I mean, there's like the bounty or the prize model. I think the challenge. Yeah. Yeah. With that is like, yeah. If you're going to, if it takes you like 20 years, you have to sell funds during that time.

1:30:04Charlie Petty:And also who do you create?

1:30:07Nan Ransohoff:But I, I, I, I, my instinct is that like, there is some, there's like something here around the pay piece that like, we do have to look at this right now. If we want the best people working on the most important problems for the world, we are going to have to get creative about how to compensate them. Now, I don't think we need to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here where we can borrow a lot from the private sector. We can borrow a lot about performance incentives and bonuses, et cetera. I'm not convinced we should totally reinvent the wheel.

1:30:39Charlie Petty:Yes. And yet you're currently relying on someone like Nan Rancihoff being like, I'm going to ultimately, I mean, I don't know. Ultimately, and I think your decision to pivot to Stripe was a good one. Yeah, same. In lots of ways. That was probably not that obvious back then, especially when it came to like – like you're going to have to have people take the gambit that like, one, I'm going to maybe sacrifice my total earning potential. And maybe this is going to evolve in a new way. Like these pieces are all going to have to be – It's kind of like a trust fall kind of vibe.

1:31:15Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. I mean, I think that there, but I think that is also a tractable problem in and of itself. Like imagine, like what does a sort of YC for philanthropic founders look like where there is some sort of, even if it's a small batch, you're sort of saying, okay, like for the best folks who come out of this, there's this much funding reserved for you in the flow of, you know, equity in X company or something like that, that you give people a bit more. And you don't have to fund everybody. Like YC doesn't fund everybody.

1:31:44Charlie Petty:I talked to a few people before this conversation and speaking of maybe the the pivot and transition I think you're someone who like very much inflected your life in a non-obvious way not that early like you weren't like in your early 20s. Sure. Maybe to set the tone, you were talking about the marriage question and why it was meaningful to you. And you said, but if I had to summarize the net effect of this book on me, it was a massive infusion of courage to not snap to grid by default for big life choices. in talking to other people about you. I think that there's just overwhelming sense of like someone who is like super ambitious along like a static ladder.

1:32:28Charlie Petty:And then like somehow you got off the main highway. Maybe two questions. One, what did you have to sacrifice? Or did it feel like it was actually sacrificing something? And then two, for other people out there who probably have like some semi-conscious or like partly conscious feeling of like, yeah, I'm doing pretty well. I've done the thing. You talk about this in the context of millennials really well, which is like you're chase the gold stars. Like, what advice would you give them to the people who like know that maybe there's some other path out there, but like it feels like they're too far along or whatever?

1:33:10Nan Ransohoff:Yes, I would. Yes. Yeah, I would definitely have like self-described as like a, I was like really good at playing the game. I like, you know, I was good at the gold stars. I was good at school. I like kind of did like life as I was supposed to do it. And, you know, got into good schools and got good jobs and, you know, got married and got a house. And then there was sort of a series of things that happened in my life, including a sick parent. And a sort of 15-year relationship and marriage coming to an end, and COVID that sort of like all ended up coinciding around the same time. And those sort of like some combination of like, yeah, the combination of those things shook kind of the foundation of everything, I think, in some sense for me.

1:34:15And I was like, I think there was a lot going on during that time.

1:34:21Nan Ransohoff:And it was very fear-inducing for somebody who is, you know, was very much like kind of on the path. And the sort of fear around getting off the path was incredibly overwhelming for me for many years. And I think that getting through to the other side of that and realizing that, like, my life didn't fall apart. And, you know, some things that I was really scared of, the things that I imagined that were going to be the worst things ever did not materialize. Our brains are very creative in that way. Yeah, yeah. And then realizing that like the space that I cleared, like the space that was cleared from like this sort of new phase was an opportunity for all this new stuff to grow.

1:35:13Nan Ransohoff:And for part of what we talked about earlier and like developing confidence that to like listen to my own instincts a bit more and listen to my own interests and curiosities a bit more like happened through that process. Yeah, I think that the combination of those things, while deeply painful at the time, were very important for my growth as a person. If you step off the path, nobody really cares that much. And nobody's really paying attention. And it feels better because it feels more you. Like it is sort of – I think I've up-weighted my – I've up-weighted how much I'm trying to like understand and live in accordance with my own values and self and less what I'm like supposed to be doing.

1:35:56Nan Ransohoff:But that was a real unlearning process that I think – you know, I have great parents and they did amazing. You know, they're amazing. And I think I just kind of also got got by the system that many of us get got by. But I look at people like – like there are so many people in – especially in San Francisco who I feel like have like gone their own weird, zaggy ways really early in their lives. And I feel some envy of them because I'm like, oh, I wish that I had like gotten there sooner, but like I didn't. But you could still get there.

1:36:32Charlie Petty:There's hope yet.

1:36:33Nan Ransohoff:There's hope yet. I think I was so fixed on the path that like things needed to get a little bit messy before I could like really kind of get there. But other people may not be as.

1:36:44Charlie Petty:Well, I think the hard thing is the it compounds. Yeah. Like the long the reason it's the reason most people don't ever get there is because after a certain age, you kind of just stop assuming that like.

1:36:55Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. And there's a thing.

1:36:57Charlie Petty:another maybe related part of this is just like lots of people you describe you as like um super hardcore and fun oh that's nice um uh and just like lots of dimensionality i'm sure part of it is is related to what you just said but um maybe a theme that has come up in lots of my conversation with people i admire is like managing to hold both like deep seriousness and intensity and lightness and like how i'm curious if there's anything that comes to mind for

1:37:30Nan Ransohoff:how you create that or foster that like because by the way like maybe maybe there's some feeling

1:37:37Charlie Petty:of like oh i wish i had whatever found my weirdness sooner or something but like i think part of what makes you you is also your seriousness and intensity and like maybe that part of that came from yeah that's from striving but yeah i think that's i don't know it's so hard to know what my life would have looked like had i taken to taking a different

1:37:57Nan Ransohoff:route i think i've become like less rigid and probably more fun over time in part because more fun i don't know about that but like less definitely less rigid over time and maybe more okay i took we all take myers-briggs event we're all forced to take myers-briggs at some point in our lives. And I used to be like a really strong J and I've like become like a soft P now. And I, well, and whatever, this is all kind of pseudoscience.

1:38:23Charlie Petty:One of your friends described you as the only person they know is going from Kiki to Booba in their thirties.

1:38:28Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. I think that's true.

1:38:31Charlie Petty:She's about as scientific as Myers-Briggs.

1:38:32Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. I think that's a great, that's a great summary. Um, and part of that is, was I think just the exhaustion with the kikiness of it all. Like, I think I just weren't kind of was like, this isn't that fun for me. Like, I've kind of been there, done that. And there were people that I like did encounter. So Ryan Orbach, who we worked together early days at On Stripe Climate. He was like one of, even though I lived in San Francisco for a long time, I like interestingly didn't, I was in a very different part of San Francisco. And Ryan, I think is one of those people who like, Like he's just always following his curiosity.

1:39:12Nan Ransohoff:And he's like sometimes a little disorganized, but like in a really fun way. And I think that that was a very sort of shocking to me at the time. And I was like, that is a way to be. In a very helpful way to see. And I now, you know, I think I actually have many friends that are like sort of versions of that. But it was very helpful to sort of see what that looks like and sort of permiss myself to, you know, not be as, yeah, I just kind of loosen the grip on things.

1:39:47Charlie Petty:Speaking of Ryan, he told me to ask about a lost drone exploring carbon removal projects in Iceland.

1:39:54Nan Ransohoff:Okay. Oh, yeah. We went to Iceland to look at some carbon removal projects in like 2021, maybe something like that. We were driving around. There was like a film crew we were bringing with us at the time. And Ryan, there was a drone. They wanted to like fly a drone over the car as we were driving. But like the guy who was controlling the drone lost service with the drone. And it ended up going down in this like massive field of like identical rock and moss. So you just, it was like the perfect camo conditions for a drone. so for like two hours we're like parked on the side of the road and you know and i was like let's just get a new drone but like you're in iceland so can you get a new drone on time i don't know um and so we were just like all out out you know we're all like walking around this field we did end up finding it but it was like truly so it was so random um it's a normal day on the job

1:40:48Charlie Petty:it's a normal day on the job yeah stripe climate exactly why do you think patrick and stripe care so much about funding things like this or Stripe Press or any, like, what about him? He's not unique maybe, but he's certainly unusual for his peer set.

1:41:08Nan Ransohoff:I keep going back to like their souls are pointed in a good direction. Like they want the world to be better. And I think they have pretty non-north, like expansive views of what that can mean. they're very long-termist and they have unusually high appetites for weird, risky or off the beaten path ideas. Um, and I think the combination of those traits is unusual. Um, and I think like actually a thing, you know, to the, the, the thing we were talking about earlier, They're like – they're not – I have not observed them to be like ROI obsessive in the sort of like works in progress press frontier like side of the world.

1:42:05Nan Ransohoff:They – they're not asking questions like what's the brand benefit of this and can you quantify it. They're sort of like a little bit more of this like intuition and judgment and belief of like this is like ideas for progress. Like ideas are a way that we spread good things in the world. So like we should have – we should have a – you know, how do we distribute more great ideas?

1:42:28Charlie Petty:You know. Also probably a lot of trust in the people running these things.

1:42:32Nan Ransohoff:They also have that. Yeah. I think that they care a lot about, yeah, finding great people and then working with them for like really long periods of time. and that like trust does compound over long periods of time.

1:42:44Charlie Petty:Why do you love scones? Or maybe do you love scones?

1:42:48Nan Ransohoff:The dirty little secret is that I don't actually love scones that much. Yeah, basically I was on a trip maybe like five years ago with a bunch of people including my sister and my best friend Sarah. Both of their names are Sarah. And I don't – like we were like eating a really good scone and then we came up with the name Sconeheads and then we were like, we should start a scone rating account called Sconeheads. But we just like thought the pun was funny and now five years later we're like... Still rocking. Yeah, I would say that we need a bit of a brand refresh.

1:43:23Charlie Petty:Okay.

1:43:23Nan Ransohoff:I would say we've gotten a little lazy in our day, but there's a, but you know, scone-heads.com, take a gander. See what you find on that website. It's been, I think it's like a fun project for, it's like a fun example of making stuff with friends and that has been it's just like a silly side hustle with friends it has been a real treat

1:43:45Charlie Petty:you have a great little old essay on relationship primitives speaking of making things with friends have you updated your thinking or had any more creativity on the ways that sort of one of the points you make there is that friendship I think is especially under explored category of ways that you can have unique relationships with people and the things you can do with your friends is including the lack of commitments and all these other things I think that was probably three or four years ago yeah Brie and I wrote that together oh yeah right right yeah any updates any updated thinking I mean I still think that I still think that friendship is like the kind of under is like the it kind of gets the dregs yes um right right we

1:44:39Nan Ransohoff:don't make like we make things with co-workers but we don't make them with our friends as much there's no default together time default together time i and i feel like that actually crystallized for me when i was um i uh did some work on my house a couple of years ago and i ended up moving in with some friends with two friends and their three kids now three kids was two at the time and we lived together for three months and I got, you know, I was friends with them before, but not like super close with them. And it was just like a really magical experience. How often do you get to live with friends as adults?

1:45:12Nan Ransohoff:And, you know, we're always joking, like we're meeting in the micro kitchen for a snack break or whatever. And it's just, it's a real joy. And the closeness that you get from that sort of spontaneous reaction, I think is you have that with a partner. You have that with family growing up, but like it is hard to sort of like replicate with friends. And this is why, you know, the Phil Levins of the world are like, you should live near friends and that's the whole thing. And that's really amazing if you can do it, but it's hard to sort of execute in practice. Yeah. Friends, we don't go to therapy with friends.

1:45:43Nan Ransohoff:Not that one has to go to therapy at all, but like, it's just interesting to me, the things that we unconsciously bucket into certain types of relationships. We do this activity with this type of person, but not with this type of person. Why is that? And I don't think you have to do anything with anybody, but it's more just like...

1:46:04Charlie Petty:See the boundary.

1:46:05Nan Ransohoff:Make a choice.

1:46:07Charlie Petty:You were talking about the John and Paul book that Ian Leslie wrote, and you wrote that it's deeply romantic but not sexual. What does that mean? What do you mean by romantic specifically, I guess is my question.

1:46:20Nan Ransohoff:What do I mean by romantic? It's like I can feel it, but I can't put it into words. It's like a soul conversation or like a seeing each other deeply or an appreciation for one's like being or something like that that is like more – it like feels more like holy or something than like just a friendship. I think that reading that book made me feel like we are, I'm even struggling to find the words now. And I think that that's because we're impoverished for the language to describe these different kinds of friendship.

1:47:02Charlie Petty:Do you think that's specifically because it was a creative relationship?

1:47:06Nan Ransohoff:I suspect that had a lot to do with it. Like I think that that, the sort of melding of the minds and the melding of the artistic spirit of folks, like making something with anybody is an intimate act. Right. Like, yes. And like, you know, the most intimate version, I suppose, is like the raising of the children together or something like that. But like creative projects, whether it's art or music or getting a new thing off the ground with somebody like a co-founder, Sconeheads. I love this. This is organic marketing for sconeheads. The like co-founder relationship, that is a marriage of sorts.

1:47:46And I don't think all of them trend into romantic territory.

1:47:51Nan Ransohoff:But I think that the creating of something creates some conditions for that. Yeah, does that resonate? It's funny.

1:48:02Charlie Petty:you there's something like there's um you were pointing so like there's almost like a sacred element of it yeah um i don't know if it's it feels most resonant in the creative because like uh you you hear you look at um johnny ive talk about steve jobs like the same thing there's some or you you even somewhere reference like all these creative duos um that's the part and so i i do wonder if it if it's possible without the creative part but i mean it must be because like

1:48:32Nan Ransohoff:I guess if you think about relationships or partnerships.

1:48:36Charlie Petty:It's like how many soulmates do you have? It's like that.

1:48:40Nan Ransohoff:Yes, but if you specifically think about the creativity, if romance is conditioned on sort of a creative endeavor, in what way is marriage a creative endeavor?

1:48:51Charlie Petty:I think it's a creative endeavor. I haven't been married, but...

1:48:55Nan Ransohoff:Raising kids are sort of like... But I guess it's like it can take... Maybe that can take a, the creativity and the making things can take a lot of different points.

1:49:04Charlie Petty:I think part of it is obligation. One of the things about friendship that's funny is like, there's no technical obligations at all.

1:49:12Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

1:49:12Charlie Petty:You're allowed to walk away at any time. Yeah. And that's not quite the case with the creative partnership or the marriage or with whatever. But I ask about soulmates because I've had dinner party conversations about this and like how many, I think some people would say, yeah, I have one soulmate and it's my wife or whatever. And then other people would be like, I've had seven.

1:49:31Nan Ransohoff:And like two of them were sexual or whatever.

1:49:35Charlie Petty:So there's clearly, you're pointing at something.

1:49:40Charlie Petty:A great old deep cut, the syllabi site. Do you have any requests for syllabi?

1:49:46Nan Ransohoff:You know, I've kind of deprecated that project because I think that you can create great syllabi now for yourself with the LLMs.

1:49:55Charlie Petty:I totally disagree. Okay. I care specifically that it's Devin Zwiegels' city curation. Like, I don't want a generic, like I don't want the internet's average.

1:50:08Nan Ransohoff:Right, right. You want like the tippy top.

1:50:10Charlie Petty:Or like somebody's cut on it.

1:50:16What syllabi would you like if we revived the project?

1:50:27Charlie Petty:I mean, I actually don't think it's the right answer. Like based on what I was just saying, it's like guides of cities and like very, very, like specific cuts on somebody's taste of it or the way that they experience a thing. But to the spirit of the original project is about learning. I don't know. Like this is a total cop-out, but like if I had to learn anything, finding out that somebody I was friends with knew a ton about it and was going to like -

1:50:55Nan Ransohoff:Guide you through it.

1:50:55Charlie Petty:Not even if they were going to tutor me. Like even if they were just like, here, I'll put together. It's very similar to like I'm going to Tokyo. It's like I can go look up the average like top takes or I can get a specific friends list. And maybe if I'm lucky, they might even add in a few tweaks for me.

1:51:10Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

1:51:11Charlie Petty:And so like that, I just think what a beautiful way to learn.

1:51:14Nan Ransohoff:Do you – does it matter to you that you know the person or just that you like – you respect their taste?

1:51:21Charlie Petty:I think it's more – especially if it's about learning. I actually don't think it matters quite as much than any other person. That's an extra nice thing. But I want, it's the same reason having a great professor is much more, or a great reading list. Somebody's reading list is way more interesting than like the list of the best books.

1:51:42Nan Ransohoff:Do you, how much do you think though that like the, because one of the things if you're like snapping to a person who's curating the syllabus is you are, they might have slightly different interests than yours. So like... But it's a syllabus.

1:51:56Charlie Petty:To use your definition, it's like, how should I spend the first five hours learning about this thing? Getting introduced to the topic, yeah. The goal would be that I get deeper into the pool and then I can swim for myself.

1:52:04Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, yeah.

1:52:05Charlie Petty:But like...

1:52:05Nan Ransohoff:The introduction to the topic.

1:52:07Charlie Petty:Right. And it's like, I'm in good hands here. Yeah. Like, I know that Devin's gonna, or whoever's gonna like give me a... I know I'm... It actually hilariously goes back to what we were talking about earlier in the conversation, which is like, this thing is so... Like, when you don't know anything about something, you don't know where to start.

1:52:21Nan Ransohoff:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:52:22Charlie Petty:And so it's like a helping hand that says like, you're okay here. Here's the map of the territory.

1:52:26Nan Ransohoff:Like dropping over.

1:52:27Charlie Petty:I don't want the AI version of that. And if it's AI, I want it to be a specific AI. I want it to be, maybe Claude's going to have a strong point of view. I don't know, but.

1:52:34Nan Ransohoff:Okay, so the original prompt for that, the original thing I wanted to do with syllabi before it became the current version of it was, the thinking was, there are like a category of topics that we, that are really important and consequential to how we live our lives. Friendship, partnership, conversation, squishier things like that, that we don't really study. We like, if you think about how do you learn a topic, you can like study it or you can experience it. And in academic topics, I think we probably tend to overstudy and under experience. And in life topics, we probably over experience and under study.

1:53:13Nan Ransohoff:Oh, I like this. And so what I originally wanted to do was like, okay, I want like the syllabus on friendship. I want the syllabus on like X, Y, Z. But finding a person to write that syllabus is really hard. And I couldn't crack it. So I pivoted to something easier.

1:53:28Charlie Petty:One of my favorite things I found in this prep is Art is Foreseeing Evil. So good. You read it. I read it. I read it in bed last night.

1:53:38Nan Ransohoff:Did it blow your mind?

1:53:39Charlie Petty:It blew my mind. It's really like if I could recommend it. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. And ironically, the start of that piece, she's like, I'm teaching a class on death. And this is part of the syllabus.

1:53:49Nan Ransohoff:iconic yeah i know i like would like we should just reach out to her and get her a syllabi for that stuff that would be good that would be cool oh my gosh that piece is incredible okay it's such a good piece she was actually going to like i read somewhere maybe i'm making this up but i think she was gonna like do a class on like partnership or marriage or something like that

1:54:09Charlie Petty:she's driving that in this piece okay and that was in this piece okay and i i'm like what take

1:54:13Nan Ransohoff:would be so interested. Because I think another piece about like the squishier life topics is that we have like, we look at friendship or marriage or raising kids from the lens of our geography and the time that we're growing up in. We're sort of like space and time constrained. Whereas like it might be helpful to sort of think about like how has marriage evolved over time? How has child rearing evolved over time? giving us ideas of like, oh, it wasn't always this way, or that's not the only way to do it, or in Japan they do it differently. You know, in my head, it's sort of a hack for how do you get out of the default snap to grid.

1:54:57Charlie Petty:Yes. My sense is the big reason that's not really the case is there are a set of things where it's like you don't want to trust general wisdom at all. Yeah. I don't know, aspects of science, like things are changing. And the list of things you just described, on a relative basis, you want to trust your grandma about marriage or whatever. It's not changing that much. But because of that, we sort of default to the like, yeah, you should never like fully even inspect this thing.

1:55:28Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

1:55:32Charlie Petty:And you should just learn it passively. Like you shouldn't learn it actively. Right.

1:55:36Nan Ransohoff:I think it's the passive active thing that feels odd to me. Whereas like we're so open-minded and active in other parts, in like the less emotional domains. And then in the emotional domains, we sort of like – we don't – like yeah, we don't study it in the same way. And is there something to – I read this anthology last year, a couple of years ago called Wing to Wing, Or to Or. And it's basically a syllabus. It's like an anthology that Leon Cass and his wife put together about marriage. And, you know, it's like it's it's excerpts from the Bible. It's excerpts from the Greeks. It's excerpts from Shakespeare and literature and Darwin and philosophers.

1:56:25Nan Ransohoff:And like it's a really neat it was sort of the closest thing that I ended up. It's it's that it's a tone. but it and I didn't read the whole thing but you just poke around but it was just the closest thing that I found to like a course catalog on on you know a big squishy topic like that and I'm I'm

1:56:46Charlie Petty:eager to read more of those maybe we're afraid of like how dare you claim to have some objective view on marriage so like you're not allowed to write a syllabus on it but this goes back to like I don't want the objective syllabus I want somebody's perspective totally totally totally There was this words that matter recommendation thing you did pulling from that on a few points. I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but you're talking about Ted Gioia. And he was making a point about inputs creatively primarily. My sense is you're someone who's fairly consistent. Are there any critical inputs that have been very consistent for you?

1:57:27Nan Ransohoff:I actually think this is not an area of consistency for me. And this is a muscle that I'm like actively trying to build. Yeah. So I'm going to dodge the question, which is to say I am trying to make the like input piece a better habit for myself. One of my problems is that when I get obsessed with something, I just like is really my blinders are on. Yeah. And I'm just like every incremental, you know, moment should go towards that thing. and I kind of starve other areas of my life. So I go through kind of spurts, which is like I do a lot of my reading, for example, on vacations and over breaks and in transit.

1:58:06And I would like to change that.

1:58:09Nan Ransohoff:You know, I think like that is...

1:58:12Charlie Petty:You think we can change these things about ourselves?

1:58:14Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

1:58:14Charlie Petty:You do?

1:58:15Nan Ransohoff:Yeah. I think I've gotten better at it for sure. I think it's a muscle.

1:58:19Charlie Petty:Like I wonder if I'm ever going to be someone who can do things with incredible earnest long before they're due.

1:58:25Nan Ransohoff:Okay.

1:58:26Charlie Petty:Like.

1:58:26Nan Ransohoff:I bet you could.

1:58:27Charlie Petty:I've been trying for a while. I don't know.

1:58:29Nan Ransohoff:Okay. Interesting.

1:58:30Charlie Petty:And sometimes I wonder, should I just like accept it? Lean into it. Yeah. Part of the point is, especially on inputs. It goes back to my marathon thing. Like every year I'm like, I'm going to try to run a little bit more. And like, I guess I'm, there's some aspect of running. It's autotelic. Like I like to run. And then I decided I was going to run a marathon and my level of serious amount running totally changed. And so like having a great output goal was really critical. and so like yeah I don't know I like I would love to become this idealized version of myself that has all the best inputs.

1:59:06Nan Ransohoff:Well, I feel like that, but I mean, in that example, I feel like your hack is just like you, the trick to getting you to do better inputs is just framing it as a goal or something.

1:59:16Charlie Petty:Yeah. So maybe that's, maybe that's the answer.

1:59:18Nan Ransohoff:So you need maybe more like mini marathons or something. I'm reading inputs is like almost like your practice.

1:59:25Charlie Petty:Well, yeah. Specifically, like I don't need to care about the output.

1:59:30Nan Ransohoff:I okay I mean I think that's like yes and here you gave a good example earlier you were like I'm gonna do 21 podcasts this year okay I'm gonna read for an hour a day for three weeks or something like that what's the what's the yeah there's I think there's there's maybe like you can whatever gamify the inputs or something if one must um yeah this is a romantic idea of the person who's

1:59:53Charlie Petty:just all inputs and trusting themselves and it's all intuition and i think probably it's the kind

1:59:58Nan Ransohoff:of thing though that like for me it's the kind of thing where like when the muscle has atrophied it's the startup costs yes are hard and you're like oh this is not fun but then when you trust yourself and it feels more fun again like i feel like there are periods you know and i hate to admit it but there are periods where like i'm not reading that much and like reading feels like Like, I want to check my phone. I want to, like, do other things. And then I'm like, ugh, I'm never going to get this back. But then, like, if you just force yourself to— Fake it till you make it. Fake it till you make it.

2:00:28Charlie Petty:Yeah.

2:00:29Nan Ransohoff:There's, you know, the real truth to that. A great line from one of your blog posts.

2:00:36Charlie Petty:We've all lost days to ennui. So did Mark Twain. What Mark Twain never lost was a day to YouTube shorts.

2:00:43Nan Ransohoff:I got to credit that one with Jacob Trefek.

2:00:44Charlie Petty:So, uh, GLPs for attention, um, is, is, is where that post comes from. Maybe it's kind of like the input thing, but like reading that post, I'm going to, I had talked with a bunch of people about this idea. Um, like I was epic for TikTok. Could it really work? And similarly, it's like, is it cheating?

2:01:06Nan Ransohoff:Does it matter?

2:01:08Charlie Petty:So this is the question. I don't know. I don't, I really don't know. like there are certain things where I'm like, if I have to force it, am I, am I, like, if you need Adderall to do your job, to really be focused on your job, and I don't know, maybe the wrong example in too loaded of a question, but like, one of the things that I, I'm like, I always joke, like, I don't really totally believe in willpower. Like, if you really have to grit and bear it, like, you're, you might be doing the wrong thing. And yet you, you give, I love the metaphor of like dieting. It's like, um, I, if I really just was hedonistic, I would eat candy all day and I don't eat candy all day.

2:01:47Charlie Petty:I don't drink alcohol all the time. And like, but for some reason there's some attention. It's like, and I worry about this so much. I mean, I think it's the talk about a thing that would be like, we solve all our problems and we all just like, we live in this abundant world and we sit on like algorithmic vision pros. Like, yeah.

2:02:04Nan Ransohoff:Well, what feels icky to you? Like, what is the thing that feels, do you feel that way about GLPs? themselves? Do you feel that there's like a cheating thing there?

2:02:15Charlie Petty:No, but I don't, um, I don't struggle with overeating. So it's like a little bit hard for me to know.

2:02:23Nan Ransohoff:But do you feel that way about other, when other people take them? But yeah, it's like, um, it sort of feels like I'm giving up the game to algo capitalism and

2:02:34Charlie Petty:I'm not strong enough. And like, maybe, maybe that's just like such a, um, I don't know. I don't feel that way about caffeine. But I suspect if you ask people about this, like you're going to give you a drug that just allows you to focus on whatever you want to focus on. Yeah. Maybe, maybe, maybe this is a very silly thing I'll look back on in 20 years and be like, oh my gosh, I was just playing on hard mode. Like if this existed, would you take it now?

2:02:55Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

2:02:56Charlie Petty:Okay. I guess I, I guess I, maybe I have like a thing where there's like no free lunch in the universe

2:03:03Nan Ransohoff:and, uh, and it's just all trade-offs.

2:03:05Charlie Petty:Yeah. Yeah. There's downside of caffeine and I'd take

2:03:07Nan Ransohoff:it anyway yeah okay well like i mean i i think then one would need to weigh the down like what everybody needs to weigh the downsides of glps in their context or whatever but i guess in this case like it i think for like it is the hypothetical drug that does not exist for glp ones for attention that we are discussing um uh if you if it did exist what are the do the benefits outweigh the costs. And like, if that lets you focus on the things that you want to rather than scrolling Instagram or TikTok or whatever all day and get good things done for the world and do things that are meaningful to you and it makes that easier.

2:03:48Nan Ransohoff:Like, okay, sure. It's like a Luddite style

2:03:53Charlie Petty:natural, like it's not natural. Yeah, yeah.

2:03:55Nan Ransohoff:No, I know. And I think like we all have that little little glimpses of that. And I don't, yeah, it's a good thing to interrogate like kind of where that comes from like there there is something in in struggle generally like you get something out of struggle yes there there's something that makes us it builds character and when is struggle good and when is struggle bad I don't that is what I'm grabbing yeah I think that that's an important question um but I guess in this case like in in the in for many people the this is the struggle of of like spending all of your time combating, spending all of your time trying to like not think about food.

2:04:33Nan Ransohoff:Is that really that yielding that much benefit? Like, I don't, I don't know.

2:04:37Charlie Petty:Totally. Um, what did you learn from interviewing your dad?

2:04:43Nan Ransohoff:Oh, okay. Well, so, okay. The context is that, um, I was up with my dad in our cottage in Canada one year. It was just the two of us. Um, uh, we go there every summer. I basically decided to like turn a bunch of our conversations into podcasts. So I just throw it on the phone. I would pick a couple of different topics and I would ask him questions about a certain period of his life or music, big, big classical music guy or relationships or, you know, et cetera. This is a kind of going back to the relationship primitives thing. it's like if you approached your family member the way that you would approach a work interview or a like with the same intentionality of like approaching a conversation that you would prepare for there's a lot of insight in those in those in those family members of ours and there's a lot of experiences that you don't know about because you haven't interrogated them intentionally in those ways so yes that is the thing that i walked away from is sort of being like there are like these treasure troves of cool stories and history all around us that we, I think bringing the like, borrowing a lens from the workplace and applying it to your family member, applying it to your spouse is like a, is a neat mix and match.

2:05:56Charlie Petty:Yes. There's some implicit thing, which is like, you're not supposed to like, think about it that much.

2:06:00Nan Ransohoff:Yeah.

2:06:01Charlie Petty:Or like, it's just supposed to be

2:06:02Nan Ransohoff:free flowing. Right.

2:06:03Charlie Petty:This goes back to the point you were making about the syllabus for some of these softer topics too. It's like these things you're just, yeah.

2:06:08Nan Ransohoff:Right. Like these ones are supposed to just come naturally and you're just supposed to feel them out. But like, and I think that that's fine. Also, like, that's great. Like, people should shoot the shit with their friends and that's awesome. And sometimes if you haven't seen a friend in a long time, one might throw together a quick little agenda in your head of like, I really want to understand, like, how are they doing on this thing or what's going on in this part of their lives? And again, it doesn't have to be 100 % of the time, but I I think infusing like 10 % more of that like intentionality into the relationships.

2:06:40Nan Ransohoff:It's intention. Yeah. That's what it is. It's quite interesting.

2:06:43Charlie Petty:And we don't love, this is something that's funny. It's like, it's very SF and even stronger. It's like very autistic to like say the quiet part out loud. And it's delicate and you can definitely go too far. But sometimes San Francisco can be, culturally can be kind of charming in that people will like say the quiet part out loud, see the water on the intentionality part and play with it a little bit in ways that can be really great and lovely. Again, I think there can be other times where you're like, you don't need to say this part out loud. So it's challenging. My last thing, you referenced this amazing little obituary on your grandmother, Regine Weiss-Ranzohoff, the Lives They Live Together piece.

2:07:25Charlie Petty:And it's your aunt had written it. You say, you can feel how fierce, principled, irreverent, brilliant, and witty she was, even in just a few short paragraphs. And then it makes me wonder what my hypothetical daughter would write about me. What would you hope that hypothetical daughter would write?

2:07:44Nan Ransohoff:You know, if I get an obituary that is similar to my grandmother's, I'll be a happy camper. I did an exercise actually like this when a couple of years ago, when, probably five years ago, when kind of I was trying to figure out which way it was up, was like kind of sketch out an obituary of yourself and use that as a bit of a guide to like, are you roughly headed in the right direction? I think like, I don't know exactly, but a couple of things that I hope will be in there or that I aspire towards are like doing good things for the world and like trying to use what I have to make the world better in some capacity.

2:08:27Nan Ransohoff:I think another big one is like helping the people I care about in my life be like the best version of themselves and like become the best versions of themselves. And so like I think that the people who have held up versions of me and like helped me see those when I wasn't able to see them have been And really, there's all these studies like kids who are told that they're great at something early on end up being great at that. And like whether or not they have that innate ability, it's easier to believe in that when sort of someone else is helping you hold that for yourself. And so those are, yeah, I think that I don't always hit the mark on that.

2:09:08Nan Ransohoff:But that is like something that I aspire towards and doing that for myself and doing that, yeah, for the people around me. and then I think there's like yeah the there's like the zag piece that like I made my own decisions and like if you don't like them you know make your own art kind of thing like do things the way that feels right for me at the you know and and aligned with myself and then I think like have fun doing it like I think that the fun piece is a important thing to lean into and you know we're not here for that long maybe we'll be in the future so maybe we'll be here forever but I think in the meantime and great more fun if that's the case the advanced market

2:09:46Charlie Petty:commitment bounty for living forever would probably be pretty high yeah I know

2:09:49Nan Ransohoff:I think somebody's working on that though people are on that but something about yeah just kind of enjoying it as it happens

2:09:55Charlie Petty:thank you Nan

2:09:56Nan Ransohoff:thanks so much it was a really fun conversation

2:09:58Charlie Petty:thank you for listening or watching to my conversation with Nan and if you enjoyed it the most impactful thing would be sharing it with someone you think would love it too you can also rate like subscribe wherever you're watching or listening every little bit helps I'd also like to thank Notion again for presenting dialectic. Notion is collaborative workspace for your life's work that allows you and your team to have access to all of the world's frontier AI models and use them right where you do all of the rest of your work. That doesn't just include your documents and databases and all of your team's context, but also custom agents and AI that work inside your workspace with you, help you automate away the busy work, have more leverage and think more deeply, work more quickly, and do far more together.

2:10:45Charlie Petty:I'm super excited about Notion's new developer platform. There's a video that explains all of what's possible thanks to it and Workers, which are cloud-hosted agents that are maximally flexible and customizable and will work with any other software you're using. I'm only scratching the surface of what's possible now, but it has really truly made Notion a first-class, end-to-end, AI-native computing platform. You can learn more at notion.com slash dialectic. Finally, Notion's team is growing. So if you're interested in working with them across product, brand, storytelling, engineering, or otherwise, please let me know.

2:11:22Charlie Petty:You can reach out at work at jacksondahl.com or reach out to Notion directly. Thank you as always for listening and I will see you next time.