Who's got the ball on carbon removal?

24:47And this was sort of the first application outside of global health. It's a very specific kind of market shaping mechanism, and it works better for some problems than others. but the kind of problem that AMCs work for are ones where you have a product that you want to exist that would benefit the world in some way. And the reason that it doesn't exist is because there is some demand uncertainty, either because the market isn't big enough or because the price that the willingness to pay for a product is not big enough. And an AMC is a way to sort of help fix that problem. The other thing that an AMC is good for, as opposed to like a prize, So a prize is another way one could solve that problem.

25:24An AMC is good for, and prizes actually are good for this too, but an AMC is good for the types of problems where you don't know who the best inventor is. There's some information asymmetry of who can actually invent the thing, and an AMC is kind of a tech agnostic demand signal to pull forward the best ideas. I think there are lots of applications outside of this. Green steel and cement are another one. The U.S. government should do that. The U.S. government buys nearly 50 % of cement in the United States. They would be a great organizer for an AMC for green cement. But there's lots of other applications, but that's the shape of the problem that I think AMCs are especially a good fit for.

26:00Can I just ask, why is Stripe doing this? Why are they committed? Well, our sort of foray into carbon removal was, it started as a small experiment back in 2019 with initially a blog post that Christian Anderson wrote, who since founded Watershed. but it was to buy a million dollars of carbon removal at any available price. And it kind of ratcheted up from there. The reaction from the market was really positive when we announced that. And we got a lot of notes from Stripe Climate users saying like, hey, I want to do something for a while in climate, but like, I'm busy. Can I just send you some money and you figure out to do with it?

26:35And that led to Stripe Climate, which is the software product that we built for Stripe users to make it really easy for them to direct a fraction of their revenue to carbon removal. And then that led to Frontier. We essentially were like, how do we add another zero to this? And the advanced market commitment idea was one that we sort of came out of a group brainstorm and came out of that. But that's a long-winded way of saying this was not some preordained thing. It was a little like we tried something and then new adjacent possibilities opened up and we kept leaning into them. Yeah, very cool.

27:08On advanced market commitments, which I think is an excellent new mechanism, I think the parallels between health and climate that you are kind of working on are exactly right in a lot of different ways, not the least of which, which is, well, our health is dependent on the climate. So, you know, it is just another, you know, kind of health initiative. Is there any way to get a bunch of forces to align to creating advanced market commitments? like sometimes you have a leadership thing like for example gates foundation you know doing this with health and vaccine but it's like could for example we get and you know it's interesting because part of the reason i'm asking this question is i think about each of the hyperscalers is kind of solving their green energy thing separately and yet actually in fact it's probably a lot more positive if they just kind of got look we're all going to do this we're going to compete on our data centers but we're going to do these advanced market commitments together because then by the You have a much broader base of entrepreneurs, other kinds of things doing it, because it's adding it all up.

28:10Is there any coordinative function for getting a bunch of people behind an advanced market commitment? So Google and Microsoft and a couple other companies, I believe, did that for some of the technology that you described. It was geothermal, nuclear, and maybe one other. But I think some of that is naturally happening. Coordinating is really hard. That has been one of the hardest parts of Frontier. We have amazing partners, and it's just coordinating at a company. Sure. That is just a hard thing. So I'm like, my instinct is only coordinate if you have to. And so if you have huge pots of money, like a country, for example.

28:51Just do it. Yeah, they can do it all themselves. So I think that, for example, the OpenAI Foundation has put in a lot of money, has a lot of money now that's sort of endowed to it, and they could probably do a lot of these unilaterally. Like absent that, if you do need to get folks to coordinate, you need, you know, it's tricky. And I don't know if there's like a perfect recipe for it. You need people who are willing to run through walls to make that coordination happen. And, you know, Godspeed to them. Part of the reason I asked is I was thinking about like what are the things the government can be doing.

29:19Yeah. And obviously the spend is important, you know, all the things you mentioned earlier. But on the other hand, that is one of the reasons it doesn't happen is because it's very difficult politically. Like in a democracy, what people tend to do is, is how do I throw some money in your pocket right now? And just like, for example, you know, building up huge amounts of national debt, you know, we'll charge that to the future. And that's part of the problem that a lot of governments, you know, kind of run into. And that's one of the problems. No, no, we're going to spend money now for that advanced thing.

29:52But like one of the things they could do is potentially coordinate the. Like, say, we'll create the incentive such that the that there is a benefit in coordinating for these advanced market commitments, like, for example. You want to incense the coordinators. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This discussion is just making me think about that because it's another tool that the governments and policy could be thinking about as, OK, we have we should, of course, be getting this spending the money. But maybe we could do this in parallel or with it, because obviously the more that you get, because this is one of the things I like about the like like, you know, there's this idiocy of, oh, let's ban data centers or restrict them.

30:33It's like, no, no, no, let's let's encourage their construction in a way that gives us a whole bunch of benefits. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some benefits in jobs, but also benefits in be developing the grid, the clean energy technology and all the rest. And then you're powering the natural commercial incentive into these things that are good. And that you can do smartly from a government. I agree. I don't – I totally agree. I wonder how much of that doesn't, again, to the point of like if you can avoid coordination, like try to avoid it. One way that one, like you could, you know, prioritize permits for clean energy development.

31:10So like these folks, the hyperscalers are more than, even more than price sensitive, they are speed sensitive. They're time sensitive. So like what are incentives you could play into there that are kind of also free, so to speak, to the U.S. government? I think there's a ton of things to be done there. The other thing that I think is nice about AMCs from the perspective of governments is that the cash isn't due up front. You only pay if you get the outcome. And from a tax dollar perspective, that's a really nice property of these things. It's very de-risking to sort of sell that internally because you're not on the hook.

31:44If it doesn't go well, you're on the hook. And I think that the power of Frontier was sending a billion-dollar demand signal very early. We even paid out a billion dollars because those companies haven't delivered yet. You know, there's a sort of time arbitrage that you get from AMCs that I think is under leveraged. Like another thing they could do is say, hey, we as a government will be providing a matching AMC to actors who are doing this within a certain environment, et cetera, et cetera, in terms of doing it. Like there's a set of other ways of, I'm thinking about like amplifying. Look, as a fellow Silicon Valley person, I totally agree.

32:23It's like, no, no, drive to it. Don't have a committee talking about it. Totally get it. And I think that's important. Also, it's like if you can make a network ecosystem work, like it's part of the thing that makes Silicon Valley work. Anyway, that's some of your thinking. Yeah, that's some of your thinking in work is kind of causing you to think, ah, I wonder if there's a way of putting that together. Anyway, that's the reason I was asking. I think the matching thing is also an interesting thread to pull on because I think it can accelerate both sides. Like the public sector likes to pull in capital from the private sector and it makes it easier for them to sell to their constituents.

33:05And so those and the same goes for the private sector. So there's like some nice complementary benefits of there of that that I think are probably underexplored as well. So one of the things I love about the work you're doing is it's part of the thing I think is really important as leadership amongst all tech companies to be saying, what are the ways that we can be leading in these problems that are not just our market development? Because when you're in a very successful industry, you should be saying, OK, great, successful. How do I help society? How do I help the world, et cetera? And so part of what I love about Stripe's involvement in Frontier is I think it gives us some examples about what a text company's relationship to civilization problems might look like going forward.

33:49I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about Stripe and Frontier and the work you're doing on this. You know, when we look at like corporate philanthropy, for example, in the U.S., corporate spend about$50 billion a year on sort of philanthropic activities. That's a lot of money. Like that is, I think that that's something to be sort of scoffed at. And one of the things that we sort of observed in starting Frontier is that it's a bit of a weird mechanism, right? Like AMCs are not a, I guess, a traditional thing that corporate philanthropy would sort of spend time on. I think one of the things I learned from it was like if you take kind of outsized risk, you can also get outsized return.

34:30and my sort of hope is that corporates can spend more of their philanthropic dollars in this way. It's interesting because in Silicon Valley we apply power law mentality to all of the work that we do and yet those same companies often don't always apply that to their philanthropic work and so my suspicion is that there are a lot of really great outcomes that we could deliver if we were more risk tolerant. For some reason corporate philanthropy has become quite risk intolerant. And I think as a result, we're leaving a lot of good on the table. So what can we do there to sort of permiss or encourage folks to take bigger swings?

35:12And I think that unusually high risk appetites could result, it won't definitely result, but it could result in sort of outsized returns. we've done that with Frontier and it's given us a lot of other ideas for sort of other things that we might start kind of in a similar vein I also think, I mean,$50 billion is great and it's always good when companies give money I am very pro that and you can give so much more you can give expertise you can figure out which of your customers can join in you can figure out what's your tech network so you can get the other hyperscalers involved like there's just so much more than money that a tech company can give because of everything that it has.

35:52And it just feels like this is using all of your assets as opposed to just one. I think Stripe Climate's a really good example of that. Like the software product that we built to make it really easy for Stripe businesses to put money into carbon removal. This would never have worked as a standalone app. Nobody cares enough about Climate to like set up their own app to like give a little bit of money to carbon removal. But if you can piggyback on someone's, you know, on sort of like other services that they're using and make it really easy, a single click to do this and give them that option, Stripe has amazing distribution.

36:23And so I don't know if Stripe Climate would have worked outside of this context, but I think that's a really good example of exactly what you're saying. What are the other assets that we can bring to bear for problems that matter to the world? One of the things I think you've demonstrated is a market shaping method needs a leader, needs a champion, needs someone running it. You, I think, have called that person a general manager for an orphaned problem. Lots of problems are orphaned, but many probably should stay that way. How do you tell which ones are worth a world-class leader? I can share what my instinct would be to that question, but I am not the arbiter of which problems get worked on.

37:05I think it's probably some combination of what is the benefit that it could give to the world. That's one. Two, is it tractable? Like, do we think that it is possible to make progress in some set of realistic-esque constraints? And then the third is, am I, the person considering working on this, really excited about it? Do I want to devote a lot of time to it? I think those are like three broad criteria. In practice, it's probably more opportunistic than that. Like, these waves come in somewhat unpredictable times. We're not going through some sort of like stack-ranked list of problems and just picking off the next one.

37:42To me, in some sense, it's not dissimilar to the private sector. It's like all of the conditions have to be there for the right person, the right team, the right funding to come together to sort of manifest these new organizations and general manager combos. But yeah, probably some combination of tractability, how big the problem is, and interest in the problem. And I like your 2 a.m. measure too. Part of the passion is would you work to 2 a.m.? I think that's part of the third. It's like, do I want to add? do I want to do this and run through walls? Because doing anything, starting anything is really hard.

38:17You've got to be ready for that. I mean, I think, Reid, you talk about this so often when you think of companies or NGOs or whatever, things that you want to exist in the world, and you just say to yourself, who's the CEO? And even if something's number one, two, three, four on your list, it's not going to get done unless you have the CEO. So we might be doing things eight, nine, and 10 because we have the best CEOs for that because you need someone who's going to run through walls. And so related to that, we have so many problems. And I mean, in every situation, you're like, man, man, I wish there was an ice cream shop in my neighborhood.

38:47I wish someone would, I wish someone would start that. And it's like, what about you? And you talk about this bystander problem, like, especially for these big problems, you're like, someone must be working on whatever, global poverty, global hunger, climate change, carbon removal. Like, do you think actually the bystander effect, like, ah, someone else is doing it is one of the big barriers here? I really do. I think that's a huge, a huge problem. And it's certainly that, that definitely describes my experience in carbon removal of, you know, you're looking at this report that is like the canonical climate change report, the IPCC report, and you're like, everybody's looking at these numbers.

39:23Everybody who cares about climate is looking at these numbers. And then you go out and talk to everybody in this space and it takes you three weeks and you're like, what is going on here? Like who's got the ball? And I, I think that we would all benefit from a little bit more kind of institutional distrust that like somebody else has has this as their number one priority. And if you do and go find that person, great. But I think we assume that that is the case and like markets are efficient and everything is efficient more often than it actually is. Absolutely. Let's talk about kind of the characteristics of general managers or CEOs for orphan problems.

39:59So D.A. Henderson didn't invent the smallpox vaccine. He changed the strategy, which is frequently what you're looking for, for a founder, a CEO, etc., what the data loops were, the accountability, the will. Presumably, this is at least part of the kind of leadership that the world needs on these problems and perhaps undervalues. How would you characterize the kind of leadership attributes? What should we try to promote and evolve? What kinds of people should we be trying to support? How should people identify themselves as this kind of leader? Talk about the leadership for all different problems.

40:35I think it's probably like the specifics of what's needed probably depend on the problem itself. Like you're in the case of Henderson, in the case of smallpox, it was strategy, it was execution as well. I think in the case of many of the topics that we're grappling with today with AI around risk mitigation and with human flourishing, my suspicion is that it's also one of vision. Like what is the future that we want to build towards? and we are probably short vision, but I think it probably is person dependent. The shape of person, though, that I refer to when I think about general managers that I would love to see working on more kind of public goods shaped problems are Silicon Valley founder types.

41:16It is like, I think that especially this new wave of funders is going to be hesitant or like a little bit wary of funding kind of more traditional NGO folks. And we grew up in Silicon Valley and we're familiar with this sort of execution and the hustle and the smarts and the strategy around this kind of work. And I think that's sort of what I, the spirit of what I mean when I say a general manager is like, these are founder mentality people. They're just working on public goods. Does the founder mentality break down when you think of a GM? You think about sort of one person who holds that accountability over time, and they are sort of laser focused on that problem, and they're sort of holding all the strings.

42:00But when you think about institutions, you think about that committee. You think about governments, foundations, international bodies. You have to have cooperation. You have to have all of that. And they're specifically designed to prevent the one person who's holding all the power. Do you think, like, the general manager model is, like, the workaround for the broken institutions we have? Or it's just a critique saying like the current institutions we have aren't aren't up to the challenge because they need to have more of a GM framework. Well, I think the current like a current institution also, in theory, has a GM, which is their leader, like the CEO, the executive director, et cetera.

42:36So I don't I definitely don't think those are intrinsically or definitionally at odds. I think the difference is that there are a lot of problems that have nobody who thinks that it's their problem to solve it. That is thing one. And I think there are a lot of institutions that are too narrowly scoped, that have not scoped themselves to deliver a specific outcome rather than and they're working on a slice of the piece. And that's OK. We don't need every institution working on the whole thing. But I would love to see more institutions saying, like, here's the outcome that we're going to deliver and we're going to pull whatever lever that we need to in order to make that happen.

43:16It's sort of like when these institutions tout, like, we've been working on this problem for 40 years, 40 years of experience. Is that good? What? Well, is it done? Did you fix it? I guess, you know, you don't know the counterfactual. Maybe we would have backslid and now we're at even. But right. We want to, if you've been working for 40 years, let's see some results. Yeah. And there are lots of great institutions out there. Of course. But I think that the number of orphan problems and I think the number of amazing people that could be working on this shape of thing to me seems far, far lower than it should be.

43:50So this leads to a natural question, which is if you could assign one world-class general manager to an orphan problem tomorrow other than carbon removal, because we've already talked about that at length, what problem would you pick? I can talk about one that I have gotten nerd sniped by basically this time last year, which is that of respiratory infections. You know, most otherwise healthy people get sick two to four times a year. We spend five percent of our lives sick with respiratory illnesses. It is very bad for the economy, probably like 500 to 500 billion to a trillion dollars per year due to lost productivity.

44:27These things are probably really bad for us in the long run. We just like haven't done a great job characterizing that. And they also periodically threaten civilization through pandemics. I think that these are just bad. They are bad. And they are also one of these problems that is so, we just accept it because it is part of life. And like, oh, your kid's sick. And everyone's, that's fine. It's annoying, but we tolerate it. Why? I think that this is the kind of thing, it is really hard. I don't want to minimize that. There's a lot of viral diversity. They mutate a lot. But the tools have gotten much better in the past couple of years.

45:01And I think that this is increasingly a tractable problem. So I have been spending a lot of time sort of thinking about what would GMing respiratory infections look like? If the goal is to make respiratory infections a thing of the past, could we do that? How would we do that? Is it possible and over what time frame? I think that this has definitely been something that's been on my mind. How do you start to figure out that it's tractable? What gave you the confidence to be like, you know what? Like, ah, we could do this. Okay, that's a great question. So last spring, when I was sort of, I initially got into this topic because I was talking to David Wiesler at the Institute for Protein Design.

45:41I was thinking about some of the sort of incentive structures that we could do to fix this, but I'm not, this is not my sort of technical area of expertise. So we ended up hosting a symposium at Stripe with sort of 40 people, largely scientists, but also policymakers and folks from pharma companies. And that was a big part of the question. Like, is it possible? Is this technically possible? And so we flew all these people in and they were giving these sort of seven minute lightning talks. And it was a day and a half of just intense focus on this question. And we left basically being like, this is hard, but it probably is.

46:11And it's not definitely, but to the point of you don't get big outcomes if you don't take some risk. You have enough confidence that this might be. Yeah, we have enough confidence this could be a thing. And there is some risk, but you've got to swing to sort of get the benefits. And so that gave us enough confidence to ultimately spin up a new frontier-shaped initiative that is going to be focused on trying to make respiratory infections a thing of the past. That's amazing. I was sick so much this year. That's incredible. Okay. So you just put out a sub stack on the new philanthropy that I was obsessed with and saw so many people chattering about.

46:49And one of the things you discussed is all seven anthropic co-founders have pledged to donate 80 % of their wealth, which will be potentially$37 billion conservatively. We'll see. And that's 10 times what the world's largest research-driven grant maker has given away in its entire history. And so we had the last, you know, you talked about sort of three waves and we had the Rockefellers in terms of philanthropy and then sort of the next wave was the early 2000s, tech philanthropy, Gates, Moskowitz, Zuckerberg, I might say Hoffman. Does that offer a useful model for what's going to happen next or why is this next wave different?

47:26Okay, just in terms of scale, I would even like broaden it outside of the bucket that you mentioned. There's sort of like these, there's the anthropic founders, there's the anthropic And OpenAI has put initially 26 % is in the OpenAI Foundation. All of those numbers add up to a lot of money. Do some math, it's probably around$37 to$100 billion per year. That's kind of what we're looking at in terms of scale. And U.S. philanthropy is about$600 billion a year. So it's a lot. It's not doubling that. I think that part of the reason that this is different is a couple of things. One is the shape of the problems that these funders care about.

48:01These funders are, you know, rightly worried about the AI transition. And there are sort of two components of that. There is how do we navigate all the minefield of risk to get to the other side? And if and when we do, how do we help humanity flourish from that? And so I think there's a problem area, problem set that they're especially interested in. The second is sort of core belief is one around speed. Like if AGI is coming quickly, we need to get to work very fast. And then the third sort of difference here, and I don't think this third difference is actually that different than the last wave, but it's really around talent and what are expectations of the types of people that we, that sort of, they would be excited about funding and we would be excited about funding.

48:44I think it's the combination of these three things, in my mind, that makes this wave potentially hugely impactful. So$50 billion a year, if you look at some of the projects that they think this group would be excited about funding,$50 billion a year would fund 333 ARC institutes per year, fully fund their budget. It would fund 5 ,000 Institute for Progresses. There's a huge, you know, the potential for impact here is huge. And as I was doing the math to write this piece, the thing that stuck out to me was just like, we don't have the organizational capacity to absorb that money. And so what are we going to do to fix that?

49:20Well, let's talk about one part of that. We'll start with one part of that organizational capacity, which is capital allocation. So what do you think it would take to get to an effective capital allocation kind of layer and advantage? What would be the, you know, kind of program managers, the venture capitalists, the kind of equivalent of the capital allocation? And what is their capabilities and skillset look like? And then what does what will they need to do to be able to be good stewards of this particular capital? And then what kinds of things will they need to be doing? Because they'll have to probably be developing their market some.

50:06What would that look like as well? At the risk of overfitting everything to Silicon Valley, which is where I grew up to, I think that this essentially is a sort of Silicon Valley for public goods is what this could look like. And the components might look quite similar. You have funders and then you have capital allocators, which are kind of like philanthropic VCs. And then they're giving money to us to call it like philanthropic startups. And there are some of these capital allocators today. The Opening Eye Foundation is definitionally going to be a huge one. Coefficient giving is another good example, Renaissance philanthropy.

50:41But at$50 billion a year, if you're giving away, on average, coefficient giving's grant last year was$1 million a year, that is 50 ,000 grants that you've got to distribute in a year. That's just a very large number. And so we probably need many more of these philanthropic VCs, so to speak. And we also need many more of these philanthropic startups. So again, I think that from a who do you want working on these, it's probably not dissimilar to the kinds of folks who are VCs today. It's identifying excellent talent, figuring out where is the space going and how do I make sure that there are great people working in each of those.

51:15And I think that that is also true on the startup side. It's like, again, looking for these GMs, looking for these founders, helping them get into this space, find their problem and start an organization. The thing, you know, again, I ended up starting, like I did this math for myself. I was not intending to write a piece. And then I was like, oh my God, who is going to do this, you essentially, the main takeaway is like, we don't need just a few more people in philanthropy. We don't need just a few more people doing capital allocation or working on public goods. We're talking about thousands of organizations that we need.

51:49And as an implication, thousands of founders and probably hundreds of thousands of people working to power those organizations. This is a pipeline sort of workforce reorientation problem. And how exciting. You get to be working on some of the problems that matter most for humanity. I think that that's a really, it's a very exciting time for that reason, in my opinion. One of the things I thought was an important thread in your piece was that this capital will be coming with expectations about what kinds of founders, what kinds of projects will be good. For example, I could easily see, for example, universities say, oh, great, this is more endowment for us.

52:27and so forth. And they're unlikely to be understanding where the folks who have put the work into building this kind of thing, what they think about an AI universe, et cetera, you know, how that applies. So go into a little bit more depth about what should people who think, oh, I'm going to come help solve this capital allocation problem because the, I wouldn't say the advanced commitments, potentially becoming advanced market commitments of we're doing this in the philanthropy will only get unlocked in certain kinds of projects. And I thought that was one of the important threads in your piece.

53:00I think the expectation for leaders of these organizations is that they are sort of tech caliber people. These are, you know, PMs and otherwise founders who are working on problems that are good for the world. And the counterfactual, if those people don't exist or don't move into public goods and don't start organizations, I think is that the money isn't going to get spent. And so it is on us to sort of like figure out what that pipeline looks like. What is the PM to GM pipeline? How do we create these talent on ramps and high status on ramps and for great people, help them find a problem that they are really excited about and can wrap their arms around and want to work on for long periods of time?

53:46And we have to do that at a pretty large scale. This is a sort of wartime mobilization effort to get great people working on problems that are good for the world. It's interesting because when you talk about the money might not be spent, I wish I had the numbers in front of me, but I'm sure there are more than, let's call it, you said$37 to$100 billion over 10 years. There's more than that much money already on the sidelines right now that isn't being spent in DAFs, in foundations, in whatever that is allocated for charitable. And so this isn't actually just a problem of a problem of the new AI money that's coming.

54:20Like we literally have this much money already that's not being allocated for many reasons. And some is because they don't feel like there's a good place to put it. They feel like philanthropy is not meeting the moment. But then there's other critiques people don't want to give because, you know, the OpenAI Foundation would get yelled at for giving to the wrong things. Like there's all sorts of reasons why the capital that we have isn't being deployed philanthropically. And certainly one of the things you talk about is how do we get all these amazing PMs? How do we get these, you know, you're essentially a philanthropic product manager right now for these social good problems.

54:52How do we make this the career pipeline for the best people? Like what needs to change in order to push them into these new fields? I think there are a bunch of things that need to change, to be honest. I think the first is we have to make the problems that need to get solved more legible. So I would love to see Coefficient Giving, OpenAI Foundation, other folks who have vision in the space, especially who are thinking about AI, make the problems and the vision for those, so how to solve those problems more legible so that somebody can learn enough about a problem to get nerd-synced by it. And the second thing is we want to create high-status on-ramps for great folks to work on philanthropy.

55:29I sometimes am surprised I work in philanthropy. Like, that is not where I expect it to be. And I think the way I sort of rationalize myself through that is, like, this is a very different shape of philanthropy than sort of traditional philanthropy. But I think a lot of people have, philanthropy has that baggage for a lot of people. And so I think we need to shift that. And so I was thinking like, what does YC for like a sort of talent and startup accelerator for public good-shaped problems? That would be really cool. I think another thing that we need to fix is pay in philanthropy. I think we've sort of, it's been gauche to talk about.

56:01We haven't really done, made much progress on this. But in theory, if these are really big problems for the world, we should be excited to pay people who fix those problems a lot of money. So I just, and I think a unique property at this moment is that the funders, where this money is coming from are some of the sort of most coveted companies in the world. Like Anthropic and AI have, all this hypothetical money is sitting in equity right now. And I think that's never really been the case before. So can we figure out a way to sort of give people incentives and bonuses, et cetera, in the form of Anthropic or OpenAI equity?

56:39I think that the pay piece feels like uniquely tractable. I mean, I have not looked into it that much, and I'm sure that this is a deeply naive thing to say, but I want to chase that down. That feels tractable to me. I'll say two things on that, which I think are interesting. I feel like people are like, LeBron James, get rich playing basketball. Beyonce, sell some records and get rich. Don't you dare solve childhood hunger and get rich. Like, how dare you? Like, no, no, no, you should be living in poverty wages. So I do think some of it is that. Says the former do something CEO. Yeah, that's right.

57:12I also do think it's interesting because this has happened in so many industries that right now the nonprofit sector is mostly women. And it's actually more diverse, certainly, than Silicon Valley. And it's low paid. Actually, 80 percent of nonprofit CEOs are men. But the rest of them are women and more people of color than Silicon Valley. And so I do think it's going to be interesting. of all of a sudden we have higher salaries to solve global problems and it's all going to white men. Like all of a sudden it's tech people who are more sort of white men, Asian men, et cetera, just, you know, by demographics.

57:46And then we give them the higher salaries. Like I'm also imagining a, you know, some, some people complaining about that. Some people saying like, what the hell, I've been working in this forever and I haven't afforded that, or I could have done better if I was able to get that equity or I was able to afford this. So I don't think you're naive. I think that is a huge piece of the problem. It's money, and then it's also status. Like you said, you didn't picture yourself being that way because it's higher status to be, you know, sort of a startup at a for-profit than a nonprofit. But I do think there's some other pickups in there.

58:16Yeah. You wrote something that had some parallels to some kind of talks I've given in Italy, which was Silicon Valley, as you know, kind of styles itself as a new renaissance. And one of the things that I've wanted it to do is to upgrade the way that it thinks of the full renaissance. Like how do you bring art in? How do you bring humanism? Not just the kind of central invention of technology, science, creating new networks and roads for commerce and all the rest. And so you wrote that San Francisco might be entering a romantic revival, more beauty, emotion, real life spaces, maybe less optimization.

58:56And so I think of this potentially as a humanist frame. What goals should technology ultimately serve? Not just what can it do? And is romanticism pointing out a humanist outcome, pointing out something different than a humanist outcome? What made you write about the romantic revival? I've lived in San Francisco for over a decade now, and I have felt a vibe shift recently. This piece was not backed by data. It was purely anecdotal on sort of how I have felt this city has been showing up now versus a decade ago. I'm curious what your experience here is, and I can't tell totally what it's a reaction to.

59:40Maybe it is a reaction to sort of AI is taking off, so what does it mean to be human and wanting to embrace our humanness? maybe there are sort of strands of nihilism in there of like you know and sort of a more hedonist origin but SF has felt like it's starting to care more about aesthetics it's starting to care talking about religion feels more acceptable now than it did 10 years ago starting to like care about how you dress feels acceptable if not cool in a way that 10 years ago would have been like you're spending time on sort of the wrong things. I don't really know what to make of it, but it does feel like a shift to me.

1:00:22What has been your observation in SF? I don't have as much direct experience with SF. I tend to be more of a peninsula person. But I do go there. Yes, Bay Area, but I didn't go there. I don't know if I'm seeing it yet. And part of the reason I like giving these speeches at Perugian, Bologna, and other kinds of things, I would like to see more of a explicit cultural focus on kind of humanist virtues. And by the way, it can be how we live our lives. Like, do we go out for walks? Do we, do we have intellectual salons? Do we, you know, I still, maybe I swim a little bit too much in the YouTube short culture of, of like, you know, like too much discussion of peptides, you know blah blah blah blah and you're like okay right and so like like it was funny we Ari and I were at a dinner last night and one of them was like I've recently discovered the Brothers Karamazov and you're like well good been around a while but that could also be looked at as a positive encountering more of that Like, what is the human condition?

1:01:37What should it be? How should we be living our lives individually and together? And more woven through everything, including, of course, your work. And that was the reason why the romantic revival piece spoke to me a little bit as a hope. Yeah. But I don't know if I'm actually seeing anything. And I get your data point. I mean, I'm not quite sure how. I guess we could kind of run a poll or something. But me? What do you think is driving that to the extent that it is happening? I do think your point about AI, there's this old book from earlier tech revolutions called Megatrends by John Nesbitt.

1:02:15And the very first megatrend was high tech, high touch. And as you get to high tech, which is alienating, you tend to get to high touch, which is more humanizing. So you tend to get to like, oh, no, I want something with a wood surface. I want to, you know, and it's one of the reasons why there is a frequent attraction to Japanese aesthetics within this, you know, kind of. A record that you can put on a turntable. Yes, exactly. So AI music, but on a record, precisely. And so I think there's at least some of that. And I think part of the question kind of comes down to how do we make these things that we're doing, which are trying to make a difference to humanity at scale, but how do we make them human too?

1:02:59I think there's at least threads of that. Now, there's also weird other threads, you know, transhumanism. Like, you know, I've lost track of the number of times that people have blithely told me, we're going to be uploading ourselves into robots. And you're like, you have no idea what you're talking about. Right? Like, it's like, what is that? I mean, it's a little bit like people going, well, I understand the Star Trek transponder, like transporter. It's like I get in here and I disappear and I appear over there. It's like, well, okay, look, there's two framings. One is you're disintegrated and there's a clone and the other one is you're transported.

1:03:29it, you really should have a theory about why it's one and not the other one. You know, and so, and it's kind of a similar kind of thing, but that dialogue, and it's also, I think, so I think that's part of the thing that's hitting us is that the technological environment where, you know, okay, what happens when we get to AGI, et cetera, et cetera, and what would that mean? And what would that mean to be human? And what does that mean for work? And what does that mean for meaning? And, you know, a bunch of other questions. But I think it's also the scale of the tech industry because, you know, when 20, 30 years ago, we were all happily the pirate challengers to institutions.

1:04:09And now we're much more like, well, none of the things we do affect the entire world. And so you also, you know, I think it's a simple line that comes from Voltaire, but with power comes responsibility. It's one of the things. So you've got to, okay, now start being responsible for this. And by the way, responsible is not, well, I have a theory. It's like, great. Your theory should be in dialogue with other people. Because, by the way, you have a theory. I am the one God person who knows everything. Oh, you have a problem. Yeah. Right? So it's like, no, no, be in dialogue with people. Kind of find out, like, okay, what are other perspectives and what kinds of things should be shaped?

1:04:47And that's the kind of, that was the reason why when, like, Bologna called me and said, hey, would you do a commencement speech? I think they were surprised when I said yes, because I've been thinking about this. Right? Right. And it was like, no, I think this is important to do. So I'm hopeful. I'm not sure how strong the signals are yet within the valley, but I would love to see it grow. So we have a section called rapid fire, which actually you can answer at any depth that you like, because it's really just the questions around that we ask every guest because it kind of creates a like a tapestry across the different possible podcasts.

1:05:20So is there a movie, song or book that fills you with optimism for the future? There's a collection of essays and talks by Richard Feynman called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out that I'm not really sure how I discovered them in the first place. But whenever I feel like I need a like mental tune up or a reset or like kind of a, yeah, a dose of optimism, I find spending 15 minutes with one of those essays to do the trick. So they're really fun. You can kind of bounce around a bit. But it's like they're essentially about science, but really they're about a lot of things about life. They're about, you know, curiosity and mischief and and learning things and and sort of growing up.

1:06:08And I think that they're a real joy. So highly recommend. I love giving Feynman as an answer. Have you read those? I haven't, but I've read other Feynman. I'm going to get you that book. What is a question that you wish people would ask you more often? I find that the questions that for me, there's like a category of questions that tend to be very useful for me. And they are sort of like constraint lifting questions. So, you know, versions of like, what is the 10x version of what you're working on? Or if you had, you know, if you're working on something and someone's like, what's the, you know, if you had$10 million to spend on this or$100 million.

1:06:46And not to say they're giving you that money, but I find that having other people ask questions that sort of permiss you to think more broadly are sort of surprisingly useful for me. I think Patrick's really good at this, actually. There have been a number of times where he sort of gently asked these nudging questions, and just the asking of them permisses you to think more ambitiously or more creatively. So I love getting those and try when I can to ask them to other people as well. Well, it somewhat leads us to our third rapid fire question, which is, so where do you see progress or momentum outside of, say, your areas, which are climate markets, an AI that inspires you.

1:07:33So we're outside of that. We're seeing a ton of progress right now in biology. I think that that's a really, really exciting area. I think in another world, I would have, I wish I'd been a biologist. I think AI is driving a, you know, is of course related to AI, is driving huge advances in our understanding and also what we can do with that understanding. And so like, you know, every day on Twitter or reading, reading different pieces, it's like, we live in an age of miracles. Like what a time to be alive. I think the pace of progress is staggering. And of course, this is going to run up against the real world and we got to do clinical trials and we got to do, you know, we got to turn the bits into atoms, so to speak.

1:08:08But it's very thrilling to watch. Absolutely. Can you leave us with a final thought on what is possible to achieve in the next 15 years? And oh, if everything breaks humanity's way, I forgot that piece. And what's our first step to get in that direction? I think the next, like the next 5, 10, 15 years are going to be very consequential for humanity, Right. And, you know, without the risk of sounding too AGI pilled, there are these two sets of questions that we're going to need to grapple with. One is how do we navigate the AI transition and manage all of these risks? And two, if we can do that, what does human flourishing look like?

1:08:43The next, you know, 10, 15 years are going to matter a lot in answering those questions. and I think there are, you know, we've talked about many of the things that need to get done, but I think a good first step is taking some of these, like, newer and squishier ideas and trying to sort of more crisply define what are potential visions for them. Like, human flourishing is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do I imagine it? And get me excited about what that future could look like so that I want to quit my job and go and work on it.

1:09:14I think that we are short vision and sort of really thinking about shaping what those visions could look like is a really concrete and possible and tractable first step towards driving all the attention and resources that we need to go and actually make the world look like that. Awesome. Thank you. Great. Thank you guys so much. This is really fun. So fun.

1:09:53Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Sayida Sepieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Rallis. And a big thanks to Freddie Williams, Florian Maganza, and the team at Greylock Partners.