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Leopold Aschenbrenner on existential risk, German Culture, Valedictorian efficiency | Podcast

June 23, 2021 Ben Yeoh

I had an excellent chat with Leopold Aschenbrenner. Leopold is a grant winner from Tyler Cowen’s  Emergent Ventures. He went to Columbia University, aged 15, and graduated in 2021 as valedictorian. He is a researcher  at the Global Priorities Institute, thinking about long-termism. He has drafted a provocative paper encompassing ideas of long-termisim, existential risk and growth and blogs at forourposterity.

For some of our conversation we were joined by phantom Tyler Cowen imagining what he might think. 

We discussed Leopold’s critique of German culture and whether he’d swap German infrastructure for the American entrepreneurial spirit. 

Whether being a valedictorian is efficient, if going to University at 15 is underrated and life at Columbia University. 


What you can learn from speed solving Rubik’s cubes and if Leopold had to make the choice today if he’d still be vegetarian.

Thinking about existential risk, Leopold considers whether nuclear or biological warfare risk is a bigger threat than climate change and how growth matters and if the rate of growth matters as much depending on how long you think humanity survives. 


Considering possible under rated existential risk Leopold sketches out several concerns over the falling global birth rate, how sticky that might be and whether policy would be effective.

We consider what is worth seeing in Germany, how good or not GDP is as a measure and what we should do with our lives. 

Leopold has wide ranging thoughts and in thinking and working on fat tail existential ruin risks is working on saving the human world. Fascinating thoughts.

Listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts or watch the video (above or here on YouTube). 

  • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo

  • Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh

  • Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh


Contents and lightly edited transcript below.

0:35 How to think about a future career (80000 hours)

3:10 is going to university at 15 years old  underrated?

5:22 In favour of college and liberal arts vs Thiel fellowships

8:14 Is being a valedictorian efficient (H/T Tyler Cowen)

12:01 Leopold on externalities and how to sort smart people

14:08 Learnings from Columbia. The importance of work ethic.

18:50 Leopold learning from Adam Tooze and German history

21:16 Leopold critiques German culture on standing out.

22:08 Observations on decline of German universities

24:22 Leopold concerns on the German leadership class

29:25 German infrastructure and if it feels poor

33:13 Critique of too much netflix

34:27 What to learn from speed cubing Rubik’s cubes and weird communities

37:04 Leopold’s story of Emergent Ventures and what he found valuable

39:08 Embracing weirdness and disagreeableness 

41:20  Leopold considering whether US entrepreneurial culture worth swapping for German infrastructure

43:44 Leopold on social ills of alcohol

43:59 Examining Leopold’s ideas of existential risk and growth

47:49 Different views depending on time frame:700 years or millions of years

51:18 Leopold’s view on importance of growth and risk of dark ages 

56:07 Climate as a real risk but not a top existential risk

1:00:02 Nuclear weapons as an underrated existential risk

1:00:45 View on emergent AI risk

1:02:20 Falling fertility as an underrated risk

1:14:35 Mormon and eternal family

1:16:29 Underrated/overrated with phantom Tyler Cowen

  • biological warfare

  • Inflation

  • GDP as a measure 

  • Berlin 

1:30:09 What to see in Berlin

1:32:22 Habits, simplicity and anti-moderation

1:35:10 What EA gets right/wrong, EA as religion?

1:43:56 Advice: Being independent, creative and writing blogs

Finding Meaning in life


Leopold Aschenbrenner in conversation with Ben Yeoh


Ben Yeoh (0:04): I am super excited to talk to Leopold Aschenbrenner. Leopold is a grant winner from Tyler Cowen Emergent Ventures, and he went to Columbia University at age 15 and graduated this year as valedictorian. He is a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute, known for its Effective Altruism philosophy thinkers. He's already drafted a provocative paper and conferencing ideas of long termism existential risk and growth. And he blogs at for our posterity. Leopold, welcome. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (0:34): Hi, great to be here. 


Ben Yeoh (0:35): So how do you think you should assess what your future career should be? I went to Cambridge when I was 17. I finished the top of my year at 20. But I didn't really think deeply enough about what I should do but I actually sense that you have. So, how are you thinking about choosing a career, and did you use any Effective [Inaudible 00:54] thinking in terms of what you're thinking about your next steps? 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:01):  Yeah, I almost think perhaps it's a trap to over intellectualize it, but I definitely have over intellectualized it where you try to think very rigorously about what is it that I want to do, what is it that I want to achieve, what impact do I want to have on the world, what pathway can I best have this impact. And I think it's worth actually trying to think this through. Right. 80,000 hours is the length of your career, so this is really what you're spending a good chunk of your lifetime on. I think this is a valuable Effective Altruism idea. I think the downside of this is that by...you end up always questioning what you're doing because you're trying to do the most effective thing, or have the most impact or whatever, and that way can be almost self-undermined. So, I always think it might be valuable to at some point be like, "Okay this is what I'm doing," and then just have this total commitment to it. I think this is one way which in the Effective Altruism maybe is somewhat a defective religion, or it has these grand ideas of things we hope to achieve, and these are very motivated. But then it always encourages people that question and question and question and then because of the types of people who are attracted to Effective Altruism, they end up undermining their own purpose.


Ben Yeoh (2:29): Yeah, so if you end up thinking about what you're going to do for your 80,000 hours, for all 80,000 hours, you obviously end up doing nothing.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (2:38):  If you think about it too much, you end up maybe losing the motivation because you're really into something, working on it really hard, then you think about it some more and you're like, "Maybe this isn't the most effective," and then you lose the motivation. I think that this sort of motivation and drive and just pure commitment is actually very important to a career.


Ben Yeoh (2:57):  Have you committed to what you're doing for the next year yet? Or are you still in thinking more about it?



Leopold Aschenbrenner (3:01): Next year I'm working as a research fellow at Forethought, so I want to continue some of this work about thinking about the long term and so on. But in general, I've been pretty confused about my career.


Ben Yeoh (3:10): Sure. So, is going to university at 15 years old overrated, underrated, or just an experience that you would recommend or not?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (3:20): I think underrated, or specific types of people. I think people, or at least people I know for whom it would have been good, they tend to discount it, like skipping grades and so on. People look down upon or they think there are all sorts of social difficulties, and it's really not my experience. I mean it worked out great for me. There were no social difficulties or whatever people always talked about. In fact, I ended up being in a better social environment with older students. And especially if you skipped grades in high school, you save yourself a lot of time in which you're not learning anything you're not making any progress. So, for me it was very invigorating intellectually, socially, it was great. But I also think it's probably only a specific part of the population this is good for. Honestly, I think in an ideal world, I would have started even earlier. I think that I got to the skipping grades thing late, but I could have started at 14.


Ben Yeoh (4:31): I think that's fair. It might not suit everyone but for those who it suits, it's very unsuitable to be in a place where you're not learning anymore. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (4:40): Exactly. I think in the US it is a bit different because you have these incredible high schools. 


Ben Yeoh (4:45): Yeah. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (4:46): Some of these private high schools that people go to, or even some public high schools in New York, have these incredible courses, incredible peer groups. But for most people, high school is really a waste of time. And to the extent that especially high schools nowadays they take up all your time. It's not like half the day and then the other half you can do other things. It's just very inadequate. School in general is a very inadequate place to be and I think a lot of people [Inaudible 05:14] dead ends after being stuck in high school or in school for too long. So, I think it's good for people to get out.


Ben Yeoh (5:22): That leads me nicely into, do you think you're in favour of liberal arts education or university in general? because you had a critique about high school and I think if I think about my peers, I would say at least half and not maybe the majority didn't particularly enjoy high school which has to be some sort of critique. And I guess a thinker like Peter Thiel explicitly gives scholarships to people who don't go to university with a strand of thought that universities are too concerned with Credentialism and not learning. But I have the impression you gained a lot from your experience at Columbia and that there is something to liberal arts, particularly if you're going to be a curious generalist thinker, as opposed to, "I definitely know I want to be an architect or a doctor." What's your think about liberal arts and university in general? 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (6:08): I am very pro College, especially the US liberal arts college. One I think the actual liberal arts education is extremely valuable, so I very much appreciated this at Columbia. We have the core, maybe a third of the courses, and we read a bunch of classics and political philosophy and all sorts of things. And if I think back in terms of, what did I get the most out of from college, was it some very advanced math course? or was it one of these core courses? It probably was one of these core courses and in terms of properly being able to really think about the world. That's number one. Number two, I think the difference between college and at least most high schools is that you can take advanced courses. So, it's not like you're stuck doing...Whatever your favourite area of expertise is you can actually do the more advanced courses and I think this is a big difference. And I think the peer group effects can be very valuable. You have the selection and sorting of the lots of smart people who go to Columbia, and it's not just a random assortment. I think that is quite valuable. I think there's a big difference between a US elite university, and say, Germany with German universities. This is my alternative, I'm originally from Germany. They're mediocre, there's not great instruction, there's no sorting so they don't sort by [Inaudible:07:37] and it's also not liberal arts so it's one subject and there's very little choice. So that seems like another dynamic for people. 


In general, I really like for example, Tyler, his way of thinking. He knows about all sorts of areas, he's read deeply in many different areas, and I think that really helps him synthesize different, new ideas and be a very creative and generative thinker. I think that's what a liberal arts college can be good for. 


Ben Yeoh (8:14): Maybe that's a good segue also into a question that Tyler Cowen asked when I put a call out to what questions should we ask you, and he asked, is it efficient, to be a valedictorian?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (8:27): Probably not. I was thinking about this when I got the award in the sense that maybe it just means I spent too much time in school, past the point of optimal diminishing returns. I really, probably should have spent more time and effort doing research, even just like blogging or tweeting or whatever and that would have been more educational. Or just reading on my own would be more educational, more socially useful. And maybe more productive for terms of starting a career later. I think the argument you can make is something that there's an area of utility function that's non concave. Usually going from fourth to third in your class. Very, very little benefit, but going from, say fourth to first is a big benefit because you get this like title valedictorian, maybe they give you some benefits later on and so actually putting in that little bit of extra effort to be valedictorian is worth it. I think there's also the argument you can make that it's not really about the optimization problem but it's about the values or the habits you form. I think I'm a believer in values or habits of excellence. I Am deeply engaging with things and so part of developing these habits and naturally came doing well. I think the other way it's inefficient is perhaps something like the peer group sorting wasn't right. And you usually probably do best in terms of learning, and intellectual exchange when you're not either at the very top or the very bottom of your peer group, you want to be in the middle. And in that way, it would be inefficient. 


This brings me to another thing I've been thinking about which people are talking about the Ivy League, they should make them bigger. There's this argument, "Oh, we should make Harvard bigger so they should admit more people."  I think the opposite. I think we should make them smaller. So, if you think about Columbia there's just a very large variation in the individual ability of the students, and in fact you could probably pre-select for that at the time of admission. Columbia has the Scholars Program, which is maybe the top 10% of people upon admission. And those ended up also just being the smartest people throughout the time at Columbia. So maybe we should create a Columbia that's a 10th of the size. There're only the people that are admitted to the Scholars Program, and then there is actually an even better peer group which has all sorts of benefits in terms of these are the people you take classes with and so on.


Ben Yeoh (11:11): I think that there is a kind of argument for that because I think it's slightly the wrong question although it's the question from an economist mind because efficiency is maybe not the only goal in something like being a valedictorian. But where you would sort say, just that very top, 1% or 10% and to a different class. I think if they're going to make transformational ideas or changes that would work, but also part of what you said is that the top 10% can bring up the median or the mean. So, I don’t know whether it might be more important to bring out more mean or medium or say second quarter students or thinkers, so that they can look at the top decile, and improve or aspire. Or whether it's more important to solve that top decile for them to improve on this by the way, I wouldn't have an answer for that.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (12:01): I think it's really all about the externalities of the world. There are very large externalities in terms of empowering smart, talented people to really fully realize their potential. The new ideas they have, the inventions, the artistic creations.  I think it's actually quite important to realize this. I think, for example, in Germany. People are very on to this egalitarian thing. You can't have different educational institutions for people with higher abilities and so on because that would be unfair, and that's really denying the whole point, or a big part of the point, which is that you want to support talented people so they create these externalities for everybody else. And it's part of the reason why I think this sorting is valuable, the type that Ivy's already does, is when you put a lot of smart people together. Great things happen. They help each other learn and they accelerate their progress but then they have discussions and new ideas come together and think of all the companies that have come out of Harvard or whatever. So, to some extent it already works out where all the smartest people at Columbia find each other.  But I still think there would be benefits to just having an even smaller Colombia with only these people.


Ben Yeoh (13:15): I think this idea that if you look at successful inventions or patents, the originator, whether that's the company or a person maybe gets 5% of the value or 10% of the value, but the world gets 90% of the value. I'm often telling people...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (13:28): Bigger. If you think about social value of research, something like 98% of that is not captured by the inventor.


Ben Yeoh (13:36): It could be even bigger than that, and I still think that aspirin is going to go on for another 100 years creating value and you had a patent on it. Aspirin has a complicated history but for a very relatively short length of time [Inaudible: 13:51] pharmaceuticals. I guess reflecting on your Columbia experience was there anything very unexpected or very much expected from when you entered and left and go, "WOW. That wasn't what I thought it was going to be at all or that was exactly how I thought, American students would be."


Leopold Aschenbrenner (14:08): COVID was the main thing during the four years that was unexpected, but that's not very interesting. I think one of the things I was surprised by was the thing I was saying earlier about just the variation in the students. I think there's incredibly brilliant people who I met. People that are my friends now but there's also actually a surprising amount of people there who are pretty uninterested. They're doing the work because they think they need to get their college degree, elite college degree so they can get a good job or whatever. They're not intellectually, academically interested. They spend a lot of time watching Netflix. I don't know, that's not great. So, in terms of other things that sort of surprised me at the beginning is somewhat opposed to what I just said but I think one sort of culture shock initially coming from Germany was the American work ethic. So, in Germany, university means you're going out, five days a week and maybe you spend one day a week, on actually studying. And in general, despite some of the people who are less academically inclined, the overall work ethic was very high, and people were really putting their heart and soul on things. I think that was quite important for me to see and soak in, at even a young enough age where I could still change my habits or something like that. Working hard is very critical to everything. That was an interesting cultural difference.


Ben Yeoh (15:55): I agree with that conscientiousness part. So, my high school here in London, we had Saturday school for all my high school going through and because I did Sciences at Cambridge, we had to do experiments on the Saturday as well, whereas the guys doing humanities and you only do one thing at a British university. They would have one tutorial or a couple of classes a week and for four days they would really be doing nothing which was surprising. I guess my looking at US university, although maybe this is universities, overall, as I thought they had a very strange and maybe complicated but very strange relationship with alcohol. It wasn’t really healthy at all, and I still really ponder this, and maybe that was 18 or not or drinking and stuff and so it goes undercover but it generally didn’t feel very healthy for a lot of these 18, 19, 20, 21-year-olds. I guess it’s not legal to drink in the US until over 21.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (16:52): I think the people who indulge in that are the sort of type...I ended up not being this type of student that was associated with it. I think there are some unhealthy relationships or something but those generally tend to be the people who are less academically interested. They're there because they feel like they have to, they're not there because they really love it.


Ben Yeoh (17:13): So, you put them in the minority or at least...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (17:16): I don't know. They're probably not a minority, but there's like a lot of self-selections that go on over the four years at least if you're doing it right. And you end up associating with a very particular group of people or at least I ended up doing that and that was great for me. But it also doesn't mean I have a great pulse on what the median Columbia student was doing. So, for example the wokeness stuff that people complain about at campuses. I read about it too and all the things’ people say [Cross Talking]. But I didn't interact with it that much, so it was just my experience.


Ben Yeoh (17:53): You have strong ties to Germany, as does Adam too, and I think you took his course.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (17:58): I took his course, it was great.


Ben Yeoh (17:59): What do you think is most misunderstood about Germany and you can extend this to kind of Austria and Europe, if you have bigger thoughts which I think you do. Well, I would agree. I found this kind of German university...Actually, because they've got the technical university route where you can become a master carpenter or the equivalent, which we don't have in some places which I think is quite interesting. Yet at the same point in time, they have this egalitarian thing which means, the professorships can't sort well as you were saying, as a kind of interesting tension. But I don't have a long view of the history of Germany as you probably do or as Tooze does. So, I'd be interested in what you think is misunderstood and also what you learnt coming to America to learn from someone else about your home country.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (18:50): Well, this is funny. I think in some way, I must admit some of my previous ignorance here where I didn't really have a great sense of German history pre the 20th century. I think the main thing that I took away from the Tooze course is just the richness of German history. The rise of pressure from this total dead end, sort of a stand basket of Europe and how they became this Spartan state and then the unification of Germany under Bismarck. There's a real rich history there and it’s a lot of interesting things. I basically hadn't internalized this at all. So, I think you learn the very basic facts but it's surprising after going to German school for a long time. The main thing I learned about was Order 1, Order 2, the 20th century. I think it's funny, but it took me coming to America and to learn from [Tooze] to appreciate the longer view of German history. Suddenly it's also funny because the pre-World War Two Germany seems very different from the Germany that I know. I guess the Germany that I know I get some very negatives on it. How do I summarize, maybe the best way to say it is this? Every time you have an idea, they come to you with all the reasons it won't work and why it's a terrible idea, and why we should just be passive and never do anything, and very, very sclerotic very stagnant in that sense.


Ben Yeoh (20:31): You've commented, "I think that Germans seem to know more US politicians than German politicians themselves." What do you think of that?  I don't know German culture enough, but we have this expression of almost tall poppy syndrome, whether that's an idea or anything out. Several commentators, you might have mentioned it, I think Jeff Bezos has mentioned it, "Be a weirdo stand up, be individual think of ideas," and that doesn't do so well in a place which doesn't want to have any tall poppies. What do you think? Is that something to do with the political climate or is it just the culture which is built up post that Second World War? 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (21:16): It's worth emphasizing that tall poppy thing. It's really incredible the extent to which this is the case in Germany. They really, really, really hate anyone that deviates from the norm. This is just my constant experience in Germany which is why I had to leave because I did deviate from the norm. And they don't want to acknowledge, for example, that there's differences in talent and that some people are maybe smarter, they need a different form of education and that's completely anathema to their thinking. Or that we want entrepreneurs to create great companies or that we want inventors. This is really contrary to their type of thinking which is very unfortunate. 


Ben Yeoh (21:59): But I have the impression that many have an arts counterculture but maybe that's only in bits of Berlin or bits of Hamburg. So, is that not true?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (22:08): For a bit but not really. Not anymore. I think the perspective shift that I had to do this course is that it wasn't always this way. This is sort of a more recent thing and to some extent it's the cataclysms of the 20th century. Though I think it's interesting to think about when it actually shifted. Did it shift with the Second World War? So, if you think about German universities, for example, there were the premier universities at the end of the 19th century. And I think the naive model I used to have is that with the Second World War, this is when German universities started to decline, and American Universities became great. But this doesn't seem to be the case so there’s a bunch of data, and that was recently compiled by an economist at Columbia, Miguel Urquiola, but he recently wrote a book 'Markets, Minds and Money' about the rise of American universities. And the interesting thing in his data is you've looked at the decline of German universities that happened much earlier. Basically, it already happened at the beginning of the 20th, a very early 20th century. So, what the shift there is, it's not quite clear to me yet, but there seems to have been some sort of shift there that was earlier, and I mean I think his story about the rise of American universities that there's competition in American Universities, and the German universities reduced status. to be able to adapt, to rise to the importance of research.


Ben Yeoh (23:43): I see that there's been a similar critique of UK universities because really, it centres around Oxford and Cambridge. And, there’s some evidence that whether intentionally or not, Oxford and Cambridge have essentially suppressed all other university competitions in the UK for arguably selfish reasons but that is why you haven't got greater...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (24:05): But at least you have Oxford and Cambridge. We don't have an Oxford and Cambridge in Germany. We have nothing! It's a barren landscape, it's disastrous. This is bad because there's also...


Ben Yeoh (24:16): Well maybe that's your life purpose, you've got to go back and find one of these. Not a charter city, but a charter university.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (24:22): I've been seriously thinking about this, and I think this is one of the bad side effects of this, that there's no competent leadership class. There are no good journalists. All the German journalists are just terrible. 


Ben Yeoh (24:34): Although Merkel comes across as competent. Is it notable that she's the only German politician I know?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (24:40): I would question some of her competence. She really wrecked the Eurozone, for example. There's no good economist. You can criticize the extreme American focus on you're going to elite universities and the elite class that comes out of it. I don't deny that there's a downside. But having no competent, smart people who are leading your country, I think that's also pretty bad. Because it is true that Germany is a leadership role in the European Union and European Union still matters. So, in this total denial of leadership, I worry that this will have bad consequences for example if you think about the whole...


Ben Yeoh (25:34): And it's bad for the world right not just them. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (25:36): That's the thing. Think about the rivalry with China right now. If this ends up heating up more, I think it might end up being true that Europe plays a key role. If Europe ends up uniting with the United States that immediately doubles the economic output, the size of the economic bloc that's trying to get from China or something like that. But my impression of European leadership is that all they want to do is sharp back and not deal with it and go on living their comfortable lives. So, it doesn't sound great to me.


Ben Yeoh (26:10): Would your critique of Germany then extend to Austria, also other parts of Europe because I think at least in nominal GDP terms Germany is still richer than say the UK and France and even the Netherlands is richer than the UK. Although the UK has these interesting pockets where if you look at the -- Actually Oxford, Cambridge, London sort of hub triangle, it really bounces up the whole average of the UK...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (26:36): Germany still does quite well but this is another thing. Germany feels a lot poorer than the United States. I think it's also because I was in New York City and New York City is richer. But it's crazy. I think even Germany, which supposedly has the highest GDP per capita in Europe, feels a lot poorer than the US.


Ben Yeoh (27:00): Do you extend your critique to a lot of the Eurozone?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (27:05): Probably, I just don't know that much about them. Germany's the one in which I would know very well.


Ben Yeoh (27:13): Staying in Europe for one touch longer. It would just be hopping over to Switzerland, which does seem a little bit different. Is there something that they got right?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (27:22): [] Yes, Switzerland seems different in culture in some ways. They seem less anti elite. Much more conservative politically but also in a general outlook on things.


Ben Yeoh (27:44): So, it's not a system of the kind of federated central government, tension or not it's more of a cultural issue on tall poppy...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (27:55): I think it's massively cultural. It extends across the political spectrum and extends across different spheres of politics or journalism or universities. I think it's very much cultural.


Ben Yeoh (28:09): You seem quite interested in geopolitics, geoeconomics. Do you have a view of Japan then? 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (28:18): Not really, No. I don't know enough about Japan.


Ben Yeoh (28:19): Alright, we'll skip that one then. Maybe if you'd go back, if you had more time, you could have done a core course in Japan to add to your body of knowledge. I'm not that familiar with it as well, but I think it's very interesting that I think Patrick Collison had one of these as one of his ongoing questions. Why I mentioned it is that he views that built infrastructure/culture/a lot of institutions in both Switzerland and Japan are so much better countrywide than in so many other countries. And so, I would say this interestingly if you want to do this travel trip. I would agree if you travelled and train across Germany as I've done, you will look at the weather or you said that there's some bits which strike, maybe it's rural but actually quite cool, like not that rich. Whereas do you don't get that same sense in Switzerland, or Japan? There are some poor parts of Japan but you go around and a lot of it seems really rather well done. And he comments that he doesn't quite know why this is the case, and their cultures are quite different, so there might be something. It was an unanswered question, that's why I threw it out there in case you might have some radical insight. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (29:25): I think you could say the same thing about Germany. People do idealize it like the trains are nice in Germany, like the ICEs. You ride them and there's no wobble or anything at 200 miles an hour. And a lot of the infrastructure is good. The towns are pretty, the whole medieval style towns. In some way I think this can be delusive though because it's just another symptom of this decadence or however you want to call it where you want to make this life as comfortable and as nice as you can without actually having grander ambitions about creating something. In some ways, you know, the United States is not as pretty. You drive around the northeast quarter and it's pretty ugly, crumbling infrastructure but it's harsher. In some ways this harshness is part of what it's about. And if we made things too nice. If it was all just fun and games, then you would lose some of that energetic spirit.  And this thing I mentioned about Germany being poor. Yes, some towns and so on are poor, but you don't have the same high incomes that you do in the United States. So, if you're a professional in the US, you'll earn pretty high incomes here, this is just not very unfamiliar in Germany. Like the starting salaries, a lot of people out of Colombia are much higher than anyone I ever knew in Germany.


Ben Yeoh (30:55): Well, I think you've got a lot of family's monies. Some of it is connected to family companies [Inaudible: 31:02].


Leopold Aschenbrenner (31:03): If you look at German billionaires, they all have inherited wealth, where the US billionaires which they... [Inaudible:31:09].


Ben Yeoh (31:10): Maybe that's partly VC software and things but it's not only. Some of them are more the industry, or the knowledge industry. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (31:16): A lot of them are. This is a big difference. It's actually a good stat, where did billionaires get their money.


Ben Yeoh (31:24): Yeah. Did they inherit? So, I do wonder whether that is a German problem. And then it’s actually interesting that you are so interested in egalitarianism. But wouldn't want to do an inheritance tax where you give all of that money away to something else to start again, or something like that. I don't view them as that [Inaudible: 31:40]. So, you mentioned that we watch too much Netflix. Is this just a US Columbia student problem? A median student problem? Or is this a broader phenomenon that you think?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (31:55): It's probably a broader phenomenon. It's probably like loss of meaning in the modern world, not just some people but for a lot of people. You have food on the table, and you have a house over your head and things rumble along, and they should have no existential threat to you and so what is it that you have no more religion? You say there's no god you're worship so what is it about. But I think that's the reason I focused on this Columbia type or elite type populations because you're getting externality. This sort of people ends up just watching Netflix then when you could have been using this time to be doing great things.


Ben Yeoh (32:46): Yeah, opportunity costs. Do you think the counter argument would be that of a Luddite fallacy? We said the same about newspapers, we said the same about printing them with the internet. But I think your point would be that there's an addictive quality that is, you might have autonomy when you make the choice to do it, but a little bit like smoking, once you're addicted you've actually lost your autonomy. So, in that way it's more insidious, is that your further argument or is now...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (33:13): I think in general, I’m pretty negative on most of the classic vices, like alcohol or drugs, smoking, or maybe Netflix. And I think most of the time you get some self-regulation where it is looked down upon and then people look down upon taking hard drugs, and socially it ends up working out where people don't do it. Or playing too many video games is looked down upon. But it's kept in check whereas I feel like Netflix has been in a weird way normalized, where it's okay, to spend all your time watching Netflix. 


Ben Yeoh (33:49): Is it a problem of Netflix programs being too good? If they're a little bit brass...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (33:53): I think it's very addictive. I think people are very bad at dealing with addictions. Whether that be Netflix. whether that be drugs, whether that be gambling, like now with Bitcoin and Robin Hood or whatever. I think there's actually a quite negative development, for example with marijuana and so on, people are embracing that 'anything goes' philosophy where it's cynical about human nature. No, people can't handle this. 


Ben Yeoh (34:23): The downside of libertarianism


Leopold Aschenbrenner (34:25): And so, you [Inaudible: 34:25] constrain them or something. 


Ben Yeoh (34:27): Have you watched the documentary, Speed Cubers? What do you think I could learn from cubing?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (34:35): I used to be very into Rubik's Cubes, this is how I met my best friend. He solved the Rubik's Cube World Record back when I was quite a bit younger. I used to be into Rubik's cubes. I had a YouTube channel, and it wasn't that fast but it's pretty good. It was maybe the 60th in Germany. I never got into competitions. I don't know what you get out of it.


Ben Yeoh (35:08): So, you memorize all these algorithms of pattern recognition so that you can insert it.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (35:12): There's basically three layers. The third layer you do with algorithms, the first two you do by thinking about it. It was a fun spatial exercise. like one course I really liked at Columbia was topology, which is very abstractly thinking about space and geometry. In some ways that applied very similar skills like spatially visualizing how you're turning things. I think the other thing about cubing was at the time, there was a good community of people that I didn't have otherwise. It was one of the first things that turned me on to weird Internet communities. 


Ben Yeoh (35:53):  And it's a weird elite sport, right?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (35:55): Exactly and I think weird Internet communities can be very valuable. Now I'm in another weird internet community, which is The Extended [Inaudible:36:02] Universe on Twitter.  I've met a lot of people through that or through emergent ventures. I think that can be very valid but first, inculcating a certain sense of weirdness and difference in you and giving you a broad space of opportunities. I think that's great.


Ben Yeoh (36:25): Sure, well maybe as you mentioned emergent ventures. I get the impression that it was meaningful for you to be able to go at 15 to Columbia and then without it would have been a little bit tricky, and I run a small micro grant thing as well. I'm not as famous as Tyler, but I think it is really interesting that we don't support more individual people, particularly those who might have quirky brilliance, or maybe they're just quirky because you're young and uncertain. Who knows quite how brilliant people will be? So, I wonder whether you'd reflect on funding individual people or the idea of emergent ventures and what you got out of it.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:04): Can I tell the story of how the emergent ventures grants happened?


Ben Yeoh (37:08): Sure, please do it. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:10): This is great. It also speaks to the unbureaucratic nature of it. A year and a half ago almost 2 years ago. I had written this paper of existential risk and growth and Tyler came upon it and he really liked it and he posted it on his website. So, he said "If you know Leopold, tell him to drop me a line. So, I wrote to him. We were emailing and this is maybe Wednesday or Tuesday, he goes, “Can you come down to Washington DC today we have a conference."  So completely out of the blue. 


Ben Yeoh (37:45): And you were in Germany at the time?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:47): No, I was in New York.


Ben Yeoh (37:48): You weren't, okay.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (37:49): Then I came down there. I arrived and he goes "Yeah, so this is the conference for all the emergent ventures granters. To make it fair. We must give you an Emergent Ventures grant too. Think about what you can use this [ ] It was great because it's just out of the blue, very quick and I think almost the most valuable thing I got out of emergent Ventures is meeting all the people at the conference, but then also, most of all, the past year or two, getting to know the community of people online. And because it's a lot of brilliant driven but also perhaps most importantly very quirky people who are trying to create things, but not on the standard career path. I think otherwise you're at Columbia and people are doing a very narrow set of career paths. And I think it's easy to get stuck into one of those dead ends. I'm in the Bay now so I'm actually meeting...this is part of the grant so I can come to the Bay. Now I'm here and I'm actually able to meet a lot of these people in person. And that's been really fantastic. It's a great community.


Ben Yeoh (38:58): I'd say this, your social capital is building up so maybe it was very efficient, to be valedictorian, so you could do that, and you've got all of this building up on the side.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (39:08): Social capital, inspiration, the combustion of ideas. There's a lot of ideas that I think are floating around in space and that can’t read a book about them, but people talk about them.  By osmosis it really shifts your worldview. I think this is here, where it comes in, that it's quite good that I was at Columbia and was doing this quite early because there's still a lot of plasticity and I'm not quite set in my ways yet. And so, for example, coming from Germany, one thing I learned was the work ethic, the discipline. The other thing was really embracing the weirdness and the disagreeableness. Where in Germany it was always about no you should be like everybody else.


Ben Yeoh (39:57): Great I can see that. So maybe picking up on a couple of other things that I've seen that you've done. Do you think subway funding needs to be radically changed? And now that you've been in California a little bit, what do you think you should do about California transport? Is it tunnels under the earth or could a radical different way of funding public transport just change it and they just need to be more radical in their thinking?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (40:24): I think what you're referring to is a thing I did in my freshman year of college. I wrote a proposal for changing the funding system. I think in hindsight, this was a very bad proposal now that I think about it. So, I don't actually have any good ideas for fixing subways, I'm sorry about that. But it's actually funny. I only really encountered economics at the end of my freshman year in college. And this is probably from taking Intro Ecom. It was one of the most world changing courses. Just this way of thinking. And I really encountered it quite late, but it also very much shifted my opinions on other things. It's a very powerful framework to think about, like, what are the incentives? Supply and Demand, and those kinds of things. 


Ben Yeoh (41:10): So sadly, no ideas for fixing US infrastructure. Because I do think they could unlock a lot if they somehow pursued that


Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:16): I think it's overrated. I don't think it matters that much.


Ben Yeoh (41:18): Right, it's the people more than the infrastructure.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:20): The benefits of better infrastructure like proper roads are small. I think they matter a lot for quality of life maybe. There's this thing I mentioned about " German towns are pretty or you have great subway systems." I think it irks a lot of people aesthetically. In the grand scheme of things.


Ben Yeoh (41:50): If you put American culture, with German infrastructure you don't actually get that much better thing out of it? 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:55): Suppose you had perfect German infrastructure in the United States, then you have infrastructure. It improves the quality of life, but this is not what it's about. 


Ben Yeoh (41:56): It doesn't help to generate transformation.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (41:57): No, the whole point is the things that are advanced or that are important in the long term. And in fact, again, I think there's some value to having things be even harsher because if you make the quality of life too good, you make things too hedonistic then people will spend their 20s going out and hanging out. 


Ben Yeoh (42:15): Watching too much Netflix. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (42:16): Watching too much Netflix. The Berlin version of this is going clubbing every day. I want people to be generative and have ideas and work hard and build a great civilization.


Ben Yeoh (42:31): I was taken back a little bit about the Berlin night club culture. I went to Germany, Berlin, when I was about 14. Reading my age, this is almost 30 years ago, and they let you into nightclubs at 14 there and this is a whole thing. I remember everyone was screaming, drinking these things which are translated as green forest. So, there were these people, and I was going, "Is this really what teenage German kids do?" I don't know but it did seem to be definitely a thing.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (43:03): This is also the other thing. Americans have a lot of weird preconceptions about Europe. Very glorified where my responses were always "You only think it's great if you're earning an American income and then you're traveling to Europe." One of the things that's glorified is the drinking culture. Americans like to binge drink less than Europeans, they start later. My experience in Germany was that people start drinking very early. They drink a lot and it's not that great.


Ben Yeoh (43:28): There's also an interesting study that is done by drinks companies that show there are these moments of drink.  A lot of people drink sorrow, which is not a healthy way of drinking as opposed to, say, for joy, or something like that. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (43:44): In general, alcohol is one of the great underrated social ills of our society. A lot of people die from it. It ruins a lot of lives. Tyler is a big thing on this, but I think he's right about it.


Ben Yeoh (43:59): So, we mentioned long termism so we should talk about your paper which goes to lead to emergent ventures and everything. If I get in a non-technical sense of what you're suggesting is that, while there are some existential risks people talk about such as emergent AI, there are pandemics, there's climate change. Nuclear weapons would be the big one. And for a time because we're innovating and we're creating these new things, new technologies. That existential risk of us deleting human life might go up, but then at some point it might steadily fall because these new technologies, let's extend nuclear, that we had some clean energy, cheap energy source. Would then mean that our existential risk goes down, and therefore our imperative should be on growth, and certainly not degrowth and certainly not all these other things and that would be a follow up on to your thing that quality of life is okay and let's have German infrastructure in America. But if we're not innovating our way away from this existential risk curve, then we're going to fail as a human species. Do I have that thesis right? Would you like to add anything to that? and [Cross talking: 45:09], which I don't quite fully get but how are you evolving your thinking here.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (45:17): The idea of this curve is that you're developing new technologies and new technologies can be risky, think of nuclear weapons or maybe we're bioengineering and that's maybe going to cause a pandemic. Very relevant nowadays. And so, some of these technologies might even be so bad or the risk might be so bad that it could wipe out all of humanity. The question is, how does growth affect that? So, you can imagine a world in which growth, McGregor makes it worse because he developed these technologies, and the underlying mechanism of what's happening in the paper, is that as people grow richer, they care more about safety because they care more about life.  You grow richer, you have your basic material needs satisfied and things like preserving health, avoiding risks, this becomes more important. People invest in safety technology, so you might invest in mRNA vaccine and pandemic preparedness and that means you can counter pandemics. So hopefully that will be enough so we can bend the risk curve, and ultimately risk and follow zero exponentially.


Now this is a moderate parameter world. There are also two other worlds. There's one world in which the world is really robust. It's not very fragile at all, in which case we would never expect the risks to rise because we always get this downward directory. It doesn't really look to be the world we're in because we are inventing new dangerous technologies that do look like risk is growing.  Then there's another world which is worlds away, sickly in which existential risk is inevitable. There's no way to prevent that even if we put all our society's efforts into it. The danger of nuclear war is so high, or the craziest person who gets access to nuclear weapons and maybe nuclear weapons are eventually $10,000 because we're improving technology, and then there's no way to prevent it. And so, we're going to go extinct anyway. That would be sad and it's actually quite possible we live in that world, but then you have to do the expected value calculations where on a world in which we go extinct anyway, there's not a long future and there's not that much potential human value. Whereas in a world in which we don't and there's a possibility of us not going extinct. That's a world in which we have a very long run potential future, a lot of potential. That's where most of the expected value of the future comes from. I think functionally it makes sense to act as if we're in that medium world.


Ben Yeoh (47:49): Does it make a difference, your timeframe? Let's use Tyler because he's said, maybe we've got a few 100 years to a few thousand years? Like 700 to 3000 years before we faced this existential threat. Whereas if you've got a million, not quite stretching out to infinity. Even if we're still only growing up to 2 or 3%, or even if it goes down to 1.  1% compounded by a million is a really, really large number, with some of these things on growth. So, is there a time set difference?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (48:24): A bunch of thoughts on this. First, Tyler's 700-year timeframe. It's quite funny in a way, this actually bothers me a bit. I'm not quite sure what's funny about this. Tyler is basically arguing that we live in a very fragile world in which existential risks aren't habitable. So, this argument is something nuclear weapons are going to get cheap because of better technology and so eventually they're going to be close to $10,000. There's going to be something like a crazy terrorist attack, or something crazy enough that they're going to destroy the world with this. You think this is basically [Inaudible: 48:59]. This is a plausible world in my paper. this sort of fragile world. But in that world, it's not actually clear if growth is good because in that world the reason that growth is inevitable is because of this better technology that is riskier. Therefore, the better nuclear weapons. That world might want a slow growth so that we can reduce risk and so have longer timeframes. Instead of 700 years, we have 1500 years. I don't actually think Tyler's growth argument is necessarily true in the short time horizon. 

  

Now I don't think it also makes sense to focus on the short time horizon because I think it is plausible enough that we can contain the threat of WMBs and in general the risk with safety technology. Maybe it means having radiation monitors on every street corner and then we can counter the $10,000 nukes. If you think the moderately fragile world is possible in which existential risk is not inevitable, a very long-time span is possible. Most of the potential value of the future is in that world. And you mentioned growth compounding. If you think about long timescales, this is potentially the idea of long termism. Humanities existed for modern humans for a million years. But really if you think about that, we could have millions and millions of years ahead of us, maybe a billion years of human civilization. Most potential people to ever exist or in the future. And so, one argument is that the most important thing if we care about the future [Inaudible: 50:39], is that we must avoid extinction. That's an existential risk. If we go extinct now, we foreclose this whole potential future. Another argument you can make, this can be a Tyler counter argument you can make based on the zero-source discount rate, is that we should be growing as quickly as we can because of its compounding value of growth. But then the key question becomes how these interact, and that is the goal of what I'm trying to think about in the paper.


Ben Yeoh (51:12): And where do you currently sit between those views as it's evolving?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (51:18): On the growth, I think I'm not as persuaded that the exact rate of growth is the most important thing we should be focusing on. Say we grow for 100 years and grow at 2% instead of 1%. That means a delay. That means colonizing the universe is delayed by some amount of time because we grew slower. The lost value of that delay is dwarfed by the lost value of if we went extinct. We didn't only lose 100 years of delay but also all the millions of years of potential future in human civilization. I'm less concerned about it. I think on the margin, should growth be a little bit faster? Should growth be a little bit slower? The effect on risk really matters. And I'll get back to the effect of risk in a bit. The one thing I am concerned about is what if we don't just slow growth, but we go all the way to zero, similar to a Dark Ages scenario. I've been thinking about this a lot quite recently and I think this is actually quite a realistic worry. 


There is a realistic worry where the Dark Ages shows that something like this is possible. I think that especially, now that people are very rich already. They have pretty high levels of material comfort so there's less incentive to escape. Then there's a few specific mechanisms that I think point to this potentially happening. I think the most important one is declining fertility rates and I'll get to that in a second. In terms of what's the effect on the rest. There's my paper which argues that faster growth is better because we're growing richer earlier, which means we can care more about risk earlier, which means you invest more in safety earlier, which means we should bend this risk curve earlier. I think there's a few good counter arguments to that. One of the counter arguments is, what matters is transition risk. So rather than a certain level of technological development corresponding to a certain level of risk. A relevant risk is something like AI. We live in a world pre-AI and then suddenly AI determines the future of human civilization. There should be a one-time transition and we want to make this transition go well. I think if you believe something like that, we probably want slower growth so we can make this transition go better. It might happen a bit later when we're a bit wiser. 


Something else you could argue is, what matters is political coordination. Political coordination happens at a different timescale than economic time. If you make economic changes go faster then political coordination can't keep up and we won't be able to do the relevant regulations. I think on the margin, I'm probably a bit more convinced by the case of my paper which shows the story of why you want to develop safety technologies. If you think about the pandemic, the way we ultimately conquered it is the mRNA vaccines for better technology rather than like political intervention social distancing. But I think it's still a very, very open question, and I wouldn't be surprised if it went either way.


Ben Yeoh (54:38): Great. Maybe I might ask you that and then the context of climate change. So, I guess two or three points of observation. Someone like Nassim Taleb would comment on climate change being a potential ruin risk. So that's why he's worried because it's an existential threat, multiplicative as well. Again, because there's so many parts of our current economy, which are hard to abate, we're going to need a lot of innovation, probably to combat some of what's happening with climate change. You've also got the problem with whatever it is, there's about a billion people in the world today who are living on less than $2 a day. So, we need growth obviously to bring those up. Then you have all the degrowth arguments about if there are issues on transition or planetary boundaries, or either disorderly transition from late policy change or late technological change or transition risk because something happens to an ice shelf. 


But we don't really have a good understanding of complex systems which could have an upside so it might not be as risky as we are today, but it could have real downsides because we're not able to cope with that. Is this a way where you can think of resolving some of the degrowth arguments with the growth arguments that we need? And does this argue for a certain amount of growth, whether we should be doing more, or at a steady pace, or how? I guess this intersects with both the political, the economic and the technology. I'm sure you've thought about it, I'd be interested in your view.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (56:07): I just don't think climate changes are anywhere close to the most important risks. I agree with...you mentioned you attributed this to Tom but [Inaudible: 56:17] there's a bunch of work on this, and I think perhaps the most important worry about climate change are the tail scenarios, maybe there's feedback loops that are unexplained. I think one thing that worries me here is that we still don't seem to have reduced the uncertainty on this much like the last few decades. There's a lot of uncertainty over the climate sensitivity like sensitivity of temperature to increase the carbon concentration. There's potentially a fat tail there and that can go really wrong. The median scenario of climate change is not that bad, or it's bad if it's a few percentage points of GDP. It's a lot of disruption but it's similar to say pandemics or something like that. 


Ben Yeoh (56:58): We can adapt. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (57:02): We can adapt because it's a big deal but it's not existential. I think the real existential threat comes from tail scenarios. I think based on what people have looked at when they thought about the probabilities, it seems like the tail on climate change probabilities where the risks that this is an existential risk that wipes out the human race is much smaller than the rest that say, the bioengineering pandemic or a nuclear war. People are not thinking about nuclear enough, but a nuclear war can still happen very, very easily. Things like AI can lead to wiping out humanity.  Climate change is still an important thing, but I think it's roughly on the order of national pandemics, bioengineering pandemics. Just as we should be doing a lot more pandemic preparedness, I think we should be doing a lot more climate change. So really this is likely to be on the margins. I think the other thing I'll say is that climate change maybe it's too far to say it's solved, but it seems to be solved like other people are on it. right the reason I'm not personally inclined to work on it is that everyone else is thinking already.


Ben Yeoh (58:10): It's not an unknown risk or a little-known risk.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (58:15): Elon Musk is solving it. He's developing his technologies and then you will have everyone in your office or whatever and all the young people in the US are very politically engaged about it. Is there a chance that things like this happen in sub optimally that were too slow? Yes. Do I think we're going to solve it also? Yes. And I think also that a pretty good insurance mechanism with climate change is carbon capture. So, if things get bad.  we can technically do carbon capture.


Ben Yeoh (58:45): It would cost us a lot...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (58:48): It would cost us a lot but there's an insurance mechanism there. Whereas, if you had a nuclear war. There's not a similar insurance mechanism.


Ben Yeoh (58:59): I get that. So, it's a top 10 risk or top 5 risk maybe even, but it's probably not a top 3 risk, or to your point, it's just not undiscovered or not... The risk of going to the dark ages from it quite de minimis as you were talking.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (59:16): I think it's still a real risk. I think it's worth worrying about. I just don't think it's the most tractable for a young person. They're starting their career and there's enough other people working on it. So, let's figure out something that maybe, I would even say the same thing about pandemics. I think two years ago pandemics was a big thing. I was worried about the people who were working at institutes. If you ask me, should you work on pandemic preparedness now, I don't know.  This seems like other people are going to cover this now after COVID.


Ben Yeoh (59:46): So, what are your top three? I guess it's nuclear. Is it emergent AI or bio-engineered pandemics? Are those your three which would worry you? Or the whole system, like you say that the system is not set up for either innovation or growth or policy thinking around this.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:02): I think nuclear is very underrated. There's actually a great book by Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers guy. He was the nuclear war planner, and he recently released a book about Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. I think nuclear is underrated. I think partially the reason I'm very attuned to this is I feel proof from family history, I'm still very rooted in the Cold War or something like that. I think nuclear is underrated. I also think what is underrated is...


Ben Yeoh (1:00:27): Even in Pakistan. I don't quite know the ideal improbabilities in markets all the time. It seems to me nonzero and probably above 1% of a chance of having it. Which seems ridiculously large for an existential risk. That's probably not quite an existential risk but...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:43): It's potentially really bad.


Ben Yeoh (1:00:45): But it puts quite a significant...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:45): There's a lot of uncertainty over what nuclear winter would look like. I think emergent AI is underrated by society at large but is probably overrated by the types of people I talked to. 


Ben Yeoh (1:00:58): Overrated by Silicon Valley 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:00:59): I don’t know, even Silicon Valley but the EA people who are concerned about AI. I think my view on AI analysis is by short timelines like a GPT-3 style language model that's human level. I think that's plausible to come in 5-10 years. I just don't think that will be the sci fi AI that people are very stuck on.  I think the more realistic scenario is this is a human level language model. Computers have always been able to deal with numbers well. Now they can deal with language as well and assist with drafting reports or...


Ben Yeoh (1:01:44): Customer service. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:01:47):  I think it'll be very transformative. Maybe on the scale of the internet. The internet changed everything, and this is going to change everything. But I don't think it will be a fundamentally discontinuous shift in human civilization, where economic growth is suddenly 20% a year. People have these crazy ideas. That said, I'm very uncertain about this. I believe that AI could go lots of different ways. And so given this uncertainty, I think it's still a top thing to worry about.


Ben Yeoh (1:02:13): [Inaudible: 01:02:13] not raising the existential risk probably, did it? Internet. So, you could say, AI probably would not, although maybe [Inaudible: 1:02:19]


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:02:20): I think the issue is the uncertainty over what it looks like. I think the median scenario is something like the human level language models. It's not even just the existential risks, it's just much less transformative than people think. It'll just be through the next set of tools that people have. But again, I want to emphasize the uncertainty, I think the uncertainty here is very long and developing very rapidly. It is possible we just have human level intelligence and the superhuman level of intelligence.  The other thing that I think is very underrated, and I sort of hinted at this earlier, but I'd like to talk about it, is the shift in birth rates. So, all around the world birth rates are plummeting. They've been below 2, which is the replacement level, 2 per woman. In Western Europe for a long time and now they're in America. They've been below 2 in the Pacific. Essentially, the only place in the world where they're almost at two is in India, I think they're around 2, in South America, Latin America. The only place in the world where they're still substantially above two is Africa. But I think as Africa develops, as they get urbanized, they get educated, they're very likely to follow the pace that all the other countries in the world have done which is why the fertility rates are plummeting. They are plummeting, and they'll eventually fall below 2. So, I think within a few decades, maybe sooner, and we already are already facing this within the developed world. We have a situation where having less than two children per woman will lead to having a population decline. This is a dramatic shift from any time in the past, where we've had an exponentially growing population. 


I think this is a really underrated shift in the sense that once you have the shift, I think it gets locked in, in some way. If you think about people who were an only child, most of them also only want to have one child, maybe two children, but they're not thinking about having four children. Whereas people who come from families with four children, five children. They themselves also want to have a lot of kids. So, in some way these fertility preferences are very dependent on the size of family you came from. So, we have this shift where we end up shifting to lower fertility rates. I think it's a puzzle that we stay at those fertility rates. So, why is this bad that we have a population of climb or a steadying population. I think the most worrying thing here and there's great paper by Chad Jones about this, is the relationship to economic growth. So, in the Semi Endogenous Growth Models, which I think are the best growth models we have in economics, as you economically develop such as developing technology, ideas become harder to find and your ideas are exponential improvement. So, you pluck the low hanging fruit, you've invented the wheel, the next invention becomes a bit harder. And so, the way to compensate is that you must throw more and more people at it. This is a Nick Bloom paper; ideas are getting harder to find. It's the same idea as the original Chad Jones paper that was worked on from the 1990s. If you see this from the macro level, US economic growth has been steady, but we now have multiple times more people working on R&D. If you see this at the micro level, think about Moore's Law, chips are improving at a steady rate, but we must throw more and more people at it, 10x or more the amount of research at it to sustain because ideas are getting harder to find.

  

The flipside is if you stop growing the number of researchers, eventually we would have economic stagnation because ideas are getting harder to find. And so, the only way to sustain exponential growth is to keep growing the population. That's what we've had in the past. But once we get below 2 replacement fertility levels, you don't get a growing population anymore and then the result is what Chad Jones calls 'Empty Planet'.  You have a dwindling population due to the negative fertility and you have economic stagnation. And so that seems like a really depressing future. The future I want is what Chad Jones calls an 'Expanding Cosmos’. We have a growing population, growing economic output then we colonize the universe. I'm pretty worried about what it means to shift to this population declining world.


Ben Yeoh (1:06:39): Sure. So, I guess most countries so far when they tried policies to increase the birth-rate, I don't think any single one of them has worked from what I can tell. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:06:50): I wouldn't say they haven't worked, it's just that the effects are pretty small.


Ben Yeoh (1:06:54): Okay, small effects. But I would say they haven't worked because they haven't been enough to get it above back over 2. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:06:59): Sure.


Ben Yeoh (1:07:01): But I wonder if this becomes a more pronounced effect whether we will do more. So, I think you had an idea, whether you blogged about it or wrote a short paper about using child benefits as an upfront payment. I think if you were to give some populations $20,000, 30, 40, $50,000 to set them up at the start, you might get some sort of...We haven't had the margin thought about it as much yet. So, I do agree that it's an increasing problem, but I do wonder, not necessarily that we have an insurance mechanism, but we do have more, not even that much more extreme policies that we haven't really thrown at it yet because Policymakers haven't quite got their head around it. But you're right, it's definitely underappreciated...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:07:48): I have a few thoughts on this. It's a good point. So, first, I agree that I think we need to get much more ambitious and in our thinking about this. Right now, we're still in this weird liminal space where for example, Biden passes child tax credit, and some people have these explicitly perinatal rationales for it.  But generally, it has a kind of hidden purpose that people don't want to talk about whereas I'm like "No, you need to talk about."  Hand families a big check like the ones that they have on prize shows when they walk out the delivery room. "Here's $50,000, Thank you for having a child." And you can justify this in very sober economics terms, which is that children have an externality, and in these economic growth models, an additional person is an additional person with ideas. The ideas they generate drive economic growth. So, you could think about this with the sober term 'externality’, but I think that you want to be more ambitious about it. 


Will that work, I don't know, I think really the big thing that is happening is the value shift, which is that becoming secular, educated and urbanized, so children are taught to do things because God wants you to, or you do it because it's economically important. You do it for your own hedonistic enjoyment, and the fact of the matter is people don't know that maybe they want to have one kid for their own hedonistic enjoyment. Once you think your kids are hedonistic enjoyment, you're not going to have a lot of kids. So, the thing I worry about is, I agree if we really went big now, maybe we can solve it. And I think this is one reason to really work on it now when you think about this. The reason I’m worried is if we don't do it now, we end up getting locked in. This is the thing I mentioned earlier, I think there's a lot of fertility preferences that surpass 'dependent', depending on what your parents had, what you're used to, what your culture is surrounded by. Once we have this culture where everyone is only having 1.3 children on average, then that becomes pretty embedded, and I think it becomes much harder to shift upwards again. [Inaudible: 1:09:53] This is on the Chad Jones paper, and I don't know if I'll be able to explain it in a way that makes sense, but there's a funny lock-in mechanism which is, if you have enough population decline, even like a social planner. If you delay implementing your fertility policies long enough, then optimal policy becomes not doing fertility subsidies and letting the population decline. The reason is once you have a dwindling population the per person effort to do research for the next increment of economic growth is high because you have less people. And so eventually the effort of additional growth becomes too high and becomes not worth anymore. This is...sorry I'm bad at explaining this, but the general idea is if you wait too long, you could become locked in. I think the more colloquial version of this is the [Inaudible: 1:10:52]. You have a really aging population, if it becomes too old and you only have a few children for too long, you end up in this very stagnant equilibrium.


Ben Yeoh (1:11:03): Yeah, one way path dependent like a one-way street, or one of those one-way locks that you can get through and then you suddenly can't come back, I think that's right.  I have a semi radical, it's not that radical at all policy thinking about this which solves two of the things that I'm thinking about that you've talked about is, I think you should do a carbon tax, and you should simply give all of that tax money back to people who have children. So, you're almost revenue neutral, but you just do redistribution. But the carbon tax is really a pricing signal because I don't actually think the tax amount is as important as knowing what externality is, and then actually you give it back. Then you have a slightly progressive thing because, typically, I think you might correct me if I'm wrong because I don't know as well. Socio-economically, you tend to have more children, or maybe if you are slightly poorer you can have this child benefit and it will affect you more. So, you just use that as your carbon dividend and have it as an almost universal benefit. It could be universal, and everyone can grow. That could be potentially a relatively popular policy because typically with the tax you don't see it but you're saying [Inaudible: 1:12:14], we'll give it to everyone, just have a child now.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:12:17): That sounds like a neat idea. I don't know what the sort of political manoeuvrings are. It seems, especially in the US, there’s always complicated deals that need to be worked out depending on what the different constituencies are.


Ben Yeoh (1:12:31): But why I think this could work is the whole increasing child thing appeals to quite a lot on the Right and certain Christian values and things like that. The carbon tax appeals to people and things on the left. And, both should appeal to economists of either colour who lose interest when you lean right or left. I think carbon tax is the way to do it. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:12:48): The funny thing though is that the Left is the one who's rejecting a carbon tax.  


[Cross talking 1:12:55] 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:13:00): Probably all economists in favour of carbon tax. In some ways I don't know if child subsidies are ultimately going to get us there because I think this underlying values shift is too large. I think the reluctance of people to have children is too large, and I don't know if people will ever be able to be that motivated by this idea of, "Oh, we should have another child for the economy," Which is essentially what you're saying.


Ben Yeoh (1:13:31): Yeah.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:13:32): You're saying we give them money because they need another child for the economy. And maybe the political resistance to that is too large. So, I wonder if the real solution to this is religion's resurgence. Maybe we all need to become Mormons.


Ben Yeoh (1:13:47): I guess this is the cultural point. So, speaking to Anton Howes, an innovation historian, he's got this thing about, we need to celebrate innovators. But this is the same thing as a cultural shift you need to show that, because you can do it the other way around. The emancipation, slavery became illegal because of the flipping around we celebrated freedom, or rather we thought that's what we should do morally. The same with women's vote or minority rights, and all these other things, there was a cultural shift. Humans decided that, as opposed to an economic shift, and people argue in the literature about the economic value of slaves so I can't quite figure out, but it really wasn't an economic argument either way. It was a moral cultural argument. So maybe you're right, the same would have to be made on the fertility take.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:14:35): Well, the Mormons do this very well. They really celebrate the family; the family is part of God's plan. They also have these interesting ideas. They have this idea of eternal family, so it's not just you're with your family while you're on earth but you're with your family in heaven and you're together forever. So, for example the wedding vows aren't till death do us part, which is the classic thing you hear, but it's for time and all eternity. So, this is part of the reason why there's a whole doctrinal or the logical reason why families are so essential, which relates to this eternal family. 


Ben Yeoh (1:15:08): Great. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:15:09): In general, the Mormon cultures seem to have very salvatory families. So maybe if we can't have everyone become Mormon, we can adopt some of these cultural ideas to celebrate families, like we want to celebrate inventors.


Ben Yeoh (1:15:25): And if we made our living conditions and our technological condition so much easier to have these families than it comes in place for...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:15:35): I think part of it might be technology, maybe you have technology to make it easier. But ultimately, I think that's probably the wrong way to think about it. In the sense that with having children there's always going to be a certain huge sacrifice associated with it. For a woman it's physically like childbirth, it's insane. Or the way your life shifts once you have this child, all the time and your priorities and money and so on. So, I really don't know if you're ever going to be able to convince people to have children if the framing is just "Oh we're doing this for your own enjoyment," "Oh this is we're going to make it easy for you.". Clearly hedonistic terms. I think there needs to be a higher calling for it or re-emphasize the cultural values of the importance of family.


Ben Yeoh (1:16:29): Cool. In honour of Tyler, we should do a little bit of "underrated/overrated", but I was going to do maybe a little twist, because this is something that you tweeted about, in reference to marginal revolution, which is what does shadow Tyler think? So, we can try that and...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:16:48): Phantom Tyler, yeah.


Ben Yeoh (1:16:49): Phantom Tyler, what do we think? We'll riff on some of those ideas. So biological warfare, underrated risk or overrated? 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:17:04): Underrated. I think Tyler would think it's underrated too.


Ben Yeoh (1:17:06): I agree. My fans and Tyler also agree. Inflation, thinking about inflation. So, what should we say, whether we should be worried about inflation? Overrated or underrated?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:17:25): Underrated by the Twitter mob. Probably overrated by certain people and overrated by the Bitcoin people who think that we're going to have hyperinflation.


Ben Yeoh (1:17:37): Okay, so where does that leave you or are you neutral? 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:17:42): Compared to most people on Twitter, or most economists on Twitter, underrated.


Ben Yeoh (1:17:48): What does Phantom Tyler think?  I think Phantom Tyler's may be less concerned about inflation per se but around all the policies which are aimed at it, that's my view about what Phantom Tyler thinks.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:18:05): I think Tyler, and he said this explicitly, he doesn't think inflation will get out of control, he just thinks it'll just be higher for a while. I think the most worrying thing is the underlying dynamic of debate which has led people to disregard these risks. A few months ago, when they were working on the new American rescue plan, the new stimulus package. The general homogeneity of the Twitter debate and not being representative of what actual economists are saying, people being afraid to voice their views. But the Twitter debate ended up driving the policy. It seemed like an unhealthy state of affairs. 


Ben Yeoh (1:18:43): GDP as a measure. overrated/underrated. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:18:47): Underrated. People like to dunk on it and yes it has a ton of flaws. It's a terrible measure but it's giving you a better measure.


Ben Yeoh (1:18:54): It strangely correlates with a lot of supposedly better measures. [Inaudible: 1:18:58] all these other things. So, I quite like the human development index which has life expectancy and education, but high correlation with GDP, as you might expect.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:19:08): In general, this is the thing that Tyler arguments for growth, which promotes moral value so if you're wealthier, you can do a lot more. Maybe it means better hedonistic welfare, maybe it means better Arts and Sciences, whatever you think is important. You can do more with more wealth and so GDP is maybe correlating with better health, GDP promotes that. I think there's some valuable critique to this which [Inaudible: 1:19:39] recently wrote about this. This is a blog. It's not actually true that growth is correlated with or that growth promotes everything that we might think is good. For example, think about religiosity. As we've grown richer, we've become a lot more secular. And so, if you think religion is true and you should all be believing in God, then growth is bad because it's made us all unbelievers.


Ben Yeoh (1:20:05): And growth seems to have reduced the fertility rate. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:20:06): Exactly. So, maybe it's also because we're at this moment of unparalleled wealth, where people are really rich and people start caring about other things like luxury goods and those luxury goods, for example, enjoying your life and not having children.


Ben Yeoh (1:20:29): I was thinking about it. I don't know much about curves, but I was thinking about the up and down curve, and I think that might be true to air pollution. There's a certain stage that has gone up and now it's coming down because we've got technology. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:20:38): There's this idea called an Environmental Kuznets Curve, so it has [Inaudible: 1:20:40] for a bunch of different pollutants.


Ben Yeoh (1:20:43): I'm not sure what my Phantom Tyler thinks about GDP actually. I don't know, I know he mentioned it in Stubborn Attachments as an imperfect measure, but I don't know whether he still thinks is underrated or overrated.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:20:55): I think he would say give me a better measure. I think this would be great to figure out a better measure of something that correlates and is better comparable. One problem with GDP is that...So I think GDP is useful to compare like


Ben Yeoh (1:21:09): Countries.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:21:10): Going from 2015 to 2014, maybe it's even decently useful across countries or something like that. I think it's very hard to compare across long time horizons. If you think 1900 versus 2000. The problem is that there's differences in quantity, and there's differences in kind. And so, GDP tries to put this all-in-one dimension so you can have differences in quantity, maybe you're producing double the amount of stuff which will double the GDP. But most of the economic changes since 1900 or at least these are the most important economic changes are the differences in kind. We have all these new inventions that we can do different things and someone in 1900, even with infinite wealth, they couldn't have gotten antibiotics and the child would die of an infection. Think of how much they would have been willing to sacrifice to get the antibiotics to save the child. And so, this is one question where it would be nice to have a measure that is better able to quantitatively compare these differences in kind across time.


Ben Yeoh (1:22:10): That'd be a huge general-purpose invention, we could think about it, I always think about this in terms of healthcare, in terms of pain. We now have and had for some time, the ability to live the last say four weeks of our life, if we need to, essentially pain free. And if you look at it economically, we don’t value that very much at all such as the price of morphine or price aspirin. If you don't think about it...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:22:39): But we do spend a lot on healthcare. 


Ben Yeoh (1:22:41): We do spend a lot on healthcare but I'm thinking specifically about the value of being pain-free. Whereas if you ask someone, or their family in their last four weeks of life, how much would you pay to die pain-free. You'd probably give up quite a lot of your wealth, at that point in time to do it and the value of pain doesn't really appear in GDP.  I agree it appears in healthcare, but I think that one thing, which in the moment, you would value extremely highly, and probably would put a price on it, would generally not appear in any kind of economic climate statistics because of the way we measure the anchors. Translating pain into a dollar figure is hard.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:23:21): In general, prices in the economy represent, ideally, items like marginal costs or how hard is it...Water is very cheap. If you didn't have water, you'd be really screwed but they don't represent the consumer surplus or something similar. This is a critique sometimes [Inaudible: 1:23:35] lobbied against, how we measure the [Inaudible: 1:23:38] technology. Google is free to us and so there's a lot of value to get out of it. Maybe even the ad revenues are accounted in the GDP, but we get so much value out of Google, and it barely shows up. Now, again, though I think those critiques can be overstated, which is that if you think about the long run economic history. Most of the time, when you think about the inventions of the first half of the 20th century, for example women had to spend all their days carrying water and then we had running water, which alleviated dozens of hours a week of work. And so, running water only carries a very small amount of GDP.  That wasn't captured either even though that was a huge quality of life improvement. So, we've always had these mismeasurement challenges. It's not clear to me that these mismeasurement challenges are unique thing now, and they can somehow explain the measured growth [Inaudible: 1:24:33]


Ben Yeoh (1:24:35): I get that they've always been about it.  I do wonder about, not mismeasurement. I still can't get rid of having some general-purpose invention. One classic one for me is the double-blind trial phenomena. First, we could have invented it a lot earlier. In fact, there were signs 2000 years ago. They did think about it a little bit, but it didn't stick. That knowledge stayed in the past. And then, ships which had scurvy carried lemons or limes or oranges to prevent scurvy, and they double blind trial found it out. That didn't stick the first two or three times. That knowledge was lost. They knew a cure for scurvy which they lost and then they had to rediscover that. Then it did stick, and they realized that we could trial this and then it spread from healthcare medicine into even economics trials. Therefore, we've made discoveries, you wouldn't have been able to discover otherwise. So where do double blind trials fit into that and obviously you've got it in some way, it gets captured broadly in how we are thinking but I still think somehow, we missed some of that. And then why don't some of these things stick? I have no idea why that is because it's quite an obvious idea. A logical thinker, any of these philosophers, should have been able to think about this 2000 years ago, and make it stick as an experimental technique, but it didn't. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:00): A lot of the best ideas are like this. I think they are very different domains, but the best economic theory is stuff that you wouldn't have thought about. If you hadn't used the machinery of economic theory, you wouldn't have come up with this idea, but once you write down your models after you come up with this thing that is intuitive and makes a lot of sense. I also think a lot of the best ideas have this property that they seem obvious in retrospect, but maybe weren't too obvious at the beginning. 


Ben Yeoh (1:26:26): No, exactly. Although [Cross talking 1:26:27].


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:28): You see it's easy to launch into this discussion of how GDP is measured. And so, this is what people always do. I think in general...


Ben Yeoh (1:26:35): So, you think it's underrated.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:38): Yeah, I think it's underrated because the conclusion people draw to these conclusions of why GDP is flawed is like GDP is worthless, but actually super valuable and actually quite indicative.


Ben Yeoh (1:26:48): Great, maybe the last couple then. Berlin, is this underrated or overrated?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:26:53): Overrated, very overrated. These people go there on vacation...


Ben Yeoh (1:26:57): You seem to view this as Germany overall, that's probably a better version...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:27:01): If you're an ambitious young person, you actually want to be productive, you want to create something completely, this is not the place to be. There are a few tech companies, but there's nothing there. You don't have that many smart, ambitious, hardworking young people. But then I would say this about all of Germany. No, Berlin has an interesting history, I will say that. So, going there and soaking in some of the history I think is nice. One thing I very much cherish about having grown up in Germany, is being connected to some of the history. It feels much more visceral. My parents grew up on opposite sides of the wall. My mother grew up in East Germany, my dad grew up in West Germany. 

They met shortly after the fall of the wall. The whole fall of the wall, enter the Cold War, it feels very visceral to me that the Cold War and the very real possibility that this could have exploded, like the Berlin crisis could explode very early. 


My great grandmother who's still alive, she was alive during World War Two. She was just outside of Dresden when Dresden was firebombed. And so, these are the stories that shall tell. I think it's quite valuable to have a sense of just how bad things can get. I think it was partially explained by some of my proclivity of interest in existential risk, and I think that's partially why I think that people very much underrate the risk of really bad conflict with China.  I think it's quite plausible that we see a World War three style event in the next few decades. So, while people don't feel that people don't viscerally internalize that, I think it's quite important to viscerally internalize that.


Ben Yeoh (1:28:37): No, I think that makes a lot of sense. The guy who ended up inventing fertilizer by understanding the nitrogen cycle. Essentially, he invented it because he was starving from famine in one of the Great famines and he said I never want to see anyone go through that again so I'm going to dedicate my life to figuring this out, and he did, but it came from a very visceral sense of this could happen. Phantom Tyler thinks travel is quite important. I don't know about Berlin...maybe this could be my next question...


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:29:13): He might say underrated because people overall still underrate travelling. 


Ben Yeoh (1:29:16): Travel but maybe not living in Berlin specifically. If I were to go to Germany or even Berlin or wherever. What do you think I should travel and do?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:29:26): Tyler spent a year in Germany already or maybe more than a year in his 20s, and I think he said that was hugely impactful for him. 


Ben Yeoh (1:29:34): So maybe just living anywhere different. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:29:37): Yeah, like setting on his path that he's been doing now. So maybe he would say underrated.


Ben Yeoh (1:29:42): Maybe we'll have to ask him or maybe he'll comment. Say if I go to Germany, what should I experience? I guess I'm most interested in anything.  Should I experience it culturally or maybe even food wise? But what should I do? I've got two weeks in Germany, or even longer, maybe we're going to live there longer, I don't know. What should I try? What's the best of Germany, we sort of critique, some of the bits that could be better but if I want to see the best of what Germany has to offer.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:30:09): I would travel to the former East; I don't think people do this enough. I think it's just very interesting and you also have a lot of weird things that are happening at the same time. For example, you have all these very nice infrastructures that they built right after the reunification, but then you also have these very ageing towns because all the young people left, and if possible, talking to the people is just interesting to get their experience. I think Berlin is worthwhile, the history is worthwhile. 


Ben Yeoh (1:30:43): Okay. All right, so maybe....


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:30:45): I don't know if the food is that great. I wouldn't focus on the food.


Ben Yeoh (1:30:48): You wouldn't focus on the food. So, you're not a fan of sauerkraut?  The two things I remember about German cuisine, maybe it's not a very good choice, is white Asparagus.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:31:01): White Asparagus is great. 


Ben Yeoh (1:31:02): White Asparagus and, I can't even remember the German name of it, but basically stew glutinous knuckle. Pork knuckle.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:31:13): Okay.


Ben Yeoh (1:31:15): Obviously, that's not your thing. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:31:17): I'm vegetarian, I don't know. Maybe this is my problem. 


Ben Yeoh (1:31:22): No, no I'll come to that. Maybe that's because Asian cuisines, Chinese cuisines are glutinous, gloopy and gelatinous. So that leads me greatly to my next question because I think probably my greatest moral failing is that I still eat animals. I know a lot of people in the Effective Altruists’ movement have ended up vegetarian and vegan from an ethical point of view, and I think, in my mind, that I agree. Cultural and other reasons I haven't got there yet but every year I cut out another thing.  I think last year, I can't eat octopus anymore, because they seem too clever and too close to what maybe something might be, even if that's that. But is that how you come to it? Do you think that maybe how we view animals is something that we don't think about enough and I think this is maybe one of the things that EA has, well at least brought to my attention? It was always simmering there in the background but might be something that they’ve added to their canon.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:32:22): I'm a big fan of two things. I'm a big fan of habits and I'm a big fan of if you're going to cut something out basically cut it out completely, instead of trying to sort of just reduce it. I think people are bad at moderation, so this goes for other things for example, Netflix. People tell themselves, "Oh I'm going to watch less Netflix." Never happens. And if they have a habit of Netflix, they're going to keep doing it. Whereas if you want to change a habit...


Ben Yeoh (1:32:42): [Inaudible: 01:32:42].


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:32:46): Exactly. If you can change a habit, it's very hard initially but once it becomes a habit, it becomes very automatic, and you don't have to think about it. With alcohol I think sometimes people tell themselves they'll drink less alcohol, but every time they go to a party they start drinking and they'll drink a lot. The same thing applies to vegetarianism or that's how I got started. I basically don't think about it, it's just a habit. I've had it for about seven-ish years, something like that, along time. I don't think about it. 


Ben Yeoh (1:33:18): Before you moved to the US?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:33:21): Yeah, a long time. In general, I think it's valuable to think about things once, decide and not have that been the habit. Now would I do it again? Nowadays, I don't know. I think that I've become almost to an extent too total utilitarian and this idea is something like if we didn't eat animals, none of these farmed animals would exist because the counterfactuals are not that farmed animals live a happy life. They just don't exist at all. And so, to the extent that you think some of these farmed animals probably live not great lives but lives that are still above zero utility, lives that are somewhat worth living. It's not actually clear if not eating meat and not existing is good. For example, cows get to go out on the grass. It seems like a decent life. So, I think it might be sort of not negative to be vegetarian. At this point, it’s a habit so I won't think about it.


Ben Yeoh (1:34:26): I think that's interesting.  I think we mentioned right at the beginning that maybe some of the critiques of where EA thinkers get to. One of the ones I hear is that sometimes their thinking is too far away from what people might say is common sense, morality, this idea that effective giving and we can do it more effectively for saving the child's life in Africa. I could see that at the margin, but most people would say well I want to give to my own community or something first because it's closest to me, and I see that. I think that makes a lot of sense to people. I was wondering what you thought about that and whether there were any other aspects of EA that you think are misunderstood or maybe taken too far.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:35:10): EA in its current form is not suited as, if everyone started believing in EA right now it would not be suitable. For example, the local community support. I think it's good to have people be involved in their local communities, give to charity, etc... That sort of basic social ordering system. But if you're the small group of EA, on the margin is it the best thing to give to your local community back? No. So, you want to think about what's most effective on the margin. There I think EA is completely right and what some people call common sense morality, other EAs might call it not actually trying to think things through. I think it's valuable. You see this with the FDA during the pandemic, where they're trying to follow their standard ways of doing things by maybe not approving AstraZeneca, or by not approving first doses first, or by not approving tests. But these are just completely unsuited for the pandemic. They're just not making the expected value calculation and you have to make the expected value calculation. 


Ben Yeoh (1:36:19): They don't do that, although to be fair or showing that it's maybe not in their mandate, but they certainly don't seem to be doing that.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:36:29):

  

You mean the FDA? Of course, it's their mandate. Their mandate is to do the best regulations for the welfare of the people, 


Ben Yeoh (1:36:35): I'm not sure if it's in their actual mandate. Well, this is a problem [Inaudible: 1:36:38].


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:36:39): Well, this is their responsibility. It's a pandemic, it's a public health emergency. They're key people and they're making it all worse. So, their mandate is not to have insane bureaucratic procedures that they follow no matter what, this is not their mandate. Their mandate is to do what's best for the people. And so, for that you need [1:37:00 inaudible]


Ben Yeoh (1:37:01): That's definitely what their theoretical mandate would be. I'm not a defender of the FDA but I think that is maybe what they would think.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:37:09): It is interesting to consider what we would make an EA look like that could spread it as a religion to everybody. I mentioned this at the very beginning, in some ways EA defuncts religion for example with the career advice, but people keep questioning it in some ways that undermines the motivation. EA seems surprisingly anti-natal, a lot of people don't want to have kids, or they have a weird reasoning about how I can have a better impact if I work instead of having children. I don't even know if that's a correct argument, but definitely if we wanted to spread EA as a religion, then it needs to be much more pro-natal to encourage people to have kids. It's a very important value. In general, if you think about which groups are going to win out in the future, there's a whole interesting argument that it's going to be fundamentalist religious groups because they have the highest fertility rates. They're also pretty heritable because they're fundamentalists, so people stay in the religion.  You think Israel, Orthodox Jews used to be a very small percentage of the population and now they're 30% of elementary school aged kids because they've had much higher fertility rates and then the rest of the population.


Ben Yeoh (1:38:23): And they can defend themselves, whereas 2000 years ago, Romans would wipe you out if you were a cult and you weren't going to assimilate. But today we don't wipe you out more or less so actually you grow.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:38:33): Thank God.  I don't know if this will actually continue. For example, Mormon fertility rates have been falling, and they're still somewhat above two but they're not that far above two anymore. So, the Mormons used to have this big fertility advantage and grow quickly and it's not clear if that's the case anymore. So, I will be somewhat sceptical of some of these long-term predictions that like "Oh, like the Amish or religious people are going to take over the world." But I do think it's actually an underrated component of who would...If you're thinking about the trajectory long term trajectory of human civilization, who determines the future? What are the values that are going to survive? What the different groups' fatality rates are, is quite important and liberalism fatality rate is low and falling.


Ben Yeoh (1:39:21): Existential risk to liberalism-particular humans in general. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:39:25): No but seriously, right? 


Ben Yeoh (1:39:27): Yeah, I could see that. Thinking on the EA thing on donations, I think at the margin that decision framework to think about how you're going to donate, and not enough people do, do that. Although, therefore I came around to micro grants because slightly, my theory is we're going to have some of these ideas generated by individuals or individuals with projects and there's not enough funding going into that, which is essentially some of the Emergent Venture type of stuff. But I think if we're not going to think about it and default to giving well or whatever, because if you just want to spend 30 seconds thinking about it, then don't because someone else has thought about it for you and this would be effective. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:40:06): I think EA has a bit of a problem about not being weird enough. They are very weird in certain ways, but they're sort of weird in homogenous ways in their community. So initially the big thing was to give well and effective donations. The problem with that was probably too oriented things that you could quantify, and then people realize now the big thing is long termism, and we should care about existential risk. These are very worthy causes, but I think there's almost too many people marching in lockstep and I think you want to diversify a bit more or you want to fund your things which is exactly why you're doing it, we're trying to do what Tyler Cowen is doing. And I think that's [Inaudible: 1:40:43].


Ben Yeoh (1:40:44): Although homogeneity could probably be quite good if we want it to be a religion. So maybe that's the way.


[Cross talking: 1:40:49]. 


Ben Yeoh (1:40:52): Slightly in jest but yes.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:41:00): I think maybe you need to have enough epistemic humility to recognize that. Even EA has already shifted a lot of priorities so to some extent we should be encouraging diverse and weird things. I think to some extent EA is doing that. I think something like Emergent Ventures or micro grants is a good idea.


Ben Yeoh (1:41:19): I was thinking of one of the critiques I've read, although I have to admit I didn't fully understand from Amia Srinivasan who's a philosopher and now at All Souls College. One of the critiques did seem to centre around the fact that it did seem quite homogenous to her as a group of thinking, although she also had other things which she talked about on it. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:41:40): Maybe homogenous is the wrong word, in some way weirdly unambitious. EA has these non-profit research institutes about existential risk, and these are great, but it seems sometimes for some EAs, this is the end all be all. It's like, "We want to fund non-profits." And sometimes EA says something like "We're not funding [Inaudible: 1:41:58] anymore. We have enough money, we're not [Inaudible:1:42:02]."  I say, yes you have enough money to fund your little non-profit...


Ben Yeoh (1:42:07): But you're not saving the world. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:42:08): Yeah, you're not saving the world yet and it's you're being unambitious. So, I think EA in a weird way is a bit European. It's founded by the Brits, also Australians maybe, some are in the middle. And they have this scepticism or pessimism about technology being embedded and the lack of ambitiousness. 


Ben Yeoh (1:42:41): Great. I could go on for a long time but I'm going to try and do these last three questions for you on that. We can do another part two someday. I'm just going to ask, what does a productive Leopold day look like? Are there any things about personal productivity or maybe productivity you, see? I was quite taken by the fact that you thought, coming to the US, there was this work ethic conscientious thing. I also see this were Chinese students, so anyone who's really studied in China, and they come to Europe, and they meet Europeans, they can't believe how little Europeans worked from the age of four to 21. I was probably a little bit in the middle but even I look at that Chinese work ethic and go, oh my god you were studying from 7 to 7 in the day, six days a week right, from the age of 4 to 21. That's a lot more studying than the average Western. But anyway, what does a productive Leopold day look like?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:43:43): To be clear, I don't want to glorify rogue studying. This goes back to being valedictorian efficient, that's not actually the best thing to do. 


Ben Yeoh (1:43:53): Would it be better if you could be more independent led and not have to take all these courses?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:43:56): Being independent and creative. You don't want to just be studying for the Gaokao. You want to be creating a start-up. I think the general thing of the US is people are driven, they're ambitious, and instead of this being cut down, people are encouraged to do it. They dedicate their lives to really creating something and I think that's admirable. In terms of productivity, I don't think I have great tips. I would encourage people to read a lot. A key part of continuing to be productive is taking out a lot of time to read, even if during the time you're reading you're not reading a lot. Then, I think one thing I struggle with, but a lot of people struggle with, is minimizing digital distractions. But I don't have any good answers.


Ben Yeoh (1:44:36): Great. And do you have any advice for young people, people your age or maybe a little older starting university or just getting into university, about what they should think about doing with their lives? I'm guessing be weird, follow research questions which aren’t as researched. I don't know if you have anything else you want to add.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:44:58): Maybe write a blog, or good Twitter but ideally a blog. I think you'll end up meeting a lot of interesting people on the internet this way. It forces you to develop your thoughts. Somewhat ironic I'm saying this since I've been somewhat delinquent on my blog because I've been spending too much [time] on the end of semester, but I realized this too late. I think this can be quite valuable and I think you need to just apply yourself. Figure out something to do and apply yourself and figure out something to do that isn't just studying for your classes. 


Ben Yeoh (1:45:34): Great. I'm going to end with a couple of...I guess these are philosophical questions. Plato Socrates asks, how should you live? Have you had any thoughts on that, partly because of your long termism and everything else? Would you have an answer for how we should live? While you dwell on that, I think it's a little bit intertwined, for instance, to what it is to be a human being. What could you hope for, what should you do? It ties back to the original one, deciding a career. What should we do?


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:46:18): Find something that gives you meaning, whether that's making this long-term imagination come true, whether it's family and children, whether it's being engaged in your community through church. I think the biggest downfall of modern civilization is that people lose all sense of meaning.


Ben Yeoh (1:46:42): Meaning and connections.


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:46:43): And it's like a hedonistic treadmill.


Ben Yeoh (1:46:46): Great. Well, I think that's a really great place to end so Leopold, thank you very much. 


Leopold Aschenbrenner (1:46:56): Thank you so much. This was great.

In Arts, Life, Podcast Tags Grants, Podcast, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Tyler Cowen

C Thi Nguyen on games philosophy, agency, real world gamification | Podcast

June 20, 2021 Ben Yeoh
Listen on Apple Podcasts

I chat with C. Thi Nguyen who used to be a food writer and is now a philosophy professor at the University of Utah.

Thi thinks about trust, art, games, and communities. We discuss his first book, Games: Agency as Art. The book is about how games are the art form that work in the medium of agency.

We chat about the difference between play and games and wider games philosophy.

Thi worries about the problems on trusting experts, if oneself is not an expert and how none of us are experts in most domains and how he’s been influenced by Elijah Milgram (also a philospher at the University of Utah).

We discuss making tea, process art and how we should be thinking about making food.

Fascinating topics across food and philosophy.

Thi’s book Amazon link. His website. And Twitter.

Contents:

06:13 Thi on Gamification

12:15 Thi on Trust and what to be worried about a gamified system

16:25 Thi on philosophy of expertise and the challenge of finding experts to trust

20:58 Thi on board games recommendations

26:05 Is “play” better or “games” better? Thi answers on how games are different from play.

31:20 The importance of drinking games

34:13 The four types of games

36:35 How constraints are useful

45:47 What is process art

50:02 Games and cooking

57:39 How to make tea

1:02:16 Thi on creative productivity (don't kill the weird ideas)

Listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts. Transcript below and video on Youtube (above).


Transcript: Games philosophy, process art and food writing.

Ben Yeoh (00:05): Hey everybody, I am super happy to have C. Thi Nguyen, a professor of philosophy at The University of Utah. He's written a fascinating book on the philosophy of games called Games: Agency as Art; you should check it out. He's been invited to lecture at The Royal Institute of Philosophy here in London and he used to be a food writer, games, food philosophy. What more could you want? Welcome C. 


C. Thi Nguyen (00:30): Thank you so much for having me.


Ben Yeoh (00:35): So, I've heard a complaint about gamification recently. There's this app that we have in London UK, where you can donate unwanted food and ingredients to people. When you do you gain stars and reviews. The way you increase your reputation on this app is by playing a five-star review game. You have to review quickly. Someone who was commenting felt she was being forced to play the game. She was going to stop using the app and donating food because she felt that she was essentially being gamified. So, is this a problem of over gamification where game rules have been brought in to substitute for some other social value and essentially our agency, our feeling of choice in it has been taken away? What's your view of this gamification aspect of our world?C. 


C. Thi Nguyen (01:27): It is funny because you tell me this and I thought "Oh, it sounds great" and one of the things I keep finding with gamifications is from the outside, when they're described on paper they often sound great and then when you actually live with them, you realize something was wrong. There are two problems. The description you gave is actually the thing that I'm not mostly worried about. I think some people feel that the game is getting addictive and their will is being pushed against so they find themselves doing something they don't want to, but they have an addictive relationship to the game. That can happen but that's not actually the thing I'm the most worried about. I'm most worried about cases in which people go all in. Cases where the gamification is so seductive that you don't feel like the game is pushing you, but you've just fully internalized the point system of the game. 


The reason I'm worried about this is because I've written a lot about games and a lot of people think that "Oh if you love games you've got to love gamification too" Like people that love games love gamification. I think understanding how games work shows you what's really creepy about gamification. So here's one way to put it, and you can tell me if this fits the sense of your app, because I mostly think about this in terms of apps such as Twitter and Fitbit which are the ones I'm familiar with. The metrics of publishing in philosophy. For me one of the great pleasures of games is they simplify the meaning of life. They simplify the purpose of an activity. In our normal activity, there are all these incredibly rich possible values like I'm a parent, I'm a researcher, I care about climbing, I care about aesthetics and I care about my children's health. 

All of these things are: 

1): Often really hard to figure out how well they've done.

2): They are so hard to square off against each other.

Like, how do I measure the value of a week in which I do research versus a week in which I split time between research and taking care of my kids. 

But in games, for once in our lives we have an experience of knowing exactly what we're trying to do, exactly how well we've done and in order to do that you have to simplify it. You have to make the values clear and explicit and mechanically countable. So, the things that really worries me are cases in which the gamification gets in us and it feels great to us but it's done so by simplifying the target. And we internalize a simplified target. So, I'm really worried for example what happens on Twitter. You might come to twitter for these rich, complicated values of connection, understanding etc. but if Twitter gets under your skin and if you buy into it, it points you to what Twitter measures and what Twitter measures is popularity. 

So I want to ask you about your app, which I've never touched of course.


Ben Yeoh (04:44): Not mine, In London here we have it.


C. Thi Nguyen (04:47): I mean the one that you're familiar with. Do you find a simplification in that system to make something measurable?


Ben Yeoh (04:57): Yes. So there is this idea that you can trust. Someone has come down to this five star review, and then also the speed. So there's this sense that if you don't put a review quickly for one another, that you're there, but to your point, the underlying intention is noble. Whereas, I can see for something like, Twitter, Instagram, some of these things, the underlying attention could be ... and we'll maybe come to this sort of outrage because we know anger, divisiveness pulls in eyeballs and eyeballs pulls in profit. And maybe in something like Twitter, it's also slightly less obvious that you're losing your autonomy. I think that might be our argument. Whereas I guess for this app, it's so simple that you should be able to see through it. What was quite interesting is that this person saw through it and therefore didn't want to play the game. Whereas, I guess in Twitter you get sucked in because seeing the follower account you're like "Oh my God, I got to tweet" which went viral could have such a thrill to it that you then playing that game and you lost the initial impulse, which is I wanted to see reasons rational other viewpoints to my own work.


C. Thi Nguyen (06:13): So I want to talk about two things. First, the easier examples are the ones in which some corporations give your attention for money. Like, people are really familiar with that. I'm actually worried that there is a logic of gamification that underlies even well-intentioned efforts. And it seems like, for people in academics in this space to be like, "oh, it's capitalism companies trying to make money off it." But I think that there are plenty of cases where what it looks like is entirely well attempted to measure something in a public way and motivate people publicly. But the very fact that there needs to be a publicly accessible measure, forces simplification. So I've written a paper that is not out yet called Transparency of Surveillance. And it's about all these cases where you look at something where transparency goes wrong. And the way that transparency often goes wrong is there's an overall attempt to get a group of people to do something good, and to do this you have to create a quick and easy measure that everyone can immediately see and catch onto that can be quickly tabulated. And the gap between that and what's really important is often huge. 


One of the examples I've been looking at is; a lot of charity oversight. So it seems like a really good idea at first. Isn't it great to have transparency, for a lot of charities for a lot of times, the oversight measure they were using was something called Throughput. So Throughput is the amount of money the people donate, how much of that emerges from the other end and the charities just got ranked on Throughput. Of course, the Throughput measure catches really wasteful charities, but once you get rid of those, you get a situation in which most charities are increasingly cutting the way to increase Throughput to cut internal costs. And if anyone in any kind of organization knows, you're not going to get the most efficient and powerful organizations if you're constantly forcing all of them to cut as many internal costs as possible. But once there's a ranking out there, then people seem to respond to the ranking. I've actually confused the issue, I realized because there are two things that we should really be worried about. I don't think anyone in the charity space has internalized the Throughput measure. But there are a lot of other cases where people do seem to internalize these measures. The ones that are in my life, of course, are academic ones. Like, which articles get excited for the most.


Ben Yeoh (09:15): And I think a lot of times GPA.


C. Thi Nguyen (09:17): Yeah, I was just about to say GPA.


Ben Yeoh (09:20): That's a great point average for our non-US. 


C. Thi Nguyen (09:27): Right, GPA actually is one of the least useful measures of a student's success. There are all these other things that seem really important. Like how curious are they? Are they reflecting about what they're doing and why they're doing it? How much are they enjoying or thoughtful about their materials and what they're learning? But that's very hard to measure. So, because of the nature of large-scale institutions, the most pervasive and salient measure that surrounds everyone is GPA, your grade point average. And if students internalize that as the primary goal for their education, then there's this enormous thing that's been lost. And one of the things that's been lost is control over what you yourself want as your value. So the big worry for me is that in a lot of these cases, we have used vast pervasive Metro fire systems. They're clear, they're crisp, and they’re appealing. But if you internalize them, you don't figure out for yourself what you should value about the thing you're doing. That's my big worry. 


Ben Yeoh (10:49): It seems to me that that's a second order or an unintended consequence of simplified game systems or point systems that they miss a lot through the fact that they are simplification, that sort of analogy to get to something, but they miss all of the new ones. 


C. Thi Nguyen (11:03): Right. 


Ben Yeoh (11:04): And we can see that. But I kind of got the sense that there could be something even deeper and darker than that. Meaning, we know there are problems, sometimes regarding regulation and these unintended consequences, although this is particularly something quite addictive. But I was thinking, trust is ailing in a lot of developed world democracies. And sometimes these systems, you could almost design them that there's almost whether it's intentional or not. That is actually undermining a lot of our trust systems. And you could be designing these games almost intentionally in some way to simplify this in a way that you know won't point people in the way that is actually most value-add. Do you think that is also a deeper causal thing to where the system might be alongside a lot of these kind of unintended consequences, because like you say, Fitbit, they're obviously aiming for something relatively positive and you get lost in the game, I could see that. But then some of these systems might be even more pervasive. Like, oh, we go for GPA, but we're not going to go for broadly what education might be. That seems to me even potentially darker.


C. Thi Nguyen (12:15): Right? So I think this is exactly the thing to be worried about. So this paper I was telling you about, Transparency in Surveillance, It started with this line from Onora O'Neill. Onora O'Neill is one of the great philosophers of trust and her BBC rifle lectures. She has this paragraph that I think most people have ignored where she says, "yeah, most people think trust and transparency can go together, but actually their intention" And her version of the argument was, transparency asks experts to explain their reasons to non-experts, but an expert in reasoning is actually an expert. So you're going to force experts to deceive and make up reasons that aren't really theirs for public consumption. So I was thinking about this and I think there's something that might happen that's even worse, which is, experts might become motivated to hit targets that are available and legible to non-experts. I'm not a person to say no, there should be no transparency. Transparency is important because people might be corrupt. I think you can see this clearly in the early political philosophy attempts to transparency arise from distrust, right? You're afraid that your politician is going to do something crappy, out of sight. So you make them be transparent. Here's the worry, there's actually a tradeoff between trust and transparency. The more transparency you have, the more you ask your experts to align their action to a metric that's comprehensible and give reasons in a way that's comprehensible to non-experts right? So you bring experts to interview. So that will eliminate the possibility of corruption, but that's also going to eliminate the possibility of experts acting on expert reasons and expert understandings of value. 


I see this in my life as an educator because a lot of the time what it looks like is there are all these things that I want to teach students in philosophy class. Critical reasoning, thinking, curiosity, self-reflection none of that is measurable in a way that's available to the legislator and the public. So, we have to justify our actions in terms of our graduation rate, graduation speed and post graduate salary. Those are really publicly available measures. So the worry is, there's this trade-off and the more you move towards metrified publicly available systems, the less you have access to the wide range of expert understanding of their domains. I guess we're really far apart from games.


Ben Yeoh(15:15): And the less help for students. That has brought to mind two particularly important domains where I think we've actually seen this in action. So one is on the COVID pandemic response and the other could be potentially on climate science. So, on the COVID response, we now have kind of quite tidily articulated that the experts decided to communicate in a way that they felt non-experts would understand, but which weren't actually what they were thinking or wanted to happen. And it seems to potentially be happening over climate. You do something because asking about climate science scenarios is way beyond. There’s maybe 20,000 people in the world that really understand that, right? And they can talk amongst themselves. There may be one degree but so few people end up with these simplified ideas, two degrees in 2050 or whatever it is. I'm kind of making it up to, to say that which doesn't represent that whole entirety at all. And then we make our problems for ourselves. COVID is another example. Sorry about that, I cut you off and you were going to say something.


C. Thi Nguyen (16:25): Oh yeah, it's funny. I thought we were here to talk about games and aesthetics, which is one side of my research, but now we're talking about the other half, which is the expert stuff. So, I genuinely think there's a problem here that no one has solved and that deep problem is the right balance of exactly the situations you're talking about. My intellectual life was transformed by a book by Elijah Milgram, a living philosopher called the Great Endarkenment. And Milgram's view is the primary epistemic dilemma of our time. The primary knowledge dilemma of our time is that the state of human knowledge is so huge and so fast that no one can master even a tiny fragment of it, which means that we're in this incredibly complex relationship of trust and vulnerability. So in that buyer, who's one of my favorite philosophers, she is the great philosopher of trust that kicks off the conversation about trust in the eighties. So the essence of trust is vulnerability. Here's the scenario: Any action we take involving any technology or any science involves trusting this massive network of experts that none of us can actually ascertain for ourselves, right? So here are two things we don't want to do. We don't want to trust without any management at all. If you just trust whatever you're screwed. They're going to be calm people and there is going to be corruption. 


On the other hand, if you demand that you understand everything, that people will be able to explain themselves, you're not going to have access to the full richness of science, the full richness of humanity's knowledge. The fact that any interaction with science involves not only trusting people who you can't understand, but not knowing who you trust, right? So the massive dilemma I think of our time is how you manage who you put your trust in when you have to trust people that are beyond your comprehension and understanding because of the hyper specialized nature of science. And I think people who work on this stuff have barely adjusted to this. A lot of philosophers who work on knowledge are still working under this frame of "A single person should be able to know everything and understand everything for themselves." How do they know for sure, but that's not the right question anymore.


Ben Yeoh (18:53): So what do you think from your reading of the state of the philosophy or even your philosophy? What does it have to say about this situation? Or this is a question that you think the philosophers should be tackling but haven't tackled successfully?


C. Thi Nguyen (19:11): There's a really small literature in this, mostly the philosophy of science. So this is a puzzle I've actually been obsessed with for a huge amount of my life. This is a puzzle as old as Socrates. Socrates' version of it is if you don't know anything about a domain, how you pick a good teacher instead of a con person. Same problem with a scientist. So some people think, oh, what you are searching for is good people because goodness is unified. I don't think this solution works at all, because I think there are plenty of expert scientists and there are plenty of good hearted people. So, the closest answer is Phillip kitchen's answer, which says something like "you might be able to trace lines into more esoteric sciences from sciences that you can judge." So I know that I can trust aeronautical engineers because planes don't fall out of the sky. And so I can trace who they trust back. But how I am supposed to treat that as an individual is really, really tough. This is a real dilemma that people in philosophy and people in science communications are working on right now. I think it's kind of the dilemma for our era and I don't see a great solution yet.


Ben Yeoh (20:35): Great, well, social scientists out there that are listening and watching this is a dilemma for you to solve. Perhaps leaping back a little bit then into the games. Well, let's ask a simpler question. You've been playing and reviewing board games for, it seems, many, many years. Can you explain the best kind of games for you? What do you recommend?


C. Thi Nguyen (20:58): I've been playing board games my entire life. My board game interests have gotten super esoteric, but I can say a few things. So I played board games, role playing games and computer games for much of my life. Right now I'm seeing fewer computer games that excite me. Most of the computer games I'm seeing do the same things as [Inaudible 21:23] was doing 10 years ago, but with better graphics and more complicated mechanical systems. But a lot of them seem like addictive grind machines. So the board game world on the other hand is exploding with innovation. So I'm really interested in these very complex, incentive manipulation games. So one example is Imperial; Imperial is a game in which the theme is truly nasty. It's world war one, the countries are at war, you don't play one of the countries. You play a shadowy investor, changing your investments in the countries, and you can control whichever country you momentarily have the most investment in, but the point is not to lead your country to victory. The point is to get the most money in the end, which you often do by dumping your country on the next stockholder or playing the Alliance structure. So that kind of structures, or the interesting to me. One of the most interesting board games out there right now is Root, which is called Whales game in which each of the sides is completely asymmetric and has different roles and different goals. One of them is like trying to build an industrial build network. Another is a warmonger trying to conquer everything. Another is basically the proletariat revolution. And you have to watch these different sides play out with different mechanics against each other, which is incredibly fascinating.


Ben Yeoh (22:56): I think board games are incredibly rich at the moment. I'm not as expert as you to sense that actually, maybe this is a golden age of board gaming. Do you think that in some way a counterpoint to what we're seeing on social media and some online that actually it's forced us to this is almost a counter-culture to that was that too soon.


C. Thi Nguyen (23:16): Oh, I don't know if it’s the relationship to social media. I'm seeing explosive innovation in the Indie Tabletop role-playing scene. And I think one of the things that's happened is it's really an age thing. So two things happened at once. One is this enormous flowering of board game innovation in the eighties and nineties, starting in Germany and leading to what we call the Euro games scene. Why that happened is really interesting. One theory is that post-World War II, Germany in particular became culturally uninterested in war games like chess, where you played head to head. And Germany has a really long history of family board gaming. I think the last stat I saw, German families were still 10 on average playing more board games and watching TV, but it's like, so you have this incredible instead. So in America you have a lot of crappy family games and you have this incredibly esoteric war-gaming culture that's built for hardcore hobbyists. But over in Germany you have this board gaming tradition that is made for families and it's also trying to find ways to make board games not just about war. They've been uninterested in war. So there's this theory that since the accident, American board gamers made these first like market manipulation auctions and bidding games. And so the German board game designers seemed to have seized on this stuff and realized, "oh my God, auction gets me really interesting," it's a way for five people to play against each other, always be in the game instead of like, one person makes all their moves. So there's this flowering in Germany and then people in America pick up on it. And I think the thing that's really driving it is a lot of people like me, my age, my wife grew up as computer gamers. Now we work full time. I don't have time for an 80 hour computer game. Melissa and I both grew up on civilization games, which will suck your life away.


Ben Yeoh (25:30): Your whole summer holiday is gone. 


C. Thi Nguyen (25:32): Yes exactly, And so now, like you have people that have grown up playing games like Civ and Warcraft and StarCraft, but now we want to do it together. We want to be social. And so, that's driving, I think this huge market, incredibly rich innovative game for people who grew up playing games, and are a little burned out on hundred hour crafting video games. Anyway, that's [Inaudible 26:00] that's too long. That’s even more interesting. 


Ben Yeoh (26:05): Because I think games reveal a facet about what it means to be human. So I think this is quite interesting and we can explore this a bit. So, a friend of mine who is the artistic director of Kony, did a lot of work with Bernie Dekoven Blue on game theory and games practitioner. And he makes the point that Dekoven had quite a lot of emphasis on play rather than games. And obviously there is this overlap and a lot of what we talked about are kind of these, and your book talks about mostly striving games for this. But I think one of the points that Dekoven was kind of making was this idea that cooperative games or games which don't really have any points scoring or things which are involved in play can be more fulfilling or somehow say more about this. And I was interested in what you think about play over games or even the making of games in play rather than perhaps even the games themselves.


C. Thi Nguyen (27:07): So this is actually to me, one of the things that really pushed me to write this book, because there's a standard view that a lot of people have that play is better than games, especially free and creative play. So, a little bit of background, what's the difference between games and play? I think the clearest version of this is for Bernard Suits. So Bernard Suits is a definition of a game, voluntarily taking up unnecessary obstacles for the sake of the possibility of the activity of struggling to overcome them. So any case in which you have clearly specified obstacles. So a game is really something where the rules tell you what you're trying to do, how you're doing it, and exactly what obstacles there will be in the way often those obstacles are created by specifying which abilities you're allowed to use and not use. So for example, soccer, the obstacles are created because you can't pick up the ball with your hands mostly. Rock climbing; what I do, a lot of the obstacles are creative because you're not allowed to use a pick or a helicopter. A lot of the time these constraints are so obvious we miss them. For example, running a marathon has a constraint. You're not allowed to take a taxi or a bicycle, right? That creates the kind of activity you're doing. So in student’s point out that look and play is something really different. Here's a kind of play: wasting resources is normally instrumental for pleasure or fun. He has some great examples; so here he thinks sometimes you play games in this way, but there's some kinds of games that are not played. 


So he thinks a professional boxer wearily checks in because that's how they make money, that's a game and not a play. He thinks kids rolling around with no rule, just wrestling in the mud or flipping things around that's play, but not a game. So they're different. And there's a bit of a standard view that pure game-less play without rules or points or scores is the highest form. And my book was trying to mount a defense, not saying that games are better than free play, but trying to say that there were different things that had their own different value. 


So play offers you creativity and free form. Games for me are the specific thing where the specificity of the rules and the affordances create for you a specific sculpted experience of practicality. So the way I put it in the slogan of the book is that a game designer just doesn't tell a story or create an environment, they tell you what your abilities are, what your environment is and most importantly what your motivations are in the game. Another way to put it is the game designer sculpt the form of agency. And then when you play different games, you pick up and learn different kinds of agencies. I kind of think games are more structured experiences and that's what art is, right? You could say, why read a book, just make up your own stories all the time. Then you'd never read other people's stories. To do that, you have to have a much sculpted, structured, roulade and experience. Similarly, you can make up activities, but you'll never experience an activity that someone else sculpted for you. So my view here is that games are the special things that let you record it, communicate forms of agency and free play doesn't do that, right? So those are two really different, valuable things. Games are more forms of communication. 


Ben Yeoh (30:49): Great. No, I think that's very clear. Hopefully we'll have some time to talk about process art over object art of which I think that tally somewhat. So, again, a simple question on that. What do drinking games about this or the designers of drinking games? And I actually think drinking games in some ways do maybe create some sort of process art, but, maybe with your idea of the rules that game designers create as well. What's the drinking game say?


C. Thi Nguyen (31:20): Drinking games are so important. Here's something really interesting. I should say drinking games and party games are the most important things in my book. There's really little scholarship about them. One of the things that frustrates me in the game space is how many people would it be like, "oh my God games can be real art too" And what they do is they create mechanically dole games that are like anything else you've seen. But they put important thematic stories on them about big topics, ethical issues. And this is not exciting for me as the development of games as an art form. What's really interesting to me is the creation of new and novel forms of agency. So, drinking games are fascinating. I should tell here for your audience who hasn't read this stuff. My favorite part of the book is a discussion of drinking games. So for me, there are two kinds of play: achievement play and striving play. Achievement play is playing for the value of winning while Striving play is temporarily adopting an interest in winning for the sake of a struggle. So Achievement plays, you really care about winning. Striving play, you just basically get yourself to care about winning temporarily for the thrill of a struggle. And some people are like, "of course they're too difficult to play." And a lot of people, when I presented this stuff, would say stuff like "you're ridiculous, there's no such thing as striving play that is not a thing people can do. Achievement play is the only thing that makes sense." So I had to come up with an argument. So here's the argument. Consider the category of a stupid game. A stupid game is a game where the fun part is failing, but it's only fun if you're trying to win. So my favorite examples are Twister and most drinking games. The whole point of a drinking game is that you really try to do this silly thing. And when you fail, everybody laughs together. But it's only funny if you fail and it's only a failure if you're actually trying to win. So drinking games illustrate this weird capacity we have to get ourselves soaked so much in the attempt to win, when even what we wanted to do fails. But if we intentionally fail it's not funny. If you intentionally fall over and twist it's not funny. So the demonstrating game I know you just go around and everyone has to name a candy bar that someone else hasn't named. And when you can't do it, you have to drink. And of course, it's funny because it's the silliest little task, but you're, cognitively just frozen in the moment, that’s what's funny. So drinking games are super interesting.


Ben Yeoh (34:03): It makes philosophy a lot more interesting to most people if they did more philosophy on the games of drinking and the study. But yeah, I think you have a really good point.


C. Thi Nguyen (34:13): Yeah. One of the great writers about games says there are four types of games, to translate from fancy Latin there's competitive games, make-believe games, luck games, and then vertigo games. It's like kids spinning around and roller coasters. And I think drinking games actually are often a vertigo game. Like a lot of is by the experience. So a lot of games for me are about the experience of changing how your mind works. Like suddenly my mind is focused on, look ahead. Suddenly my mind is focused on balanced challenges with climate and taking games directly to change your cognitive experience of the world while you're trying to do something. It's not just being drunk. It's trying to do a simple task as you get drunk. And that gives you a direct experience of your mind and flux. And I think that's one of the really interesting things about drinking games. That's why I think there are processors.


Ben Yeoh (35:19): Great. I'm thinking on my feet on that. So that's really fascinating. So only one kind of element specific that drinking games that came up which I thought was potentially looping back, was the only issue being that when you choose to do drinking or choose, say to go ahead on drinking at a certain point, do you lose a bit of autonomy because of what the drink does to you? And I thought that was really interesting because to me that was a little bit like Twitter. At some point you go into really good intentions and then at some point you've lost sight of it because of the whole moral outrage thing, or you want the follow a thing and you're sucked in. Now drinking games does have a nice end point because you will always either collapse or stop at some point in which Twitter doesn't. But I was wondering, where we can see that you might lose autonomy in something, is that a danger flashpoint for you in any systems [Inaudible 36:15] or not, or it just occurred to me that there's a specific issue maybe with alcohol, although not with the whole sense of vertigo games.


C. Thi Nguyen (36:26): There's a bunch of interesting philosophy and rational choice theory about this. So I've been really influenced here by Jon Elster. Do you know Jon Elster's work? 


Ben Yeoh (36:35): No. 


C. Thi Nguyen (36:35): So basically I think there's a really simplified view of autonomy that says the fewer the constraints the better, the more the constraints the worst. That can't be the right theory of autonomy. It has to be that you can take on constraints to increase your autonomy. So for one thing, if you believe that the more constraints, the more freedom, and then all governments decrease your freedom but that's a ridiculous theory of freedom and autonomy because governments can, through the creation of constraints, create new categories and new possibilities. So you can actually see this really clearly in games. Let me give you the simplest example. Imagine you're in an open field and someone proposes to put up some walls and a roof. You might think, "Oh, I've lost freedom, I used feel to walk in every direction and now I can't. But the real answer is no, you've lost a little bit of freedom, but you gain a different, more rich kind of freedom. You're given the freedom of having the choice to be inside or outside. So similarly game rules work like this. The game rules constrain you in a certain way. And if you have this really simplified notion of autonomy, you would say "oh my God, well, the game rules are telling me what to do. I can't do anything I want, that's destroying my freedom" but now you think, "no, no" Especially since the rules are voluntary. The rules of basketball enable new kinds of action that never existed before, without the rules of basketball, you couldn't pass and you couldn't dribble. You couldn't make a point. You couldn't play basketball. So, I mean, for me, [Inaudible 38:37] is my favorite philosopher in the space of games. What's interesting for him, but it's interesting for me, for what he's doing is he is saying that because games are activities that are literally constituted, they are made up of constraints. It's a clear case where constraints make us freer. Because they invent new activities. We could never have done it before. But I think that argument can easily be applied to governments. And I think one of the interesting things I find with my students is a lot of students can't see that when you talk directly about governments, you can see it with games. 


So far as new activities are created by constraints, games and governments, both can make us freer. If the trade-off is worth it. If what you lose is counterbalanced by gaining a richer and more valuable set of options. So Jon Elser had a bunch of great examples about this. So in his most famous book called Ulysses and the Sirens. You think about Ulysses, right? So, you know the story: Ulysses has himself tied to the mast so he can hear the sirens. Because he knows he'll be weak of will. Here's a case where the constraint being tied to a mast that he entered into voluntarily let's have an experience he couldn't have had before, which is hearing the sirens. So, what I would say is given the fact that a drinking game is a impairment on your cognition that you enter into voluntarily and lets you have any experience and you didn't before, then if you did it knowingly and voluntarily, then it's increasing your freedom. It is a decision that you make that takes on a temporary constraint that increases your range of experiences and your range of knowledge.


Ben Yeoh (40:05): And that would be a similar argument that people who take psychedelics would say. I would actually extend this further into a lot of creatives and artists would tend to say this about art. So a poet would say by putting these constraints on, I want to write a sonnet. I want to write a haiku that you actually more creative, particularly when you say, I want to write a sonnet and then I slightly change what a sonnet means to me. You couldn't do that without the form of the sonnet to be able to do so. And actually that's true across artists and painting and segue into our other conversation, potentially was around the food. I would say these constraints around how we cook might be similar. If you can cook with anything available, then that actually isn't necessarily a sort of cuisine or a cooking or a thing. But if you say I'm going to use salt, sugar, these types of ingredients, and I'm going to create something from that, that says something more about the constraints that we put on food to make a meal. Do you think philosophy says anything particularly about food or the constraints we have about food and maybe let's touch upon. I think you send and I think I agree that actually cooking either for ourselves or friends and family or cooking on a stage for a restaurant of people is a lot of the time a form of process art. Something actually ending in an object art as well, although we eat it, but it certainly seems to be a priceless art with a history and a culture and everything about that. So I don't know comments about the philosophy of food is art [Inaudible 41:45].


C. Thi Nguyen (41:46): So the constraints question, the process, our question are really different. So the constraints are super interesting. There's a lovely little conversation in the philosophy of art about this, that centers around the paper from Kendall Walton called Categories of Art. There's I think a simple view that's like why have all these rules about genre and form? Why not just do anything? I think you said exactly what a lot of people in the space thing. The rules are ultra-binding. There are rules to what counts as a Western. The rules can't have sonnets. You don't have to write a sonnet. You don't have to make a Western, but once those rules are there, then you can do really subtle things. So my friend, Matt stroll, who works in the philosophy of film convinced me that one of the nice things, but incredibly specific genres like zombie movies, Westerns or Kung Fu movies, is that as the sonnets would so much as be fixed, you pay a lot of attention to subtle variations. And the subtle variation becomes incredibly important. What Walton's whole theory was that when you fix certain things, the audience knows what to pay attention to and what to ignore. So one of his examples was, so you know, busts like a thing, that's just the head and the shoulders, a statue, but no arms. We need to know what counts as a bust. We need to know the standard bust doesn't have arms because otherwise you'd walk around being like, "wow, there's a bust of Socrates with no arms. What a bold choice? What did that mean? What are they trying to do?" But when you constrain the space in a certain way, people know where to look for the meaning. They know that when you break this little rule, that's really meaningful. They know that if it's a Kung Fu movie and then the main character just stops fighting in the end, that something really extraordinary has happened because that's not part of the conventions of a Kung Fu movie. The view is kind of like when we have these constraint latent structures, they make the possibility of meaning because they give you the background against which variation can happen. That's a brief thing about constraints.


Ben Yeoh(42:27): No, I think they're great. I guess they're underappreciated and they are underrated. And also, as your earlier point is, we don't appreciate them sometimes because they're so soft there. A marathon has lots of constraints, but we somehow don't think about them because we realize it's all about the running.


C. Thi Nguyen (44:44): Yeah. I mean, people are always like, there's this standard argument. People are like, "Well, games can't be art because there are rules." And I think if you do philosophy of art, you're like, "wait, no, that's nuts, Like every single art form has rules for consumption that stabilize our relationship." So here's a simple one. The rule for novels is to read the words in order. So, if you like, I read Moby Dick. First, I had a computer program, alphabetize all the words. You haven't read the book, right. There are every art form. If you're like, "yeah, I had a great experience with Van Gogh's Irises. I closed my eyes and I just licked the back of a canvas, and it was so musty." You're like, "No, no, you did something, but you did not experience that." So, should we talk about process art?


Ben Yeoh(45:47): Yeah, Let's talk about process art. I have a question which might introduce us to a little bit, at least within cooking or something. Is there any dish which you've been trying to perfect? Maybe trying to perfect your whole lifetime, or feel you have perfected and what are you doing with this dish?


C. Thi Nguyen (46:07): It's funny, a lot of the times when you cook, I've noticed that when people come over, you want to cook something new and exciting. But once in a while I get lazy and I cook one of my old, simple standards and people freak out, they're like "oh my God, this is so good." My centers are like omelets and Sichuan mapo tofu. There's this really simple dish I found, an Okinawan dish of turmeric miso, bok choy and tofu, over sweet potato rice. And I make this stuff for myself all the time. And I realized it's not that I'm consciously trying to perfect it, but when I make it for people they love it. And I realized it's because of fancy new dishes I've made two or three times in my life. Like Mapo tofu, I've made it like a thousand times in my life. I think a lot of us are very cosmopolitan about dishes we cook and then we always talk about, grandparents cooking was so good, there's something in it. A lot of people like my mom make about 20 dishes over and over again. She cooks mostly Vietnamese Chinese. When I talked to her about how she cooks, she doesn't have recipes, but, she knows all of these like micro variations that are like, "oh, well, if the fish is a little bit drier, you should up the temperature of the oven by five degrees and when it's a little humid, she actually has like different spoons that she uses to prop open the oven, like a tiny bit. And she has that master because she's doing that thing over and over again. But I haven't [Inaudible 47:56] except for like the stupid dishes I make for myself when I'm lazy. And of course the stupid dishes I make myself when I'm lazy are the best things I cook because I made them a thousand times. I wasn't trying to perfect them. Mapo tofu is the thing that I can make best in this world.


Ben Yeoh(48:23): Great. So I have a seminar, so my mum makes chicken rice, a kind of Singapore-Malaysia dish that's all around Southeast Asia. Vietnamese have one as well. And I think when you watch her cook it in all circumstances, it is a form of art. I think something that you alluded to is what also sends it to me, takes it to art for all participants, but also kind of one is artist or cook is the state, or the physical motion. All the emotion that you have through this, obviously when it's shared with an audience of more than just one. You mentioned this, I think in a blog, but I agree that this is an underappreciated form of this art is what you and your audience go through. So I have a particular art practice which I picked up a little bit, which we call in theater, a performance lecture practice. It is actually when I was reading your work, I realized it was a type of process art because the art is often in the place between the audience and the performer. These types of performance lectures don't work because the audience has to participate. So there's a little bit of games and rules, and it's oddly most successful when there's more of the audience or the space between where the audience and performer live, which I think is one of the elements of process art. And so I was wondering, how do you feel about that in terms of cooking and whether we really understand what we go through within that?


C. Thi Nguyen (50:02): The stuff I've written about processors actually started in two different places. And I didn't realize until I saw in the end that they intersected. One is games, the other is cooking. So let me give you the different threads and then we can talk about theater. So with games, one of the things I think is really interesting is if you look at scholars and critics and people talking about how games can be great art, they tend to constantly have the fixed features of games that are like written into the script, graphics, music or the dialogue. But if you look at game reviewers and game players kind of in the wild, what they talk about is the gameplay. Basically I started thinking that people, especially people trying to defend games and art form or scholars, or do it by making games too much like fiction or movies by concentrating on the fictional or movie parts of it. So here's the theory. I think their aesthetic qualities in the object [Inaudible]. So, the novel is thrilling, the movie is beautiful, the painting is amazing and then there's another thing that I want to call processes, aesthetic qualities. And those are the qualities that are in you, the audience member interaction. So, so with the game, right? So take super Mario brothers, the object aesthetic qualities are the things that are in the program itself, the graphics and all that stuff. The process aesthetic qualities are the aesthetic qualities in you and the player as you interact. So how it feels to make the jump just in time or slide or time to thing, just right. It is the beauty that is in your body, your movement and your decisions. So my theory is that in games process or process aesthetic qualities are actually most important in natural practice. And then when people are worried about it being art or something, they concentrate on the object aesthetic qualities, they concentrate on the fixed qualities in the work, but think that's what games are for. And one of the big things that makes it difficult is that sometimes object aesthetic qualities are kind of the same between us, right? Like we see the same. 


If you're looking at a movie and the aesthetic quality you're interested in is like, say, the cool jump cuts. Those jump cuts are the same between us. But if we're both playing a game and what's interesting is how it felt to execute a jump, we executed different jumps, we had very different solutions. And so you don't get this precise sharing. And I think a lot of people in the art world really want this precise, they want to be like, we have to be talking about the same novel, but you're playing and my playing are different. And trying to find the sameness there. I tried to say that the most important things about games are things that are the same between all experiences. What's really special about games? Games are emergent, interactive qualities, and the game designer skill isn't making this thing that makes for so many people have these interesting aesthetic qualities that emerge in their own mind, in their own bodies as they play. So that's the game side. On the food side, I had this thing where I got really interested in. So there are some cookbooks I love to cook from like Marcella Hazan's essentials of classic Italian cooking, where everything is just elegant and lovely. And then like a lot of people, when I started to learn to cook, I would buy fancy restaurant cookbooks and the food would come out good. But the process of cooking was miserable. And I think the reason is they were never made for one cook. They were made for a working kitchen where there's the person making the stock, and so when you boil that down to one person, it asks you to do things that are impossible or incredibly awkward and there are like 15 things coming off the stove at once and they all need to be dealt with simultaneously. 


So I got really interested in the fact that the cookbooks I was drawn to are ones that had this elegant process of creation. But when you look at cookbook reviews, they concentrated on how good the dish was, but they never talked about the process of cooking. So, when I'm cooking, I'll often be cooking for an hour or two. Most of my engagement with the cookbook is in the cooking process. But the most important thing is to find a cookbook that gives me an elegant, lovely process. And yet that's elided. I think again, because people are obsessed with these kinds of stable object qualities in the finished dish. John Thorne has a really lovely comment here. So he's my favorite food writer. He's an amazing writer. And he says something like "we become hyper obsessed with the product of cooking and making it perfect that we are willing to sacrifice pleasures and joys and aesthetic qualities and the process of cooking it." In this version a lot of the time people cooking now like to shut their friends out and try to cook by themselves to get everything right behind closed doors.


Ben Yeoh(55:00): But they have these second kitchen, where they do the cooking and then present it in their main kitchen.


C. Thi Nguyen (55:05): Right, exactly. What happens when you invite your friends and you cook with them, you improvise on the cooking, you taste things together, you drink together. The final product can be significantly less perfect but the entire process is imbued with action and collective choice and all these wonderful, mixed, socialist aesthetic qualities. One of my big worries these days about cooking culture is the rise of the scientifically perfect cookbook that says, if you do exactly this exactly that and you make sure that perfect French fries and I'm like, yeah, but that was no fun. That was like me looking at my watch that wasn't me smelling, tasting and stowing them around. It was me just anxiously looking at my thermometer until it had exactly the right point. And so again, I think not always, but for a lot of these cookbooks, they arise because we're so laser-focused on the object qualities in the finished product that we're willing to sacrifice all the pleasure along the way. I mean, one interesting thing about cooking without a thermometer is a lot of the time, the way you're judging it is by smelling the food and making a judgment based on the smell of the food. And that's incredibly aesthetically pleasurable.


Ben Yeoh(56:28): Yeah. and there's all of the elements of your environment, your friends, the time, all of those elements, which go into eating. So, I have a question for you on tea, which is how best should I make my tea? So I like oolong tea and I've paid a little bit of attention, but actually I've realized after reading some of your work far not enough. So consider me a great beginner. I've never really heard of a Gong Fu style. I like complexity, I like oolong tea. What should I do and what should I be thinking about making tea?


C. Thi Nguyen (57:04): Yeah. This is interesting because this is very processing. So going from the style tea comments through China, and Taiwan. The way you do it is you take a guy wun, which is like a covered cup. And you put what'll seem like a lot of tea. This is like an eight ounce cup, or less often maybe a five ounce cup. And you'll put in like a teaspoon or two of tea. So first of all you need high quality tea. I'll send you the link.


Ben Yeoh(57:35): [Inaudible 57:35] leaves, but you got actual leaves at the end, right?


C. Thi Nguyen (57:39): Yes, you definitely need something that has whole leaves. Most of what Americans drink is the equivalent of particle board. It's like the sawdust from the bottom of the factory that they've packed in bags because that's the cheap crap. So real tea should be whole leaves. Some of it is rolled up tightly into balls and they'll open up. And the way you brew it is, you'll put a lot of tea in a little cup, and then you're going to brew it for a short amount of time, but you'll brew the same leaves a bunch of times. So for example, I will typically brew some of the tea I have five or ten times. The first brew is five seconds long. The second brew is seven seconds long. The next brew is nine seconds long. And good Chinese tea is really made for this process. So you get to glimpse over time, the changing quality of the tea like each little snapshot is a little evolution and that's what you want. That's the glory. And also you're smelling it the whole time you're adjusting in response. So yeah, this is a case where I think the enjoyment is actually inseparable from the process of making, as I find it really meditative. I write a lot with my tea set up right next to my computer. And the fact that you're constantly pouring a little bit in making it up. I also think you are micro adjusting your caffeine dose because the first few doses off of any tea have most of the caffeine and then it goes down, down, down. It's just a complex, lovely process that involves a lot of intimate interaction with some leaves and it's wonderful. It's so aromatic, deep and changing.


Ben Yeoh(59:39): That's great. And we'll put the link in the description below for those who want to explore more about the tea making process. So I've never been to Salt Lake City or around there. If I had sort of five days, three days, or maybe one day. What restaurant do I need to go to? Let's, let's maybe cut out the Western Canon, unless you think that's going to be the one I'd be interested in, But where should I go? Or maybe we can have one from here. You can have one or two.


C. Thi Nguyen (1:00:17): Salt Lake is a really good place for growing, it's interesting farm land and it's grazing territory. Culinarily, the most exciting thing for people coming to Salt Lake. This is not a restaurant Deltek's Meats is a butcher and truck caterer that does extraordinary work. Cafe de Bola is this wild intensive coffee master who does siphon service and he understands his coffee so profoundly and it's worth doing his siphon service. Interestingly it's like, you can get normal coffee at normal prices, or you can get his special siphoned service for like 12 bucks. And it's funny that people will freak out. People who are totally willing to pay like 10 bucks for a glass of crappy wine will not pay $12 for an extraordinary perfect coffee service.


Ben Yeoh(1:01:18): That actually feels cheap to me, $12 compared to master sushi chef and things like that. Okay. I will definitely put that on my list. Well, maybe we're in around Utah. What do you think is most misunderstood about Mormons? Is there something people kind of think, and then we just really don't understand about Mormon culture? Is there a Mormon cultural food? I suspect there isn't, I don't know.


C. Thi Nguyen (1:01:43): Oh yeah. There's some Jell-O and scallop fried potatoes. I'm going to decline to answer your question.


Ben Yeoh(1:01:48): That is fine. Okay. Let's move over that. So coming to the last couple of questions. What makes a productive day for you? So we had a little bit of it. It seems like tea is an important part, but, what makes you think this is your productivity, or you're feeling most creative and what's a good day, in terms of productivity for you.


C. Thi Nguyen (1:02:16): I think you're asking about creative productivity. So I'm going to leave aside the sludge of like grading [Inaudible 1:02:23].


Ben Yeoh(1:02:24): Yes, Some really good hacks like one of my teachers always used to joke, but I think he did it for real. He would just get your essays and throw them down the stairs and rate it that way, because he says that was just as useful. This is your whole thing about it. He was not a believer in the whole GPA thing. It was everything else. So he said, "I'm just going to throw them down the stairs, but I hope you got a lot out of the process of writing the essay" but no, yeah, creativity.


C. Thi Nguyen (1:02:47): So I went through a big thing in my life where at one point I was writing really boring stuff, because I thought that was what you're supposed to do. I got professionalized in this discipline and a part of the discipline that wrote a lot of very tiny technical papers that I ended up finding really boring and I was doing boring work. And so for me, one of the most intriguing things is figuring out a new idea that excites me. And so the best days are when I actually managed to grapple together some big connection between different ideas. I find it really easy to bog down in boring ideas that you can write a little bit of something about. So here's my productivity tips for creative writers. I often write down every single weird, bizarre idea I have. And then I'll sit down and try to develop every single one, at least a little bit. This might mean just taking a one sentence scribble and trying to turn it into like a few paragraphs or taking a few paragraphs and trying to turn it into an outline for a paper. And what I often find is the really bizarre ideas that seem silly if I give them a little life, if I breathe into them, they'll suddenly flourish. And so what I often do is instead of immediately for each idea, picking which one seems most likely to work, I will try to breathe life into everything and then sit back and be like, wait, which ones are the most interesting. And what this looks like for me is I often have a notebook with like 50 different ideas. Then I will try to turn each of them into a couple paragraphs. And in the end, I'll end up writing papers out of two or three of them, but it's not the ones I expected at the beginning. It's the ones that I let sit around for a few weeks and try to expand and let sit around again. And then suddenly like, oh, that idea isn't silly. That actually is really interesting. Most of my good ideas started just like silly, probably drunk one-off jokes that lived.


Ben Yeoh(1:04:57): Cool. So don't kill off the weird impulse, nurture them.


C. Thi Nguyen (1:05:05): Then kill them later.


Ben Yeoh(1:05:07): Yeah, That was really crazy, but yeah.


C. Thi Nguyen (1:05:12): If the idea is not right, don't turn everything down, but give it a chance for a while.


Ben Yeoh(1:05:16): Yeah. Give it a chance to breathe. I guess you could give advice to young food writers, also young social scientists or philosophers about what they should be thinking or doing or questions or curiosities they should be exploring.


C. Thi Nguyen (1:05:32): Totally different answers for food writers and philosophers. Food writers are curious. There's been a transition from a more professional food writer class who worked for newspapers to a very blog driven food writing world. And one of my concerns with the blogger written food writing world is…


Ben Yeoh(1:06:05): It's gamified.


C. Thi Nguyen (1:06:06): Well, that's part of it, but I'm not sure how to say this politely, but a lot of people from that space don't spend a lot of time researching the cuisines and learning about the details of the cuisine.


Ben Yeoh(1:06:25): Understanding the language of the food that they're talking about.


C. Thi Nguyen (1:06:27): I see, not all, but a very large number of the modern food blogging and Instagram world are easily captured by very Americanized foods that have been tuned for hipster, Instagram ability and missing out on the weirder stuff. I thought as a food writer, a lot of my mission was education. So I had to educate myself first. If people need to understand about how to appreciate social and cuisine, and it's really different for American cuisine, then you need to communicate the difference to that sensibility. So people can learn to do that. You have to learn by yourself and that's actually a fair amount of work. So that's the fundraiser for philosophy. The humanities are not a comfortable place to be in professionally right now. Like the world is against them. I think the only thing I can really say is that the world is huge and full of incredibly interesting topics and a lot of fields that specialize in a very narrow set. But if you keep looking around for the weird, interesting stuff of the borders, I don't know, you might do something as bizarre as writing an entire book based on analyzing the philosophy and proofing games and people might find that interesting


Ben Yeoh(1:07:55): And the world would be a better place for it. So follow the weirdness, I guess. Which then becomes not as weird as you might think. So thank you so much. Please check out the book which I have linked below and thank you very much for coming to chat with me.C. 


C. Thi Nguyen (1:08:15): Thanks so much. Bye.

In Podcast, Arts Tags Podcast, Podcasts, C Thi Nguyen, Philosophy

Anton Howes on innovation history, the improving mindset, and progress studies | Podcast

May 21, 2021 Ben Yeoh

Anton Howes is an innovation historian and policy thinker. He’s written a brilliant history of the RSA - the royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce - arguably Britain’s national improvement agency over the last 260 years - and is the RSA’s Historian in Residence. I recommend you check out his book, Arts and Minds. He writes a substack newsletter blog on innovation thinking that has won an award from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures. He has a day job as head of innovation research at the Entrepreneurs Network think tank and in my mind is an all round excellent thinker on innovation. His paper on re-thinking copyright here.

We discuss raising the prestige of innovators today, but consider it easy to say but harder to enact.

Anton argues for the benefits of a “great Exhibition” as a direct mechanism to inspire an “improving” mindset - the type of mindset that leads to innovation.

Anton shares what he has discovered about how invention has happened in history; and whether stagnation has happened or not recently, that it might be good to send a signal on the importance of innovation in any case. Why incremental innovation might be underrated, and why the process of innovation (ideas, iterations) is not publicised more.

Anton discusses evidence that formal education has not been needed for historic inventors (an improving mindset being potentially more important) and whether there are more than enough innovation prizes currently. 

We have a strong section on problems with copyright and how rules around copyright might not be fit for purpose today and how to pronounce “gimcrack” - a useless invention - and why having more gimcracks might be a sign of healthy innovation.

A fascinating walk through innovation history.

See the podcast below, video above and unedited transcript below.

Transcript (edit light):

File Name: Anton Howes chats with Ben Yeoh on innovation history, the improving mindset and progress studies

Length: 01:26:11


Benjamin: Welcome, everyone. I'm super excited to have Anton Howes with me today. Anton Howes is an Innovation Historian and Policy Thinker. He's written a brilliant history of the RSA; the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. That's arguably Britain's National Improvement Agency over the last 260 years and he's the RSA's historian-in-residence. I recommend you check out his book Arts and Minds. It's a great read. He writes a Substack Newsletter Blog also on the ideas of innovation thinking and that has won an award from Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures. He has a day job as Head of Innovation Research at the Entrepreneurs Network, think tank and in my mind is an excellent all-round thinker on innovation. Anton, welcome.


Anton [00:00:45]: Thanks for having me on.


Benjamin [00:00:47]: Alright, so let's go straight in. So, productivity and innovation; when you think about value and welfare and maybe items that are not easily recorded in economic measurements. Do you think the decline in productivity or this period or possible innovation stagnation that some people have argued for recently has been perhaps somewhat overstated or not? And do you think we're entering another era perhaps now of an enhanced invention and innovation?


Anton [00:01:17]: Yeah. So, I tend to take the view that if it has been overstated, it's perhaps in particular realms or particular industries. My view is that there's actually more innovation than ever that the acceleration of invention has only accelerated all the more to the extent that in the past would have been considered quite groundbreaking stuff. Nowadays it seems boring. The 10% improvement in the textile industries doesn't have quite the impact that a 10% improvement in the textile industries would have had 200, 300 years ago. We see ever more diversity in products, we see ever more changes to logistics, to transport infrastructure, to the kinds of foods that we can eat to the kinds of experiences that we can purchase, what we can do with our leisure time in constant changes to the quality of the kinds of goods that we use, the materials that we use for them, and it's become so common for us to get. We're so used to those sorts of changes that I'm not convinced that we've had any kind of particular stagnation. Now, where I can concede a point is that perhaps in the really big headline stuff, the sort of things, for example, that Robert Gordon might point to. Maybe there've been slowdowns in particular realms or the introduction of radically new household items, for example, that everyone's going to use. Perhaps there's been some kind of change, but by at large, I think we've had a continued acceleration of invention. 


That said, and this is a point I make quite often; it's no bad thing to be worried about it. Even though I might disagree with people who think that there's some kind of stagnation, I can see it being a good thing to say that there is a stagnation because if we do get the technology of the future a little bit earlier than we would otherwise have done, because of that concern, then that sorts the good. I'd rather have the future faster than have the future now if that future is one of technological progress and continued improvement and so on. So, a useful myth perhaps, although I think it’s well worth promoting and to a large degree, it has a big impact in the creation of this progress studies banner largely. Thanks to Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, you know, others that have been working on this, or they've been kind of circling around this idea for a long time. The big impact that we've had as a sort of lightning rod, is that suddenly people who were already working on this sort of thing, but kind of circling around and, or didn't have a name for it, now have got a banner under which to do those sorts of studies and that's been useful.


Benjamin [00:04:02]: Yeah. And fast forward to today, there's some evidence that they slightly changed their minds. That actually a lot of innovation is happening, or rather we've seen it maybe in some fields like Biomedical. Your comment that leads me to think also around the difference between incremental innovations or things we kind of think of incremental and those transformational ones, and maybe also specific versus general-purpose, but maybe on the incremental versus sort of transformational. Do I sense that maybe we underwrite those five to 10% incremental innovations? The ones which might not even be worth a patent or something like that, but slowly improves over quality and it is quite hard to measure.


Anton [00:04:45]: Yeah. I think we generally do. We like to focus on the headline stuff. Partly because it's sexy. These exciting new products that kind of come out of nowhere and we think of the first big apple; showcase events with Steve Jobs standing in front of those people, wowing everyone. We think of these big launch events, but the reality is even if we look at those inventions or those innovations, when we boil it down to it, it's actually a collection of small improvements that have just been kept under wraps for a long time. We've allowed those margin improvements to accumulate to this point where, when we reveal it, it appears as though it is magic. And that, I think, is something for all of history as well. The steam engine is another great example. If you look at the development of steam engines, it is a story drawn out of decades and even centuries of margin improvements to its efficiency, margin improvements to the ways in which it can be applied, and so on. Margin improvements turn our understanding of how it works, then over time it results in this transformative technology, but there isn't any single inventor who kind of had 'the' one big breakthrough. Now, even when we talk about that, we actually have to split the credit across a small number of people. When we actually start to look into the very details of their invention, we actually split the credit even further. But even with any particular adventure in that regard, it's not necessarily that they had some kind of annus mirabilis, the sort of thing that people think of. When the pandemic started, a lot of people noticed that Newton seemed to have his plague. He was particularly productive. That's not really the case.


He writes a lot during that year, but it's actually still as a result of the accumulation of a lot of work that has been going on for years. So, that I think is what's happening. Then there's another thing worth mentioning, which isn't just that margin improvement is underrated. And often, not even measured, right? When we think of inflation statistics, for example, when we talk about real GDP, we're actually often discounting quality improvements because we're trying to equate the television of today to the television of yesteryear. Even if we actually compared the two side by side, they're obviously not the same. So, the money we're paying for these things, no inflation statistics are supposed to look at a set basket of goods, but the basket of goods that we use has changed radically. It has to be rebased every few years because of the changes to the diversity of products that we purchase and to the quality of those products as well. I think that often we understate in our statistics just how much improvements are going on there but the other point is that each of the industries that we have; this is what I call the Paradox of Progress. Each of these industries we have has become smaller as a proportion of the economy as a whole. I mentioned textiles earlier. Textiles used to be massive. We're talking at least 15% of the economy in Britain in the 18th century, but today, in the major textile exporter in the world, China, it's less than half of that. It's about seven percent based on the kinds of estimates that I could find. Now that's a massive industry today and we're talking all aggregate. Many more textiles have been produced, millions and possibly billions more textiles have been produced each year, but as a proportion, even of their economy, it's shrunk. So, any improvement that you have to this smaller industry as of; the industry itself is bigger, but the smallest proportion of the whole industry is going to have less of an impact on the economy overall. But, if coffee were something like 50% of the British economy, then the arrival of Starbucks and all the increased improvements for the autosomal coffee makers would put them on par with James Watson, John Kay, and Richard Arkwright. … or whoever you want to mention, right? Because of the impact that that would have had, but it's become the smaller thing and I think the paradox there is that through invention, we actually create new sub-specialism out of previous specialisms. Textiles have gone from overwhelmingly in England, let's say, being well to adding things like silk and linen and cotton, and then you've got all of these newly invented artificial fabrics; the nylon and the various kinds of polyesters, and so on. That there is invention. That's creating these improvements or creating that diversity. And as a result, any improvement to the sub-fields has a smaller apparent impact than an older invention of a very comparable sort would have had before.


Benjamin [00:09:21]: That brings to mind two reflections. One is on your first point about people not understanding incremental innovation and I'm sure we've talked about this. It's because the person in the street doesn't have a very good idea about what innovators do, how innovation actually happens, you know, small teams, big teams, corporate, and the like, so that will come out of there. They missed the incremental because they don't know it's kind of happening. And then on your second point about essentially the challenges of the mismatching of inflation, big TVs versus other TVs. I felt this generally over welfare. So, my example within healthcare is how we view pain. Now, we have ways of managing pain and, you know, talk about something extreme, like terminal illness in your last couple of weeks of life. You can now spend those last couple of weeks pain-free. I don't exactly know what the value of that is, but I'm guessing it's pretty enormous to you, if you could particularly last two weeks, you could have exchanged half your worldly value to be in your last month and to know your family is pain-free. You would maybe be making that decision, but because we have very cheap pain medications which being around all the time that nowhere in our measurement do we say, "What is the actual welfare value of being pain-free?" And that's one small example of where I think some of these general inventions or even that are quite hard to measure because actually, the value to us is extraordinarily high, but not in a dollar way.


Anton [00:10:58]: Yeah. Or, even on a societal level, I think medicines have a lot of really useful examples there, and that there are all sorts of drugs that have been developed year after year. Which are treating very specific diseases which may be a handful of people in the world suffer extraordinarily from. This is like debilitating stuff. It's the sort of thing--


Benjamin [00:11:16]: It gets narrow and narrower.


Anton [00:11:18]: It gets narrow and narrower but we've actually seen extraordinary improvements in the treatment of a lot of those diseases. But just because there are a few people, I don't think it means that progress has slowed down. Maybe on the big stuff, you know, the cancer research and the Alzheimer's and so on that affects millions of people worldwide that have been slowdowns of some sort. And even then I'm actually skeptical because it seems as though there has been dramatic improvement in the treatment of even the headline diseases. But the fact that we're having this incremental improvement that's still ongoing and actually sometimes even accelerating in these kinds of smaller cases. Their smallness is only comparable to looking at society as a whole and thinking things in this kind of frame metal way.


Benjamin [00:12:00]: Yeah. I look at healthcare quite a lot, and I agree that healthcare biomedical progress is still happening at a reasonably fast clip, obviously quite hard to measure. They maybe argue about how much we're having to spend to get that progress. But even there, I think it's a little bit unclear. So, you have this idea or a vision for a kind of grand or great exhibition as a mechanism for people to understand invention and innovation closer and maybe be inspired to invent and fix problems for themselves, but almost as a direct mechanism. Would you like to elaborate on why you think a great exhibition is such a good idea and actually maybe what you would do if you're organizing one? This in the UK has got a kind of mini one may be in the offing, but you know, how should we really think about the great exhibition both in history and what we should do now?


Anton [00:12:52]: Yeah. So, a lot of people think of the world's fairs and they'd be right in doing so, right? They camped at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The famous one for Crystal Palace as being the first of its number. Not that there was this idea of world's fairs coming out of it. It's just, that was the first one and they've kind of backdated the first of their number to that one. The problem is that nowadays world's fairs, I think, have become very much a national branding exercise. They're highly curated. You've got conference designers putting together exhibits that they think the public will like for a sort of mass market. You've got country stalls, but the country stalls are going to be the sorts where Britain is trying to show off particular things that it wants to show off at the time. I don't know. It's got buzzwords that some ad agency has come up with that it wants to promote. Various other countries will have certain cultural things they want to do. They're trying to get tourists along. It's a PR agency kind of-- I'm trying to think of the word that it's kind of delightful … They're kind of a grand international and they get lots of visitors and some of them are extremely popular, but that's not what the original exhibitions were. So, the Great Exhibition of 1851 is copying the French model of the industrial exhibition. Which is a highly commercial event in the sense that you have lots of businesses, but also individuals and scientists and whoever else all over the country and who are producing things. These producers should have this opportunity to showcase the best of what they're doing. By showcasing the best you do two things: you allow producers to educate one another by sharing best practices.


So, if you are a cotton manufacturer and you get to see what your rivals done in the south of the country and you're in the north of the country and you're like, 'Wow, this stuff is amazing, here's where I needed to catch up.' Here are the inventions I need to adopt in order to raise my game, then that sort of does it. So, it becomes an engine of invention in that respect. In another respect also, you've got the fact that by putting everyone in the same room or in the same building and in just the space of a few months, you're potentially going to create all of these connections amongst people. The Great Exhibition of 1851 happens to coincide and it's not a coincidence at all with the First International Chess Tournament. Now, World Level International is one that they're trying to organize and likewise with all sorts of other initiatives for international standardization. You start to get the first proper conversations about standardizing things from the postal service to telegraph rates too late with the later world's fairs, including things like musical pitch which hadn't been internationally standardized before. So, you've got those kinds of conversations that might spark further invention and then from the consumer point of view, if you are just an ordinary visitor to these things, you might be exposed to products that you hadn't even realized you wanted. In the same way, that constantly happened through advertising today is that often the main effect of advertising is just reminding you that you might want something already or just exposing you to a product that you had no idea was there. So, the highly commercial things, which I think nowadays a lot of government bodies will be uncomfortable with, perhaps explains even at the time, why the Great Exhibition despite the fact it has this Royal Commission that set up to organize it is still ultimately a private event. It was a for-profit event. The profits are reinvested in the creation of what ends up being the kind of museum model.


I think that rollout the other memorials; the Victorian Albert Museum, the Science Museum, all of that. That's a kind of cultural hub known at the time as Albertopolis, named after Prince Albert for being the kind of national head of this project. Ultimately, it's a for-profit thing with these nonprofit kinds of aims. Very strangely organized, but also the funding doesn't come from the government. It comes from subscriptions. I think today you'd actually have to probably copy that model fairly closely because it probably has to be something that's crowd funded to a certain degree that has private capital going into it to a certain degree that allows you to then do those quite commercial things. Like have people sending their exhibits and be able to use it as advertising and not get uncomfortable about you tendering processes and fair treatment and so on from the use of that event. I think it's the sort of thing that requires some kind of government involvement. Certainly, you're going to need permissions, you're going to need perhaps policing, you're going to need insurance kinds of questions that need to be sorted out. There are all sorts of things that need to be solved, but the way I like to think of it in modern terms is if you imagine some of the great big industry fairs that you see often for specific industries. Imagine all of those rolled into one super event. So, not just seeing the very latest in drones or software, but also the very latest in bathroom design, arts in general, sculpture, pottery or building. Just absolutely everything that you can think of jammed into this super events. The kinds of things I'm envisaging would include; if we do manage to genetically engineer dinosaurs and so on. Those would be featured if we do manage to sort of-- This isn't the right thing to say because I'm kind of going to raise Jurassic Park kind of concerns. Whatever is the next level of technology that we're just about to hit, it should be showcasing that like everyone doesn't see robotics.


Benton [00:18:26]: Robotics! Yeah. People moving things with their brain.


Anton [00:18:30]: People don't realize that today people are going around in mixed suits lifting heavy objects in factories. This is happening already and it's the sort of thing that is otherwise consigned to fiction. Like Iron Man kind of suits sort of exist in some very specific ways.


Benjamin [00:18:49]: Yeah. Although, I think to some of the other work you've been doing, it's sort of a bit of a false presumption that you've got this kind of rich Tony Stark, which is going to make an Iron Man suit in terms of how invention actually happens. So, I think that's a brilliant idea. I do think there's a touch with a huge big tech conference, which happens in Spain every year. I don't know. You might be fascinated to know when we do the real person in life thing again.  Amazon, on their AWS side, have this big conference and I went around to one of them. This one is free with this idea and thousands were there, but it was really just the people who were interested in Amazon tech and it's open to the general public, but it wasn't. This is the problem about the fact that we've had advances in so many areas. This is just the little pocket of Amazon world. Like you say, "Where's the medicine? Where's the engineering? Where's the networks of fact? Where's the deep mind? Where are all of these? I think it would be a great thing although, I wonder about the scale of it to really happen. We need to cross all of these things, but it would then show that actually, we've made progress in so many of these different fields compared to where we were and that's part of it.


Anton [00:20:00]: Yeah. I think there's the benchmarking, right? With the original industrial exhibitions that are copied to the great submission. In France, they start these off in 1798 and every few years they have a new event. The idea at the time was that, out of patent fees that would be funded. The French ones were state-funded ones from this particular accrual of fees and then they were kind of holding the vendor for a few years. And then you have this benchmarking process, you're able to see how much has this particular industry progressed in the country versus where it was before and people started to get worried. The reason the Brits copy it is because they start to look at the levels of mechanization that are being achieved in France and starting to worry that France already has this lead in fashion, but if it also catches up to the lead that Britain had in any kind of mass production of things, then from an international trade perspective, the competition is really coming in and something needs to be done about it. The idea behind having the international exhibition was not just to celebrate British accomplishments, but actually to reveal shortcomings and it's used as a tool by reformers to point to things that need to be done by the government from a policy perspective. That's again, another very valuable thing about it. Which I think it can reveal who's ahead and who's behind along these certain metrics is I think often very valuable information that you just don't otherwise come by, right? Especially when it's in this kind of qualitative way. You can do all of the quantitative studies you like, but ultimately seeing is believing. Especially for policymakers.


Benjamin [00:21:32]: Yeah. For certain. That's one of the things I got from your book Arts and Minds; were I hadn't appreciated in the early history of the RSA and actually its whole history into the modern-day. This idea that there was a nation-state element to it is like, we will better the world as a sort of side effect but we should definitely better our nation. And then if what we do spills over to the rest of the world, that's great, but we need to ensure British inventions or British things don't fall behind. Therefore, this is why we're going to gang together and do that. This is what you might call an enlightened self-interest. It was seemingly quite a large driver which could kind of remain today and be utilized. You do not think even in a globalized kind of framework.


Anton [00:22:25]: I think there's actually a globalized justification for this kind of nationalism. In a way that if you have lots of countries like Britain; Boris Johnson said, "Oh, I want this country to be the best place in the world for scientists and inventors or something to that effect." I can't remember the exact words but that's a useful thing to what every national leader can say, right? We should be encouraging every national leader to do that because then we can get a race to the top of the kinds of institutions, the kind of support that invention gets worldwide. Some people often say, "Why?" But then given the agglomeration effects, given that usually the real driving force happens in the place. It's where people are most concentrated. Surely, we should just get everyone over to the kind of valley or whatever is the latest version. I don't know. Miami or there'd be lots of new ones lately, right? But to the Silicon Valley or newer Silicon Valley, we should just get everyone there and have the kind of agglomeration effect from everyone being so concentrated. But in actual fact, we want other countries to be the next place because that way, even if that particular hub starts to fail or starts to decay or starts to decline in some kind of way, then there's going to be a new place for them to step to.


Benjamin [00:22:31]: Most countries should be able to sustain at least one, if not more than one type of hub. It's kind of interesting that there are so few hubs of Silicon Valley's nature....


Anton [00:23:43]: Yeah. I mean, I suspect there were more hubs but for small specific industries that we give credit to. Think of Nokia and so on coming out of Finland and I think there were particular industry hubs of certain ways and Silicon Valley makes a big headline impact because of the fact that you've got these very successful companies making a lot of money and kind of attracts people to that as well.


Benjamin [00:24:05]:  What role do you think innovation prizes should play or not? Because also, when I was reading your book, I was sort of struck by how many essential innovation prizes, all those types of things, seem to be around. And when I look at today, there are some, but don't seem to be the level and scale, also adjusted are the money and prestige available versus that. Do you think we should be having maybe more innovation prizes? I guess it's gone down the world of VC and accelerators in a different form of funding. But, I was intrigued by how many innovation prices there seem to be about versus today. Or maybe.....


Anton [00:24:47]: Well, today it seems like there's loads more. It's just that there's certainly a lot more money available by prices. I don't know about prestige available by prices and that's a slightly different thing. Now, certainly we're not talking here for a kind of more general listeners about things like the Nobel prize which is sort of lifetime achievement of prize, but more for a specific longitude style prize. Here's a particular problem. If you find a solution is 'X' amount of....


Benjamin [00:25:14]: That would be a more environmentally friendly cement or....

Anton [00:25:17]: Right. So we've got the 'X' prices. Elon Musk has got his various prices. I've seen all sorts of other particular ones. I think Prince William just announced a new prize with someone else for environmental purposes. I actually remember at one point even the RSA did a study on the number of environmental prices saying, 'there's too many and we need to start kind of...'


Benjamin [00:25:38]: Okay. Alright. Well, I take it back. There's not a problem with the number of prices, maybe it's the prestige essentially.


Anton [00:25:44]: Yeah. Or, perhaps the money is too spread out along between too many different prices and that actually is not sufficiently motivating. Now, the problem with prices I think is that just like a lot of innovation policies in general, it affects the direction of invention, but I don't think it actually does much to increase invention as a whole. If we think of there being a kind of pool of inventors; they have limited attention spans. There's only so many things that they can be working on at once. And what prices do is, people follow the money generally speaking. So, if you attach pools of money to particular activities, they're going to direct themselves towards those sorts of things. Now, that can be extremely useful. And one of the valuable things, I think that the Society for Arts did was it often tried to have prices that will be available to people who otherwise wouldn't have access to sources of funding. So, there might be people who are too poor for patents. They might be too gentlemanly too grubbing themselves with commercial things hence, the kind of prestige elements or they might be for prizes that aren't worth patenting because they're either too niche or they’re not for profit things there might be safety improvements where the profit-making isn't as obvious as a kind of, lying to them or they might use them to direct people's attention to the sorts of things that people were working on.


So much more humanitarian kinds of things to do so it includes how to rescue someone from a river who's drowning? Improvements of how to prevent carriages from overturning? Improvements of how to put breaks on steam engines? Improvements to the lifeboat and so on and so forth. All niche which actually often does have this hidden humanitarian aspect to them but isn't as obvious in hindsight like, improvements to carrying fish over land rather than sea so that you could break the monopoly of the Billingsgate Fishmongers because there's this social concern that monopolies are taking advantage and raising prices of basic commodities and so on. You have all of these. I think those are the particular uses of prices that I think people should focus on when designing them is that they should be about directing people's attention to things that aren't already being done. I think there's a lot of work on environmental stuff. I can see why they're environmentally focused prices, but the more specific they are the better. So, something like, I want a price that's going to take carbon out of the atmosphere is much better than a general environmental prize nowadays, given the value it has at least getting existing inventors to look at particular problems. The other lacking thing is definitely prestige. I think sometimes the prestige comes with the amount of money that's given out.


Benjamin [00:28:26]: Sure.


Anton [00:28:27]: Nobel Prize being what is it, a million dollars I think, or equivalent there too is a big deal. And so, the larger the prices, the better. Probably Elon Musk's one will have a big impact for a similar reason. Given the kind of amount of money that can be winnable, but even then, I worry that it's just going to be people who already were working on those problems just applying for the grant or applying for the prize money rather than it stimulating other people to work in.....


Benjamin [00:28:55]: New people, which is one of the good effects of a Great Exhibition. You might get a general public person thinking, 'Oh. I could do this. I've got this problem I might want to......'


Anton [00:29:05]: Prices can be combined as well. The Great Exhibition had a prize jury, right? That would look and try to find the best of the best within each category. Internationally drawn group of experts and they would give out prizes. In France, for the National Level Ones, they would hand out to Alicia and Donair to someone who happened to be the best of the best within some of these categories. There're ways of combining those two which might actually make the price stand out even more by being associated with the event rather than having a price and building things around that.


Benjamin [00:29:41]: Sure. I think one argument I've heard you articulate is that formal education may not necessarily be a good predictor for invention, which I think is quite interesting for people who aren't going down a formal routine; I can be an inventor. Do you think this is still true today? And, why might that be? And you have a small movement say, "Peter Thiel has these fellowships where you're purposely not allowed to go to university because it might open up different avenues of thought." So, I'm interested in whether you think maybe formal education is not needed for being an inventor today and perhaps why that might be?


Anton [00:30:24]: Yeah. I think invention itself is more of an attitudinal thing. I like to describe it as an improving mentality that the people who do invent things are people who see room for improvement where other people perhaps don't. Then, they work at solutions to the problems that they've created. So in a way, the first step is kind of whining and complaining about things saying, "Oh, this could be better. It's not so great after all." And not being satisfied with the way things are but what makes them much more interesting than just people complaining about things is that they actually try to find the solutions as well. It's those two things combined which I think is the most interesting thing to look at. But, the first step really ultimately is against people who are saying it is broke and I want to fix it rather than kind of being satisfied saying that, 'if it ain't broke then don't try to fix it.' The problem identification is the crucial thing there. And then what happens after you've identified the problem is that actually you don't necessarily need to have been skilled in the industry that you're trying to improve there. That's typically inventors. You just self-educate which is easier than ever today. Thanks to the kind of information technologies that we have.


To the extent that things like YouTube have opened up tacit knowledge to us in a way that wasn't really there before. It could be getting the expertise to solve a problem that used to involve at least spending a few years with you doing an apprenticeship, copying someone else, and trying to get those kinds of tacit things that can't be written down and communicated just through the written word or text. Nowadays, I think video is breaking that barrier to the extent that you could effectively do an apprenticeship with someone a million miles away and it would be just as good or close to as good. Or, they rely on other experts in the same way that for you to have a life-changing app idea, you don't necessarily need to be a software engineer. You can rely on other people and as long as you've got a clear idea of how you're going to go about all of the improvements that are being envisaged there and that you can still be an innovator in that way, but with a bit of a division of labor going on. And that's where I think teams when they innovate, they actually do it properly. There are people who are doing different stages of the invention process; the ideation, the implementation, the iteration, and then improvements along certain lines alongside that as well. I have forgotten the original question, but that...


Benjamin [00:32:59]: It was the formal education that was needed and basically your answer is no because mindset is more important. Which means...


Anton [00:33:07]: It could help, right? So, it's yeah. I qualify there is, but obviously if you are a software engineer, you come up with an app idea that is helpful. If you already know about the process and you know what's possible, for example, you know some of the limitations and with that said, sometimes the only limitations can be a bad thing, right? So there are cases in history where sometimes the complete novice actually had an insight into these things or not so much had an insight, but was willing to waste their time in experimentation in a way that the experienced person wouldn't be. So, Bessemer and steel is a great example of this, where he was told by all of the IMS legit, 'Don't bother. It's not possible.' And he says, "Well, I wouldn't have a go anyway, because that's just what he'd been doing for decades." He's already been an adventurer in all sorts of other ways, but he says, "You know, I had nothing to unlearn," and that was the benefit there. And that he was kind of rebuilding something from scratch. Now, not everyone's going to be a Bessemer. Some people might kind of listen to this and start to reinvent a field and discover that actually, the experts were right all along for years. But eventually, it's inherently wasteful in many ways, right? Experimentation is inherently waste...


Benjamin [00:34:13]: A lot of failures or…


Anton [00:34:16]: There is a lot of failure or...


Benjamin [00:34:17]: ......or learning. "Fail attentive learning," they say. F-A-I-L. This is why I'm really excited by your idea about this mindset. First of all, it goes into all of these books where you had the growth mindset. Now, I know you've got the scale mindset and things, but it is not just curiosity. Although, curiosity has a problem complaining as an element, but then going to do something about it and maybe this idea of stamina, like keeping at it as well. So, these qualities, which are just subtly different from just being curious about the world. I'm curious. You can read a lot about it, but then you have to do something and then not quite give up, you kind of keep going on, which I think is really interesting.


Anton [00:35:01]: So, I think there's one thing. This is a really important point that you're raising here. I know I haven't even let you finish the question, but there is an important point here which I want to tease out. Sometimes out here, kids are naturally innovative. The problem is the education system has stifled kids. They're naturally experimental, they're natural thinkers. Now that's true. I think kids are naturally creative and a lot of us are in general. And that sometimes, we learn conformity in some ways or sometimes our creativity is poo-pooed enough that we kind of give up on certain elements a bit, or we kind of restrict ourselves in terms of the kinds of things we reveal. But that's not quite what I'm talking about when it comes to the improving mentality. It's that yes curiosity and the kind of creativity is maybe extremely useful in finding those solutions, but there's a lot more direction going on, right? There are a lot more kids who are experimenting with this stuff aren't necessarily identifying problems and then finding solutions. I don't think that's going on. They're just tinkering and creating random things, but they're not necessarily thinking about the applications of those things or their usefulness. Now, maybe once in a while, maybe one in a hundred inventions turns out to be the reason that way. Where someone just kind of randomly doing something and through the kind of natural bubbling up of their creativity that they create something that they then think, 'Okay, it solves this problem.' But that I think is actually one of the problems with how the public at large thinks about the invention is that we almost have this idea of maybe, it is used to be people in some R&D Lab in some major company like Xerox or something or Bell Labs. Nowadays, it's just a bunch of people in smart suits sitting around a whiteboard and, or maybe not in smart suits but in t-shirts and shorts sitting around a whiteboard and coming up with ideas and brainstorming. But in actual fact, I think when it's people just noticing the problem and saying, "Let's find a solution." That's when creativity comes in. Perhaps as useful as a kind of means to an end, rather than the engine itself.


Benjamin [00:37:03]: Yeah. As you hinted to earlier; the sort of ideation or the idea, but then whatever you're doing. Say modeling, prototype, testing, iterating, an idea it's like, 'Oh, maybe we need to shave off this, move that, do this prototyping, iterating and measuring. Oh, it may be that went the wrong way so, maybe we need to do the reverse.' That sort of effort involved being directed much more than just, 'Oh, genius. I thought about that idea.'


Anton [00:37:30]: I've been calling it the optimizing mindset in some ways. It's like people have these-- who's your friend who has an Excel spreadsheet for like a particular activity that they do. And that optimizes the efficiency of that particular thing. I know a few people who have applied that to like going to the gym or something, right? That's self-improvement, it's actually still an improvement. It's the same mindset at play there. It's that they've realized there's a particular activity they do but they also want to make sure they do it as efficiently and as best as they possibly can.


Benjamin [00:38:01]: Yeah. I agree. I guess the one extra I would add is if you're working in a small team or large team, you don't need necessarily everyone to have that. Because you might have the one person who's working much more on the ideation or how to tweak it. It's still their underlying current because that's what your team is working on, but someone's very good at the kind of recording, measuring, iterating and someone's kind of very good at like, 'oh actually maybe we should try this or maybe we should try that.' Actually, that leads me onto this sort of follow-up about how invention works, because I guess when you go back 300 years ago maybe you did have these kinds of singular inventors. They do worth speaking to a lot of other people, but maybe it was just them and some of their assistants, but today it very much seems to be more small teams, large teams. I'm interested in whether we should back the person or the project. What do you think works best for innovation? What are the strengths and weaknesses between smaller teams, larger teams, iterative teams, and all? Do you think this is a myth? I've said its myth, so maybe it's not of just the lone inventor. How true does that actually happen and how important is teaming and thinking about that for innovation?


Anton [00:39:17]: Yeah. I think if there's a division of labor amongst people, for me, it kind of brings to mind as though invention is something that happens by committee. The people sitting around the whiteboard; I don't think that's what happens. I think it is much more divided. There's a lot more individual effort that's then combined in the same way as science overall, right? And you have lots of scientists doing their own thing and then through their interaction we get science, right? This kind of thing which is accumulated and kind of, not even accumulated, but often being tested kind of knowledge. Where there's a lot of individual effort then through various other impersonal mechanisms combined into something else of its own. I think that's what happens with technology as well. I think what happens with invention is that we should think of it as something that happens on the individual level and we should seriously take the fact that people who work in teams are definitely individuals doing a bit of invention. But it's through their combined marginal improvements that we sometimes get for the invention, right? If we want to start putting it into a box. That again, is why this ultimately comes back to focus on marginality. Let's focus on the small tweaks and implementations and small changes. We were right to say that an invention isn't just the product of a single genius necessarily, although it might be. But even that thing is drawing upon prior improvements, right?


Benjamin [00:40:57]: Sure.


Anton [00:40:58]: Newton famous said, "He could see further because he stood on the shoulders of giants, right? That's something that all inventors must do. There's no way that they're not doing that. They're building on previous improvements that other people have done. That's either something that happens outside of a team because you've got some inventor down the garden shed who is working on a thing and has read about something that comes up with their own improvement. But I don't think them doing that is actually that much course, it's qualitatively different than if they'd been in the same room with the person, they just read about their invention. They're kind of bouncing ideas off one another. Perhaps bringing the inventor from their garden shed and into the room will speed things up a bit. And that's perhaps where the team comes in useful, but ultimately, it's still individual.


Benjamin [00:41:42]:  Do you have a view? Some of the literature suggests that at a certain point a certain size of team doesn't work as well when you're working on a project. In extremist, I think if you're getting 300 people to work on something, it doesn't seem to work as well as three to 12 people or teams. Although the project is a bit mixed, you are going to have many experiments on it. Do you think you'd have a view there or is it hard to say? 

Anton [00:42:09]: I don't know much about the intricacies of innovation management, but where there is a problem often is in what you might call the research element that you have to do to prevent yourself from doing any wasted research of your own. If you are someone who comes up with some improvement to the mop and you're going to get your patents on that, even if you're not, it's not necessarily going to exploit it. That commercially is going to be your proof that you are the inventor of this margin improvement. You're going to have to go and do a whole lot of research before you even start...

Benjamin [00:42:52]: I think...


Anton [00:42:54]: ...doing much of the tinkering to work out if your things are original, and someone hasn't really done it. Now, when you have hundreds or thousands of people all working on those sorts of improvements, that becomes a bit of a slog and requires wasted effort, almost doing research for people to even kind of do the search before they even start doing other stuff. That's where I can see is being the problems today, that there's such a proliferation of stuff. There's so much going on that it's difficult to know where to put your own intentions. There is this very harmful idea that there's nothing new under the sun. In actual fact, very often, the sun has not seen a lot of interesting things that you'd think were quite obvious. But I think having that extra bit of self-confidence to be the person to say, "No. This is actually regional and no one else has done this." I think a very useful attribute of inventors is what some inventors are accused of and the innovators accused seem to be quite egotistical. Maybe there's a kind of correlation there between the people whose bold enough to say, "This is brand new." That someone who would...


Benjamin [00:44:02]: There seems to be a partial element of that. You think of someone like Elon Musk, who thinks of himself as an engineer is just somewhat off mainstream, can sometimes seemingly be helpful. Actually, large teams and small teams are what people are conflicting theories over, I do think there is a duplication element. There's also an element of potential. You want to follow the person rather than the project and if you have 300 people, not all of them really want to be on the project and just things like that. But I was interested and didn't have a view, but if you were then in charge of a corporate R&D lab, or maybe say in Tech or Software or even Biology. Do you think there's a way of organizing or having an insight of over history that you think maybe they could do a little bit more and therefore be a bit more effective? Or, is it too unique to the culture and projects of the actual organization to have any insights?


Anton [00:45:00}: That's a really interesting question. Now, what's interesting about my own research is that it's almost the wholly concentrate over the pre-lab era where it's the overwhelming individuals doing stuff often in concert with one another. And, they're a part of communities of engineers where they're all working on their separate thing. Yeah. I guess...


Benjamin [00:45:19]: ...don't have. Yeah. That is interesting whether the modern world has something to learn from how we did it before. I'll re-ask the question, which was if you're in charge of a corporate R&D lab or thinking about R&D today. Are there any learnings that you might've had from your historical perspective on innovation?


Anton [00:45:42]: Yeah. It's an interesting question because largely the period I've studied is that one before the rise of the corporate R&D lab. Which is kind of in the late 19th century kind of thing, it really takes off in the 20th century. We've seen a decline since then in the mid-20th century and late 20th century in particular. A lot of my insight is from this era of individuals. Now, they're not necessarily just people who just work on their own in isolation. They're certainly a part of communities of engineers; London engineers. The people who were starting the kind of standardization that you have of mechanical parts. These are the people who are doing their individual stuff possibly with their own individual companies. It's their apprentices who are going off and setting up rightful companies that are using other kinds of machinery, but it's still improving on the standardization, that's taken place at the parent company, where their previous masters have been doing stuff. Ultimately, it was something that was done by individuals there. So, in terms of lessons from it, it's hard to say. Now, one possibility there is that over the course of the late 19th century, we saw the improvements in the process of invention which then gave rise to the corporate R&D lab. I think there's possibly something to that, but again I couldn't say for sure. That's kind of an open question for me. It's still something I'll have to work on, in the future.


Benjamin [00:47:17]:  Well, if we'd solve this, then progress studies would not be such a hot topic, in terms of how we think about progress. You might not have anything to say on this one either, but I will ask it anyway. So, that was on the corporate R&D lab, but then here in the UK we're about to launch ARIA, which is modeled on the US DARPA or ARPA-E. It's aside from NIH, but I guess we're talking about government-funded innovation labs. I was just thinking if you were going to give a bit of advice to the new executive director, or maybe you would be the new executive director of ARIA yourself. What do you think it should be doing or not? And, given maybe another preamble to work into this because there is this idea now that maybe we should be sponsoring more people rather than projects. And, if you look at little labs at the moment, they're often led by a lab leader who's having these ideas, and then they have three to 12 people or teams working under them with their own kind of research projects which they are feeding into and then constantly talking with the lab director of thinking, let see how we do this. Actually, even in corporate R&D labs there is a touch of that. Although it's changed a lot. The UK R&D seems to be going to do a program management approach, but it does seem to be quite open. Executive director, UK ARIA, is there any advice for them?


Anton [00:48:50]: Yeah. So, I guess the question is about the model that's going to be adopted here. I think one of the things that you often hear, at least within the mythology of DARPA ARPA is that it's funding; if the kind of blue skies research that doesn't necessarily have a particular application yet, and you just want to see where they throw some money at people doing all kinds of research without having to answer too many questions and have too much oversight and see what happens and then perhaps start looking at applications. Now, maybe there's something to that. I guess, I still think an organization like that needs a kind of framing of problems. In terms of strategic oversight, I think I've always assumed that there's a problem in the back of people's minds. Perhaps, another model that we need to look at here is what happens during World War II. Where you have in the UK and the US you have these kinds of defense, or you have experts in various fields brought into close proximity and asked to find things that will help the war effort. So, you've got some framing of problems there, and perhaps you have specific problems identified for them to solve, and then that's the kind of research model that the individuals through conversations and through just their own research would be coming up with solutions to work on. There was a book I read a few years ago. I'm not sure how historically accurate a lot of it is because it was a biography. It focused on the achievements of an individual. It was called Churchill's Iceman.


Someone who works in one of these World War II British laboratories and is coming up with ideas like, instead of building these fast aircraft carriers why don't we use icebergs and create artificial icebergs, and then you can land planes on them. Now, I don't know how feasible that work is, but he also comes up with all sorts of other ideas which do have interesting applications, like trying to draw the Germans out into Norway. Through the use of troops on what would be later become snowmobiles. This is pretty interesting fun work, but again, even though it sounds quite random and sort of out there, it still has that basic purpose that the application is actually at the forefront of their mind, not even at the back of their mind. This is the strategy that we should use, and here's a way to solve that strategy, even though this means that is quite creative and out there. I think there's potential that ARPA or ARIA ends up giving a lot of funding to people who are working on interesting things and just for them to carry on doing those things. But, where I think things get really interesting from the kind of state-funded model isn't so much the blue sky stuff, but it's actually, which I think a lot of the universities-supported sector really does. But it's more in solving particular challenges where a lot more investment in solving those challenges could be very useful. So, perhaps something to do with climate change. I don't know. The governments all have their strategic kind of ideas about things they want to have improvements in.


Benjamin [00:52:01]: Yeah. I have a personal view that they should be looking at some of these things where there's a lot of public goods, but private companies might not necessarily be looking into it. And, some things which are sort of controversial or anecdotal which could just do with better study, like personal productivity. If it's really true that if we can work in psychological flow and be that much more productive, then surely, we should be doing lots of research on something like that. Or, if it's really true that intermittent fasting is really going to work for you? That's not something that a private company is really going to ever make that much money from to be interested in. Therefore, we should look at it like, people think educational mastery may or may not be a thing, but actually the work is quite patchy and no one's going to really look at it. We should really look at how progress studies or how we teach these things which could be studied. But I think you're right. That it would stem from having a really interesting program behind it. Like, this is the application, this is how we're going to learn better and then get some kind of people thinking like, 'Oh wait, that's the problem. I really kind of want to work with them.'


Anton [00:53:12]: Yeah. The interesting thing is that ultimately, it's going to come down to who is chosen to work for those projects. So, even if we take the people; not projects approach, which I think has a lot of merits. Especially, probably more than most, I think that approach have a lot of merits. Then, which people are we choosing because they're going to have their own projects in mind that they're probably already working on and they probably want to get a bit of funding for. It's the strategic direction there. It's going to be very important. So, whoever's in charge is going to be having to make some hard decisions because whoever they don't choose, perhaps it's not going to be working on this thing at all.


Benjamin [00:53:47}: Yeah, that's true. Then, there's that mystical but very important culture piece which I think goes back to your kind of inventing mindset of having a culture of rewarding or thinking about like this and the tension between not knowing what you're doing so that you can do something a bit different and new, but then working in the field. I think about Paul Graham's Y Combinator, and that part has seeded this whole model of seed in VC, which has been really important. The way he tells it is, he partly did it because he didn't know he couldn't do it. Right? So, that model came from that. Although obviously, he had all of these other things, but then the other thing about why it's been very difficult to replicate in other countries is because there's something particular about the culture and the people that you also form, that makes it work. Y Combinator really works for that, but essentially you haven't, although it's seeded a lot of other ideas in that whole thing, you haven't actually had a UK Y Combinator, for instance...

Anton [00:54:49]: Yeah.


Benjamin [00:54:51]: ...or actually any other one really. So, it's this really weird blend which I'm hoping progress studies make some insights into, but we certainly don't seem to have the...


Anton [00:55:01]:  Yeah. I think in that case, success breeds success. There is two steps. If you had a lot more people in the UK who get very rich and successful off of their innovation in particular, and didn't just retire to the home counties to some big match and not talk to anyone ever again, but then decided it's up to them to also give back to the community and inventors in particular, not even necessarily giving back a lot of money to charities, but decided that the thing they want to do is raise the next generation of themselves in some ways. Then that's what you require for that to happen. For it to be bottom-up, I think you...


Benjamin [00:55: 43]:  I think this is the bet which we touched upon. The reputation or prestige, or want to call it life purpose. This kind of intangible thing to touch upon about why you might want to do something right...


Anton [00:55:57]: People going to VC is crazy financially, it makes very little sense, I think. There's much more kind of secure things you could do with your money. I suspect throwing money at some crazy ideas, but the fact that it's a very prestigious thing for a successful entrepreneur in California to do is what's helpful there. Again, invention is wasteful. I think that the question is, how do you create a culture that can accommodate that waste?


Benjamin [00:56:21]: Yeah. I...


Anton [00:56:22]: And that's perhaps the key thing there.


Benjamin [00:56:24]: I'm going to say I learned a new word reading your book as well. I don't know how you pronounce it correctly as a gimcrack. Is it a practice gimcrack or a [Gimcrack]? [Different pronunciation] 


Anton [00:56:35]: That's a good question. I think it's a gimcrack... [inaudible 00:56:36].


Benjamin [00:56:36]: [inaudible 00:56:36] Yeah. I actually thought that gimcrack is quite a good sign because if these are useless inventions coming out, which is what a gimcrack kind of means. It was kind of used in a slightly derogatory rate, but that's quite good because you're getting this flow of ideas coming up and you can recognize them as gimcrack, which is great. For every hundred, as you say, you're going to have 99 gimcracks to get one which isn't, and we don't have that...


Anton [00:57:03]: Yeah. It’s a sign that something that is working.


Benjamin [00:57:06]: It's a sign of something working...


Anton [00:57:07]: When there are bad ideas coming to you as an inventor, then that's actually a sign that there's enough people who think that being an inventor is a good thing. That you're getting the crazies and the cranks and the people who don't really know what they're doing, but they kind of have the wish to identify as an event. Yeah.


Benjamin [00:57:24]: Great. Okay. Actually, I got a few more questions. We'll see how we do in time. One of those is that success breeds success; is kind of what you said. I was really interested, particularly in history, which is probably different today; but why certain inventions didn't stick or also to your point that actually there were some small things or even not so small, which in some respect should have been obvious to a lot of people, but didn't. You give a lot of examples of small improvements industrially. One I've always think about is this idea that we've talked a lot about within healthcare now, but also in other fields of the double-blind trial, which seems to have to be rediscovered. We think that may be Captain Cook did one around scurvy. He gave some people lemons or citrus fruit. But it seemed to be rediscovered over the ages, but as a concept that maybe that was also prevalent in Babylonian times. But the idea of a not testing and trialing with one group and the other and comparing is actually the idea which could have happened and probably did happen quite a lot, but didn't really stick until relatively recently. And actually didn't move away from healthcare into economic, randomized controlled trials that we have today until relatively late. So, I'm interested in dispersion of invention and what makes it stick and is that a mindset cultural idea, or is it that something more complicated going on there? This is probably quite a difficult question to come up with, but I have thought about something like double-blind and then my follow-on thinking while I'm just talking is that the value of the double-blind test. This is going to the stuff you can't measure. Has been immeasurable. You couldn't do any pharmaceutical development until you understood that and that's something which doesn't go into measurements; some of these journal purpose ones. It's also going into economics and all of these other fields, because of that. So, that's another element, but I was thinking, what makes certain inventions stick or not? And has that changed? Is it to do with the mindset where something like double-blind or in your book, you have a lot of these things where you kind of look at it and go, Wow! They could have invented this a lot earlier and then someone did at this point in time and it stuck.


Anton [00:59:46]: Yeah. The question of, why certain things don't get adopted at certain times? Isn't a particularly fascinating thing. I think there's a certain kind of activation energy to adopting an invention and that can be the biggest hurdle because adoption is costly, right? The double-blind trial is a good example. If you're in a field where you're reasonably certain that something is true and you're probably not bothered to subject to this gold standard; very costly way of doing things versus the other things that are available to you. In medicine, obviously, the risks of creating something that then does something awful is perhaps higher than it would be in another science or in another field. I can see the kind of cost-benefit analysis for some of the same whether or not you adopt to something is perhaps very different there. I don't know the specifics of that case. One thing I have been looking into is the printing press and its spread. This can have advanced notice here. This is my next substack piece for me. A very long investigation of why the Ottoman Empire for about 300 years doesn't adopt the printing press for Arabic script in particular. So, that's Arab in Turkish. Both of those languages at the time haven’t been written in Arabic script and it's a kind of interesting question. In 1727, you get this official Ottoman Press. Before then, it's done by minorities but never in Arabic script. You've got Jewish printing presses in Istanbul. You've got Armenian presses being set up in Greek presses. There seems to be a few even Protestant presses in the kind of Ottoman-ruled Hungary. There's use of this technology, but it, for some reason isn't adopted by the majority or even by the kind of ruling majority in particular and you think that's kind of crazy. That's a very useful thing to have the printing press. Now, the thing is there are obviously counter arguments to it. You've got lobby groups against it, scribes, even in Western Europe. They were opposed to the introduction of the printing press. There were stories of scribes perhaps burning down the printing house in Moscow because they were angry at the printer who had set up there in the 16th century. I'm not sure how much to credit that story. At the same time, there are potential political concerns. Having seen the wars of religion in France, the ultimate emperor's probably like, 'Well, I probably don't want to introduce new ideas and new religious ideas into my country that might spread as a result of printing.' It has to be something that's either I have to have a lot of censorship or maybe I don't bother with censorship at all, or there's an even more present kind of boring view which is probably the correct view based on what I've seen so far which is that it's actually just a very costly thing to do. You require a lot of paper, you require metals. The printing press itself is a very large cumbersome piece of equipment, it weighs a lot. There were very small technical problems to overcome when it comes to Arabic scripted ligatures versus the kind of plain alphabet. We don't have to connect up the letters in particular ways. 


Now, that's something that could be overcome either through adopting a script where you don't bother using ligatures anymore which is something that is possible or, you have to come up with improvements to solve it. There's another hurdle to overcome that, but enough of those small costly hurdles means that perhaps it's just the sort of technology that requires some kind of direction from the top. It requires patronage. Another interesting thing about the printing press even in Europe is that very often rulers in a country actually took active measures to introduce the technology to their country. They used patents and monopoly. They used funding and acted proactively to giving money to the potential person who's going to bring the printing press over from France or Germany or wherever, in order to spread this thing. I think very often a failure of adoption of certain things isn't so much that there's any particular blockage; so much as it is that there's just someone not taking the proactive steps to do it. That's what you see in the 1720s, is someone who goes on a visit to France in a period where there's also a kind of shoe-lift period in an alternate history. Where there is this kind of pro-Western approach amongst certain factions and the ultimate's court. Where they're looking at the Western saying, “Look at what France is doing.” We should have gardens and canals and printing and observatories and all these other things that, for some reason, our quarterly culture hasn't adopted for a long time. Even though it's had very strong economic and diplomatic ties to countries that have had all those things. I think very often it's nothing to do with a barrier per se, but just that you actually require an inventor to take a very simple idea from one field to another.


Benjamin [01:04:43]: I like your idea. You said earlier in our conversation that you need activation energy and that activation energy has to partly come from a person because it's maybe cost money technically and partly reputational, like someone's doing something new. Someone's got to take the reputational kind that's a bit weird, that's not what we do, right? So, you're doing something new and that almost always has to come from a little body or a person to go on. I'll do this, I'll normalize it and if it requires a little bit of technical or money; those are the extra hurdles on that. So, pivoting very slightly or not really because it's on type into this idea of copyright. I've read your very interesting paper on the idea that a copyright today is maybe not quite fit for purpose. This is a way that copyright things have evolved over time, but there's also an intersectional idea of that. I think risen from time to time, Matt Garcia said it more recently that copyright might be too long in the trade-off between inventions and that which is actually not a new idea. I think Milton Friedman also argued that maybe copyright is too long. And certainly, if you look at patents which are generally about 20 years, copyright is at 50 years plus that definitely seems long. I wondered whether you'd maybe sum up these ideas. Is copyright too long? And where are we going on digital as well? Have nations governments not really thought hard enough about the complications that will bring to copyright?


Anton [01:06:14]:  Yeah. I think there's a whole load of this in a real thicket. I think in terms of intellectual property, copyright is the one that's most in need of improvement. Now, I do personally think the copyright is too long, you know, 20 years is a pretty good time to have a monopoly on things. Having your entire lifetime plus 50, sometimes even 70, sometimes even more years is ridiculous, right? I can see the case for being able to pass on ownership copyright to your children, but to your great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren. This is getting a bit out of hand especially if we have this idea that copyright should be a temporary monopoly. With the idea that it should strike a balance between promoting creativity, by giving an artificial monopoly at the start. Also not getting in the way of people improving further on the things that you've done and taking those things and running with them.


Benjamin [01:07:10]: It doesn't incentivize your children to write anymore.


Anton [01:07:13]: No. Not at all, actually it probably does exactly the opposite because they can live off those proceeds. Now, on the other hand, there is obviously an argument that the market around copyrighted works can emerge when it is property, right? So, you can have licensing regimes. Now, some of the things I pointed out in that paper is that for example, it's very difficult to actually often identify the owners of works simply because they're so old, right? So, even if you could work out who the original artist of something was; to work out who their great-great-grand child who happened to inherit the rights is actually almost impossible sometimes. Particularly given nowadays, that the process we have is that a copyright is vested in you. The moment you create something, the moment you have a fixed form. So, the moment I write a doodle down on a piece of paper, that's my copyrighted work. As long as it is original. Now again, the other thing there is I can simply assert my copyright all the time and just say, "This is mine." The only way we're going to ever test that is in court because there's no way of registering and then having the registration being contested like you would with a patent or with any other trademark or anything else. There's this great deal of strength in copyright. Now, the thing is a lot of that emerged in the context of the weakness of enforcement. Now, ultimately it comes down to the person who is claiming ownership of a copyrighted material to enforce their claims and to find infringes and to bring them to task and say, 'Look, you need to pay your license fees,' and to bring them to court. Now, I've noticed that in the past few years, the ability of bonus to enforce copyright is getting much easier. I think in the next decade or so you'll have a situation where we've got near infinite copyright, at least in terms of from the perspective of any creator with extreme strength. That is extremely easy to enforce because we've got so used to this idea that you can rip off CDs and have torrents and download all this stuff. Okay. We'll give the creators a SOP in terms of legal powers to try and prevent this stuff, but let's imagine a case where we can effectively automate. We can scrape the web for infringements and have automated services that will send subpoenas or whatever you require just like that without you even having to really go through the task of doing all these things. We're already starting to see these things emerge. I've noticed that people have been paying back license fees for using some stock photo that they just found. They've put it on their blog and they're getting emails; five, six, seven emails from some companies saying, "On behalf of the owner of the photographer, I'm trying to get him £ 10,000 off you for using this thing once," and then forgotten about it many years....


Benjamin [01:10:13]:  Even worse than patent trolls.


Anton [01:10:16]: Yeah. Even worse than patent trolls in many ways. Now, the US system is kind of interesting because on the one hand it encourages some forms of creativity because there are all sorts of ways in which you can claim fair use. Now, the problem with fair use is it is self-contested. So, you see all sorts of different legal cases in the US where the next legal case can have a huge impact on what counts to be incorporated or not. Things like Fan Art; that a lot of people who upload Fan Art based on the copyrighted material will claim fair use for that. Now, in a country like the UK you just don't have that. We have what's called fair dealing which is basically just a few rules set out specifically that are exceptions to copyright. Ultimately in the UK, unless you happen to be within these very few five, six, seven exceptions, then whatever you're doing is almost certainly infringing copyright. If you happen to write some doctor who fan fiction and upload a book somewhere. You have broken the rules in the UK. Now, in the US you might be able to claim your fair use and maybe there's the chance that the BBC or whoever owns the copyright is not going to come and pursue you through the courts and try to get you to pay up. They may just simply ask you to cease and desist. But the fact that they can is worrying for the future. Now, the big worry is going to be video games. Right now, you see mods of sorts of kinds. I've seen popular games where there's like the Lord of the Rings Mod and the Game of Thrones Mods. These things are not licensed as far as I can tell. I can see no way that these things have been licensed and people are putting enormous amounts of creativity and energy into these things. For the better right, they're creating things that most people like. The meticulous things that load of people have put a lot of effort into and a lot of people are benefiting from, but they haven't paid for it. Often times, they're doing this thing not even for the profit themselves but they haven't paid for it and there's a very real risk that maybe not this year, maybe not next year, maybe not in next 10 years’ time, but maybe in a hundred years’ time; the children of the people who we're the owners of this original property is going to start taking those people to task for it.


Benjamin [01:12:42]: Yeah. Now, I agree. I think there's use to the other phrase. I don't think there's enough activation energy about wanting to try and look at this, but I do think so. There are a couple of ideas you propose, which seem really useful to take up. One idea is that maybe the patent office can be extended to rule on when a transformation might be a failure. In advance, that you can know these types of things; you found out five poetry transformations or fan fiction. Now, the only way we're going to accept those because they trade-off the other way. The other thing is when you get author copyrighted things. You can't find the original author and let's say it lapses after 40 years and you can get another 40 years if you relicense it. If the presumption is after 40 years, then actually it's lapse because actually 90% of the work doesn't have a value after that. It's something like maybe 10 or 20 cents, so the orphanage put it into that. Now, if you want to claim it at that 40 years, and you're active it should be very easy for you to continue that, but then to put the presumption within that.


Anton [01:13:45]:  Yeah. So, with author works, the presumption at the moment is on the potential user. They need to basically pay a license fee and then it seems to be license for some reason will go to the person who claims it many years. Hence...


Benjamin [01:13:57]: For the sake of invention, it seems to be the wrong owners, right?


Anton [01:13:59]: Yeah. I think it should be on the owners to say, "This is ours and if you want to use it, here's where to find us now." That's the main thing. The analogy I like to use is imagine we had a property system where you literally didn't know who owned what and you tried to have a property market where something that has happened. While we don't have a centralized land registry, or it has all sorts of problems in the UK. We still at least could find out with a reasonable degree of certainty who owns the property through a bit of inquiry. But imagine you have some kind of artwork or when you have very complex media video games being a great example of where it's actually a combination of lots of different copyright rights. Now, on the IPO, being able to rule on stuff. This was me proposing that the UK has something like the transformative use defense or acceptation like they have in the US, but one which isn't going to be one that's constantly litigated over and where the boundaries of it are going to shift over time, but where the IPO can rule on these things and at least publicly say, " This is what we think it is." Now, that's giving a regulator a lot more power than they currently have, but it's potentially a good thing if it reduces the wasted resources that you might have on disputes.


Benjamin [01:15:20]: Yeah. You don't get the path to the regulator. You're essentially doing it to judge who are making common law and there tends to be more important cases like a Harry Potter fan fiction thing which may not be then readily applicable because you're only talking about these really high commercial level things.


Anton [01:15:37]: Well, the other thing is there is actually very little law to draw upon. So, what happens in practice is that loads of countries all over the world simply copy the US because they have a more contested system. Where people are claiming there's copyright and they're claiming it fair use and they're battling it out in the courts all the time. That results in a lot of other countries especially even the UK where there's actually very few copyright cases that even make it to court. Now, there's probably a lot that settled out of court, but because it's settled out of court, we're potentially seeing cases where people are paying non-owners for copyright stuff, but there's no president being set that people can then site. So, we're often following the US president. I think having proper guidance on these issues is better. Now, there are certain things in that report, were it say we should copy the EU in some respects. In other respects where we should definitely not copy the EU where they've strengthened copyright owner's rights in a way that you will have much bigger ramifications for other things. One that is hotly contested right now is whether or not internet platforms should take responsibility to basically filter what's even being uploaded. As to whether or not that's copyrighted before it's even put up. And, there's all sorts of controversy right now on YouTube about people getting stuff taken down and their entire channels deleted because they were playing something by Bach or Beethoven, which is obviously........


Benjamin [01:17:12]: Yeah. With a clip of five seconds of a little happy birthday in the background or something.


Anton [01:17:17]:  Yeah. But, like the background where it isn't actually copyrighted, but someone is claiming copyright for a particular version of it that they're saying is being copied because a particular performance of Beethoven can be copyrighted, but obviously Beethoven is so long dead that this is in the public domain. Now, the fact that they're getting like the onus is on the person to prove that they haven't infringed is kind of interesting there. At the moment, it's much too geared towards the people claiming ownership. Now, the fact that the EU and a lot of other countries are proposing that it actually should be up to the platform to even filter stuff before it's put up. I think we're going to see some really horrible things as a result of that. Particularly, when you've got things like parody, for example, being at the moment exempted, like there's a real mind field of cases that at the moment I think are just waiting to blow up. But again, because the durations, it could be decades and it lowly become a scandal many years from now. We haven't designed these things for the long-term.


Benjamin [01:18:21]:  Yeah. Now, I would agree and I think just too sort of finish off on this. When people are not aware like the US, they didn't have copyright on international works. That only came in the early 1900s. I think it's very interesting that there's an argument that you have two large biopharmaceutical companies based in Basel, Switzerland today because of where French dye patenting laws or process patents happened a couple of hundred years ago. So, you should look that up. That's really interesting about how nations use a patent laws defensively or offensively in that time. Also, in Germany and in fact, there's arguments that Japan itself only has a semiconductor industry because it held up IBM's semiconductors patents in the patent office for many years. Allowing their own home industry to essentially copy the patent before it's being issued to get them up to the scale and then issuing the patent when actually it was already not necessary. There's a lot more which goes on with IP copyright patents than perhaps it would seem I had lots of second order and third order effects.


Anton [01:19:36]: Yeah. How interesting. The problem with copyright actually is it's so internationally regulated. There are a lot of international treaties that you can't implement a proper registration system. Some countries do anyways. Like, the US has a sort of orphan works type get around where it kind of requires that registration be done for certain legal rights to be used, but technically the treaty forbids any such thing. So, any change that has to happen is now very difficult. It has to happen at a global level.


Benjamin [01:20:04]: Yeah. 180(+) country negotiation.


Anton [01:20:07]: Yeah. It's one of the very few things I can think of where the UK can actually take a different copyright regime...


Benjamin [01:20:13]: Yeah. Actually, post-Brexit is one area that you can actually do something different.


Anton [01:20:18]: But even then what I propose is a bit of adoption and a bit of difference it's....


Benjamin [01:20:24]:  Cool. Yeah. So, definitely check out that paper. The last two questions would be, what did you learn from the US university system? I think you spent some time at Brown. Do you think the liberal arts way of doing everything is superior to the more narrow way of UK or is there a different culture? Any thoughts on your US University experience?


Anton [01:20:53]: Very different. Yeah. It's very interesting teaching students who are drawn from a lot of different fields versus people who are already hyper specialized from actually late school level. I think they're different systems, but they have their advantages. They have their pros and cons and it'd be best if there's just a mix of different systems that people use and I think it's good to have that diversity of systems. That's what I think the US is so interesting in. There are so many different university models coexisting which is less common in the UK.


Benjamin [01:21:33]:  Yeah. My parallel thought is that the diversity of innovation organization and innovation funding is also something that maybe we should explore a little bit more. Not just one way of doing things, but because of where it plays.


Anton [01:21:48]:  Yeah. I think more models is better than fewer...


Benjamin [01:21:52]: This is it because we get the flow of ideas. We get more of these gimcracks. Okay. Then, last question and in a personal productivity note is, what does a productive day look like for you? Or, do you have any sort of ideas on personal productivity or also any advice you'd like to give to independent researchers or who want to be inventors?


Anton [01:22:17]:  A productive day for me looks like a lot of writing typically. If I was in, I'm usually listening to video game or a kind of epic movie soundtracks because they're often optimized. I think for concentrating on something other than the music and also being quite of an enjoyable thing to listen to, in getting into some kind of writing flow state typically for a few hours or so. That's a pretty good day for me. It's getting some writing down because writing is a very difficult thing in general. Even when you've done a lot of it, it doesn't quite get any easier to formulate things and put them on the page.


Benjamin [01:22:59]: Do you write every day?


Anton [01:23:01]: No. I definitely don't write every day. I know people like Tyler Cowen; I'm very good at somehow finding the time in the mornings to do that. I'm very much evening and night person though. I think that's a part of the problem. It's that evening and night is also like hanging out and watching TV kind of time. So, there's the two things initially exclusive. If I may be over time, I've become better at getting up in the mornings but I still find that a morning for me will go by very quickly and then I'll actually start writing a bit later on, once I've managed to let things go a bit. That said, I think bums in seats is the main way to go as long as you're certainly at your workstation doing something, even if it's reading before writing that's important. The other thing I find well in a good day is one where I've done a lot of writing. Sometimes, you've only been able to do that writing because you spent the entire previous few days just reading and taking notes and not actually doing any kind of writing for popular consumption or for wider consumption than your own. That's the thing that I often lose sight of and it can be a bit of anxiety-inducing, but actually is completely necessary to the whole project.


Benjamin [01:24:17]: Yeah. You need thinking time for sure. Any advice for others? Except these seems to be definitely keeping an idea on an innovation mindset, something like that. Is there anything else you'd give as advice?


Anton [01:24:32]: Yeah. I think the main message I have for people that are evangelist is that it's worth adopting the improving mindset. I think it's trying to find problems in whatever and wherever, even if it's not something you're particularly concerned in and think of solutions to it and it might be that you become particularly obsessed with particular solutions that can have an impact. Even if that impact isn't profitable, even if that impact is for just a few people, I think that's a useful thing. Self-improvement often affects you yourself, but it's still a thing that's worth doing all of the time. The more people who are affected by it the better or by any kind of improvement that you follow, and then once you've done those improvements, if they are particularly successful, I think the most important thing is then giving back to the next generation of people who are going to do those improvements. This isn't just something that I think is unique to Silicon Valley today and things like Y Combinator like we discussed earlier, but it's also the reason why Britain becomes the kind of initial Silicon Valley in London particularly in the late 16th, through to 17th centuries becomes the initial hub is because you have inventors kind of not just being invented but also using the proceeds of invention, or even the proceeds of other things they're doing to then promote invention still further. And it's creating those institutions and those norms and that kind of culture of being pro-invention as well as being an inventor yourself which I think are very two distinct things is the most important thing. So it's a sort of adopt the improving mentality and then actively try and pass it on.


Benjamin [01:26:05]: Great. Anton, thank you very much.


Anton [01:26:09]: Thanks for having me on.

In Podcast, Life, Arts Tags Innovation, Podcast, Anton Howes, Invention, Progress Studies
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