Samo Burja live players vs NPCs

Auren Hoffman (00:00.733) Hello, data nerds. guest today is Samo Burja. Samo is the founder and president of Bismarck Analysis, a research and consulting firm. currently chairs the editorial board of Palladium Magazine, and he's an all around super intellectual. Samo, welcome to World of DaaS

Samo Burja (00:17.965) Wonderful to be here.

Auren Hoffman (00:19.465) Now, one of the things you're kind of known for is this idea of this great founder theory where kind of a small number of really extraordinary people, great founders are kind of responsible for driving civilization forward. Can you break down that theory a bit for us?

Samo Burja (00:35.668) It is very close to a whole family of theories of history that is sometimes called great man history, right? This approach, I think, has been sort of unfairly disregarded by academics in the last hundred years. And we can go into

Auren Hoffman (00:49.383) Where they kind of like sometimes people say, well, this would have happened anyway. If Lenin wasn't around, it still would have happened. If Napoleon wasn't around, it still would have happened. If Hitler wasn't like, they kind of go through all these different things.

Samo Burja (00:56.032) Exactly.

Samo Burja (01:00.428) All of these reasons, right? And like partially the strongest reason that they sort of have against this approach is the argument that the individuals themselves are a product of their times, which in a strict sense is true, but it doesn't mean you can predict anything concrete about the individuals. The individuals are too stochastic, right? And there's nothing deterministic about it. Like you have many, many people who say, grow up in very similar circumstances and you will only have a few

Auren Hoffman (01:15.08) Yes.

Samo Burja (01:29.142) individuals that stand out, there's no way to predict what those individuals are going to be like just from the society that they came from. And I think that's a stronger and harder to defeat argument than the counterfactual. Because the counterfactual, it's just like it's just too ridiculous. If you look at the life of Napoleon, it's sort of like when he escapes the prison on the island of Elba and the French government falls and he's restored again to power.

I guarantee like there's just, it is so implausible that the government of France would have fallen. And it's so implausible, it would have had a war again with the British and so on. Now, of course, Napoleon lost that, you know, that return was a hunger days in power. It was a temporary return, but it still shows how pliable history still was to his agency and his influence on it. But

Auren Hoffman (02:02.963) Crush.

Samo Burja (02:23.508) Here, I will also point out how great founder theory and you know, there's a manuscript online that I released years and years ago. You know, the audience can read if they're if they're curious. It differs from some of the great man theories, right? Because I think a lot of the great man theories posit that amazing and tremendous events in the world are sort of initiated or driven by the exceptional individuals. And while I think that is true,

The counter argument of this like long-term trends like things like economic growth rule of law, etc You know religion all of those forces. There are these almost like glacial forces that sort of like transform the landscape So maybe while you have a big you make a big splash 50 or a hundred years later your effect is washed out now in great founder theory I propose that these forces actually have a human origin, too

I think that great founders create these exceptional institutions that come to shape our history. So this means that perhaps, you know, it's not just the conquering general that's interesting. Even more interesting is perhaps the general that reforms how the structure that commands structure of a military changes the model of the military, right? Perhaps has something like, you know, what we today think of as the modern officer system.

or perhaps changes how conscription is done. Or perhaps, you you have people who create new states, who create like, you know, America's founding fathers or Charlemagne taking what's basically still a tribal coalition and forging something we could recognize as feudalism that then like defined medieval European civilization for 600 years. But it can also be, you know, the prophets of history, right? Like it's, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (04:14.377) Now, if you take like a Bismarck or somebody, know, so in some ways, like Germany was already kind of on the rise when he was there, but like maybe wouldn't have unified. Maybe there's another, maybe there's an alternative history where it wasn't like how much of Germany's rise was inevitable versus how much was driven by like this very obviously clearly capable person Bismarck.

Samo Burja (04:39.864) Well, let's break it down. All of the key challenges of, if we look at specifically Bismarck at his career, Otto von Bismarck, I think that it is plausible that Prussia would not have actually succeeded in unifying Germany on exactly the same time scale, or would have done so in a more decentralized way. Engineering for the French to be baited into a war that they lose, that resulted in a much more centralized Germany.

than what would have happened otherwise. And much less Austrian influence.

Auren Hoffman (05:10.793) He needed debate. Was that 1871 or somewhere around that? He needed to debate France to attack.

Samo Burja (05:18.486) Napoleon, specifically Napoleon III, right, who also sort of, you know, was perhaps a genius politician, but was not, you know, a genius military commander or strategist like Napoleon I was. So really, it was a situation where France couldn't help but intervene. Now, I think that it's possible to try to carry out such a strategy where it completely fails.

Auren Hoffman (05:21.512) Right, right.

Samo Burja (05:45.592) had you failed to get the coalition forces prior to the war of all the German states on your side, if say some of the German states went with France, and if enough of them went with France, you'd basically be engaged in a hostile occupation of these countries.

Auren Hoffman (05:59.785) Could they have aligned with others? Could have broken up and they've aligned with that? You could see a lot of different alignments potentially that could have happened, right? Without Bismarck, yeah.

Samo Burja (06:07.168) Exactly. And actually, that was normal German history. If you look at even the 30 years war or the wars of religion, you would have powers like, you that you had the Habsburgs contesting, you had the Swedes intervening in the war, you had the Catholic French. Exactly. Exactly. Like whenever you have an area that has many small states, the default

Auren Hoffman (06:11.132) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (06:22.473) Because you have the Catholics and Protestants, you know, like at each other.

Samo Burja (06:32.768) isn't that they all band together and they go fight an external foe. That's kind of the exception in world history. What normally happens is that the local conflicts are, you know, inflamed or used by external powers and they're divided against themselves. Right. And

Auren Hoffman (06:48.807) Now, do you like when you look at the founding of the US, like there's these extraordinary people, some of which I think like if they didn't exist, like the US would still be amazing today as a true country. But some of which, like maybe they put it on the trajectory. And it's so hard to know, did Washington put it on the trajectory because he stepped down and he wasn't a dictator and he he modeled the right way to be a president. But then like

Samo Burja (06:59.49) Yes.

Auren Hoffman (07:15.069) Was Jeff, first of all, he's brilliant. Was he really necessary? Like, I don't know, like, or Hamilton, was he really necessary? Like, so I'd love to get your thoughts on like, how would it, what's the alternative history if, if, if, if a few of them didn't exist, would we still have the America we know today? Or do we need a whole lot of them not to exist for not to have the America not today?

Samo Burja (07:25.485) Mm-hmm.

Samo Burja (07:37.122) Well, each of them is almost a great example of how a country can have, you know, how an individual can have a long-term legacy in the country. So let's look at Alexander Hamilton. think without Alexander Hamilton, America, America is basically running an industrial policy. had very concrete. will be much more agrarian, concrete views on trade, concrete views on banking, financing of ventures, but also

Auren Hoffman (07:53.437) Yeah, we'd be more agrarian, right?

Samo Burja (08:03.852) And this is the funny part, which, you know, I think some of my American friends don't know. Today we think of China as stealing a lot of Western IP. Well, the U.S. was stealing a lot of British IP quite intentionally.

Auren Hoffman (08:14.697) Yeah, yeah, certainly throughout the 1800s it was quite good at that, yes.

Samo Burja (08:19.406) Exactly. Britain was ahead technologically, right? That's important to know. The colonies were ahead in some spaces, like, you know, maybe they had better guns than the British. But really, when it came to the industrialization, there was one country in the world that had the IP and that country was Britain. And all the other countries like, you know, the United States, Germany, Belgium, they were all trying to steal as best as they could the IP and rebuild industry there. So without Alexander Hamilton, a much slower industrialization.

Auren Hoffman (08:22.088) Yeah.

Samo Burja (08:48.95) Now, it still happens. New York is kind of like, you know, already on this trajectory of becoming a rapidly growing city, being a center of capital, being a gateway to the Great Lakes region. The geography of the Great Lakes region is beautiful. There's these vast coal reserves, know, Appalachia, there's like immense mineral wealth. There's like cheap labor. It's all set up for industrialization. But for example, if the US is slower to industrialize, might the Civil War last longer?

before the North winds, for example, right? I don't think you can rig it without just Hamilton. I don't think you get a situation where like the South winds or anything crazy like that. But can you have a longer war? yes. And if we assume that say Benjamin Franklin, mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (09:18.344) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (09:33.193) Well, by the way, they don't have to win. could at some point, like if the war was four years longer, like people would have, you they already had riots in New York. You're hit all these other things going on during the Civil War, where people didn't want to go to die there. You know, they you could see an uprising just saying like, OK, just let the South have their own like, who cares? Like they'll have their own country. We'll have ours. Ours is better. But like we don't need to go fight with them. Right. You could have seen that scenario if the war went on a little.

Samo Burja (10:01.806) Of course. here's another funny one about New York. There were pamphleteers arguing that actually New York should declare independence from the Union and just be neutral in the Union versus South conflict. So they will be immensely successful as a city state. know, is an island. It's not quite Venice, but it is an island. alternate history, independent New York. But for Alexander Hamilton specifically, undeniably, he accelerated American

Auren Hoffman (10:13.426) interesting. Wow.

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (10:21.619) Yeah.

Samo Burja (10:31.04) industrial, technical development. He, the other hand, also accelerated the strength of the federal government. So, you know, all else equal, you know, the country would have been more devolved and more, you know, in the political sense of devolution, it would have been more decentralized. Right. And then if you look at someone like Benjamin Franklin, you know, I think there's a very subtle effect where the concept of an American genius sort of starts with Benjamin Franklin.

the idea that there's an American polymath or an American inventor and so on.

Auren Hoffman (11:01.191) Yeah. And, and, and what I like about Franklin, it was like, it was a worldwide phenomenon. He was not just known in the U S as the American genius, but all of a sudden it became known there are American geniuses. Like when he goes to France, which was like, probably like the most, you one of the most furthest along countries, they were like, wow. He is a genius. Like when the French say someone's a genius, then they really think this person is a genius.

Samo Burja (11:14.957) Exactly.

Samo Burja (11:25.858) They truly respected him. He was completely the right ambassador for France, like a great intellectual, also someone that was very good at flirting, someone who was very socially, you know, he was exceptional at making friends, right? You can just read his writing, read his biographies. And I think that without his assistance, the diplomatic relations with France would be worse. That's very important, right? French support at various times and at other times, French neutrality was crucial for about like,

at least the first 30 years of American history, not just their interventions during the Civil War, sorry, not their interventions during the Revolutionary War, but also them being willing to lend support and being kind of a counterbalance still to the British in a variety of contexts, right? mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (12:06.6) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (12:15.465) No, you assume you believe like it would be great if we had more great founders, right? There's a because you could you you could you could you make an argument. So if that's true, like how do we do that? Like how do we get more great founders? How do we double? How do we 10x the number of great founders that are there?

Samo Burja (12:21.613) Yes.

Samo Burja (12:35.064) Well, I think it's very, like I said at the start, it's very probabilistic. I don't think we have a science of human psychology or biology or spirit or whatever it is that is sufficient for us to produce truly unique genius. I even would go as far as to say that, you if we dig up and clone, clone, say, von Neumann who's a great scientist, right? We'll certainly get very good physicists.

But I'm not completely convinced unless you get the upbringing just right that you would get this unique genius. After all, there are many, many smart people who do very little with their lives, right?

Auren Hoffman (13:03.923) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (13:07.625) Yeah, yeah, you could have an IQ of 160 and really do very little.

Samo Burja (13:13.358) Mm And part of it is, think, if I were to venture to guess what our society might be, say, lacking to certain other societies that actually think had a higher density of great founders than we do now for to give examples of give the example of the Roman Republic's almost overflowing with exceptional individuals that like routinely reform army sense, social systems, land redistribution, etc, etc, legal institutions, new cities,

And, you know, produce the, the Romans like routinely produce conquerors on the level of Alexander the great. Okay. Like it's like Mac Pompey, Pompey Magnus and Julius Caesar and Crassus. These are like, if any of those individuals show up today, they're Elon Musk here immediately. Right. Like let's remember Crassus, for example, it's like he made his wealth, right? He, was like a real estate mogul, real estate mogul comes to be political, political big shot.

Auren Hoffman (13:50.003) Yeah.

Samo Burja (14:11.638) runs a attempt to conquer Persia. Now he dies early in it, but if he didn't die, maybe he'd even succeed. So what did they have? They had a appreciation for ambition. They had an appreciation for this view that if you do something amazing in society, if you, in a way, even if you elevate yourself, but if you do a good enough job in the self elevation, that it's not mere self promotion, but it is great accomplishment, that you crave that glory.

that society benefits. The Romans were like, know, Caesar, of course, is full of himself, but Caesar is also for the people. Right. And they had this intuition that human greatness is excellent. And I think America used to have that. Right. Early 20th century, you would get like, you would still get a parade as a victorious general. Right. And you would still get a parade for at least the NASA astronauts that landed on the moon. Like Neil Armstrong got a parade in New York. Of course, it was a

Auren Hoffman (15:01.096) Yes.

Auren Hoffman (15:09.159) Yeah, John Glenn. Yeah.

Samo Burja (15:10.762) Exactly. Of course, it was like a big bureaucratic NASA behind it. But that was the man that risked their life, went to space. That's the man who the president would mourn in a speech. Do you ever read the unpublished Richard Nixon speech for if the astronauts died or were stuck on the moon? it's it's worth reading, right? It's like now just there in the archives and it's you know, kind of has a grim determination. It's like, these astronauts are like stuck on the moon.

Auren Hoffman (15:17.758) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (15:27.153) No, I never read that. wow. my gosh. Wow.

Samo Burja (15:38.638) They're going to run out oxygen in 72 hours. We can't do anything for them. We like salute their sacrifice and like they're going to be forever their names. Yeah. Look, look, how in the world are you going to incentivize like risking your life in any way or even risking your fortune if there's not upside? And I think in our society, as soon as someone who is prominent fails in any way, even a small way, we immediately attack them. We turn on them. And I think that

Auren Hoffman (15:40.595) Yeah

Auren Hoffman (15:44.709) Yeah, yeah. Right. That was a real possibility. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (15:58.398) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (16:07.433) It's almost opposite though. feel like when they fail, people kind of like almost celebrate them, but it's when they succeed is when they attack them in our society.

Samo Burja (16:09.144) Mm-hmm.

Samo Burja (16:15.51) Okay, that's an interesting take. Well, I think we're not comfortable with anyone being quote unquote, too powerful or too wealthy. And I think we're, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (16:22.919) Yeah. Yeah, not gonna have always been true, right? People are always been conspiring against people who are too wealthy and too powerful, but you have to hide it.

Samo Burja (16:30.712) But there was the sense that we needed it. Like in previous eras, the view was that, we don't want too many people being too powerful, too successful, but you know, our country really has these problems. We really need this individual to succeed. I think maybe we're getting a little bit of that back right now. It sort of feels that, let's say in the last two to three weeks, I think on the net, the country now sort of wants Elon to succeed.

Auren Hoffman (16:34.749) Yes.

Samo Burja (16:59.596) And they sort of wanted him to fail two months ago. Now succeeded, what is a different question, right? Going to Mars, I think they would be way happier with him going to Mars now than if he was going to Mars under, say, a different administration or under a different cultural moment, right? Since this, think, is not a narrow party issue. I think you can't actually vote your way to a great society, to an amazing society. But I think that we have to develop

Auren Hoffman (17:02.471) Yep. Yep. Yes. Yeah.

Samo Burja (17:26.878) some sort of public counterbalance to the feelings of, think, and spite and frustration.

Auren Hoffman (17:32.297) Though I feel like we do feel we're okay with people in their lane. it's like, think people always love Elon Musk building rockets and going to Mars. Most probably, 80 % of Americans probably love that and hope that he gets fabulously wealthy from that. Or they love that Taylor Swift gets fabulously wealthy for our singing songs. Or just think of Patrick Mahomes being just this incredible quarterback.

Samo Burja (17:37.697) Hmm.

Auren Hoffman (17:59.099) and getting fabulously wealthy that because he entertained so many people. so I think, I think the, but, sometimes Americans don't like when they like slightly change their lane. Like all of a sudden Patrick Mahomes is going to be like a business mogul or Senator or something. Maybe like, Whoa, you're a great quarterback. But, you know, so they have this kind of like odder feeling for some reason, I don't know why, when somebody like slightly deviates from the narrative of the, of who they are.

Samo Burja (18:09.358) Hmm.

Samo Burja (18:25.144) Well, when Arnold Schwarzenegger went from bodybuilding to being an actor, people said he's no actor. He's just a muscle guy. When he became a politician, people finally said, well, he's an actor. He's no politician. at least they didn't, you know, they acknowledged the achievement of being an actor after there was a third lane he crossed into. I think the truth of it is that if you have, you know, people who are truly amazing. Well, we mentioned Napoleon earlier, you know, there's, there's a math theorem named after Napoleon.

Auren Hoffman (18:27.58) Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (18:37.225) Correct, yes.

Auren Hoffman (18:42.921) Crunch.

Auren Hoffman (18:54.729) I didn't know that.

Samo Burja (18:55.01) Because he just, he was just corresponding with the plots. And I think, you know, the, frame is French mathematician and he wanted to troll him a little bit and just send him some fine math sort of to demonstrate, you know, in a, metaphorical way, you know, if I was not Alexander, maybe I'd be Diogenes, the classic encounter, you know, when Alexander great means Diogenes and, you know, it's like, Hey, I can do anything for you. And this philosopher in a barrel is like, well, move away, from, know, move away from the sun, leave me.

Auren Hoffman (19:11.401) Mm-hmm.

Samo Burja (19:24.174) stop throwing shade on me. And he says that, you know, if I wasn't Alexander, I'd want to be Diogenes. And Diogenes is like, if I wasn't Diogenes, I'd want to be Alexander. So a lot of these people have in them the capacity for many different amazing lives. They're not insects. They're not super specialized. And I think that perhaps that you are correct. I think you're actually right in that very narrow accomplishment is okay with us.

Auren Hoffman (19:34.505) Mmm.

Auren Hoffman (19:45.352) Yep.

Samo Burja (19:53.954) but the jumping to something else is something we have grown less comfortable with. Let's note, no one took Eisenhower's military record to be a reason that he shouldn't run for president, right? Great military achievement followed by great political achievement. And I think that people were sort of holding the businessman background.

Auren Hoffman (20:07.271) Yeah.

Samo Burja (20:17.494) against Donald Trump back in let's say 2016 when the campaign started. Now everyone thinks of him, of course, as a politician, like that's what he is now in people's minds. But I think that there's something about it where the more you can do, more sorry, the more you do, the more you can do. And I think this just never, never stops being true. I think it just keeps being true to very uncomfortable levels, where we kind of have to face a very inegalitarian conclusion.

We can't tell ourselves the story that, if only I trained as much as Mike Tyson, you know, I would actually be Mike Tyson. Like that's, that's not true. If only I dedicated my life to music as much as Taylor Swift, I would be Taylor Swift. It's not true. I mean, you can be something else. That's amazing. Right. But, I think for a lot of these, it's like, they have more drive. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (20:56.403) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (21:07.347) Well, in some ways, that's freeing to write in some ways. It's freeing. I just like I focused on the wrong thing. I just spent so much time boxing. I actually could be great in some other area. And maybe in, you know, there's there's like a line that maybe everyone can be great if they just found their their calling. But then that's probably also not true either. Right. It's it's it. Now, how do you think like the thing of these like, you you talk a lot about these live players. Most of the world are these these NPCs.

Samo Burja (21:17.645) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (21:36.477) these non-player characters that exists for many, there might be some NPCs that have agency and when they want to become live players, how does that work? Like how does, how does one move from one to the other?

Samo Burja (21:50.37) think the concept of a live player that I introduced in a, I think 2017 essay has been picked up is tied to the ability to go off script. So every time you have every industry, every sort of established field of human action, right? Be it academic or otherwise has sort of a predetermined script of how things are supposed to be. Okay. This is what a successful academic career looks like. This is how many times a year you publish. This is the kind of topics you publish on.

This is how you treat your doctoral advisor. This is how you treat your grad students. This is how you interact with, you know, student protests. If they show up, this is how you answer email. It's a lot and it's received wisdom and people will not be able to deviate from it in the moment. They won't be able to improvise on the spot and a live player will. So in the academic context, you know, maybe actually say back in the day, you know, Richard Hamming was like,

raking social script by showing up and like asking people, what's the most important? Okay. have you ever heard of the Hamming question? Okay. The Hamming question is he's a mathematician. his name is Richard Hamming. He was quite accomplished and he would ask scientists in other fields, what are the most important problems in your field? And then he would follow up with the very provocative and rude question. Why aren't you working on them?

Auren Hoffman (22:51.079) I have no idea who Richard Hamming is. Who is that?

Auren Hoffman (22:56.776) No.

Samo Burja (23:19.766) So it's kind of funny. It's an interesting question. Now you can of course answer it. comparative advantage, you know, maybe, maybe fluid dynamics is the most interesting area, but I'm not really talented for that. So I'm doing this other thing that's also very good. And we're looking at how ice crystallizes and all of that stuff. But I think people usually don't have the answer. think people usually are like, it's not really my place. Well, whose place is it? And like, who gets to have a shot at solving the most important questions in a field. So I really want to emphasize this doesn't just apply to like,

Auren Hoffman (23:25.447) Yeah.

Samo Burja (23:50.014) this person rewrote the book on how to do a tech company, right? Or, this person totally changed French politics. It can also be this person totally changed the field of physics, going around and asking uncomfortable questions. And it's not that the uncomfortableness is itself super good, but it's just that you're not tied to the script. And when it doesn't make sense, you don't do the thing that doesn't make sense, and you do instead the thing that makes sense.

even if you're the only one doing it. there is an implicit bravery. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (24:20.335) Do you think you could have a high percentage of identifying live players when they're 16? Do you think you could somehow interview 16 year olds and have a very high likelihood of picking? Or do you think it'd still be very, very hard to pick live players?

Samo Burja (24:38.574) I you know, I think that for young people, it is actually quite tricky because what you can see, what you can see is that you can see intelligence. You can see, sort of maybe confidence, like you can some drive. You can sometimes see very early signs of like a savant, a very high accomplishment. And you can certainly see when someone is spirited. But you know, okay, why do I say spirited?

Auren Hoffman (24:50.877) Mm-hmm.

drive.

Auren Hoffman (25:04.219) Mm-hmm, and maybe a little bit of a rule breaker or something

Samo Burja (25:08.078) Exactly. But you know, how much of that is youthful testosterone? Everyone's a rule breaker at 17 or 16 to some extent, our culture encourages it. 26, fewer. 36, very few people, right? So a lot of this in a way is almost more like a marathon than a sprint. Yes, in our society, for example, in mathematics, it happens to be true that person has to be a very young brain to win the academic races and do all the mathematical accomplishments.

Auren Hoffman (25:11.731) Yeah.

Correct.

Auren Hoffman (25:20.071) Yep.

Samo Burja (25:36.77) But even historically, that wasn't true. Like, Gauss was producing world transforming math in his 50s. So I do have to ask whether it's actually true or whether we've just decided it only like people very early in their career can do math. And once they accomplish something exceptional, get a Fields Medal, they kind of lose the drive to do more and no one expects them to do more and they can retire. So I would say that we could sort of spot people. I think by the time they're like 23.

Auren Hoffman (25:59.017) There's something about like

Samo Burja (26:04.238) I think 23 is like a very good age because if they've been live players, if maybe they say start in high school or if they only sort of broke with, like, for example, broke with the implicit expectation of their parents in like the college era, that still gives them time to have successfully switched at least once something important about what they're pursuing. Right. So maybe they start being super intellectually interested in mathematics.

Auren Hoffman (26:04.969) it's shank.

Samo Burja (26:32.056) They figure out something interesting and they're like, you know what, actually this would be a great company. Or maybe they start off interested in biology and then they realize, wait, you know, actually, academia is just so messed up. I'm going to go reform how science is funded. That's the real problem. That's what I'm going to do. And they start doing well right away. So I would look at someone who has done at least two things extremely well. And ideally they're somewhat unrelated. They can be adjacent. It can be still a logical jump.

but it should be the mastery of a totally new set of skills in a way that's too fast to have been preparation. Like a lot of people can be raised to be a doctor or raised to be a lawyer, but that just means you've learned a very high functioning script very well. No one can like go and do amazing things in a new field two years in if they're not writing their own script.

Auren Hoffman (27:26.089) Now, I knew back in the 90s, like in Internet 1.0, I happened to meet a lot of people who looked at the time a lot like Elon Musk did. They had very similar types of exits. They seemed to be very ambitious. literally none of those people, even they're all young at the time, they're all in their 20s at the time, literally none of those people you have ever heard of.

Samo Burja (27:35.982) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (27:52.521) there's not one of those people who I knew back then, who you've heard of today, they're all, you know, they're still wealthy. but mostly they're, they've, they created a winery or something like that. And they test, they kind of fell off the ambition path. So how would one know the end? I think if you looked at them, they seem like the rule breaker. They're starting the companies, they were successful. They, but some, at some point they just kind of fell off the path, maybe because they were a little, just a little bit too normal.

Samo Burja (27:53.036) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Samo Burja (28:13.774) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (28:21.123) or they were just too optimizing for happiness or I don't know how, how would one know if they're going to fall off the path or not.

Samo Burja (28:30.584) think it's a very interesting question as to why does that happen so often? I think for many people, it's sort of like,

Samo Burja (28:40.302) I think that there's something interesting that happens, which is like, okay, I've made my money, so it's time to retire. And often it's like, it's a big amount of money by any objective measure, but it's not often even a Silicon Valley large amount of money, right? It can be like just a relatively low bar, something like, okay, I can now be upper middle class for the rest of my life and never worry about earning any more money. Or maybe it's time for a family, it's time for kids or something like this.

Auren Hoffman (28:46.984) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (29:06.856) Yeah.

Samo Burja (29:08.556) And I think if we were to drill into it, if we were to be able to like talk to them very, very deeply and out, they might not trust you. I think every single live player has a very esoteric and strange view of the world under many layers of normality. have some like crazy thesis. like, okay, I mean, now this is no longer a crazy thesis, but 20 years ago, if someone shows up, it's like, you know, the human era is about to end in 25 years.

and we are like at the cusp of the singularity. That was a way more interesting person to talk to than if someone shows up right now and says, we're five years away from the singularity. The end of the human era is near. It's a totally different filter because I think this is when kind of almost a worldview or like a philosophical position, but it has to be an embodied, an embodied philosophy, right? It has to be motivating, animating. That's why I often use this term of spirited. I mean, if you were

Auren Hoffman (29:48.477) Right.

Samo Burja (30:07.426) superstitious, maybe you call it a possession or an obsession at the very least. If it enters late in your life where you're sort of like, you know, it's like all your layers of personality are developed, you look around, okay, turns out AI is the thing that's very different than, okay, you think about intelligence and you read some science fiction and you grasp weight. But if we had an artificial form of intelligence that would change everything. And you get like very excited and you think about the world and you're like, wow, okay, this is going to define my life. This is what I'm going to do with the next 30 years.

You know, I'm going to say like of and many prominent people today have this element of almost a mystic to them. To give an example of someone who's like pretty obvious, who almost doesn't hide it at all, even shows it. think actually Ilya, Ilya Sudskivar is like, he's practically a mystic of AI. If you like listen to him talk about, models want to learn or like the, know, intelligence is a fundamental property of the universe. Exactly.

Auren Hoffman (30:52.947) Sure.

Auren Hoffman (30:59.089) Vitalik is kind of like that for Ethereum. He really does seem like that. The whole crypto thing is kind of interesting to me because there's these series of founders there that are somewhat deity-like. I'm starting with Satoshi, who we don't even know if it was a person or a group of people or a man or a woman. We really just don't know anything about Satoshi. so therefore,

Samo Burja (31:06.115) Yeah.

Samo Burja (31:24.91) Or maybe a team at the NSA or we don't know. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (31:27.313) Right, right. could have been exactly. we then can, because of that, we can project onto Satoshi what we want he or she, this deity to be. And because it's a deity and not a real person, it doesn't have flaws. It's not like cheating on their spouse and doing all this other stuff like normal, you know.

people that we know of do. like, it's perfect, right? In some ways. And then we have Vitalik, who's kind of the next deity. And then it seems like he is pretty perfect, like in a very weird way. He seems like he actually is a good person, right? Like of all the tech people, I mean, he's like, he probably is like the least evil in him if you had to like score evil stuff, right? He just seems like actually a genuinely good person. Now, like maybe he is a secret evil genius. don't know. like,

Samo Burja (32:18.754) But that's part of the reason. But do you know, ironically, no matter what the mechanism of Ethereum is, the fact that he's such a trustworthy person and such an original thinker and just basically does what does what he perceives to be the right thing, that in itself should make someone more bullish about Ethereum. Right? Yeah. And I think it's not irrational to it's kind of funny, right? Because crypto had for a long time this theory of a trustless

Auren Hoffman (32:18.909) He seems like an actually good person.

Auren Hoffman (32:38.089) Of

Samo Burja (32:47.468) You know how important trustless systems are, but let's be real at the end of the day, trust in those founders still under rights. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (32:53.587) Yeah, we're trusting, we're trusting Vitalik, right? And then Satoshi may be dead, we don't even know. it's like, then we're trusting this other thing out there.

Samo Burja (33:00.194) Man.

Exactly. mean, currently, anyone who's participating in the crypto bull run is like sort of trusting that the Trump administration will like restrain the overregulation of crypto that was perhaps otherwise in the cards. So they're at least trusting the administration in some way or trusting at least to not do certain things, even if they don't trust it to do certain things.

Auren Hoffman (33:24.909) Speaking of trust, like there's been this decline of trust in elites in the society. Are elites less good today than they have been in the past? Like, is that trust warranted? Mistrust. Yeah.

Samo Burja (33:38.958) Well, I think trust has to be earned. And I think we should not be developing, let's put it this way. We should not be delusionally trusting because misplaced trust will be abused and eventually will be broken anyway, because no matter how much you might exhort people to sort of like, you know, have faith in their government. There's some bad people, but you know, it's good on net. Behave.

in a good trust way to the universities, to your HR manager. Like, it has positive externalities if you act that way. But in another way, no, actually, low trust is a healthy immune response to institutions and individuals who are no longer worthy of receiving the subsidy.

Auren Hoffman (34:25.449) How do you square that? Because like, we have like, it seemed like we have lower trust in institutions, but we still have like a fairly high trust society. Like, we still kind of trust that no one's out there like gonna rob us and stuff. And we still like we're still generally like we interact with people. I'm wiring money, know, to people all the time, like, don't I've stuff fairly high trust, I'm not gonna scone with it to, you know, Venezuela and

You know, like we're, we're, we're still like in, business it's, it's very, in like the U S is very high trust in business, like extremely high trust. Like, you know, just to trust like a complete stranger, you know, and if you think of venture capital, complete stranger shows up with an idea and you're like, great, here's a million bucks. You know, you know, it's like, so it's a, it's like kind of crazy that we do that, but we, we do that because it, because it actually, generally it can, it works out like they usually don't abscond. Like they're not like bad, they're usually not bad actors that are out there.

Samo Burja (34:58.35) That's true.

Samo Burja (35:14.743) It works out.

Auren Hoffman (35:19.539) to how do you square this kind of like lower trust within the decision was still like very, fairly high trust of everyone in society.

Samo Burja (35:28.056) think we are declining from a very high baseline of trust. I think there used to be a very high baseline of trust in day-to-day interactions, business and politics. Well, in politics, it's pretty straightforward. Like the General Society survey, if you compare results from today versus the 1950s, I think the only institution that is still trusted at 1950s levels is the US military. And even that's losing points.

Auren Hoffman (35:33.714) Okay.

Auren Hoffman (35:38.043) Everywhere you think we're declining. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (35:56.137) I think that's way down from where used to be, the military. I think the military has been going down every year for, mean, obviously Vietnam took a hit, but then the Iraq war took a hit and Afghanistan took a hit.

Samo Burja (35:56.29) Meanwhile, Congress has dropped like a rock. Well, over the last two years, especially.

Samo Burja (36:10.584) But the presidency and Congress and the federal agencies actually lost the trust even faster. So it's sort of the question of like, what is the last man standing? Right? What is the most trusted organ of government? I will note that, you know, I don't think the U.S. is going to have a coup anytime soon, but, know, in countries where the only trusted organ of government is the military tend to not be the happiest countries. So the result isn't now to blindly trust a government that has demonstrably failed.

Auren Hoffman (36:16.477) That's right. Yeah, relative to kind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (36:31.39) Yep.

Samo Burja (36:38.922) you say a government that that that try to block through a variety of policy measures say open and free discussion of the realities of the COVID virus and the realities of the COVID vaccines, which, you know, I'm in favor I'm in favor broadly of the vaccines, but I thought it was insane. The amount of information control Western governments try to exert over the internet. It's like, why in it didn't make sense in the name of public health, right? Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (36:59.433) Yeah, it didn't make any sense. Well, I think that's actually what created the distrust was that. So sometimes this over kind of regulation was what creates distrust on certain types of things. You clearly have something to hide if you're not going to allow people to debate, right?

Samo Burja (37:16.78) or you're trying to nudge people or manipulate them to behave in ways that are against their individual self-interest. And there are so many tells when you as policy try to encourage the individuals in a large country to behave in a way that is maybe collectively good and individually bad, and you lie to them that it's individually good for them, they can tell. So there's a certain amount of lying that the government can get away with. In fact,

Auren Hoffman (37:23.271) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (37:38.142) Yeah.

Samo Burja (37:42.88) Here's, I'm gonna be a little cynical. I think people want their government to be able to lie to them a little bit because if the government can't lie to you a little bit, it means it can't lie to your enemies. And then you want the government to keep you safe from like the scary enemies in the world out there. So, but there's a tolerance zone and the government's way out of that tolerance zone. And the politicians as individuals, people don't even trust that they're doing their work in government well. So it's not just trust of abstract systems. It's like trust in

Auren Hoffman (37:50.153) Of course.

Samo Burja (38:11.36) Okay, will this representative actually be a representative? Will they actually be more than just a social media personality? I think we're losing that because the class of politicians is worse and we're losing trust in the bureaucracies because the bureaucracies are so broken compared to when they were built. I don't think we can get away with having a society with no bureaucracy actually, by the way. think bureaucracy is like markets, right? Bureaucracy is amazing. It's a great machine.

where you string together 50 people following rules and together they almost do as good a job as a single genius would. And that's like very fortunate because we have probably 50 or 500 or 5 million people per genius. So it's a really good trade-off. It's like we have so many millions of people. You can get 50 of them to do the job. Amazing, right? But over time they become cancerous. They become out of date. People like expand head count.

Auren Hoffman (38:44.265) Yeah.

Samo Burja (39:05.358) They find creative ways to reinterpret what the mission of the bureaucracy is on paper. It's achieving it in actuality It doesn't all these normal effects and this has this is truly added up now You said that we still trust people but you know if I hear in San Francisco if I go to a store You know the shaving creams locked up What's the point of an inconvenient convenience store at that point? I truly shouldn't go out in the street. I should truly just order it on Amazon

Auren Hoffman (39:22.845) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (39:30.193) Yeah, what you do, of course.

Samo Burja (39:32.302) which I do more and more. But then that's a kind of a death spiral for the whole concept of a city. And at the end of the day, do I prefer living in like, let's call it universal LA, where I drive everywhere, and I have everything delivered to my home. And I never take a stroll down the street with some storefronts. And I never just like explore a physical world with lots of bustling people around. I don't like that. I actually like, I prefer us being able to use these physical spaces.

I think Manhattan is great for the world. Big cities are great for the world. They make everyone more productive. They make everyone more social. They socialize them in a deep way.

Auren Hoffman (40:12.179) But no, no one actually like forms their opinion on everything on first principles. Like that would be impossible because it takes so long to go down the first principles rabbit hole. Like maybe, maybe people we know, like pick like a few topics a year to go in first principles on and form their opinion of. But like, I don't even know. I've never even gone first principles of whether the world is round or not. Like I just kind of trust the, I trust the quote unquote experts, whoever these people may be.

Samo Burja (40:18.989) That's true.

Auren Hoffman (40:42.269) that it is round. I don't know. I'm just kind of making like, I've never like gone around the rabbit hole of whether we fake the moon landing. I'm just kind of like trusting that we did it and that people like Neil Armstrong, as you said earlier, actually landed on the moon and then actually came back. But like, who knows? Like, I'm not, I'm not like, so I, you can, you can't go down on everything. You have to decide. And then of course, if you're trusting the experts, you're, you're picking the experts you trust. So everyone is trusting some experts somewhere on something.

Right? They're going on the internet. It could be on the internet and they're looking at some YouTube influencer who's an expert on your health and they're trusting, they might be trusting that person over the quote unquote medical establishment. But everyone is looking to an expert to trust on almost every single issue. And then rarely ever going on first principles on anything. so a lot of us is a lot of the decisions is just deciding which expert to trust. And hopefully that person went on the first principles on it.

and we are going to trust that they did a good job doing that, right? Or is that kind of like in the end what we're doing? we're just, so now it's not that we're trusting experts less, it's just we're trusting different experts.

Samo Burja (41:52.142) I think that's correct. Because it's not like there's generalized skepticism. But for example, you might not trust the FDA, but you trust the bodybuilder Twitter account that you follow when figuring out your diet and how to lose weight, right? You don't follow the food pyramid.

Auren Hoffman (42:02.601) Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And why would you trust, you know, it's like, cause at some point you're like the food pyramid was been wrong, right? They had this idea of this food pyramid. Who knows how that no one even knows. There's no one even knows how actually that even came up. Like it's not even clear. So it's like, okay, well they've been lying to me all this time. They don't make me even know why they're lying to me. They may not even not know they're lying. So I'm going to find another expert who maybe hasn't.

Samo Burja (42:11.105) Exactly.

Samo Burja (42:18.349) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (42:28.103) Maybe he is lying to me, but I don't know that they're lying to me yet. So I'm to go to that person because like, know, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, you know, fool me twice, shame on me.

Samo Burja (42:36.482) Yeah. Yeah. No, no, it's exactly the case. I think it's it is, as you explained, it is impossible for us to rethink absolutely everything. It's just a question of whether we are capable of occasionally rethinking things. And that's actually very difficult, right? You you are immediately very strange if you're like the first person to trust the anonymous dieting guy.

Auren Hoffman (43:00.584) Yeah.

Samo Burja (43:00.736) over the FDA's recommendation or you're the first person that sort of like is like, you know, I think I'm going to inject myself with this Zempek stuff. I think it's pretty good. Actually, I've read the papers and everyone's like, what are you doing? Like what? yeah.

Auren Hoffman (43:08.135) Right. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (43:13.939) Well, there's safety in numbers too. So if you have enough friends or people you like who trust this person, then you're more likely to trust this expert in this one narrow thing, right? Yeah.

Samo Burja (43:21.006) Then it gets easier. Then it gets easier. Yeah, yeah. look, I think that there's perhaps, let's put it this way. As long as we have the mechanism in society to update eventually the legal recognition of who are the best available experts in our society, this is actually a pretty healthy process because over time people will, you know, I think if given enough time, people will cohere and find the new experts.

Auren Hoffman (43:42.025) Yeah.

Samo Burja (43:50.082) Now, whether these experts will be accredited, like will they be credentialed? Will they be recognized by the government or by big companies in their official decision making? That's another problem. So I think there's like individual trust. Like on that level, the whole internet has been slowly rerouting to new sources of trust, like new media platforms, new writers, new scientific authorities on all sorts of topics. Some of these are of course bad.

They're like, medical misinformation is rife, both among so-called experts and among the contrarians. But on, on net, think individuals will like find their way. But the laws will be the same. And then everyone will be like, well, I figured out my entire treatment plan online. And I figured out, I talked to everyone about what I need to do. Okay. The only thing I now have to do is go to an office with this person who's technically my doctor.

Auren Hoffman (44:32.242) Yeah.

Samo Burja (44:44.854) and convince them to sign off on my internet assembled treatment plan. It's like, I'm like, why do need that person in that office? How long are we going to do that? Like, because that's in a way a miscredentialing, right? That's a I mean, the person might even be a great doctor. They just literally don't have time for you. And we need to open bureaucracies to accept the input of, hey, this person that's like or this organization has come up with this treatment plan.

Auren Hoffman (44:47.111) Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (44:52.051) Yeah.

Samo Burja (45:14.144) Insurance company, this is just as valid as if a doctor did it and there's no laws preventing you from from, reimbursing them. Right. For example, if you even were to use insurance for that, but, there's this like a deeper problem here because you can have a bureaucracy that's stupider than the sum of its parts, because sometimes the sum of its parts, just know things that are inadmissible in the official record. Like

Auren Hoffman (45:40.359) Now, how does it work as we're

Samo Burja (45:40.834) You know, even for farm policy, if you print it out, like a blog post from like a really insightful commenter on geopolitics and you show up and it's like a state department meeting. I don't think that works. Now, maybe it works in the Trump admin, but even there, I don't think it works.

Auren Hoffman (45:54.311) Well, I think foreign policy has been. Yeah. Well, I think the U.S. foreign policy, I think some other countries are quite good at it, but U.S. foreign policy in some ways has been so discredited over the last 25 years. The experts have just been so wrong at almost every big issue. They're maybe right on a lot of the small ones or whatever, but at least on the big issues, they've been wrong on almost everyone that that I think it's much easier to do today. But still amazing how much power.

Samo Burja (46:06.093) Yeah.

Samo Burja (46:21.112) Yes.

Auren Hoffman (46:23.987) the these quote unquote experts have when they've been wrong so much. Right. Imagine investors have just been wrong on literally everything for 25 years. Like they probably would not be the ones in power anymore if that was the case, because they would have lost all their money. So it is kind of interesting to me that that even though we've essentially lost the kind of like you run all these big bets and you're wrong, you're made in Iraq, whatever the big bets for that were completely utterly wrong. you?

Samo Burja (46:36.696) Yes.

Auren Hoffman (46:52.061) where it disastrous things, yet you still have lots of power, which is kind of funny to me. Now, if we're gonna, like there used to be scenario where like there really weren't any live players, let's say after the age of 80 or something. I mean, it was just like, you know, maybe historically there was maybe one or two, but it's extremely, it'd be extremely rare where that would have ever happened. Either they died before then, or like they just were just not functioning as a live player.

Samo Burja (46:59.053) Yeah, because-

Samo Burja (47:12.696) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (47:21.107) But we're, we're, moving to a world and maybe even 70 for many cases. That was probably the case. Yeah. Now we're moving to a world where like they're clearly going to be live players after seven years, clearly going to live players after 80. there may be live players after 90, maybe live players after a hundred. like how does that, cause now we're just going to have like the, the, life, the someone, it will be a quote unquote live player for much longer. you know, pulling was really not that much of a life for, for that long. he's briefly a live player.

Samo Burja (47:49.346) He died fairly young. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (47:50.673) Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you know, so he's briefly a live player. And you know, people are going to span a much longer lifecycle of being alive. But like, how does that change things?

Samo Burja (48:03.212) You know, I've had this discussion with related to life extension before, and let me propose that actually very long lifespans will be a boon for true merit, not a detriment to merit. Let me explain. If modern politicians, people will learn, people will change. And especially we should not conflate old incumbent powerful people with life players, right? There are many people who

Auren Hoffman (48:18.409) Okay, because it will like, they'll learn over time.

Samo Burja (48:31.534) In America, it's practically a seniority system. But the average age of Congress goes up by a year almost every year. So that's kind of wacky. We are now about, and I think the average age of Congress, this is a depressing one. I think it's the average age of Congress right now is like about 10 years older than the Politburo in the 1980s, the Politburo of the Soviet Union. And we call that gerontocracy back then, right? Because America was more youthful then. The Senate is very old, right?

Auren Hoffman (48:38.847) That's crazy.

Auren Hoffman (48:55.005) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Certainly the Senate, the Senate is very old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Samo Burja (49:00.832) And to be fair, the word does mean old, right? Senate, it's sort of senior and the Latin, et cetera. But it's not supposed to be that old. Okay. It's not supposed to be that old. even, even the Romans would be like, what are you guys doing? so I, I do think that, you know, if Benjamin Franklin had access, let's play this way. If Benjamin, no, no, just if Benjamin Franklin had access to tech talk, I think great things would be happening. I think it would be tremendous. I think he'd figure out how to do it.

Auren Hoffman (49:03.569) Yes. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:16.243) Like when you think of like Lyndon Johnson, sorry, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (49:25.225) Hmm.

Samo Burja (49:28.27) I think he'd probably even figure out like new little viral dances, but also he'd probably educate you about science and he'd come to his own bespoke opinion on vaccines. And of course, maybe occasionally he'd have to defend a statement he made in 1820. But by that point, there'd be so many other people around who made like a statement in 1820 that is like now racist or sexist or whatever, that the actual statement of, hey, I was very young, it was a different era, I've learned better.

Auren Hoffman (49:36.776) Yeah.

Samo Burja (49:55.426) Here's the things I've done in the last hundred or 200 years where I've changed my social views. I think that we would be better off. Like, wouldn't you feel better if in modern politics you had some of the greatest politicians of the last 200 years competing together on an even playing field? I think that would actually result in a mere seniority decaying. Because let's put it this way. I think that, you know, a...

Even a like, let's put it this way, a 30-year-old Alexander Hamilton would certainly outmaneuver in politics a 150-year-old Cromwell if he was forced to compete with him. So I think there will always be new geniuses, new young people who will come to succeed and who will come to like compete with the old live players. Now, gerontocracy as a whole though, is a massive problem. As we move into a low fertility regime,

where even the United States is a low fertility country. It's just masked by immigration. We literally have European tier fertility in this country now. It's like TFR 1.6. It used to be the case that elitist games in all human societies and all places favor the old and democratic games tend to favor the young. But what happens when the median voter is old? Then you have a world where both like populism is gerontocratic and elitism is gerontocratic too.

And of course your bank account keeps going up if let's say the economy is growing and like you're investing in the stock market and the stock crashes never in corrections never happen. So compound interest also works in your place. So I don't know, we're going to have to do something to empower young people systematically. Like I think we're getting too old heavy.

Auren Hoffman (51:30.857) How do you think on the for

Auren Hoffman (51:35.433) Let's double click on the fertility stuff, because I know that's like that's something that you're super interested in. mean, we now have like Japan is kind of like a mid fertility country. used to think of it as like a super low fertility country, but it's kind of been flat for a long time. I think there were the TFR 1.3 or something like that. They're in that range. OK, so like that's actually pretty good. That's better than like it seems like most of Europe now. Right. Certainly better than most of all most of East Asia. Right.

Samo Burja (51:41.293) Mm-hmm.

Samo Burja (51:52.781) Yes.

Samo Burja (52:01.078) Asia.

Auren Hoffman (52:02.441) So it way better than China, way better than Korea, et cetera. Korea is what, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8 in that range? I mean, which is insane, right? I assume China's in that same kind of range as well. which is crazy. Yeah, that's right.

Samo Burja (52:12.61) Yes.

Samo Burja (52:21.996) Especially especially in the cities, right? If you look at Hong Kong or Singapore or if you look at Chen Zhen like the official statistics for China The official ones for China are like a little above one, but they might be inflating them, right? I think we've entered the point where countries are gonna hide how much their populations declining for example a Polit a census in a country in a European country like Romania

Auren Hoffman (52:27.847) Right, they're gonna be even below one.

Auren Hoffman (52:36.136) Yep.

Samo Burja (52:46.55) or even Ukraine is politically super explosive because then you have to admit that during, the last 10 years, 20 or 30 percent of the population moved out.

Auren Hoffman (52:55.289) And what does the census even mean? Because you might still be counting people that moved out, right? Yeah, maybe they're still voting there. Yeah, yeah. But they moved to Poland or they moved to the UK or they moved some other place or something like that. At least in the US, people aren't leaving the US usually. It's pretty rare for someone to leave the US for another country. We're not that much of an exporter of people.

Samo Burja (52:57.474) Yeah. Don't live. Don't live. Don't work. Don't don't make babies in the country. Yeah, exactly.

Auren Hoffman (53:20.701) to other countries. But yeah, when you think of some of these other places, like you've got this like doom loop that they're eventually kind of exporting folks outside of it. But what is it? What is a country like? Do you think so many things have been tried to increase fertility? It doesn't seem like anything has worked and seems like fertility is going down everywhere. I think you had mentioned it's even going down in Iran like massively. So, yeah, it's like it's not like religion solves it or something.

Samo Burja (53:42.828) Yes.

Auren Hoffman (53:47.969) And people make a big stink like, the only first world country that has relatively high fertility is Israel. who knows why? It's such a unique and small country that it's hard to generalize that to anything that's out there.

Samo Burja (54:03.95) My dispiriting prediction for Israel is that Israel's fertility will come to decline as well. It's an outlier in that it's like perhaps a bit slower, but it's on the same trajectory. If we were talking 10 or 20 years ago, we would actually be talking about America as a high fertility country, right? And America is a very religious country. But if you today look again at the self-identified religiosity of teenagers and people in their early 20s,

America and Europe have converged. America is actually, in the young generations, about as secular as Europe. And the fertility is, again, sort of comparable. So a lot of the time when something seems like an exception, it's sort of like the last data point that's like straggling before it joins this cluster that's all going the same way. So, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (54:54.467) America, I have this theory that, there's a certain expectation of how you want to live. Back in the day, we maybe had an okay with cramped apartments and kids running around, but we have a certain expectation. So if you're not wealthy, it's hard to afford having more than two kids or something. And then if you are wealthy,

Samo Burja (55:03.415) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (55:19.901) then there's this whole other kind of weird loop in America, which is kind of somewhat unique to America, which is that the people are investing so much in their children. Everyone has a multiple, you know, if they have multiple kids, they're both on two crazy travel teams and they're traveling every weekend. well, if you have two parents, can't even have more than two kids. It'd be like functionally almost impossible to be like on the travel team. You know, you would need, you would need like this whole staff of people and stuff. and so.

It's like only billionaires now can have like lots of kids or something. So even if you have the space in the house to go do that, seems, it still seems harder for people to go do. And then of course, a lot of them are paying for private school. these costs kind of like go up pretty significantly over time. And I think certainly that's been true in Korea where people are putting so much into their kids. They're spending so much time with their kids that

In their case, think it's even harder to have more than one because they just spend so much time and they're because they're going to so much tutoring and they're really investing so much in them. Do you think there's any truth to any of this?

Samo Burja (56:22.796) And to be clear, I think it is and also has to say, the kids are not happy with it in Korea. They hate school. They hate the test props, test prep stuff. They hate. In Korea and even in the United. Well, I feel like America like is, I, I think that the ideal of a happy childhood is more important in the United States than it is in Korea.

Auren Hoffman (56:29.341) yeah, all this stuff is terrible for kids. Yeah, yeah, in Korea. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. I feel like the American kids are pretty happy. Yeah, yeah.

Samo Burja (56:52.172) So I think in both cases, you have a fertility reducing power here at work with the parents basically competing with each other. In America, in a way, it's like you get your kids the most enriched childhood, even if it means you have like very few of them. And in Korea, it's like your kids will be well-educated because it's good for them and also means you're a good parent because you got your kids to become like a doctor, an engineer, and they went top of their class. They have a perfect score.

Auren Hoffman (57:00.585) Yeah.

Samo Burja (57:22.24) It still is tugging on the same heartstring of like caring about children, just the view of what is good for children. It's like in the U.S. it's like, okay, maybe it's happiness. And in South Korea, maybe it's education. Though I would say even in the United States, I bet Americans overvalue formal education at this point. There are definitely kids in America who have a completely choreographed high school resume, all in the service of trying to get them into an Ivy League university.

Auren Hoffman (57:51.133) Yeah, of course. And they're all on the fencing team or something of the sailing team to help them do that. Yeah.

Samo Burja (57:54.742) A lot of them burn out after they get into the school, their parents are okay. Okay. Go be happy. And they're like, I don't know myself. I guess I'm to be a consultant at McKinsey. don't know. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that's, that's kind of like something that destroys, you know, not just to riff back on some of our previous topics. I think it can, it can derail or it's a detour in the life of a live player.

Auren Hoffman (58:03.4) Yeah.

That's what happens. They're all at McKinsey. What? No, what?

Samo Burja (58:22.306) to be like shepherded excessively by parents being given opportunities. guidance, sure it's useful. But I think that there's a way in which parents are way more responsible for what their children do now than they would have been 100 years ago. It's like, you could literally as a kid or a teenager, you could literally get a job and never talk to your parents again at 15. If you're, for example, if your dad was like,

a raging alcoholic, or if they had a religion you disagreed with. even though in a way children are much more protected, you know, maybe, you know, and I don't want to see them working in coal mines, that's fine. But wouldn't it be interesting if it was more normal that a 15 year old could like start a company if they want to, where they can have a normal job if they want to, where they could be signing contracts.

Auren Hoffman (59:10.633) Honestly, like what's wrong with working in a coal mine? Like go for it. if you, yeah. Yeah.

Samo Burja (59:14.446) Okay. Yeah. I mean, we have now, you you have the masks and so on, so you don't destroy your lungs, etc., etc. But I'm just saying I understand the impulse behind banning child labor. But I think we've become such a rich society that it's like the hyper exploitation is not going to happen anymore. It's just going to be like mostly win-win situations. And I think the liberation of children is something that the United States could do more. Where, for example,

Auren Hoffman (59:20.573) Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's like.

Yeah.

Samo Burja (59:44.45) You know, how many parents are now comfortable to have their children go for a five mile trip and back unsupervised. And that was very normal even 70 years ago, even 20 years ago, it might've been very normal. Yeah, exactly. So what the hell happened?

Auren Hoffman (59:51.549) Yeah, almost, almost none.

Correct. Yeah. When I was a kid, that was normal. Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:03.837) Yeah, yeah, and sorry, not even five miles, let's say, even one mile trip, know, parents are, people aren't happy with, right? Five miles is quite a lot, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, that's right.

Samo Burja (01:00:08.454) One mile trip, sure, Yeah, but you know, the five mile one's not arbitrary. You've seen that sort of scope of shrinking. There's like this map online that shows the over generations how the range of where people let their children go on the same town just kept shrinking generation after generation.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:22.055) Yeah. Yeah. Most parents, most parents, I don't want even let your kids go outside their house, you know, until, you know, without without knowing where they are without unsupervised or, you know, that's extremely rare nowadays.

Samo Burja (01:00:35.694) And then of course, of course the only youth culture possible exists online because that is the only space where they can go on their own. And now you're even perhaps supposed to maximally monitor their online exposure, right? So it's really, it's sort of like the situation where we have put onto parents the task of making the world safe for their children or rather keeping children safe from actual dangers because there are actual dangers to be real.

Auren Hoffman (01:00:41.063) Yeah.

Correct, of course.

Samo Burja (01:01:05.71) and, are also, but two things are tolerance for danger has dropped so much that I think we, we, are too into the safety, too into safety in all dimensions. It's like, you know, let's put it this way. people might think you're a bad parent if your kid gets into an injury, but you know, I'm going to be like super provocative and say, if, if you've had like four or five kids and none of your kids has ever broken a bone, you're also a bad parent. You've actually smothered them.

Auren Hoffman (01:01:15.922) Yeah.

Samo Burja (01:01:36.034) You've actually made the world much too safe. They've probably not been physically active.

Auren Hoffman (01:01:37.218) Yeah, and not just on the soccer field, which is what generally they usually are on the soccer field where they break their bones nowadays, right, which is maybe fine. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. least. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. What what? You know, people are now getting married later, too, right? And so now now I don't know really if they're getting married much later than they have been historically, because historically, I think people did get married, especially men got married very late.

Samo Burja (01:01:43.244) Sure, sure, but that's better. That at least means you let them play a dangerous sport. Okay, there are people who won't even do that, right? Look, look, because part of being a cop, mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:02:05.961) I think in the 60s in the US was the all time lowest age for marriage. Certainly for men and women has always been younger than men, but certainly for men it was way younger. was probably the average age for men getting married for the first time in the 60s was in like their early 20s. Whereas I think at the beginning of the 19th century, sorry, beginning of the 20th century in the 1900s.

It was probably like in the thirties where men got married. So it's probably went down 10 years during that time frame. and then now it's starting to come back up to like the thirties again and stuff. But of course, you know, back in the, you know, 1900s, we didn't have birth control. We didn't have other things that were preventing, people from having lots of kids. Like now we have all these things and now that people get married later, like it's just harder to have lots of kids. If you get married when you're 35, it's just, you know, just technically.

Samo Burja (01:02:33.496) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (01:03:02.545) more difficult, have to have IVF. And then of course, like, well, you're, you're older, you don't have as much energy, you know, all these other types of things as well to have lots of kids.

Samo Burja (01:03:13.202) I think part of this transformation is that people say that, say artificial wombs or better reproductive technology will solve this problem. But I think if we make it possible, and by the way, I'm in favor of developing those technologies. However, if we make it possible to have your children in your 60s, biologically your children in your 60s, I think the same sort of Red Queen race, the same sort of competitiveness,

to seem like a good parent, whether or not it's actually good for your children, to be best at your career and like invest everything in your career at the right time to get into the right spots and the right corporate hierarchy, whatever. I think all of those races will intensify to the point where people will feel that they can't have children before 50. And you know, maybe then life extension kicks in, but there's another deep cost to having children later in life. It's not just total fertility.

Auren Hoffman (01:03:44.22) Yeah.

Samo Burja (01:04:11.754) It is intergenerational continuity. How much time do you have with your grandchildren? Right. And look, while of course the world has changed massively and you know, the baby boomers, well, perhaps they weren't like the font of wisdom. Maybe they were more like the broken chain, broken link in the chain. you know, I still think that human nature has some persistent truths to it. And like, say evaluating like character is as useful today with some updates as it might've been a hundred or 200 years ago.

Auren Hoffman (01:04:14.857) point. Yep.

Samo Burja (01:04:40.63) or understanding like even your temperament, right? Like, for example, someone that has a melancholic temperament and like enjoys reading poetry and perhaps share some poetry with their children that their children enjoy possibly because they inherited some of the same melancholic genes. You know, that right there is a psychiatrist customer that is not raising GDP, right? They don't need, they don't need lithium, right? They don't need it and they're better off for it, right? They may have

Auren Hoffman (01:05:03.814) You

Samo Burja (01:05:09.43) an extra creative spark. I think we've forgotten like how much cultivation it takes to really make yourself a functional human being. And we want to outsource that, you know, we want to outsource that we've sort of like, like religion did provide a lot of this, but also like small, these like micro family traditions provided that they really did different families used to be different. And now I feel like we want to send away all these differences.

And we want to be like, okay, you have to raise your kids like a therapist, or you have to raise your kids like the tiger mom way. Either consensus is actually equally stifling if we like contrast East Asia versus California.

Auren Hoffman (01:05:50.025) Alright now a couple of personal questions before we leave. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

Samo Burja (01:05:56.918) Okay, very straightforward. think think Lyndon B. Johnson was doing his best to sort of get Kennedy out of power or get him killed. So, yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:06:06.303) really? Okay, so you think he was involved in the assassination somehow.

Samo Burja (01:06:10.892) I think he was trying to enable it because of course the vice president is the most unimportant role you can think of. like Lyndon B. Johnson is among the most, you know, I'm not even critiquing his positions, but objectively he's one of the most like ruthless politicians of the 20th century.

Auren Hoffman (01:06:16.232) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:06:23.539) Correct. Yeah. If you read Paths Power, which is an incredible book, like, yeah, he is a ruthless man. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I like it. Okay. All right. That's awesome. I love it. Okay. And last question we ask all four guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

Samo Burja (01:06:27.244) Yeah. Yes. Yes. Okay, so that that's conspiracy theory. Yeah.

Samo Burja (01:06:43.182) That's tricky, right? Because I could give many normal answers, the answers that are normal in our Silicon Valley, like contrarian set. Like if I were to say, college is overrated, et cetera, et That's common wisdom. Yeah, it's conventional. So let's try to stay actually unconventional and, you know, okay. Okay.

Auren Hoffman (01:06:50.825) Mm hmm. Right, right. Nowadays that might be conventional. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Samo Burja (01:07:09.454) taking a year or two off from an extremely highly accomplished career to go and read in seclusion or travel outside of tourism and so on. And let me emphasize, don't do ayahuasca, don't do acid, don't go to like alternative spiritual communities, just actually read old books and contemplate things in seclusion and nature for a year. I think that's really underrated.

Auren Hoffman (01:07:28.275) Aha.

Samo Burja (01:07:38.68) People used to understand that's necessary, but there are modern example, a year, yeah, a year is to break all your habits. And then you'll go back, you'll still have an amazing biography. Hopefully you're not in the position where your CV as written makes or breaks you, right? Like ideally you have a strong enough reputation that that's not a problem. But at the end of that year, if you're like a driven individual, you will have basically like remade your whole concept of the world.

Auren Hoffman (01:07:41.907) for a whole year kind of like, okay, wow, okay. Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:07:55.432) Yeah.

Samo Burja (01:08:07.468) And if you look at people, often there are misfortunes that are encountered in professional life, like their companies that fail, their political parties that lose elections. Sometimes, know, in cases, I mentioned Mike Tyson, you know, he went to prison and he actually read a lot. He actually read a lot there, right? So the use of that, the use of reading, like in a way we are a post-literate civilization, so we're undervaluing reading.

Auren Hoffman (01:08:07.527) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:08:23.121) Yeah. Yeah.

Samo Burja (01:08:35.254) And we're undervaluing the reading of like a book as a full format, not fragments on your phone, not doom scrolling. So I would honestly say that, you know, this, this, this concept, the Roman concept of OTM, right? Like, like Lee, you could call it leisurely or free time, but it's almost a self renewal. I think it's underrated. And I think, many highly accomplished people would.

Auren Hoffman (01:08:59.241) And how does one do that? mean, for many people, are still in, even if they have amazing exit, like they're integrated in society, they still have parents, they have to interact with, they may have children, they may have a spouse, they may have other friends that are relying on them. Like how does one extricate themselves from society for a year?

Samo Burja (01:09:19.927) Well, I have no solution for a spouse that will not go with you to the ends of the earth. But to be fair, that's a very rare commodity in any era, in any time, in any place. So, you know, that's hard. But for children, know, usually, you know, if you're well off, you can take them with you and they're not gonna have a bad year. They're really not gonna have a bad year with you. Exactly. And again, the extrication is so that you...

Auren Hoffman (01:09:24.519) Yeah, yes, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:09:30.449) Right, it's a point. Find that person. Yeah.

Could take them with you. Yeah. Yeah, they'll probably learn more. Yeah.

Samo Burja (01:09:48.078) after having been very deeply socialized in a very successful industry, you achieve distance from it before you do the next step and or distance from your previous politics. know, you know, when Dominic Cummings was like, you know, in British context, kicked out of politics, he just, you know, he said this in interviews, he just like started reading a bunch again. And of course, he'll be back in politics. If I were to bet on an individual being prominent in British politics over the next five or 10 years.

Auren Hoffman (01:09:56.926) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (01:10:08.626) Yep. Yep.

Samo Burja (01:10:15.746) it's going to be him, you for those who don't know can Google him and his involvement. Exactly. But the breather, the chance to think, the chance to like have, it's not even that your cortisol goes down, it's that your sources of information de-correlate from your current network. And then you can go back to the network. This is why in politics, often a political defeat is what happens before a comeback.

Auren Hoffman (01:10:17.021) Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's a live player, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:10:25.512) Yep.

Auren Hoffman (01:10:34.726) Hmm.

Samo Burja (01:10:42.174) It's not clear to me that Churchill would have done as good a job during, say, World War II had he not been basically a disgraced politician before then, right? Because he advocated the disastrous Calipoli campaign. And he did a lot of writing. He even wrote some science fiction. People can find it.

Auren Hoffman (01:10:55.507) Well, every president, every president in my, you know, in my lifetime before Trump, lost a major election. Trump was, you know, Trump lost, you know, Trump won before they won the presidency. Right. So, you know, Clinton lost in 82 for, you know, reelection, for, governor, George W. Bush lost for, for Congress. Barack Obama ran against Bobby Rush for Congress and lost.

Samo Burja (01:11:04.077) Yeah.

Samo Burja (01:11:10.05) Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Samo Burja (01:11:19.886) Mm-hmm.

Auren Hoffman (01:11:23.625) You just have all these, Reagan ran against Ford, and lost for the presidential nomination. it's a constant. Really, Trump was literally the first one to kind of break the mold of never losing an election before writing for president.

Samo Burja (01:11:41.998) I mean, I think that it's going out into the wilderness and being first off, being able to endure defeat, but secondly, also being able to wean yourself from the addiction because every profession has its own deep addictions, right? And I think I think being able to live without the immediate social approval of the people, it just actually fortifies you. And then since no one else read books, know,

Auren Hoffman (01:11:57.543) Yeah. Yep.

Samo Burja (01:12:10.606) Let's be real, if you read 10 books on a topic, probably top 0.1 percentile, unfortunately, on that topic.

Auren Hoffman (01:12:17.225) You know, you know, it's interesting. She's like, I, I, we're, we're taping this in kind of like mid November, 2024. I'll probably end this year with reading about 50 books. and I think I'm reading way too much and my new year's resolution for 2025 is to read way fewer books. I feel like many of those books are just not impactful. They're not helping me. They're not, you know, they're, they're, they're kind of somewhat enjoyable. Yeah.

Samo Burja (01:12:29.005) Mm-hmm.

Samo Burja (01:12:41.134) true.

There are many bad books.

Auren Hoffman (01:12:46.887) Yeah, they're somewhat enjoyable, just like watching TV is somewhat enjoyable and stuff like that. But maybe I should have actually just watched more TV. Like maybe I should have replaced it with watching more TV.

Samo Burja (01:12:54.798) I mean, maybe you've done that already, right? I'm just talking, again, there's no universal advice, but you know what? I bet a significant one year change where you do something really, really different. And I know you've done several things that are quite different already. I mean, honestly, I would so read Orin of film reviews. I really, I would take your movie recommendations.

Auren Hoffman (01:12:58.93) Yeah.

Auren Hoffman (01:13:08.967) Yes. Okay, so I'm just gonna watch more TV. That's my New Year's resolution. I'm gonna go, yeah, yeah. That's my sabbatical.

Auren Hoffman (01:13:20.289) Okay. All right. I like it. All right. Well, thank you, Samubhurya for joining us on World of Dast. I follow you at Samubhurya on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been super wide raging and a ton of fun. So thank you very much.

Samo Burja (01:13:36.664) Thank you. Cool.