Resources on how to do good with your career — and anything else we here at 80,000 Hours feel like releasing.
Matt Reardon: Hi, listeners, this is Matt. You're going to hear from our host, Conor, in a moment, but I just wanted to add this disclaimer at the top of the show to say that we are aware that Arden had two black eyes in the episode, as keen-eyed viewers are surely going to notice. However, we never got around to discussing it, and I just wanted those listeners to be reassured that Arden was fine at the time back in October when we recorded, and she is still fine now. There is no ongoing thing to worry about with Arden. She just had an unfortunate encounter with her counter which caused one black eye and then spread to the other through a condition that I only just learned about by witnessing this happen to Arden called periorbital ecchymosis, which you all can look up on your own.
Needless to say, we had many other interesting things to discuss and I hope you enjoy this final episode of mine and hopefully the show will continue on soon. But with that spoiler and disclaimer out of the way, I will turn it over to Conor.
And it's so cool that they let me sit in Rob's chair for this one. I don't even work here anymore. It's great.
Conor Barnes: Hello, listeners, we're here with Matt Reardon for another episode of the 80K retreat podcast where we discuss various retreats from the world, from responsibilities, from daily work hours, from London. But specifically, we're going to talk about Matt and his retreats. Matt, how's it going?
Matt Reardon: It's going all right. You prefaced me to be thinking about retreats, and you're in the chair that I'm usually in. I mean, which speaks to the first retreat, which might be most relevant for listeners, which is that I'm retreating from this podcast. And maybe Conor will take over from Halifax, Canada.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, yeah. There's a way.
Matt Reardon: There is a way. There's a way to do many things.
Arden Koehler: I mean, podcasts are pretty remote friendly.
Matt Reardon: Yeah, that's true.
Conor Barnes: But the brand of this one has been.
Arden Koehler: That's true. It's in the office.
Conor Barnes: Yeah. On surveys, people say that matters to them when they watch this.
Arden Koehler: Is that right or is that a joke? I'm sorry, I didn't know how intense you were with the user research, Matt.
Conor Barnes: Well, anyway, we should introduce ourselves. I'm Conor. Think of me as Matt. This is Matt. Think of him as Conor from two episodes ago. This is Arden.
Arden Koehler: Hi. I'm just myself.
Conor Barnes: What's there else to say? We're all at 80,000 Hours for a few weeks more. And some of us are at 80,000 Hours for longer than that.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. So we're all at 80,000 Hours physically for a few more weeks. Well, actually, wait, I'm the only one who's actually here for a few more weeks, you guys.
Arden Koehler: I'm here for two more weeks.
Matt Reardon: Oh, nice.
Conor Barnes: I'm here for one more days. Yes.
Matt Reardon: Okay. Nice, Nice. So consistent with the theme of this show that I've been running kind of all year now, not only is the guest leaving London, but every participant is on the verge of leaving London. And the news for me, and why Conor is sitting in the chair, is that I've given these three big updates to my 80K colleagues over the last four weeks. My first update was I am moving to the United States in early 2025, maybe DC, maybe the Bay. Kind of classic places for folks like us to go. A couple weeks later, I said, I'm moving to Korea before the US. So both will happen, but moving to Korea much more urgently in about two weeks from the time of recording here in early October for a while.
Arden Koehler: A few months, right?
Matt Reardon: Yeah, for three months.
Arden Koehler: Three months, okay. Yeah.
Matt Reardon: And then the third update came this last week at the retreat, which is, I'm also formally leaving 80k and I am going to run the programmes team at the Institute for Law and AI. We're hoping that people like our listeners will come to know it as Law AI.
Conor Barnes: I already think of it as Law AI.
Matt Reardon: Is that news to you, Arden?
Arden Koehler: Yes, it is news.
Matt Reardon: I've been calling it Law AI all week.
Arden Koehler: I thought you were just forgetting one of the words in between.
Matt Reardon: It was like the Law AI thing. That's where I'm going.
Arden Koehler: Law AI. Law AI. Law. You don't worry about all that vowel.
Matt Reardon: Lie.
Arden Koehler: Lie. Lie. Lie.
Conor Barnes: Over time, it'll become [grunt].
Matt Reardon: Our hope is that it will make people think of the Gilmore Girls.
Arden Koehler: Right. Or lies, which I think could work for you -- you know, being lawyers.
Matt Reardon: Is that a lawyer joke you just made?
Arden Koehler: Yeah.
Matt Reardon: Okay, that's good.
Conor Barnes: That's good. Are you stoked?
Matt Reardon: No.
Conor Barnes: Cut.
Arden Koehler: I really thought we were going to talk about how excited you were about your new role.
Matt Reardon: I endorse my new role.
Arden Koehler: Which is what's important.
Matt Reardon: Which is as close as I ever get to stoked. That was more of a kind of Matt personality. Where's the ceiling on stokeness? It's like below the point at which you would...
Arden Koehler: But stoked for Matt?
Matt Reardon: Yeah. Relative to a Matt-based stoke.
Conor Barnes: If we normalised this to other people, then we'd say, you're stoked.
Arden Koehler: That’s great. What are you going to be doing? Can you tell the audience? I don't know, sorry, you're the host.
Conor Barnes: We're co hosts.
Matt Reardon: My vision for the show, yeah, it's now counter show or maybe someone else's show. But my original vision was like, anyone can ask any question. Right. So, yeah, running programmes. What does that mean, programmes? Those could be anything.
Arden Koehler: That sounds like the whole thing.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. And I kind of. Yeah, I mean it's funny, like getting a job at a new org that's like starting up and growing really fast. There's lots that needs to get done and so exactly where the boundaries are kind of unclear. But in the conversations I've been having with my future colleagues, it does seem like, yeah, I will kind of be like the in-house 80K of Law AI. That is just thinking about the talent landscape, who's out there, who do we want to engage, what do we want them to do, what do we want them to know and what are the ways we can get them to do that? So I think a lot of it is going to be just literally informational stuff.
Just like, are there talks, conferences, summits, meetings, whatever that we can put on, get lots of people in the room, get lots of relevant perspectives, just educate people in a sense. And then another function is sort of like recruiting. So we're going to have these tracks for different researchers, seasonal fellows, winter fellows, summer fellows and annual fellows, who we pay to be researchers and do researchers with us and for us for those amounts of time and hopefully scaling up to maybe we can hire them full time and things like that. And I need to go and find those people in the world and get them to the place where they can hit the ground running for their seasonal or annual fellowship or whatever.
Arden Koehler: Cool. So these are mostly people who are lawyers that you're trying to get to do legal research for helping with AI governance, is that right?
Matt Reardon: Yeah, I'd say lawyers and law students are the vast majority of folks. I think other adjacent academics might be on the table as well.
Arden Koehler: Got it. Can you give an example of what's the legal research that's actually useful for AI governance?
Matt Reardon: Yeah. So the way that I sort of frame this is like you have really big picture academic people thinking about what should society do, what should the rules be around AI and things like that. Just from a what do we want to get done, what do we want to see happen perspective. So, you know, listeners might know various things like if then frameworks, responsible scaling policies. There should be some lines that we draw around what AI models are capable of and how worried we should be about that, and what sorts of consequences should follow from observing these lines or crossing these lines or whatever. And good. That's a good big picture framework of a policy. Whatever. And I think it is the case with just all policy.
The place where lawyers come in is like, all right, you've got an idea, you know roughly what you want. You used all these words in describing the thing that you want. Let's take a close look at those and think about how someone in the world who wouldn't be pleased either with what you want or with what the words might imply would interpret these things and challenge them, given the kind of other law that exists out there. And think really carefully about changing those words and phrasings to actually get you the outcome you want, as opposed to just roughly scoping it and throwing it out there.
Conor Barnes: Right, right.
Arden Koehler: So most of this is about making precise, defensible, solid, usable in the real world in a maybe possibly somewhat hostile environment. The ideas that people who are doing more big picture AI governance research are coming up with.
Matt Reardon: Yeah, totally. And I mean, there's a few focus areas just like substantively like compute governance, international agreements, interesting law abiding AI kind of projects. And then also liability, which I think kind of feels like double law or something.
Conor Barnes: Double law.
Arden Koehler: Law about law.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. And I mean, I'm mostly referring to the idea of liability for harms and accidents and stuff. Just goes all the way back to the common law. It was judge-written 500 years ago. It's not like some policy template we have from the ‘50s.
Arden Koehler: Are we going to talk about SB 1047 on this podcast? Because it feels a little bit like it was just recently vetoed. And here we are talking about liability and AI and the importance of legal frameworks. And I guess I am kind of curious what you think.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, this podcast did have a news section at one point, right? Yeah, this could be the news thing.
Matt Reardon: All right, here's some news from three months ago or whenever this podcast gets released. It was an inherent problem with the news section that it took me so long to turn the subject around. So no. SB 1047. Yeah. As I read it and listened to the nice podcast that Luisa put out with Nathan Calvin, to my lawyerly ear or whatever, did seem to be just clarifying this idea that, hey, these new models that you're training and making and releasing to the world have the potential to cause harm. We need to make it very clear that you are going to be liable for that harm. And yeah, there's this interesting tension and I think Nathan can speak to it better than me. And his conversation with Luisa, we're like, well, that's just the basic thing that exists in the world.
If you counterfactually cause some harm to someone, you should compensate them. That's the basic principle of court law. And we already have that. And this is something that people use to object to the bill. And it is a worry I have about the fact that the bill failed sort of, because a thing that happens in law is like courts and judges in our system of government. I often talk about law like it's sort of advanced civics or something like that. The courts generally frame themselves and the way they interpret things as very subservient to the legislature. They're the elected ones. They're the ones whose job it is to pass laws. Our job is just to interpret their intention and what they meant.
And yeah, my sense with SB 1047 was like, you have this thing in tech. Most of tech is just these big online media companies that we know about and they have section 230 which says, all right, people are going to be posting and using these platforms for all kinds of things that maybe can do bad things or whatever. And the platforms overall seem like they're going to be beneficial to society even though they're going to enable people to do things they could have done with other platforms. So we're going to kind of just take away their liability.
Arden Koehler:
Or they couldn't have done with other platforms, you mean? You said they enable people to do things they could have done with other platforms.
Matt Reardon: Right, and I did mean to say that. But maybe it calls for some clarification, which is to say with great effort you could have, through newspapers and radio, done what you do on Facebook. But like Facebook's value inherently is because it way lowers the cost of doing those kinds of things, which means you're going to get a lot more of them. And I think when Section 230 passed, the legislature's judgement was like, oh wow, lowering that cost for so many people in such a big way is societally valuable that we wouldn't want our standard methods of liability to hinder that great value. So let's make sure that the platform makers are not going to be responsible for what individuals use the platform for.
And there's this debate, is AI like social media, like older tech stuff, or is it a new thing that is different and much more precise as a tool? Or what?
Arden Koehler: Or will it be in the future?
Matt Reardon: Right, right. And so yeah, my sense is the kind of profit driven tech world is like, section 230 is great. We got to build all these platforms. We didn't have liability. AI is just like that. Let's just assume those are the rules. And in fact this is just ambiguous. Is this a new thing? Is it not? And I should clarify for listeners, I really don't know the intricacies of section 230 and how much it covers or how much it doesn't or what the language is. But there's this notion out there in tech that's like, yeah, we're not liable for the ways that users use our products.
Arden Koehler: And is that because they're like, this does just enable people to do things they could have done anyway more efficiently? How key is that to the argument?
Matt Reardon: I'm really unsure. Maybe not very, I think. Yeah, interesting. I mean this is sort of like how the legal process works. I'm sure there were debates at the time that touched on that kind of thing when Section 230 was passed.
Conor Barnes: And even in this framework there's ongoing debate about some liability. Right. I've seen people try to ding Facebook for people inciting things on the platform. So what's that?
Matt Reardon: Yeah, I mean the idea is you should say there's some outer bound here of if the platform was so counterfactually enabling of some really big harm, really disproportionately to what you could have done with radio or newspaper. Maybe this is outside the bounds and maybe the important legal point is just like everything is in the words in the statute that passed and how those words are interpreted. And so I don't actually know the words in section 230. They could be as sweeping as tech people claim they are. And maybe that question implies they are, but they could be more circumspect.
And my notion is, yeah, that usually you can think of some hypothetical scenario where clearly you've violated the spirit of the law to such a great extent that the words won't even allow for it, even if the words themselves are quite sweeping. So yeah, we're getting pretty deep into legal weeds. Yeah, yeah, maybe to sum up the kind of worry is like, okay, so when something goes wrong with AI, yeah, there's always this question of like, all right, how causally distant are the AI model builders from the users? Because there's this discussion of like, oh, well, maybe you open source it, maybe someone fine tunes it, makes it new, and there's like, it changes hands like four times before the bad actor actually gets it and uses it for something bad. And courts are going to say like causally attenuated things like, how should we interpret these? And they might take the failure of SB 1047 to pass as an indication that the legislature said those causal links need to be relatively tight. And so in cases where they're relatively loose, we should interpret this in favour of model developers.
Arden Koehler: So are you concerned that if SB 1047 had never been put forward, courts might have interpreted 230 in a more like... Or sorry, courts might have held, there might have been greater liability than there will be now that it has been put forward and failed?
Matt Reardon: Yes. It doesn't turn on 230. Sorry, 230 is more like how the tech world interprets.
Arden Koehler: Okay, got it. Sorry I put it that way. Yeah, yeah. Interesting, interesting. I mean, I think they might try again though, right?
Matt Reardon: Oh yeah, I certainly hope they do. And so that can be cured that way. And I think it's not like a super load bearing piece of evidence, but it's definitely something that lawyers for the AI companies will point to and say like, hey, look, the legislature considered this question and they said that they didn't like it. Well, the legislature liked it, but the governor didn't. And that's the process. And the process that's important.
Arden Koehler: Right, right.
Conor Barnes: Okay, nice. Okay, great news section. I want to bring it back to you.
Arden Koehler: I just appreciated the legal analysis. Can I ask one more thing? So you started this by Conor asked, somebody introduced the idea that maybe this is already covered in law or something like that and this is like making it more precise. I guess I am interested in the broader question. As something of a conservative, I'm under the impression that maybe conservatives don't like making more laws on more laws on more laws to make things more and more precise or clarify the thing. Can you talk about why that is and why my sense is that you wish that SB 1047 had passed. Why you don't feel that way in this case?
Matt Reardon: Sure. So, yeah, I mean, the conservative impulse is to say that, I think it's not necessarily conservative, though it does overlap with that. It's more of like the progress studies kind of impulse, which says that if you look at developed societies, we see productivity kind of slowing down, productivity growth slowing down a bunch. And why might this be? And one reason is we've noticed all these cases where bad things happen. You could write a news headline. I mean, classically super classic example is a little girl, you fell onto the railroad tracks and ran her over or whatever. Oh, if only we had higher fences or gates or something, that wouldn't have happened. Now, this is in fact a 1 in 10 million event that happened, but it was newsworthy and people cared and said there ought to be a law.
And so now legislatures across the whole country, in whatever country it is, say every rail crossing anywhere has to have these big, huge gates in front of it and they have to be up to code and they have to be so high and so wide and so sturdy and whatever. And you can write 10 pages of law about the fences on the rail because of this one story. Right. And just like there are thousands of stories in this category and then thousands of these rules, and then it takes you years and years to just be on a train station so people can get where they're going, which is like, fundamental of society.
Arden Koehler: Sorry, I actually was trying to point to something slightly more specific, which is like when there are laws, new laws that are seeking to clarify old laws, as opposed to adding on top something that's clearly additional. I guess I had this sense that's also something that is not like, just like adding many pages of like, clarifications and specifications is something that I get the sense that conservatives in the US are like, that is just going to make things maybe too inflexible. Maybe it's just not necessary. Requires there to be more government to be bigger in order to interpret all that. I don't know what it is. I was curious about that because SB 1047, it sounded like you were thinking of it as a clarification of existing law. And some people will be like, you don't need to clarify. The law's already there, or let the courts interpret it or whatever it is, or let it stay flexible in some ways. And I was curious if you could talk about that as an impulse.
Matt Reardon: Yeah, so I think it's sort of like a rare case that isn't the central case that people are thinking of when they have this intuition. But people can lean on this intuition to say it's bad. And I mean, one rationale they might have is just to say okay, you say you're clarifying the law, but you aren't actually repealing the old law and replacing it with something simple and smoother. You're actually just adding another law on top of it. And so in the future, some government agency or whatever is going to look and say, hey, both these laws are on the books.
And sure, maybe the intent of this second law was to clarify it, but really an easy interpretation for us who want to expand our departments and have bigger salaries and more staff is to say, hey, both are in place, we should just double down and do more. And so you don't want to run that risk. And so you hear a lot of conservative people saying, well, we can pass new laws, sure, but it should be two old laws out, one new law in, or something like that. This is a slogan that you hear sometimes. And I think maybe that's the intellectually defensible justification for this view.
Conor Barnes: And you're sympathetic to this in most cases. Yeah, right. But not this one. Or how much sympathy for this case?
Matt Reardon: Yeah. So look, I mean, I think this speaks to the whole broader debate about AI safety and catastrophic risk and stuff like that, which is to say most people who are worried about catastrophic AI risk sort of believe in the power of technology to change the world. And most technologies are just like very well controlled by the people who built them and well intentioned towards making the world better, making something more efficient, more convenient for its users. And so, yeah, we'd often want to say, well, don't hinder that process, don't slow that process down. That's what has caused so many gains in wealth and health and all these things that we care about. And yeah, we just make an exception for this AI case because it is different in this almost unique way where it's like, well, actually this thing can be incredibly potent.
And yeah, it almost stands as a unique kind of technology that there are special reasons to think we both can't control and that the consequences of failing to control it are truly catastrophic. SB 1047 set the threshold at 500 million. Most people said that was too low because the things we're actually worried about are many billions, many trillions in damages like that. And I think when the stakes become that high, some light touch regulation just makes enough sense.
Arden Koehler: Cool. Okay, good pitch. Thank you, I'm sold. Great.
Conor Barnes: Other things, Other things, yeah. Well, I want to get back to you leaving because, you know, it hurts my heart and I want to hear the pitch. Why are you abandoning me? Us?
Matt Reardon: Yeah. So first I just want to say that it was hard. Yeah, it was hard. And I guess the thing pushing in the leaving direction was some kind of urgency about levelling up, about I need to like, take on a bigger challenge and I need to do really well at it and have that be really legible, in part, so I can just like be trusted to go and do more and bigger things in the world. This is a lot of it rhymes with the thing that I most often advise people to do.
Arden Koehler: I was about to say, are you using this as an opportunity to give the listeners some career advice?
Matt Reardon: Yeah. Which is like, Yeah, I think like, our whole model is kind of like, hey, if you have like good values and good perspectives that were arrived at by a good process, you know, you should go out there and like, make that clear to lots of people and make it compelling to lots of people and like build concrete projects and programmes that demonstrate the value of your perspective and what interventions you think are valuable in the world so that you can actually grow the number of people who do this in a big way and grow the funding for it. Because one thing I tell people is people also --
Arden Koehler:
So that you can sometimes do just object level, useful things, right? I just meant people are sensitive about the... And sort of, you know, I don't want people to think this is a pyramid scheme.
Matt Reardon: The way that I have framed it is a very meta framing because I do think of myself as a very meta person. So, I mean, it's very good to flag that. But yeah, I think the thing that I wanted to point to is like. Yeah, I mean, I'm saying all this on a background of like, we are this small group of people who really care about this thing that seems incredibly important and very stakesy to us. And. Yeah, why the need to level up? Why don't you just slot in where you're good? Because I think I'm good here and I've slotted in well here, but I have limited capacity to level up. And why the urgency? Why is it so important to level up?
And I think because we were just talking about AI safety and the law and how it interacts with all of society. And it's like, before society is going to let you influence it in big ways, you need to establish a lot of credibility. You need to do great things that are very legible to lots of people. And so this is like, yeah, both government stakeholders, policymakers, decision makers and things like that, and potential funders and new collaborators. And I think that actually just going out and building good things and the conflict that I'm speaking to that advisees often have is classic questions. Should I earn to give or should I do direct work?
And oftentimes I want to say, hey, if you're really ambitious and you're really serious, direct work kind of strictly dominates earning to give in the sense that if you build a project or a system or an organisation to such a degree of excellence, people will notice this and fund it. People who have more money than you could hope to earn elsewhere. And indeed, I don't know, this is my story for where Open Phil came from. Just GiveWell was amazing. It was the best advice for the most important question. And you had this big donor who recognised it.
Holden and Elie Hassenfeld could have gone off and worked at Bridgewater their whole careers and even worked their way up to near the top, and they wouldn't have done a meaningful fraction of what Open Phil is now able to do, because they built GiveWell so well and it was so legible and so impressive. And so, yeah, I think I want to get myself in a position where I can do that and I can get us to the point where things like SB 1047 getting vetoed don't happen. Because this is just a very serious, credible, accomplished, well supported group of people who are introducing this perspective to the world.
Arden Koehler: Like I in particular, or do you mean just like, you want to make this true of the people who are concerned about this? Okay, I have two questions, both about universal universe. Oh, God, is me not being able to say words gonna become a theme? Universality, Universability.
Matt Reardon: Universalizability.
Arden Koehler: Universalizability. Thank you, thank you. Your spiel there. So you're an advisor, you talk to lots of people. They're often very talented, but I guess I am, you know, you said it strictly dominates earning to give, to do direct work. And you talked about building this thing. Like, is this something advice that you would actually give everyone who fits who meets a certain bar of like, talented, altruistic, thoughtful. You would think really, they should all be going for this. Or is. Is that just like for some subset in which you fall?
Matt Reardon: Yeah, well, I think it's unclear whether I fall in the subset and there is like some bar at which you start giving this advice.
Arden Koehler: But you would give this advice to yourself.
Matt Reardon: It's quite a high bar. I would give this advice to the aspirational version of myself. I really don't know. I really don't know whether this will pan out in the ambitious model that I have. But the point is I endorse trying.
Arden Koehler: And you want to give that advice to advisees. I mean, we talked about this with Dwarkesh, right. You want to be sometimes being like, try the thing, even if it doesn't, it might not work.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. I mean, you just want to seriously use the evidence you have and make a good decision. And my track record so far, I would say, is mixed in terms of whether it really predicts that I'll be able to nail this. But because it's mixed, I should kind of aim for the high upside, even though there's a lot of risk of it not working out and me kind of just wishing that I had kept humming along, giving solid advice to the good people who come to us for calls.
Conor Barnes: Do you feel like you need to de-rust on anything to do well here?
Matt Reardon: Yes. Despite the legal analysis earlier, I have been kind of out of the law game in a quite dedicated way for more than three years now. Yeah. And so I feel like picking up all the parlance, all the ways of thinking, all the updates, all the things just happening in the legal community, because the legal community is its own kind of beast and has its own sorts of comms and status games that people play. And I was just very in tune to that stuff as a lawyer would be. And I've just vanished from that world. And I just vaguely remember the ins and outs of how to do law school is what I feel like I have left over. Maybe that's selling myself short.
Arden Koehler: But I thought you did pretty well on my spontaneous SB 1047 questioning. So, you know. But. Okay. Actually, yeah, that reminds me.
Conor Barnes: You had another question?
Arden Koehler: Well, I do have another question about the career advice. This whole be in touch with the law stuff. Yeah. Do you have any idea what's going on in the law world of what do I...? What's the question I have right now? Like, does the legal community go through concerns and trends and things that they're anxious about and things that they're excited about? And if so, do you know what any of those are right now?
Matt Reardon: So, no to the latter question, but I think one way to... It's an interesting question. I'll foreground it this way because I was thinking about this a little bit, thinking about myself and the show and where I'm going and stuff like that. I think we're used to this like EA community.
Arden Koehler: Well, I was going to ask if it has some similarity with that or if it's totally different.
Matt Reardon: Right. And I think it is mostly totally different in two ways with one explanation. And so my basic sense is like the EA community is like 12 years old, something like that, and it's. I don't know how you count five to 15,000 people, something like that, who are kind of really engaged. So it's very new, very changing and in fact focused on things that change by nature. The legal profession has kind of had its norms and ideas. Like even I'm thinking about the US, but I think this probably extends to Great Britain and Canada and stuff like that. Yeah, all those things were established in the early 19th century and surprisingly little has changed about the way business is done. And then the other thing is, yes, it is way bigger and the common cause is much broader. That is just like we want to understand what laws are being produced and what they mean and those laws cover just run the gamut of everything that you can imagine being a societal concern.
Arden Koehler: Would you say that is broader than what the EA community is trying to do, which is do good as effectively as possible, which it can run the gamut of any cause area and intervention.
Matt Reardon: The could is doing a lot of work there. I would say the legal community just does value and care about anything that is a law. Like, you know, I worked, I was a patent litigator, but you know, I could definitely go to like a constitutional lawyer or an immigration lawyer and in the norms of the legal community say like, oh, I really respect your work. It's really interesting. I think EA's emphasis on prioritisation says that. Like, sure, we start with the whole world open to us, but we narrow as quickly as we can to get to the really important stuff and then we focus deeply on that.
Arden Koehler: I disrespect your work. I don't think it's interesting. Please do something better. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, I mean actually, sorry I make this joke, but like, I do think the EA community has try to be a pluralistic community that wants to like, you know, have prioritisation, but also not dogmatism about what is most depressing and most important and have people do like, have respect for other people's views on what they should be working on.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, I do think if we were as big as the legal community, our bar for causes would lower. We would get people spread across more things, but we still wouldn't cover the huge amount of morally neutral things that lawyers still address. But it would be neat to see a much lower bar. You had another question?
Arden Koehler: Oh, yeah. Should everyone always be trying to level up?
Matt Reardon: No. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's a question about comparative advantage. Right. To me, that's what all of us are doing on the career decision journey. It's just like, advantage. Yeah. There's just like some place where it's best for me to be for the whole ecosystem of folks working on cause X or Y or whatever. Cause is important. And yeah, there's just like some true answer for that. If we ran all the hypotheticals and whatever, and I just want to land there. And it's interesting. I've just gone through this hiring process and it's like, you've hired people. It is just like, we make them as good as we can, but they're not super predictive. And I interestingly yeah. As like, as the candidate in my new role I feel that I was like --
Arden Koehler: You’re like, “Are you sure you should be hiring me?”
Matt Reardon: Have I given you really all the information you need? Because I'm not totally clear on what I'm going to be doing. But for some reason you're confident enough to back me to do it and pay me all this money.
Arden Koehler: I mean, they also want to encourage you to take the role. And so them being like, you know, we think there's a 70% chance that you're going to do great and a 30% chance that you're going to flame out is, you know, maybe not the most motivating thing to say to you. Not saying that they're being dishonest. I'm just saying you know, they want to give you a sense of, hey, you're going to come here, we're going to take care of you, we're going to help you thrive.
Matt Reardon: But in the comparative advantage framing, right. They had other candidates and they basically put me top, of course. And it's like that decision, I just. Like many ways you could have gotten that wrong. Yeah, yeah. And just like, so. Yeah, I mean, it's. So this is what I'm saying is like one version, one easy cop out is to say, everyone swing for the fences and leave it up to your employer to figure out whether you should advance to the next fence or however the metaphor works. Yeah. But I just do think that jobs are sticky for lots of social reasons.
A person comes in, they work for you, they were the best candidate as far as you could tell when you hired them, and they do okay, and they're solid and they contribute and you have a relationship now and I don't know, make this all double for the nonprofit space or whatever, because it's not like you can just say, hey, we're losing money on you. You knew this was the deal. It's like our objectives and goals are much less clear and so people can just get stuck in roles for which they are not the best person. And there can be double blindness on both sides of this exchange.
And so I think a lot of what I try to do in my advising is try to heighten the awareness about whether you're in the place you should be or what place you should be aiming to be, given what you know about yourself.
Arden Koehler: So the thing that comes to mind for me is also the costs though of people switching a lot. So I feel like in the EA community, people often want to change roles, level up quite often. Yeah. I mean, it seems ambitious. Well, sorry, it is ambitious and it is challenging and it shows that you can do something new and it's growth oriented. And I think people are obsessed with growth. Sorry, not in a bad way. In a way that I think is often great. And I noticed that it's probably quite painful for people and orgs to have to be paying the investment costs of hiring rounds, like getting started, onboarding, enculturation and so on and so forth, you know, fairly frequently. Do you think there's like. Yeah, what am I trying to say here?
I think there's a way in which I'm not sure that the... You sort of framed it as like the bias being on the side of the status quo. And I feel unsure that the bias is on the side of the status quo versus the optimal. But I'm not sure.
Conor Barnes: Something here I notice is with the, like the framing of once you're in the role, you might not be the best person. Like, I think that, you know, is more true when you don't consider the switching costs to come. Like, yeah, if we could pop you out, then yeah, you weren't the best person, perhaps.
Arden Koehler: And also the imperfection of the search, right. There probably is somebody better for your role. But like, yeah, who are they? What are they doing? Are we going to be able to get them? Sorry, go on.
Conor Barnes: The costs are substantial. So, yeah, thinking of it as you might not be the best person for it, I think, does ignore the costs. And yeah, there was a really good EA Forum post about this like 36 hours ago.
Arden Koehler: Yeah, I saw this, by Amy. Right, yes. The thing that was like in celebration of people doing a solid job or something like that.
Conor Barnes: Being stable. Yeah, yeah. Is there something here around like, orgs are really competitive for talent. So we have this culture where people can and thus do prioritise their own growth even though it's costly for orgs. Whereas if we had an abundance of talent, just the negotiations here would look different. Is this a thing that might be going on?
Matt Reardon: Conor is speaking to something that I've been thinking of here. I don't know how costly this is. It's a real phenomenon that you're pointing to and it does seem costly. It does seem like the fix falls largely on 80k's shoulders. Because what you'd really want to do --
Arden Koehler: Is enable growth at the org.
Matt Reardon: Yeah, well, enable new people who are doing what we'd say is not very important work now to come in and start doing very important work as opposed to this dynamic that I think you were pointing to, where people go from very important org X to very important org Y and backwards and forwards into Z and A. But they're all very important. And there's all these switching costs. However, if you just brought new people in to fill in the needs at these orgs. Yeah, you'd avoid those switching costs. And I think another important thing to point to is just like, as you stay in a role longer, you build up all this institutional knowledge. And it is just the fact that we cannot preserve or record all that when people leave.
And it's super valuable to have people who've been around for a long time and built up instincts and intuitions and memories. And I feel that is a real cost of me leaving now. It's what Michelle tells me is just like, Matt, you have all this institutional knowledge. Whenever someone has an idea, you're like, well, two and a half years ago it was like this or that. Yeah. And so I think that's a thing where it's really urgent to go and find new great people to help things drive forward beyond just the normal case. Because also there's this switching costs dynamic.
Arden Koehler: So you're pointing toward you'd like to put pressure on orgs to not be trying to poach people from other orgs or something, and being more like. Who are already doing great work, because that really makes the switching costs possibly dominant in this case, but instead being like, let's find people who are kind of not doing things that seem that important and try to bring them into the thing and then give them great work. Is that the idea? Is that what you're pointing to?
Matt Reardon: I want to put the stress more on 80K and orgs like 80K where it's like we've got to go and find those new people and boost them and create an abundance.
Arden Koehler: Right. Because it's our job.
Matt Reardon: Talent supply.
Arden Koehler: Yeah, yeah.
Matt Reardon: And yeah, putting it on orgs.
Arden Koehler: I thought you meant. I thought you were talking about hiring orgs. Like orgs hiring. But you mean 80K should like help create this talent pool. Yeah, that makes sense.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. I don't like this idea of like, well, everyone should restrain themselves in different ways to make it work for everyone else. I just like have entities and organisations and institutions that can all just like go for broke on the thing that they think is most valuable and just have it be that the right institutions exist. Such as this works out.
Conor Barnes: You've been at 80K for three years. Yes. Do you feel like you've stopped levelling up?
Matt Reardon: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean a lot of this is on me. I think I've learned some big lessons here and mostly big lessons I've learned from mistakes and mistakes that are hard to reverse, especially on my end. And to be less vague, I think that I at some relatively early point got my relationship with my manager Michelle just wrong. And yeah, it's mostly on me for not focusing on the goals of the work and the space where we can collaborate and do really productive things together. And more on just we have a disagreement about vision and that upsets me and makes this work feel aversive. And look, I do think that knowing what I know now, if I could go back in time and start this relationship over...
It's a weird hypothetical where it's like I have the lesson learned but I don't remember all the details of how I learned it or something like that. I could just do it right and really click with Michelle and have both of us really driving forward on the things that we each endorse and in a way that we endorse for each other. That is just the right compromise of values and perspective that drive the one-on-one advising programme forward. But just on my end is I feel emotionally burdened by all the things that happened and it's just hard for me to click in. I mean, some days I do, some weeks I do and I think it's a bit telling that I was here a year before Huon and Huon's a really young dude. Well, really young, by my lights.
I think he's like seven or eight years younger than me and he is now on basically a leadership track, as far as I can tell. And I definitely don't feel like I'm on a leadership track and this feels like the reason. And so now what I want to do is take these lessons into a new context where I don't have all the baggage of the memories and the emotions and stuff like that and apply them really well. And that's going to be my opportunity to level up.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, this is just a thing that does happen, right. In friendships or relationships where you goof. There isn't a reverse time button. You do just have to hold it and apply it elsewhere. This just seems real and true.
Arden Koehler: I mean, is it not the case that one can repair a relationship with a manager with somebody else? I mean, this happens. It is hard. Sorry. It is hard, but it seems sometimes something that people should try to do. Yeah. For our listeners, I am curious if you can give more advice, having learned these lessons. How would you advise people to relate to their managers if you have a disagreement or something? You sort of said this, but I kind of want to hear it in a pithy form or like, look, face the camera and like, you know, because this is career advice, you know, and I don't know, we do that here.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, this is it.
Matt Reardon: So the pithy version is just, realise that the keys to realising your vision and your success in the short run lie with your manager's success, because they're the person who's going to vouch for you, back you to do whatever you want to do. And it's a relatively short period of time, maybe like a year and a half, where if you just. Maybe you don't do it on the object level, but if you just take on their vision and say, hey, I understand your perspective and what you want to do in the world and how you see this team and this programme, and I'm going to put myself and my own ideas aside and I'm just going to run forward and try to nail that as best I can. I think you learn a lot about their vision and how it works.
But if you just conceive of yourself as having this intense service orientation for a short period of a year or a year and a half or something like that. You do get the most done and you get the most credit and your ability then to raise disagreements and things like that is greatly enhanced and multiplied.
Arden Koehler: I think this probably sounds like good advice, especially when you begin in a role as a new person at the org. I think it's different if you get a new manager, but you've been doing the role for a long time. But if they basically had a vision, they hired you to execute that vision and then they're going to want you to execute that vision probably unless you can convince them otherwise. And it might take a decent amount of intellectual muscle to do so that you maybe shouldn't expect to have at the beginning especially.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, I feel like there's something here around executional roles and decision making roles. I could imagine somebody in a decision making role hiring somebody, like somebody in strategy, hire another strategy person and then this doesn't make as much sense. They are asking you to disagree with them more and hash things out. Whereas I think this model that you've put forward fits me at 80K really well actually insofar as I was hired to be executional, be a software engineer. And I always joke that Kush, I was there for Kush to throw me at things and over time took on more responsibility. And at this point, I mean we still agree about basically everything, but not actually everything.
And yeah, something about, yeah, be executional and then have like the credibility and the knowledge what have you to have your own ideas make sense for my case. But I think not every case.
Matt Reardon: And importantly, you own the job board now.
Conor Barnes: Exactly.
Matt Reardon: It's totally your baby. No one tells you what to do.
Conor Barnes:
No. I mean we have input, but yes, it's very hands off input.
Matt Reardon: And you started out the way that you described. I do want to raise one worry I have about this advice, please love it, which is that you become the person you act as day in and day out. Right. And so if you start out saying like, well, it's instrumentally useful for me to be highly deferential to my boss and their vision, you may just end up wholesale adopting that vision for yourself in a way that you wouldn't have if you didn't come in with that mentality. And it is not clear which of these is going to be right.
Arden Koehler: I think it just really depends on basically, I think this is just an epistemic question. How likely is it that my manager has a vision that is great. If I disagree, how much should I discount my own views based on the fact that I just started, I haven't considered all these alternatives, blah, blah, blah, and have less experience and so on. And then something about what's the difference between our disagreement? So if they think plan A is what we should do, and I think plan A is what we should do, how much is the star worth versus the strife of constantly arguing? And I think sometimes, even if you're right about the star, the strife can outweigh it. Like, orgs need to function. We need to have hierarchies. We need to have things that like, whatever.
We need to have a single decision maker on various things in order to actually do things and move forward. Yeah. So I think that's another question. But I could easily imagine it being the case that you it's not true that the strife doesn't outweigh it and then you want to really push your vision.
Matt Reardon: I think the dream is the ability to really intensely compartmentalise and be like, look, at the end of every month or every quarter or whatever, I'm going to switch off my service mentality for a day and I'm going to pull up all these documents I write where how would I do things ideally? And if this happens regularly enough, you can kind of preserve your independence. I think this is very hard to do without it feeding back into your process.
Arden Koehler: I just think this is weirdly uncooperative, sorry, like as a mindset.
Matt Reardon: Even the minimal compartmentalised version of it where you're just like, I'm going to hypothetically engage with this world where like, I can do whatever I want a day, a month.
Arden Koehler: Sorry, what I'm saying is that I think a manager generally is trying to cultivate the growth and ideas of their report. And so it's like there should be a kind of like, So now here's my journaling about what I think, you know, how I would run the department if I were in charge or whatever. And like, having that be part of the relationship, I think is so much more ideal. And being able to like have them interrogate that and be an interlocutor and an intellectual partner in that would be the ideal case, is all I'm saying. And sort of like being like, now I'm like this person at work. Or I'm at this person for 90 of the time at work and for 10 of the time at work I'm doing this other thing where I'm trying to grow. But I'm kind of doing it and weirdly separately seems less good.
Matt Reardon: Completely. I'll just say that I think we're mostly speaking about cases where, for whatever reason, you and your manager can't sync up and can't resolve the crux or whatever.
Arden Koehler: But you don't need to resolve necessarily. Right. Sometimes just arguing can be good intellectual exercise. And so even if you don't end up in the same place, you can kind of...
Matt Reardon: Right, right. Yeah. So it's not like, totally solo activity. The ideal version of this is closer to what you're saying. Your manager should know what these docs contain and what you think. But there's some point at which you need to switch this off and just do the thing that either process or your manager thinks is the best thing to do and feel good about that and feel like that's your main source of contribution. So, yeah, have more discourse, have more input. Though that does raise the chance that this bleeds into the rest of your mentality. And it's just hard to control your impulse towards my vision, my manager's vision. And so finding some way to engage sincerely with your own vision and then switch off and do the thing that the process says should be done is the trick. And it just seems like a really hard trick.
Conor Barnes: I'm going to get closing thoughts from you because I want to ask you about the team retreat next.
Matt Reardon: Nice.
Arden Koehler: Okay, closing thoughts. Something. Something. I don't know. I feel like I have a lot of feelings about this, but I have nothing else useful to say in a pithy way. So never mind. No closing thoughts.
Conor Barnes: Very good, Very good. So let's get out of these here weeds. Let's talk about our recent company retreat. We went to some cute little cottages for, cumulatively three days across four days. And we all did some bonding, some strategy, and you wanted to talk about it. So I'm wondering how you felt overall about the retreat, how you feel about retreats in general as a concept.
Matt Reardon: Yeah, you'd think I might have weird takes about this or normal takes. I think most people think they're just great. Yeah, it's like we get to exhale a bit. We're not just turning out the thing we turn out every day. We get to step back and reflect and also bond and know each other. People like those interactions. Whereas, I don't know, I think the character that I play most days is the grinder and just like, come in, get the thing done, put things out, don't pamper yourself. This kind of thing. And so it's a bit resistant to this general positivity towards retreats that I see. But yeah, I don't know.
I think the standard reasons actually do just have a lot of value and I think this retreat especially, I think Neil did a good job being like, hey, the thing we want to do here is generally sync up on high level strategy. What do we think 80K is doing? And I had a lot of conversations that felt like people were making some really big updates. I'm just like, what is the basic model of what we do? And I think that is so core to being able to do well here or anywhere is just to understand the high level vision and then interpret your ideas and plans and projects through that. And it seemed like, yeah, there was just a lot of big updates for a lot of people.
Conor Barnes: Yeah. Hell yeah. Did you have any big updates? Did you feel like you needed any big updates?
Matt Reardon: This isn't going to sound so flattering for Matt. I think that I just sort of knew and other people didn't.
Conor Barnes: Nice.
Arden Koehler: Just sort of knew what the strategy is or could be the strategy that produces the strategy.
Matt Reardon: Yeah.
Arden Koehler: Because we're talking about strategic changes that are possibly on the horizon.
Matt Reardon: And in fact if I wanted to criticise like the vision at the retreat, I think like the idea that's like, let's make our forward looking strategy was actually kind of like, yeah, too specific and in the wrong direction. It should have just been like, what are we doing here? What are we good at?
Arden Koehler: Interesting.
Matt Reardon: Just like much more basic building blocks for a forward looking strategy rather than trying to pin down what it's going to look like.
Arden Koehler: I mean for us, I think Niel was like, we're not like making the strategy, we're talking about a potential sort of beta version of the strategy or something like that.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. And this is consistent with me feeling good about that.
Arden Koehler: Yeah, interesting. Do you think it's better to describe explicitly what we do here? Sorry. I have some idea that maybe having a bunch of conversations about what our forward looking strategy should be is actually a great way to sort of instil what the meta strategy is and what it is we do here basically in terms of how we try to have an impact and stuff like that because I don't know, it's easier to understand things when you see the concepts in action rather than being described in a sort of bullet point form that will feel obvious until it gets put into action. Until you realise it actually has some sort of function. Yeah, sorry, this is a take I have a bit. I guess suddenly I have this take. I don't know if I usually have this take.
Matt Reardon: And you're saying it feels good to get the vibe.
Arden Koehler: I'm saying that doing it feels like usually doing the work of figuring out what we should do should, like if you're doing it right, contain a tonne of information about what the goals are, what are kinds of ways of doing things should be that is more communicated in a higher fidelity or something than sort of straightforward description of what we do. A straightforward description of what we do anyway.
Conor Barnes: Would you say you're more of a just start playing the board game and we'll figure out the rules that way kind of person?
Arden Koehler: Yeah. Or you need the minimum. Okay. You need the minimal thing. But I guess I hope that people have that, you know, like generally as they come in and then it's like, yeah, you play the board game that like teaches you how to play like much more viscerally or something like that.
Conor Barnes: There was also, I saw in the show notes that you wanted to talk specifically about the game of Assassin, which multiple people participated in. What sparked this?
Matt Reardon: Well, it was just a fun thing that we did at the retreat. I don't know if listeners have played it. If you haven't, the idea is that you get however many participants you have, ideally an even number, but I'm not sure, it could be an odd number. But the idea is like you get assigned another participant to target when you're the assassin, they're your target and an item which you will use to assassinate them. Well, and you do not actually kill your fellow participants, instead you metaphorically kill them when you successfully hand the item to them and they accept it. And in warm social contexts.
Arden Koehler: Symbolic killing.
Matt Reardon: Yeah, symbolic. In presumably warm social contexts, people are often inclined to accept things and the game just sort of alerts people to like, maybe you shouldn't accept things. Maybe you should just tell people, oh, place that down on the table before you hand it to me because I'm being distrustful and you know, it's a little funny and you enjoy these kinds of things. And then of course, given whatever item you have and whoever your target is, you can come up with various, like elaborate plans to hand it to them. And then it is just like a fun, embarrassing, revealing social moment when you inform someone that you have just accepted something from me and that means you are now killed in the game. The game proceeds by you then inherit the target of the person you killed until there are only two people left and one of them hands whatever they need to the other and becomes the victor. So, I don't know. It's a fun game to generate stories among a big group of people.
Conor Barnes: Pardon?
Arden Koehler: Who? What?
Conor Barnes: Jenna?
Matt Reardon: Yes, nominally Jenna, though our particular game was not allowed to run to completion and it's Conor's fault. No, it didn't. Conor, I think, fairly, for entertainment purposes, requested that the group be texted whenever an assassination happened. We don't say who did whom, but we just know how many have been racked up. I think we had 16 players and basically it would be fun to get those texts. There's been one assassination, there's been two assassinations, there's been six assassinations, there's been seven. And we're like, wow, things are happening. It's fun. However, the problem is, if you know you have 16 players and there have been 14 assassinations, the only possible target that you have left is the other living assassin. So you both know who each other are, which, if you know who the deaths are.
Arden Koehler: Yeah. And you just said you don't, right?
Matt Reardon: No, no, no. There are 16 players. 14 players have been eliminated. Yeah.
Conor Barnes: But you don't know who.
Matt Reardon: You have a target.
Conor Barnes: Yeah. Oh, no, you're right. Yeah, you're totally right.
Matt Reardon: Your target must be the only other living player and you must therefore be their target. And so now you two just, like.
Arden Koehler: Interesting.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, true.
Matt Reardon: So we decided to call it when it was only Valerie and Jenna got it, because yeah, Valerie was never killed.
Conor Barnes: That's it. Well, Jenna won because she killed more people. Jenna killed four, Valerie killed two.
Arden Koehler: Got it?
Matt Reardon: Yeah, got it.
Conor Barnes: I didn't realise that. Well, anyway.
Matt Reardon: But anyway, it was fun times. I thought I had the most embarrassing story. Well, anyway, the game starts and my target is Jorgen, our head of ops. And my item was a towel, and thought, oh, this is good. Because in the cottage scenario that kind of laid out earlier, Jorgen and I were sharing a cottage, only the two of us, and I thought, towel. My cottage mate. There's a trap that I can lay for him. So anyway, we get into the night after the game has begun, and people go off to their various social activities. And I know, okay, Jorgen is out of the cottage, he's going to come back later.
All right, I'm going to leave my social activity, which is like the social games or something like that. And I go to our cottage, I go into Jorgen's room, I remove all the towels from Jorgen's room and put them in my room. And then my plan was, well, I'll get back early tonight and wake up early in the morning, and I'll just generally have my door open and my lights on so that when Jurgen goes to shower and realises he doesn't have a towel, his first instinct will be to ask his roommate hey, do you know if there's any towels around here? Or something like that.
Arden Koehler: Seems like a pretty good plan.
Matt Reardon: I hand him the towel. I win.
Arden Koehler: You need to actually hand the item.
Conor Barnes: Yes.
Arden Koehler: It can't just be that they have to hold it. Specific item.
Matt Reardon: Right, right. So I thought creating a need. That's going to be good. So I actually do go into his room and I take his towels and I put them in my room and then I go back to the social games. Yeah.
Conor Barnes: Feeling pretty proud of yourself?
Matt Reardon: Oh, I'm so high. I've laid the perfect trap.
Conor Barnes: Yeah.
Matt Reardon: And I sit down at the table between Valerie and the kitchen in the relevant cottage. Valerie turns to me and says, hey, Matt, is there a garbage back there? I was like, oh, yeah, of course there's garbage in all these kitchens. She says, can you get this for me? And almost immediate, playing my trap, Valerie informs me that I did indeed get that for her and that meant that I was dead.
Conor Barnes: What was her item?
Matt Reardon: A cup. Terrible.
Conor Barnes: What was your feeling in the moment when you realised?
Matt Reardon: I mean, just like, sinking shame.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, yeah.
Matt Reardon: I'm proud of myself, though. I turned it around very quickly into being. Like, my mentality is now that I want to be beaten by the best, I am rooting for Valerie. I want Valerie to win. And so the very next thing I went and did after that was I unlaid my trap so Jorgen would not be suspicious of towels.
Arden Koehler: Nice, nice. Okay, so then Valerie, she inherited your item. Nice. Good.
Conor Barnes: That's very good.
Matt Reardon: Play Assassin, folks.
Conor Barnes: It's good. You can experience a range of feelings.
Matt Reardon: Oh, yeah, you took it rather hard when Valerie... Wait, who got you? Jenna.
Conor Barnes: Oh, okay. So I had gotten two people. Then I went and spent two hours looking at art with Zia and Inés. Super lovely, super nice. I'm not thinking about Assassin at all. My target is elsewhere. Nobody's tried handing anything to me. It's just not on my mind at all. So we're all sitting around in the gardens afterwards with many more people and Jenna says, I'm going to go get a drink. Jenna comes back and she says, this tea is so hot. This actually feels like really hot tea. And I think to myself, my hands aren't that sensitive to hot, to like, hot water. I better take this to protect my friend. And I grab it and I go, it's not that hot, don't worry. And she says, I'm sorry. And there's the moment of confusion where you're like, what's not lining up here? And then... Yeah, falling.
Matt Reardon: Horrible. If Jenna's telling of the story is correct, I believe you said after she said, I'm sorry, you said, no, really, it's not that hot. Don't worry.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, yeah. I didn't really feel shame with that. It was a good kill. It's fine. I did feel shame when I killed people. I like when I killed Inés. I apologised again and again. I just felt so bad.
Arden Koehler: Can you say how you killed Inés?
Conor Barnes: Yeah. I think half an hour after the game started we were doing one on one talks. Like you'd pair up with somebody and discuss a topic, an assigned topic you disagreed upon. And on a particular topic, eight people would stand in a row. So you'd pair with the person who disagreed with you most. And I tried to get kind of opposite Inés in this way so that we could disagree the right amount. So we pair off and I need to give a laptop. It's not that hard. I have a laptop with me and I decide I'm going to take notes on it and at the end of our talk, I'm going to give it to Inés to get her review of my notes. It's easy. I jot down very rough notes and say, does this look right?
Conor Barnes: Takes it. I think she said, no. And I said, oh, okay. Sorry, you're dead.
Arden Koehler: You feel bad? How many people did you kill? How much people you got? None. Sorry, I forgot.
Matt Reardon: You're calling to mind another interesting thing that I learned about a few people on this retreat and it's probably true of a bunch of people in the audience and maybe a bunch of people at 80k. The thing that I like to do socially at these things is play social deception games -- i.e. Avalon, Mafia, Secret Hitler. And I noticed that some people, Conor included, Michelle included, I don't know about Arden. But I presume not. They just won't play these games.
Arden Koehler: Oh, no. Yeah, I won't play these games.
Matt Reardon: Oh, really? And is this because lying feels terrible?
Arden Koehler: It's just. I cannot think it's just personal healthy to be in a game where you're like, fabricating a sort of the story and trying to paint somebody else as a bad guy.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, right.
Matt Reardon: Fascinating.
Conor Barnes: I kind of feel that for these sorts of social deception games, Assassin felt a little different.
Arden Koehler: I think I could enjoy Assassin. I don't know why. It's like more physical or something and like drawn out. And it doesn't involve a big confabulation of...
Matt Reardon: You don't have to make arguments.
Arden Koehler: You don't have to make exactly like confabulating arguments in a way to deceive others.
Matt Reardon: The like, accusatory nature of the social detectives.
Conor Barnes: That's big. And I feel like it's kind of, I do enjoy tricks with friends. You know, like we share this understanding that, let's not tease each other, but like trick each other a little. That's fun. Pranks.
Arden Koehler: That makes sense.
Conor Barnes: Yeah. It's better. Big recommend. Good. Over multiple days. Do you feel like you learned any other life lessons from it?
Matt Reardon: From the retreat or from Assassin? No.
Conor Barnes: Okay, that's fair.
Matt Reardon: I do want to explore the social deception game because it's striking. It's like one of the most fun things that I do in an organised fashion, I think, is play these kind of social deception games. And I agree that when you draw the bad side. And so anyway, for anyone who doesn't know just the social deception games are, there's a majority of players who are the good guys and a minority of the players who are the bad guys. The good guys don't know who anyone is. The bad guys know who each other are. Going that direction. And the idea is the bad guys try to silently coordinate in order to sabotage the good guys in their attempt to find each other and to cooperate on scoring points. And so the real meat of the game is that people argue about who's bad and who's good based on the evidence they seen.
Conor Barnes: Right. Like every time somebody dies. Right. Like in Mafia.
Arden Koehler: But there's some piece of evidence that will come to that. Some sort of piece of hard evidence about things happening that will happen each turn.
Matt Reardon: There's basically secret votes that you get to see the outcome of the votes. And you'll know that there's at least so many bad people voting in that. That combination of people. And you try to make inferences based on various voting mechanisms, about who's bad. And the information is usually just quite incomplete. And so people will be touting different kinds of theories about what's logically consistent with what we've seen. And then also going on vibes. Oh, they're kind of looking shifty or like this kind of thing.
Arden Koehler: So I see why this is a fun, logical puzzle. And when you're a good guy, it's quite fun, I think, to try to be working it out and being like, But they did, and then this happened and that couldn't have been blah, blah. Yeah, I don't know. I think I feel like some of my worst experiences in life was a big statement. I don't know if I feel like trying to hide something or pull something out somehow I have these formative childhood experiences or something slash like teenagerhood experiences of trying to have some deception that's drawn out and then I get caught in it. And that was so terrible. And my social instincts are very strongly just live straight. And they even apply in a game context. I find it very stressful. Not that I never lie, but I like, find that kind of thing very stressful.
Matt Reardon: Right, right.
Conor Barnes: And it is plenty of lying. You're lying about yourself and you're lying about others. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, it is extended. People are going to grill you about it and you have to defend your lie. Yeah, it's a lot. Do you find that costly at all?
Matt Reardon: No, it's definitely worse to be a bad player. I think both, because some people really enjoy. It is very satisfying when you win as a bad player, but the experience up until you win or lose is, I think, bad for almost everyone.
Arden Koehler: I don't know. I don't know. I feel like I have some friends who, the challenge is it's harder, but it's kind of a sweet, interesting, more of a difficult puzzle. You have to really be keeping track of a lot of stuff and they sort of relish that. Anyway, go on. But, yeah, sorry.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. And yeah, I guess I just do think that in this incredibly abstracted kind of thing, you can just treat it like a constrained puzzle or something like that. And then just the kind of bickering, kind of social dynamic is just funny to me or something. And it just feels like, look, there's literally a game board in front of us. Guys, we have stepped away from the realm of morality now, and we're just playing by the rules of this game. And it feels relatively easy for me to do, though, so I don't feel any moral pressure to be a liar or accusatory when the game board is there. I mostly feel pressure in I'm not very good at this and I'm going to get found out and fail, and that'll be embarrassing.
Arden Koehler: Embarrassing from an intellectual perspective or something. Yeah. I'm not a good compartmentalizer. So maybe this is part of what makes a difference. I think maybe an unusually bad compartmentalizer. Not sure.
Conor Barnes: Is this the same as being a bad decoupler?
Arden Koehler: I don't think so, but I'm never totally sure. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Time to admit it. What does decoupling mean? When people say high decoupling, what are they saying?
Matt Reardon: I am shocked that you don't know this.
Arden Koehler: I mean I feel like I know. I know the results of being high decoupling. I know what they're talking about. I know what it leads to.
Matt Reardon: Such a dark road that I don't want to go down.
Arden Koehler: Sorry. Look, I know its place in the social conversation, the function.
Matt Reardon: It makes you rattier.
Arden Koehler: Yeah. And some of my best friends are rats. Some of my best friends like playing Avalon. But you're decoupling. What? From what? Like, is it like separating out the consequence? What is it separating out?
Conor Barnes: I think the premise is anything, but usually it means trying to separate out the consequences of something being true from whether it is true.
Arden Koehler: I see. I see. Yeah. Oh, no. I think I'm high on that.
Matt Reardon: Okay. And, yeah, I think the way it's often hardest for people is when there's a moral dimension. You don't want to admit that this true thing has implications that are hurtful or harmful or offensive or things like that. And yeah. Decoupling just means your belief to the truth of a statement can just be totally separated from what you think its moral implications are.
Arden Koehler: I feel like if you are a philosophy student or have philosophy in your background, then you're probably going to be high decoupling, because it's like basically thought experiments are basically about decoupling different things.
Matt Reardon: Well, hang on, this is something you might be able to speak to. My experience of studying philosophy in undergrad was that there is just this very strong division between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, where in my parlance, the continental philosophy is known as woo. It's not woo.
Conor Barnes: Only the best parts are woo.
Arden Koehler: The stuff that survives into the contemporary culture is woo. No, I actually don't know if I believe that.
Matt Reardon: And importantly for this setup, I'll just say that in the parlance, the opposite of being high decoupling is being high contextualising. That is to say that things are deeply intertwined with each other and you should never, it is actually just bad practice to un-intertwine them.
Conor Barnes: Right. You will miss something important.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. And I feel like continental is things are deeply intertwined and contextualised, whereas analytic is like, no, we decouple. Does that track for you? Is this like a real thing?
Arden Koehler: It feels like there's some resemblance to a distinction there that I would recognise.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. Are there other people who've done philosophy PhDs, maybe in your programme, maybe not, or whatever, who just lean very heavily on this thing that is maybe not decoupling. And they might be worse decouplers.
Arden Koehler: I don't feel like I know and I actually didn't. What I take to be the emotional profile of the decoupler versus not decoupler doesn't actually map on to the people who studied analytic versus continental philosophy in my experience. That said, I do think analytic philosophy encourages. It's just very about. I mean, literally, it's sort of in the name. It's really about pulling things apart and examining them separately. And so I think it does encourage that. But, yeah, I don't actually, for some reason, this doesn't feel like it empirically matches my memory of the people that I knew.
Conor Barnes: Cool. How did we get on the topic of decoupling?
Arden Koehler: Oh, we talked about social deception games. I'm not a good compartmentalizer, but I probably am a high decoupler in some sense. So I guess that means those are different.
Conor Barnes: In me, I do think that all of the set of social deception games are really good insofar as they push for and require good theory of mind. And I think that does make the best kind of game. You do need to be able to model other people quite well in order to succeed. And I think that's so cool. Modelling people in games, that's really neat because they're modelling you at the same time and it goes back and forth. And I think that creates the most dynamic, interesting games. That's my pitch.
Arden Koehler: Can I ask a random question that picks up on something Matt said earlier? Matt said the character that I usually play is not into something. What was it that you're not into? Oh, yeah, retreats. Not you, but the character. I was wondering if you could tell me more about that character. And then I also want to know about the character that Conor plays.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, let's talk.
Matt Reardon: Oh, yeah. The character that Conor plays is fascinating, but the character that I play is probably most of the Matt that you know, because I think it is like work Matt.
Arden Koehler: I guess I'm also interested in hearing about what are the parts of that most feel like a character. So talk about the character for the audience. I mean, I know the character. And then how is it different from the mat that is more, let's say, continuous with future Matt or past Matt.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. So work Matt is basically a curmudgeon. Just like nothing is ever good enough. Everything is broken. We don't know what we're doing. These plans are all bad and gonna fail in all these kinds of ways. And we should just admit that what we don't know and greatly simplify. Yeah, just the general vibe of. It's a large part contrarianism, but then a lot of scepticism about optimism as well, how good we are at what we do.
Arden Koehler: Yeah, we just said these plans are gonna fail.
Matt Reardon: Yeah, yeah. I think it's mostly just like work Matt perceives like part of 80k culture, which is that it's very appreciation oriented. It's very celebrating, success oriented. It's very positive.
Conor Barnes: The worst.
Arden Koehler: This is so interesting because I just feel like I experienced it as so critical and like, the appreciation is all about trying to make up for that. I mean, I don't know, maybe it's like different roles, different people. But I come from analytic philosophy, which is also very critical. But my experience of it is very nothing is ever good enough. The task that we're doing is impossible and we're trying our best to do it. And we're finite. But like, also we have to feel bad about our finiteness and like, everything is very critical. And like all of this appreciation and celebration is about trying to have that not be the fully dominant thing that is always. That wears people down.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. And I think the hope of, you know, I did call him Curmudgeon Matt or whatever is that we can just decouple these things. We can just decouple the fact that our task is impossible and we're never doing as good as we want to be with our ability to come in every day and feel good about what we're doing and endorse it. And I think the pushback is that we're too critical and therefore we need all this appreciation and celebration, that just seems so fake and inauthentic to me that actually makes me angrier.
Arden Koehler: Okay, I disagree. I don't think it's inauthentic at all. So I think you can be critical and be like, okay, this article, this argument has like 75 problems. And find that it is actually really important to be able to point those out and to try to hold ourselves to high standards and then also be like, but you know what? I realise that actually very few people in the world could even create an article with only 75 problems. And I want to really appreciate that. And the fact that you're like, showing up and doing this thing, working hard, working more than 40 hours a week often people really like putting in a lot. And the sort of appreciation is to be like, and that it's difficult and you're like, appreciating your colleagues for doing things that are hard for trying really hard, even if you also want to be critical of the outputs. That doesn't feel inauthentic to me at all or in any tension. It feels like it's just managing the emotional fallout of high standards.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, yeah, I feel this. And maybe there's a crux here around how much we appreciate the process and want to appreciate the work people put in. In this framing, it's kind of people are working very hard and so we're going to appreciate them for it, even if the outcomes aren't always.
Arden Koehler: And they're doing a really good job in the sense of for a human.
Conor Barnes: Yes. Yeah, yeah. We push ourselves hard, often much harder than I see in other places. So is the crux here something like... Is the crux here more you wish people would work harder or you wish people would work smarter, or does that not tap into this?
Matt Reardon: Yeah, I guess I have this perception that the push to celebrate and appreciate does blind people a little bit to all the ways they could be doing the thing better. And I'm really just worried about that blindness or just creating perceptions, because a lot of it is like, look, I have no problem. And I think I've done this with you, Conor, and maybe I haven't had the opportunity with you, Arden. When I feel the impulse and the urge and I reflect and recognise the stuff that you guys have done, I just actually do think you guys are great and incredibly on it and fascinating people who are aiming at the right things. Like when I feel that I should tell you. However, we have these meetings where it's like, appreciation section time. Come up with something, say something nice about somebody. And this is just like, I think it almost officially says our cultural value is to think we're great.
Arden Koehler: No, appreciation is different than thinking you're great. Yeah, appreciation is different than thinking you're great. I think it's appreciating the great things which do not need to be an overall assessment. And I think I think you can say, you could even say this thing, this programme is underperforming, or even this person is underperforming. But I appreciate the things about them or about it. These are compatible.
Conor Barnes: And I do think I would be more sympathetic to your view if our appreciation sections and meetings were like, I appreciate this person. They're great. But often they're very narrow in scope. I thought they did really great work here, which I think is more genuine.
Arden Koehler: Or they saved my ass in like, blah, blah way or something like that.
Conor Barnes: Yeah.
Matt Reardon: Like, look, we are smart and creative people. I do not doubt that when prompted to find something that we can appreciate about someone, we can find something specific. But that to me just doesn't feel very different than the, You're great.
Arden Koehler: Okay, what do you do about the fact that, empirically, it seems like people really do better, perform better when they feel appreciated, when they know? Also the fact that people are generating these things show that they're paying attention. And people like to feel like other people are paying attention to what I do; I'm not just toiling away here. Blah, blah.
Matt Reardon: Okay, so, Arden, I think you've arrived at the crux of the problem. This is a Matt psychology thing.
Arden Koehler: I don’t know. Is that usually the crux of the problems in your experience?
Matt Reardon: Well, I guess we're two for two on this recording. So I don't know if you remember this. We had a team dinner where we went to Caravan in North London, and we ate outside and we got up from the dinner. And I don't know, we were figuring out where we were going or something like that, and you had some impulse to be like, I had grown a beard at the time. And you're like, hey, man, by the way, I like the beard because I hadn't had a beard in a while or something like that. And I accused you of oh, you just like beards because your current partner has a beard or something, you weirdo. Like, I don't know. I don't think I called you a weirdo, but I was just like, there's no way that this can be genuine.
Arden Koehler: Wait, that would be a genuine thing!
Matt Reardon: I appreciate it’s spontaneous. And you were not at all required to do this, and you came up with something and something. But no, remember, the crux is my psychology. My psychology is that compliments are fake. People don't mean them.
Arden Koehler: I just think that's really not true.
Matt Reardon: I agree, but I feel it and I suspect it, and I don't know where to draw the lines. And I suspect other people are drawing the lines in the wrong places.
Arden Koehler: Interesting. You think other people should be more suspicious of compliments.
Matt Reardon: Especially in the context that we do them. Guys, we're smart people. We can remember things and come up with them when prompted.
Arden Koehler: That doesn't make it less genuine.
Matt Reardon: I think it does.
Arden Koehler: I'm sorry. Here's what it means. If something is totally spontaneous and unprompted, then it does mean that it was so psychologically powerful that it kind of invaded your brain. And then you were like, now I must speak it. And so it does speak to... It says something. I agree with that. But it does not make the other thing not real. Yeah, and I feel like it's worth bringing out that other thing.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. No, so actually, episode one, Chana brought up the compliment deficit, and I think this speaks to me.
Arden Koehler: And you were like, there's a compliment glut. There's a compliment surfeit that you're talking about.
Matt Reardon: I did not push back on the point. It seems as she presented it then and as you present it now -- very reasonable and probably correct, but there's something in me that resists it.
Conor Barnes: When you see our narrow appreciations, do you just feel like you don't agree with them as well. You're like, that's not worth appreciating.
Matt Reardon: I just take the manufacturedness of them as just like an incredibly steep discount to their value and other people don't. And I feel like you're all just deliberately pulling the wool over each other's eyes.
Arden Koehler: It just seems... Yeah, okay.
Conor Barnes: I feel this a little, actually, just thinking about, I think I discount very slightly some people's compliments. I'm like, you're a very, very complimentary person, so I'm going to discount it a little. But still, I'm like, but you feel this. This is a true thing. All right. Yeah, yeah. Matt, stop.
Arden Koehler: So I just. I think I discount a lot. Let's say I actually inflate some people's. So just the other day, I don't know, Ben Todd left a comment on a doc of mine. He said, I think this is probably a reasonable idea or something like that, and I sent it to a friend.
Matt Reardon: Yeah, this is exactly where I wanted to go. Father love versus mother love.
Conor Barnes: I didn't know you wanted to go there, Matt.
Arden Koehler: Take us there, Matt.
Matt Reardon: Go all the way. Right. Father love is approval love: there are things that I want you to do and achieve, and when you do and achieve them, I will acknowledge it. Mother love is unconditional. Just like I always love you, no matter what. I will find the good in you. I will see the good in you. This does track right and left a little bit, I think, as well, which maybe me as the most conservative member of 80K, is surprising that I have this father love thing, because, yeah, I think I want my compliments to be like Ben Todd compliments, where it's like after many years of me never saying anything good about what you do, when you actually do something that is really good and it comes out of me, that's going to mean so much more to you.
Arden Koehler: Here's what I'm going to say. People should actually genuinely notice and appreciate the talents of others. And I think that the amount that is warranted for doing that for people like the people who work at 80k and a lot of our advisees and a lot of people that we interact with is actually enough to produce quite a lot of verbalizations of this and that. I think people who give an appreciation or compliment once every six months are actually under appreciating from a truth tracking perspective because they have inaccurate pictures of what is either doable, possible or ideal. And I think that it's not good.
Matt Reardon: My take is like people have different perceptions of this. So like my claim about me was that like I actively dislike the compliment culture. Like I think they're literally true as stated, that this is a good positive thing that person X did. It can be me. Right. And that is true that I deserve some credit for producing the good outcome in the world or something, but when you verbalise it, I just feel like your standards are too low.
Arden Koehler: Because we also simply expect excellence of one another and it should be unremarkable.
Matt Reardon: Right, right. And I will say that empirically, I think you're right. Most people just don't operate the way that I operate. I do think there's maybe some value in having a diversity of compliment givers. So there are some people who are very consistent and very reliable. They will let you know and make sure you're aware when you've done a good thing. And then other people who will kind of credibly, emotionally, socially signal to you that like, wait, this thing you've done here, really insightful, really good, really valuable pyramid of compliments.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, yeah, I think that's useful. I mean, I do think that naturally happens. Like people just are on a spectrum of how complimentive they are.
Arden Koehler: I think it's not just about epistemic calibration and about specific, how good was this project? I think it's about a feeling of being on a team.
Matt Reardon: And I think the team thing is huge. And I wonder, what do you make of this conversation that we're having right now where I'm like, I have this view, this is how I feel. Am I being vulnerable? Are we a team right now? And it's clear where I'm coming from and that I think good things are happening and that I do appreciate them. It's hard, it's hard to express and it's important for us to sync up on.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, there's something here.
Arden Koehler: Yeah, I do appreciate the vulnerability.
Matt Reardon: This is what I want the relationship to be, just like incredibly close and free flowing between people who work closely together. And that's like how I hope that my relationships are at Law AI.
Conor Barnes: I am imagining that this first report of yours, it's like a little Matt. And just to delight me, you come away from this conversation and you're a little bit adjusted to us, and you're like, you know what? Maybe I should push myself to be a bit more complimentary. And then he hires the most cold, grumpy 22 year old. That'd make me so happy.
Matt Reardon: I mean, I was hoping for that already. You were hoping for that. But yeah, I agree in the movement and just, I don't know, somehow getting clarity on what this is and what forms feedback should take.
Arden Koehler: Yeah. It is probably just worth being bespoke with the person as well. Should we talk about the character that Conor plays?
Matt Reardon: Yeah.
Arden Koehler: And then I don't know how much time we have.
Conor Barnes: We are at a clean 12:13. So we could do my character quickly and then your character quickly. There's no escape.
Matt Reardon: Conor, your character. I'm me, you're Ned Flanders. We had a whole episode about this.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, I thought about that after the fact. Yeah, I think that's somewhat true. I do think there's an element where there's something to the fact that most of the art I enjoy and like music, etc. is actually quite sad. Like, I'm not like, purely like cartoonishly silly and happy. I want to make a claim that I'm a more complex human, but I guess the character is like, extremely bubbly to the point where people have to ask, is this for real?
Arden Koehler: That is the character. People ask, is this for real?
Matt Reardon: Well, one of the people on this couch asked.
Conor Barnes: And remember in our discussion the other night with Sudanshu and Nik, Sudanshu said, is this a facade?
Arden Koehler: Oh, yeah.
Conor Barnes: It's not a facade. I'm telling you. Yeah, yeah. That's my character. What else is there to say?
Arden Koehler: Do you feel that you chose that character at some point at all? I mean, even if it's not a facade, one can sort of like, maybe even lean into and cultivate.
Conor Barnes: 1 trillion percent. I mean, in the way that anybody aspires to be a thing, you're like, oh, you know, I want to be a friendlier, more caring, more thoughtful person. And then over time, you just do through lots of teeny little efforts and little rewirings. Because I used to be a much more grumpy person. Yeah.
Arden Koehler: Look, Matt. Oh, there's hope for you.
Conor Barnes: Well, I was discontented in my grumpiness, whereas you're more set.
Matt Reardon: I mean, it's mixed. And I do admire Conor Barnes quite a lot, especially the persona and what people perceive as a character, but does seem close to the genuine article.
Conor Barnes: I mean, I am kind of opposed to the concept of authenticity, with people like you just are what you do. Like there's no unmasked, yada, yada.
Matt Reardon: Yeah, totally.
Arden Koehler: Hot take.
Conor Barnes: Okay. What about your character?
Arden Koehler: So I don't experience myself as having as much of a character as I feel like you two do. I might have less of a character. Sorry. First of all, little aside, I feel like I'm a bit surprised. This is very, this is a very like silly thought probably. But like I feel like I'm a bit surprised at how much of characters people in real life are. You know, people are like such, such personalities. I sort of expect everyone to be much more, I don't know, similar to one another or like normal or something. I don't know. Anyway. Yeah.
Conor Barnes: Especially in our world with a lot of personality.
Arden Koehler: Yeah, I guess that's right. Is that more true? Yeah, maybe it is more true. Yeah, sure. Okay. So I don't have like a ready made answer like the way you guys do. I assume there is some sort of like I definitely am doing a thing when I come into the office or even when I sort of like come into the sort of public world. But I wouldn't know how to describe the character. I guess like I'm trying to lean into certain traits. Maybe like trying to be thoughtful, trying to be like a defender of subtlety often or something like that. Maybe like try to reliable or responsible or something like that. I think these are virtues. There's virtues I try to cultivate and try to lean into, but I don't feel like it’s a character.
Conor Barnes: I mean I think this is the same thing of like there's an aspirational version of you that you lean into when you have the opportunity.
Arden Koehler: Yeah, but Matt’s is not an aspirational version necessarily. Right. Is the curmudgeon an aspirational Matt or is it just a Matt that you sort of think it's kind of good to be, but it's not like the person you want to be with your whole self?
Matt Reardon: I think it's mostly a reaction to my environment, and probably as we discussed, a relatively bad one. And it's interesting How I contrast it with other environments. I guess here I feel like I have a relatively good sense of what 80K is trying to do and what I'm trying to do compared to other folks at 80K, which could be right or wrong, I don't know. But it's the feeling that I have. It's like I get what we're doing and other people think we're doing some slightly different thing. And famously, what we're doing is really hard and complex. And so people have different views on it. And I think some of the views are bad or whatever. And so I feel like I need to set these people straight. They're wrong and they're all happy. They're wrong. The worst.
Arden Koehler: Yeah. Interesting.
Matt Reardon: And so I'm reacting to that environment. Law firm, very different. As I said, 200 year legal tradition. Partners and other associates at my firm doing it for decades. Got better grades than me, really know what they're doing. Much humbler Matt. So I think it's a reaction to my environment. And whether I'm right about the empirical premises of these reactions is unclear.
Arden Koehler: Okay. Interesting. Yeah.
Conor Barnes: There's a lot to be said for finding the environment where you can be the best of you. And maybe that sounds trite and obvious, but then in practice, sometimes you do find people who change environments and they're like, oh, yeah, I should have done this hundreds of years ago. So I'm stoked to see what happens.
Matt Reardon: And perhaps Law AI is just the perfect middle point between these two. I'm humble on the legal side. I'm really confident on the impact side. And then maybe this ends up in a good place. But I'm going to try to be more aware of it. But, yeah. Arden, because we are talking about you, is it like pragmatism and problem solving? Arden, I feel like you walk in the store and you're like, look, there are all these complicated topics and pressing deadlines and reasons we got to pursue things, and we just got to look people in the eye and get them to feel good about the compromises we make here. And so let's find the right compromises. And I'm just very open to whatever they ought to be. That's how I perceive you.
Arden Koehler: Interesting. I am somebody who often finds myself in the middle, so there's probably some truth to that, but I don't usually like going for compromises. I often find myself being somebody who's like, defending some of the more kind of hardline 80k stuff in strategy conversations about like I find myself defending, going for the long term impact for the prioritising for the kind of thinking of things as comparable things like that. So that feels like a little anti that. But at the same time I do think pragmatism. Yeah, pragmatism and problem solving more than compromise.
Matt Reardon: Just saying, you have many stakeholders at the table and like you need to agree on a plan. And that's true.
Arden Koehler: I am very into collaboration.
Matt Reardon: Yeah.
Arden Koehler: Like I do feel like I want to say often like, all right guys, here's the thing. Blah, blah, blah. Or like something like boil it down to like what we're going to do? Yeah, maybe. Okay, so I like that. Yeah, yeah, this is good.
Conor Barnes: I feel like I associate you with the sentence, “Let's figure this out.”
Arden Koehler: Great, that sounds good. That sounds good. This reminds me of... This is just like random. But one of the best pieces of feedback I think I've gotten is from Cody. He once was like, probably the best thing to do won't happen to be sort of between salient positions; it seems like you end up there suspiciously often. And I thought that was really good. And I think about that a lot.
Conor Barnes: Right. You've seen the joke about how there are centrists who are really concentrated in their middling beliefs and then there are centrists who are happy to average out between extreme beliefs.
Matt Reardon: This is a great visual meme. The two dimensional political axis chart that gives you four quadrants that you can fall into. And so it's like there are two kinds of centrists and little dots on the chart are like policy positions or whatever. And there's one kind of centrist where all the dots are clustered right in the middle of the chart. There's another kind of centrist where it's just a circle of dots going around the chart.
Arden Koehler: Yeah. Right. So the first is a principled centrist.
Matt Reardon: The second has independently formed views on all these different things that happen to average out to the middle.
Arden Koehler: Oh, I see. Okay.
Matt Reardon: I do think the latter kind is cooler.
Arden Koehler: Interesting, interesting.
Conor Barnes: Yeah, I think the joke term is a radical centrist.
Arden Koehler: Okay, got it. Sorry, I was misunderstanding the thing before. Yeah, yeah, interesting. So maybe my persona or my character it's like pragmatist a bit, but maybe like its faults come from being maybe sometimes a bit of a centrist in maybe a bad way. I don't know. Or that's like some of the downsides. Not sure.
Matt Reardon: I think you're just a good philosopher.
Arden Koehler: Well, what does that have to do with anything?
Matt Reardon: Like just think through all the reasons and contingencies of all the things and be very clear about defining them and whatnot and make that clear for everyone at the table who needs to make a decision. Cruxy decision. Relevant stuff.
Conor Barnes: It’s good.
Arden Koehler: Thanks.
Conor Barnes: You went through all this stuff about how you hate compliments.
Arden Koehler: I was just saying this is getting a little sappy. Like cringe, like. God.
Conor Barnes: I think we should wrap because we're over time and over budget.
Matt Reardon: God. Conor's hourly rate.
Conor Barnes: Hey you. Is there any wrapping up things we should discuss? I guess, particularly with you leaving. This is I guess your opportunity to have a public send off monologue about your time at 80K.
Matt Reardon: Dear friends, one year ago at our team retreat in 2023, the germ of an idea was birthed to have a very low stakes, freewheeling podcast to complement what Wiblin does. I think in a very low stakes way we have met the vision and I hope that it will be carried on by others and that this will not be the last year here for me.
Conor Barnes: Awesome. Thank you, Matthew.
Arden Koehler: That's the way the cookie crumbles.
Conor Barnes: That is the great note to add on. Cool. Unless there's anything else you do want us to talk about and we can just cut it back in.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. I'm going to miss this place and a lot of these people, at least on the everyday basis we're still going to work together. I'm going to miss London a lot.
Arden Koehler: Wow.
Matt Reardon: One thing people probably don't know about me is that I'm incredibly sentimental.
Arden Koehler: Like, we didn't talk about how you're going to Korea to meet a girl.
Conor Barnes: It might have been the main thing I wanted.
Arden Koehler: And marry her. Maybe.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. The reason I'm going to Korea is to get back together with my ex. And the idea is to get married.
Conor Barnes: Wild.
Matt Reardon: Yeah. In part because we just did build a bunch of memories together. Very London centric memories. And yeah, she's also just like, interestingly, given our last conversation, given me like the most unconditional love of anyone. Everyone else felt like they wanted a lot of things to do, specific things to be specific kinds of people, to live specific kinds of lives.
And you know, Taryn, for whatever reason, just like, no, I just love Matt and whatever Matt wants to do, I'm down and I'm happy and I'm positive and we can make it happen. And I felt like I really failed to appreciate that, and I want to work on actively appreciating that and not taking it for granted. So that's what Korea is about. It's trading one sentimentality for another one, but I think the more important one.
Arden Koehler: Wow.
Conor Barnes: It's a pretty precious thing.
Arden Koehler: That's lovely. Good luck.