Manifold

Samo Burja founded Bismarck Analysis, a consulting firm that investigates the political and institutional landscape of society. He is a Senior Research Fellow in Political Science at the Foresight Institute where he advises on how institutions can shape the future of technology. Since 2024, he has chaired the editorial board of Palladium Magazine, a non-partisan publication that explores the future of governance and society through international journalism, long-form analysis, and social philosophy. From 2020 to 2023, he was a Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation where he studied how institutions can endure for centuries and millennia.

Samo writes and speaks on history, institutions, and strategy with a focus on exceptional leaders that create new social and political forms. Image has systematized this approach as “Great Founder Theory.”

Steve and Samo discuss:

(00:00) - Introduction
(01:38) - Meet Samo Burja: Founder of Bismarck Analysis
(03:17) - Palladium Magazine: A West Coast Publication
(06:37) - The Unique Culture of Silicon Valley
(12:53) - Inside Bismarck Analysis: Services and Clients
(21:35) - The Role of Technology in Global Innovation
(32:13) - The Influence of Rationalists and Effective Altruists
(48:07) - European Tech Policies and Global Competition
(49:28) - The Role of Taiwan and China in Tech Manufacturing
(51:12) - Geopolitical Dynamics and Strategic Alliances
(52:49) - China's Provincial Power and Industrial Strategy
(56:02) - Urbanization and Demography, Ancient Society
(59:41) - Intellectual Pursuits and Cultural Dynamics
(01:04:09) - Intellectuals, SF, and Global Influence
(01:13:45) - Fertility Rates, Urbanization, and Forgotten Migration
(01:22:24) - Interest in Cultural Dynamics and Population Rates
(01:26:03) - Daily Life as an Intellectual

Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.

Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU.

Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.

Creators & Guests

Host

Stephen Hsu

Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University.

What is Manifold?

Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Join him for wide-ranging conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Samo Burja: Part of what has changed Stanford and has sort of elevated Stanford to become a campus that bets on the tech industry, but also, some place that at least some people prefer to Harvard. Yes, we're going to Stanford and Harvard who are admitted to both.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. And you know in New York you have a big concentration of the financial industry So you might go to parties there and you run into a bunch of hedge fund investors private equity people, and those people are very smart, but you know.

Samo Burja: They know a lot about the world. They know a lot about geopolitics.

Steve Hsu: But they're not creating new things. In fact, what I often find is especially people who come from science or math backgrounds and end up in finance. In a way it kind of dumbs them down.

Here, it's different because if, if you're going to come to Silicon Valley, whether you become an investor or you're a technologist or a founder, you're constantly evaluating wider variance things.

Like you go to the party and somebody tells you some idea that, wait a minute, is that crazy or should I invest in this, you know, so that you're constantly having those conversations here, but not necessarily in New York.

Samo Burja: And I think that people are willing to listen out to ideas. They're willing to hear out someone's ideas. And in particular, I think that there's this assumption also that intelligence, even absent credentials is a valuable resource.

Steve Hsu: Welcome to Manifold. Today we have another special episode. We are here in the offices in San Francisco of, is it the Bismarck group?

Samo Burja: Bismarck Analysis.

Steve Hsu: Bismarck analysis. And we're here with Samo and pronounce your last name. Burja, Samo Burja, who is the founder and CEO of Bismarck Analysis. probably some of you are quite familiar with Sammo from his writings and his own appearance, his many appearances on podcasts.

I've read his writing for some time and actually watched many of his podcasts, even going back to the early ones, which I'm sure he looks back on and says like, Oh, I was just getting started in this. But when you come upon an interesting thinker that has original thoughts and original insights for someone like me, I sort of pay attention.

I put a little mental bookmark next to that person and sort of see what they have to say. Samo has recently taken. So you're the editor in chief

Samo Burja: of Palladium? I'm chairing the editorial board. The nuance there being that, you know, it's very hard to combine two executive positions, so it's a bit more of a devolved and delegated position.

Okay. Where the priorities are set, but You know, will I have time to review every single article? Probably not. So that's the difference between that and an editor. But you keep nudging them in a particular direction and setting topics, setting research goals, helping source writers, and managing the editorial team.

Steve Hsu: Right. So maybe we should just start by just mentioning Bismarck and I also mentioned Palladium. First, maybe just say what Palladium Magazine is.

Samo Burja: Palladium Magazine is a unique effort founded by my good friends Wolf Tyvee. and Jonah Bennett. It was founded in, I believe, 2018. It's a San Francisco publication, and it was intended to be sort of a replacement for Wired, which had already failed at that time.

And in addition to that, a challenge to the political and social commentary coming out of basically East Coast legacy publications. Lots of people complain about the paper belt. People want to replace it with some sort of technological system. I think that's foolish. I think there's a reason magazines exist.

There's a reason newspapers exist. these forms are likely to persist, but, you know, updated. But the concrete organizations, well, those need replacing, right? They have created a very inbred industry. Where people mostly write about what they don't know. If you think about it, you know, philosophically, epistemically journalism is an impossible profession unless you have a wealth of personal experience.

And at least something, at least human nature, right? If not ideally the industry you're reporting on or writing about, or, you know, would there be any accurate science journalism without people who are scientists themselves writing? Probably not. So I think over many decades of competition for those jobs, and especially as there was this mass failure of publications it was kind of like, it wasn't the persistence of the best, but sort of like, you know, the worst.

kind of survived. It was kind of the victory of sharp elbows over sharp minds and the victory of flattering ideological biases rather than presenting a unique perspective. That's why so many of the publications became more similar rather than more distinct.

Steve Hsu: Right. So last

Samo Burja: 10

Steve Hsu: years. So Palladium is aiming to be a very different kind of magazine.

Yes. I think there's a huge, very physically impressive version of the magazine that goes out as well as the articles being online. I actually have a copy

Samo Burja: here. This is issue 12 which was the Silicon Nemesis issue features, you know, Grimes on the cover. And had a wide variety of essays on artificial intelligence, both from people who

Steve Hsu: have, and if you could see this, it's physically beautiful.

It's like a glossy fashion magazine, but the articles are very highbrow. And I guess, sorry to interrupt you, but one of the, I think points you were trying to make is this is really meant to be a West Coast publication, the way WIRED is, and you know, we normally think of the media complex as being centered in the Northeast.

Yeah, but I think you and I both think that the new ideas very disproportionately come from this part of the country and so something that isn't native to that region captures that

Samo Burja: has a lot of value and that's what has to be in San Francisco, right? Yeah, it actually disagrees with some of the ideas that are common in San Francisco.

All the new ideas are here, both the mainstream ideas, the new ones are coming from San Francisco to the East Coast, right? And the contrarian ideas.

Steve Hsu: Right. A

And so before we get into Bismarck, I just want to say that Samo and I, we just finished being at a conference, a crazy conference at this so-called Lighthaven campus in Berkeley.

It's called Manifest. And you know, okay. Maybe half the people there were on the autism spectrum,

Samo Burja: I've never really some neurodiversity,

Steve Hsu: a lot of neurodiversity, but I don't think I've ever been to a conference as friendly, open, fun, loving, and open to ideas. people and it's just a crazy, crazy conference with, you know, in addition to academic, very academic and serious talks with whiteboards, you have wrestling matches, you have AILA leading dance lessons.

and then a raging party every night. So, I guess I got it. It was well done. It was a well done event. Well done event. But I, I guess what I was trying to get into is the idea that, new ideas, new ferment, just like in the sixties and seventies. Like if I think back to the sixties and seventies, Berkeley, Haight Ashbury in San Francisco Ended up changing the whole country over a period of decades, right?

But emanating from here and I feel that as well as you so I was at a House party at your place. This was a few weeks ago a month ago, but it was part party part intellectual salon Yes at the same meeting you had writers technologists Billionaire venture capitalist drops by. Where else can that kind of mix of things happen except in San Francisco and the Bay Area?

Samo Burja: I think that there are probably people who have some very curated dinners also in Los Angeles and New York. But the barrier to entry here is much lower and the concentration of human capital is immense. If we think about it, there's one industry that is concentrated, sort of the intellectual talent.

Of basically anyone who can be moved by market incentives and drawn here to the Bay Area. I'm talking about tech, right? If you look at merely, well, let's take finances. Let's take what finance values the most financial returns. If you went into finance 20 years ago, or if you went into tech, the median person did way better if they went into tech, the same is true.

10 years ago and five years ago, and people have started to catch on, which is part of what has changed Stanford and has sort of elevated Stanford to become a campus that bets on the tech industry, but also, Some place that at least some people prefer to harvard. Yes, we're going to stanford and harvard.

Yes admitted to both

Steve Hsu: Yeah, yeah, and you know in New York you have a big concentration of the financial industry So you might go to parties there and you run into a bunch of hedge fund investors Private equity people. And those people are very smart, but you know, they know a lot about the world. They know a lot about

Samo Burja: geopolitics,

Steve Hsu: but they're not creating new things.

In fact, in fact, what I often find is especially people who come from science or math backgrounds and end up in finance. In a way it kind of dumbs them down. People that had they not done that would have had wider variance in their ideas and what they ended up doing the rest of their life. Kind of get pushed in because basically in terms of remuneration you can't compete, right?

So you should just focus, once you're going into finance, you should just focus on making more and more money. But in terms of new, novel ideas, less and less. Here, it's different because if, if you're going to come to Silicon Valley, whether you become an investor or you're a technologist or a founder, you're constantly evaluating wider variance things.

Samo Burja: York. And I think that people are willing to listen to ideas. They're willing to hear out someone's ideas.

And in particular, I think that there's also this assumption that intelligence, even absent credentials, is a valuable resource, which I think is not true elsewhere, right? Yeah, I agree.

Steve Hsu: I think in New York finance, it's still heavily credentials driven, right? You want to get into a quant fund, you better have gone to MIT or you got a PhD.

If you want to get into a more traditional fund, you better have gone to Harvard or Stanford or Ivy League Here, there's an expectation that You're standing at the party holding your drink and some young guy comes starts talking or gal comes starts coming to talk to you And you're evaluating them on what they say and immediately you're thinking wait This person has some really interesting ideas or looks really driven And you don't ask them.

Oh, where did you go to school? Right? So that's what's important . They might still name drop the school that they went to or the school. They're dropped out. It's all part. The signaling is still there But it's not as it's maybe not the first thing. I

Samo Burja: I think it's like a top 10 indicator, but not a top three indicator.

And I think that's a massive difference from the rest of the country and the rest of the Western world. Yeah. I think that another aspect here is that it is a higher status to attempt to create a new company than it is to be an employee, even at a very prestigious company. Now there are golden periods where sort of like, people would prefer to be an open AI engineer in 2023.

Or 2022, then they would be to start their own AI startup. But even in 2024, that's no longer true. Similar to how the mystique and, you know, excellence of Google wore out to the point where the company is now a byword for a very well paid. Yes. But Cushy jobs where you're giving up a lot of intellectual upside.

You're giving up a lot of intellectual upside, but also you're giving up a lot of respect from people, right? People will think possibly highly of your potential, but they won't think you're changing the world. And that's sort of what everyone here still loves, right? They still love that idea of impact and they don't call it impact.

It's changing the world.

Steve Hsu: Yep.

Samo Burja: Yeah.

Steve Hsu: Great. So that's I guess we got into that because of palladium being, you know, very consciously at West coast magazine. I

I want to shift a little bit because we mentioned your firm Bismarck analysis. So let's talk a little bit about Bismarck analysis. Who are your customers?

What is the product? What is the value proposition of the product that you produce?

Samo Burja: I think the value proposition is that we have a team of multidisciplinary Researchers who will just answer your question as to the state of an industry the state of a company Or at times even a holistic evaluation of the strategy of a prominent individual it's Combines kind of geopolitical risk forecasting with some aspects of private intelligence.

To call it a private intelligence firm, not a bad idea, not a bad description if you remember that it's as much an analysis as it is gathering a special piece of information. The world has been very busy gathering a global haystack, but it's not really gotten us the needle very well, right? We see this in all the information tools and with the media landscape as well, misprioritization of what is brought to the attention of executives.

So, part of our services include the Bismarck Brief, which is a weekly subscription newsletter. Its subscribers are a wide range of people in finance and technology, People in government as well. we have subscribers from, well, at least their interns probably from British parliament and Congress and minister level positions in Europe.

So a nice diversity of views basically for the generalist who wants to understand what is happening with China's self-driving industry. What is the potential in China to expand petroleum production if that were a strategic priority? What is the, what are the prospects of Airbus now that Boeing is failing?

What is Mohammed bin Salman up to this year? Right? This, this basket of things that I think generalists would find value in. And that partially also describes our client. Our clients are executives usually most often in Silicon Valley. Though at times also prominent members of philanthropies. And we've also done some work for governments.

We've had projects such as, you know, rethinking Britain's steel industry. If the subsidies could be restructured, if it could be, you know, made innovative, innovative. cutting edge venture again, which is, you know, more probable than you might think, Sweden is still competitive when it comes to steel exports.

So it's not all China. There are a lot of specialties and there are world class metallurgists still working in Britain. I don't know. Have you heard about the news of the electron well, the electron welding? demonstration. No, I haven't followed it. It was in Sheffield, actually, in the United Kingdom, they welded together a demonstration nuclear, small modular nuclear reactor in 24 hours that with traditional welding techniques would have taken almost a year.

So great, but who's going to capitalize that? Which industry is that going to be plugged in? In a way, Britain has that talent, but not much. Now, was

Steve Hsu: that, was that topic one that there was a special request that came in for? It was a request. It was a client.

Samo Burja: It was a client. And sometimes we can, you know, discuss what we work for, or we can discuss who we've done it for.

but sometimes you can't do both. It really depends. because often what our clients are searching for is a competitive advantage in their domain. We did like a big overview of the AI industry including available computers and there I'm not at liberty to say who the client was, but it's pretty self explanatory who would have an interest in this.

Steve Hsu: So is your priority, I mean, obviously both of these things would be good for the firm, but one thing would be to expand the reach of the brief. The other one would be to have more clients ordering bespoke. research reports. What, where do you prioritize those two

Samo Burja: things? I've always prioritized the client relationship because they believed it to be more impactful.

However, to keep in touch with clients and to remind them of your offering, including the specialized work, we had a newsletter. We actually had it for years. But at one point I realized, is it possible for us to democratize this product because it had become pretty all encompassing. And the answer was yes.

There were many people who were willing to pay, you know, reasonable sum of 2, 000 a year or whatever to receive in their inbox this one weekly report, which basically goes into a deep case study on a single topic and then trust that the selection of topics is worth at least the skin to then decide.

If this is worth a deeper read they're impeccably cited and so on. So the funny part is that it was an information product that developed out of reminding our clients after we successfully completed our commissions that, Hey, you know, even if you're not deciding to hire us for retainer, to, you know, be at your beckon and call to solve, you know, to, to give you the information you need when you need it.

Right. Here's what we're thinking about. Right. Here's an example of what we can do. So the briefs are actually, I think, fairly representative, not of the extent or depth, but of the quality of our research

Steve Hsu: work. I see. And in the briefs, you're not trying to be you're not trying to have, for example, the kind of broad coverage that the FT or the economists would have.

Is it, is it more what you find interesting that week? It's not, it's not, we've got to cover everything that happened

Samo Burja: this week. It is, it is not news. Right. It is a series of one deep weekly case study, and I think it is worthwhile to read. I think over the course of a few years, one will touch on most of the strategically important topics, but I basically chose that pace.

because I believe that there are very few shortcuts. If you want to have an informed opinion on something, you have to do at least, you have to read at least one medium depth or deep dive, ideally on the topic. You might choose not to. Maybe the Chinese nuclear industry doesn't matter. Maybe Sweden's weapons manufacturing and how they will adjust to now being a NATO member.

Maybe that doesn't matter. But something shows up. Something's relevant and something you've heard news about and then you click that brief and you read it. And you actually know more than the headlines would give. Right. And the selection is driven also by my view of what is most interesting, what makes for the most surprising case study.

For example, there are things that are not as flashy, but I think are deeply relevant. Such as a look at Estonia's sort of digital republic and administration. Yes. The most interesting aspect of it is that they have only 50 percent per capita of the number of government employees as Belgium.

However, Belgium has also now adopted basically the same set of technologies as Estonia. So what's the difference? Well, when you introduce computers to replace bureaucrats, it sure does help if you first fire all bureaucrats. Right. Yeah. Which Estonia had to do in the 1990s because it was you know, it could not have former Soviet officials still governing the country.

So they just put kind of a blanket ban on those. Right. And then they had the, you know, shortage of trained people. And actually one of the interesting things about Estonia was there was a center of computer science in the civic union. So it was sort of like, you know, that was a nail and there was a hammer and the hammer hit the nail.

Right. And You know, today, if Belgie Belgium would need to go through a similar political revolution to reduce the number of administrators. The legacy interests are hard to overcome. Exactly. But when I talk to colleagues and clients in Silicon Valley, they often think technology itself is sufficient for disruption.

Right. And I think technology gives the opportunity for disruption.

Steve Hsu: Right. Yeah. I've been to Estonia in Tallinn and it's amazing how digitized. Their government is and it's probably well, of course, it's a small country But but definitely they're one of the leading countries in digitizing everything making it super efficient

Samo Burja: You can do basically everything except get married on your computer, right?

And the government has a policy it only asks you for your information once for any given piece of information, right? Remarkably high trust. I'm not sure you could scale that To the United States, but wouldn't it be nice if bureaucrats stopped externalizing? Their work On to the citizens, on to the consumers and customers.

Right.

Steve Hsu: S

o tell me how you started Bismarck, because even the, like, deciding on what is the right business model. there must have been a process for that, you know, were you already familiar with, for example, what McKinsey does or, you know, other things that are at least sort of in the same universe as Bismarck?

Maybe you can talk about that.

Samo Burja: I was familiar with various firms such as Einbremer's firm, McKinsey, and so on. My view was at the time that what I basically wanted was a high degree of research freedom. I felt I had a unique approach to thinking about economics, politics, society, even history. Though, you know, of those, views in history are harder to monetize.

Right. The big social theories are hard to monetize. But once you apply it, well, okay, you know, there's some, there's some alpha there. Right. and my view was that this was much, much easier to do by just starting a new firm. I also felt that there was a cultural shift between the East and West Coast, which caused basically West Coast founders and corporations and CEOs, especially in tech.

to distrust and question the value of services like McKinsey, you know, there's a, there's a rift between let's call it corporate America and corporate California. And I think it was easy for me to demonstrate that I had, you know, those qualities that they tend to value in a software engineer.

So those were kind of the two views I had. Theories that I thought, of course, were biased, are extra smart and extra good, and I was not interested in fighting a boss to present those to a client, number one. Number two, I thought there would be an opening for marketing. And in 2007, this turned out to be the case.

Before that, I had mostly worked as a non profit researcher. I'd been associated with, you know, a few organizations. there was a one interesting one called Leverage Research,

Steve Hsu: founded

Samo Burja: by Jeff Handers. Yes. And we

Steve Hsu: We're just at the house of sorry, what's his name? I want to say Menchus Bullbuck, but his, his real name.

Curtis Yarwin. Curtis Yarwin. Yeah, yeah. Apparently, was he peripherally involved in this leverage? No? No. Okay.

Samo Burja: He wasn't. Okay. but, you know, then later had a research fellowship at the Long Now Foundation. Yeah. Sort of the creation of Stuart Brand, Kevin Galley. Yes. Yes. Kind of the original. Yeah.

Counterculture of Silicon Valley. Today, many people don't realize that a lot of the people who started the hippie movement grew disillusioned with the hippie movement. And left it for the hacker world. Yes. And Stuart Brand is exactly that. The whore of the catalog. Exactly, yeah. I, I, I, you know, I did once go interview at Curtis's for Urban that he was funding.

Yes. But I decided not to do that. so there's an alternate universe where I'm a software engineer. I see.

Steve Hsu: Interesting. So I didn't realize Bismarck was, you said it was, was it founded in 2007? 2017. 17. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't think it was that old. Okay. Yeah.

Samo Burja: Did I misspeak? I don't

Steve Hsu: now. I don't know.

Okay. Yeah. I may have misheard you.

Samo Burja: Yeah.

Steve Hsu: I see. Okay. Okay. So. Now, usually the people that are good at research are not necessarily good at client relations or selling the work to people. So are you so talented that you can do both or do you have other people that do that play that role?

Samo Burja: I honestly think I'm pretty good at both, which is conceded, but it's, I think I'm quite good at both.

But the truth is that there are many, many talented researchers and there's always an alpha in hiring people who are underrated in some way or another,

Steve Hsu: right?

Samo Burja: and we have hired people both from the Bay Area, but also, for example from London, right? From the United Kingdom. There's a research team there.

You know, I joke with my friends that there is an underdeveloped country where they speak great English. It's called England.

Steve Hsu: I, I heard this from you recently and then I, I'm increasingly hearing it from other people because, unfortunately the economy in the UK is so, it's suffering so much that yeah, labor costs are low.

You can hire an Oxford Don for almost nothing then. Exactly.

Samo Burja: Exactly. Well, we do have also, of course, some of the analysts working directly with the clients. So not all client relations go through me. I do take responsibility for ultimate quality control and the evaluation of every single analyst.

And of course, there's like a price tier where I personally work on the projects that the client wants.

Steve Hsu: This is something that I have never been involved in consulting. And in fact, I'm one of those founders who it's funny because I have friends who work at McKinsey and BCG and all these top levels.

consulting firms, my, my own brother worked in consulting and I always thought, oh, come on, if you're the founder and you have to figure everything about the market and the business and build the product and, and the team, you don't need some consultants coming in to help you. It's some guy who parachuted in from Harvard business school and doesn't really understand the industry that he or she is in who needs to hire these consultants.

And so I definitely had that you described a few minutes ago. But one of the things I always wondered about consultants is when they go in and they pitch their business to, you know, GM or something, a lot of it must be in the pricing to figure out like what is like, it's not easy to figure out what is the maximum amount I can extract now from this client now that I have the business.

So how do people do that?

Samo Burja: Well, I would say even first look at how you provide maximum value, right? That would be a sort of win-win perspective. Yes. And I do want to say that there is. You know, a small difference. We don't necessarily do management consulting. We sort of analyze areas where the company's alternative is to hire in-house experts.

Yes. The problem with hiring experts is you don't necessarily know how to evaluate them very well. And the other problem is jobs advocate for themselves. Mm hmm. So if you hire an in house political expert. Yes. You'll be overpaying. Yeah, you'll overpay. Maybe not this year. Perhaps they'll be invaluable this year, but you will overpay four years, five years or 10 years down the line.

Yeah. Secondly, if you take someone and put them into your company, they will over time become less and less informed as to what is happening in the world. Necessarily, they will interface mostly with people inside your company or in your industry. They're going to be speaking to colleagues, say, if today you're hiring an AI policy expert, there are many people who have rebranded themselves as AI policy experts.

Some of them come straight out of academia, which is super interesting, right? How did they learn over four or eight years? Something that was totally different before 2022. Still, they do it. And they're doing it. They also start thinking not in terms of necessarily the company's interest in that way, but what looks good in my career for the next company, right?

I think in sort of the diversity industry, this is strongest where you could consider, you know, some of the diversity consultants to be basically at war with their own company because if they achieve the right result and they're fired. But they kind of have an almost martyrdom status in their, in their profession, DEI credit, DEI credit.

Right. If you didn't upset anyone, did you do DEI well? Right, right. So there are reasons not to hire in-house experts. And I think that, you know, I don't, you know, I could be tempted to work somewhere and sort of leave Bismarck and be hired in, and this might be even true of some of my colleagues. However, I think the end result is that our intellectual output would be worse, right?

So basically what people are paying for is to be connected with us, a wider network of experts that we curate, have these unique thoughts that we're developing and essentially what's an independent social science research program. It's a political science economics aspect, right? And I think this is, you know, you can't hire that anywhere else.

And as a bonus, you don't have to have these capabilities in house and you just get them when you need them.

Steve Hsu: And also you now with remote work, you could even have someone who's, you know, almost full time with you, but they can be anywhere in the world doing this kind of stuff.

Samo Burja: This is true. This is true.

no, often companies have the most need for this when there is a strategic transformation of some kind, either they're considering jumping from one industry. expanding to another industry, opening business in a new country or, you know, since it's not just businesses, it's for philanthropic efforts, individual efforts, people who are considering, okay, I've Made a lot of money.

How do I best, you know, accelerate technological development or, or pursue like a political goal of this or that. Or suppress certain kinds

Steve Hsu: of technological development.

Samo Burja: I mean, maybe, maybe, maybe. Well, you

Steve Hsu: have the EA. We charge

Samo Burja: extra for that.

Steve Hsu: Okay. I mean, there's a whole industry of EAs, you know, telling rich people where they should put their money.

Stop AI for example.

Samo Burja: Yeah. Yeah, I think the first is AI safety. Yes, but you know again in 2014 when I arrived first in the Bay Area, right? I'd never lived in it. So this is your 10 year anniversary? It has been 10 years in the United States and in the Bay Area. It's so funny after a few years in the Bay Area where I actually had never been to New York before 2016 I was like, oh wow This is halfway to Europe.

It culturally felt notably closer to Europe because I had just jumped straight from Slovenia where I was born to first Oakland and then San Francisco here in the Bay area, and then when I visited New York, New England, I was like, It just seemed like a halfway point. Yes, yes. Right. And it was oddly familiar.

Right. had I gone to the east coast first, I would've had a different experience. Right, right, right. The subjective view of culture shock would've been different. U

m, but I do think that in 2014 in the Bay Area, some of the smartest people were effective altruists. Mm-Hmm. . Right. The rationalist community that you mentioned earlier.

had significant overlap. It still does, though I think people who have ideas more describe themselves as rationalists and the people who have white collar jobs more describe themselves as EAs.

Steve Hsu: Yes, that's a good way of describing the dichotomy at the, at this festival that we were just at. Occasionally people would ask, what's the difference between an EA and

Samo Burja: a

Steve Hsu: rationalist?

And my answer was rationalists are people who are interested in being strong in epistemology. So trying to get to the truth and, and evaluate evidence, and that doesn't mean they necessarily care about maximizing the utility function for all of humanity, right? So that's an intrinsic part of EA, but it's not necessarily an intrinsic part of

Samo Burja: rationality.

And it might have similar values that they endorse, such as say probabilities and thinking in probabilities may be a desire to, you know, boost. Markets and so on right at the end of the day though I think effective altruists end up having a greater effect on the world because they're less On that less individualist, right?

They're more like company company men used in the 20th century. Yes. Yes you know, they won't quite say they follow a party line, but they will say, ea leadership on this interesting. Okay.

Steve Hsu: I've never I've never uh heard that from them But yeah, I well i've heard it i've heard it from a lot of people Yeah, I feel like it's clear they behave that way, but I've never had a conversation where someone said something like that Yeah,

Samo Burja: I think it was more explicit in the 2014 to 16 era I see over time, you know all of these things go under through multiple layers of development Yeah, and I think that we see in Silicon Valley.

There is a culture war The EAT versus EA thing. Yes. That the rest of the world might miss. Right. Which is that you will have people who might identify as effective altruists who might end up being at war with their own company. And it's not even over social justice. It has nothing to do with it. Right.

Right. but from their perspective, they're ensuring the most powerful technology ever is developed responsibly, that the profit motive doesn't destroy us all. From the management's perspective, they're sort of. getting in the way of delivering products and don't they realize we only have so much runway and that the other companies are on our heels.

And then EAC is kind of, you know, the funniest way to describe it. It's not that a lot of people who are into EAC are very smart, but it's not an intellectual movement. It's much more vibes heavy, heels heavy. It has like art and like shish toasting and aesthetics and all of that. Yeah. And I would describe it as a pride movement for software engineers.

Yeah. It's basically, hey, I'm proud of building tech. And that's why, yeah. would put effective altruists as part of a broader deceleration of society in their narrative, but effective altruists don't see themselves as, you know, worrying about global warming. If anything, they're probably in favor of nuclear energy, and they're probably in favor of genetic engineering.

They're just worried about the robot apocalypse. That is the one apocalypse they worry about.

Steve Hsu: I I was in you know, manifest. You couldn't walk five feet without getting into some conversation about AI safety and P doom and stuff like this. And so I got into a conversation with a very clever guy who was an AI safety guy and I just shocked him.

I said, look. What could be greater, a greater accomplishment for humanity than to make some amazing God like thing that is going to do great things in the universe. And how, how can you, how could you, how could you shy away from that? Like, you know, and, and actually my, my perspective that I, I'm not saying this is actually really my perspective, but it was fun to like throw it out there.

He was so shocked by what I said. He actually had to pause and he was thinking for a while, like, Can people really feel this way? And I said, yeah, I think this is what people who create technologies really feel.

Samo Burja: So I think to a great extent, there's some who are sort of dedicated to a vision of like intelligence expanding to the universe and they, you know, care less about the exact cultural norms or like embedded values or the substrate, the substrate of the AI.

Yeah. but you know, there's also the other perspective, which is, Well, you know, I'm a carbon based creature. Yes. It's very unlikely that I will be uploaded. Uploading doesn't make sense. I personally don't want to die. And you interestingly have the immortalist strand, which can go in both directions.

Yes. One version of the immortalist story where, you know, people question the inevitability of death for creatures like you and me. they will say we need artificial intelligence to solve anti aging. And the other side as well. AI might kill us long before that's relevant, right? And with the rest of this technology, it's probably going to get there even without AI.

So don't die.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, you just said don't die. And I think you and I were both at a meeting with Brian Johnson not very long ago. I don't know if you remember very well, but I've known him for many years and when I first knew him, he had just sold his company , Venmo, to eBay.

The company's called Braintree, but Venmo isn't as famous. So he was an overweight, typically stressed out tech bro guy. And, I had no idea that years later I would turn on my computer and see a slightly alien looking guy, but Incredibly very

Samo Burja: fit.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, and so I hadn't seen him in person because of covid for a long time And we had a long conversation his whole Some people just think like oh he's a narcissist or he an egomaniac and that's why he's doing all this But he actually actually has a very elaborate framework that he uses to think about all this.

And it is actually centered on the idea that A. I. s are coming and he has to live long enough for the A. I. s to actually then solve all these problems so he can then live, live forever.

Samo Burja: this is actually a concept that in transhumanist circles, people have called actuarial escape velocity. Yes, exactly.

Right. Another. You know, the intellectual or ideological legacy of the mailing list of the 1990s, right? You know, and it's very interesting.

Steve Hsu: Extropians.

Samo Burja: extropians were sort of the precursors to the rationalists. Yes. Eliezer Yudkowsky, all of these people came out of that space. Yes. But also others like Satoshi Nakamoto were influenced by that space.

a lot of the technologists like Elon Musk were. Influenced by space. Yeah, I think this is one of the better arguments for why ideas matter. Yes Like the ideas that direct the surplus Cognitive yes civilization matter immensely. Yes, you know, we might Put the brightest minds of our generation on Catholic theology, or we might put them into physics Yeah, we might put them into AI or we might put them into medicine Yeah And at different times in human history each of these has an argument that this is what allowed that Civilization to dominate the others, etc.

Yeah But I think that's why I don't think in a I don't believe in a deeply deterministic technology tree for two reasons. One is I think we are operating under immense cognitive scarcity. So there's like many, many problems even everyday intelligence could solve. There's just no attention for them because there's not enough of it.

Let alone the few people who have exceptional intelligence that can be then combined with. Maybe an exceptional ability to communicate or manage such as say Elon Musk has, right? Elon Musk is at that nice overlap. Yeah, a very intelligent person that understands the technology it has driven at times, possibly difficult or at least strong personality that can match, right?

And so the attention of those people and what they believe the future is and what information they happen to have changes the contingencies that a society runs into. So I definitely think it's. It's possible to have different areas of technology advance, at different paces, and so on.

Steve Hsu: Ideas definitely matter, and so I agree with you on that.

And, you know, one of the things we were saying is that this place is, so disproportionately the origin of ideas. Now, in a way, some, in, in some sense, we're, we're maybe aggregating ideas. In our in our thinking of oh, that's a silicon valley idea It may have come from a guy in paris But it was of course it was expressed online on the internet in english And and then the people who jumped on it right away were like maybe silicon valley northern california So so it of course, it's not entirely people who are geographically, you know within 50 kilometers of here, but the the vibe is sort of the silicon valley vibe for Creating and propagating these ideas Now, my question to you is, what's with the rest of this planet?

Like, how come, how come, how come, you know, although I just did say some of it is a dream, but still, why is it so predominantly Americans and people attracted like you and, you know, maybe my father or something attracted to America from other places and everything is done here?

Samo Burja: Well, you know, America is a big place.

Yep. but I will say even in America you know, Idaho is not Las Vegas, right? And New York is not quite San Francisco, though I guess it's the second best contender for a sort of tech center after San Francisco. And during the pandemic, people believed that perhaps remote work together with truly disastrous governance in the city here would result in secondary tech centers such as Miami or Austin overtaking it, right?

People talked about decentralization, but what they really imagined is a new center. So I think it's inevitable that industry has become very deeply concentrated. And I don't think this is a crown that the United States will have automatically forever. Yes. I remember reading an article a few years ago that might have been Wired actually, Which was that Shenzhen is the Silicon Valley of Hardware.

Steve Hsu: Oh, I remember this. I remember this article. When I read

Samo Burja: that article, I was like There

Steve Hsu: was even, I think, a video essay or documentary about this as well, yeah.

Samo Burja: Exactly, and then I thought to myself, Okay, the thing to watch out for is when Shenzhen starts to build software. Yeah. Not just hardware, because that's what Silicon Valley did.

Yes. It started by building hardware. Yes. It then went on to build software and I think we have software giants in China that are keeping pace, you know People here think oh, you know ai they're two or three years behind. Yeah, that's so long. Yeah, well, that's enough to have self-driving cars all over China. You have more cities with self-driving cars than you have.

Yeah, uh waymo approved cities. San francisco is one of the few ones um There were a few deep advantages the U. S. had though. One is, I do think, high level talent seeking around the world. First, you know, the diaspora from Germany after World War II, and then I actually argued the Soviet diaspora. Sure.

After the end of the Cold War. That

Steve Hsu: affected my physics career, because when I was starting out as a professor, the people that I was competing against were the very best theorists from the former Soviet Union, who were all, they'd all moved to the United States. So.

Samo Burja: Yeah, we might, we might think of MIT, but you know as kind of like one of the origins of AI.

But we should remember there's not just the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there's also the Moscow you know Technological Institute, I think MIPT, MIPT, exactly. And a lot of the underlying mathematics for the architectures people now use were developed by those mathematicians. Yeah.

Steve Hsu: Actually, I think back propagation was first. It was worked out by a Russian by a Soviet mathematician, so not, not by an American. So.

Samo Burja: Right. The U. S. was extremely good at attracting human capital from around the world. Yeah. Now, perhaps the U. S. is less good than it imagines at cultivating human capital.

Yes. So there's an interesting situation where. You know, I, I'm not sure actually that all aspects of the education system or society are quite as good at developing, supporting, developing deep models and developing, especially Peak human talent. I think like, you know, the Soviet Union actually for all the faults of their system. Yes, we're ruthlessly cognitively Yeah, the product yeah, like targeting and drawing this talent upwards and saying even modern France has still some of that Absolutely.

Yes. So if you have someone from the Nicole Polytechnique or whatever and they're Right and that's that's not actually a given you can bet that they're good if they're from Stanford, but it's not a given Yeah In

Steve Hsu: fact, actually the British system where, you know, admission to Oxbridge is pretty meritocratic.

There aren't these personality things I mean there are scores and then there's an interview But the interview is really focused on what you were supposed to have learned in high school And do you actually know this stuff? So you can say that because Oxbridge is actually quite big Relative to the size of the UK and the US their elite education system actually could you could argue actually functions better than ours right now So on a per capita basis,

Samo Burja: I think, especially if you consider that they are operating with a smaller pool of applicants, not just domestically, but internationally.

To be fair, Oxbridge can draw on a bigger pool than schools can. There are many people in Europe who prefer to stay closer to the time zone. so they'll go study at Oxford, not at an American university, even if they're accepted at an American university. And also, universities are so sticky, the oldest one tends to stay more prestigious.

In America, other than Stanford, all the most prestigious universities are old. And you know, Oxford and Cambridge, well, they're so old that when Harvard got started, it tried to pretend that it was Cambridge, right? Cambridge, Massachusetts, was named Newtown, right? But when they started school. They renamed the town.

They were saying, okay, this will be the Cambridge of America. And of course, when you become the Cambridge of America, you're not known as Cambridge anymore. You're known as Harvard. Exactly.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. I think the counter, the only counter examples to that are. As you said, Stanford, Caltech, and MIT, which are all pretty young and have already reached the very top in the world.

So,

Samo Burja: yeah, yeah. And I think for California in particular, thinking of it as America's America is still true.

Steve Hsu: Yeah.

Samo Burja: And all the most dysfunctional truths of modern America are most apparent here, but also the most functional. Yeah. I, I think honestly, for example, when people complain about regulators, right?

For let's, let's think of self driving. It's Californian institutions that were about as fast as Nevada at allowing self driving cars to drive and to, this year as of March accept money for their rides. That didn't happen in New York. It didn't happen in Boston. it, you know, has not happened in Texas even.

So I think to a great degree, there are elements even of California's government, including Gavin Newsom, who are actually friendly to some technologies. People here complain because they have an ideal, but it's better than anywhere else in the world.

In Belgie They literally just banned self driving, right?

There are many European countries where the debate is still, do we allow Uber, right? That's the debate in 2024. and I think, I think that's also a strength in the United States that the government has been willing to Bet on and get out of the way of technology at times both are necessary, right?

Because at the end of the day silicon valley came to california out of a totally different technological center Partially because the aerospace development and legacy the upfront capital expenditures of the u. s Government were vast and because of this again You And China, I think, is now matching those vast expenditures.

Yes. And that's why I think that, you know, the U. S. might very soon not be the only country in the world where the future is made. I would even argue that the technological revolution is slightly misattributed as fully a Silicon Valley phenomena, where we should actually think of it as at least a Japanese Taiwanese South Korean Silicon Valley collaboration.

Yeah. Right? Right. Right. What is Apple without Foxconn? Right and without TSMC. Well, what is NVIDIA without TSMC? Right.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. Yeah, but the Apple chips are also made. They're also made by TSMC. So double dependent, right?

Samo Burja: And you know because of the success of TSMC I know that the business culture of Taiwan and China is eminently compatible.

Yeah. I honestly think we can't really stop them. I think Mainland China, there's a strategic reason they will have cutting edge chips. Yeah. I think there's just no way they can't both hire some of the staff over.

Steve Hsu: Yes.

Samo Burja: And their industrial espionage will just be good enough to copy that. Yes. And you know what?

They will probably be, let's put it this way. If there is a race between the U. S. and China. To onshore the production Of CPUs and GPUs. I think China wins.

Steve Hsu: I do too. I think that specific thing you put your finger on which is not oh, it's a collective competition between U. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea versus china.

That's one way to look at it. But if you just ask, we don't really have cutting edge fabs in the United States. They don't have them in china. Actually. They only exist in korea and taiwan at the moment You Are they going to get the cutting edge ones first or are the United States going to get the cutting edge ones

Samo Burja: first?

I'm actually surprised you as strategic thinkers did not prefer the South Korea option where the US would bet on South Korean shipyards and Taiwanese. It's surprising.

Steve Hsu: It's a little surprising. I

Samo Burja: I think French oring kind of got lost in the strategic discourse where look, you know, ASML being in like the Netherlands, well that's fine and it's good.

It's not going to be threatened by Russia anytime soon and you know, South Korea, you. It's not perfectly safe. North Korea is next door, but it's better than Taiwan. Right.

Steve Hsu: And, but part of the problem is, you know, there are no congressmen or senators from Korea here that can lobby for their home state. You know, Arizona can lobby for it itself, but Korea can't really lobby as effectively here.

Samo Burja: Well, you know, there's some governments that do succeed at lobbying the United States. Sure. And, you know, possibly South Korea should consider and think about how it could lobby the U. S. more effectively. Yeah, I think the problem,

Steve Hsu: The problem these East Asian countries have is they don't really understand American culture well enough to really operate the way say lobbies for Israel can operate here.

Samo Burja: or even lobbies for certain European countries at times you know, I found, I heard some very interesting rumors that, you know, Emmanuel Macron, who might soon no longer be the prominent politician in France, went as far as to have personal phone calls with AI engineers to convince them to move to Paris.

Like, that's very agentic. I don't think, I don't think that happens anymore in East Asia. Though it did happen in Taiwan when Taiwan got started interesting There was a strong support to basically create the nvidia tsmc partnership Yes, maybe not quite the president's call but certainly government support for that

Steve Hsu: It wouldn't be surprising china.

If I don't, I don't know that it wouldn't be that Xi Jinping would call somebody but High government officials would get involved in bringing, you know, companies or bringing people to those places.

Samo Burja: They are not

Steve Hsu: yet

Samo Burja: trying very hard to convince people to leave the United States. That's one thing I want to say.

I think we, that people are going back because they're good economic opportunities, right? Right. Straightforwardly, you know, you can make a copycat of an American tech company and the odds are good that it's going to work. Right. So why not do that?

Steve Hsu: Sure, right? I mean their strategy is multi pronged.

So, so for example And also one thing that's not understood so much about China is that people think it's highly Centralized the direction comes from the center, but each individual city province has its own strategy and This is something that I sort of know firsthand is that a particular city will say Okay, we want to recruit a bunch of startups and maybe academics in this area They will reach out and they'll say, okay, we're going to invest this much in your company.

You're going to get this apartment. and you have to come here and relocate your, and it's, you know, they're trying really hard.

Samo Burja: So I mean, the provinces are, they are almost in some ways countries, right? They still have an internal passport system where you need basically permission to change your province residence.

You know, this is analogous to the older Soviet one. When we, you know, we're investigating solar solar power, it became clear that China dominates global photovoltaic production, not because of the decision of the central government, but due to the decision of two provinces. Yes, exactly.

And the same is true, actually, of wind energy. Yes. The Chinese government has said that. Stop subsidizing wind and energy because they think it doesn't make sense, but several provinces continue to write and those provinces have enough weight. They are seriously competitive with Germany and Denmark on windmill production.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. And in fact, some of these provinces are, you know, They could be twice the size of a big European country. So they can have a hundred million people or 150 million people. one thing that's often said in China. So when you look at South Korea, there are a bunch of industries in South Korea now that are actually getting out competed by their Chinese counterparts.

So flat screen displays electric vehicles, chip manufacturing, they're still ahead, but they're under threat. Software. So, there are all these different, Oh, ship building. So they've now been eclipsed in ship building. I says the U S yeah, but, but, so it's China and then, you know, South Korea and then I don't know, they might end

Samo Burja: up being eclipsed in the production of nuclear reactors, which until recently South Korea had the cheapest, most cost effective nuclear reactors in the world.

Steve Hsu: Right. So collectively across all these industries, I very seldom see Western analysts. Looking at things like, Oh, South Korea versus China across the industries that South Korea is strong and also, I think chemicals as well. That's another issue for them, but, but in China, people are aware of this because they see the tigers, Taiwan, South Korea, and then Japan as their, as their lower, we're going to pass through them on our way up.

And the interesting observation related to what you were saying about provinces is people often say in China, well, South Korea, that's only like half a province. So of course we're going to surpass them. How could we not? How could we not suppress something that's just the size of half the islands of China.

So that's

Samo Burja: all. So, the magic of scale is actually something that the United States had as a great advantage over European countries in the 1900s. And now for the first time ever, there is a country that might have that.

Now this is not to say the Chinese system doesn't have problems such as the very low fertility everyone brings up.

The US and its allies also have lower and lower fertility. Yes. Whose demographics are truly worse? Germany, Japan, or China, who can say yes. And Germany and Japan are the US' most consequential allies. Right. There's an important way where, you know, we talked about French shoring earlier. The correct way to think of the United States isn't really as a nation state, it's an empire.

Mm-Hmm. . Think of NATO plus, yep. NATO plus East Asia and Australia. I think that is easily over one and a half billion people. It's a vastly bigger economy. It's actually a somewhat more integrated economy than China. Yes. So when people see Germany de-industrializing, well, a small number of those jobs may go to the U.

S., but most of those jobs go to China. Exactly. So the de-industrialization of Germany makes the United States weaker because Germany mostly listens to the United States. The United States Probably blew up. No, I'm certain it blew up Nord Stream. Okay, you heard it here. Well, I think many people are willing to say this in private like who else would have done it, right?

I had Jeffrey Sachs on a long time

Steve Hsu: ago and he just flat out said they blew it up. So yeah, so he's right

Samo Burja: Yeah, the u. s. Blew it up And who else could blow up basically, you know, the gas, the, the, the Ivy keeping the German economy alive, right? They had a disastrous energy policy, but the blood transfusion of that natural gas from Russia was keeping their economy alive.

Yeah. So what was previously in theory a disastrous energy policy with the destruction of the pipeline became in practice. Disaster energy policy. Yeah, and and

Steve Hsu: Yet the German people who must be curious. You know, there's no answers, they're not getting any answers like you would think . We have a functional government. Why aren't we doing an investigation and they should report back to the people who blew this thing up?

But nobody gets that

Samo Burja: right and as a reminder, that's an act of war So really, you know while the US and Germany are allies It's very much clear who is the senior partner, of course. And who gets to set policy. Yes. And who gets to discipline the government, right? Yes. And you know, this is not necessarily a bad arrangement for Europe.

Many American commentators point out that, oh, Europe doesn't spend much on its defense, right? It lies in the US Right. But I think they miss the other side of this, which is. Because Europe doesn't spend much on defense, the U. S. gets to set the continent's policy. There will never be, outside of Russia, which is, you know, for now, what it is, there will never be a U.

S. rival to emerge on continental Europe as long as Europe doesn't spend anything on defense. And that actually is well worth paying a bit more, right? Like, that's what World War II is arguably

Steve Hsu: about. It's very funny because, like Geopolitical realist planners in the U. S. understand all this, and you know, for them, it's like, yes, we should stay in Europe, it's a bargain for us, right, and we want to have our bases there.

It's only occasionally some, somebody like Trump says, hey, my God, you know, get your, you know, get your defense spending up to at least 2 or 3 percent of GDP, right?

Samo Burja: To be fair, for most of these countries, 2 to 3 percent of GDP would not be enough to have serious independence from the U. S. But hypothetically, if you had a European federal government, then 3 percent could start to be uncomfortable.

Absolutely. The U. S. doesn't want that. No, it would actually be an independent power. Yes. And it could intervene in the Middle East. It could intervene in Eastern Europe.

It could negotiate its own outcomes. Yes. It would not be good for the U. S. Right,

Steve Hsu: There was this book. I think it was Paul Kennedy at Yale who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers I don't remember.

This is way back in the 90s but at that time it seemed plausible to people who were I think were too naive about The nature of the U. S. empire, but they thought the EU was actually a plausible candidate for the first among equals among the, if a multipolar world had reemerged.

Samo Burja: I mean, part of this is that Europe has had a lot of lost time since 2008.

It's good to remember that before 2008 in the financial crisis, Europe was converging with the United States. And if we were to analyze Europe's mistake, I would actually say that Europe's mistake was believing in education too much. Yeah. They bet on human capital as the ultimate road to development.

When actually the utilization of human capital was Europe's weak spot. So in a way, Europe doubled down on its strength, but did not overcome its sort of weakness. And even today you will have wonderfully talented, German math PhDs, Italian engineers, Yes. French mathematicians and I meet them here in San Francisco.

Yes, because there's just no way to be compensated anywhere close right and furthermore The common market in Europe wasn't common enough. There's no digital common market there. Mm hmm. Not really. Or if it is, it's, it's a set of no's. Right. And then every single individual country says its own no's on top of that.

Right. There's no EU wide directive to say Actually, in all of the EU as of today, self driving is legal. Right, right. There's no such directive. There's only the forbidding things, not allowing things. And until the European Union is able to allow things and override individual states, well, that long it's not a super state, right?

And you know, the US itself went through this transition, but it went through it in the 19th century. Europe has very little time. If Europe integrates proportionally to how each of the individual countries declines, then it cannot become a power. It must solve something that I don't think has been solved in human history, which is how do you integrate still relevant?

Still powerful states peacefully, right? I've never seen that

Steve Hsu: precedent in history. No

Samo Burja: I don't think that is right? I think I think it always requires at least something of a war Right, like, you know you know the company's named Bismarck because I felt realpolitik was underrated Yes, and I also felt that you know You have to be You have to advertise that you will make your clients uncomfortable at times.

By telling them what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. So the Bismarck brand is sort of perfect for that. You know, if you named a company, Machiavelli, no one would hire that. That's going a little bit too far. Exactly. Right. But you name it Bismarck, it's like realism and even if uncomfortable and it's kind of blunt, but a lot of thought has gone into it.

So I was bringing up Bismarck. I'm a big fan of 19th century history. Yes. He did the right thing by if you wanted to unify Germany, no convention, no election could have done it. You needed to defeat France. Yes. Because France was the ultimate block to German unity. Yes. And he kind of did it masterfully where the very defeat of France was the unifying effort of those countries.

Yes. So You know, hypothetically, if there was some sort of terrible Russian European war, maybe Europe could do it. But it couldn't do it while the U. S. was part of that war. Right, right. So, really, it's a non-starter.

Steve Hsu: Right. So, isn't, isn't there an analogy there that the defeat of France is the defeat of the United States, and then Europe can then reorganize itself?

Yeah,

Samo Burja: But, yeah, I think that's true. Let's put it this way. I don't want this outcome even as someone who still thinks himself as European, but I think a sufficient, if the United States were ever defeated, I think Europe might have a surprising renaissance because for the first time in centuries, it would be responsible for itself.

Steve Hsu: They would react to the pressure of, okay, all of a sudden we have to defend ourselves.

Samo Burja: Yeah.

Steve Hsu: Let's give up some national sovereignty for a really functional federal system.

Samo Burja: Yeah. I do think that there was a missed opportunity in the 1990s for a closer economic, military and diplomatic integration.

Between East, Democratic countries of East Asia, Europe, the United States, Canada, even Mexico, there could have been an EU, but the problem is their concept of a kind of, you know, EU, but around the United States, the American extended union, the problem is they called it the international community, and it declared that it has no boundaries, that actually this is the planetary government, yes.

You know, the IMF, the, all of these institutions, right? Even NATO itself declared it was, its business was global security, not just Atlantic security. And in 1992, this seemed plausible, right? China's economy was minuscule. Russia was actually friendly. Yes. People forget this, but it was Very weak. Very weak.

There were even people in Russia who were proposing, you know, if you bail us out, we'll join NATO and yes, you'll get to see our military secrets and yeah, you know, we'll be, we'll be friends, right? That was a

Steve Hsu: missed

Samo Burja: opportunity, I think. It could have been a Marshall Plan, right? Because consider now in 2024, if you had a democratic, rich, but basically like in Europe disarmed Russia, but maybe more armed in Asia, that would be a way better position or a hypothetical conflict with China.

Yes. Because currently China and Russia. Have an economic integration that basically bailed out Russia. Yes, Russia has had good economic growth in the last year. Which is insane, right? It's given all the sanctions, but there was another first world Right, the true second world, the one that people thought would happen during the Cold War but didn't now has happened in China. It is impossible for the West to To truly sanction a major country.

Yes, and bring it economically to its knees. Yeah, China does not exactly

Steve Hsu: Yes, when the sanctions were levied on Russia after the Ukraine invasion, I just started checking Why I didn't have to check but I just once I knew that they had access to Taobao and these different e commerce platforms in China I said well they can basically buy everything they need right and unless the u.

s. Has some way to fully interdict that You The sanctions aren't going to work

Samo Burja: and there was no real there was no real way to do that. Yeah, right, that would be excessive ; it would require an excessive amount of naval rights, even warfare. Well,

Steve Hsu: It's connected by land So, you know, it's pretty tough to interdict that right?

Samo Burja: Yeah. Yeah, of course The economics are still worse for rail than oceanic sure, but

Steve Hsu: it doesn't bring the country to its knees

Samo Burja: agreed agreed And

Steve Hsu: Some of these things are rather light, like a train, a container car full of Microchips, you know, yeah, it doesn't really, yeah, it doesn't really occupy that much space.

Samo Burja: So and even Western imports, you know Kazakhstan's exports. Yes When something like 400 percent off, I'm like, oh, that's a sudden economic development Yeah,

Steve Hsu: I mean a similar thing related to that You know the u. s. Sanctions on China lead to Vietnam and Mexico Suddenly having much more trade with China and much more trade with the United States because a lot of stuff is just moving, you know, for final assembly into Vietnam or Mexico, but it's actually the main value that is coming from China.

So basically, they just sort of created an extra step in the products before they came here.

Samo Burja: Yeah, I do think the United States should very seriously consider. Just opening special economic zones not in third world countries, but in random parts of the u. s I think that there is some need to intentionally redevelop a industrial center Yes, if one is serious, right not disperse 50 facilities across 50 states, even if that's politically great, right bring 50 facilities To a single state, a single city, ideally.

It's a good idea. I

Steve Hsu: mean, in Michigan, you can still see the remnants of the industrial era there. There's still lots of, or now it's almost all gone, but when I first came to Michigan in 2012, there's still lots of, you know, machine shops and things like this that used to service the auto industry.

And they're just gradually going away and the human capital is going away.

Samo Burja: And it's already been demolished in many places. I think one of the more disconcerting views is that, you know, perhaps the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and experienced sudden de-industrialization. The West didn't collapse, but wait another 10 years and perhaps over a 30 year timescale, the de-industrialization, which is different than an impoverishment, a de-industrialization as profound as that of the Soviet Union will in fact have taken place.

I would argue that it did for Britain at least, right? Any industrial capacities that Russia has today were, you know, in the early 20th century. built in the last five years. All of that old capacity was lost. All they had were blueprints. Right. And the West is now in the business of blueprints. And it's, I think, a matter of time before the blueprints are outcompeted.

The fact that we need to put 100 percent tariffs on Chinese EVs. Yeah. Everyone knows that's bad news. Elon Musk knows it's bad news. He says he doesn't want the tariffs because he knows they're there to save GM. They're not there to save Tesla. Exactly. I think that there is something very concerning with industrial society.

As far as I can tell, we are post-industrial, not in the sense of having transcended industry, but abandoned it. Yes. And left it to someone else. And left it to someone else. And there's one view where this is just a matter of trade, right? But there's another view where Actually, our production costs were going up and our workers were less disciplined and our engineers were becoming less talented.

We were experiencing a competency crisis and an environmental crisis. So of course it made more sense for someone else to industrialize and they do all the Adams work, the dirty work, to have our society. Yes. And you know, I wonder perhaps we have not yet figured out how to have a socially sustainable industrial civilization.

Because I think many of the fundamental values related to the formation of human capital, they're needed to have Boeing planes not fall out of the sky. We've moved radially away from that. Anything like workplace discipline, anything like hard neurotocracy, anything even, even our, the U. S. openness to use technology to solve problems, even that is attenuated compared to 50 years ago.

Yeah. I Like, 50 years ago, it would not even be controversial. It would actually be progressive and environmental to say, Oh, new technologies will solve climate change. That would have been progressive.

Now it sounds almost reactionary. It's like we're supposed to de-grow our economy. And, you know, even in China itself, this will, I fear this will eventually happen, perhaps more slowly, but they are very concerned about environmentalism.

Right now, it's very sensible. They've cleaned up the air in Beijing, but it could easily go all the way to the western View and say the lying flat movement. Well lying flat Where you know young Chinese are opting out of the extremely hard work culture because you know, they're well off enough Yeah, that's a one to one analog to what managers in the West call quiet quitting and this complaint of like low productivity Yeah, perhaps it's just the case that an industrial society requires this kind of mobilization and hard working population, and maybe our planet is actually going to run out of hard working, talented populations.

And that that's a problem

Steve Hsu: It could be this sort of thing runs its course You know when you when the thing you're comparing it to is working in the farm on the farm Then working hard at the factory actually is much better It's a great deal exactly and so that has a certain momentum But then after a while people just want okay I want my transfer payments and I don't want to have to work that hard, right?

Samo Burja: Yeah, yeah. And at the end of the day, there's also this view that the economy is way more automated than it truly is. I think it's simultaneously true that we have some jobs that we don't need. There are some things that basically don't need people anymore, but we still have them for Basically, political economic reasons, and it is true that we are suffering crushing labor shortages.

I don't, I think it is extremely hard to hire people who could design and improve a chip fab.

Steve Hsu: Yeah.

Samo Burja: I think it's, it's very hard to hire people who will, with precision, reliably, and for a low salary, like assemble an airplane window, right? And they're probably going to be 60 years old and addicted to opioids, or maybe even They're all like Adderall dependency and they'll burn out and it, it, it is not clear that our society can deal with a constricting labor supply driven by an inverted population pyramid simultaneously with people's expectations being towards Essentially office work.

I think as a culture, we have said that the normal thing to do is get an education, which prepares you for a white collar job. And you know what? White collar jobs seem easier to automate than manufacturing, like, you know, maybe, maybe GPT 10 will answer my email just as well as my assistant can, right, or as well as I can, maybe, by GPT

Steve Hsu: 20.

I wanted to come back to demographics. So you mentioned demographics. We were talking about this just before we started recording. And, At the meeting we were just at we heard a lot about a lot of cries of alarm about low fertility rates and such and some pretty elaborate theories about what's causing that related to culture related to All sorts of things and you were just saying to me Maybe the simplest model is just that when people move to cities they tend to have smaller families and the world is much more urbanized now.

So basically every developed country is China, I think it's 65 percent urbanized. Yeah. But, but other countries like the United States is

Samo Burja: 80 percent or higher. And note the U. S. is more urbanized right now than it is ever before. Wow. In its history. I see. Right. So we are, we are still increasing and taking up urbanization.

Yes. One thing to remember is that, first off, the vast majority of immigrants into the United States come to the already urbanized regions. That's number one. Number two, many of the small towns are just dying and being abandoned. There's no reason to live in a town that has fewer than 200, 000 people.

It's kind of just a legacy, right? A legacy of a different economic structure. Yeah,

Steve Hsu: So in that model, there's something about moving to a city that reduces fertility. There's an old, I don't know who coined this term, but cities are IQ shredders. Do cities attract the most talented people, they move to the city, but then they don't, maybe don't have enough kids to replace themselves, and so gradually, like, you're sucking in the IQ points, and then you're destroying them in the next generation.

Samo Burja: I think that this is in a way, perhaps something that is deeply true, and that was always true, because of the oldest cultures that is truly an urban culture where we have written accounts of their life experience. So this would be Sumeria in ancient Mesopotamia 5, 000 years ago. They have a lot of complaints.

There's actually one letter where, you know, I am better than you. I'm a Sumerian. I can write my name. You're illiterate. You used to be a goat herder. You only started eating bread and drinking beer last year. So, in other words, they're complaining about hunter gatherers and pastoralists moving to the city.

Yes. Being rowdy, not working well, not being educated, and we, in fact, see a complete demographic turnover where eventually the Sumerians are replaced by the Akkadian people and the other Eastern Semitic languages. Now, of course, the Babylonians inherit the Sumerians religion, civilization, and enculturation into it.

But what I'm bemoaning here isn't the decline of the Sumerians, it's the point that when you fully urbanized your civilization, you needed an external source of population to replace your fully urbanized civilization. And when they acculturate successfully, guess what, they have to do the same thing. So possibly urban life was always a pyramid scheme where the city needs ever new sources labor and biological replacement, be it Paris extending its dominion over the French countryside, minting Frenchmen in the process, where people who might have spoken Occitan move to Paris and quickly adopt Parisian French, or people in Britain who might have spoken a Celtic language moving to London.

When Europeans, and I'm European as well, Complain about mass immigration being unprecedented. I remind them that millions of Italians moved to France and vanished and worked for Gotham Right and even Britain. Most of the stories of it being multicultural are completely fake. It was predominantly a European country, etc, etc Yeah, but there were many many Irish people who moved to London.

There are many prominent British figures who have an Irish Grandparent when you read 19th century accounts. All of that Gaelic language, of course, vanished, and many of them, when they converted out of Catholicism, also forgot they were ever Irish in that sense. And the Romans, finally, created hundreds of millions of new Romans.

Our mutual friend Raziv Khan had a good post where he noted that the genetic signature of the Romans It's sort of minuscule. Their cultural footprint is vast. Yes. But what happened to them? Well, you know, some of them are certainly still around. There's some continuity in Italy itself, but all of those colonies elsewhere you know, mostly demographically, it was a black hole and in a way, maybe the Italian countryside survived, but Rome itself did not, right?

Rome was a city at its peak, according to some estimates, as many as two and a half million people. In the 7th century, It had 70, 000 people, and goats were grazing in the Colosseum. The most important guy in town was the Pope. That didn't really depend on the city, right? He just happened to be there and depended on this big church bureaucracy, and you know, the same thing actually befell Constantinople, too, before its conquest by the Ottomans.

On the eve of its conquest, this was not the Constantinople of one and a half million people. This was a much diminished town, and so on. So, I think that we might see a world where Tokyo is mostly abandoned ruins. Imagine a Tokyo which is like Detroit, but not because people moved elsewhere, but because no one moved in.

Right. And no one had children. Right. To this day, real estate prices are perhaps lower in Tokyo, so it's a model for urbanism. but they're, you know, lower than some other high density cities in the

Steve Hsu: Anglosphere,

Samo Burja: like London or San Francisco. You know, I acutely felt this here over the years, including purchasing real estate and renting and all that.

But they remain higher in the rest of Japan and people still move from the rest of Japan to Tokyo and Tokyo has lower Fertility than the rest of Japan. So there's like a double effect here first Everyone is living in a city and this depresses fertility. Second , if your culture is super urbanized, 90 percent or 95 percent of the people in your society live in cities. Guess what the remaining 5%?

Are going to be adopting city cultures and norms. Yep So even if they could be different they don't want to be they aspire to it, you know There's a there's a phenomena where in san francisco when I meet someone from uh midwestern states And I often sort of expect them to be trying too hard to fit into the Californian stereotype.

They'll be progressive in an annoying way. I see. Yeah, especially if they're a white guy. I see. They'll be very progressive in a very annoying way. Interesting. And I think this is because they want to belong. They don't, they want to escape from there. Right. Right. Now there's a counter to that too, where you have people who Are proud, right?

They're doing it differently. Yeah, but it's really a coin flip, right? And I'm originally, you know, I'm from Slovenia. I lived there until you know with some small detours elsewhere until 2014. I know that we continue to admire Germany.

Steve Hsu: Mm hmm

Samo Burja: We continue to want to catch up to Western Europe, right?

And the conservative, you know, the Democrat the, the liberal position or socialist position is we should try to catch up with Sweden. The conservative position is actually, we should try to catch up with America and be more libertarian, right. And, you know, get into guns, et cetera, which is so strange to see, like, you see, being conservatives didn't care about guns 20 years ago.

Suddenly they now want guns. They picked it up from the United States. Exactly. So, So city culture, the culture of the metropole, the culture of the dominant power expands, right? And because of this, I think we might have a behavioral sync where the ever deeper socialization of ever more people might result in very viral mimetics.

I worry that cities are not perhaps historically the centers of infectious diseases. Well, perhaps these are also, you know, the centers of maladaptive meme plexus. Yeah, perhaps they always were as well.

Steve Hsu: It's interesting that so many people just recently, I would say, almost in the last year or two have started getting interested in these questions of cultural dynamics, damaging memes.

Robin Hanson, I guess, I don't know if he wrote a large article about it or a book, but I guess it's an article. Is this based on empirical evidence? Inputs like noticing that wow, there are all kinds of destructive trends running wild in our society. What is triggering this uh interest in cultural dynamics?

Samo Burja: I mean for for hansen his his His trigger according to him has been the drop in fertility where he believes this will result in a shrinking global economy And societies that are dominated by you know, the old will of course have less innovation in societies where the majority of the people are young um You I've been actually always interested in the cultural dynamic stuff.

I do think the bulk of the story, it's, it's sort of like, let's say 80 percent just people living in close proximity to each other. And I think there must be something that we're picking up on a very mammalian level, probably deeply evolved that is telling us actually enough.

Steve Hsu: Yeah.

Samo Burja: I've spoken, I've seen 300 humans today.

There's not going to be enough food. There's not going to be enough meat, etc. Don't reproduce. And then we build these complicated rationalizations on the top. You're like, oh, the climate's dead. Or, oh, I need to take care of my career. Or, oh, this person isn't quite right. Right. None of these things ever stopped anyone before.

I think we, as a species, likely lack deep introspection on it. Now, having said that, I do think imitation is also a real aspect of human nature. So I do think that when fertility starts falling in the Japanese countryside, that's not urbanization, that's enculturation. When, again, 80 percent of the population lives in cities, all the media is made there, all the curricula are made there, all the laws are made there, and, you know, this war between city and countryside.

it's become very pronounced, but it's not how people were thinking even 200 years ago. 200 years ago, the nation state was ascended and the assumption was that a city dweller and the rural population of that country had more in common with each other than with the city dwellers and the rural population of a different country.

I don't think anyone that's very urban in the Western world today thinks that way. And, you know, in an interesting way, China's problems. Are also related to rapid urbanization Their word about political instability of people who are one generation ago rural Because they know their history arguably early 20th century europe was the destabilization of a large young population Moving to cities for the first time and struggling with city life So that would be also a place where I would say that the cultural effect is something right like I think mass movements have always required cities Mass political movements, right?

You need a place to organize. You need a place to talk to lots of people, convince them of your ideology, whatever it is. And you know, I think cities were always that breeding ground. Now, I don't think this will happen in modern China because the population is so old, so I think it's going to be less culturally innovative than people might worry, but we might see that effect happen in India and Africa, where there is rapid urbanization and a still young population.

So you might see new ideologies emerge there and new political movements and so on.

Steve Hsu: Interesting. You know, one of the things that I find interesting about you is that, you know, you're a real intellectual, right? So you're interested in ideas and you're always thinking about ideas. How are you? View your daily activity.

So do you, do you view yourself, do you view your work at Bismarck as part of your intellectual life or is it your job and then you have your intellectual life separate from that?

Samo Burja: The company is designed to facilitate my intellectual life. I designed it as the most cognitively stimulating job I could find and as one that would be most educational both for myself and for the other analysts.

That's why, you know, I, I not only spend a lot of effort getting good human capital in, we spend a lot of effort to educate and train them in this local school of knowledge and expose them just to as much stuff as they can. You know, they complain, but I actually keep the same pace, so I demand of all my employees the same pace I have.

I see. And my case is, well, you can imagine it's many hours of reading a day, and also many hours of talking to people. And there's not much outside of that. And, because I get to think about something like urbanization, right? I might, you know, not consider reading a book about Sumerian Sumerian urban culture to be exactly work.

But can I leverage and include it in that way? Yes, I do. You know, it can be work. My activity at Palladium is partially also intellectual. I originally was involved because I started writing articles for Palladium magazine, including one on long history and theories related to that. So I think that if one wishes to be a generalist intellectual, the best thing to do is to orient your life so that every sort of, you know, you make your intellectual heart more intellectual.

And if you're lucky you will find niches or be able to make niches outside of academia because academia has this problem Where as society has gone into an inverted pyramid Academia has remained a pyramid scheme where you are perpetually competing with more and more people and you have to narrow and narrow and narrow Your school of inquiry.

Yes, but no human mind works that way. Even the deep experts almost always have something interesting to say on one more topic Whether we wish to or not We are not Call functions. We're integral . We are integrated human minds, right? We could think about many things very well. Mm-hmm , right? The people who think well can think about many things.

Well, yes. They're just usually not rewarded for thinking of many things,

Steve Hsu: right? So, you know, there are many professors who are doing, you know, some kind of job where they're specialized in one area. Maybe they also work in another area. I think you, the thing you've created for yourself is very unique. I can't actually think of very many other people who have anything like the setup that you have.

So what do you think about that? Do you think you're actually maybe the one guy in the world that's got this kind of setup or the 10 guys?

Samo Burja: I think people used to have way more setups like this,

Steve Hsu: But yes, in the past. But now, I can't think of, you know, I could think of some McKinsey partner, but I think of that guy basically like.

Wrangling business and managing a bunch of associates to make like half big power points and stuff. Yeah So that's not a right comparison, um I have a friend that I interviewed on the podcast Sebastian Mallaby who writes, um Serious books usually about business, but he takes about 10 years To write one of these books.

So he's living a very deeply intellectual life. Um And learning, you know, although he's writing one book. He's also learning a lot of things along the way, but Seems rarer and rarer This will be a generalist who's really able to 100 percent of their time just work on increasing their knowledge and understanding.

Samo Burja: I think the very pinnacle of venture capital had a few people in the gen x generation who achieved this. And, you know, I believe in praise. So I'm just going to say that, you know, among. All the silicon valley venture capitalists. I most respect Peter Thiel. Yes, who I believe has deep knowledge in many domains Yes, and has a good eye for talent across all domains

Steve Hsu: Yes, I was going to mention Peter because he also despite i'm sure a lot of people out there hate loathe and fear Peter Thiel, he is actually an intellectual and I believe he spends a significant amount of his time actually on intellectual activities, even though he's got all these things to run.

But yeah,

Samo Burja: and he has, there are some returns to this. Like, who would I, who would, who, whose opinion would I value for the future? Of our civilization and society. Yeah, there are many venture capitalists who make the claim that you should listen to them. Yes, very few are worth listening to. you know one of the curses of silicon valley is actually secretly being a very intellectual culture.

Yes is that you have Random VCs you know, pretending they're Paul Graham or Peter Thiel and they're really not. They're really not. Paul Graham's another example too. I don't know what he

Steve Hsu: actually does in his spare time, but clearly he's thinking about stuff, right?

Samo Burja: I think he definitely was at Y Combinator.

And I think he probably still is as a, as a free individual, but I believe he's not that closely involved with Y Combinator. No, he's

Steve Hsu: definitely stepped

Samo Burja: back. Yeah. But that was another company where sort of being an incubator. Yes. For many, many companies expose you to. Exposes you to a lot of the world Also, he is an essayist.

So there's something interesting that perhaps Paul Graham and Thiel have in common. They both know how to write, by which I mean they have a classical education of writing out your thoughts, seeing them laid out, improving them, editing them, right? It is an auxiliary memory. and I worry that we as a society have become functionally illiterate, where I feel there are very few people who understand the power of just sitting there, interrogating yourself as to what I think, putting it on paper, reflecting on it, refactoring it, asking other people what you think, Do you know how much time, I mean, you have written in the past, you have a podcast, you know how much time you save when someone listens to your podcast, reads your essay, or reads your book?

It gives you good feedback. It gives you good feedback. Yes. It's incredible. And you can jump into the most interesting part of the conversation, rather than being stuck at one on one forever. Yes. It's,

Steve Hsu: it's one of the lovely experiences I had this weekend at Manifest, is somebody would come up to me and say, Oh, I'm you know, I read, started reading your blog in high school or something, and I listened to Manifold, and then, okay, but it might have just stopped there, right?

Yeah. But what you just said, which actually does happen quite a bit, at least around here, is someone says, well, you know, when you were talking to Mearsheimer, and you said XYZ, and then Mearsheimer said ABC, what? And then, and then we, we, as you said, we can dive infinitely deeply into American sophisticated conversation, just pick it up at that point.

And yeah, that's an amazing experience actually.

Samo Burja: Yeah, and I think that that experience also makes it delightful to work and be active. I think many people who are very intelligent, lose interest in intellectual pursuits because their environment just does not reward it and it's not it's not challenging or interesting.

Steve Hsu: Even as a faculty member you might feel like Yeah, but there's really no one for me to talk to about this.

Like I'm going deeper and deeper and deeper, but the deeper I get, the fewer people I can talk to, and you could despair about that, but.

Samo Burja: Eventually, eventually if one goes deep enough, they're left alone and maybe, you know, maybe they're, if they're lucky and they're a philosopher, maybe there are dead philosophers they can talk to in the books, and if they're unlucky and they're physicists, then there's nothing but nature to talk to.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Luckily, physics is still a pretty big international community. So, and actually the internet has made it easier and easier to find. So in the past you might have had a situation where you were the one guy in your department with that interest and that could get lonely. But now because of the internet, it actually works the other way.

I can go home and interact over zoom or whatever with. Five different colleagues who understand this particular area as well as I do. They're all at different universities. That's actually more valuable for me than to go in and be collegial with my colleagues because I, you know, so unfortunately it's, it's caused the departments to be empty.

When I visit, like was it Caltech a month or two ago or I guess it was six months ago. And the number of people roaming the halls was just much lower than in the past.

Samo Burja: I think that That has immense strength because people can know each other and have developed relationships. Yes, exactly. And there was a precursor to this, right?

The Republic of Letters. Yes. Right? Scientific culture was always very correspondence based and international. Yes. Right? Einstein might correspond with Marie Curie over letters. You know you know, might empathize with how she's been mistreated by the tabloid press. You know, we are certainly at a point in history where if you have a hit piece written about you, it's a badge of honor.

Right. But you know, that was true a hundred years ago too. And then in the P. S. you might be, Oh, and I solved this or that problem, right? So it's much faster. It can, it can be like a live conversation, not just a high latency correspondence. But I do think, like, living and working together with people is irreplaceable, at least occasionally.

And you know, that's part of the value I get out of this city, is they're often very, very smart people. And if they're, let's say, retired from tech, a lot of them pick up new intellectual interests in their 40s and 50s. Yes. That's great. Yes. Right? Brian Johnson's arguably someone whose first career was over and picked up a new one.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, I think that if I were to encourage Silicon Valley to do something slightly better. I would even argue that more of the people who have made their money and their financial and economic independence in tech should consider becoming dilettantes, talent spotters, and patrons in other fields.

Many of them come out of biology or physics, go into tech, make their money, and then they retire? I'm like, you know, your retirement doesn't need to be angel investing in even more software. You could go back to biology and physics. Maybe you yourself will never make up for the lost time, but could you get good enough that you could fund other people?

Steve Hsu: Yes, you could. It does happen. The amount of philanthropy that goes like from former physicists or mathematicians that comes back is actually getting pretty significant.

Samo Burja: Okay. That's cool to hear. That's cool to hear. Yeah. Yeah. Good spot for us to wrap

Steve Hsu: up. Yeah. Fantastic. It's been a great conversation.

Samo Burja: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show for coming here to our offices. That's a wrap.

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