Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think that those are different questions. What are the things that power me? We've talked about a bunch of the themes. I just really like building things. I specifically like building things around how people communicate and understanding how people express themselves and how people work. When I was in college I studied computer science and psychology. I think a lot of other people in the industry studied computer science. So, it's always been the intersection of those two things for me. It’s also sort of this really deep drive. I don't know how to explain it but I just feel constitutionally that I'm doing something wrong if I'm not building something new. Even when we were putting together the business case for investing a $100 billion in AI or some huge amount in the metaverse, we have plans that I think made it pretty clear that if our stuff works, it'll be a good investment. But you can't know for certain from the outset. There are all these arguments that people have, with advisors or different folks. It's like, “how are you confident enough to do this?” Well the day I stop trying to build new things, I'm just done. I'm going to go build new things somewhere else. I'm fundamentally incapable of running something, or in my own life, and not trying to build new things that I think are interesting. That's not even a question for me, whether we're going to take a swing at building the next thing. I'm just incapable of not doing that. I don't know. I'm kind of like this in all the different aspects of my life. Our family built this ranch in Kauai and I worked on designing all these buildings. We started raising cattle and I'm like “alright, I want to make the best cattle in the world so how do we architect this so that way we can figure this out and build all the stuff up that we need to try to do that.” I don't know, that's me. What was the other part of the question? I'm not sure but I'm actually curious about something else. So a 19-year-old Mark reads a bunch of antiquity and classics in high school and college. What important lesson did you learn from it? Not just interesting things you found, but there aren't that many tokens you consume by the time you're 19. A bunch of them were about the classics. Clearly that was important in some way. There aren't that many tokens you consume... That's a good question. Here’s one of the things I thought was really fascinating. Augustus became emperor and he was trying to establish peace. There was no real conception of peace at the time. The people's understanding of peace was peace as the temporary time between when your enemies inevitably attack you. So you get a short rest. He had this view of changing the economy from being something mercenary and militaristic to this actually positive-sum thing. It was a very novel idea at the time. That’s something that's really fundamental: the bounds on what people can conceive of at the time as rational ways to work. This applies to both the metaverse and the AI stuff. A lot of investors, and other people, can't wrap their head around why we would open source this. It’s like “I don't understand, it’s open source. That must just be the temporary time between which you're making things proprietary, right?” I think it's this very profound thing in tech that it actually creates a lot of winners. I don't want to strain the analogy too much but I do think that a lot of the time, there are models for building things that people often can't even wrap their head around. They can’t understand how that would be a valuable thing for people to do or how it would be a reasonable state of the world. I think there are more reasonable things than people think.…

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