Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe. Patrick, first question. You have an excellent compilation of advice on your blog for people 10 to 20. You say there, that once you turn 35, you'll write some for people in their 20s. What advice do you have for us now, the people in our 20s? When is it coming? Patrick Collison 00:22 I haven't really thought about that. The one piece of advice I've been wondering about recently is this: I said that people in their teens should go to San Francisco. I wonder if people in their 20s shouldn't go to San Francisco. That advice was a generalization. There's a significant set of people who should go to San Francisco. But there is a set of career paths that people ought to pursue and would derive most fulfillment from pursuing, that are also really valuable for the world, that require accumulating a lot of expertise and studying a domain in tremendous depth. I think San Francisco valorizes – this is also San Francisco's great virtue. San Francisco valorizes striking out on your own, iconoclastically dismissing the received wisdom. It praises the founding archetypes and lore of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and all the rest. I'm way less successful than those people, but to some extent, Stripe, in as much as it fits a pattern, is an instance of that pattern. That's great, I'm happy that this phenomenon exists in the world. But the world needs lots of other things. And I don't think San Francisco, using San Francisco as a kind of a metonym for a cultural orientation, encourages the pursuit of really deep technical knowledge. We're recording this in South San Francisco, which is most noteworthy in the corporate world for being the headquarters of Genentech. Genentech was co-founded by Bob Swanson and Herb Boyer. They produced cheap insulin for the first time with recombinant DNA. Like Herb Boyer couldn't have done that at age 23. Herb Boyer first had to accumulate all of the knowledge and the skills required to be able to invent that over the course of a multi-decade career. I don't know what age he was when he finally went and invented it, but he was not in his 20s. I feel like San Francisco doesn't culturally encourage one to become Herb Boyer. Or yesterday, at the time of recording this podcast, Patrick Hsu, one of the co-founders of Arc, which maybe we'll speak about later in the show. This is a biomedical research organization we started a few years ago. He announced this new phenomenon of bridge editing, which is a new recombinase where you can insert DNA into a genome. It's pretty early, but it might turn out to be quite consequential. In order to do something like that, you have to study for a long time and acquire a lot of technical skills. I don't quite know how to synthesize it yet, but as I think about advice for people in their 20s, I'm not going to normatively pretend to know or presume in which direction one should go in life. lls. I don't quite know how to synthesize it yet, but as I think about advice for people in their 20s, I'm not going to normatively pretend to know or presume in which direction one should go in life. Obviously, there are successful examples of basically every strategy. I'm really glad that you're doing what you're doing at what age? 23. 23. So that's...…

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