Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…There's plenty of data on the earnings of Stanford kids. If there were a betting market in, you know, what's the future trend? I'm long. How long I should be, I really don't know. But I visit Stanford not every year, but regularly, and the selection in who it is I meet... We're talking about selection, and they're very impressive. Emergent Ventures has funded a lot of people from Stanford. As far as I can tell, as a group, they're doing very well. So that is of no concern to me. If you're worried about the Stanford kids, something seems off in the level of salience and focus in the argument because they're overall doing great. They have high standards, and that's good too. Paul McCartney thought John Lennon was a crummy guitar player, and John thought a lot of Paul's songs were crap. In a way they're right, in a way they're wrong. But it's a sign what high standards the Beatles had. How old are you, by the way? Okay, now go back however many years. Was there a 24-year-old like you doing the equivalent of podcasting? It's just clearly better now than it was back then. And you were doing this a few years ago, so it's just obvious to me the young peaks are doing better. You're proof. Wasn't Churchill, by the time he was 24, an international correspondent in Cuba and India? I think he was the highest-paid journalist in the world by the time he was 24. I don't know. I mean, what was he paid, and how good was his journalism? I just don't know. I don't think it's that impressive a job to be an international journalist. What does it pay people now? He did some good things later on, but most of his early life he's a failure. And then ask the Irish. Getting back to Patrick, ask the Irish and people from India what they think of younger Churchill, and you'll get an earful. His real great achievement, I don't know how old he was exactly, but it's quite late in his life. Until then, he's a destructive failure. There was no one on Twitter to tell him, "Hey, Winston, you need to rethink this whole Irish thing." Today there would be. Sam will do it, right? Sam will tweet at Winston Churchill, "Got to rethink the Irish thing." And Sam is persuasive.…

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