Speaker unverified: recommendation

Transcript context

…t go to someplace that puts you in a holding pattern for 10 years. You've only got 40 something years of really good work ahead to level up as much as you can. Go work somewhere that's very demanding. As much as you can take, for as long as you can take it. Yeah, probably more than a hundred people have asked me over the years, “Oh, I got into grad school and I got into SpaceX, what should I do?” And I said, well, the psychic damage is the same, but the pay is better at SpaceX, which is hard to believe but true. And I really believe that. You want to go and work with the best people on the things that you care about. Whoever they are, wherever they are, whatever it takes. Don't settle for second best. On the other hand, if you've recently graduated or you're about to graduate, it's more important that you get a job and you kill it. Do really, really well straight out of school then that you sit on the job market for a year and then compete against the next round. I see a lot of resumes. No doubt you've seen a lot of resumes over the years, and really you're only as good as your most recent job. And if your first job out of school is super important to set the foundation upon which you can build the rest of your career. Even if it sucks, stick it out for 18 months to two years and make sure everyone there has something nice to say about you. and then you can build on that. But yeah, it's really sad when you see someone with an ostensibly decent degree out of decent school and they kind of failed to launch in some way. As Casey is describing, and as we've heard a lot about on Cheeky Pint, prototyping is easy but production is hard. A surprisingly large slice of human progress comes down to reducing the timing cost of industrial production processes. In Stripe Press’ newest book, The Origins of Efficiency, author Brian Potter breaks down precisely how that progress happens. He draws on a hundred years’ worth of research to explain the fundamental steps of a production process and how each can be made faster, cheaper, and more reliable. He includes detailed examples from steel and semiconductors, to wind turbines and container shipping, to Tesla and the Model T. And he discusses how the principles of production efficiency can be applied to domains like construction, medicine, and education, where much work remains to be done. And Brian should know, he's the author of the popular Construction Physics newsletter and worked for 15 years in the construction industry. The Origins of Efficiency just came out, You can buy it on press.stripe.com where we offer all Stripe Press books. How are you planning to educate your kids? Mostly benign neglect, I think. No, but actually. Well, they're in the local school. But presumably that's not the limit of your plans. l Stripe Press books. How are you planning to educate your kids? Mostly benign neglect, I think. No, but actually. Well, they're in the local school. But presumably that's not the limit of your plans. Yeah, I mean so, I'm not worried that they're going to find an uninspiring academic environment at home, right? We have a house full of books—that's going to be fine. So why do we send them to school? To get the stuff they can't get at home, like how do you deal with people who aren't like your immediate relatives and as obsessed with space as you are? That said, it seems not entirely unlikely to me that at some point the schooling system will, I don’t know, not be quite sufficient in some way. But in particular, the Bloom 2 Sigma effect is one of the biggest effects in education. The idea that you get way better outcomes with one-on-one tutoring focused on mastery learning, where you only progress through topics once the student has mastered the prior topic, and you move your way sequentially through things. And schools almost definitionally can't do that. They can't do that. Yeah, I actually think that maybe the Bloom 2 Sigma effect, you can achieve it on your own if you're able to follow your areas of curiosity and have access to resources and learn. So actually in my case, probably the reason I'm not a chemist for example, is that I didn't have access to chemistry textbooks until I was in late high school. What I want for my children, especially in a world with AI and all kinds of nonsense coming, I don't really care what they do as long as they love it and they're as good as they can be. They have to love it and they have to try. They have to sweat, they have to contend with the material because incredible privileges have come to them and to me and to some of my more recent ancestors. And I feel like you do have a social obligation to not waste that opportunity. Do you buy the explanation on the falling fertility rates that we've just made it too expensive to have kids? Have you seen the “booster seats as contraception” paper and all these? I just forwarded that to one of my Congress people actually, when they were saying, “Come to a California Highway Patrol session on fitting your car seats.” And I was like, “How about we just tweak the law? So if you have three or more kids, you don't get them taken away for putting them in a sedan.” For reference, something like 58 children's lives are saved in the United States every year, statistically, by car seats and something like 10,000 births are averted by families who cannot afford to upgrade their cars, which is a bit of a problem. Even if you add to lose 10,000 additional births, it still wouldn't reverse the demographic decline. Well, but that's one example of where, just I think people don't fully internalize the barriers to having kids. So car seats is, again, it sounds like almost an oddly trivial one but it does have a measurable impact. And that's before you get to housing, education— fully internalize the barriers to having kids. So car seats is, again, it sounds like almost an oddly trivial one but it does have a measurable impact. And that's before you get to housing, education— I think you could certainly say, well, what if we took all these things that have some marginal effect and we just turned them all up to 11 and saw what happened. And I think you'd make a plausible argument that you'd see a bump in fertility, especially if you had a pro-natalism law package that did all these things at once. And so you start a national conversation around how kids are great when you have more kids and we specifically focused on existing families and got them to go to N plus one or N plus two. Make a big difference. And that's what Australia actually did when I was in, I guess my teens, so let's say around 2000, was like, “Have a third child for the treasurer.” But the same problems kind of stick there. But this is obviously a very complicated problem because there are many countries on earth where these counterfactuals exist, at least in part, and it hasn't miraculously turned around the birth rate. And actually the number of developed Western liberal democracies where the birth rate is not either already catastrophically low or falling fast is very, very small and probably will be zero before long. But it did occur to me today, having spoken to a friend of mine about children, whether or not to have children and so on, that our evolution did not depend upon us in the past having a deep obsession with the need to have children. Because we didn't have contraception and we had sex drive. So children would just happen then. But once you have kids, then you're all about kids. As soon as you hold the baby in your hands, you're like, “Kids are fucking great! This is great. I might have six more of these.” But until you have that first one, you don't realize. You don't know. It hasn't come in yet. There's no evolved necessity to go out and have kids. Whereas with food, it's obvious. People get excited about food. So it sucks to be evolution in that case, I guess. But actually if you run the math on our demographics right now and kind of how dire it is, even if as a result of listening to this podcast, every single person in the West just immediately started having babies, it still wouldn't really for many decades… This hole we've dug for ourselves, there's basically no way out of that. There's no way to avoid it. I think the news that came out yesterday was the triple lock in the UK is going to go up by 4.7% against a backdrop of inflation of two-point-something percent and economic growth of like 0%. What's the triple lock?…

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