Nadia Asparouhova: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes, that actually raises an interesting question that I've been wondering about. There have been movements that have been focused on “community building” in an explicit way, effective altruism is a good example of that. And then there's other movements where they have a charismatic founder who doesn't really try to recruit people. I'm thinking of somebody like Peter Thiel. Once every year or two, he'll go on a podcast and have this really cryptic back and forth. And then just kind of go away into a hole for a few months or a few years. I'm curious, which one do you think is more effective? Given the fact that you're not really competing for votes and the absolute number of people is not what you care about. It's not clear what you care about but you do want to have more influence among the elites who matter in politics and tech as well. What are your thoughts on those kinds of strategies? Explicitly trying to community build versus just kind of projecting out there in a cryptic way. Somewhat being cryptic myself, I favor the cryptic methodology. You mentioned Peter Thiel and the Thielverse is one of the most influential things. It is partly so effective because it is hard to even define what it is or wrap your head around that. You just know that every interesting person you meet somehow has some weird connection to Peter Thiel. But I think this is sort of that evolution from the 501(c)(3) foundation to the idea machine. Implicit in that this switch from — used to start the Nadia Asparova Foundation or whatever. It had your name on it and it was all about — What do I as a funder want to do in the world? And you spend all this time doing this classical research, going out into the field, talking to people and you sit and you think, “Okay, here's a strategy I'm going to pursue.” And ultimately, it's very, very donor centric in this very explicit way. Within traditional philanthropy, you're seeing this backlash against that. For example in non-profit land, you're seeing the locus of power moving from being very donor centric to being community centric and people saying, “Well, we don't really want the donors telling us what to do, even though it's also their money.” Instead, let's have this be driven by the community from the ground up. That's maybe one very literal reaction against having the donor as the central power figure. But I think idea machines are maybe the more realistic or effective answer. Without the presence of a funder, a community is just a community. They're just sitting around and talking about ideas of, what could possibly happen? They don't have any money to make anything happen. Really effective funders are good at being subtle and thoughtful. No one wants to see the Peter Thiel foundation necessarily. That's just not the style of how it works but you meet so many people that are being funded by the same person. Just going out and aggressively arming the rebels is a more a distributed, decentralized way of thinking about spreading one's power, instead of just starting just starting a foundation. Even if you look at the life of influential politicians, somebody like LBJ or Robert Moses, how much of it was calculated and how much of it was just decades of building up favors and building up connections in a way that had no definite and clear plan, but you're just hoping that someday you can call upon them in a Godfather way. By the way, this is also where your work on open source comes in, right? There's this idea that in the movement, everybody will come in with their ideas and you can community build your way towards what should be funded. And yeah, I'm inclined to believe that it's probably a few people who have these ideas about what should be funded. The rest of it is either just a way of building up engagement and building up hype, or maybe just useless. What are your thoughts on it?…

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