Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
34 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“The Wall Street Journal had never been wrong in my experience as a 19-year-old who knew nothing about anything.”
02 / commitment
“Please tweet at me if I'm wrong in 2030. I will happily eat crow. I want to eat crow.”
03 / uncertainty
“I don't know if I'm inserting those words into his mouth. The suggestion was genuinely his.”
04 / uncertainty
“Effectively every time we had a verbal green light with regards to money, I would advance the company, the charity… Charities are companies, by the way. I don't know if that is obvious.”
05 / commitment
“" Very plausibly, we should get on the nightly news and say, "I received the following email from the White House that says we should stop this everywhere.” If you point a gun at me, I will comply with this at the point of a gun.”
06 / uncertainty
“Oh, goodness. I don't know about the productivity numbers. Generally, I do know that Steam keeps a counter of how much I'm playing video games in a year.”
07 / evaluation
“There is one tiny actor who understands that he has unitary control over some decisions, and who is capable of betting boldly on those without a huge amount of process when it is important to bet boldly on things.”
08 / commitment
“If people counterfactually point to say, World War II, I will say read more history there.”
09 / evaluation
“Interestingly, I was a marketing engineer earlier in my career and really thought that was important.”
10 / belief
“Here I have to stop for a disclaimer. I think people in county health departments did real important work.”
11 / disagreement
“If you tell me something which says the laws of physics have been suspended and will be in the future, I won't agree with that.”
12 / evaluation
“It’s partly because of political incentives and because we're approaching an election year. It’s also because of the quirky way that American parties and candidates bounce off each other.”
13 / evaluation
“" A thing that might not be obvious to most people in the world is that AppAmaGooBookSoft literally have teams of people whose job is public health because they are the operating system of the world right now.”
14 / preference
“Crypto fans would not like to hear it from me. So I prefer Vitalik Buterin's articulation of this question from 2017.”
15 / prediction
“Maybe because we thought we had very limited state capacity at the time, the government would make rational decisions and go after $10-100 million enormous white collar crooks and drug trafficking cartels a year.”
16 / evaluation
“" Amazon would say, "we literally do that every day." They say, “back in December, people were saying on the news this would be an unprecedented logistics challenge because the vaccine has to be kept at ultra-low temperatures.”
17 / preference
“If I had ended up working in a water treatment plant, I'd probably be writing about water treatment plants because I enjoy writing.”
18 / evaluation
“He says very loudly that the reason why he got this opportunity to do bitcoin arbitrage between Japan and the United States is because he was able to do something that the rest of the world wasn't.”
19 / recommendation
“I would tell that individual to go to the county website and tell whatever lies are necessary to get an appointment with me. They come in for an appointment and I will inject them rather than verifying the lies that were on the appointment card because basically eff the rules.”
20 / recommendation
“Be very careful about saying things like “Oh, the tech industry is so over, haha,” as a joke because it is quite possible that someone will listen to that and just perceive the surface-level meaning of it.”
21 / belief
“Now we have an existence proof of it happening, and I am reevaluating what I think about the world and how tractable various problems are in it.”
22 / belief
“I think if you’re not a heritage reader of Japanese or Chinese, you should benchmark it at least three years to be professionally capable at it.”
23 / belief
“I think there is a material chance it is truly worth something like $30, potentially negative after you add government fines and other actions that happen.”
24 / prediction
“” I’m an American who lived in Japan for many years, and I expect in the future to, at some point, be an American living in Japan.”
25 / evaluation
“The median haul that a bank robber gets is about $8,000. It is the worst possible way to earn $8,000 because a career bank thief — the other word for that is long-term guest of the United States government.”
26 / evaluation
“For a while and continuing, I thought that crypto was drawing a lot of the fraud out of the more traditional sectors of the economy, because if you do it in crypto, that wasn’t fraud, or it was fraud that you would get away with and make a substantial amount of money doing.”
27 / evaluation
“Depending on the bank and the locality, et cetera, it’s between 200 and 500. So, if you turn away a single customer or two customers in a row to open accounts because you had three parking spaces where you could have had seven, you’ve done a very outsized amount of damage to your financial institution, and thus over-provision the parking in all the places.”
28 / prediction
“Then Elon Musk came around and said, “Actually, I think we can cheat the costs of getting things up to orbit by, oh, three orders of magnitude.”
29 / prediction
“If the human race does not exist in a hundred years, it is almost definitionally because of some knock-on consequence of the invention of the internet.”
30 / evaluation
“Many, many tens of billions of dollars of check fraud happened over the years because of that issue, and we just took the punches and developed a vast shadow infrastructure to defang this fundamental, irreducible security hole in the heart of the checking system.”
31 / preference
“He doesn’t know me, but I think after walking into his office, I can beg, borrow, or steal a job there and do something much more impactful, important, personally fulfilling, et cetera, over the next couple of years, doesn’t seem that I’ve been doing the last couple of years.”
32 / evaluation
“I will say one thing about the experience, is that having a lot of free time on your hands in the evenings and no outlet for English was a great push in the right direction of writing more than most people do in their 20s.”
33 / evaluation
“It is possible to be a net-negative productive debt collector, and since your activity is tracked, your employer will eventually come to understand that about you. But most people who leave don’t leave because this is a job that is beyond their intellectual capability or because the script they’re given doesn’t work well, et cetera, et cetera.”
34 / evaluation
“Since the corner bodega can easily verify that the Tide hasn’t been tampered with because the Tide seal is on it, and has basically unlimited willingness to do small-dollar transactions that make money, that was a way to recycle Tide which had been stolen — or which had been acquired by means that were not stealing, but also not exactly the official way of getting Tide — and recycle it into the more or less legitimate economy, insofar as we think that the corner bodega is more or less legitimate, which I think is a complicated story.”