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William Eden on Rome, Negative Actualization, and Covid Epistemics (Episode 30)
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Want to become more Stoic? Join us and other Stoics this October: Stoicism Applied by Caleb Ontiveros and Michael Tremblay on Maven
"No, we have not picked all the low-hanging fruit yet."
In this conversation, Caleb Ontiveros speaks with William Eden – a recovering economist turned biotech venture capitalist. They talk about a wide range of topics: the importance of history, whether Rome is a good analogy to today, Stoicism, voluntary discomfort, negative visualization, and Covid.
BecomingEden
(00:43) Introduction
(01:55) History
(13:23) Rome
(34:40) Will's Take on Stoicism
(58:50) Negative Actualization
(01:07:54) Covid
(01:44:06) Lab Leak
***
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Stoicism and Ancient Philosophies
00:00:00
Speaker
where the voluntary discomfort part comes in is this question of, well, what do you do when there's no outside stressor? And I think is this real question of, can you develop a practice where you're willing to endure the voluntary pain or suffering in order to produce some effect that will make you happier and stronger later?
00:00:22
Speaker
And I think that's something that's very not easy to do, but to me feels like it fits very much within Stoic philosophy, as well as other ancient Greek philosophies too. You know, they also had ideas about sort of enlightened hedonism where you're actually not just doing the most pleasurable thing in every moment,
Guests Introduction and Their Backgrounds
00:00:43
Speaker
right?
00:00:43
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
00:01:00
Speaker
And in this conversation, I speak with Will Eden. Will is a recovering economist turned biotech venture capitalist. He's currently entrepreneur in residence at Ulysses Diversified Holdings. Before that, he worked at Teal Capital. We talk about a range of topics here, the importance of history, whether Rome is a good analogy to the political situation today, stoicism, voluntary discomfort, negative visualization, and COVID.
00:01:29
Speaker
This wide-ranging conversation is a great intro to Will's Epistemic Virtues, the thinking style of someone who cares about carefully figuring out what is going on. If you'd like to learn more about Will, you can find him on Twitter at WilliamAEden or at BecomingEden.com. And here is our conversation.
Is History Actionable for Investments?
00:01:55
Speaker
So let's start with a big one upfront. How actionable is history? It's funny that you say that this is like the really big one. I feel like in some ways it's almost like a marginal question because almost no one seems to think about it or care. I've been trying to give some thought about how to discuss this. And I thought of a framing of it, which is helpful. Suppose you want to invest in the stock market.
00:02:23
Speaker
Is it actionable to learn any history about, you know, what the stock market has done over the last hundred years? Yes, yes, of course. At some level.
00:02:39
Speaker
Right. If you really believe the strictest form of the efficient markets hypothesis, right, the current price contains all of the information throughout history and the price should be just as likely
00:02:56
Speaker
from here to go up or down. So why would you ever have to learn? What would you gain by knowing what the markets have done for one century, you say? Yeah, yeah. I guess the assumption is you would probably deny the efficient market hypothesis. At least when it comes to history, it seems like
00:03:20
Speaker
not all the information is factored in. Maybe that's not as true in a financial case, but if you want to zoom out and talk about the history case, maybe it is more true there.
00:03:31
Speaker
Well, I would actually argue that it's also true for markets too. For one thing, if you look at the prices of stocks, for instance, they tend to go up quite a bit more than every other asset class. More than bonds, more than gold. And if you don't take that sort of long-term view, you don't even realize that there's a puzzle there.
00:03:53
Speaker
And if you look at the actual investing advice that we get, it's, oh, you should just put all of your money into the stock market, maybe until you're 60 or something. But you wouldn't know that unless you actually went back and looked at the history. And that is a strategy that just radically outperforms everything. And it's not even close.
00:04:18
Speaker
Right? So right off the bat, just the very basic investing advice that we get is based on this historical abnormality, which is that you make more money if you put money in stocks. So I would just argue right off the bat, the answer is you can clearly learn something.
00:04:37
Speaker
The next question is, what exactly can you learn? Because ultimately that's a very high level thing. So maybe the answer is, you know, you can learn some, some very high level patterns, but history is never going to exactly repeat itself. And I think you need to avoid drawing a parallel that's just a little bit too close.
00:04:59
Speaker
So one thing that you wouldn't want to do is say, okay, well, the stock market did exactly this in 2000. And I think it's going to do exactly that same thing right now. You will certainly be wrong. It's definitely not going to do the exact same thing. And I think folks who look at history also know this because as they say, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
00:05:25
Speaker
And I think then the question is, you actually need to develop a better model of what are the relevant features, right? And I think once you really drill down into which features you think are universal, which features you think are going to actually persist and which features you think are sort of more contingent at that time, then you can actually start to extract lessons there, I would say.
00:05:53
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That seems plausible. So just one way to make it more concrete is often I'll bump into people, say in San Francisco, they're quite focused on working on their startup, what have you. And if you wanted to describe their attitudes towards history friendly in a friendly manner, you would say they're very focused on working on a startup. If you wanted to be less friendly, you could say they're essentially Philistines. You know, they know.
00:06:18
Speaker
And why would you waste time on on history anyway? So what's your general approach? Like is it useful for like this kind of person who's especially focused in their day-to-day practical projects to have a knowledge base of facts that maybe are even slightly outside of their their industry or go back to periods in history on the order of thousands of years ago? How would you how would you for that that sort of issue?
Should Founders Consider History?
00:06:45
Speaker
So I think for a startup founder in particular, some of what they have to do is be extremely focused on the exact problem that they're trying to solve that's right in front of them, right? In many ways as a startup founder, you don't want to get distracted. So I think there is like a reasonable case that a startup founder probably doesn't need to know 2000 years of history to be much better at their job.
00:07:10
Speaker
Arguably, you don't even want them to be focused on that. I think if you take the outside view of a startup, the answer is the startup is almost certainly going to fail. And in a weird way, if you're a founder and you learn a bunch of history about startups, you're probably more likely to think that you're going to fail, which is going to actually make you more likely to fail. You could do bias search, right? I do know lots of founders who in fact study the successful founders.
00:07:38
Speaker
And I think there is a question there of can founders actually learn something from other founders who were successful in the past?
00:07:48
Speaker
And I would say that the argument ends zero to one is that the answer is kind of like, if you read zero to one, it's trying to lay out a bunch of general rules for what makes a successful startup at the exact same time that he says every successful startup is kind of special and kind of different. Right. So I feel like the study of the history of startups itself kind of contains.
00:08:14
Speaker
that contradiction. But here's where I actually would say learning a little bit of history is directly actionable for founders. And that's about the funding cycle. And what I've noticed with a lot of founders over the last 15 years, they've never really experienced a downturn. Not, not like a really, really big one. And I think that has affected the way that the entire field operates. And in particular, there is just this
00:08:44
Speaker
baseline assumption that most founders have, which is you can raise money every year to two years at least a slightly higher valuation, if not a much higher one, and that money is basically there. And we're about to see that dry up. I mean, we are sort of in the process of really the first market downturn wasn't an extremely short-lived spike from COVID. We basically had in 15 years
00:09:12
Speaker
And I think that a lot of the founders today are really badly positioned. And I think that if they'd done a little bit more study about what funding was like in 2000, 2008, I think they would have been much more likely to build up a big war chest when the funding was good and would have been less likely to burn through it quite as much.
00:09:36
Speaker
Now, would that have maybe slowed their growth overall? Would that have been a good strategy 10 years ago? Maybe not. But I would argue that the point of history isn't showing you how to best thrive in the current environment. It's about giving you a reasonable probability distribution of what the future environment might look like.
00:09:57
Speaker
And I think for a founder that doesn't put at least some probability on there's going to be a downturn, what could I do to survive in a downturn? Even if you think a downturn is only 10% likely or something like that, that's a 10% chance of just absolute failure. That's pretty bad.
00:10:16
Speaker
So I think even for someone who is, you know, laser focused on a startup, at least you need to understand what is the reasonable possibilities of what you might face over the course of, you know, the next 10 years. And that's going to be a lot more variable than you might think, unless you just through some sort of like crazy event. Right, right.
00:10:42
Speaker
Perhaps one general lesson from history is that the good times are very fragile. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think that it's, I think it's tricky. I definitely would say as, as I've gotten older and as I've just seen more things happen in the world, I would say when I was a teenager, I was more of like, both optimistic and more of an accelerationist in that like,
00:11:09
Speaker
I basically thought that things that can't really continue won't and they'll collapse. But the basic system that we have in place will probably rebuild something that's a little bit more functional. Now, I think it's a little hit or miss. And I think that if you look at the broadest sweep of history, most downturns and even most collapses are relatively local and relatively short-lived. You might have a really bad.
00:11:38
Speaker
generation, maybe even two or something. But like generally you can expect like your grandkids or at least your grandkids are probably doing somewhat better. And that was true for like many, many, many centuries. But then there is also these instances of collapse that there is no recovery from, or one isn't really truly surpassed for, you know, hundreds or a thousand years. So.
Parallels Between Roman and Modern Times
00:12:05
Speaker
In short, I think with something sort of as complex as our current system is, I think it is both fragile and that there is the possibility of a truly catastrophic collapse. And I also think within a very wide range of operating parameters, we are going to reconfigure to at least something vaguely functional, if not like, you know, much, much better.
00:12:29
Speaker
Got it. Got it. I see. So it's a mix of, mix of optimism with some expectation of, or at least if not an expectation, a serious possibility of something close to collapse.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think that we have to be mindful and wary of the fact that a collapse is possible. And that might be a 0.1% chance, that might be a 10% chance. But I think that the right thing to do is to have non-zero thought and planning to the really bad scenarios. I just think that that's a very prudent thing to do if you look at the broad sweep.
00:13:06
Speaker
of history, even if you think that it's not the most likely outcome, if we could prevent, you know, another period of centuries where humanity is, you know, trying to kill each other, like bows and arrows and spears, that would be hugely valuable. Hugely valuable.
00:13:24
Speaker
So analogy people always come back to, especially when they're thinking about collapse, renewal, revolution is the, yes, of course, is the late Republic of Rome. And since this is a stoic podcast, we need to ask about Rome and what you think about how useful this analogy, you know, going back to analogies involving Sulla, Marius, Cato, and of course Caesar. Lots of thoughts on that.
00:13:49
Speaker
Yeah, one thing that I think is a little bit that I would say is underrated about Rome is that it actually had a bunch of really meaningful transition. I would argue that over the, you know, thousand year history of Rome in the West, it really had a few major periods and there was a period of sort of crisis and chaos and collapse at the end of all of them. But the question is just what sort of came out of that?
00:14:17
Speaker
So you have the transition from the kingdom and we know very little about what life was like back then. Certainly there were some kings and they were overthrown and people seem really happy about their early Republic period. So I'd say that was a like transition in Rome seemingly went well, but also, you know, we don't have really good firsthand counts of what went down. It's possible that was a very like.
00:14:40
Speaker
horrible chaotic time. Also then you have the late republic which is specifically what you asked about and I think that that one's a super fascinating one because if you lived in any of let's say the three generation prior to the end you probably thought life was pretty bad. You're involved in non-stop warfare or
00:15:01
Speaker
street violence, mass murders when one side won or the other. There's a very reasonable chance that you were, you know, basically conscripted from your farm and sent off to war and you come back and someone has like bought your farm out from under you because you weren't home. Horrible things were happening and life was very bad. And the reason that I find this super interesting is the late republic did collapse.
00:15:28
Speaker
But the early Roman Empire, I think was actually perceived as a great improvement, actually.
00:15:35
Speaker
And I don't think that it necessarily had to go that way. I've tried to give this lots of thought, and it is a little bit weird. The first Roman emperor lived for a shockingly long time, much longer than most of his successors did. And I do wonder, you know, if Octavian had, say, died five years into his reign, we might not even have the Roman empire.
00:16:01
Speaker
I could have seen a situation where the Senate asserted control again, where there could have been another massive civil war straight out of the gates. But ultimately what we actually saw was a pretty long and peaceful reign for quite some time. Really was centuries until Rome was once again somewhat existentially threatened and torn by a lot of civil war. And that's a pretty good run.
00:16:31
Speaker
It's easy to sort of see that as kind of like the blank of an eye, but, you know, you could think about how your children's children's children's children just didn't know conflict. That's way better than what you had prior to a so-called collapse.
00:16:52
Speaker
Right. So I think that there is a lesson there, which is there are these periods of great upheaval, but they aren't necessarily always absolutely terrible once you manage to come out the other side. I think that's really path dependent and it's a little bit hard to tell.
00:17:08
Speaker
So if you're already in a situation that's, you know, really, really, really bad, it's possible the transition can actually make things better. Whereas if you're in a situation that's kind of okay and there's a violent transition, you know, I certainly wouldn't put good odds on the next thing being good. But I do think we, we have to at least acknowledge that for the average person, early empire was just better than the late.
00:17:34
Speaker
Republican era. They recently spoke with Jimmy Sony who wrote The Founders. His earlier book was on Cato the Younger and he said, I asked him about Cato's early life and he said that, oh, you should sort of see it as one of those Star Wars opening sequences where there's a list of all these terrible things that have happened before he came into the world, which I thought was really nice.
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah, very, very much so. Yeah, that is not a period of time that I would voluntarily choose to born into. Let's just say that. Right, right. But sorry, I interrupted. So you've got these other transitions in Rome. I would argue that Rome then went through two more phase transition.
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, so then you had the crisis of the third century, and if you look at the Roman Empire before and after that, they basically completely reorganized the whole system.
00:18:30
Speaker
And it went from looking like the kind of ancient Roman empire that we know of to something that looked a lot more like the early stages of feudalism. And that was clearly a crisis and a collapse that I would argue made life on most metrics, but not all metrics substantially worse than it was prior to that period.
00:18:49
Speaker
On the flip side, it did sort of stabilize the empire. And if you were in the core, you probably didn't have a horrible transition and you probably had a couple more pretty good centuries. But if you look, especially at kind of the periphery of the empire and the kind of lives that folks tended to lead there, I would argue that after the third century, life was clearly worse than it was before.
00:19:15
Speaker
And it was really a transition that kept the whole thing kind of holding together for a couple more centuries, more than that actually sort of fixed the problems. So I would argue that was a transition that was actually quite bad. And then there was the final fall, right? And that it's almost impossible to argue that anyone's life was significantly better off at that point. I do know that there's a lot of historical.
00:19:43
Speaker
revisionism and people don't want to use the term, the dark ages. And I get all of those arguments, but if you just look at objective metrics, like the height of the people that lived in those areas, they all shrank. Clearly life was much, much harder and much, much worse. And that's the collapse that I think most people kind of think of. And the one that folks focus on is like, that was truly catastrophic.
00:20:08
Speaker
But would argue none of the other transitions were truly catastrophic. Some of them things got better. Some of them things got worse. They were really crappy to kind of live through, but that was the one that really ended things. And that's the kind of thing that I think people are worried about today.
00:20:24
Speaker
Right, right. I mean, I suppose there is always what you mentioned earlier, there's always that question of contingency with the fall of the late Republic, where you end up with Octavian or Augustus, who seems like exceptionally bureaucratically competent. He has a grip next to him who is exceptionally competent. But imagine if it had been a different party, maybe if it had been Mark Antony who won, then probably your hopes for the Empire are not as high.
00:20:54
Speaker
Indeed, and I think that's why it is useful to look at a wide range of these major transitions in society, and you find that it's a pretty uneven distribution. There are a lot that have actually gone pretty well, and there are a lot that have gone horrifically bad.
00:21:15
Speaker
And I think that from my perspective, that has actually led me to be a little bit more conservative. I don't think we can just assume that if we're going to undergo a massive transition today, that it's definitely transitioning into a state that is better. I think it is useful to remember that we might transition into a state that's better. And it's very easy to see all of the things that are wrong with the current system.
00:21:41
Speaker
But the way that I feel right now is things are not working great and the risk of a larger collapse is absolutely there. But like, do I see the preconditions for a like peaceful transition to a new system? Also no.
00:21:56
Speaker
That makes me a little bit hesitant to say like radically overhaul the United States or something. We still have something that kind of works, even if it works poorly. And there's something to be said for like, maybe we need to keep this thing limping along for another, you know, 20 years or something. Is there a specific reason why HO is 20?
00:22:16
Speaker
Just because I think that's a reasonable timeframe. I would say right around when the financial crisis happened, that was probably when I was my most sort of doomer. I was privately telling people, yeah, the US maybe has 20 more good years.
00:22:36
Speaker
And it wasn't much more than 10 years after we sort of came out of that crisis that we then had the COVID thing. And I think that a lot of people who I've talked to over the years have definitely updated a little more towards my position, which isn't a good thing. I do think that 20 years was sort of overly pessimistic. I did try to go back and look at sort of how long societies take to actually collapse. And it's really tricky to answer that largely because
00:23:04
Speaker
when do you date the start of the fall? Like that is actually a surprisingly difficult question. Like I think that if things fell apart right now, I think future historians would look back and be like the 1970s were the start. Whereas if things collapse in like 40 years from now, I think people might be like the financial crisis was the start or something that happened, you know,
00:23:33
Speaker
20 years from now or something. But overall, I've tried to take a pretty wide view of this and the answer is usually things can take a lot longer.
00:23:45
Speaker
These things play out generally quite a bit more gradually than it feels like when you just read a history. I couldn't really find total collapses of civilizations faster than 10 years, and that usually required some overwhelming foreign power coming in and physically conquering something. If you look at purely endogenous collapses, I would say 20, 40, even up to 80 years.
00:24:10
Speaker
There can actually be these extremely long periods of just gradual decline where things are just a little bit worse and they're just a little bit worse and they're a little bit worse. But it's almost impossible to know when that exact tipping point is. And I'd say that is one of the major takeaways for me is when I look at the history of just like, you know, mass social unrest and uprisings, fairly often if you look at
00:24:39
Speaker
at what the people in charge were thinking and saying at the time, almost never actually realized that they were that close. And that's just one thing that leaves just like a little yellow flag in my head, which is like, there might be some crazy like overthrow of our government in like next year. And everyone could be completely shocked. And that would be totally consistent with what everyone throughout
00:25:09
Speaker
history has thought. And it's really easy to sort of look backwards and be like, well, there were clearly all these signs of massive discontent and arrest and all of these things. But for some reason, people in charge of the society just didn't see it, or maybe they didn't want to see it, or maybe they weren't perceiving the same signals then that we can see we're clearly there now.
00:25:36
Speaker
Maybe they were locked into this form of intra-elite competition so that they couldn't actually break themselves out of extracting too much from the commons. There has to be some reason why people throughout history just can't see it, but the answer is virtually always they cannot see it coming.
00:26:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's surprising because on one level, you very often will find significant voices arguing that there's decline occurring. There's a nice book called The Eternal Decline of the Roman Empire by a historian called Edward Watts, and he basically just...
00:26:18
Speaker
You know, it goes through all these people who said, oh, Rome's declining now. It's declining now throughout its 100-year lifespan. And sometimes it was correct that it was declining. And it seems like, you know, of course you find pockets of people, often quite large pockets of people saying this throughout history. But yeah, as you say, they're often surprised that, oh no, by declining now, we're right. And also it's happening really fast. It's almost similar towards people's attitudes towards death, where they think, oh, they know they're going to die, but they're not going to die in the next year or something like this.
00:26:46
Speaker
There's more uncertainty, of course, with the decline issue, but it does seem to me like there's something similar going on in the sense of both knowledge of the problem, but some amount of not wanting to stare at it directly almost. It's a little bit too much psychologizing.
00:27:02
Speaker
Well, maybe. I think there's a useful analogy there, which is something like to the people that are currently in charge of society, if there's a radical overhaul of society, they're not in charge anymore. And throughout most of history, that also meant that you were killed. So the idea that, you know, we're sort of over-psychologizing it, like, well,
00:27:26
Speaker
a civilization is made of humans. Why shouldn't we, psychologists? I feel like for the specific people in charge throughout most of history, if you were overthrown, you were also murdered. That's literally death. That's actually just fear of death. And I don't think that that's crazy. I think they also were very cognizant of the fact that if they got overthrown, they were probably going to be murdered. So I would say that, you know, we're not like over-psychologizing society. I think that's literally what's in people's heads.
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's right. I'm glad I thought of the metaphor, but my case might be more than that's quite strong. Excellent. Well, is there anything else you want to say on the history front? Yeah. I mean, I suppose to just like.
00:28:09
Speaker
to just look directly at the Rome comparison. I do think if you're going to draw that comparison to today, there is this very real question of like, which of the transitions is the current one like? Because if it's the fall of the empire, our future doesn't look good.
00:28:29
Speaker
If it's the crisis of the third century, we're going to be fine-ish, but we're going to look at a century-long gradual decline from here. If it's the fall of the late public, then I think there's this open question. Do we get something much better or do we get something much worse? It's very hard to actually know. I think when folks try to compare us to Rome, they're actually not really very specific about which period they think that we're in.
00:28:58
Speaker
Right? I mean, that's a very long history. So I would just say like, it's, it is absolutely a valid comparison. And I think people just need to think about it much more carefully and to also look at what are the factors that are probably comparable and which things don't really make sense. And I'll just throw a few quick thoughts out there.
00:29:22
Speaker
One is like the Roman economy was mostly based on like conquest and slavery. And the problem with the conquest based empire is that you kind of have to always be militarily expanding in order to extract, you know, new things from folks who order you. And the US economy doesn't resemble that at all. And so right off the bat, I think you just have to, to realize that like certain economic fundamentals are just not the same.
00:29:53
Speaker
On the flip side, I think that humans are still humans and people who live today are not that psychologically different than the people who lived 2000 years ago.
00:30:05
Speaker
maybe a little bit, but not that much actually. And when I look at the accounts, particularly of the late republic, it does seem a little bit eerily similar to what's going on today. So I don't think we should a hundred percent rule out that there's actually something similar-ish at play. And yeah, just like a lot of the social commentary going on then
00:30:31
Speaker
just really sounds eerily familiar to what people are saying now. You know, there were lots of outcries about how we're like losing our morality and traditional gender roles and all kinds of these things. And, you know, there's like bad things there. And, you know, I don't think it's obvious that we, you know, should keep things exactly as it were 2000 years ago and like the present day. But I'm just like flagging it as like,
00:31:00
Speaker
the actual words being produced by people of that era sound shockingly like the words being produced by the people of our era right now. And I think when you're looking at it from the sort of human psychology perspective, I think that looks quite similar.
00:31:15
Speaker
And when you're looking at it from the perspective of like the concentration of wealth, like squeezing out small businesses, things like that, I again start to see lots of parallels. So I think just in summary, I don't think we have this like weird feature where we have to continually conquer other people to like expand our wealth, but like the social and core economic patterns that we saw do look quite similar.
00:31:45
Speaker
And I do think that the other factor that does look similar, not just to Rome, but to every empire throughout all of history, is that we tend to get very big, and we tend to start lots of wars, and the wars tend to be really far from home, and they tend to not really affect the core that much, except financially.
00:32:06
Speaker
And a fiscal crisis has basically ended every empire pretty much ever. And that seems like a pretty close parallel, actually. It very much looks to me like the US empire is greatly overextended and we just keep pushing that a little bit more on the margin. And that I think is probably the greatest comparison historically that gives me like an extreme level of pause.
00:32:35
Speaker
Right. Right. Yeah. Just so quick reactions to that. I suppose on the morality front, that does seem like the sort of thing that many people complain about throughout the ages. So it's hard to know how predictive that is, right? You have Cato the elder complaining about the influence of Greeks and then, you know, the younger will continue to complain about variety of different influences in Rome and see his opponents as a feminine or what have you. But yeah, certainly there's some amount of breakdown around political norms.
00:33:05
Speaker
that's occurred during the late republic.
00:33:08
Speaker
There was something I've been thinking about recently as you have a famous or well-known phenomenon is that generals had more command over their armies and people became more dependent on their generals rather than the state. That's something that doesn't hold up well now, at least in the US. That has held up throughout most of the world even in the modern era, but I do concur that that's less of a problem specifically in the US case.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah, I was wondering if the breakdown of part loyalty might be somewhat analogous. This is not something I've entirely thought through yet. Well, it's tricky because, yeah, you effectively had two parties in Rome, one of which were basically the populace and one of which were like, keep the current system in place. And you're kind of seeing divisions along those lines in the U.S., though I think that this has been like very fluid since the 2016.
00:34:06
Speaker
front election where like the left used to be more populous and now like the right is more populous. So we're seeing a little bit of a political realignment, but that doesn't quite feel to me like the parties themselves are collapsing. And I wouldn't really say that we saw that in Rome either. I would say if anything, we're starting to see a dividing line in the US that looks a little bit more similar to the dividing lines that happened late in Rome too. Right, right. You have a little bit more of a stronger culture wars, right?
00:34:37
Speaker
Yes. Well, another thing I want to talk to you about moving away from the history then is some stoic ideas you have and you've written about and you've practiced. So the very first one is on how you've thought about this issue of the dichotomy of control or thinking about practically what is up to you and what is not.
Stoic Philosophy and Control
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah. So.
00:35:01
Speaker
I will say, you know, I've read a fair bit from the Stoics. And if you check my website, I did summarize summary. So I do think that if folks want like a re-introduction to some of the ideas in Stoicism, I think that's actually a pretty good starting place. And then I just want to confess that despite the fact that I have in fact looked into this a fair bit, I do feel like Stoics would not recognize me as living a very like Stoic life.
00:35:26
Speaker
philosophy, at least right now. So I feel a little bit awkward sort of expounding on stoicism when I don't feel like I'm a very good stoic. I would say though, like some of these ideas have stuck with me and then some of them I think I've kind of like independently come to similar conclusions.
00:35:43
Speaker
And we end up at the same, you know, final point, but I came through non means that still feels quite valuable to me. Right. Right. But I have in mind is like, there are some ideas you have that are shared between you and aesthetics and it'd be useful to go through them or at least interesting.
00:36:02
Speaker
So like the first one I had, we had talked about a little bit is this idea of this division between what is up to you and what's not. And that's always, for modern Stoics, that's always an important rule. And also there's a lot to explore in terms of, well, what is actually up to you and how do you think about that? And what's your attitude towards those things that are not up to you? Yeah.
00:36:24
Speaker
Can't say why this framing has really worked for me, but I feel like it really has. And in most of my life, it's served me quite well. I think that the boundary between what you can and can't control is a little bit fuzzy. So I think it's, it's slightly more complicated than would appear on the surface, but in some cases, you know.
00:36:46
Speaker
Actually, it is quite clear and I think it has been helpful. So ways that this has shown up in my life, I guess, we've, you know, had a couple of health scares, for instance, with pets or with a family member or something like that. And that has often thrown into really sharp contrast, like when we need to make a decision about health that could be like a life or death decision possibly.
00:37:11
Speaker
And then sort of sitting back and waiting and just having to be there with someone who is super, super sick. And it's like, well, in this moment, there's actually nothing that I can do to make them better. I can sit with them, I can be with them, I can talk to them, but there's no immediate medical decision that I can make that will just solve this problem or give me more answers. I might be waiting on the
00:37:41
Speaker
results of a blood test, you know, maybe that's going to come back in a day or maybe like several hours or something. But like, I don't really feel that constant anxiety during that period of like, Oh, I need to think about what I'm going to do. Like when I get that knowledge or something, it's more like I can actually just accept that we've done everything we can possibly do in this moment. And it allowed me to just like.
00:38:05
Speaker
let go of that until I need to make the next sort of like critical. So I think that, that, that is one situation that I've had come up a few times that felt the most stark. Most situations in life are a little bit more ambiguous there. I would say one of the hardest blurred lines for me is like,
00:38:27
Speaker
To a certain degree, we have control over ourselves. But I think there's a little bit of a question about exactly how much control we do have, you know? There's a lot of talk about, say, the, like, elephant and the rider or, like, System 1.
00:38:42
Speaker
There's lots of thought about how we're actually like a non-unitary mind. So I think there actually is some like weird, blurry area internally about how much control we actually have. So that's like one place where I've found it harder. Another place I found it harder is, you know, we do have some control over ourselves. And then, you know, we can say that we don't have control over other people and what they think and what they do. But I think the answer is that we actually have non-zero control.
00:39:11
Speaker
When we say words to another person, they're hearing those words and it's changing the internal state of their brain.
00:39:20
Speaker
So it actually does seem clear that there is also some control that's not just in ourselves, but we have some locus of control in other people. And it's not clear exactly how much is there. And then I think the final case for me that's like sort of fuzzy, which to just sort of like tie it back into the piece about history, which is something like if there is some really high chance of like civilizational collapse,
00:39:43
Speaker
our life in that world is going to be much much worse and like how much control do we actually have on a like civilizational level in order to avoid and like save ourselves from and like i noticed that i do have some anxiety around having to like live through like a total civilizational collapse but even there i would say that we do have control like we can stockpile things you can stockpile food you could like have a generator you can get
00:40:08
Speaker
solar panels like there there actually are it turns out all of these things you can do to sort of like harden yourself so that you can actually do better so you know i would say that's one where like it seems like it's fuzzy but we actually have a lot more control than we think in summary this serves me extremely well in life when it's very clear it's harder when it's not clear and i think it's a little less clear than stoicism would like to pretend sometimes but like at least in many many cases in life
00:40:37
Speaker
It's been really helpful for me to just like set aside that anxiety and focus on what's actually actionable.
00:40:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That's really useful. One framing that we have on this, which I'm curious to hear your take on is, so reframing this stoic idea away from control and making it more about identity. So what are you as a person? Well, you are ultimately a choice-making being, and all you are responsible for are your choices and your judgments. So not
00:41:12
Speaker
thoughts that you have that may be a result of system one or intuition, but these judgments you've built over time. And that is on the stoic line, all that really matters are your reflective judgments and your choices. And I think
00:41:30
Speaker
There's certainly some controversial philosophical ideas here around the nature of the mind, but that has been, I think, a useful way to sort of expound on this idea of control, which certainly gets very blurry.
00:41:47
Speaker
I guess there could be a kind of useful fiction here, which is that we always have full control over ourselves. And in fact, that's the only thing that we do have control over. And, you know, that's maybe a kind of like mental hack for sort of gaining a little more control on the margin. I assume that you've at least sometimes in your life felt like you weren't fully in control of your actions. Is that fair or not?
00:42:11
Speaker
I'm not sure if that's true, if I've never not been in control of my decisions, yeah. I think there's probably some, the next thing to do is clear out what do we mean when we say decision. But I don't think I have. That seems tricky. But I would also say that the one thing I deny that I think other people accept is the idea that
00:42:31
Speaker
You could be in control of a decision even if you don't feel like you're in control. So in many meditative type experiences, one can get into that state of mind where it seems as though thoughts are just occurring. And in the most extreme version, you might be walking and you're not even making the decision to take a next step or what have you.
00:42:52
Speaker
And I think that, you know, one interpretation of this experience is you've discovered something true about the mind, which is that you aren't actually making decisions. Instead, there's just all this data coming in. Another interpretation, the one I favor is that, well, when you meditate, you also don't think there are chairs because there are only, you know, these pixels, these spots are brown and so on. But that doesn't follow from that, that there aren't chairs and it's sort of a separate
00:43:18
Speaker
ontological debate over that. And I don't think mere experience is going to settle that debate, if you will. I mean, I think there is a consistent viewpoint which encompasses both of these, which is that like the objective world does exist outside of yourself, but the thing that we directly experience is a simulation created by our brain.
00:43:41
Speaker
In what sense am I directly seeing this laptop in front of me versus I'm perceiving the neural patterns in my brain that have taken in this view from outside my skull. I have eyes that have looked at this thing and it's gathered some data and then my brain is filling in all of these pieces.
00:44:06
Speaker
And I think I'm seeing a laptop and what I'm actually experiencing is the neural pattern of a laptop in my head. So you can both be fully living in this sort of world of your mind, but the world of the mind, in fact,
00:44:24
Speaker
it does, for the most part, a pretty accurate job of telling you what the outside world is. So, you know, I don't think just because you do some like mindfulness meditation and then all of a sudden you're like directly interacting with the like sensory perceptions, I don't think that has to mean that it doesn't acknowledge that the outside world is like still there. But yeah, I have certainly had that experience of doing something more like noticing the thoughts that are happening.
00:44:52
Speaker
And I do think that it is a little more difficult once you've recognized that and just perceived that to then, you know, there is this question of like, well, what is the you then? What is the you that feels like you have control? Is it a subset of your thoughts that you're choosing to identify with?
00:45:14
Speaker
Is it a particular process that's doing something like directing attention? Which is one sort of function that's maybe happening in the frontal cortex, but it's a particularly useful and helpful one. It's a more goal-directed one, and we can feel that it's doing that.
00:45:34
Speaker
I do think there, there, there is this still very real question of like, what, what is this thing that we think is doing? And I actually think that it's fine to identify with that process. And I think that in some ways what stoicism is, is it's a philosophy that says, you know, that thing is real and it's powerful. It actually has much more control over what you're doing, if you in fact let it
00:46:03
Speaker
operate. I think other philosophies, there's more of this sort of noticing that you're not directly in control, that it is this whole ecosystem of all of these processes, and you can identify with the entire mind system, not just with that one thing.
00:46:22
Speaker
And I think you can then sort of get back to the stoic idea of full control, which is like, yeah, the entire system that is my brain decided that I was going to eat the ice cream instead of the salad.
00:46:34
Speaker
And you can just own it, right? Like you, you had control over that because you in fact identify with the entire system and that's what the entire system wanted. So yeah, I sort of feel like you can go either direction with it and get to a place where you're still like focused on the fact that you do have control and ownership. But I think you can almost come at it from like diametrically opposite philosophies. Yeah. Yeah. That's so it's almost sort of similar to where.
00:47:01
Speaker
The view, or at least to my mind, it seems similar to the view where there is no self and you end up identifying with things outside of yourself or the view where, no, there is a self, but it's much larger than you had thought. And those plate views can end up in the same area where you end up identifying, either expanding your sense of self or letting it sort of collapse into something much larger. Either way, you are some larger thing usually in some metaphorical sense.
00:47:32
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like all self and no self, you know, basically converge to the same place. But I think that stoicism is actually like, no, there is a self and that is you and that self is actually in control. Yeah. Which feels really, really different.
00:47:48
Speaker
Yeah, that is different. So you can come at it from different routes, but yes, that is a different view from the no-self and all-self view. So the next thing I wanted to ask you about is this idea of negative actualization as opposed to the stoic idea of negative visualization, the idea that you should premeditate on things that might go wrong in order to better plan for them or better prepare for them. So what's negative actualization?
00:48:11
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess in terms of visualization first, I would say that I still very much do plan for things in my head. I would say that my perception of what is happening there with stoicism isn't that you're pre-planning for the bad thing, it's that you're creating a sharp contrast to the life that you live.
00:48:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think you can do it multiple ways. One is, you know, imagine that something goes wrong and then you can't prepare for it. Maybe the more you imagine different scenarios you could account that could arise during the day and then you can better plan for it, but also sort of psychologically prepare yourself for it. It's something that's indifferent. And what matters on the stoic view is that you act a virtuously in whatever situation arise, or you can do the view that
00:49:00
Speaker
As you mentioned, imagine that you have lost whatever you have or what you value and then use that as a tool to appreciate what is, what is around you. Yeah. And so for some reason, I feel like this has not really worked super well for me.
00:49:19
Speaker
I do find if I can sit down and really actually just do it properly and think of how horrible life could be and then successfully contrasting it with my current life and then feeling the gratitude for the good things that I do have in life, I feel like that does kind of work. For some reason, it's never been the mental process that I gravitate towards and I don't feel like it's
00:49:45
Speaker
been wholly positive for me either. I do wonder if this is just a psychological difference. I think I tend to like ruminate on the bad things and it's much harder for me to just like wholeheartedly feel the gratitude that like the bad thing isn't happening to me right now and instead it's almost like thinking about all of the bad things that could happen and then feeling sort of bad that they might happen and so like
00:50:11
Speaker
Yeah, I'm curious if you have thoughts. Is this something you think could just universally work for everyone? Do you think it's psychologically contingent? Do you think I just need to train my brain better, and if I focused on it, and I actually did this daily, that it would help? Why do you think this doesn't land as much for me, I guess?
00:50:33
Speaker
Yeah. So I would say my view is that even stoicism as a larger life philosophy, at least as a practical system, probably is not for everyone. So even at the larger scale, I think it's not a universal practical philosophy. So why not? And how can you tell who it's good for?
00:50:51
Speaker
Oh, that's a great question. Well, let me answer the question about negative visualization and I'll go back to the stoicism bit. So I think negative visualization might not work for people who are too prone to managing some worse outcome.
00:51:10
Speaker
And they're not in a space where they can imagine that worse outcome and still feel safe. So I think, yeah, in many of those cases, if you feel like that is you, then it will not be useful exercise. Maybe there are kinds of almost like exposure type therapy techniques you can use. So you can imagine a slightly bad thing occurring and work up and a number of people find that useful. More generally, I think just for
00:51:36
Speaker
mental techniques, meditative type techniques. If you are prone to rumination like many people are, I think that you just need to do some amount of search and really cut out any of those that...
00:51:51
Speaker
you find are leading yourself to more rumination. I think that's probably just my initial first stab. And if you find that visualization is that for you, at least initially, then that seems like sufficient reason to try something else. Yeah. I think if I compare it to something like insight adaptation,
00:52:11
Speaker
It's really not clear to me that it's actually had a net positive effect on my life because I feel like taught me to perceive a lot more like subtle shades of suffering that I realized were there. And then all of a sudden now I've like developed the muscle to notice certain kinds of suffering.
00:52:30
Speaker
And there's a mental state that I can get to, or if I really like focus on that, I can just perceive it as something negative without actually fighting it. And I find that I can make the suffering sort of go away even when something bad is happening, but it takes a lot of focus and concentration to get into that mental state. And I feel like by default, when my brain is focused on something else, I've just learned to like see the bad stuff more clearly.
00:52:57
Speaker
And then it takes active effort to then not see the bad stuff as bad or something. And so I'm just a little bit worried about those kinds of techniques, having more blowback than people think. And we mostly hear from the people who like do a lot of meditating, right? And like.
00:53:15
Speaker
It works really well for them in part because they're doing it so much and in part because maybe like their brain works better that way. But for someone who's like kind of busy and kind of like anxious about his life things, I'm sort of like, is this really the best technique for people or something?
00:53:34
Speaker
Yeah. I think that the answer in some cases is probably not, and there might be other useful things to practice. I mean, there's always the principle of equal and opposite advice. And for some people, if you want to use other philosophy, for some people reading Ayn Rand is very useful because they're exceptionally, maybe passive or they don't have this idea that actually you can stand up for your needs. But for other people, maybe they're too far in the spectrum and they don't need a philosophy to justify their bullying of others or what have you.
00:54:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. It's true. I think what's hard then is like the actual right. Advice to give people is very context dependent. And this is one of the reasons that I just am a lot more hesitant to give blanket advice to people than I used to. I did have some clients many years back and when I did life coaching type ish stuff.
00:54:32
Speaker
I did find I could actually get to know someone's context pretty well and I could usually make pretty helpful suggestions. But like when you're talking to someone that's a proponent of a particular philosophy, they're basically only interacting with the people who've been really successful by using that philosophy. And so there's a ton of people out there being like stoicism is great. You should like meditate one hour per day. And you're only ever hearing from like the, you know, survivorship group and
00:54:59
Speaker
It does seem to me like there would be something useful in this space that I haven't seen really, which is something like trying to codify a little bit more precisely what are the types of people and circumstances and contexts that certain advice works better for than others. I think there are like
00:55:20
Speaker
You get this a little with like the personality typing thing where they're trying to sort of create some kind of system for like you are a, you know, X kind of person in general, but really making that more rigorous and then wetting it to the best of the like activity, self-help kind of advice. I feel like I haven't seen a great job of that. And it feels like that would actually be something really, really valuable.
00:55:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good idea. I have thought about writing a piece before on, you know, these are the 10 features that make services. I'm not the right life philosophy for you. It sounds very, I would love to read that a little bit too of a catchy title or marketing, but I think if it's an honest piece that it would be very useful. And I haven't, haven't thought of those 10 things yet, but
00:56:09
Speaker
Hey! Well, it sounds like you need someone who's not a stoic to write it then. Yeah, maybe so. Maybe so. I do think that in modern stoicism now, we are seeing pockets of different kinds of stoicism. For example, there's a woman named Brittany Polat who works on stoicism related to
00:56:30
Speaker
parenting that's more focused on stoic advice for caregivers. And one sin of some stoics has been that it's been two of an individualistic philosophy, two people would say cold. And there is a caricature attack of that on stoicism. That caricature gets lots of things wrong. But it is true that there's something to that for some people. And what people like Britney are doing, I think is helping
00:56:59
Speaker
provide resources for people who might sort of slide into that, but they're still really attracted to stoicism. And I think that's sort of the direction I'd want to push is I hope we see more things like this that address what you might think of. Every life philosophy has its different sins and often they come from, but not always. There's some truth to the criticism that people who don't hold those views will have. And I hope those are continued to be addressed.
00:57:27
Speaker
Yeah, I do find it fascinating. I know honest to nothing about modern stoicism. So like hearing that there are these like schools of thought sort of like spinning out from that is like super, super cool.
00:57:40
Speaker
Yeah. I think related for Western Buddhists, there are now people doing more work into, and you are probably familiar with this, but it's people who had done more work looking into the harms of meditation or in particular people who reacted really poorly to meditative practice, which is a real phenomenon and communities being built up for that, which I think is a very good thing.
00:58:06
Speaker
at least that people are doing more research into it and that more people know that it's not a 100% safe exercise.
00:58:13
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that's important. Also, I would just say as like parents, I am also starting to see more people at least warning like, Hey, once you set foot down this path, it can be really intense and really time consuming. And like, you know, maybe a few of other people who are like, depending on you always being there, like maybe this is not a good point in your life to try to go down that path.
00:58:37
Speaker
Excellent. Well, we got a bit distracted. So negative visualization, you may not find to be as useful, but you mentioned that negative actualization is something that has played more of a role in your life.
00:58:50
Speaker
So I mentioned that I have this issue of not really being able to do negative visualization, at least consistently or properly. But that said, life gives us plenty of opportunities where things actually go wrong, where things are actually bad and hard.
Practical Stoicism Through Discomfort
00:59:07
Speaker
And I think probably the way in which I'm kind of the most stoic actually is that for me, having had those sort of bad experiences in life,
00:59:18
Speaker
does make me actually appreciate all the good stuff more in a way that I can't from just doing the negative visualization. I kind of actually need the bad thing to happen to really get the bulk of the effect, I would say.
00:59:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's sort of this idea of, look, I've persisted through this event in the past before. If I did that, then I can persist in whatever else comes my way, maybe, as part of it. Well, I think it isn't just that I know that I'm capable of surviving something bad, but actually just the direct contrast.
00:59:56
Speaker
Like I think a very trivial example is something like I go on a long trip and I'm not home for like a week. And it's exhausting and it's hard and I don't have all of my stuff. That moment when I get home and for like days afterwards, I'm just like so glad that I'm home.
01:00:14
Speaker
I'm so glad that I have like my own bed, I have all of my stuff. I don't have to like carry everything on me, right? Like there's all of these ways in which home is just like better than travel. And I can sort of abstractly think about that when I've been at home for like a month, but it's really not the same as actually just going and traveling and then coming back.
01:00:39
Speaker
And for me, this is actually one of the main things that I get out, you know, every year going and doing Burning Man. Like a huge part of that experience for me is just the fact that it's so unpleasant that I'm extremely glad to come home every single day. Which I don't think that I've heard that from almost anybody who goes, but like it is a real honest to God reason of like,
01:01:07
Speaker
comfortable temperature, comfortable sleeping arrangements, like getting hot when I want, being cold when I want, right? Like there are so many ways which it just like strips me of all of those comforts that I take for granted. And just having that, you know, one week every year where I'm like maximally uncomfortable does make things just so much better for so long.
01:01:35
Speaker
Yeah, it relates to the practice of voluntary discomforts as well.
01:01:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think that the idea behind hormesis actually just goes beyond the voluntary discomfort, but actually goes into like applying real stress to your body. So just as a brief history, the way that this hormesis phenomenon was, was, was found is really early on when people were looking at the effect of exposure to harmful radiation, it was noticed that there was this dose effect response.
01:02:06
Speaker
where if you actually got exposed to a little radiation, you were healthier and then if you got exposed to a lot, you were dead.
01:02:13
Speaker
So obviously there was a turning point where, where something, you know, went from a stress that produces a like adaptive response in the body. It's just like, damn. And so this term hermesis was coined to, to, to sort of like point this unusual kind of inverse U curve where a little bit of stress actually produces something healthier.
01:02:38
Speaker
And what I've basically come to think is this is a very general feature of pretty much all complex systems. The way to think of a complex system isn't that it's in some like static equilibrium that you're trying not to be disturbed. It's actually a highly dynamic system. And in fact, the system is the healthiest when it experiences the widest possible range of extremes on every dimension you can think of.
01:03:05
Speaker
And I basically think that this applies, you know, both to like our brains and our bodies as well as like human civilizations. And where the voluntary discomfort part comes in is this question of like, well, what do you do when there's no outside stressor?
01:03:22
Speaker
And I think there sort of is this real question of like, can you develop a practice where you're willing to endure the voluntary pain or suffering in order to produce some effect that will make you happier and stronger later?
01:03:41
Speaker
And I think that's something that's very not easy to do, but to me feels like it fits very much within the kind of like stoic philosophy, as well as other ancient Greek philosophies too. They also had ideas about sort of enlightened hedonism where you're actually not just doing sort of like the blindly most pleasurable thing in every moment, right? You want to maximize the area under the curve.
01:04:06
Speaker
And basically, I am quite convinced at this point, if you want to be a maximally vibrant biological organism, you have to be put under different kinds of stress. And what I'm not talking about is like the chronic stress that we feel so often. That I'm actually convinced is pretty much just destructive. What I'm talking about is sharp, extreme, short periods of stress.
01:04:33
Speaker
And that can come via life circumstances. As I've said, I've had pets and I've had family members who are super sick. And there really is a way in which that was horrible at the time and also made me much more grateful and happy when they turned out fine, which obviously they sometimes did.
01:04:50
Speaker
But like the idea that then you can sort of voluntarily add stress to yourself, I think is actually one of those skills that does serve people really well in life. And one pretty clear example of this that I think a lot of people get behind is voluntarily exercising.
01:05:08
Speaker
And yeah, some people are like, you can like get a runner's high and like it does actually feel good when you're doing it, but it's a large fraction of people. It doesn't feel good when you're actually doing it. It feels good after. And, and I feel like that is kind of probably the most common one that people would identify with.
01:05:25
Speaker
I think it goes way beyond that. It goes to fasting, which I talk about a lot, like voluntarily abstaining for a long time. It goes to hot exposure. It goes to cold exposure. There are all of these different ways in which our body is well designed to cope with and respond to specific kinds of stress that we don't have a natural way to expose ourselves to by default. It's something that we have to make into a deliberate practice.
01:05:54
Speaker
And I think that that is just what you need in order to live the most vibrant life for the longest possible.
01:06:03
Speaker
Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on which practices you might advise different people to check out depending on their physical or personal profile? I mean, that's a tricky one in part because a lot of people are kind of unhealthy. And if I'm like, well, everyone should do high intent training. Like maybe that's actually not good for someone who has like a hard problem that I don't know about. Right. So I think to some degree, you know, people have to
01:06:30
Speaker
have to know themselves. I do think especially with fasting, way more people treat themselves as fragile than I would have sort of naively thought. That does seem to be one where like most people, if they haven't thought about it and tried it are extremely wary to go without food, even for like one day, which, you know, I would consider to be a fairly short fast. People are shockingly unwilling to try it.
01:06:54
Speaker
Yeah, maybe given that people are more willing to voluntarily exercise, I guess I would say one place average person could start is try doing max effort exercise, not even for long. Like if you're on a bike, try to bike literally as hard as you possibly can just for like 20 seconds and then rest and do that, you know, six to eight times.
01:07:19
Speaker
I think just doing that alone, people will start to notice like for a few days after like they're just a little more energetic than they would have been something like that, which again, there's always caveats if you have like chronic fatigue syndrome, that's actually probably counterproductive, but like other than narrow case for most people like
01:07:40
Speaker
it's gonna be really unpleasant when they do it because they're forcing their body to work harder than it naturally wants to work and like what they're used to. But I think most people will start to see that like it does pay dividends later.
01:07:55
Speaker
Yep. Well, another topic I wanted to talk to you about is COVID, of course. So you built up a following for incisive and prescient COVID commentary
COVID-19 Predictions and Authority Critique
01:08:06
Speaker
on Twitter. And I think it's always, I've been talking to a number of people who have met that profile or been good at predicting.
01:08:13
Speaker
crypto because I think it's always good to talk to people who have some amount of a positive track record. A history of being right. Yeah, a history of being right. That's always true. And you don't get so many of these tests where you get good feedback, I think, like you do in the COVID case where there's a single big thing and you can see tests of people being right. Perhaps there's some analogies in finance, but it was interesting to see this.
01:08:38
Speaker
this big happening and rank people who you thought were good at forecasting or good accommodators over time and see how they performed. So who performed well in the beginning?
01:08:50
Speaker
Yeah, maybe this is a little bit self-serving, but I would be like rationality and effective altruism. Groups tended to actually write pretty early and were pretty driven by actual data pretty early and good at, you know, understanding the priors about what pandemics are like and how they unfold, I'd say for the most part. I think that one of the groups that have gotten a lot of the stuff right are people who've been like studying
01:09:18
Speaker
security and there are in fact folks who spend much of their time thinking about like what would happen during a pandemic and I would say the core people there were actually quite good and I would separate the like public health group of folks from that. I really mean the people that are like thinking about pandemics most of their
01:09:39
Speaker
time. The public health authorities I think did absolutely, absolutely terribly. So I just want to kind of like separate those two. But yeah, in short, I would summarize it by the people that were willing to be pretty driven by the data and rapidly updating and people who'd done a lot of thinking about this in advance tended to actually get it pretty right for most of
01:10:02
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I had the fortune of living in a rationalist house in 2020, so around, you know, February, everyone was excited about it. And you would have the experience of walking around the streets and thinking, oh, these are going to be closed soon, most likely. And yeah, I don't think I've experienced a similar thing in my life, actually, where I've been so convinced about something empirical and that I thought so many people were missing at once. Can you think that's true?
01:10:28
Speaker
Yeah, I mean you mentioned, you mentioned crypto. I think that's another one where the skeptics have mostly turned out wrong and the people who really deeply believed have turned out. So I think that was a good, you know, thing that you flagged too.
01:10:43
Speaker
There's not that many though. I mean, we can go back to the financial crisis and it's tough because there's a group of people that's always calling for a bubble and it just so happened that there was a bubble. But like when you look at the actual people that had money on the line at the right time, at the right place, my group was so small, like Michael Lewis wrote a book highlighting half a dozen of those people and that was like most of them.
01:11:12
Speaker
I would say that was like a decent test case that almost everyone got wrong. Now, I knew that was like way before most of the kind of rationalist community had even like coalesced into a community, but like that I feel like was kind of one of the last really big moments where kind of everyone collectively realized that almost everyone was wrong.
01:11:34
Speaker
and like who got that right very few people and then a couple people that are like basically perma bears who have been proven wrong ever since then so you know i would fly that
01:11:48
Speaker
I would say another one is the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning. That was one that a small group of people called really early that it was going to be a huge deal. And it has absolutely turned out to be a huge deal. And, you know, once more, this is also sort of self-serving, but like I've been in the kind of like AI safety community for quite some time. And it was widely believed that like, there were going to be some really big
01:12:18
Speaker
steps forward coming and that, you know, folks really did kind of like suddenly wake up. It was right around the 2015, 2016 sort of timeframe is when it became obvious to the mainstream that AI was going to be huge. And the developments that we've seen since then, you know, I think have sort of really correctly maybe now we're kind of overstating the case, but
01:12:44
Speaker
At least then I think got most folks on board with like, that is going to be a big deal and it's going to be way more impressive and powerful than we thought it would be. So yeah, crypto, AI, COVID are all things that have happened in the last, you know, 10-ish years that I think a small group really thought through and got right.
01:13:03
Speaker
I don't know if I can think of another example. There were obviously people sort of calling the Trump phenomenon pretty early before that got big, but that was like a much larger group. And, you know, once more kind of lots of them were for like ideological reasons. So I don't know how much credit to give that. What else? I guess like.
01:13:23
Speaker
A smaller example recently is there was a huge online argument going on about whether Russia would actually invade Ukraine. Right. And that's one that a lot of people were loudly saying there's no way. And, you know, a smaller group was saying, you know, guys, all the evidence points to this happening.
01:13:46
Speaker
And, you know, I would say that was a win for the like open source intelligence community. They basically got this one completely right. Most of like the pundits got this one absolutely wrong. And I do, you know, always hesitate to, you know, too much credit to, you know, the mainstream establishment, but like the mainstream intelligence community was saying like, no guys, like Russia's going to go in and they got a lot of crap right up until February 24th.
01:14:17
Speaker
And then all of a sudden, yeah, it was, it was very clear who was right and who was wrong. Those are a few big trends. And then one, you know, very precise, you know, one from this last year. Oh, even that I'm having a hard time coming up with more.
01:14:36
Speaker
Yeah, the Russia Ukraine is a good example. It's also one where you get to see people's predictions play out over different issues. Of course, will there be invasion? How long will the invasion last? And it's always interesting to see a model of the world that predict there's going to be invasion and the war will be very fast. So that is the other thing is most people who are following this thought that the war would be fast. And that's an interesting case where
01:15:03
Speaker
Yeah, when the first invasion started and there were some really rapid gains right at first, almost everyone thought that Ukraine was about to fall. And that was one where it turned out almost everyone was wrong. Very few people were like, no, they've got this. They're going to hold them and we're going to be having this conversation a year later.
01:15:27
Speaker
the very few people. I was in some private chat groups and the number I gave for a like vigorous defense of their country was something like 20%.
01:15:37
Speaker
which obviously turned out to be far too low, but that was way higher than what everyone else was saying. No one thought there was any chance. And I was like, guys, there might be a chance actually. And it turned out that I was more right and still very wrong, very, very wrong. So yeah, that was a super fascinating case where a small group was actually proven super right.
01:16:01
Speaker
right at the start, and then almost all of them were also proven wrong. But to just tie this back in, if you look at the history of wars, almost everyone thinks they are going to happen faster than they do. And I think we have actually just been a little bit too focused on the recent wars that the US has been involved in, where basically we just come in and absolutely steamroll somebody.
01:16:26
Speaker
I think we've sort of gotten into the mindset that that's what a modern war looks like. And I think we forgot that, no, actually, wars almost always take years to play out. Almost always. So maybe I should have studied a little more history and given higher odds than 20%. Yeah, maybe. Maybe so. So you're going back to COVID, although we can explore these other topics as well. What are you think are some reasonable heuristics people use that didn't work in the COVID case?
01:16:56
Speaker
Yeah, a couple of big ones come to mind, one of which I think actually works most of the time. It's pretty, like nothing really happens, which isn't saying that we're in the like end of history, but for like every story that you read about insane trend or this new thing coming out or something happening in like some country, almost always that's kind of like overplayed.
01:17:21
Speaker
And it's pretty reasonable to just assume that like nothing ever happens is a pretty reasonable first pass. And so I basically think when you do see a developing story like this, it's really important to then down into the actual details and figure out, does this thing have the actual causal structure of like a world changing event or
01:17:46
Speaker
Can we kind of not really tell? And it's kind of ambiguous. Maybe this trend will matter. It's not clear. I do think we've had a little bit more of run the last couple of years of like, no, things actually do happen. COVID, war, things which were not on most people's radar. But like, I do think that it's hard even with potential pandemic.
01:18:06
Speaker
Lots of like random weird tropical viruses crop up and they infect a couple people or a couple dozen people or even a couple hundred people and they like always fizzle out. And so, you know, when you get a case like this, it's like, well, what are sort of broad reference class for this?
01:18:27
Speaker
And I think one of the early mistakes I made was, well, maybe it's going to be more like SARS-1. And SARS-1 did spread a fair bit, but not that much, right? It got to like thousands, not hundreds. It was pretty easily stopped, mostly just because you tended to start getting a fever before you really started being super infectious. And it actually wasn't.
01:18:49
Speaker
infectious. It was pretty infectious. We went that infectious. And the combination of being able to just do a symptomatic check for it, plus the consequences of like failing that, you know, relatively minor, basically meant SARS-1 was actually stoppable.
01:19:07
Speaker
And I think I had to point to an early mistake that I made. I actually thought the combinations of lockdowns, travel bans, contacts, tracing, massively ramping up some testing would have been enough to potentially stop this virus.
01:19:26
Speaker
And when I look at what China did, they actually did basically get cases down to zero. And I think that was true. I don't think that they were just hiding some massive amount of COVID in their country for years. I think basically China beat it.
01:19:42
Speaker
But then when the rest of the world continued to make more infectious variants of it, then, you know, I think, you know, it was only a matter of time for all of us. But like I did actually, if those first few countries had like taken it really seriously at the very start, I actually think it wasn't inevitable that COVID had to spread. But I think.
01:20:03
Speaker
If I critique myself, I would say that it should have been more obvious more quickly that it was like, there was no way we would actually manage to contain those things. I think I was too kind of hopeful at first. And some of that, again, was because I actually studied SARS-1 and I looked at how we stopped it. And even though, you know, it was this like airborne, somewhat infectious virus, we still stopped it. It made me, I think, overly optimistic for it. So I think you always want to be mindful of
01:20:31
Speaker
What is the proper reference class of things and events? And I think that there are better and worse ways to do that. And I think it was actually pretty reasonable to just say like most pandemics fade out, including SARS-like ones. And I think we sort of didn't, you know, update sufficiently much of like, well, there's four seasonal coronaviruses that are like worldwide and infect everyone.
01:20:58
Speaker
every year, maybe COVID's more like those than it is like SOPS. So yeah, the other reasonable heuristic I think that didn't really hold up very well, which feels pretty reminiscent of everything going on over the last several years, is that trusting authority figures did not work very well.
01:21:19
Speaker
And this is a really tough one for me because I am just kind of by nature, like pretty contrarian, pretty skeptical, like pretty like anti-establishment in general. And, you know, I feel like there are pretty good reasons for that. And I think at least for like myself personally, I think that's good because I'm willing to actually put in the time and effort to figure out what the hell's actually going on.
01:21:44
Speaker
But I don't think that's actually a scalable solution for the vast majority of the population. We're all busy. We have lives, jobs, kids, so on. Most people can't just figure everything out for themselves all the time. And so one of the sort of heuristics that we all rely on, at least to some degree, is trusting people.
01:22:06
Speaker
And unfortunately I would say that the public health community and like people in the government trying to like do, you know, pandemic communication, I think fared extremely poorly, not to put too fine a point on it. And so I think the like normally reasonable heuristic of like, we'll trust the authorities actually failed really badly here. Yeah. Yeah. Well, don't you think the authorities were trustable? It's just that they were running six months to two years late.
01:22:36
Speaker
but then they're not really trustable either. I think that there are like honest mistakes and the problem is the very early mistakes were political in nature, not because they didn't really understand what was going on. I think that's like the first thing I would flag. The second thing I would flag is once they were actually proven to be wrong, the way that you maintain trust is you really rapidly just admit that like their understanding of the situation had changed and then they need to update what they're suggesting.
01:23:06
Speaker
And the fact that they tried so hard to defend what was state of the art six months ago to two years ago, that's actually a failing. That's not just that they were behind, it's that they were trying to cover for themselves and can't do that. The point of public health is to get information to people that they can use as best as they possibly can.
01:23:30
Speaker
And if you're deliberately lying to people, either to cover your ass or for like some political reason because there's something they want to protect, or because they're trying to nudge you into behavior, like telling people that masks don't work because they're trying to preserve masks for like healthcare workers, rather than actually saying, masks do work, we're going to scale up as much as we can, please give healthcare workers what you can right now.
01:23:55
Speaker
Those three things are all lies. They are fundamentally lies and they're fundamentally not actually serving the people that they're supposed to be helping and protecting.
01:24:08
Speaker
Right. So, but I guess there's always this question that you mentioned earlier of how do you make this a more scalable, how do you have a more scalable solution? Because of course, authorities, not so good, but compared to what, and if you look at many of the other options that people go to for their news about the pandemic, I would submit that. Many of them were not good.
01:24:35
Speaker
Well, right. It's possible that we live in the extremely unfortunate world in which literally no one is actually trustworthy. It's not like there's some law of nature that there has to be one source that everyone can just go to to get good info. Unfortunately, I would say, given that we have such a loss of trust in public institutions,
01:24:57
Speaker
We're kind of in a epistemically Darwinian world, where unfortunately, even though the fact that almost everyone should probably be outsourcing trust to something, we actually sort of can't.
01:25:11
Speaker
And so I think a lot more people are trying to figure out what's real than they were before, which means that a lot of them are going to be wrong. And I just think that like, just because a lot of people are going to be wrong a lot of the time isn't sufficient to justify things like, you know, censorship or things like that. Because I think that that's actually a losing battle that is currently making the problem worse. So I think there's like the two prong thing going on here. One is,
01:25:37
Speaker
If I were magically in control of all the public health institutions, the number one thing that I would focus on is just regaining trust.
01:25:47
Speaker
and nothing else. I wouldn't be trying to nudge people, nothing like that. The only thing that I'd be doing right now is be trying to have a full and honest accounting of what happened at each step and why they did it with a credible commitment that that's not going to happen in the future. I think that means fact finding. It means putting out reports. It does mean some people that were in charge losing their jobs. I think there's a level of public
01:26:13
Speaker
accountability that needs to happen that is going to be the first step to actually creating something that people can trust in the future. I'm not expecting anyone to trust those things right now, but I think we should be taking steps to rebuild that trust because we're going to need it, right? We needed it once and we didn't have it and we lost more of it, right? So we have to be getting back on the path of regaining that.
01:26:36
Speaker
In the meantime, unfortunately, I think that we're in this world where most people don't know what's actually true. And there are various voices that are going out there and some of them are, you know, just right lying. Some of them are kind of doing their best, but they're like already kind of cognitively compromised. I think that's where most people are. And then some people are actually genuinely trying to find out the truth in a relatively open and
01:27:06
Speaker
like, honest manner. And I basically think that over time, the people that are right more than they're wrong, will get more people to actually hear what they're saying. And despite the fact that the public health institutions were lying all over the place,
01:27:24
Speaker
In actual fact, the majority of people tended to come to the right conclusions in the end. And maybe that process could have happened, you know, months sooner. And, you know, maybe we got, you know, could have gotten more than like 70 or like 80% of folks kind of like roughly right. You know, it's sad that we're losing this tale of like 20 to 30% of folks or something. I'm just like throwing out some numbers, but like at the end of the day, I think that's kind of the best we can do.
01:27:51
Speaker
I think as long as we don't have trustworthy institutions, we have no choice but to rely on this highly distributed process and basically accept that not everyone's going to come to the right conclusions. We can't force them to, nor should we.
01:28:08
Speaker
And I think that's just how it is. And I know that we want everyone to be right. But the only system that we have for doing that right now is basically just conformity to some set view. And if there's no trust in a system that can come to the right answer, we need to actually be more hands off. We need to, in fact, let go. We have to stop this death grip on convincing people about the truth, because honest answer is we don't know.
01:28:38
Speaker
And we don't have anyone we can trust. So we have to rebuild it and we have to see who has a track record of being right and let people flock to the voices that are actually working. Yeah. Do you have any advice or general thoughts on, as an individual, thinking about how to choose people to outsource your judgments to? Since, of course, many issues won't be able to look into the finer details.
01:29:06
Speaker
Uh, yeah, that one is super hard. Unfortunately, I think that the heuristics that I use and that I would suggest are not really ones that can be easily applied by most people to most circumstances, which makes it a really hard problem. For me personally, one of the main things that I look for is something like epistemic humility. And I think this comes in a bunch of different forms. One thing is I will trust people a lot more if they're willing to ever admit that they were wrong.
01:29:36
Speaker
And if you actually go through and look, it's a shockingly tiny fraction of folks that are expounding on all of the stuff that will ever admit that they were wrong about anything.
01:29:45
Speaker
even just being willing to come forward and say like, this is what I thought and why I thought it at the time and why I've updated and that I think that view was wrong and I'm sorry that I said that, that is huge. You've already ruled out almost everything or right there. But like to me, what's really important is that seeing someone is willing to update on new evidence. I'm actually okay with someone putting something out there and being wrong, not okay with them being proven wrong and then not owning it.
01:30:14
Speaker
I need to know if I'm going to outsource some trust that I can trust them to also tell me when I shouldn't have had that trust. That's so, so, so key.
The Value of Strong Arguments and Diverse Perspectives
01:30:28
Speaker
Another thing that I look for would be something like good faith.
01:30:33
Speaker
arguments? One thing that's really important to me is can someone state the strongest version of the view that they don't think is true? So if you're able to construct a steel man rather than a straw man of kind of like the other side, I'm much more willing to trust that you've thought about this and that your brain hasn't already flipped off.
01:30:57
Speaker
because most of the time arguments are soldiers, right? You are putting these things out there in order to try to beat the enemy. And as soon as I see that mindset, I'm like, no, this person maybe can like dredge up some like interesting facts that I can use trying to construct it myself for like one side, but I can never fully trust that.
01:31:22
Speaker
I can never fully outsource it if they're only presenting good arguments from one side. It's extremely rare that there's never a good argument for something else. That really just doesn't happen. Life is too confusing and it's too complicated. There's always good arguments.
01:31:39
Speaker
And so if someone can't construct those, huge red flag. Other hero six of mine are more involved and harder. One thing that I like to do when I'm trying to learn about a new field is I'll basically get a big download from like one thinker and then I'll try to find someone on the other side. And I'll basically just try to raise all of those same points I just heard.
01:31:59
Speaker
And this is basically something like an epistemic arbitrage I'm doing where they can't really necessarily have the conversation directly with like the enemy. But as someone who's relatively uninformed on a field, I can come in and just like ask dumb questions.
01:32:16
Speaker
And I actually find this a really helpful way to learn a lot about a new field very quickly. Now, mind you, this is very time consuming and very hard, which is why I'm saying I don't think this is a heuristic that can actually scale. I don't think it's something that most folks can do. You can kind of do a version of it by looking at people responding to other people, which then sort of looks more like those first heuristics I laid out where
01:32:41
Speaker
Yeah, you're like seeing one side of it, but but you can sort of tell whether one side of it's actually being like kind of reasonable and like sort of thinking but for someone who does have the time and
01:32:52
Speaker
just inclination to actually learn the answer. I think doing that arbitrage between two different viewpoints, you can learn a lot very quickly. And I think you can also start to get a sense of like, is one of the sides responding with sort of well-reasoned and thought out arguments or are they only responding with soldiers, right? And at that point,
01:33:13
Speaker
I can start to see who I can trust on which sides more, right? Even if someone is like technically on one side, but I can tell that they're genuinely responding to arguments and they've thought about it and they're not just trying to shoot them down with some sort of like casual dismissal. For me, that's just a much, much better sign that I can trust that person more in the future.
01:33:37
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, it is, it is always disappointing how a few people will state what they think of as the opposition's best argument in a good faith. It's an unfortunate fact, but perhaps not so surprising. Not surprising and very unfortunate, you know, but at least it makes it easier to spot people who are actually thinking. That's right. Do you think this whole experience made you more pessimistic or optimistic about the state of things in the US?
01:34:07
Speaker
Uh, much more pessimistic. Yeah. I would say on a couple different levels. One of them is I actually do still genuinely believe that if we had a more unified and competence and speedy like way to handle all this from the very start, COVID didn't have to turn into a world-wide pandemic. And clearly I was wrong about how likely it was we could actually do that. Almost every arm of what needed to happen, like immediately fell apart.
01:34:37
Speaker
I keep very, very strict lockdown, even self-imposed where folks really just genuinely stayed in their house for like two weeks straight. Like there wouldn't be much spread, you know, or if we had extremely widespread testing, everyone could get tested every single day, which is not like it's completely like infeasible. We would have caught like every single case.
01:34:58
Speaker
If we had had a vaccine that was developed and deployed both much, much sooner and simultaneously everywhere, maybe that would have actually stopped it rather than a slow rollout for old variants that aren't even circulating. In so many different ways, one piece of it done extremely well, at least had a chance of stopping it, but we just failed on every dimension.
01:35:24
Speaker
We failed on testing, failed on contact tracing. We failed on actually isolating from people. We didn't do any travel bans when it was really early and could have actually helped. There's just so many ways in which we just screwed everything up. And it's particularly disheartening too, because it's not like this was some completely out of the blue thing that humanity had never faced or thought about. People have been doing pandemic preparedness for a while.
01:35:52
Speaker
And the fact that like all of these existing systems that we had basically fell down should be a major negative update of like, no, we're not actually as competent at this.
01:36:07
Speaker
I think the sort of like most optimistic spin that I can take on this is something like we ended up with almost like a worst case for how severe it was because if it killed like two orders of magnitude less people, we wouldn't have even cared. We would have just had another common cold virus.
01:36:25
Speaker
and you know maybe someone in a lab somewhere might be like oh there's like a new seasonal coronavirus whereas if it killed like in order of magnitude more people I think everyone would have been so scared at least we would actually pulled out all of the stops and stopped the virus
01:36:40
Speaker
And instead we almost wound up in this like perfect place where like there was a reasonable disagreement about how bad this would be for society. So that you couldn't just say that the people who are like pull out all of the stops were like totally crazy. And you also couldn't say the people that were like, we should just ignore this thing were like totally crazy.
01:36:59
Speaker
We ended up in this middle zone where it allowed it to turn into something highly political. And it was just so weird because for the first, I'd say six weeks or so, it really felt like everyone was kind of in this together and we all realized that it was very serious. And it's pretty unfortunate because I think that to some degree we got there because people were actually more scared than was warranted.
01:37:26
Speaker
And from my perspective, from the very early case studies we had on cruise ships, that gave us an extremely good set of data because 100% of those people were tested. And so we know exactly how infectious the virus was and exactly what fraction of folks it killed. And that estimate from almost the very start of the pandemic held up totally fine.
01:37:50
Speaker
You know, in those early cases, IFR was like about one. And then once we got like better methods of treating it, we didn't like immediately rush people onto a ventilator, things like that. You know, then we got the IFR down to like half a percent. Now I see that and I'm like, for a virus that's going to kill 1% of the world population, if we just let this thing go, it's worth taking steps, like try to stop it. If we could stop it quickly. Is it worth taking steps for multiple years? Well, that's much less clear.
01:38:17
Speaker
but I think he was worth a try at first based on just like a 1%.
01:38:22
Speaker
Right. But a lot of people were just like scared into thinking that it actually was much more serious. Like, and if it were like an order of magnitude more serious, they were kind of right to be scared. Right. But like, they think we sort of got caught in this weird thing where like people actually got too afraid. And then once they actually sort of updated on the fact that the virus is less serious than they thought it was, then they were suddenly like, okay, well, all of the stuff that we're doing is like way too crazy, way too out there. And that process took, you know, less than two months.
01:38:52
Speaker
And I think that's actually pretty reasonable because I think we had pretty good day pretty early about exactly how bad it would be and it just took a little bit of time for that to like filter out and That was kind of the point where it became highly political and people just never look back and it's just been a terrible thing ever since True. Yeah, I would say I did not
01:39:14
Speaker
update fast enough into the direction of how bad it would be and thought that it was worse than it in fact was for several months longer than I should have. So I will say, right or right, but like months longer is very different than like two years longer. But yeah, in my own case, actually, I do think that I did overstate the severity of the infection for the people who didn't die. And I basically got the right.
01:39:41
Speaker
infection fatality rate, but I did actually overestimate the hospitalization rate. So I did think hospital overruns were actually much more likely than I thought. And I thought that a shortage, just of like hospital beds, but also specifically a shortage of ICUs and a shortage of ventilators, I actually thought was going to probably be much more severe than I actually turned out being. So like I also did overestimate the severity in certain ways.
01:40:07
Speaker
And I do think that, you know, that, that firm was actually a pretty significant update of like, okay, hospital overruns actually are less of a concern than I feared. So at that point, the need for things like lockdowns to slow the spread more than people are sort of naturally taking precautions, I think was actually probably overdone from the start, but like, I don't think that was obvious for like a couple of months.
01:40:32
Speaker
Right, right. Yep. Yep. That seems right to me. I would say on the optimistic side, I did not expect the vaccine to be developed so fast and that that is one reminder that things can happen.
COVID-19 Surprises and Lessons
01:40:42
Speaker
I didn't think things like that could happen.
01:40:45
Speaker
Right. So I was overly optimistic about everything else and overly pessimistic about developing one vaccine. That was literally the one thing where I was like, we're going to be in this state for years while they're still working on it, they're tinkering on it. I basically did correctly predict that the FDA was going to speed the vaccine through much more quickly. Obviously could have sped it through even more quickly. Though, in retrospect, a lot of people are now really complaining that they think the vaccine is actually less safe than they thought.
01:41:14
Speaker
and less efficacious. So it's not even clear to me that that actually the like average person on the street is happy about how long the vaccine took. But if we put that aside, yeah, there obviously are a couple things that could have sped the process quite a bit more like you could have done challenge trials like
01:41:32
Speaker
Certainly we could have gotten out faster than like a year-ish, but like a year was so much faster than even I thought would happen, trying to like rush things through. A major piece of this is that the vaccine actually happened to work on the first try.
01:41:48
Speaker
And I think I again sort of overly updated on the SARS-1 case where vaccine development turned out to be extremely challenging. And folks were basically working on vaccines for years after we'd actually cured SARS because people were rightfully worried that SARS might come back. SARS leaked from a lab multiple times. We had multiple SARS-1 outbreaks because of lab leaks. So like having a SARS-1 vaccine actually isn't crazy and folks tried for years and they never got it to work.
01:42:14
Speaker
And so I think I was actually a little bit too pessimistic on the underlying biology being possible to make one. And I was probably a little too...
01:42:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think I didn't sufficiently update that like a lot of the work that folks had put into the SARS-1 vaccine was actually repurposable. There is actually lots of stuff that we learned, right? Like we learned that you need to like make antibodies for the like binding domain on the S protein. That turned out to be really important for SARS-1.
01:42:45
Speaker
And that allowed us to make a SARS-2 vaccine on the first try. Whereas if we didn't really know that necessarily, we could have ended up with a vaccine that was like making infections more severe rather than less severe, which we saw with SARS-1. So I think I did probably underestimate the degree to which we actually accumulated useful biological knowledge that in fact made it easier to make the vaccine.
01:43:08
Speaker
I also was a little less optimistic on mRNA as well because I'd been watching Moderna for years and like they did have like a couple of vaccines in there. They had like really over promised on the technology for so long. And they really seem like pretty like overvalued company, frankly, that I was genuinely surprised that mRNA worked as well as it did. The fact that like, you know,
01:43:30
Speaker
the viral vector vaccines worked. You know, those, those also are like relatively new and kind of grand scheme of things, but are basically working on pretty well-known biological principles. So I was pretty sure those would work, but yeah, I was.
01:43:45
Speaker
I would say, yeah, I both was too pessimistic about the FDA, though ultimately I think I was correct that they would try to speed things. And I was more too pessimistic about what we'd learned on the underlying biology and our skill in developing a good vaccine quickly. That I was very, very wrong about. Got it. Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have a view on the lab leak idea at this point?
01:44:12
Speaker
Yeah, my personal feeling is it's probably more likely than not. It's really hard to get good data on this because there are a lot of folks both in the US and in China that are trying to not give us what we need to know. But I think it's honestly pretty hard to look at the totality of
01:44:30
Speaker
evidence both from from this lab leak but also the history of lab leaks and not think that it's at least more likely than not am I certain no I'm definitely not certain and and I think anyone who says they're certain either way is just absolutely crazy those are soldiers those are not like valid arguments but but yeah like if you put a gun to my head I would go lab leak over not yeah got it got it yeah it might make sense
01:44:58
Speaker
So switching gears to the last topic, what's your view on role models? So at Stoa, we have an exercise called contemplation of the sage, which involves imagining a role model, the advice they give you, or imagine what they would do in your place. And it's a very common stoic exercise and exercise for a number of other traditions as well. So I'm curious what you think about role models generally.
01:45:24
Speaker
Yeah, so role models actually haven't played a very large role in my life. And I don't know if this is just kind of a unique quirk of my psychology or my situation or something, or like whether maybe I've like hit on something about why role models don't make that much sense, but I've had a couple different experiences in life where I actually have had something more like role model.
01:45:47
Speaker
Or I wouldn't say a role model, but there have been people that I sort of look up to as like, wow, they seem awesome. They seem like they're really focused on things that I care about. They seem like they're making some kind of forward progress or something. And over the course of my life, I've actually ended up meeting most of these people. And in most of the cases, once I've gotten sufficiently close, it's actually just really clear how like flawed and human everybody is.
01:46:14
Speaker
including those people that I did look up to. And so that kind of got me thinking, well, what even is my conception of a role model? Is it just this idealized figure? That's not even a real person. When I got to know the real person, they had all these other flaws and things going on that I wouldn't want to personally emulate. So what is my role model at that point?
01:46:40
Speaker
feels like this fictitious concept or something. And like, I don't think it's bad to have some ideal that you're aspiring to, but it feels a little bit weird to me when the ideal that you're aspiring to is like another human being who's not what you think they are actually. So like, yeah, I mean, I think you obviously can admire certain things about certain people, but I guess to me that just doesn't fit what I think of as a role model in my head or something.
01:47:08
Speaker
So yeah, I don't know if it's, if it's just that I've, that I've, you know, met my heroes, which, you know, folks always say like, you know, you don't want to actually meet your heroes or if it's just because like the way that I conceptualize it as, as, as sort of different than the way other people use role models in their head. But yeah, like for you, I guess, what is the role of a role model and like, how does that show up for you and how is that helping your life?
Modern Tech Giants and Historical Figures
01:47:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's useful to think about people's specific traits that you admire and just sort of take them as, see if you can simulate them and how they would handle different situations, especially if you think they are more skilled at a given trait than you are. So I personally find that useful. It both has a way to explore ideas, but also sort of expand ones
01:48:03
Speaker
sense of possibility. And I think in the past I had been somewhat constrained in what I thought was possible for me because of my view of who I was and if imagining advice other people would give you or even imagining others in my place opened up the possibility space. And I think I talked to a number of people who find that advantageous as well. Yeah. So I guess
01:48:31
Speaker
I guess I can see how in some sense this kind of helps to have a specific real physical person that folks can think of that can fill this role. But for me, this almost feels like the domain of spirituality and religion. It seems like what you're actually wanting to do is to embody the divine essence of the virtue or something like that. That, to me, feels much more like something you can aspire to as an ideal.
01:49:01
Speaker
Because I'm really seeing it as a true ideal, I'm not trying to emulate another person, I'm trying to step into the best version of this thing that I can conceive of or something.
01:49:14
Speaker
Yeah, I suppose there is this ambiguity of whether you are using a role model who's a real human, learning from them, or if you're using a person as a sage, which is a perfectly virtuous person, and then it's more of a spiritual and idealized version of the exercise. And I think both are useful, but actually I would find the
01:49:37
Speaker
ladder using the contemplating a sage, the ideal version of someone, maybe even it's a fictional person to be especially, especially useful because of some of the risks you mentioned with trying to take someone on as a more concrete, concrete role model.
01:49:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think for me, it's just a little bit hard to use a concrete person in part because I feel like you almost sort of can't just extract the one feature that you like. I think that like other people can and do influence who we are, you know, there's that phrase like you are the average of the five people that you spend most of
01:50:15
Speaker
your time with and I think something like that is basically true but that also means that you're not just absorbing the good you're absorbing the bad you're absorbing all of it and and for me if I want to be more like some I don't feel like I can just take that one piece of it that I like I feel like I sort of take on something about their whole being like there's something about their their entire
01:50:36
Speaker
system, if you will, that I take on. And I can't just use them as this idealized version of someone who's a generous or hardworking. It's more like I'm importing this entire process in, and that has lots of flaws and bugs and all kinds of other things that come with it. So you find that with the idealized version as well?
01:51:04
Speaker
Well, for me, it's more like I, I've lost the ability to idealize individual, like living humans just because I have seen this play out way too often. Right. And, and like, if I'm sort of conceiving of the sort of like perfect ideal, like, yes, I can like sort of take on that aspect, but that, that to me really feels like I'm just sort of tweaking a like internal variable in myself or something more, more than it feels like I'm sort of looking up to something. If that makes sense.
01:51:35
Speaker
Got it. I think that makes sense. Yeah, it is almost like a temporary buff to one aspect of my personality or something.
01:51:45
Speaker
Yeah. I suppose if you take the more philosophical or spiritual approach to it, it's that you are simulating this version of someone who many more people have simulated that includes these different values of your tradition. That's sort of informing what you are doing, even if there's a sense in which. Sure. Stoics love to emulate people like Marcus Aurelius, Cato the Younger, Socrates. These people were, in the end,
01:52:15
Speaker
real people versions of them are somewhat mythical or at least compressed and likewise for other other religious very much so Yeah, and in some ways I think having like abstracted those virtues into a sort of like semi mythical figure even if they were based on someone actually real I think is creating that sort of idealized version that people can Aspire to without all of the downsides
01:52:43
Speaker
Yep. Yeah, I think so. I think that's right. Well, one, one fun question that I thought that you can answer or not is you choose one fun question that I wanted to ask that I should have asked earlier is when I was talking to Jimmy Sony about the late Republic and also he wrote the founders, I thought it might be fun to ask you which person is most like Cato the younger from the founders. And he mentioned that he thought, he thought Peter Thiel was the most like Cato, Cato the younger. Does that, does that seem right to you or not? That's really funny.
01:53:13
Speaker
You know, I think I'm a little hesitant to answer that directly because I think I would want to have a better handle on them before I weighed in on that. I will say of kind of like the great founders are currently living, the one who seems to be the most interested in ancient Rome is probably Mark Zuckerberg.
01:53:33
Speaker
Which I do find really fascinating. As far as I can tell, I think in some part of his brain, he sees himself as like being Octavian or something. And I don't get that same sense from probably any of the other, you know, major founders of our time. So I'm not sure what to pick of that, but I'll just leave that out there. I'll leave that out there. Very good. Excellent. Well, this has been great.
01:54:02
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. It's been super fun. Thanks for listening to Store Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
01:54:19
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.