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Paul Graham on Conversations with Tyler

168 points by superposeur 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
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cushychicken 3y ago
Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Say we wanted to boost ambition by 2X. What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way? Here's a guess: where it once was possible to be a one person wunderkind in scientific discovery or business, it no longer is. Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery. Anyone smart enough to have that kind of ambition is also probably smart enough to realize that it's a huge undertaking, and huge enough that they can't do it themselves. It also likely comes with the parallel realization (or fear) that what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team. I know that holds me back in my ambitions. It's hard to convince others you have the right ideas, and that they are worth working on.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  If I may riff off your comment: I want to work hard with kind, smart people on hard problems and then go home to my awesome family, not make shitty people wealthy. Is Paul smart? Or his he smart and he got lucky, and he’s trying to launder that luck into status? I hear lots of “people don’t want to work anymore” from a whole lot of lucky wealthy (“right place right time”) folks, for example. Asking in a first principals sort of way. “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." - Honore de Balzac
  - cushychicken 3y ago
    Balzac probably isn't wrong. You need at least one ruthless motherfucker on the team if you want to get dirty, shitty wealthy. Somebody has to be focused on the money; otherwise, nobody is. I'd also postulate that a complete ignorance of money probably isn't ultimately productive to your goals. You can't work on your business without distractions if you're getting evicted, for example. (This is assuming you're not generationally wealthy.)
    - benreesman 3y ago
      “If I’ve learned one thing in this life, it’s that when it’s millions of dollars at stake: you keep your head down, your nose clean, and work twice as hard as the other guy. But when it’s billions of dollars? The only thing that matters is never, ever saying no.” Cue Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones
  - benreesman 3y ago
    pg had too much success too quickly for it to be chance (IMHO). Leaving Viaweb aside (Yahoo was buying all kinds of stuff back then so it’s hard to know how cool-headed finance would have valued it) he clearly saw and exploited a massive opportunity around technology investment. And it’s worth bearing in mind that he drove several of the first few monster batches through an overall market meltdown that had a lot of VCs saying it was the end of the world. There was a definite luck factor called the iPhone: someone was going to build an army of businesses on the back of a platform revolution like that, but he got there first and executed. Now the public good component is a more complicated story, I honestly don’t know if replacing one club of secret-handshaking insiders who routinely fail up with a different one is a net win, and I certainly don’t buy the argument that you can measure it by market cap, but at least the new club doesn’t care who your parents are I guess? I think it’s probably a win vs. an admittedly abysmal bar.
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      I’ve thought about this comment a lot since you wrote it. I’m reminded of Bill Gross, “the bond king,” who founded PIMCO. Skilled, wanting to win at all costs, but who built a strategy primarily for a declining interest rate macro (“structural alpha”) that slowly became less effective near the end of his career, requiring creative maneuvers to successfully compete against competitors. I’m not ignoring the varying degrees of skill, education, and intelligence. I’m emphasizing the luck required for all that to be effective. Great comment, appreciate the history lesson and teachable moment.
      - benreesman 3y ago
        I’m flattered that you got value from my comment, I think it’s just stuff people my age ended up watching: I think I joined HN in like 2007/2008 and that’s when pg’s essays were still considered radical and no YC company had IPO’d for zillions yet. It was a very cool time!
  - commonlisp94 3y ago
    > “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." This quote reflects a very European attitude towards wealth to me. I believe PG specifically talks about possible origins of this idea.
    - blululu 3y ago
      An Orleanist interpretation of this aphorism is as credible as Louise-Phillip's claim to the French throne. Vautrin derives this statement from a near endless litany of examples. I would strongly recommend reading Balzac to get to the origins of all this.
      - commonlisp94 3y ago
        You can share all the true examples you want. But 19th century France and 20th century America have completely different economic models. So we can't understand that purely by studying French literature.
  - blueyes 3y ago
    A truly horrible take, and sadly pessimistic. Balzac's pronouncement assumes the world is zero-sum; ie that wealth must be stolen from others. While that may have been true of many fortunes for many centuries on earth, it is not true now. The essence of Silicon Valley is the positive-sum game. Paul's at the heart of it. Paul has done a lot of good for a lot of people, including the founders who went through YC, which is why people pay attention to his opinions. Giving $10k out to each founding team in the first year of YC wasn't laundering luck into status. (I doubt he cares about status.) It was changing how tech investing worked in order to liberate more tech people to recombine with each other in order to work on hard problems.
    - badpun 3y ago
      > Balzac's pronouncement assumes the world is zero-sum; ie that wealth must be stolen from others Not stolen, but it really pays to be super-ruthless towards your competition and everyone around you really. Just look at Microsoft's history.
      - blueyes 3y ago
        Some people succeed that way. Others succeed with a lot of creativity and hard work. They may eventually face competition, and then sure, you have to compete. To say every great fortune stems from a great crime is self-limiting at best, at worst the germ of socialism.
        badpun 3y ago
        There aren't many great fortunes, they usually require dominating an industry (say, come to be one of top 5 vendors out of industry that initially had 10,000 competitors), and I think it's pretty unrealistic to believe you could dominate an industry without getting your hands dirty. There may be exceptions like Warren Buffet, but I think the dark path is much more common.
        blueyes 3y ago
        This is simply untrue. The number of great fortunes itself has vastly increased in tech's positive-sum economy. The increase in the number of multi-millionaires, and the growth of that class, has been deeply impacted by tech. And it's not just founders. Lots of execs and senior software engineers now possess fortunes that past ages would have considered great, even in real vs nominal dollars. Not all industries are winner take all. And many industries remain to be invented by founders. This fortune == crime is part of a scarcity mindset, and it's a shame that limits people.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  I doubt an undergrad chooses not to go into science today because they see it being too collaborative. They don’t because they realize they can become a finance bro and make a metric ton more. A lot of science seems highly collaborative yes but that’s not because of a lack of choice. It’s honestly a cop out way of doing it. See the competition between the massive effort of the human genome project and Venter going rounds around them with a small team and in the end they announced together they sequenced the human genome to save face.
  - mtz1108 3y ago
    They go into finance because everyone since the Boomers has faced a nightmare of a job market in academia and science. Why spend 5+ years for a 15% chance at a middle class job when the alternative of doing anything else is so much easier? Kids don’t come out of college wanting to be corporate or finance bros. That happens after the world grinds them down.
  - watwut 3y ago
    > I doubt an undergrad chooses not to go into science today because they see it being too collaborative. They don’t because they realize they can become a finance bro and make a metric ton more. It is also years of PhD and postdocs where you work a lot for a little money while having super large chance to be forced out despite your efforts. And having to move every few years where you get the job, which makes families more complicated. Plus, competition for those slots is still high. It is not like there would be unfilled PhD or postdocs positions. There is more interests then available slots, leading to all kind of abuse.
- ta988 3y ago
  An extension of that, we are still doing ego worshipping and attributing the success to single individuals. Both in academia (PIs get the fame, money and recognition even when they didn't initiate or even believed in the idea) or in business (CEOs or founders get pretty much the same treatment). And I wonder if that's not impending on the success of the teams.
- acover 3y ago
  Even simple things are hard to do in developed countries. Building a house now requires experts. From what I've seen developing countries don't have that luxury and they accept everything might kill you. Though driving a car is much more dangerous.
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    Non-experts build their own houses even in developed countries. For example there is a subcommunity of folks helping each other to build DIY houses out of straw bale https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/ideas/67k-straw-bale-self-build https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/ideas/67k-straw-bale-self-bui... Self-sufficiency and other "simple" things are possible in developed countries, they are just intrinsically hard and this is probably a good limiting factor because basically lots of things (eg foraging) don't generally scale if a lot of people want to do them.
    - acover 3y ago
      Cool, thanks!
- spamizbad 3y ago
  I'm going to have to disagree with the interviewer's question. I do not think there's an absence of ambition at all. I think for a particular segment of society we've actually gotten much better at putting ambitious people to work. In the past, an ambitious person had fewer options and would strike out on their own, which fueled a entrepreneurship. Now there are hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprises that slurp up ambitious individuals and put them in charge of important things. I've been reading about postwar corporate culture recently and its pretty amazing that orgs would just sit on these amazingly talented people - and knew they were talented - but just didn't care. Not only were some of their most skilled workers not promoted, they weren't even paid more. I think WWI and WWII greatly shaped the attitude of corporate leaders from this period that you just simply hired someone to do their job and made sure they did it well and that was that. Very reminiscent of military ranks. Seniority and loyalty each mattered just as much as skill.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    "Now there are hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprises that slurp up ambitious individuals and put them in charge of important things." I'm not sure I agree with that... They slurp up ambitious people, put them in charge of something, work hard to convince them it's important, layer endless amounts of bureaucracy on top and around them, and pay them just enough to make sure they don't leave - I think this may be more accurate...
    - badpun 3y ago
      That's tech monopolies (FAANG etc.), which have more money than sense. In the normal businesses, there's hardly any busywork, because the relatively low margins don't allow for it.
  - a_bonobo 3y ago
    >I think for a particular segment of society we've actually gotten much better at putting ambitious people to work Yes yes yes!! There's this great essay from Stephen Jay Gould on why we haven't had 0.400 hitters in baseball for so long. His argument was that the overall pool of baseball players got too good so you're not seeing strong outliers anymore! I'd say that this is a phenomenon we see across all kinds of life, not just sports. From a paper reviewing the evidence of Gould, I can't find the original essay online: >Gould then supposes that the decline in batting average peak (the .400 hitter, the outlier) is due to decreased variation in the population of hitters. In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choose from increased, the variation in talent (the difference between the best to the worst batting averages) should decrease. Therefore, players in Major League Baseball in more recent period are arguably reaching the “wall” of human performance. Gould’s analysis of the data supports this idea, as the standard deviation of league-wide batting averages has decreased steadily since the early 20th century. https://sabr.org/journal/article/can-stephen-jay-goulds-theory-explain-why-there-were-no-batting-triple-crowns-in-mlb-for-45-years/ https://sabr.org/journal/article/can-stephen-jay-goulds-theo...
- aborsy 3y ago
  I don’t think it’s true in pure science. Like, building a team to solve the Riemann hypothesis would actually be counter productive. In experimental science, the number of coauthors of a paper has increased, but probably not the number of active coauthors. Even business is born out of small startups, later expanded into larger teams.
  - nuclearnice1 3y ago
    You may be interested in Terry Tao’s polymath collaborations. https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/polymath-proposal-upper-bounding-the-de-bruijn-newman-constant/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/polymath-proposal-... > As for upper bounds, de Bruijn showed back in 1950 that {\Lambda \leq 1/2}. The only progress since then has been the work of Ki, Kim and Lee in 2009, who improved this slightly to {\Lambda < 1/2}. The primary proposed aim of this Polymath project is to obtain further explicit improvements to the upper bound of {\Lambda}. Of course, if we could lower the upper bound all the way to zero, this would solve the Riemann hypothesis, but I do not view this as a realistic outcome of this project To your point, there was some excitement and progress in the beginning, but it remains an unusual approach to mathematics.
- ehnto 3y ago
  I think in line with your point, if we did increase ambition 2x, are there enough people in a position to action their ambitions? I think there is plenty of ambition, but many people, probably the majority, are focused on making ends meet and the daily grind. I think the 4 day work week is a great step toward enabling people to be ambitious and innovative, in whatever field drives them.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way? Consider the tsunami of hate and ridicule and "you didn't build that" directed at Elon Musk for having the temerity to think he could build rockets and having the gall to be highly successful at it. Oh, and also build a competitive electric car company and school all the established car makers.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  I think there's an ongoing bias for many of us. During our lifetimes things have changed so rapidly, and generally positively, that we kind of assume that this is the normal direction of things. And so when things slow down we look for some profound meaning to it. In reality, we have all been fortunate enough to live through a really weird time in history. One of my favorite quotes: "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. ... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." - Albert Michelson, 1894 That quote is from from Albert Michelson of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. [1] For some really brief background, before Einstein it was believed that light had to have a medium to travel through in space. Light was seen as a wave, and waves can't propagate in a vacuum. That medium was called the luminiferous (light) aether. Morley set out to experimentally prove the existence of this medium by showing that the speed of light measured from 2 perpendicular directions would be different, given that the trajectory of the aether, and thus the speed of propagation, would be different. Yet he kept measuring near the exact same value for light. He was so convinced in the correctness of the luminiferous aether (which had dominated scientific thought for centuries, and was imminently logical) that he doubted his own results and would continue to repeat similar experiments for decades. Hence, the context of his quote. But then of course Einstein was soon enough to be on his way and discover relativity, which would not only completely invalidate the aether but completely revolutionize science. And then quantum mechanics was also right on the way. The point of all of this is that Albert Michelson was convinced science had effectively come to an end in terms of major discoveries, let alone revolutions, let alone those driven by one off thinkers, in much the same way you do. And there's no real reason to think anything has really changed. Science has historically always had long lulls, as well as societies driven to the point of assuming as absolutely true ideas which are ultimately proven to be fundamentally and completely wrong, and whose assumption of truth was actually one of the reasons progress lulled. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...
- city_guy_1 3y ago
  Another dimension is access to money and financial knowledge, which I find strangely missing from the context. Assuming you have to pay for schooling, that along with the disproportionately increasing cost of rent and property factors into people being less ambitious due to the necessity of settling for a job that pays enough to support oneself. I'm curious how Paul Graham did it, given that he has multiple higher education degrees in philosophy, attended art school in Italy, and what capital he could rely on from his parents. It would be disappointing if they both come from money yet miss this point, given the emphasis of progressive politics on socioeconomic or cultural privilege. Of course one doesn't have to agree with it, but shouldn't it at least be discussed?
  - thimkerbell 3y ago
    You have seen his essay addressing that? "What I Worked On", http://paulgraham.com/worked.html http://paulgraham.com/worked.html
    - city_guy_1 3y ago
      Thanks for linking that; seems like it's a bit of both: on one hand he notes that "computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS-80, in about 1980", but later during his adult years "wanted to go back to RISD, but I was now broke and RISD was very expensive, so I decided to get a job for a year and then return to RISD the next fall."
- paganel 3y ago
  There's also the problem of housing and that living in or very close to big cities (which you need to do in order for your "ambitions" to be noticed) has become expensive as hell. Which is to say that almost no-one has time for shitty "ambition" that would make some multi-millionaires (angel investors and the like) into multi-multi-millionaires or even into billionaires, people have to live and to pay rent and to purchase very expensive avocados (because that's the only thing that they eat, of course). But maybe the trust-fund kids who don't have to worry about all of these things will be able to find enough ambition among themselves in order to move things forward.
- iEchoic 3y ago
  > Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery. The best way to get great people to work with you is to build things that people care about. That's something you can do alone, and it's never been more accessible than it is today.
- cturner 3y ago
  "Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery." Whether this is true or not depends somewhat on definitions, but I am going to take the counter-argument. This is just not the case, you won't be able to evidence it that it is, and it might be this assumption that is holding you back. In our age, momentum is towards large org-charts, and it is not clear that any greatness comes from it. The foundation of unix came from two people. Craigslist has 50 employees. Pre-acquisition, Twitter had 7000. Facebook has nearly ten times that. There is astonishing talent at the big silicon valley firms yet they reliably fall short of greatness. If lots of well-trained minds was the gateway to greatness, those firms would already have it. Yet the original concept of twitter was great, and it was such a simple thing. If any of us went back in time to 1995, we'd build a first cut of Twitter in a weekend. But it went undiscovered until all those years later. In this thread, Walter Bright is taking a hammering on votes for his comment. Yet here is someone who is known to have built complete toolchains for C and C++, also a java-to-native compiler, and his own language that is well-regarded, written variety of articles for journals, built applications. Here is someone who can do great things working alone. (He has also held various dayjobs building other stuff.) "what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team ... holds me back" Is it possible that your faith in the team sports model is itself what's holding you back? What could you achieve if you role-play that as being false, and consider how you would organise in light of that? What if you stopped spending energy trying to convert the unworthy, and instead put that energy to be broader yourself. You could still work with people with compatible ideas. Your profile says you are a fpga engineer. The building blocks you work with are some of the most flexible humans have had access to. There will be undiscovered twitters in your space.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Totally agree. “No great discoveries can be done by one man anymore,” seems like demoralization propaganda and it’s impossible to prove regardless.
- desas 3y ago
  "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"
  - jononomo 3y ago
    I literally did exactly this for the five best years of my life in my late 30s, early 40s. It was absolutely soul-destroying.
- delbronski 3y ago
  Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Maybe there is just as much ambition as there ever was. Maybe people have just shifted their goals. Maybe they have different drives. Instead of aspiring to be the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, maybe people have realised that this is not really what they want in life. Instead of having a strong desire for financial and business success, maybe people in the developed world have started to shift their focus to other things like friendship, family, enjoying life, and learning to be satisfied with less. Maybe in this new world we live in to be ambitious means something else. I don’t know.
  - listenfaster 3y ago
    I had a similar thought reading this, and I looked up ambition to check myself. ‘The desire to achieve fame, rank or power.’ You raise a good question: does power lie in solely material gain? Of course not, more and more people understand that controlling one’s own attention and time _is_ the material gain we seek. The equation is changing (has been for years, accelerated by the pandemic), not just in ‘the developed world’. Aside: Still waking up and chewing on why the developed world is called out specifically as a thing in this question. Where does the developed world end and the undeveloped world begin?
mtz1108 3y ago
[flagged]
- telotortium 3y ago
  Look, I like mchurch, but I think griping about rumors here is uncalled for. If you've got any actual details, spill them.
  - mtz1108 3y ago
    [dead]
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Is it really a rumor when a party to the drama is the one bringing it up?
- rideontime 3y ago
  His boys? MOC? What are you talking about?
  - oh_sigh 3y ago
    Michael O. Church. The guy who basically everyone hates after spending 20 minutes with him.
    - dang 3y ago
      Please don't respond by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tptacek 3y ago
  You really need to stop doing this.
  - zee25 3y ago
jekude 3y ago
This feels far too short and rushed. Maybe with some longer form podcasts we have (fortunately) become used to full-length conversations. I would have loved 4 hours of this with more back and forth.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Cowen’s interviews are always like this. Contrary to the name, he is not actually good at having conversations and seems to just have a list of specific questions he wants to ask. It comes off as very stilted and you can usually tell that the guests are little whiplashed.
  - karaterobot 3y ago
    Oh, that's what I like about that show the most. He gets the guests uncomfortably outside the zone of a normal interview, both with the specificity of the questions as well as the pacing. I'm sure it's at least partly on purpose. I agree that it feels a little like a thesis defense, but I like it when you can hear the guest (someone who is usually at the top of their field and used to answering softball questions) thinking "christ, what am I supposed to say to that?"
    - keiferski 3y ago
      But you don’t get good responses. Instead it’s just, “I hadn’t thought of that” or “That’s a good question but I’d need to think about it awhile.” The idea that an expert should be able to give a fully-formed answer to a novel question on the spot is not a good one. Thinking takes time, which Cowen doesn’t give his guests. Subsequently most of his interviews are notable for their anecdotes or trivia, not for insightful responses.
      - whimsicalism 3y ago
        I disagree, when he is interviewing really intelligent people it often works out quite well.
gwern 3y ago
Some interesting points: - he's mentioned learning gliding but I didn't know it was to cure his fear of flying (given how international he is, I would never have thought of that as an issue) - I didn't know pg collected old master paintings (although I did know they've become relatively cheap) - his optimism about fixing SF by simply removing a few bad apples from the supervisors is quite surprising to me, although I suppose he'd know way more about that topic than I do - lol at the Robert Morris anecdote. Well, he wasn't wrong, exactly... - the comments on fame ring true to me - this does seem oddly short to me, and like Cowen could've interrupted less (especially in the ambition section where Cowen diverts pg onto the shuffling-networks topic and pg never gets to finish). Maybe there was some scheduling constraint so Cowen was rushing through his usual list? I notice many of the usual tactics like overrated/underrated are absent.
pgayed 3y ago
PG on the problem with fame: “‘The world sucks because of tech, and tech sucks because of Paul Graham.’” lol
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portman 3y ago
I had not realized that PG and his family moved to England. I also recently moved from California to England, so would be fascinated to learn more about the genesis of PG's move. (As an aside: I sometimes hear my kids late at night trying to convince their friends back in California to ask their parents to move here. Anecdotally it does feel like many families are considering it. Of course I have an availability bias here.) Does anyone know of any essays or interviews where PG discusses his decision to emigrate?
- kpw94 3y ago
  PG is British. Born in England. So not sure emigrate is the right term. He must have had a strong connection with family back in UK his whole life. He's also American, so moving between US and UK must feel pretty fluid.
  - bambax 3y ago
    > PG is British. Born in England. Yeah, he simply went back to where he was born to raise a family. The salmon move.
  - slim 3y ago
    you say he's paying double taxes both in US and UK ?
    - desas 3y ago
      Very broadly and simply speaking you can write-off UK taxes against the US tax bill and vice versa. There's much more nuance than that though.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- mtlynch 3y ago
  >In the summer of 2016 we moved to England. We wanted our kids to see what it was like living in another country, and since I was a British citizen by birth, that seemed the obvious choice. We only meant to stay for a year, but we liked it so much that we still live there. http://paulgraham.com/worked.html http://paulgraham.com/worked.html
textread 3y ago
Is there any way I could download this episode's spotify url as an mp3? https://open.spotify.com/episode/6QQr6eO9qgQTwdo7UbdiXq https://open.spotify.com/episode/6QQr6eO9qgQTwdo7UbdiXq I tried a couple of sites online (spotiydown, spotifymate), which both failed. yt-dlp fails. spotdl fails.
- lordgrenville 3y ago
  Not the Spotify version (if it's different in some way) but it is syndicated here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/cowenconvos/CWT-189-PaulGraham-final-v2.mp3 https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/cowenconvos/CWT-189-PaulGr...
- deleted 3y ago
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- dingleberry 3y ago
  open the interview site (parent, not spotify) in browser with dev mode open click network bar, look for media file that's currently streaming should be about 45mb mp3 file: right click, copy as curl then paste it into a terminal, append " -O" then press enter
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mercurialsolo 3y ago
Why do we have not so many great individual players anymore but great teams? Is our rate of progress and build slowing down? Can the brilliance of an individual overshadow big tech? Why did we have the best quarter in growth for public companies and why is it taking longer private companies to go public? More than ambition the rules of the game and the frontier has now changed. I don't think ambitious people don't exist - they just realize this is better realized by being within a larger ecosystem and having influence rather than building everything around oneself. Would we say Hinton was ambitious? Did he have sufficient impact?
- ankit219 3y ago
  Ambitions are mostly defined by external stimuli, that is what does a society value? Value not in terms of the actual praise, but what are the things they keep talking about. If we look at it from a narrow definition of tech, we realize there aren't many ambitious individual players. The premise becomes hard to justify if we were to include so many teenagers on insta/tiktok/twitch getting a lot of following and making content individually (where in the past it take a full crew to make such stuff) and newer creators wanting to join that club. I think many people are still ambitious. Just that (for quite a few people) their ambition is no longer to work 10 years to build an everlasting company, or do original research to get themselves a nobel, but just to gain the fame and following that comes with social media. In an abstract sense, for a select set, the end goal of ambition was the adulation and fame you got after doing your thing well. Of course, there is another set where ambition is to build a lasting thing and they continue to work towards that. Just that former set outnumbers the latter easily, and it's never easier for that set to achieve their goal.
- mlinsey 3y ago
  "Why do we have not so many great individual players anymore but great teams? " IMO this hasn't changed as much as it seems from the outside. The brilliant individual leaders of the past owed most of their success to their team members, and most high-functioning teams today, if you study how they work internally, do actually have a key leader who is aligning everyone around a shared vision. What's changed is that it's no longer seen as a positive to boost the profile of the leader too far the rest of the team.
Barrin92 3y ago
It's a good interview and Tyler like pretty much always has an absurd breadth of knowledge on the topics he asks about but I wish he could just drop some of the economics jargon at times, even Paul seemed to be confused by it lol. COWEN: Why and how did so many things here end up undercapitalized? The water utilities, the NHS — it seems to be a consistent pattern. That could make us more pessimistic because the flow numbers don’t reflect the fact that capital maintenance is even worse than we had thought. GRAHAM: I don’t know. You’re an economist. I don’t know what the term capital maintenance means. I mean come on instead of "what exactly, in the smallest number of dimensions, are you better at than the other people?", you can just ask, "what are your core strengths"
shaftoe444 3y ago
Paul Graham has the rare but admirable habit of saying "I don't know" when he doesn't know something.
welder 3y ago
> When I talk to people who are in their teens or early 20s about starting a start-up, I tell them, “Instead of sitting around thinking of start-up ideas, you should be working with other people on projects. Then, you’ll get a start-up idea out of it that you probably never would have thought of, and you’ll get a co-founder too.” I wish people would do more of that. You can get co-founders — just work with people on projects. Great quote about how to indirectly find co-founders.
prepend 3y ago
Man, I really hate platform specific podcasts that require a special player or account. Spotify in general seems to be “bad” about taking an open podcast out out through an rss feed that was playable anywhere and making it exclusive. It’s a tale as old as time, but it’s the inconvenience of upsetting an ingrained personal habit (open podcast player, look for new episodes) and having to add an extra step (open Spotify, look for new episodes). This is good for Spotify but bad for users. I want to organize my information and optimize my behavior. Not do dumb, unnecessary steps because it makes Spotify more money.
- bronco21016 3y ago
  Joe Rogan has entirely lost me because of this friction. I was only an occasional listener before but after trying one episode in Spotify I just gave up. The attempt to switch between video and audio only when locking and unlocking my phone, and the subsequent skip in audio, ruined it for me.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Indeed, same with me. I don’t think I’m a “super fan” enough to follow him and others to platforms. I understand people switching and as much as I’d like to think that I would refuse $100M to switch my HN comments to a different, parallel, crappier internet; I suspect I would fail that test and take the $100M.
    - benrutter 3y ago
      I think this is the real tragedy at the moment- it makes sense for content producers to switch to the highest bidder, and it makes sense for platforms like spotify to offer exclusive contracts. The end result is we all act rational and it still winds up worse for users- I don't really know what it would take for the incentives to change for the better?
- psYchotic 3y ago
  Is this discontent coming from the embedded player on the linked page? Because yes, that's a Spotify player, but in case you missed it: there are three links at the top of the page, for Google, Apple and Spotify. And if it's an old school RSS feed you want, here you go: https://cowenconvos.libsyn.com/rss https://cowenconvos.libsyn.com/rss
thimkerbell 3y ago
I'm interested in the Dark Ages thing. If we instantiated PG as an AI and asked it to give its best guess, as to why (human) creation went dark, what would it speculate?
jgalt212 3y ago
No acknowledgment by them how easy it's been to push on open doors (QE and ZIRP).

168 points by superposeur 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Say we wanted to boost ambition by 2X. What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way? Here's a guess: where it once was possible to be a one person wunderkind in scientific discovery or business, it no longer is. Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery. Anyone smart enough to have that kind of ambition is also probably smart enough to realize that it's a huge undertaking, and huge enough that they can't do it themselves. It also likely comes with the parallel realization (or fear) that what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team. I know that holds me back in my ambitions. It's hard to convince others you have the right ideas, and that they are worth working on.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
If I may riff off your comment: I want to work hard with kind, smart people on hard problems and then go home to my awesome family, not make shitty people wealthy. Is Paul smart? Or his he smart and he got lucky, and he’s trying to launder that luck into status? I hear lots of “people don’t want to work anymore” from a whole lot of lucky wealthy (“right place right time”) folks, for example. Asking in a first principals sort of way. “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." - Honore de Balzac
- cushychicken 3y ago
  Balzac probably isn't wrong. You need at least one ruthless motherfucker on the team if you want to get dirty, shitty wealthy. Somebody has to be focused on the money; otherwise, nobody is. I'd also postulate that a complete ignorance of money probably isn't ultimately productive to your goals. You can't work on your business without distractions if you're getting evicted, for example. (This is assuming you're not generationally wealthy.)
  - benreesman 3y ago
    “If I’ve learned one thing in this life, it’s that when it’s millions of dollars at stake: you keep your head down, your nose clean, and work twice as hard as the other guy. But when it’s billions of dollars? The only thing that matters is never, ever saying no.” Cue Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones
- benreesman 3y ago
  pg had too much success too quickly for it to be chance (IMHO). Leaving Viaweb aside (Yahoo was buying all kinds of stuff back then so it’s hard to know how cool-headed finance would have valued it) he clearly saw and exploited a massive opportunity around technology investment. And it’s worth bearing in mind that he drove several of the first few monster batches through an overall market meltdown that had a lot of VCs saying it was the end of the world. There was a definite luck factor called the iPhone: someone was going to build an army of businesses on the back of a platform revolution like that, but he got there first and executed. Now the public good component is a more complicated story, I honestly don’t know if replacing one club of secret-handshaking insiders who routinely fail up with a different one is a net win, and I certainly don’t buy the argument that you can measure it by market cap, but at least the new club doesn’t care who your parents are I guess? I think it’s probably a win vs. an admittedly abysmal bar.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    I’ve thought about this comment a lot since you wrote it. I’m reminded of Bill Gross, “the bond king,” who founded PIMCO. Skilled, wanting to win at all costs, but who built a strategy primarily for a declining interest rate macro (“structural alpha”) that slowly became less effective near the end of his career, requiring creative maneuvers to successfully compete against competitors. I’m not ignoring the varying degrees of skill, education, and intelligence. I’m emphasizing the luck required for all that to be effective. Great comment, appreciate the history lesson and teachable moment.
    - benreesman 3y ago
      I’m flattered that you got value from my comment, I think it’s just stuff people my age ended up watching: I think I joined HN in like 2007/2008 and that’s when pg’s essays were still considered radical and no YC company had IPO’d for zillions yet. It was a very cool time!
- commonlisp94 3y ago
  > “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." This quote reflects a very European attitude towards wealth to me. I believe PG specifically talks about possible origins of this idea.
  - blululu 3y ago
    An Orleanist interpretation of this aphorism is as credible as Louise-Phillip's claim to the French throne. Vautrin derives this statement from a near endless litany of examples. I would strongly recommend reading Balzac to get to the origins of all this.
    - commonlisp94 3y ago
      You can share all the true examples you want. But 19th century France and 20th century America have completely different economic models. So we can't understand that purely by studying French literature.
- blueyes 3y ago
  A truly horrible take, and sadly pessimistic. Balzac's pronouncement assumes the world is zero-sum; ie that wealth must be stolen from others. While that may have been true of many fortunes for many centuries on earth, it is not true now. The essence of Silicon Valley is the positive-sum game. Paul's at the heart of it. Paul has done a lot of good for a lot of people, including the founders who went through YC, which is why people pay attention to his opinions. Giving $10k out to each founding team in the first year of YC wasn't laundering luck into status. (I doubt he cares about status.) It was changing how tech investing worked in order to liberate more tech people to recombine with each other in order to work on hard problems.
  - badpun 3y ago
    > Balzac's pronouncement assumes the world is zero-sum; ie that wealth must be stolen from others Not stolen, but it really pays to be super-ruthless towards your competition and everyone around you really. Just look at Microsoft's history.
    - blueyes 3y ago
      Some people succeed that way. Others succeed with a lot of creativity and hard work. They may eventually face competition, and then sure, you have to compete. To say every great fortune stems from a great crime is self-limiting at best, at worst the germ of socialism.
      - badpun 3y ago
        There aren't many great fortunes, they usually require dominating an industry (say, come to be one of top 5 vendors out of industry that initially had 10,000 competitors), and I think it's pretty unrealistic to believe you could dominate an industry without getting your hands dirty. There may be exceptions like Warren Buffet, but I think the dark path is much more common.
        blueyes 3y ago
        This is simply untrue. The number of great fortunes itself has vastly increased in tech's positive-sum economy. The increase in the number of multi-millionaires, and the growth of that class, has been deeply impacted by tech. And it's not just founders. Lots of execs and senior software engineers now possess fortunes that past ages would have considered great, even in real vs nominal dollars. Not all industries are winner take all. And many industries remain to be invented by founders. This fortune == crime is part of a scarcity mindset, and it's a shame that limits people.
ramraj07 3y ago
I doubt an undergrad chooses not to go into science today because they see it being too collaborative. They don’t because they realize they can become a finance bro and make a metric ton more. A lot of science seems highly collaborative yes but that’s not because of a lack of choice. It’s honestly a cop out way of doing it. See the competition between the massive effort of the human genome project and Venter going rounds around them with a small team and in the end they announced together they sequenced the human genome to save face.
- mtz1108 3y ago
  They go into finance because everyone since the Boomers has faced a nightmare of a job market in academia and science. Why spend 5+ years for a 15% chance at a middle class job when the alternative of doing anything else is so much easier? Kids don’t come out of college wanting to be corporate or finance bros. That happens after the world grinds them down.
- watwut 3y ago
  > I doubt an undergrad chooses not to go into science today because they see it being too collaborative. They don’t because they realize they can become a finance bro and make a metric ton more. It is also years of PhD and postdocs where you work a lot for a little money while having super large chance to be forced out despite your efforts. And having to move every few years where you get the job, which makes families more complicated. Plus, competition for those slots is still high. It is not like there would be unfilled PhD or postdocs positions. There is more interests then available slots, leading to all kind of abuse.
ta988 3y ago
An extension of that, we are still doing ego worshipping and attributing the success to single individuals. Both in academia (PIs get the fame, money and recognition even when they didn't initiate or even believed in the idea) or in business (CEOs or founders get pretty much the same treatment). And I wonder if that's not impending on the success of the teams.
acover 3y ago
Even simple things are hard to do in developed countries. Building a house now requires experts. From what I've seen developing countries don't have that luxury and they accept everything might kill you. Though driving a car is much more dangerous.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  Non-experts build their own houses even in developed countries. For example there is a subcommunity of folks helping each other to build DIY houses out of straw bale https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/ideas/67k-straw-bale-self-build https://www.homebuilding.co.uk/ideas/67k-straw-bale-self-bui... Self-sufficiency and other "simple" things are possible in developed countries, they are just intrinsically hard and this is probably a good limiting factor because basically lots of things (eg foraging) don't generally scale if a lot of people want to do them.
  - acover 3y ago
    Cool, thanks!
spamizbad 3y ago
I'm going to have to disagree with the interviewer's question. I do not think there's an absence of ambition at all. I think for a particular segment of society we've actually gotten much better at putting ambitious people to work. In the past, an ambitious person had fewer options and would strike out on their own, which fueled a entrepreneurship. Now there are hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprises that slurp up ambitious individuals and put them in charge of important things. I've been reading about postwar corporate culture recently and its pretty amazing that orgs would just sit on these amazingly talented people - and knew they were talented - but just didn't care. Not only were some of their most skilled workers not promoted, they weren't even paid more. I think WWI and WWII greatly shaped the attitude of corporate leaders from this period that you just simply hired someone to do their job and made sure they did it well and that was that. Very reminiscent of military ranks. Seniority and loyalty each mattered just as much as skill.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "Now there are hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprises that slurp up ambitious individuals and put them in charge of important things." I'm not sure I agree with that... They slurp up ambitious people, put them in charge of something, work hard to convince them it's important, layer endless amounts of bureaucracy on top and around them, and pay them just enough to make sure they don't leave - I think this may be more accurate...
  - badpun 3y ago
    That's tech monopolies (FAANG etc.), which have more money than sense. In the normal businesses, there's hardly any busywork, because the relatively low margins don't allow for it.
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  >I think for a particular segment of society we've actually gotten much better at putting ambitious people to work Yes yes yes!! There's this great essay from Stephen Jay Gould on why we haven't had 0.400 hitters in baseball for so long. His argument was that the overall pool of baseball players got too good so you're not seeing strong outliers anymore! I'd say that this is a phenomenon we see across all kinds of life, not just sports. From a paper reviewing the evidence of Gould, I can't find the original essay online: >Gould then supposes that the decline in batting average peak (the .400 hitter, the outlier) is due to decreased variation in the population of hitters. In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choose from increased, the variation in talent (the difference between the best to the worst batting averages) should decrease. Therefore, players in Major League Baseball in more recent period are arguably reaching the “wall” of human performance. Gould’s analysis of the data supports this idea, as the standard deviation of league-wide batting averages has decreased steadily since the early 20th century. https://sabr.org/journal/article/can-stephen-jay-goulds-theory-explain-why-there-were-no-batting-triple-crowns-in-mlb-for-45-years/ https://sabr.org/journal/article/can-stephen-jay-goulds-theo...
aborsy 3y ago
I don’t think it’s true in pure science. Like, building a team to solve the Riemann hypothesis would actually be counter productive. In experimental science, the number of coauthors of a paper has increased, but probably not the number of active coauthors. Even business is born out of small startups, later expanded into larger teams.
- nuclearnice1 3y ago
  You may be interested in Terry Tao’s polymath collaborations. https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/polymath-proposal-upper-bounding-the-de-bruijn-newman-constant/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/polymath-proposal-... > As for upper bounds, de Bruijn showed back in 1950 that {\Lambda \leq 1/2}. The only progress since then has been the work of Ki, Kim and Lee in 2009, who improved this slightly to {\Lambda < 1/2}. The primary proposed aim of this Polymath project is to obtain further explicit improvements to the upper bound of {\Lambda}. Of course, if we could lower the upper bound all the way to zero, this would solve the Riemann hypothesis, but I do not view this as a realistic outcome of this project To your point, there was some excitement and progress in the beginning, but it remains an unusual approach to mathematics.
ehnto 3y ago
I think in line with your point, if we did increase ambition 2x, are there enough people in a position to action their ambitions? I think there is plenty of ambition, but many people, probably the majority, are focused on making ends meet and the daily grind. I think the 4 day work week is a great step toward enabling people to be ambitious and innovative, in whatever field drives them.
WalterBright 3y ago
> What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way? Consider the tsunami of hate and ridicule and "you didn't build that" directed at Elon Musk for having the temerity to think he could build rockets and having the gall to be highly successful at it. Oh, and also build a competitive electric car company and school all the established car makers.
somenameforme 3y ago
I think there's an ongoing bias for many of us. During our lifetimes things have changed so rapidly, and generally positively, that we kind of assume that this is the normal direction of things. And so when things slow down we look for some profound meaning to it. In reality, we have all been fortunate enough to live through a really weird time in history. One of my favorite quotes: "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. ... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." - Albert Michelson, 1894 That quote is from from Albert Michelson of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. [1] For some really brief background, before Einstein it was believed that light had to have a medium to travel through in space. Light was seen as a wave, and waves can't propagate in a vacuum. That medium was called the luminiferous (light) aether. Morley set out to experimentally prove the existence of this medium by showing that the speed of light measured from 2 perpendicular directions would be different, given that the trajectory of the aether, and thus the speed of propagation, would be different. Yet he kept measuring near the exact same value for light. He was so convinced in the correctness of the luminiferous aether (which had dominated scientific thought for centuries, and was imminently logical) that he doubted his own results and would continue to repeat similar experiments for decades. Hence, the context of his quote. But then of course Einstein was soon enough to be on his way and discover relativity, which would not only completely invalidate the aether but completely revolutionize science. And then quantum mechanics was also right on the way. The point of all of this is that Albert Michelson was convinced science had effectively come to an end in terms of major discoveries, let alone revolutions, let alone those driven by one off thinkers, in much the same way you do. And there's no real reason to think anything has really changed. Science has historically always had long lulls, as well as societies driven to the point of assuming as absolutely true ideas which are ultimately proven to be fundamentally and completely wrong, and whose assumption of truth was actually one of the reasons progress lulled. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...
city_guy_1 3y ago
Another dimension is access to money and financial knowledge, which I find strangely missing from the context. Assuming you have to pay for schooling, that along with the disproportionately increasing cost of rent and property factors into people being less ambitious due to the necessity of settling for a job that pays enough to support oneself. I'm curious how Paul Graham did it, given that he has multiple higher education degrees in philosophy, attended art school in Italy, and what capital he could rely on from his parents. It would be disappointing if they both come from money yet miss this point, given the emphasis of progressive politics on socioeconomic or cultural privilege. Of course one doesn't have to agree with it, but shouldn't it at least be discussed?
- thimkerbell 3y ago
  You have seen his essay addressing that? "What I Worked On", http://paulgraham.com/worked.html http://paulgraham.com/worked.html
  - city_guy_1 3y ago
    Thanks for linking that; seems like it's a bit of both: on one hand he notes that "computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS-80, in about 1980", but later during his adult years "wanted to go back to RISD, but I was now broke and RISD was very expensive, so I decided to get a job for a year and then return to RISD the next fall."
paganel 3y ago
There's also the problem of housing and that living in or very close to big cities (which you need to do in order for your "ambitions" to be noticed) has become expensive as hell. Which is to say that almost no-one has time for shitty "ambition" that would make some multi-millionaires (angel investors and the like) into multi-multi-millionaires or even into billionaires, people have to live and to pay rent and to purchase very expensive avocados (because that's the only thing that they eat, of course). But maybe the trust-fund kids who don't have to worry about all of these things will be able to find enough ambition among themselves in order to move things forward.
iEchoic 3y ago
> Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery. The best way to get great people to work with you is to build things that people care about. That's something you can do alone, and it's never been more accessible than it is today.
cturner 3y ago
"Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery." Whether this is true or not depends somewhat on definitions, but I am going to take the counter-argument. This is just not the case, you won't be able to evidence it that it is, and it might be this assumption that is holding you back. In our age, momentum is towards large org-charts, and it is not clear that any greatness comes from it. The foundation of unix came from two people. Craigslist has 50 employees. Pre-acquisition, Twitter had 7000. Facebook has nearly ten times that. There is astonishing talent at the big silicon valley firms yet they reliably fall short of greatness. If lots of well-trained minds was the gateway to greatness, those firms would already have it. Yet the original concept of twitter was great, and it was such a simple thing. If any of us went back in time to 1995, we'd build a first cut of Twitter in a weekend. But it went undiscovered until all those years later. In this thread, Walter Bright is taking a hammering on votes for his comment. Yet here is someone who is known to have built complete toolchains for C and C++, also a java-to-native compiler, and his own language that is well-regarded, written variety of articles for journals, built applications. Here is someone who can do great things working alone. (He has also held various dayjobs building other stuff.) "what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team ... holds me back" Is it possible that your faith in the team sports model is itself what's holding you back? What could you achieve if you role-play that as being false, and consider how you would organise in light of that? What if you stopped spending energy trying to convert the unworthy, and instead put that energy to be broader yourself. You could still work with people with compatible ideas. Your profile says you are a fpga engineer. The building blocks you work with are some of the most flexible humans have had access to. There will be undiscovered twitters in your space.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Totally agree. “No great discoveries can be done by one man anymore,” seems like demoralization propaganda and it’s impossible to prove regardless.
desas 3y ago
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"
- jononomo 3y ago
  I literally did exactly this for the five best years of my life in my late 30s, early 40s. It was absolutely soul-destroying.
delbronski 3y ago
Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Maybe there is just as much ambition as there ever was. Maybe people have just shifted their goals. Maybe they have different drives. Instead of aspiring to be the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, maybe people have realised that this is not really what they want in life. Instead of having a strong desire for financial and business success, maybe people in the developed world have started to shift their focus to other things like friendship, family, enjoying life, and learning to be satisfied with less. Maybe in this new world we live in to be ambitious means something else. I don’t know.
- listenfaster 3y ago
  I had a similar thought reading this, and I looked up ambition to check myself. ‘The desire to achieve fame, rank or power.’ You raise a good question: does power lie in solely material gain? Of course not, more and more people understand that controlling one’s own attention and time _is_ the material gain we seek. The equation is changing (has been for years, accelerated by the pandemic), not just in ‘the developed world’. Aside: Still waking up and chewing on why the developed world is called out specifically as a thing in this question. Where does the developed world end and the undeveloped world begin?

mtz1108 3y ago

[flagged]

telotortium 3y ago
Look, I like mchurch, but I think griping about rumors here is uncalled for. If you've got any actual details, spill them.
- mtz1108 3y ago
  [dead]
- tptacek 3y ago
  Is it really a rumor when a party to the drama is the one bringing it up?
rideontime 3y ago
His boys? MOC? What are you talking about?
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  Michael O. Church. The guy who basically everyone hates after spending 20 minutes with him.
  - dang 3y ago
    Please don't respond by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tptacek 3y ago
You really need to stop doing this.
- zee25 3y ago

jekude 3y ago

This feels far too short and rushed. Maybe with some longer form podcasts we have (fortunately) become used to full-length conversations. I would have loved 4 hours of this with more back and forth.

keiferski 3y ago
Cowen’s interviews are always like this. Contrary to the name, he is not actually good at having conversations and seems to just have a list of specific questions he wants to ask. It comes off as very stilted and you can usually tell that the guests are little whiplashed.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Oh, that's what I like about that show the most. He gets the guests uncomfortably outside the zone of a normal interview, both with the specificity of the questions as well as the pacing. I'm sure it's at least partly on purpose. I agree that it feels a little like a thesis defense, but I like it when you can hear the guest (someone who is usually at the top of their field and used to answering softball questions) thinking "christ, what am I supposed to say to that?"
  - keiferski 3y ago
    But you don’t get good responses. Instead it’s just, “I hadn’t thought of that” or “That’s a good question but I’d need to think about it awhile.” The idea that an expert should be able to give a fully-formed answer to a novel question on the spot is not a good one. Thinking takes time, which Cowen doesn’t give his guests. Subsequently most of his interviews are notable for their anecdotes or trivia, not for insightful responses.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      I disagree, when he is interviewing really intelligent people it often works out quite well.

gwern 3y ago

Some interesting points: - he's mentioned learning gliding but I didn't know it was to cure his fear of flying (given how international he is, I would never have thought of that as an issue) - I didn't know pg collected old master paintings (although I did know they've become relatively cheap) - his optimism about fixing SF by simply removing a few bad apples from the supervisors is quite surprising to me, although I suppose he'd know way more about that topic than I do - lol at the Robert Morris anecdote. Well, he wasn't wrong, exactly... - the comments on fame ring true to me - this does seem oddly short to me, and like Cowen could've interrupted less (especially in the ambition section where Cowen diverts pg onto the shuffling-networks topic and pg never gets to finish). Maybe there was some scheduling constraint so Cowen was rushing through his usual list? I notice many of the usual tactics like overrated/underrated are absent.

pgayed 3y ago

PG on the problem with fame: “‘The world sucks because of tech, and tech sucks because of Paul Graham.’” lol

deleted 3y ago

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portman 3y ago

I had not realized that PG and his family moved to England. I also recently moved from California to England, so would be fascinated to learn more about the genesis of PG's move. (As an aside: I sometimes hear my kids late at night trying to convince their friends back in California to ask their parents to move here. Anecdotally it does feel like many families are considering it. Of course I have an availability bias here.) Does anyone know of any essays or interviews where PG discusses his decision to emigrate?

kpw94 3y ago
PG is British. Born in England. So not sure emigrate is the right term. He must have had a strong connection with family back in UK his whole life. He's also American, so moving between US and UK must feel pretty fluid.
- bambax 3y ago
  > PG is British. Born in England. Yeah, he simply went back to where he was born to raise a family. The salmon move.
- slim 3y ago
  you say he's paying double taxes both in US and UK ?
  - desas 3y ago
    Very broadly and simply speaking you can write-off UK taxes against the US tax bill and vice versa. There's much more nuance than that though.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
mtlynch 3y ago
>In the summer of 2016 we moved to England. We wanted our kids to see what it was like living in another country, and since I was a British citizen by birth, that seemed the obvious choice. We only meant to stay for a year, but we liked it so much that we still live there. http://paulgraham.com/worked.html http://paulgraham.com/worked.html

textread 3y ago

Is there any way I could download this episode's spotify url as an mp3? https://open.spotify.com/episode/6QQr6eO9qgQTwdo7UbdiXq https://open.spotify.com/episode/6QQr6eO9qgQTwdo7UbdiXq I tried a couple of sites online (spotiydown, spotifymate), which both failed. yt-dlp fails. spotdl fails.

lordgrenville 3y ago
Not the Spotify version (if it's different in some way) but it is syndicated here: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/cowenconvos/CWT-189-PaulGraham-final-v2.mp3 https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/cowenconvos/CWT-189-PaulGr...
deleted 3y ago
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dingleberry 3y ago
open the interview site (parent, not spotify) in browser with dev mode open click network bar, look for media file that's currently streaming should be about 45mb mp3 file: right click, copy as curl then paste it into a terminal, append " -O" then press enter

deleted 3y ago

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mercurialsolo 3y ago

Why do we have not so many great individual players anymore but great teams? Is our rate of progress and build slowing down? Can the brilliance of an individual overshadow big tech? Why did we have the best quarter in growth for public companies and why is it taking longer private companies to go public? More than ambition the rules of the game and the frontier has now changed. I don't think ambitious people don't exist - they just realize this is better realized by being within a larger ecosystem and having influence rather than building everything around oneself. Would we say Hinton was ambitious? Did he have sufficient impact?

ankit219 3y ago
Ambitions are mostly defined by external stimuli, that is what does a society value? Value not in terms of the actual praise, but what are the things they keep talking about. If we look at it from a narrow definition of tech, we realize there aren't many ambitious individual players. The premise becomes hard to justify if we were to include so many teenagers on insta/tiktok/twitch getting a lot of following and making content individually (where in the past it take a full crew to make such stuff) and newer creators wanting to join that club. I think many people are still ambitious. Just that (for quite a few people) their ambition is no longer to work 10 years to build an everlasting company, or do original research to get themselves a nobel, but just to gain the fame and following that comes with social media. In an abstract sense, for a select set, the end goal of ambition was the adulation and fame you got after doing your thing well. Of course, there is another set where ambition is to build a lasting thing and they continue to work towards that. Just that former set outnumbers the latter easily, and it's never easier for that set to achieve their goal.
mlinsey 3y ago
"Why do we have not so many great individual players anymore but great teams? " IMO this hasn't changed as much as it seems from the outside. The brilliant individual leaders of the past owed most of their success to their team members, and most high-functioning teams today, if you study how they work internally, do actually have a key leader who is aligning everyone around a shared vision. What's changed is that it's no longer seen as a positive to boost the profile of the leader too far the rest of the team.

Barrin92 3y ago

It's a good interview and Tyler like pretty much always has an absurd breadth of knowledge on the topics he asks about but I wish he could just drop some of the economics jargon at times, even Paul seemed to be confused by it lol. COWEN: Why and how did so many things here end up undercapitalized? The water utilities, the NHS — it seems to be a consistent pattern. That could make us more pessimistic because the flow numbers don’t reflect the fact that capital maintenance is even worse than we had thought. GRAHAM: I don’t know. You’re an economist. I don’t know what the term capital maintenance means. I mean come on instead of "what exactly, in the smallest number of dimensions, are you better at than the other people?", you can just ask, "what are your core strengths"

shaftoe444 3y ago

Paul Graham has the rare but admirable habit of saying "I don't know" when he doesn't know something.

welder 3y ago

> When I talk to people who are in their teens or early 20s about starting a start-up, I tell them, “Instead of sitting around thinking of start-up ideas, you should be working with other people on projects. Then, you’ll get a start-up idea out of it that you probably never would have thought of, and you’ll get a co-founder too.” I wish people would do more of that. You can get co-founders — just work with people on projects. Great quote about how to indirectly find co-founders.

prepend 3y ago

Man, I really hate platform specific podcasts that require a special player or account. Spotify in general seems to be “bad” about taking an open podcast out out through an rss feed that was playable anywhere and making it exclusive. It’s a tale as old as time, but it’s the inconvenience of upsetting an ingrained personal habit (open podcast player, look for new episodes) and having to add an extra step (open Spotify, look for new episodes). This is good for Spotify but bad for users. I want to organize my information and optimize my behavior. Not do dumb, unnecessary steps because it makes Spotify more money.

bronco21016 3y ago
Joe Rogan has entirely lost me because of this friction. I was only an occasional listener before but after trying one episode in Spotify I just gave up. The attempt to switch between video and audio only when locking and unlocking my phone, and the subsequent skip in audio, ruined it for me.
- prepend 3y ago
  Indeed, same with me. I don’t think I’m a “super fan” enough to follow him and others to platforms. I understand people switching and as much as I’d like to think that I would refuse $100M to switch my HN comments to a different, parallel, crappier internet; I suspect I would fail that test and take the $100M.
  - benrutter 3y ago
    I think this is the real tragedy at the moment- it makes sense for content producers to switch to the highest bidder, and it makes sense for platforms like spotify to offer exclusive contracts. The end result is we all act rational and it still winds up worse for users- I don't really know what it would take for the incentives to change for the better?
psYchotic 3y ago
Is this discontent coming from the embedded player on the linked page? Because yes, that's a Spotify player, but in case you missed it: there are three links at the top of the page, for Google, Apple and Spotify. And if it's an old school RSS feed you want, here you go: https://cowenconvos.libsyn.com/rss https://cowenconvos.libsyn.com/rss

thimkerbell 3y ago

I'm interested in the Dark Ages thing. If we instantiated PG as an AI and asked it to give its best guess, as to why (human) creation went dark, what would it speculate?

jgalt212 3y ago

No acknowledgment by them how easy it's been to push on open doors (QE and ZIRP).