Fighting for Our Future with Robin Hanson on the Baby Boom Crisis

Transcript

A lot of the value of crypto in my mind is just that when people make a lot of money in crypto, then they decide to take on projects that are interesting projects. It feels like we're going through the next era of arts and philosophy and learnings. This is like a gigantic social experiment that we've been seeing play out. Like, welcome back to the rollup, your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future. Nothing on today's show is to be construed as financial advice. You can see our full disclosures list at the rollup.co/ventures. Sit back, relax, and enjoy today's episode after a quick word from some of our awesome partners. Ladies, gentlemen, anons, and dens. It is stable coin season brought

to you by your favorite, the best in stable coins, Fracks USD dollar stable coin, backed by the best in the business, the Bidd Fund by Black Rockck and Superstate. This is stable coin season. It is the yieldbearing stable coin by Fracks. Coming soon to a chain near you. What's going on guys? Welcome back to the rollup. Today we are joined by Robin Hansen, the man who makes other men look socially welladjusted. He's calculated the odds of alien civilizations, the economics of uploading your brain and probably the signaling value of appearing on this podcast. All before his morning coffee.

when he's not busy making uncomfortable observations about human behavior that make us question our life choices. He's revolutionizing fields most of us didn't know existed. Please welcome George Mason University's resident futurist and the man most likely to casually mention posthuman civilizations in small talk. Robin Hansen, welcome to the show. It's good to have you, man. Nice to meet you both. also father of prediction markets uh mentor uh to Vitalik I think or at least the current prediction market uh schematic that we have on chain um Robin it's a pleasure to have you on the show um have read a lot of your work and and it really has uh set the tone for I think a lot of the ideologies that we see uh in the crypto blockchain uh and

just generally the technology space that we see now when you're kind of considering like you know the broad swath of work that you've put out there. What are some of the themes that tie it all together? Is it is it is there any kind of like through lines or ideologies that you think are are pretty consistent across a docket? There's a bunch of different ways to try to frame me and uh I'm probably too close to see. So, you might be as good as I at judging between them, but one framing is to say I look for neglected important things that I can focus on.

Um, another framing might be to say that I slowly realized that social institution problems were behind other problems and I kept trying to sort of dig deeper to look for more meta problems. So, I have this blog called Overcoming Bias, but when I first set it up, I had an alternative title and, you know, picture and everything are ready to go called more meta than thou because I was, you know, going to say that I was tended to think matter. So, that's another way you could frame it.

Um, otherwise I guess I might be just idiosyncratic and um weird and then see things other people don't from my own peculiar weird way. And in order to explain what I do that way, you'll have to know I'm weird, I guess. Otherwise, you won't know how to predict what particular things I'd get into. But I'm going to have to say I'm not very good at knowing how I'm different from everything else or how to explain all the things I've done because I'm too close to it. Our our podcast is has been quite primarily focused around the intersection of blockchain and crypto and the real the real world, right? and really have kind of branched off into into AI as of recently, broader tech and

and and have have spent the last four or five years thinking and coming from this very um like cryptonative background, right? Like Robbie and I have seen like I dropped out of university in 201 18 or 19 pursuing online business. Robbie uh finished his um math and philosophy degrees and we kind of rekindled five years ago to start this business together. A and our bet was seeing something that people didn't already see which was it was very obvious to us that blockchain cryptocurrency and a non a non um a non-government form of money was likely to persist in the world of AI in in the world of of rapid

digitization. Um, so this isn't like just an example of us taking a bet with our time and our career on something that others perhaps weren't able to kind of see as early or have still been yet to see. When you're looking back to to some of the decisions uh of of where you were spending your time and and and kind of how you were thinking about allocating your your your just your bandwidth really. Um, sometimes when you're so early, it also feels the same as being wrong. And and I'm curious if you have any stories of you being early to a particular phenomenon or idea that was so contrarian um that that that you felt wrong and and perhaps even how you how

you dealt with being so early or so wrong in that in that time. I mean, honestly, I think I'm just early on pretty much everything I've ever done and still early. So, I don't know that I've ever gotten past the early stage. Crypto in my mind is this corner of the world and it's a small part of the whole world. And so, when I come to talk to people in crypto, I have to sort of think about like how does this corner of the world relate to the rest of the world? Because people in this corner of the world do want to talk to me more.

Um, now I guess I was there early on when um crypto anarchists were in Silicon Valley in the uh late or I guess uh late 1980s or early 1980s uh sorry early 1990s uh where I sort of heard people initially thinking about crypto stuff and planning it and I didn't I engaged it a bit but I it wasn't in the center of my attention. And so I can see that it's grown and I've had a relation with it on over the years. But I guess, you know, how do I describe my relation to it? I guess there's two things.

Um, one is that most people find it just really hard to engage proposals for changes and mechanisms. So, uh, the world, you know, a lot of my best ideas are ideas for changing how we could do things. And the world has mostly just yawned and not been very interested in that. And crypto is a part of the world where people are much more open to thinking about mechanisms. So if I describe a mechanism idea, you know, you guys are open to that possibility and you will engage it and think it through in terms of a mechanism and you can imagine, yeah, that's not there now, but maybe it could exist in the future. So I have that affinity with crypto people.

Although I tend to think about mechanisms for just all the different main areas of our lives. And crypto people are focused on the mechanisms that they can implement in their crypto products and and ventures. And so then there's the question of you know I'm going to sort of tempt them to think of new ventures and new products that are not the ones they're working on now. Uh because I've thought of all these other things. But it's great to have a set of people who are open to you know mechanism innovations. Um so that's one key relation I guess I have to the crypto world. And the other relation I have to the crypto world is that um you know I'm interested in just a lot of unusual ideas and a lot of contrarian

perspectives and oper options or things like that and sort of grand projects and ambitious goals and and visions. And crypto people when they get into this world and they succeed and they win and they make a bunch of money, they have to tell themselves a story about why they deserve that. This is true for everybody. Anybody in the world who gets rich, they need a story about why I deserve this. And that story that they tell then pushes them to how they behave with the money after they get rich.

And so if you get rich in dentistry, right, the story you tell about yourself is that you're a good dentist or whatever. And then you, you know, I don't know, golf or something because that fits your story of what a good dentist does when he gets rich. But a crypto person, when they get rich, the story they tell themselves is, I got rich because I had this insight in vision into the where the future's going, contrary to all those other people who don't get it. And then that story makes them do things with their money that you know support that story and then they do more interesting things with their money. So a lot of the value of crypto in my mind is just that when people make a lot of money in crypto then they decide to take on projects

that are interesting projects that are you know related to contrarian views or things that could change etc. So those are my two in my mind relations to the crypto world. One is you're open to invent you know mechanism changes and the other is that uh you guys sort of have the same sort of vision of what it is to be interesting and what sort of projects are grand and inspiring that you know I find the projects you do when you get rich interesting. Um I guess but the closest connection obviously is going to be that some of my mechanism ideas over history are actually more appropriate for crypto, more feasible implementing crypto. And so some crypto

people are doing that and that's maybe probably why you called me uh as you've heard about those and we could talk about those. Um, but in my mind they are just one of a number of different ideas for changing the world that I'm opportunistically would like anybody to talk about and try. But hey, over here somebody's actually trying this stuff and that that's really exciting. that is relative to like for example futarchy my governance mechanism I wrote about in 1999 even 98 and so now 26 years later people are trying it and so we'll finally get to see how well it works.

double click on futurearchy a little bit because this is one of the mechanisms that you um you described in a in a manifesto that you called vote values but bet beliefs and you didn't exactly term prediction markets you termed this thing called decision markets where essentially people could put their their money I did the prediction market thing 10 years before that let's be clear okay so maybe you could yeah please do traces through the chronology of like what we see now today on chain. How did like when you were thinking about these things, what what was your logical progression from your original inspiration through to the implementation we see today? So I was a grad student at University of

Chicago from 81 to 84 and I did philosophy of science and physics. And so I was thinking about what was wrong with academia and how to might fix that. And I read about cool stuff happening in Silicon Valley at the time. AI research was one, but other was this hypertext vision of how we might basically do the worldwide web, which if you understand the history, that was pretty early for people to be thinking about the worldwide web in 19 uh 84, 83 really probably when I read that stuff. And so I went off to Silicon Valley to work with these two groups. I got a job doing AI at Lockheed initially

and then NASA later and then I worked with a small group of people called Xanadu. Uh Ted Nelson was their inspiration on how to make the worldwide web. And the vision was the worldwide web could help cure some of the ills of our intellectual conversation. And one of the main things they hoped was something called backlinks. That is if somebody said something stupid, you could write a rebuttal and then people could easily find your rebuttal from the stupid thing somebody said and then that would make our conversation go better. And so in the process of working with these people for a few years starting in ' 84 in Silicon Valley um I came to doubt whether merely having backlinks was really going to solve many

of the problems we have in intellectual conversation. And I was hunting around for alternatives and these people happen to be somewhat rabid libertarians, people who are interested in um backlinks in the worldwide web. And so the idea of betting markets was accessible to me through them wouldn't have been otherwise because I don't didn't otherwise bet or have family members who bet or anything like that or even did financial market trading. So, but the idea that a betting market would solve problems with conversations seemed plausible. That is, if we have something we're arguing about and we're we're getting bad estimates because we're

listening to the wrong people or getting confused about things, then a betting market would just aggregate the best estimates on the question. And then those who really understood it better than the rest of us could bet and be proved right and make money. And uh those of us who didn't realize we weren't that sure what if we knew what we were talking about would just back off and not bed and then that would work well. So I you know had that idea around um you know 88 89 uh in Silicon Valley hanging around with these other pe futurists who were thinking about various aspects of the future and AI and um the web which then did get going in

'94 roughly. Um then I started to write about how you could use betting markets to aggregate information and to have a healthier conversation. And I tried to sort of give talks and write some papers and um, you know, I inspired some people. And then in '94 when the worldwide web first got going, one of the first things that happened, somebody made a betting market based on these ideas called Ideosphere. I think you can still find it. And uh the company the group of Xanadu that was trying to make the worldwide web they were funded and trying to make that happen but then they got upstaged by Tim Berners Lee and that version of the

worldwide web uh and I introduced actually a prediction market in their Xanadoo's private management you know internal processes uh then and then um you know I went back to grad school in '94 3 and I was a PhD student from 93 to 97 at Caltech. Uh and then I did a two-year posttock 97 to 99 at UC Berkeley in health policy and then I got my current tenure track job in 99 here uh at George Mason and during this period of time from 889 when I first started thinking about uh what I called idea futures

which have since been called prediction markets um I evolved my thinking about what use cases were most interesting and what problems there were and how you could deal with them. So the way I started is the way most everybody starts even say people who do prediction markets lately they've started in the same place which is we tend to think of the public conversation the news the public policy conversation as the place where we want markets to improve the conversation. And then if you think about it more, you say, well, look, information is mainly useful for advising decisions. And therefore, the most valuable markets for information would be the ones that advise the most

valuable decisions. And where are those? And you realize, well, our most valuable decisions are in organizations. And how can you make a market useful for a decision? What you want to do is make the market itself, its advice right next to the decision. Just almost no translation. And so that's when I realized that decision markets which are markets you know set up exactly to advise a particular decision by some particular organization would be the most valuable form of prediction markets. And then I started writing about that you see around 99 which is 10 years after I first started thinking about prediction

markets in say 88 or 89. uh and that's when I wrote about what I call future and decision markets. So decision markets would be just the general mechanism and then I was trying to inspire people with the most dramatic inspiring application and that was for national governance and that's what I called QT. So that's a long explanation for you know and then so there's more sort of changes in my opinions over the the 10 years about what was important and what were the problems and mechanisms for dealing with them but basically again over the years I continued to see whenever somebody gets new into the area they first focus on what if we just had betting markets on public policy topics where the customer would be people who like to bet and talk

argue about things and I realized that's actually not the best application nor the customer the best application is organizations who have decisions to make and the best customer is that organization they should be willing to pay to get their decision advice and that's when I started to sort of focus on how could we create trials of that and motivate those customers to um try out these mechanisms and then as we've said in the last few years there are actually crypto organizations that are doing this that are concretely using decision markets to directly advise their organizational decisions. And so now we're getting some concrete experimentation with uh whether this works. Yeah. And it took it it took

since about it really took the election for Poly Market to become a a worldrenown platform. I think one of the largest crypto app successes. I think prior to that it had quite a bit of usage, but leading up to that was the major success. Um, and it it kind of takes me into an interesting train of thought around the self-fulfilling prophecy that these decision markets can lead to. A and so I'm just curious in your work um, as you have you as you have explored the the the the future possibilities of prediction markets and seeing the market for the Trump versus

Biden this year or sorry last year be one of the largest ever. Um I this really led me to think that there is a way where we can actually have these markets dictate reality in some sort of capacity where if there's enough on the line then there's a self-fulfilling prophecy mechanism that can be enabled through this. If there's enough willing beters or if the stakes are high enough for something that is being uh bet on in in terms of an invent like an event then there's a way for the world to kind of uh influence that whether moral ill or you know within the terms of conditions

or not if you can kind of get what I'm hinting at. So tying this into some some of your theories around simulations, I I'm very interested as to how you can understand the the rise of prediction markets and decision markets being self-fulfilling prophecies and then how this is kind of leading or how this has influenced any of your thoughts with regards to us existing in a simulation. And if there's no through line here, then then I can perhaps try to provide an example. But I I see kind of a through line that I think you may be able to pick up. Okay. So if we just look at the process of getting advice and getting information, there are kinds of advice or information you can get

where they might plausibly have a self-fulfilling prophecy effect or a self-refuting prophecy effect depending on the kinds of information you ask for. Um, but what we usually think we want is to try to sort of make that effect go away so that the way we ask the question gets us at the information we want without creating this self-fulfilling or refuting prophecy effect. So for example uh in an election the the usual most popular market is what decision will we make which is you know the chance of somebody winning or losing and then that could induce some people to sort of do

the thing that they think we're going to do anyway or it might induce people to rebel and and defy and do the opposite of what they think we're going to do anyway. Either of those is the self-fulfilling or selfdefeating prophecy effect. But plausibly what we more want is to know the effect of our choice. So imagine say we have a project with a deadline. Um and we want to know if we're going to make the deadline. So we can have a market on the deadline. Now um you know it could be that the odds of making the deadline are low and that by warning the management that the pro odds of the deadline making the deadline are low that induces them to reform how they're doing the project

change the requirements resources and then that makes them actually make the deadline but by doing that they've punished the people who warned them that they weren't going to make the deadline and so that seems dysfunctional. uh why should I bet that we won't make the deadline if you know upon seeing my warning you're going to change how you do it and then you will make the deadline right so what we would rather do is have a market on will you make the deadline if you don't change anything then I can give you the warning if you don't change anything you're in trouble you're not going to make this deadline but I could also have a market on well if you change resources or management of the project somehow um or the requirements will you make the deadline

then and might be able to be more optimistic about that. And so, as a trader, I would rather give you the conditional advice that isn't subject to the self-fulfilling or refuting process because that's the way in which I could more reliably give you the information I have and get paid for it. Whereas, when I'm subject to the self-refuting thing or then I'm in trouble, right? I my warning could well prevent me from getting paid for warning. So that's why I think decision markets are so attractive. What you know they're of the form if we do this what happens? Now if the market says if we do this this you know this will happen and the only way that makes sense is if we

do the other thing so that's going to maybe encourage you to do the other thing. But we then we can end up with that same sort of self-fulfilling effect there. So whatever other things need to go into if we do this maybe you need to make that explicit and make several different options. if we do this and this if we do this but not that etc. So I think the safe recommended thing is to be clear about the options and then ask people to estimate the consequences of each option and that then is more safe from the self-fulfilling or self-refuting effects which I think you really want to get rid of in order to entice people to give you good advice. You don't want them to have to guess about the self-refuting or

self-fulfilling effect and which way it'll go and how it'll play out because that could give you pretty misleading advice um if they sort of misjudge those effects. This is like a gigantic social experiment that we've been seeing play out like prediction markets leading to decision markets and then you know the most the most um expansive form of the social experiment would be operating this at a government style level and making government decisions this way. You you operated this in somewhat of a controlled experiment on a company level. Now we're seeing this play out in a in a broader social experiment on chain with poly market and prediction markets

there. I as far as like where prediction markets will snowball outwards like we I tend to think that block blockchain is one of the best tools for social coordination. So, we're seeing social experiments play out repeatedly and and we're seeing a lot of these social experiments in action today because they weren't possible before some of this technology at least at this scale. You know, we're also seeing this this like in parallel while you know we're we're seeing a lot of changes happen in the world in governments, nation states and geopolitically. Do you think that these social experiments that are currently

happening in somewhat of an isolated controlled silo will start to have a outsized impact or or or a more significant impact on some of the ways that that major decisions are being made in in some of these larger organizations like governments or or nations. So the most basic thing to know about innovation pretty much all innovation ideas just get no response and are just completely ignored. And then that's on the one side. On the other side, people looking to maybe do something different are usually only look a short distance away from what they are currently doing.

So, uh the the only people you really have much of a chance of enticing to do a new thing are the people pretty close to somebody else who's already tried that thing. So that's why as a person with a new idea, you're first just want anybody anywhere to try this thing because until anybody anywhere tries it, nobody is going to be willing to try anything. Uh and so you're opportunistically like anywhere it could plausibly work, let's get those people to try it. And then you'll be trying to get people near anywhere it's be tried to say, well this is pretty much like your thing. Why don't you try it there?

people will often say no it's not as much like your thing as you think so I'm relatively an abstract thinker and many academics are so to an abstract thinker many things are pretty much the same thing whereas to to a more concrete thinker it's not the same thing at all because it was in a different organization at a different time with a different application etc right so that's why I'm thrilled that anybody is trying any versions of these And you know the if if I thought the application had no chance of working well that wouldn't be so great but as long as there's some chance of it working anywhere I'm happy to support and give that a try.

Um now so for example poly market is an application of sort of betting markets where the customers the people who want to bet and that's not advising particular decisions mostly. So, it's hard to point to Poly Market and say, "See, you should go use a decision market for this decision of yours because they'll say, you know, that's not the same thing." Uh, but Poly Market having sort of gotten big and done a bunch of things, they're just going to lower the costs of setting up the infrastructure to do any other thing you want to do.

So, in that and they're going to make the ideas more accessible to people and make it easier to explain things to people whenever you want to do things. So in that sense all these different variations help a bit because they all you know work out some of the technology lower some costs you know create this um you know background knowledge that many people have about kinds of things that exist and how to work them and so all of the different variations that do that help somewhat right uh but but then when you want to get to getting some particular person to try something it tends to come down to is there anybody nearby who has done almost the same thing. So that's why, you know, I'm really excited to see these crypto

organizations trying out Futarchy and then of course they're getting similar organizations with similar decisions to also try them and then it's spreading in that way and that's exactly what you should expect that far away things like you know there's a stock market somewhere and a currency market there and these other things they are background things that sort of help but honestly the main thing is to get people to try specific things. Yeah, that's been the the never- ending fight that those involved in crypto have been fighting for. Um, it's just that we we've we've yet to produce much outside of uh a handful of of novel uh stable coinbased payment systems and a 247 kind of uh kind of DeFi system. And I think

we're kind of on the cusp now of uh like poly market leading the way amongst others um for a more robust and user centric normal person orientation of of the space took some time in terms of user experience in terms of education as well as the broad perception of the of the space. But zooming out from the prediction markets and decision markets going on a bit more of a thought exploration here. Robin, do you use AI on a daily basis? What is your current AI usage? Let's just start there. I mean, I have a Chrome window with, you know, a half a dozen tabs to half a dozen different AIs and then when I think of a question I think they might

be able to answer, then I ask them the question and that's a way that I can more quickly learn things. So, I think that I have gotten into the habit of learning about things more quickly by, you know, being able to know what kinds of questions you can ask and get an answer to. So, um, yeah, yesterday I wanted to know, okay, they've got this 5% rule, uh, for announcing when you're trying to take over a company. How does that work? So, I could just ask, so tell me about this 5% rule. And then it could go through. And I look at that and I go, I don't think they hallucinated that.

I think that's that sounds about right. Especially you can ask several of them and hope at least that they don't all hallucinate the same things. And so, you know, that's the kind of usage I have, but I don't have it write letters for me or write essays for me or blog posts or things like that. Uh, and then it tends to give sort of a somewhat shallow analysis basically. um that is uh you can see how there's a framing of things and it's going to give you the framing that's most common in the writing that it's read and if there's maybe a deeper framing to rethink it, it's not going to think of that or present that to you.

So, it's still up to you to consider different framings of what it says or of how to think about the question. So, sometimes you can ask it about a different framing and then it'll go, "Oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense." and then give you some reaction, but it's not usually going to spontaneously offer you the different framings. No, that might be useful. And just to follow up there before we kind of get into the the main kind of macro view of of what's happening here, do you think uh your students are using AI to uh do better in in their classes? Well, of course, I'm trying to um be aware of and sort of limit uh you know, versions of that. I for example

um if I assign an essay topic say to undergraduates I purposely pick weird topics and that I contest that the large language models don't do very well on. So they just do well on better on topics that lots of people have written on and that they have integrated together. So if I asked a regular question like that they could just use the language model and I'm not sure I could tell a difference. Uh, so my main defense is to ask weird questions and that'll work for a while I guess until maybe they get good at weird questions. Um, but I can just generate even weirder questions. That is, you know, it's a matter of sort of how far away from the usual discussion of the topics is your

question. But I have I mean you can see that I have a comparative advantage. I have lots of very weird unusual lines of thinking on things. So that means I'm extra wellprepared to um you know test students away from where the usual thinking is. Other professors who aren't as weird as me are going to have more trouble, right? Most of their lectures and most of their thinking goes down the usual lines of thought and then when they ask questions about that, language models are all ready for them, right? So they're in more in trouble. We weirdos are uh rewarded here. I think Andy has some weird questions about AI he wants to ask you. But I I would like to go down a little bit of a rabbit hole on the weird question thought line because

you recently posted a a blog post on uh on your Substack called overcoming bias which is great. Um and it was basically about like what do we want? Um, and each person is individual and unique in in what they want. But you basically said that, you know, you want this insight into important neglected questions, which could abstract abstractly be thought of as wisdom or knowledge, right? But I'm c curious into like exactly maybe just a couple of examples as to like which questions you think are the ones that are neglected. And this I think ties into the weird questions that you may ask your students. Innovating finance, global, institutional and onchain. Deep liquidity to drive capital

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Redstone modular oracles are available on 50 plus chains trusted by over 100 clients and over 6 billion in total value secured. Visit redstone.inance to find out more. If you just look about the world from an ordinary person's point of view, like aliens sound important, sex sounds important, right? Uh pride seems important. Um there's just a bunch of concepts that are accessible to ordinary people that we mark as important concepts by the fact that we use them a lot and that they we invoke them a lot in ordinary lives.

Right? So then if you go to the academic literature, you look at what topics they cover and you'll often find that some of these most familiar ordinary topics like pride or sex or aliens, there's just not much of an academic literature or say disagreement. And so that's an that's right there saying okay here's an important concept apparently from you know even academics they use these concepts a lot in their or in their personal lives say but um academics aren't studying them much. So right there you've got important neglected. So it's not very hard to find important neglected stuff. Really just notice the concepts you use in your life and the

things that show up in you know your talks and discussion and then look at the academic literature to see what they're talking about and notice holes in the literature. So you'll have to read some academic literature to find that. So you know you will have to spend some time reading academic literature in order to notice the holes. Okay. But if you spend enough time in the literature the holes are easy to find. neglected important stuff. The hard part is do I have a way to make progress on this? Like maybe the reason they aren't working on it is because they couldn't figure out how. Right? So the trick isn't to so much to find important neglect and stuff. Although academics so get stuck in thinking about the way the literature is structured. They forget that there's this other metric of how ordinary people talk about things that

is at odds with that to also apply. So some people I know my colleagues especially often I value them and we like each other because we have this sense of what the other metric of topic interestingness to compare to the academic metric in order to notice the holes. But so many academics don't even notice these holes because they're just too stuck in thinking in terms of the usual academic terminology and topics. Right? So but again if you just bother to remember a persona inside yourself that you know talks about things not in the usual academic ways you will notice a different metric of what topics are important. You'll see these holes. So important neglected by itself that's all it takes to do is to find important

neglected things. But then the trick is okay but can you find a way an angle to make progress? And so that's what takes mo most of the work is to sort of think about these familiar topics and think about the all the tools we have and then notice maybe where one of the tools could help you think about one of these important neglected topics. That's more the trick and that I think takes more of a polymath habit. That is if you just learn one particular field and one particular set of tools and then you go and look at these ordinary topics, well the hit rate's going to be pretty small where the tools you've learned happen to give you insight into one of these, you know,

ordinary topics that people have neglected. But the more you learn a lot of different subjects with a lot of different methods and then you go think about some ordinary topic like pride then the more you could just draw on a lot of possible tools and basically you'll be looking for a match where one of these tools looks like it might let you say something about that. So this is a strategy that increases in its effectiveness as you get older. So a polymath strategy is a strategy that peaks later in life which is collect a lot of tools just learn a lot of different areas collect a lot of tools and then notice the neglected topics and continue to ask for each one you know

which of these tools could say something to them. Um now one of the ways to think about this is to find puzzles. that is um if you look so you know one of the nice things about being a social scientist is that anytime you're dealing with the world of people it's all data around you and you should always be asking does the thing I see around me is this what my theories predict and quite often you'll go no that's not what my theory would have predicted and you'll be looking for these puzzles patterns of behavior in the world that aren't actually predicted by your standard best theories and now well that's a puzzle now it's not

necessarily interesting if unless it's near one of these important neglected topics but often you'll find puzzles that are near the important neglected topics and now you've got an angle you've got a lever you see that you can use to try to weasle your way into the topic so that's just one there are other sorts of tricks but the general idea here is retain your metric of ordinary person what sort sort of topics matter. Why? But also learn the different academic fields and their methods and what they how they see them and how they rate them. And then notice the mismatch things that seem ordinarily important that aren't very studied and then collect all these tools by which

you're going to like ask notice maybe a tool that happens to apply to one of these near one of these holes and then then you're off and running. So, you know, I could I could give you an example of the story, say, for any of the particular kinds of research I've I've done in my life. Uh maybe that would make it more vivid, but that's the abstract description. I think um one of the neglected and important questions that would be interesting is around um the idea of needing to make more babies as as a society. I think that would be a good example. One thing is to notice that it's obviously important, right?

that is if we don't have babies then we go away right that's like pretty basic and then to notice that we're in fact at risk of that that's like oh my goodness that's obviously important isn't neglected well you go look at the literature and you see people kind of shrugging well it just seems like it's like not a problem yet it's like kind of like ah we'll be fine we have like 70 billion people but like it will be a problem it's like you can just project this forward it definitely going to be a problem it's just not there yet but hey that's maybe One reason why it's neglected is people sort of have to wait to get slapped in the face with it. But I think just one more thing to add into the mix is that we were told that we had an overpopulation crisis for a long time

and now all of a sudd not only did we no longer have that problem, it's just suddenly the opposite. Right? So that's one way to find neglected topics is there's just this momentum in various sermons and you know moral crusades people have where they don't they just find it hard to change their mind about these things when circumstances change. So the more you can realize that hey things change the more you can find neglected topics. So that's a way in which this topic remains neglected because it's just you know people get entrenched in these um moral positions and and you know activist sort of stances. Um but then uh you might say well you know okay what angles you know

what sort of leverage do we have? So now as an economist I I can just read and notice um people predict that as population declines you know soon then innovation will decline and that just makes a huge difference. So right there I've got a oh see I know this thing most people don't know. Innovation is far more central to the world than most people realize. And so if innovation goes away that's like an overwhelming fact about this scenario that makes you really motivated like this becomes even much more important than you realized. Um, and then you can think about the different framings people have about this and then you I realize that well there's a simple framing that most people don't seem to apply. So there's

this economist framing that even most economists don't apply because I you know read some literature on it which is just um you know you have a life and there's a cost of producing it and is the value of your life higher or less than the cost of producing it right and if the value of making your life is higher than the cost of producing it there is some win-win deal by which we could make it happen and then you want to ask well what would that deal look like and you know in simple economic analysis well the deal would be you parents you pay your parents to exist So the obvious economic de you know arrangement you expect for selfish people who have these differing interests and abilities is that the selfish kids who want to exist pay the selfish parents to raise

them. So that you know the parents get paid and the kids exist and that's a simple economic analysis of the situation but that's not how anybody thinks about the situation. So you notice ah there's a simple standard framing that's very well accepted as an intellectual tool that applies to the situation but people are just not applying it. So that's that's a lever. You can say, "Aha, I've got an angle, right? A way to make progress on this that other people aren't making progress because I found an angle." That's one angle. Okay? And so I can say I can recommend, well, in the past, we've counted on parents to give this gift of life to their kids. And you know, maybe that worked fine in the past, but if somehow that's no longer the world we're in, there is this deal we could make.

And now I can think about how we could set up this deal or how we could make variations. So basically, you could say, well, look, one way that the deal would be made is the parent, you know, endows the kid with debt or equity of some sort that they're obligated to pay back, and then the parent can sell that off to raise their expenses of childbearing. And now that works and that would work, except everybody seems to hate this idea. It's terrible for parents to endow their kids with debt. That's just a no moral thing. But you then you notice that, oh, but governments are already doing that and we don't mind. So every new kid is just automatically endowed endowed with their share of the government debt. That just automatically happens. Nobody minds. And in fact, the size of that in the USA is $100,000

official debt, but like 300 to 700,000 of unfunded liabilities. And so there's this win-win deal. The parent, the government's going to get if all if those unfunded liabilities are actually paid later, 300 to $700,000 from each kid. That's the value to the government of each kid. So if we just pay the parent a cut of that, it's a win-win deal, right? The parent the governments win, the parents win, and the kids exist. So all we have to do is pay the parents some cut of the tax revenue that the government's going to get later because we're already okay with endowing the kids with the debt with respect to government debt. And so now the usual contractual win-win deal can apply in this slight variation. And

then I've found a policy that solves the problem. because of noticing that, you know, there's a way of thinking about it that other people don't think about it, but it's just very well accepted. It's not I'm not being, you know, contrarian or something. The idea of finding deals by which there's mutual benefit is extremely well established in economics. And then you notice the fact of government debt is just a fact of our world, right? So then you find the solution, but then the next thing you realize is, okay, this would be a win-win deal and it would just solve the problem, but people don't want to do it.

Well, what's with that? Well, they're on like Time Time magazine with like a a guy and a like an older woman and an older man laying on the beach saying the childless life and they're promoting it. So, it's like shifting that, right? What happened to me was to realize that okay, if I think about the approximate causes of fertility decline, which I had read out, there are a bunch of key cultural trends are pretty strong and striking cultural trends that are causing this decline. And the new question is why would there be a bunch of strong cultural trends causing this decline and I guess another framing is to realize look low fertility is biologically maladaptive. So if you think of humans as a biological species, which is another framing that a multi,

you know, a polymath has accessible to them. And my trick is to sort of have lots of framings I can bring in and apply. So the framing of a biological species says low fertility in times of plenty is just maladaptive. Something's just wrong there. Why would there be a bunch of cultural trends producing maladaptive behavior and also producing this reluctance to actually take the solution I've designed? Then you realize culture is a powerful force here. It's so powerful it'll make people reluctant to adopt sort of the simple economic solution.

It's a powerful force that's causing these declines. And I realized I've been a polymath for a long time, but I never studied culture. So that's an invitation which I took it, you know, a year and a half ago. Let's let's go learn some culture. So I decided to go add that to my portfolio of intellectual toolkits. study cultural evolution, see how it works, see what sort of the best standard theories of it are, so that I could make sense of this puzzle in front of me, why is fertility declining because of a bunch of trends making it go down. And over the last year or so, I think I have successfully learned what we know about cultural evolution and in those terms made sense of this decline.

And so then I've made sense of it in a way that doesn't seem to be accessible to other people. So then there's still this question. Well, how did I find this angle other people don't find? I'm not sure exactly, but here's two sort of related things. So the world of cultural evolution, so here's a striking fact. Our most celebrated intellectuals, the people intellectuals we we we we put the most high in our world are cultural activists who in you know prestigious time magazine and New York Times etc argue for moving culture in particular directions. So the war cultural warriors who tr who push culture in different directions and argue for that those are our most celebrated heroes. Then there are the academics who study the abstract process

of cultural evolution and they are pretty low status as academics and they're really they want to see themselves as scientists but they feel kind of nervous that people don't think respect their stuff very well. It looks kind of fuzzy and fluffy. So they're really emphasizing how scientific they are. They want to have mathematical equations and models and stuff like that. And part of being scientific is to not be political. So they are just really strictly going to not have comments on how we should run society and not take positions on that because they are scientists and they really want to emphasize how scientific they are and therefore implement it. So from their point of view if something's going wrong with culture it's not up to them to say their job is just to study the process and tell the world how it works.

So basically I think there's something going wrong with culture. And so the puzzle is, well, why didn't these cultural evolution specialists figure this out before me and why haven't they told anybody? So one part of the problem is that they're really so seeking to be scientists and rigorous that they won't go there. And then all the other people who are cultural activists, they don't really understand how cultural evolution works actually. They just do the activism. And in fact, their activism is part of the problem. So, um, they're not going to really, you know, say that what they're doing is bad and wrong because they're getting so much celebration for it. But fundamentally, humanity has this power

of cultural evolution. It is humanity's superpower. This is the thing that makes us different from all the other animals is this power of cultural evolution. But it's a really simple thing. It's it's natural selection, variation of selection. So, in order for it to work, natural selection needs enough variation and enough selection pressures relative to the rates of drift and random change that would exist. Um, and that's just a feature of natural selection in general, but applies to cultural evolution. And the problem I'm going to say that I've discovered that other seems to make sense, but it's hard to get other people to see it or to talk about it is just that we messed we we we broke the system. So three centuries ago the world had hundreds of thousands of

little peasant cultures. Each had a thousand or so people in it. Each of them was poor and close to the ed edge of subsistence. So it often suffered famines and wars and dise pandemics. And when it made bad choices, it just died and got replaced by neighbors. And that was a healthy world of cultural evolution. Even if you know living in a poor peasant society isn't such a great life. But culture was very well selected and made adaptive by that process. And then what happened in the last few centuries is first we crushed little local peasant cultures in the nations and made national cultures out of them and vastly reduced the variety. And then we actually merged national cultures

into a world monoculture of elites. And so variety has gone way down. selection pressures have gone way down because we're rich and we're peaceful and we're healthy. And in addition, the rates of change have gone way up. I.e. the environment is changing a lot faster in our world today. And add that to cultural activists who are causing even more changes to cultures that aren't adaptive. They're just due to these internal cultural processes. And so all four of these parameters have just gone wrong. Plausibly meaning that this is no longer working. So that cultures are just drifting off the rails. They're just drifting into dysfunction. And that's the claim of the problem I found. But you know, I think I

found a neglected important problem here. That is culture is really important. You may not realize it, but it obviously just is. And uh if it's going wrong, that's obviously really important, but apparently it's neglected. And now I'm struggling with like how to understand why it's neglected. So one of them is that the people who really have the basis for understanding it, their whole stick is we're just scientists and we don't comment on how to do policy. But another one is most of the academic disciplines that house cultural evolution are really like on the left like ratios of 30, you know, 40 to1 etc. or 80 to1 to Democrat to Republican. And the fundamental problem here is kind of actually the

problem that conservatives have been complaining about for for a long time at least when they have any sort of consistency which they often don't is just that hey you guys are trying to change culture too fast like you know you're trying to get rid of divorce and get rid of gender roles and you're trying to like you know you're just trying to do all these changes but you don't know what you're doing and you're risking a lot of stuff. Stop changing stuff. That's been like the conservative complaint for a long time. And this message says they were basically right. And the left is really loves to celebrate these cultural activists who have been causing a lot of these cultural changes which is part of causing the the cultural drift. So I think that's also part of why that world is less eager to highlight and accept

this as a problem because it's basically saying some of the things they most celebrate are the cause of why we're going wrong. Um, so that's the way in which it's another important neglected topic. So anyway, I think it should be obvious to you that if I'm right here, this is an important neglected topic. You might have doubts about whether I'm right. And then again, the puzzle for me is always how to how to explain how I seem to come across important neglected things and find an angle on them such that but other people don't do the same thing. I don't get it.

Like that's that's the puzzle of my word. I'm too weird to really have a good view of how I'm weird and how it is. But that makes me worried. Like maybe I'm just wrong. Well, I come up with an unusual view that that other people don't see. Maybe I'm just not seeing how I'm wrong and they're right. I I think it's also your skill set. I I think your part of your skill set is being able to recognize the distortions between what the theory says the way it should be and the way things actually are. And even being able to recognize that is is a skill set in of itself. Then to think like, okay, well, this goes back to Andy's kind of like first question that we had on this podcast. Is it is it the case that, you

know, you're just you're just too early to to sync up this theory with the practical reality of things? Or is it the case that So, so what is the theory wrong or too early? Or is it just the the fact that that reality hasn't quite caught caught up? Um, and I think that is kind of a dimension on its own to explore and almost being the one to kind of push that would be the activist point of view would be to push the reality into the into the space where theory says it's okay and it makes sense again or the scientific point of view would say no we're just going to observe it and see how it goes and kind of as as we so but this is an ancient look this is really old so around 1900 a bit before

then or around then among cultural elites. There was this big recognition or change that we were now in the modern era. And the modern era was quite different in the previous era. And they struggled to say what exactly it was. But most everybody agreed that essential features of the modern era was that we were changing things a lot more than people ever changed them before in culture, including elsewhere. And the one thing we all agreed was we did not want to go back to the past. that we were just going to have very different morals and social organization and attitudes towards thing and that we were going to celebrate the people who were most exploring the space of new possibilities and that modernism dominated in architecture and literature

and uh other kinds of very wellrespected artistic areas that was this perception basically of I would say cultural drift the perception that our cultural inheritance we were no longer attached to it was too far away. We were moving fast away from that and that we didn't really know where we were going and we didn't really have a good guide to tell us which way to go. That was a consensus a century ago among our most respected cultural elites. But I don't think people didn't put that in the cultural evolution terms to say that's bad people. Do you get that?

That's bad because they saw it as heroic. They thought they were the wonderful explorers going into this grand new space of the modern and finding new modern, you know, ways of doing art and architecture and arch and and sculpture and music and all sorts of, you know, even other intellectual areas. They loved the idea that they were the moderns and that they had broken away from those stale habits of the past that had constrained people for so long to stay within certain cultural limits. But that was cultural drift and we've been suffering that a century for the century we've been drifting further further away from where we started for a whole century and now it's finally being

realized in fertility. But it was going wrong in many other ways plausibly over that time. You see, so it's not something that's about to happen. That's the population decline. But the more fundamental problem of we lost our cultural anchor. We lost the cultural evolution process that picked out what cultures we were in and set those terms. We lost that process a long time ago and we've been drifting away from it for a long time is the inference I'm drawing here. The hypothesis I'm offering to you. Is this a one one directional drift or because you know I've also two parts.

Yes. Just a go ahead. Go ahead. So um the key idea is natural selection had held us at a good spot. That is that's the idea like you know if an animal body has the right level claws and furs right whatever if it drifts away it gets pushed back right if there's an optimal size of claws and fur for some animal then uh natural selection will allow some variation but like punish the devian too far to keep it on track and then the environment changes it gets colder. Well now more fur is appropriate and then the animal will change slowly over time. Right? So that's what's supposed to be happening with cultural evolution. You know, we have this variety, but it's punish things that get too far away from the optimal spot get punished. And you know, up until a few

centuries ago, we had all these little peasant cultures, and they were pretty well adapted to their local circumstances uh because of this vast variety of them and strong selection pressures. But then selection pressures weakened and now there's two kinds of things that can go wrong. One kind of thing that can go wrong is you just do a random walk drift away from wherever you were and just any random place is worse than where you started because of you know you started in a good place because that's there was this long process that put you there right but another way you can go wrong is if there was a way in which culture was holding humans in a place against human nature. So we could think humans had a nature say hundreds of thousands million years ago in a long

actual history and we had a certain environment we lived in and then we had a nature and a set of habits that were evolved for that context and then as the world changed and say farming became possible, civilization became possible. Now cultural evolution moved our behavior away from human nature to the thing that was appropriate for our new cultural environment like living in you know farms and with war and more density and disease and you know a whole bunch of you know new marriage even property a whole bunch of new things that farmers had that their forager ancestors didn't have. because we had a whole new sort of set of cultural norms and values and practices that were adapted to that new farming situation. And then when the

selection pressure just goes away, the predict we just drift back toward human nature, the forger nature, our older human nature. And actually that drift can explain a number of key trends here. increasing democracy, decreasing slavery, decreasing religion, increasing leisure, increasing art, increasing travel, uh less domination. Um all of those are ways in which foragers are different from farmers and that we've had those trends over the last few centuries. So a lot of our trends over the last few centuries can be understood as our drifting back to sort of a human nature or one of them is is promiscuity. So basically former for foragers were a lot more promiscuous

than farmers. Farmers were held as farmers with repressive social pressures and punishment because humans were often naturally more promiscuous. And then once these selection pressures went away, we've drifted to be more promiscuous, to be more like what foragers were like as it became possible for us being rich and at peace and healthy. So again the prediction for our cultural drift and decay is that some of them are just random walks away from some particular place but some of them are a drift back to a human nature.

Another kind of human nature might be plausibly human nature is just naturally selfish shortsighted and lazy. That's just, you know, humans have to be motivated to do anything else but to be selfish, short-sighted and lazy. Uh, and culture did make us something else besides selfish shortsided lure had all sorts of structures to make us get up and work and pay attention to other people and think about the future. But selection pressures go away and maybe we just drift back to being shortsighted and lazy. I can't help but think that we're entering this postmodern era. So Robbie and I are 25. Uh I've been a digital nomad for two two and a half years. So

very much like a forager by nature. Um and have it might feel natural, doesn't it? I mean it feels like it's actually I'm moving to New York City in like two weeks and if for like a three-month lease and that feels like a massive commitment. Um and so like like just putting this into perspective, we grew up with you know iPads and iPhones and things. we're like 10, 11, 12. Uh came into now the generation has all sorts of social media and and all sorts of of these kind of uh technological ways of creating connection and then kind of we we we're advancing now towards AI being much much more rapid in terms of its

development and broader usage. And I can't help but to like take these uh take these mental models that you're building here and overlay them into today's world where it feels like there's a lot of deflationary uh forces at hand in in by by means of AI by means of of uh population decline over time while simultaneously having a lot of also inflationary forces for various wars or programs or spendings etc. And so it it really puts us uh it puts my generation and our our outlook of the world in a really peculiar spot because we are we are birthed luckily without

debt to our parents but a large large debt to those who came before us by means of asset prices being higher than they ever had been. Like there was this golden era of this modern era per se from 1970 to 2008 really and then beyond of everybody who was an asset owner uh be having this large financial appreciation without really lifting a finger per se. Um, and so now we come into this world a and and we feel like it's our responsibility to kind of like carry on what what what the the previous have have built before us.

But I can also just open my phone, go smoke a joint, and go through Instagram and just text some people, hang out, go for a walk, jump on a plane. And like why do I need to contribute to society when in five years we're gonna have I'm gonna have an a a robot here that will snap my finger and be like hey can I have a beer and you know can you solve this problem for me and maybe just the elites have these have these tools but what what I'm getting at is it feels like we're going through the next era of arts and philosophy and learnings and so I'm just curious whether from an economic perspective or through a thought exploration for just a pure humanity perspective, kind of any trends or thoughts or predictions around how

you generally see society as a whole going through this next shift. A and like anything whether important and neglected or uh potentially uh that others are not thinking about that you think is is clear as far as the consequences of like this next era. when thinking about the deflationary forces uh as well as kind of the current iteration uh of the state of the economy for for our generation per se the most insight I can offer you here is to frame this thing you're looking for in the light of this larger context so the key thing to notice is that we are for a long time we have been

expecting cultural change and noticing there is a lot of culture change even over our lifetimes. And we want people who will both tell us about this, help us frame it, help us understand it, maybe predict it, but we also want people who will be activists telling us and motivating us which changes we're pushing for and we want to, you know, hope for. And that's all part of what it is to be part of a culture today.

And that's the process of cultural change that you've long been embedded in and probably never thought about whether it works. That is this process by which we all like notice changes and then talk about them and then argue for some being better than the others. That process is causing cultures to change. It's not just reacting and observing to change. It actually substantially causes culture to change. And that's uniquely human, of course, but that's also a striking fact about the modern world that wasn't true thousands of years ago. Thousands of years ago, cultures changed so slowly in a lifetime, you hardly noticed any changes and you weren't expecting them and you weren't trying to cause

them. You know, it's only in this recent era that we expect to see a lot of change even in 20 years. We expect to um have an opinion about which changes are good or bad. we expect to even be taking sides, pushing the changes one way or the other. And in our world today, our biggest heroes are the people who both frame the changes for us and then argue which side we should be on. Those are our heroes. They are the people get the most attention and sell the most books and you know keynotes, conferences and write the articles people read the most and argue the most about. Those are our heroes. and notice they are heroes who are about taking sides in these cultural fights and pushing for them. That is

this world you live in. But what you should notice is you've never thought much about how that process works and where it came from and you just live through it. You just exist in this in it. Right. Right. Exactly. So the cultural evolution people are the specialists who sort of have learned about how that process works. But you've never been taught that and nobody thinks that's very prestigious. Nobody assigns that to you in college or something because people are so enamored with being part of this heroic battle of culture that they find it hard to step out of this heroic battle to see it as an you know a natural selection process that where that natural selection doesn't necessarily take their

side. You see like it's like analyzing war from the point of view of how war works rather than that we want to win. Right? A lot of say military history novels are all about our side and yay our we were winning and we did the right things here. But then a lot of military analysis is just saying no how does a war work? What are the factors that make you win or lose it better? What are the better strategies? And so there's there's quite often there's two different perspectives, right? There's the me as a participant view of how I could, you know, participate and win and who my opponents are. And then there's this outside view of the battle seen neutrally by a third party trying to guess what's going to happen and understanding the various moves you can make. So uh the key point to notice is

culture is really a central process in our world but you are hardly at all trained to see it from this third party point of view. You you you have a little training in biology to see that from a third party maybe business competition from a third party point of view. Even military competition for some degree you can understand well missiles might help if they go faster or whatever but culture no but the point is it is another sort of you know form in which people fight and there is this third party neutral view to understand it as a process and it as a process could just be going wrong compared to in the past and that's my main message is this whole game you're playing it's going wrong and it's causing us to just go farther wrong and

but then you say, "Yeah, okay, but tell me who's winning and which side I should be on, which is sort of jumping to that, you know, much more prestigious discussion people have about who's right about the various fights, right? We have intergenerational fights. We have gen fights across the world. We have fights but left versus right. We have fights, you know, rich versus poor. You know, there's all sorts of these divisions and people, different groups aligning with themselves and different groups having their complaints about what was going wrong and how they've been mistreated and how, you know, they need to get back at those people who mistreated us, etc. Right? That's all very engaging. Uh, and it's very powerful.

But have this ability to stand back from that and think about this whole process. How does it work and how does it go wrong? Yeah. And and through this we we could achieve a uh an objective view of how the world actually works rather than being enamored by a particular side or an emotionally charged position of what we should be thinking. So one hard thing is that when you think about this biology so basically culture is another it's biology that is uh it's a uniquely human kinds of biology but it's basically just a natural selection process. And so there's this concept of adaptiveness that makes sense of biology. We can think of some concepts of more or less adaptive. But what adaptive means is that it will have more descendants and it will win more in

conflicts, right? But when you think about culture and your fights, you don't use the you don't tend to use the concept of adapt as your standard. You use the some sort of concept of morally right and fair. And you know, you have all these other more personal ways by which you will judge cultural changes like does it make people live longer or be happier or at peace or you know and so you have opinions about all those things but it's hard to get you to also see this concept of adaptiveness which is how biology is judging these things and it's how the third party judge of this the things that goes you know basically like in war we would talk about you know military

power as an explanation for who wins war. But when you're arguing for our side to win the war, you don't you tend to want to focus on we're just and those people did the bad things and we we got to retaliate blah blah blah, right? And so again in culture uh the question biologically from in the distance is are the cultures getting more or less adaptive and which parts of them are getting more or less adaptive and and how to understand how that be going because the general process and over the long run was to make cultures more adaptive. So if they're becoming less adaptive that's this deviation from the usual trend and you try and understand well how could that be happening? Yeah. What's uniquely interesting about that from the way that like my like entrepreneur brain works is

that having a more world a more holistic worldview uh from this kind of polymath perspective that you laid out identifying these areas of adaptiveness and what you described as maladaptiveness and then discovering if there's actually products, solutions, ideas and change that needs to be implemented at some scale and using this as a way to do. We don't have that much time left, but let me just connect this back to say discussion of futur and and and blockchain, which is it may be that the era of cultural evolution is coming to an end and that we can't actually fragment into 100,000 cultures anymore

and have this whole separate thing, which means we need a new way to make these cultural change choices uh in order to prevent this cultural drift and collapse. So actually futarchy is one of my candidate solutions that is plausibly the cultural drift we're facing is going to cause population to peak and then decline and civilization to decline and that's going to make civilization less capable of doing lots of things. So if we could have a government, a community of people who used a futur with a goal that was inconsistent with collapse then and they were willing to stick with it then maybe they could prevent collapse. So I did some surveys

about what sort of goals people that could inspire enough devotion that were inconsistent with collapse and some of them were about space like when do a million people live in space or when do we get to another star and other was about immortality but the key point is those could be seen as sacred goals. So if a community could say we are the community devoted to when a million people live in space that's a thing we're devoting ourselves to and we're going to empower a futur to actually make that happen then when it started to you know implement policies we didn't like that had temporary pain and cost to them then if we weren't very devoted this long-term goal we would just drop it say hell with that we don't like that anymore right but if it's a long-term

sacred goal that we've devoted ourselves to we might be proud to pay these costs and to be sacrificing because that's often what happens when people feel they have a sacred goal and they are asked to sacrifice for it. They they are especially motivated by sacrificing for a sacred goal. So and if the sacred goal was inconsistent with collapse then the government might be figuring out how to prevent the collapse therefore how to prevent the drift because otherwise it couldn't achieve the goal. So the point is if we just did this with an ordinary form of government like we have now, they're so ineffective that they wouldn't actually achieve the goal, they would just claim to be doing it in our name and maybe making us pay some cost, but then it wouldn't actually work. But if you have a form of government that

actually is effective at achieving a goal and you give it the goal of when a million people live in space and say we want that date to be as soon as possible and we authorize you to do what it takes to change our policies and practices in order to make that happen. And then it starts to do things we don't like that are at odds with our immediate inclinations. But we say, "Oh," and we believe that that's because that's what it'll take to achieve this long-term sacred goal. Then we might say, "Let it let it continue. Let's pay the cost and let's achieve this goal." And if that goal is inconsistent with collapse, then

if we effectively achieve it, we will effectively have prevented collapse and therefore effectively have overcome the problems. But fundamentally, we will have replaced sort of this intuitive cultural competition process you have you see with this governance mechanism that's going to manage that in some way as to make it not go so terribly wrong look so this is a big ask I get but part of the thing to notice is this problem we're facing is a really hard problem and there are no obvious easy solutions but one of the solutions is using something like futuri i.e be a form of governance that you can give a particular concrete goal and that it would be very effective at actually

achieving that goal. A thing you can do with that is then choose together a sacred goal that's inconsistent with collapse but also has attractiveness in terms of a sacred thing we could devote ourselves to and be willing to sacrifice for. So it can't just be the goal of preventing collapse because apparently people don't care so much about that but they might care about immortality. say if we are the community devoted to creating immortality then um let's let that happen. So I feel like um Bitcoin and crypto was was kind of earthed and unearthed on this idea around just kind of a a non state form of money and it's like this it's this goal. It's to build this alternative system inconsistent with collapse. But perhaps we have a

perhaps we have a little bit of refining of the cultural mission at large. Unfortunately, I think a collapsed civilization could still have working still have crypto workings. So, uh, if we devoted ourselves to making sure we had, you know, Bitcoin working and kept working, that isn't enough to prevent populations to collapse. I just have one last question for you before we go. I know we have a couple minutes. It it's a it's a broad question. Feel free to take it wherever. question is what unpopular idea do you believe that most of your colleagues are currently dismissing which will be obvious in 10 to 20 years?

Well, it's that obvious part that's the hard part. That is a lot of the things I believe I'm just not sure when they will be clear. Uh you know they could just take a very long time. Like for example, um there are people who have studied meteorites who have fallen down from Earth and looked inside and think they've already found alien life in those meteorites. And when I look at that, I'm kind of persuaded. I say, "Yes, they have." And then the what happens is the astrophysicists just have crazy high standards and they say, "Yeah, we don't care what you see in there. That's not proof." And then they just insist we need to keep, you know, doing more things because we we still don't know, right? And a lot of say NASA funding comes from the fact that they're saying well we're out there searching

for life for you. We need to give us money. So I guess they think that if they they just say they found it that they won't get the money anymore. So that's a thing I believe but I don't know that in 20 years that'll change his mind because actually you know there was a first paper in 1961 showing that stuff and then they basically made the guy the journal retracted and fired the guy for publishing in the top journal that he had found the stuff. So basically a lot of the things that I might believe that disagree with a consensus it's because there's this force behind the consensus that maintains it and it's not obvious that that force will go away in 20 years right that's the key question which when there's a consensus you know maintaining some view and making sure

people conform to it those can just last a really long time so uh but you know I I I have contrarian views I think there good evidence for and often it's because there is some pressure to hold a different view that's the reason why other people don't hold that view. Kind of brings me back to the self-fulfilling and self-refuting prophecies of the prediction markets conversation as well. Robin, it's been a pleasure. Um really kind of covered a wide variety of topics as expected. appreciate you your time and uh sharing some ideas uh for for our community and uh love to have you back on in the future as the world progressively gets weirder and weirder faster and faster.

It's already pretty weird. I don't know if it's going to get weirder, but it's going to keep staying weird. That's for sure. Absolutely. Thanks, Robin. All right. Nice to meet you all. Likewise.