![[13-Nabeel Qureshi.jpg]] *Dialectic Episode 13: Nabeel Quresh - The Will to Care - is available on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6W1ZTKEFOlFFOdHPeIVTcV?si=0SrFawZeR0ixEfcPVzVVYw), [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/13-nabeel-qureshi-the-will-to-care/id1780282402?i=1000701529752), and [YouTube](https://youtu.be/itVaIp0A1tU?si=-n0ImDeLcBKba9fe).* <iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/6W1ZTKEFOlFFOdHPeIVTcV?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe> <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *; fullscreen *; clipboard-write" frameborder="0" height="175" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;border-radius:10px;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/13-nabeel-qureshi-the-will-to-care/id1780282402?i=1000701529752"></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/itVaIp0A1tU?si=y7vjEwCMUZzYQAqf" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> # Description Nabeel S. Qureshi ([Website](https://nabeelqu.co/), [X](https://twitter.com/nabeelqu), [Substack](https://nabeelqu.substack.com/)) is a writer, entrepreneur, and former Palantir product lead known for his writing on technology, AI, Palantir, culture, and learning. After a brief hiatus writing and researching and spending nearly a decade at Palantir working across government, healthcare, and intelligence, he's now founding a new company. The first half of the conversation focuses on two big ideas. First: the growth of "slop" across media and culture and how "care" is its opposite. Then: how to think, learn, and understand more deeply across domains over a lifetime. We discuss how both of these sit against the backdrop of AI's rapid challenging of what it means to make and what it means to think. Then we discuss Palantir and "grey areas" that many technologists avoid working on or thinking about, government bureaucracy and DOGE, and how technologists are pursuing and accumulating power. We also chat about Nabeel's idea maze ahead of the new company, art and what it is for, and a range of other topics that showcase how curious, polymathic, and considerate Nabeel is. As the world changes at a breakneck pace thanks to technology and AI, Nabeel embodies a deeply humanistic approach that also accepts change as the default. This conversation inspired me to embrace surprise and strangeness, especially in creativity; to push through the friction and temptation to accept the answers at face value and instead yearn to more deeply understand; and to pursue a life of growth, practice, and care. # Timestamps - (3:21): “The Opposite of Slop Is Care.” - (4:15): Defining Slop - (14:17): Do We Decide What We Care About? - (20:16): Original Seeing and Intimacy as a Path to Care - (24:05): Creativity, Craft, and Care in the Digital World and Physical World - (28:24): The Human Moat and Practice - (32:48): Can AIs Care? - (35:52): Understanding Things Deeply and “The Will to Think” - (39:52): School: Getting the Answer vs. Deeply Understanding - (41:44): High-Dimensional Learning from Simulations (Games) and Reality (the Real World) - (48:38): Moving Down from Abstraction: Be Specific - (50:49): Karl Popper, Fallibilism, Tyler Cowen, and Fighting Intellectual Inertia - (53:00): Slowing Down - (56:00): Nabeel's Funnel for Information & Retention - (59:18): Spaced Repetition (Flashcards) - (1:01:09): Palantir, Duty, and Engaging in Political and Moral Gray Areas - (1:07:06): Palantir's Culture of Independent Thinking: People Who Speak Their Mind but Aren't Douchebags - (1:09:38): Government Bureaucracy, DOGE, Power - (1:14:51): Why Can't Governments Be Better at Error Correction and Healthy Renewal? - (1:17:02): Technologists and Power - (1:23:47): Nabeel's Next Company and the Idea Maze: “Context Is That Which Is Scarce” - (1:27:11): Scientist Brain vs. Founder Brain and Context vs. Details - (1:30:17): Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and What Art Is For - (1:34:02): Art for Defamiliarization - (1:36:00): What Makes Film Special - (1:37:15): Depth in Text and Other Mediums - (1:40:32): Patterns Across Nabeel's Taste: The Unfamiliar - (1:43:11): Lightning Round: Travel - (1:44:37): Stories Nabeel Tells Himself - (1:45:31): Agency and Being Told What to Do by AI - (1:47:49): Negotiation and Creating Optionality - (1:50:28): Palantir's Vocabulary - (1:53:07): Lessons from Tyler Cowen - (1:54:41): Fighting Inertia # Links - ["We don't get a lot of things to really care about." (Pig, 2021)](https://youtu.be/MDPeLlMR2D4?si=w6Yw82lTcWPU_WgS) - [The opposite of slop is care. (Tweet Thread)](https://x.com/nabeelqu/status/1898433496839798942) - [Slop wins when you let go of taste entirely, because it's more efficient to produce. Median person prefers AI-generated poetry to TS Eliot or Walt Whitman already.](https://x.com/nabeelqu/status/1898441454525223263) - [Towards Benchmarking LLM Diversity & Creativity](https://gwern.net/creative-benchmark) - Gwern - [Principles](https://nabeelqu.co/principles) - Nabeel - [The Lottery of Fascinations](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/) - Slate Star Codex - [Why's Complete Printer Spool As One Book](https://www.scribd.com/doc/136875051/why-s-complete-printer-spool-as-one-book) - [‎Flow (2024)](https://letterboxd.com/film/flow-2024/) - [How To Understand Things](https://nabeelqu.co/understanding) - Nabeel (The brick of the opera house, "When in doubt, go closer") - [Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/306940.Impro?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=iPYIxSCPQZ&rank=1) - Keith Johnstone - [Damien Hirst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Hirst) - [Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26901.Seeing_Is_Forgetting_the_Name_of_the_Thing_One_Sees?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=rjlJG4Fk8N&rank=1) - Lawrence Weschler - [Video Games are the Future of Education](https://nabeelqu.co/education) - Nabeel - [David Deutsch on Pokemon](https://x.com/DavidDeutschOxf/status/966238851596505088) - [Notes on Puzzles](https://nabeelqu.co/puzzles) - Nabeel - [When We Cease to Understand the World](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62069739-when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=dt353U3XRo&rank=1) - Benjamin Labatut - [GoCardless](https://gocardless.com/) - [Inventing on Principle (Talk)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII) - Bret Victor - [Bret Victor](https://worrydream.com/) - [Notes On Karl Popper](https://nabeelqu.co/post-popper) - Nabeel - [Tweet about Spaced Repetition](https://x.com/nabeelqu/status/1731386142581231898) - [Augmenting Long-term Memory](https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html) - Michael Nielsen - [Reflections on Palantir](https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir) - Nabeel - [Palantir’s Alex Karp Talks About War, AI and America’s Future](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/style/alex-karp-palantir.html) - NYT (Maureen Dowd) - [Dominic Cummings - Inside the Collapse of Western Government](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i7ym_Qh7BA) - Dwarkesh - [Nabeel S. Qureshi - film, Shakespeare, AI, startups, and more](https://youtu.be/6nZE2moM_LI?si=zDn8w13TgsSHtQQj) - Dan Schulz - [In a world where the cost of copying things trends to ~$0, the value of secrets increases enormously](https://x.com/nabeelqu/status/1902018130659913787) - [Tolstoy on Shakespeare: A Critical Essay on Shakespeare](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6723614-tolstoy-on-shakespeare) - [Paradise Lost](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15997.Paradise_Lost) - John Milton - [Consider the Lobster](https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf) - David Foster Wallace - [Blonde](https://open.spotify.com/album/3mH6qwIy9crq0I9YQbOuDf?si=GxFajigYSUKnhKe2JP0a_w) - Frank Ocean - [Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74034.Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death) - Neil Postman - [The Overstory](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40180098-the-overstory?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ufTBz7ZXkN&rank=1) - Richard Powers - [And The Days Are Not Full Enough](https://allpoetry.com/And-The-Days-Are-Not-Full-Enough) - Ezra Pound - [Nick Cammarata](https://x.com/nickcammarata) Dialectic with Jackson Dahl is available on all podcast platforms. [Join the ⁠telegram channel for Dialectic⁠](https://t.me/dialecticpod) [Follow ⁠Dialectic on Twitter⁠](https://x.com/dialecticpod) [Follow Dialectic on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/dialecticpod/) [Subscribe to Dialectic on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@Dialectic) # Transcript **Jackson:** Welcome to Dialectic, Episode 13, with Nabeel Qureshi. Nabeel's a writer, entrepreneur, and spent much of his career working at Palantir. He recently started a new company, but he's also known for his amazing writing on technology, AI, culture, understanding and learning, Palantir, and much more. He's someone who consumes an unbelievable amount of information and seems to just have a polymathic interest, curiosity, and understanding across so many different domains, and I was thrilled to interview him. I decided to focus at least the first half of the conversation on two big ideas that feel connected to so much of what I've been thinking about and reading, and even talking to people on this show about. The first is based on a tweet thread Nabeel wrote recently titled, "The opposite of slop is care." As Nabeel states, "Slop is one of the defining aspects of modernity, and one of the reasons that I think so much of our experience with media and culture these days can feel meaningless." We spend some time trying to interrogate what actually makes for slop, and then we talk about how to create things that do have meaning, with care at the root. This is not a science, and as you can tell, I think he and I are both thinking through this live, but it was a conversation I found to be really meaningful. And I think one of the most important aspects of it is Nabeel's contention that a critical part of creativity is a kind of strangeness, or surprise, or unpredictability. The second big topic is his rigorous approach to thinking, learning, and understanding things more deeply, regardless of the domain. Obviously, both of these ideas tie in deeply with what's happening in AI, and that is a backdrop to much of the conversation. We spend the second half of the conversation covering a wide range of things, from Palantir, government bureaucracy, Doge, gray areas, technologists in power, art and why it's meaningful and why it matters, all the things Nabeel has learned from Tyler Cowen, and many other topics, which all just do more to showcase how wide-ranging Nabeel is. More than anything else, I hope the conversation leaves you wanting to put more intention into what you do, what you make, what you think about. How you approach your life. Something I've talked about in the past with other guests, and it is really meaningful to me, is this idea of fighting inertia. How do you fight the default? How do you fight growing friction? How do you fight a world and society that is increasingly full of slop? There are a few patterns and solutions that we talk about here, but ultimately, I think the goal is a life of growth, of practice, and of care. With that, here is Nabeel Qureshi. **Nabeel:** Hello. **Jackson:** Nice to be with you. Thank you for making this happen. **Nabeel:** You as well. Thanks for having me. **Jackson:** You have... I told... I texted you this before. There are, like, so many versions of a interview of you, I suspect. Even on a few of them I listen to. Very, very different. And maybe, who knows, maybe we'll do more of these in the future, but I'm excited to pick a few topics that I think are particularly interesting and feel resonant about you today. **Nabeel:** Yeah, somebody once put me in a group chat which was just like, "People with confusing vibes." [laughs] And I felt like- **Jackson:** I don't- **Nabeel:** ... I belong here. [laughs] **Jackson:** I find a lot of it coherent. I just find it... Just the amount... Even just scrolling your Twitter timeline, it's just like, "Oh my God." Okay, I gotta rein it in. **Nabeel:** [laughs] **Jackson:** No more, no more, uh, research. ## [00:03:21] "The opposite of slop is care." **Jackson:** I wanna start with a topic that I think has been coming up in a bunch of ways for me recently, and there's one thing I think of a lot. Uh, there's this film, uh, called Pig with Nicolas Cage. If you haven't seen it, there's this iconic scene where he's talking to a restaurant owner who's like, done it, and he has the nice restaurant that everyone likes. And this guy used to work for him and he's like, "Whatever happened to that pub you were gonna open? You really wanted to open..." He's like, "What are you talking about?" And Nic Cage goes on to say, "We only get a few things to really care about." You wrote a tweet thread recently titled, "The opposite of slop is care." And to me, this is this interesting amalgamation of so many things that feel particularly relevant today. Obviously, AI. I think broadly, social media and algorithms. On the other hand, conversations about craft and taste, and what's gonna be human. All these things coming together. ## [00:04:15] Defining slop **Jackson:** To start, it might be worth just talking a little bit more about slop. I wanted to read kind of the first chunk you had about that. You say, "Slop is probably one of the most important and rich concepts for understanding modernity. Slop is four things. It's efficient, mass-produced, and low-cost, done carelessly, thrown together without fussing over the details, and ahistorical, not rooted in tradition or practice." You go on to say, "Mode collapse refers to LLM models losing their creativity after being post-trained, RLHF, SFT, et cetera. Slop is what happens when mode collapse happens to society and culture at large." And then just as a simple example so people have a reference point, you... [laughs] It's amazing. You say, "Lemon gochujang creamy miso pasta is slop food. Spiritual pseudo-Western self-help Buddhism is slop religion. Most modern new builds are slop architecture. Netflix is slop TV. GPT poetry is slop poetry. AI art is slop art, et cetera." This probably resonates with people who've heard, uh, I think Venkatesh Rao has this term premium mediocre, or just this broad feeling. There's examples in fashion, there's examples even in the idea of, like, seeing, like, a state in the way that we sort of add needless order to things. My friend Eugene Wei, who I just had on the pod, he talks about how social media is sort of pushing us to this frictionless positivity. So, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how you actually see the pattern, how long it's been happening, and potentially, like, what the terminal state of at least the direction it seems like we're going in is. **Nabeel:** Yeah. Wow, there's so much there, right? Uh, this is one of those threads that I started writing, and then more and more things kept coming out. And you know how sometimes you just pull on a thread and then suddenly you're like, "Oh, there's a whole essay buried in here"? **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** Uh, so there were a few, there's a few different things going into it. I think, like, one is just the work of Christopher Alexander, the architect and writer. He wrote these books. There's The Nature of Order, Timeless Way of Building, Pattern Language. And I think he, he basically is trying to answer the question of what went wrong with architecture in the 20th century, right? Because in his mind, you have these amazing things. You have the Gothic cathedrals, you have... Yeah, just all the kind of religious buildings of the 16th and 17th centuries. Uh, you have, you know, beautiful mosques, et cetera. And then if you kind of fast-forward to today, if you look at a lot of the buildings in urban metropolises, it's like, they're kind of slop, [laughs] right? They're like visual slop. And then for him, it was especially disturbing because he was a architecture instructor at UC Berkeley, and what he observed was that the students are being taught to generate slop as, as well. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** Right? So for him, it was like the scholarly culture had degraded. And, and the scholarly culture is the thing that should be preserving the craft. Like, if anywhere preserves craft without pure utilitarianism, it should be the scholarly culture. So for him, it was like, "Oh, we're also teaching slop." So this really disturbed him. And I mean, long story short, he, uh, he comes to the conclusion that there's this kind of religious awe underlying true creation, and if you don't tap into that when making a building, then your building is, is kind of dead, spiritually. Uh, and, and you know, he's, he's a Catholic, right? But like, he's not very overt about it. And, uh... So this thread has kind of been humming in my life for a while, right? It's like, what kind of world are we creating? And then, you know, you have AI creation. I think the specific thing that, uh, triggered that thread was, I, I saw this study that got kind of re-upped, and it was how people rate ChatGPT 3.5's poetry way better than all these like famous Western poets, like T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson. **Jackson:** Right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** And Walt Whitman, and I was like, "This is so disturbing." **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** Uh, and then I also cite this amazing article by this guy Gwern, right, who says that he feels like there's this huge risk of feedback loops here, where basically you already have, like, students who...... aren't really reading the way they used to anymore, right? Like, talk to university professors and they complain about this a lot. And, and so the risk here is, like, we basically just forget what good looks like entirely, and we stop producing, you know, good writing, good buildings, good anything. And, um, so yeah, that, that was th- what the thread was about, and there's just so many different directions it kinda- **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** ... applies in, right? **Jackson:** Well, you've, you've gotten right to where I wanna go. One initial question would be, there's some frame of this, or at least some interpretation of part of what you're saying that says you're just like an elite coastal douchebag who's telling people they can't like mainstream or normie things, at least in certain categories. You can imagine the, the classic, like, A24 versus Marvel argument, or, or some of these categories. I think in some areas, obviously, like the, I don't know, the people who always give the, like, the minimal, uh, telephone booths, like everyone kind of acknowledges the new telephone booth- booths suck. But one, I, one, I'd be curious for you to riff on that, maybe to lead you a little bit, you mentioned the Gwern essay. You say, "In his essay Towards Benchmarking LLM Diversity and Creativity, he speculates that slop could create this terrible feedback loop," as you said. "People, more slop, people start preferring slop, even more slop, people forgot what really good stuff looks like. Anything that you read that describes things in a famili- familiar vocabulary and doesn't really go beyond that, it's just news. It's just something that will come and go. Anything that's truly compelling, there's a quality of strangeness to it. Howard Bloom says this is the essential characteristic of art." Strangeness. I think I combined those two things. The second one wasn't the Gwern bit, but this notion that, on one hand, it's easy to critique normie or mainstream things just because they're mainstream. On the other hand, maybe there actually is this risk of society in 50 years simply won't appreciate things that are cared for. Is it that strangeness? Is it something else? Like, how do you, how do you think about... Uh, and I realize it's a few different questions rolled into one. **Nabeel:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. I totally get what you're saying. So I don't think it's a mainstream versus niche thing at all, actually. There's a lot of, like, niche avant-garde art that is basically slop in my mind- **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** ... and there's a lot of mainstream art that's full of care. And one inter- one, one interesting, so I'm very interested in movies, right? And it, and so, for example, like, if you look at the Terminator movies, like I and II. **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** They're both amazing, right? **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** But they were also, like, Hollywood blockbuster hits. And, um, they were made with care, like James, I think it was James Cameron directed them, and you can tell he put a lot of thought into, like, how the robots should look and all of this kind of stuff. Or like casting Arnold Schwell- Schwarzenegger. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** Um, and so that stuff is really good. Similarly, uh, you know, like E.T., The Matrix, The Godfather, like, these were all mainstream smash hits, but the distinguishing characteristic to me is they were made with care. Even, I think the original Transformers movie with Michael Bay, right? **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** Pretty good, actually. Like, you can tell he put care into it. Um, whereas, you know, Transformers 6, like- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... [laughs] feels close to the slot. **Jackson:** Maybe you could say the same about Marvel, by the way. Iron Man I, like- **Nabeel:** Right. **Jackson:** ... clearly made by people who really cared for the IP and the whatever, yeah. **Nabeel:** Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so to me, it's not, it's not really an elitist thing. Um, just to take the flip side of that as well, like I think if you open, you know, the Paris Review or like a contemporary lit mag nowadays, you will often read very mid contemporary poetry, but like clearly, like, elevated art contemporary poetry. **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** And I, I tend to think that's sort of the slop version of elite taste. Like, on occasion, it's pretty good, but... Yeah, so it's, it's a general phenomena. I do think it's like, uh, there is [laughs] , I hate this word "taste," but there is some thing that is, like, linked to taste and care that good things have in common, and they can be both mainstream things or they can be not mainstream things. **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** To that, I'd, I'd kind of combine two things, but to the Howard Bloom idea that maybe the essential characteristic could be strangeness, at least of art. If you were to try to pinpoint, we'll talk more specifically about care and how to get to it and what that might mean, but I th- I, I w- I can't help but wonder if some people still hear this and be like, "Okay, I, I kinda," like, is, is slop a you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing? Is the opposite of SLOP, is it the fact that it can be surprising or that it can be moving? Is it a spiritual thing? Is it a personal thing? **Nabeel:** Yes, yes. Uh, I do think surprising-ness is an essential thing. So like, I, I think, and I, if you stick with the mainstream thing a second, like The Matrix, very surprising when you first saw it, right? **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** Like, oh my God, so memorable. [laughs] What was it? Like, I know kung fu- **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** ... or like the whole thing dissolving into zeros and ones and green numbers, right? All very strange and very cool. Um, it got incorporated into mainstream kind of parodies so fast that I think we're all numbed how strange it was initially. **Jackson:** Mm, that's a great point. **Nabeel:** Uh, Harry Potter, really strange, like set in a boarding school, full houses, like expelliarmus, like all these Latin spells, right? So, um, I do think the, and, uh, there's like a simple, like, information theory concept underlying all of this stuff, which is just, like sup- surprising-ness in information theory is this technical term, right? It's like, in a given string of bits, like how many, how predictable are those bits? And I think, I think it's a necessary condition of good art that it's not that predictable, and I think this is an issue. It's not an insurmountable issue, but it is an issue with AI art, where it basically goes for things that are quite predictable, sort of by the nature of the way it works. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** And what, I guess one last thing that I have on this theme was, there's a poetry professor in England that used to make his students do this exercise where he'd take a poem by, in this case it was Philip Larkin, but it could be anybody, and he would, he would basically blank out a bunch of the words and he would make his students guess them. Basically, almost none of them would ever guess any of the words, because the words used were all just really strange. Like there's this one line in this, uh, famous in England poem, I don't think it's that well known in America, but the line is, uh, the, the guy's like going by on a train, and then the line is like, "A hot house flashed uniquely." And, um, he blanks out the word "uniquely" and no one ever gets the word "uniquely." It's like, you know, you might say, "A hot house flashed brightly," or whatever it is, but if you look at it in the context of that poem, it's perfect, because the whole point of the poem is like, this is one very specific day that's never gonna come again, and all days- **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** ... are like that. And so the word "uniquely" works very well there, but you could never predict that in advance. **Jackson:** Yes. Yes. **Nabeel:** Yeah, so again, I think it's the opposite of SLOP is care, and I think part of things that have a lot of care put into them is that, there often is something really surprising or delightful about them, yeah. ## [00:14:17] Do we decide what we care about? **Jackson:** To talk more about it specifically, you already brought up Christopher Alex- Christopher Alexander, excuse me. You specifically say, I, I just loved your framing. "You can read all of Christopher Alexander's work as saying modern architecture is SLOP. The opposite of SLOP is care. To create anything worthwhile, you basically have to put God into it." There's another, uh, I think from something else you wrote, maybe this is from Principles, you, you talk about aim for Chartra. **Nabeel:** Mm-hmm. **Jackson:** Also a- an Alexander idea, this idea wh- when doing something, aim to be the best there ever was at it. This compensates for your natural bias, which is to do something mediocre. You have to really aim to be as good as the greats. On the same, and maybe in the same way that the SLOP idea is a little bit hard to totally pin down, care is a little bit ineffable too. There, Alexander specifically uses the, the phrase, "The quality without a name," at least in A Timeless Way of Building. How, how do you foster this? How much, maybe even control, do you have over what you care about? **Nabeel:** Wow, yeah, that's such a good question. There's this really good Slate Star Codex essay, one of my favorite essays of all time, it's called The Lottery of Fascinations. **Jackson:** I've never heard of it. **Nabeel:** It's amazing. He basically goes into, he basic- the thesis is just like, you are basically born with these things that you are very interested in, and it's very hard to change that. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** And the way you detect it is like, what are you naturally good at, or like, what naturally sticks in your mind, right? **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** And, uh, he uses the math example, like he claims he's bad at math, which I'm skeptical of, but- **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** ... [laughs] Uh, I, I do think this is true. Like, you are, your interests do feel a little arbitrary to me. Um, and I think one, one reason I think about this topic so much, right, is like, I grew up with computers, I'm, uh, like both of us work in technology. I grew up playing video games, but I also have this other side of me, I think partially maybe from, you know, growing up in England and in a particular culture, but like, I'm very into art, I'm very into words, I'm very into poetry and like old beautiful things, and-How do I reconcile these two sides of myself, right? And one answer is video games, right? So in the '90s, you have the Final Fantasy video games, you have Metal Gear Solid. You have these amazing video games that I think have a good claim to being art in some way. **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** Zelda's another example. But then it- it feels like subsequently, like, things have tailed off a little bit. Like, it's not clear to me that the games now are that much better than the games being made- **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** ... then. They're better in some ways. Like I love Elden Ring, but, um, yeah. Like, what about, like, bits, zeros and ones, is eternal in the way that, you know, a cathedral door in the south of France is eternal? Is any of it eternal or is it all just, like, written in water, right? Um- **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** And I th- I think, like, one of the most compelling answers I've seen to this actually was... I'm curious if you know about this. So th- there's this Ruby programmer called... He, he was, he was pseudonymous, so his online moniker was Y the Lucky Stiff. It was like underscore Y. **Jackson:** Oh. **Nabeel:** Uh, yeah. He's, he's, like, quite well-known on, like, Hacker News and in the kind of Ruby programming community. **Jackson:** Okay. **Nabeel:** And he, he was famous 'cause he wrote all these, like, how to program in Ruby guides but they were writ- they were written as, like, comic books. **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** And, um, delightful comic books. Like very artistic ones. But it, it would be like, you know, how do you do a full loop in Ruby or whatever. And, um, at one point, he basically committed, I, I guess they call it info suicide, where he deleted his entire online presence. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** Deleted everything. And, and, and [laughs] he, he then, like, started's I don't even know how to describe this, but he started, like, I think it was, like, faxing written stuff, like written words and drawings on pieces of physical paper to this, like, particular thing that was hooked up to the internet. And then basically, like, published it in a scrip somewhere and it went, like, viral on Hacker News, right? And, um, it was, it was called Why's Printer Spool. And- **Jackson:** He'd been absent for a while. **Nabeel:** Yeah. He'd been... He'd gone dark and everyone was like, "Is this guy okay? Did he kill himself or something?" And no, he'd just gone dark and decided that the internet wasn't for him. And the whole... So it's, it's basically... I think it's, like, 40 pages of, um, written... It's, like, sort of a series of short stories almost and, like, little poems and little drawings. And the theme is just, like, can anything in technology be eternal? Like, he was basically like- **Jackson:** Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** ... "Have I wasted my life? Like, have I spent 15 years writing code that is just gonna get, you know, obsoleted?" Whereas, like, he, he says he reads, like, you know, Kafka's work end to end and he's like, "Has anything I've ever done been as important as the stuff that Kafka wrote?" And he basically concludes no. Uh, and, and so I thought about that a lot. Like, to me, ironically this is, like, one of the few, I think, enduring ar- artifacts that came out of the tech world, right? Which is, like- **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** ... The Why's Printer Spool but, yeah. Look it up. It's really fantastic. **Jackson:** Wow. It's interesting too, just thinking about the video game example briefly. Much of the things that have seemingly given way to the over just IPization of everything, tons of sequels, were... You can talk about Harry Potter. Like, even some of the Marvel stuff. Video games in the '90s, they were super new and surprising or strange, and we've basically copied that template for the past 20 years. That goes back to the Gorn idea, I think. Which is just, like, our temptation and our default and our incentives today are to just play the hits over and over and over again. Maybe that's something, to tie it back again to the w- w- is it Why? **Nabeel:** Why, uh, like the question wh- **Jackson:** Yeah. Maybe there's something around digital mediums too that especially wants to do that. It's, it's interesting. **Nabeel:** Right. Yeah. Like copy and replicate and- **Jackson:** Because they're really good at it. It's ea- it, it's frictionless to copy. **Nabeel:** Exactly, yeah. And, and, and I'm, I'm not a doomer about this, to be clear. I think it's just early. Like, I think- **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** I mean, computers 1980s, that's not that long ago. **Jackson:** Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** Um, there was this recent Latvian movie that I think won an Oscar. It was called Flow and it's, it's- **Jackson:** I haven't, still haven't seen it, but yeah. **Nabeel:** But the, yeah. The animated one about the black cat. And I think it was- **Jackson:** Made in Blender. **Nabeel:** Made in Blender! Exactly. **Jackson:** Yeah, amazing. **Nabeel:** Right. And, and supposedly, like, a beautiful work of art. So I think all this stuff is possible. It's just, like, it's gonna come from unlikely directions, like, you know, a Latvian team- **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** ... or whatever. And it's gonna be made with care. **Jackson:** Hm. ## [00:20:16] Original seeing and intimacy as a path to care **Jackson:** One... Maybe this is also a leading question, but wha- on the idea of fostering it or even choosing what we care about, one kind of connection I made, you have this awesome parable from Zen, uh, Motorcycle Maintenance about the, the first brick of the opera house. And, and maybe pointing at this idea of sort of how do you, how do you really look with intention in a way that allows you to see past the cache or see freshly? Uh, another quote you, y- I think it's from a photographer, that same essay. You say, "When in doubt, go closer." Do you think that, to the extent there is any control, it might start with just attention or with, with intimacy with something that we're not... I don't know. If I wanted to become... One maybe relevant example for you relative to most people is people don't read anymore. Long form text is something that in general people don't read and even I think otherwise interested, tasteful, smart people don't do much of. If I wanted to... And maybe you just have a DNA that says culturally or otherwise or instinctively that you're gonna care so much about that. Shakespeare. Do you think that something like this... I don't know. If I wanted to get more into Shakespeare, is it... [laughs] Is there a template there around the brick? Like, is there a template to try to just zoom way, way into something really close or spend a lot of time with it? Am I reaching? **Nabeel:** Yeah. No. I, I think that's, I think that's right. Like, I've often wanted to teach this. Like a w- almost like a workshop on, like, original seeing or something. 'Cause I feel like it's so easy to actually do. [laughs] **Jackson:** Hm. Mm. **Nabeel:** But, but like people need these paths in. And I don't know if you've read the book Imperfects but it's one of my favorite books by- **Jackson:** This is the, the- **Nabeel:** ... Keith Johnstone. **Jackson:** And it's the Palantir, like, default recommendation? **Nabeel:** The one that... Yeah, exactly. And, um, I don't think they give it for this reason, but the, the, the book starts... I think the very first sentence is like, "As I grew older, the wor- world got more and more dull. Like, it got gray." **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** And then he basically talks about how he brought color back into the way he sees things. And it's through these wacky tactics. Like, he, he basically, um, walks around counting backwards from 999, uh, while also, like, repeating a word in a different part of his brain. And then he's like, "After a while of doing this, the colors got brighter." [laughs] **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** And, you know, like, he, he tries all these ridiculous tactics. Another one that he's really into is, um, he... So he'll, he'll... It's like a guided improvisation so he'll have a student lie down and close their eyes and then he'll be like, "You walk up to an ancient rock wall in a cave and you peek really closely. What... And you see some writing. What does the writing say?" **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** And then he says often the students block creatively. They block themselves so they say, "Oh, it's too blurry. I can't..." And then he says, "Okay, you get out a magnifying glass from your pocket." **Jackson:** Just more specific, more zoomed in. **Nabeel:** Yeah. "Now read out what it says." **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** And, like, if you yourself try this, you will come up with the strangest- **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** ... stuff. **Jackson:** Huh. **Nabeel:** Like, you will come up with what feels like original poetry but it'll feel like you're just reading it off of your, like the retina of your imagination or something. And it's, like, just full of these, like, in- interesting exercises. And I've kind of got this list of them privately and I, I just feel like it would be a delightful workshop to teach 'cause I think it's... This is the key is, like, original seeing is your birthright as a person. **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** We spend all our time, like, scrolling or in front of screens. Like, I spend 18 hours a day in front of screens, right? I am working on my laptop, I'm on my phone, whatever. And I don't make time to do this but I think if I just did then... The original seeing is easy to access. It's like, what's hard is, like, the consistent doing it again and again and, you know, producing an artifact and iterating on it until it's really good. Yeah. **Jackson:** Well, and we're also used to getting these things that are so prepackaged and compressed- **Nabeel:** Yes. **Jackson:** ... and, like, legible that we've maybe lost some of that muscle to pick up a proverbial magnifying glass. **Nabeel:** Yes. ## [00:24:05] Creativity, Craft, and Care in the Digital World and Physical World **Jackson:** Thinking about this, obviously over this whole kind of slop and care thing is, is AI. On the creative side-I think one sense is we are reducing the friction to create so dramatically. Conversely, we, the, the amount of creation that can happen is so abundant. How do you think about care, specifically in the sense of sort of like leaning in when going the extra mile you can literally get carried there in a few seconds by an LLM? A couple of riffs on this that I've thought about is like is it maybe where you stop the frame? You, you have sort of like infinite frames in front of you and it's which frame you pick out. You... There was another recent tweet you had about like the things we come back to. "Any idea you write down in the notes app and tell yourself you'll visit later is probably not that good of an idea. The really good ideas fill your body with excitement and make you want to start working on them immediately." What do you think the template is for creativity when, again, anyone can do anything really, really quickly? Maybe I'm over-rotating the fact that you can generate a mediocre slopper- sloppy image today really quickly, but it seems like that's only gonna get more robust, at, at least as a baseline. Like the, these quote unquote finished products that an AI can produce is going to be at the level of somebody who quote unquote cared 50 years ago or 20 years ago or five years ago. **Nabeel:** Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I, I guess one lens on it is like creativity is basically generation and selection, right? So you're generating a bunch of ideas, your brain rejects some of them consciously or unconsciously, and then you select some of them and put them down and then you basically re-iterate this process. And so one simple lens is like okay, the AI is actually very good at generation, right? But then the human is the person selecting and so you could make AI sort of hybrid human AI art but the human is the ultimate decision maker. So I think the model here is something like there's this artist Damien Hirst who- **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** ... you know, he, uh, he makes all these skulls and everything and he actually is controversial, right, because he has this basically factory of like, you know, interns producing the art and he kind of just like rubber stamps them at the end and goes yeah. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** But like maybe that's fine, maybe you know it passed through the Hirst filter and he's rigorous about... It meets his standards and so who's to say that that's a bad thing? Um, so that's kind of one model, right? But then okay so an AI art maximalist might say no but eventually the AI will learn what good taste is and then the AI can do both the generation and the selection and then, you know, what, what role will the human play? **Jackson:** Well and, and I'm not like... There's the separate litigation of like what role does the human play? This may- maybe... You, you often use the example of, of AI playing chess against itself. **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Like there's the separate point which is just how good will the purely AI stuff be? What I'm m- maybe more interested in is just what it w- actually substantively looks like. Care used to mean going through all the additional friction and time that a process would take or that craft would take. Painting the back of the cabinet, whatever these things are, and at least digitally but maybe even beyond that, it seems like if anything the, the thing that technology and AI is really good at is speeding up the process and reducing friction. And so I almost like... What does care mean when you can just do everything really quickly? **Nabeel:** I think you're, you're hitting the core of this issue, right? Is like there is m- th- again it could go one of two ways. One is just like there is inherently something to just, you know, sitting with a piece of wood in a shed and like painstakingly kind of whittling it into a beautiful thing, and that element of craft is only gonna get more important in the AI age. And so everything that can be automated will be automated, but the things we really value are still gonna be like- **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** ... you know when... Say your daughter draws you like a birthday card, right? That's always gonna be more important than she generated one with AI. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** Uh, but you know I find, I find scary the other version which is like actually no the AI ends up capturing everything that you care about better than you and you're kind of just like uh, here's my AI generated thing. Oh well here's mine, it's even better you know and [laughs] it all becomes a little meaningless. But I, I don't think we are close to that and I don't think we're gonna get there for a while because I think the physical world and physical artifacts are still extremely important to us. Like for all the generative AI stuff that we have it's not like the buildings that we are building are any more beautiful to me for example. **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** So maybe one answer is simply that we will just shift a bit more towards caring about the physical world. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** That's a good thing I think. **Jackson:** Yeah, yeah. ## [00:28:24] The Human Moat and Practice **Jackson:** You recently said any median level work task that involves clicking a mouse or typing on a keyboard is going to be fully automatable in two years, price that and act accordingly. Conversely though like what are the areas where we have more weird strange human mo- whatever. A couple of ideas I liked that I think are pretty recent too, this is why celebrating the peaks and enshrining human values cultural criticism becomes more important as the world becomes more slopified. We already mentio- mentioned Harold Bloom for literature, Tyler Cowen for his blog, Menswear Guy on Twitter for clothes. Th- there was one other bit where you said in the long run the human moat against AI is that it's go- is going to be great books and art, and art, religion and love. The AI can't hike the Pacific Crest Trail for you, it can't fall in love for you, it can't pray for you etcetera. In Dune the fremens learn o- an irregular jagged way of walking on sand to avoid sand worms. Maybe more personally are there areas in particular that you're finding your human moat or at least leaning into or feeling like almost like the care feels strong? **Nabeel:** Yeah there are a bunch. I think I... There's a, there's a simple answer which is just you know human presence mat- is gonna matter a lot more right so like the fact that I'm on this podcast. Like I used, I used to say no to podcasts and then at some point I was like hang on like I'm gonna have to get good at [laughs] you know talking and verbal fluency and having interesting ideas because like that is gonna be my comparative value in five years, it's not going to be writing Python or even, even, even maybe starting companies right I think AI is gonna get better and better at that too. So- **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** Um, I think there's some aspect to live presence and live performances of any kind that are gonna be very important. Um, I think for myself as well you know just like it's important to spend time with the arts man like and I, I actually it's funny this is happening across tech now right like a couple months ago everyone in tech was reading Middlemarch. **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** Uh, there's like books that kind of just like sweep the zeitgeist and uh you know people are doing more of that and so yeah like read great books. To me like I will write things like poetry or like prose poems and just like privately enjoy doing that but yeah I think it's just important to have a practice and it's okay like whatever kind of practice it is but it's like something where you're exercising the faculty of care, you're not just typing stuff into Claude and like pasting whatever it comes out with into something else. **Jackson:** Practice is a great word too. To the earlier point around f- practice implies friction. **Nabeel:** Yes. **Jackson:** Om- often sometimes even deliberate friction. **Nabeel:** Yes. Yeah, yeah and and just one more thing is like we were discussing off this previously like the book Seeing is the, the Robert Irwin book right? **Jackson:** Yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** Yeah. Um, and I feel like that entire book is about this theme right? It, it opens with this very physical description of him driving around the LA desert and you know drinking kind of Coke from the soda fountains at the diners and [laughs] you know do, do more of that right and also like his entire career is just he kind of masters one art form and then he gets bored of it and he moves on to something else and he's like what if I made art by putting like long wires in the desert and then kind of framing them and taking a photo or then he's like oh I'll make a garden it's gonna be the best garden ever you know. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** And so I think it's important for you to just constantly be pivoting as soon as you feel like you've mastered something or if, if it's become slopified it's like go find something where you, you can exercise more care and get something better out of it. **Jackson:** One of my favorite parts of that too one as you hinted at one major theme for him is just presence he's like it's not about the ideas behind the art it's a... I think he literally says I want to like bang you off the wall like y- like and there's another bit where he's talking about I think it's like the late lines and he's talking about how he's just getting more and more interested in questions over the course of his career rather than answers he's like I'll kind of answer it a little bit and do my little performative artwork and show it off and then I'm ready to move on to the, the more questions.That feels, that feels human mode y a little bit. **Nabeel:** Yes. Another, another example is, to the presence point, is meditation, right? **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** Like, go, go get into the Jhanas or something like that. Go on a journey retreat. **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** Actually, very good. Like, I do think there is this question of, can AI ever be conscious? Like, maybe... I, I, you know, I think it's, it's a genuinely hard question, right? We don't know. But, um, what we do know is that we are conscious and we can access these marvelous internal states through things like meditation. So maybe go and invest in that. **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** Just things where, like, the differential value of being human is very high. **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** Yeah. ## [00:32:48] Can AIs Care? **Jackson:** My last note on this theme. There's this phrase that you've used, that others have used, AIs that care about humans. I think Ilya Sutskever even talked about, like, this metaphor of sort of a loving parent. Running in the background of this whole conversation is, like, is care a distinctly human trait? Is it the, maybe even the, the human moat? You, you have [laughs] a tweet or somewhere, you, you called Claude 3.6 the only AI model with the, uh, the quality without a name. **Nabeel:** [laughs] **Jackson:** The, the, uh, Christopher Alexander idea. And then you had even proposed this world where AIs care really deeply about humans. You had said, "AI agents that want to be moral and care about the human species. The cornerstone paper of the current AI paradigm is titled Attention Is All You Need. The cornerstone proposition of AI alignment theory might be, might well be that love is all you need." That's probably a whole can of worms that we don't need to get all the way into, but is, is it oxymoronic to talk about an AIs that care about us, or is that actually maybe the point? Is that the, the sort of heightened form of cau- Is that the most human thing that we should want the AIs to have too? **Nabeel:** Yeah. I was being a little tongue in cheek with that one, but also there was a serious thing there. And I think people have come around to it a little bit since, you know, Claude 3.6 came out, right? Is like, I think the original kind of Yudkowsky-ite view is that AI is going to evolve in this way where it's not going to understand human concepts, right? So ethical concepts like love and care- **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** ... and goodness, we cannot write down a formal description of them. And so how could an AI possibly learn those, right? **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** And then you had Claude 3.6 come out. I mean [laughs] - **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** I don't know. It seems to understand morality better than like most humans I interact with on the street sometimes. **Jackson:** And you think distinctly, even relative to Claude 3.7 or other, more, more modern models? **Nabeel:** It nailed some human responsiveness that I think is like very special. I don't know how, I don't even know if they know how they did it, to be honest. Um, but it, it did have that. Uh, and so I, you know, I think it's a little bit like, if you think about, does AI understand things truly? Okay, like a few years ago it was easy to say no, it's just sort of regurgitating. But then eventually it got to the point where like you can ask it as many questions as you want and it's gonna give you the right answer. And then you do have to say like, "I think it does understand this thing," right? Even if it's like basically a perfect simulacrum of understanding- **Jackson:** Yep, I was gonna say. **Nabeel:** ... and understanding are essentially the same thing in practice. And so I think this is the case with care too, as weird as that sounds, is that, um, eventually I do think you get AIs that we functionally treat as though they are beings. And we basically say, "Yeah, I mean this thing cares about me," and it's, it sounds less and less weird. It sounds weird to us 'cause we're, you know, Millennials or Gen Z and you know, we're kind of remember the world before AI. But the next generation, I don't think it's gonna sound so weird. Now whether like the essential thing that matters about caring is actually like some deep inner process that's happening that can only happen in beings with souls, like, I don't know. Um, I don't personally think that, but it's, it's an interesting debate. **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** Yeah. ## [00:35:52] Understanding Things Deeply and "The Will to Think" **Jackson:** The next thing I want to talk about is a bunch of ideas running through one of my favorite essays you wrote, How to Understand Things. And the core idea there is this, you call like the will to think, which I think comes from either William Shockley or Enrico Fermi. Maybe Shockley represent... Okay. There's this bit you say, "It's like almost an honesty or an integrity, a sort of compulsive unwillingness, an inability to lie to yourself." Also this sort of feeling of like this incessant need to go deeper until you have high resolution on an i- idea or a concept. To me, this rhymes a bit with care in a maybe a different way. It's pushing past the default, the acceptable, the cache, the expected. So one question would be like, do you think that connection is, there is something there? And then beyond that, maybe one could argue that this will to think would be less meaningful in a world where intelligence is truly abundant. Do you think that's right? Do you think that's... Maybe it's a serious overreach, but I could maybe argue that over time the care piece is gonna extend, but the, the will to think or the will to understand is like increasingly less important. **Nabeel:** That's a really fascinating thought. Yeah, I think you may be right. Um, that one was interesting. You know, like I... You know how sometimes you sort of tweet out of your own inadequacy? Like maybe you say like, "Yeah, respond to your emails faster," and really you're talking about yourself, right? **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** 'Cause you like let that thing hang for three days. Uh, that's kind of what that was. **Jackson:** Those are the best tweets. What are you talking about? **Nabeel:** Yeah, yeah, right. **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** Like, and I think that essay was written as an exploration of my own inadequacies. Like I think it literally starts with my friend from high school who was amazing at physics and math, right? And I saw him do this, like he was just not happy with any of the answers that he was given in anything. Like, uh, I didn't talk about this in the essay, but you know, he was, he's a physicist now actually. He's a professional physicist. And, um, I saw him do economics. We did economics together. And he had the same thing. He would just take Keynesian theory apart and he'd be like, "No, why is, why are these things..." Whereas I would be kind of focused on just learning the thing itself. I'd be like, "Okay, Keynes said like GDP is made of these five things." Like, "All right, let's understand what that means." But he would be like, "Why?" And he'd be like tearing it apart and trying like different ways of calculating GDP. And, uh, it was just like a diff- the next level up for me, right? And so this phrase will to think, when I found it, I was like, "Ah, that's what he has that I don't have." **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** Um, this also becomes very clear if you play a game like chess. Like, very good chess players just have more of this. And what you realize is that thinking is actually a very painful process. [laughs] Like your brain will do anything to minimize resource consumption and to avoid thinking. And so most of chess instruction is in basically hacking around this tendency- **Jackson:** Ah. **Nabeel:** ... of your brain by forcing you to think for longer. But your brain will just go, "Oh yeah, this is the move." Uh, you know, and then actually if you're being rigorous about it, no, you have to check what if your opponent does this or what if they do this? And you just sort of don't want to think about that after a certain time. You're just like, "Oh, this move clearly works. Like why do I have to be pedantic and check all these things?" And so I, I do think like the most intelligent people I've ever met just have an abundance of this trait. I don't think it's necessarily like a fully adaptive trait, by the way. Like- **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** ... I d- I still don't... Like I'm, I'm starting a company right now and I can't go down every rabbit hole I see. I can't try and understand- **Jackson:** Right, right. **Nabeel:** ... everything. I just have to make a snap decision based on 60% of the information. **Jackson:** You talk about scientist kind of orientation versus founder orientation, yeah. **Nabeel:** Versus... Yeah, exactly, exactly. And just anybody who operates in the world and has to kind of go about their day. You can't stop and be like, "What is the air made of really?" [laughs] Like- **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** ... it's an interesting question, right? Um, so yeah, and then I think to your point, like, you know, I, I'd like to think that learning stuff is going to remain important, but I think increasingly it's gonna be more of a leisure activity than it is... Right now it's like you actually really do need to understand stuff, otherwise the trains stop running and the computers stop working. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** And as more and more stuff gets offloaded to the AI, I think understanding stuff is gonna be more of a thing we do for fun. **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** So. ## [00:39:52] School: Getting the Answer vs. Deeply Understanding **Jackson:** You say, uh, "School kills the will to understanding in people." On some level are, are societal systems and inertia kind of like structurally just grinding out both of these things? The will to think, the will to care? **Nabeel:** Right, yeah, I think so because they're sort of opposed in their goals, right? Um, school is sort of trying to get you to...... pass these tests and get the highest possible score. And so, in order to pass the tests, y- it needs to cram you with all the concepts and so the most adaptive thing to y- to do is to learn the concepts and then pass the tests and get 100%, which is basically what sort of I found myself doing, right? And so like, in some ways, as I was saying, the will to think is actually counter to this because you're, you're basically questioning absolutely everything, right? And, um, it's not adaptive to doing well in school at all. An interesting example of this is in modern geometry there's this French mathematician called Alexandre... I think it's Grot- **Jackson:** Grosindig. **Nabeel:** Grosindig, yeah. And he, he sort of notoriously... He would spend, he spent like five years just being like, "What is a line?" [laughs] Like, "What is a shape?" [laughs] **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** And then, "What is w- what is volume," right? And everyone else would be like, "Well, volume is defined in this way." And he'd be like, "No," like, "what is, this doesn't make sense." And eventually he invents a whole new field of, of geometry and mathematics. But, um, I, I always think of him in this way because he also went completely insane. Like, he fully went crazy and ended up writing all these like kind of schizophrenic religious tracts in a forest and eventually he kind of died like knowing no one and destitute. Uh, so I think this trait is very double-edged. It does mean that you're not necessarily the favorite child in school. **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** Uh, and you could end up in like very strange places but it's sort of high variance. **Jackson:** There's an amazing book called When We Cease to Understand the World that he's featured in, uh, amongst. Eh, but it's that pattern over and over again with, with people kind of on the edge. **Nabeel:** Yes. ## [00:41:44] High-dimensional learning from simulations (games) and reality (the real world) **Jackson:** One of my favorite things you talk about in the context of education is, is why video games are really relevant as both a practical way to learn but also a template for learning. I think it's also ironic given that what we were just talking about is sort of the player playing the game on the field as it is laid out in the school context. As someone who did it, I was, I was a very good 90.000 student, which is ironic in that like it's a bad game and, and video games might be better. You talk about simulation and video games and particularly this like idea of feel. There's different ways you talk about it. One, another one is like lines of force and the way... You give the example of a chess board, the way that a, a really skilled player who's sort of felt it in their body almost can see the pressure or feel the pressure that pieces are putting on. Another phrase you use is a high dimensional grasp o- of what's going on. Reality has a surprising amount of detail. A lot of these ideas kind of revolving around each other. And then you also, I think, just succinctly talk about video games as being this amazing pairing of simulation plus really fast feedback loops. Like, the, the best way to learn [laughs] Pokemon is to play. You're not, you're not, you don't, you're not required to like learn all the, the Pokemon's names before you, before you start. I think it's maybe from David Deutsch or maybe you, even this final phase of like bone level understanding. There's one other idea which is, I think Tyler Cowen, motivation is that which is scarce. And so I was thinking about a lot of this in the context of learning and, and video games and, and these challenges. I know I'm packing a bunch in here but you, you've also written about puzzles and like the idea that puzzles maybe improve our will to think in part because we know that there's an answer to get to. And so I was wondering about what it might be about high feedback loops that generate this feel, this bone level understanding, and if maybe they not only help us improve but they actually help us be more motivated. **Nabeel:** Oh, wow. Yeah, that's really fascinating. Um, also you are amazing at connecting ideas, by the way. [laughs] That's like eight different ideas. **Jackson:** Maybe a few different... There's probably some overload but I'll give... I, I try to think about it as just like I'm gonna throw you a bunch of things that you can feel free to discard some of them. **Nabeel:** Yeah. Well, so Deutsch likes to talk a lot about explicit versus implicit knowledge, right? And I think what he would say is like, "The textbook can give, the textbook can give you the explicit knowledge but the implicit knowledge is always created by you." And, um, I think this is clear in entrepreneurship actually, right? Like, one thing I say to people who, you know, want to s- say you're a student, you want to start a company one day, it's like, you know, maybe if you have the idea already and you're really keen on it then go do it. But- **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** ... a, a next best thing is to just go and find a really good founder and follow them around and, and like help them and just work with them for six months. **Jackson:** Totally. **Nabeel:** Um, I did this when I was, I was, uh, just graduated. I, I joined this company in the UK called GoCardless which ended up spawning a bunch of further billion dollar companies as well. And, and all three of the founders there were absolute monsters, they were incredibly good. And I just learned so much from that experience about what, A, what a good founder is, like what the actual bar for it is, in a very visceral way that I would not have got from- **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** ... like, I read every PG essay, I read every like- **Jackson:** Okay. [laughs] **Nabeel:** ... What Is A Great Founder essay. And like just s- watching, you know, Matt operate for a day taught me way more than any of that. **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** Right? **Jackson:** And also probably literally being next to him. **Nabeel:** Yes. Yes. **Jackson:** Is, in a, in a bodily sense, the lines of, or whatever that, yeah. **Nabeel:** Sen- sensing that aura and, and also just the things that surprise you, right? Um, it's not always what you think. Like, you know, one example is like, I think i- in your head you imagine, "Oh, great founder, like, he's probably going to some conference here and then giving a cool talk there-" **Jackson:** Yeah. [laughs] **Nabeel:** "... and like getting drinks with Marc Andreessen after that." And it's like, no, like, he is hunched over his laptop and he has his to-do list app on his, on his Apple Notes and he's just like checking things off like a demon. And he's typing these emails, then he's, like, getting annoyed at the ops person 'cause there's no drinks in the fridge. Like, it's all this very banal stuff. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** And, um, I th- I think it makes you realize like, okay, succeeding is not glamorous and, you know, like, a good example, an example of a good founder is just somebody who does 100% of their to-do list every single day instead of what usually happens with 99% of people is they do like... They have 10 items, they do maybe five, and then it's 6:00 PM and you're like, "All right, I'll do the other five tomorrow," and you kind of roll things over into the next day. He would just stay late until he'd ticked off all 10 and then he just did that consistently every day. And I thought, wow, like, that's all it is. It's just you're very consistent and you're very high output. And I don't think I'd have got that from reading any number of online essays. **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** Um, so yeah. It's, it's just this... Reality is just very high dimensional and there's no substitute for just immersing yourself in it. Um, an- another, like, unrelated example is just I, I get a little annoyed when I see people talking about foreign countries and they've just never been there, right? Like, you have strong opinions on whatever conflicts but it's like you haven't talked to a bunch of people from there, you haven't, like, driven around the roads or taken a walk there. And I think if you go it's always way more nuanced than anything you read online or anything you read in the paper. Um, so yeah, that's another example. Just like the value of direct experience. **Jackson:** On that last note, I even like, obviously classic, like map is not the territory, but I remember I went to school in LA. I've been there a little bit before. The first time I ever did like a long bike ride arou- ar- around LA, I had a grasp for what the city was that was three orders of magnitude higher than like staring at the map. And it's, yeah, the amount of things that are like that. I think maybe the unique insight, or maybe not unique, but the, the powerful insight you have is that video games actually can be pretty good at this. Or maybe the, maybe it's not even video games, maybe it's just like really thoughtfully designed games broadly. I'm sure chess has elements of this too. And in fact we ended up opting into a lot of games societally in school or otherwise that aren't... That don't actually give you that multi-dimensionality or high dimensionality. **Nabeel:** Right. And I think, I think you're starting to see bits of this today. Like, I actually saw a... Somebody posted a video on X the other day that was like, "Hey, I made this math video game for my son using AI and now..." And it was just a video, it's like a five-year-old kid- **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** ... and he's delighted by this, right? It's like every time he solves a math equation it zaps a monster or whatever. And it's still, that's like s- that's kind of cool. It's like I didn't know the AI thing was... I mean, I was kind of generally excited about AI but I think the essay was written in 2018, right? Pre-ChatGPT. Uh, it feels like AI was the missing link there of like AI will help you generate these- **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** ... interactive environments- **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** ... that you then use to hone your intuition. But that essay is really just rooted in the ideas of Brett Victor, right? Brett Victor talks about... **Jackson:** Brett Victor. **Nabeel:** ... this a lot in, um, Inventing on Principle and his other essays. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** And I, I th- I view AI as like the way that his ideas will end up getting realized. **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Yeah. Maybe even more underrated than-... the understanding part is the motivation part, to go back to it. **Nabeel:** Mm-hmm. **Jackson:** Like, that's what's amazing about video games is that, like, yeah, video games are an on-ramp for coding. Kids play Minecraft or whatever, they learn to code. But the, the key idea is that they spent that much time in Minecraft, which is, which is impressive. ## [00:48:38] Moving down from abstraction: be specific **Jackson:** A few questions quickly on, on sort of like learning broadly or from a meta level. You talk about abstraction. This, this obviously ties a little bit into the bodily experience. But you talk about abstraction and Faraday, and I think there's also some Feynman examples too about sort of embodying some of these things. I'm curious how you think about moving down from abstraction on kind of a regular basis or in a day-to-day sense. You even talk about, like, how can you generate con- concrete examples when you can't physically do an experiment. Obviously that's specifically in a science context. But as someone who, if you wasn't clear already, like I, I spend a lot of time in abstract layer, and there seems to be this, like, at least really talented, smart people, especially in science but maybe broadly, are good at finding ways to, like, go down, like abstract down into more concrete stuff, again, even when there isn't a simulation to run or a test to run or experiment to run. **Nabeel:** Yeah. One thing I learned from the rationalist movement that I found very useful was this phrase, "Name three examples." **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** And it basically just goes by leaping [laughs] , right? Like when, when you hit anything abstract, like, "Oh, AI's gonna create explosive growth," you're like, "All right, name three examples." **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** Right? Okay, let me think of something I know well. So like clinical drug discovery, how is that gonna explode once you get ASI, right? And then, okay, you think about what's involved in clinical drug discovery. It's like, well, you have to write a bunch of stuff for the FDA, and they spend six months approving it or two years approving it or whatever. How is AI gonna accelerate that? And then now you have a much more specific version of the question, which is like, okay, how do we deal with, like, regulatory authorities, right? **Jackson:** Right, and you can't be as lazy. **Nabeel:** Yeah, you cannot be, exactly, exactly. And so I think this applies to just, like, every area of life. Like, another simple example is, like, and they, they teach you this at Palantir and I think a lot of other good companies too, is just like whenever you're interviewing someone, just ask them for concrete examples and gather data, right, gather signals. So just like, "What's an example of, like, a project you're proud of?" Right? **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** And, and don't let them stay on the abstract level of like, "Oh, I, I owned this project." Just be like, "Okay, what was your specific role there?" Right? "What did you specifically do? Who else was on it? Tell me about them." **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** And, and the more, like, down to that level you get, the better your epistemics are. **Jackson:** Right. Maybe related, ## [00:50:49] Karl Popper, Fallibilism, Tyler Cowen, and Fighting Intellectual Inertia **Jackson:** you're very into Karl Popper and fallibilism, it seems. Maybe not very into them, but good at talking about them and explaining them. Are you able to run this sort of like fallibilistic frame in the background? The, the, the key idea there to me seems to be this, like, default to just updating your thinking and criticizing your ideas. Maybe part of this is, like, being unafraid to look stupid. Maybe part of this is just, like, a default skepticism. It makes sense in a scientific kind of like, there's a rhythm to create and then evaluate, create and evaluate. In a personal life, it's easier, uh, i- for me, it's much easier to, like, be drinking my own Kool-Aid for a while until I, like, realize it. Do you have any methods or thoughts or, or frames to sort of keep that more top of mind? **Nabeel:** Yes, I do. I think, you know, one thing I'm really terrified of and always have been is this idea that as people get older, they just kind of settle into their grooves. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** And they just get set in ways of thinking, and their opinions get set, and they don't change their minds, and they're really stubborn. And I'm absolutely terrified of, like, stagnating as I get older, right? And so, like, m- one of my favorite examples of somebody who just completely avoids this is Tyler Cowen. And, um, he's so, so good at just constantly revising his thinking in a very basically Bayesian way. And the way he does it is he just constantly writes about stuff via his blog. So, but it, there's a lot he writes that never makes it onto his blog where he'll just sit down with a Google Doc and be like, "I'm just gonna write a page on what I think about topic X," right? And he'll, he'll just, like, yeah. So I think just having these different ways of... I, I think for me, the very base principle is just you don't actually know a lot, and everything you have is only a provisional, and it's only a hypothesis, and you should always be willing to say, "Oh, this thing I thought for a long time was actually totally wrong." And I've had several moments of this in my life. And I, I v- view this as Popper's core message is like, as soon as you think you have the final answer- **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** ... and this is the way it works, bad things happen. **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** Both epistemically and, you know, he took that into politics, and he said, "This is what happens when you have authoritarian governments. They think they know the answer, and they end up ruining-" **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** "... everything," so. **Jackson:** Yeah, our mutual friend Graham Duncan has this, like, frame of the loose grip- **Nabeel:** Mm-hmm. **Jackson:** ... which I always come back to. It's like, uh, man, I could have a looser grip on almost everything. [laughs] And you wanna have a grip. You wanna, that, that's the, the, the, the challenge of course. ## [00:53:00] Slowing Down **Jackson:** There's n- a theme you talked about a little bit. Uh, it probably ties back to some of the previous things we talked about too, but just broadly, like, going slower. Is that a meta-theme that's... And, and g- you also don't seem to be someone who's always or usually going that slow, but you do read a lot of long form. You seem to at least be taking time to think. How do you relate to the, the slowing down? **Nabeel:** Yeah. [laughs] I think anyone who knows me would laugh if he [laughs] , if they heard that I would, I like to go slow, right? 'Cause I, I think I'm, like, notoriously hasty. Um, I think, you know, it's interesting when you use LLMs, right? Because there's, there's the kind of ones that instantly generate responses, and then there's, like, o1 pro or something where it thinks for a while. And, and they're kind of different models, right? And I think this, this is analogous to, um, humans. But yeah, I think it depends what domain you're operating in. So for example, like, in entrepreneurship, I think typically going slow is a mistake. Obviously there are exceptions. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** But usually you want to run very fast at any idea you have. **Jackson:** Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** Because chances are it's- **Jackson:** To go back to the prior question, like, quickly find out everything that's wrong. **Nabeel:** Exactly. **Jackson:** Yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** Exactly, yeah. Uh, I think this is true personally too, by the way. Like, if I, you know, like, I'm guilty of this recently. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** Like, if you have this essay idea or book idea or whatever that you think is so great, and you're just chewing, uh, on it for weeks and weeks and weeks, it's kind of a mistake, right? It's like what you actually wanna do is write the version as fast as possible and, like, prove to yourself that you have something great, and then- **Jackson:** Yeah, go and make it have contact with reality. **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** And, and, and spend all your points, just like don't assume that you have a finite supply of stuff in you, and if you, like, spend it too much, then you won't have anything left. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** It'll always regenerate. So just, like, sit down and do it. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** I have this recently, I have this thing I've been chewing on forever, and I just need to sit down and ship it at some point. But it's, like, gained this stature in my mind of, like, this is my ultimate theory of aesthetics- **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** ... and now I can't sit down and write the damn thing? So I'm guilty of it. But I, I think, like, uh, on the, on the flip side though, a situation where it's very valuable to go slow is when you are trying to learn something complex and difficult, right? So a CS concept, a math concept, even stuff in econ, right? It, it is, like, very important to, uh, not be like, "Oh yeah, okay, that, I got that. It's just like this." Like- **Jackson:** Right, so the world of understanding is kind of definitionally a little slow. **Nabeel:** Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Like, just test it with loads of examples. Be like, "Okay, is this an example of this?" It's, you know, you hear the phrase efficient market hypothesis all the time, right? **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** Like, that's a good example is just like, okay, what does that actually mean? Just slow down for a second. Does it mean, like, there's no ideas... No, that's not actually what it means at all. And then when you zoom in and find out what it actually means, it's, like, a very technical, kind of a boring statement. Which is to the effect of, like, you cannot predict short-term stock prices. Like, you cannot tell me what the value of Microsoft stock is gonna be next week. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** That's actually what the original thing is saying. I think people extrapolate from that to all sorts of other things. **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** But, like, you wouldn't really know that unless you kinda went slow and read the paper- **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** ... and chewed on it for a while, right? **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** Yeah. ## [00:56:00] Nabeel's Funnel for Information & Retention **Jackson:** There's this idea from Getting Things Done, "Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them." You seem to, you're clearly like a crazy info bore. You have, like, a lot of different models running in your head at all times. Uh, yet you also seem pretty good at synthesis and compression. And so you've got this, like, crazy high volume top of funnel, and you're, in the world you're not just like a, a, a person stuck in theory. You're building a company maybe building off that, that idea, having ideas, not holding them. Like, how do you...... is that a conscious thing you're trying to make sense of? Like, do you have systems that you use for cataloging and, and remembering important ideas? You've talked a little bit about the ways to kind of go through- you maybe were just getting at it- like go through very complex ideas or complex literature. But is that something you have a- have methodology around? Or you just kinda ebb and flow? **Nabeel:** Yeah. I do think- I have this other thing of, of like lean into what makes you balanced, right? And I, I do think this is one area where I'm pretty imbalanced 'cause I just- I take in a lot of information. Like almost- there's a couple people I know who more than me, right? But it's like pretty high. Um, so I like to lean into that. I, I think like, um, there w- there were a few things that helped me. One was when I was at university, the degree I was doing just required an insane amount of reading. **Jackson:** Okay. **Nabeel:** Like an unreasonable amount of reading. And I actually learned to speed read just to like be able to do all the reading. And I think [laughs] it was like- it was some Tim Ferriss article that taught me. **Jackson:** Is this the one with the lines? **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** You draw the lines on the page? **Nabeel:** Yeah, yeah. **Jackson:** I gotta seriously try that. I kinda tried it but not seriously and I- I'm a very slow reader, I think. **Nabeel:** It was very helpful for me. My reading speed increased a lot without losing too much retention. Yeah, I mean, there's a few tips he gives which are like very concrete. So it's like when you read, don't so- sub-vocalize as much. Like don't pronounce words. **Jackson:** Yeah, that's the- that's the thing I can't get past. **Nabeel:** Right. **Jackson:** I have like the hardcore internal monologue and narration. **Nabeel:** Right. And then- and then the other thing is like don't, um, backtrack. Just keep going down the page. Don't worry if you even don't take in stuff. Like actually your unconscious is taking in more than you're aware of. **Jackson:** Hmm. Hmm. **Nabeel:** So, so yeah. I had all these tips and then I think what happened was I just got better at that over time and, and so on. But you know what, man? Like I've tried every note-taking system under the sun. **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** I've tried Zettelkasten. I've tried Obsidian. I've tried Roam Research. I've- I have physical notebooks. But, uh, I, I just don't find note- note-taking that compelling. I th- I, I think that you just have to take in a lot of inputs and then what sticks with you is going to stick with you wha- no matter what you do, and that's okay. So now I'm just- that's where I'm at at the moment. **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** And then every now and then what happens is it's almost like something inside me overflows a little bit and I have to write it down in some form, and this is actually why I tweet is, uh, I'm having this happen to me a fair amount and then just to get it out I'm like, "All right, I'm gonna make this a tweet and then I don't have to think about this anymore." And s- and the way my essays come about is I start a tweet and then more tweets come and then more come. **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** And then before I know it it's like this is too unwieldy, it's actually an essay. And then I have to switch to Google Docs and then before you know it it's an essay. Like that is how almost all of them have come about. And so for me, Twitter is this very generative, like useful, creative tool of just like- **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** ... all my readings coming in, stuff just comes out and I don't really care if it's good or not, and then some of it just turns into essays and that's how it all works. **Jackson:** You called tweeting like a candle wick- **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** ... which is an amazing metaphor. **Nabeel:** Yeah. ## [00:59:18] Spaced Repetition (Flashcards) **Jackson:** You, you are getting at this idea a little bit of like sort of the things that need to be remembered. Like it's almost like a, a lack of in- intentionality around memory. You've also praised spaced repetition specifically. **Nabeel:** Yes. **Jackson:** Maybe back to the note-taking, not having a note-taking system. Is that something you're still using a lot? What would you suggest others u- use it for? Broadly memory is a deliberate choice. Like how do you- how do you think about that s- 'cause that feels like an e- the extreme, extreme end of like hyper-specialized, systematic deliberate. **Nabeel:** Yeah. I've- one of my favorite tweets I ever did was just I- I asked the question which was just why aren't spaced repetition things more mainstream? **Jackson:** There's also flash cards just for people who are- **Nabeel:** Yes, yes, yes. **Jackson:** ... uncertain. **Nabeel:** Flash cards, right. Uh, why aren't they more prevalent? And I got a lot of interesting answers back. Uh, so I don't actually use it that regularly. Like the only time I use it is when I have to memorize a bunch of boring facts. [laughs] And so that turns out to be a somewhat specialized thing. I have tried the more expansive version of it, like go read Michael Nielsen's- **Jackson:** Yeah, I read part of that. Yeah. [laughs] **Nabeel:** ... essay on this. **Jackson:** Crazy. **Nabeel:** It's very good. I can't do the stuff he does where he- he's like, "I will spaced repetition a favorite painting just so I get to look at it every now and then." I- the idea of doing this is very alien to me. Like I- sometimes I will think of it as I'm walking about my day or whatever, but if I'm having to artificially bringing up it's li- bring it up, it's like something's gone wrong. So I think for me, there's- there's all these domains where the facts you have to learn are very boring. Like the- you know, the recent one I was learning about how electronic health records work in- in medical context, and there's just a lot of very specific arbitrary facts you need to learn. Um, so it's amazing for that. But for anything beyond that, I haven't really gotten it to work. So I do think there is this thing here of just like what you- what is useful to you is what is going to stick in your memory anyway. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** I think Ta- Taleb made this point originally and I think that's very true. **Jackson:** Right. ## [01:01:09] Palantir, Duty, and Engaging in Political and Moral Grey Areas **Jackson:** Changing gears pretty dramatically. I wanna spend a little time on a category that I would call a mix of sort of government and bureaucracy and politics and power. You spent almost a decade at Palantir. There's an idea in your Palantir essay that I- I really found interesting which is these three categories of like areas of work. The first you call like morally neutral, pretty easy to underwrite like not- not political or whatever. Uh, the second is obviously good, and the third is gray areas, category three. You say, "But it seems to me that ignoring category three entirely and just disengaging with it is also an abdication of responsibility. Institutions in category three need to exist. The USA is defended by people with guns. The police have to enforce crime. In my experience, even people who are morally uncomfortable with some aspects of policing are quick to call the police if their home has been robbed. Oil companies have to provide energy. Health insurers have to make difficult decisions all the time. Yes, there are unsavory aspects to all these things, but do we just disengage from all of these institutions entirely or let them sor- sort themselves out?" Uh, I read- I think I mentioned when we met, Alex Karp, there was this amazing interview with him recently in New York Times and it was very similar, and- and it was one of the things that stood out to me as an uncommon moral perspective which is just like I'm w- I'm willing to spend time in category three. Maybe a defining aspect of Palantir in some way. Can you talk about this from a moral perspective, maybe even as a form of duty? You're also an immigrant to the US and so I'd be curious how you relate to maybe that piece of it too. **Nabeel:** Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts there. So I don't know if I should tell this story. So my first day at Palantir, I- I was doing onboarding with this one other guy, right, who was like at least Suni is older than me. And I was like, "Wow, this guy doesn't look like a normal, like tech company employee." And so we go- we- we're in the room, we're chatting. It's like a hotel conference room. So I was like, "Oh, so what did- what did you do, you know, before, before this?" And he kinda just stares me dead in the eye and he's like, "I worked at the agency for 15 years." **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** [laughs] And I was like... **Jackson:** That's like actually probably exactly what people expect of Palantir. **Speaker 2:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** No, I know. It's like so stereotypical. And I was just like this little pipsqueak. I was like, "Oh, I worked at a fintech company." [laughs] **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** I felt ridiculous. Um, and yeah. It was a really eyeopening thing for me in general because, um, you know, I- I came into it with certain views and certain kind of preconceptions about stuff like, you know, the military, intelligence, defense, et cetera. I was much more on the kind of- not that I'm like pro-war now or whatever, but I was- I was very much on the kind of anti-war, like, you know, don't like the military kind of vibe. And, um, then I had a bunch of colleagues who were ex-military or ex-Marine or ex whatever and, um, just kind of talked to them about stuff and just realized, wow, it's actually really, really, really- the world is way more nuanced than any of these kind of concepts can really capture, right? **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** And if you- if you just think about international relations and foreign relations for a second, a lot of the most- Y- Tyler likes to say the def- the default is war. The default is conflict. The default is death and destruction. One of the most peaceful periods of the entire world was like post World War II kind of like, you know, Pax Americana. And the reason Pax Americana existed is because America was this massive behemoth, all the European countries had kind of destroyed themselves.... America built up this massive military and then any time somebody stepped out of line, they would just go in and, kind of, essentially smack them, right? And so you kept the peace and you had this crazy period of economic growth throughout the entire world. And so, like, if you actually think really hard about this, then you realize that what is going into it is a threat of violence and a threat of military force, and that's very morally ambiguous, right? You are, you probably don't want to be the person applying [laughs] the military force that involves doing unpleasant stuff. At the same time, it's like that speech in A Few Good Men, right? It's like, uh, you know, "Your world is guarded with men with guns," and so on. And so, I just had to kind of confront that really head-on and then, you know, while I worked there, right, I think it was 2017 that people started protesting outside the office because of all the ICE stuff and the first Trump Administration. You just have to very directly confront this thing of, like- **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** ... "Okay, like, where do I stand on this stuff," right? And, um, I- I, again, I think immigration is just one of these classic examples where you could have no immigration policy but it ends up that most people don't like that result. And so as soon as you have any immigration policy, you're like, "Well, do I enforce it?" And then as soon as you have to enforce it, you're suddenly confronted with these moral dilemmas and there's just nothing you can do. Like there's no- **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** There is really no easy answer, right? Um, and so my, my point there was just like, well, you can either completely wash your hands of it and walk away from it as, you know, I think notoriously, you know, Google walked away from this Pentagon-AI contract back in the day, um, because they didn't wanna engage with defense, and I just think that's a mistake, man. Like, y- you not being there is not gonna make things better if you are a good agent and if you're oriented in the right way. And I think, I think Palantir did well to exploit this inefficiency for a while. They were one of the few tech companies who said, "No, actually, we, we believe in a strong America and we think the West is good and we're gonna, we're gonna be in the game when other people drop out." That was really unpopular at the time. Now the vibes have changed completely- **Jackson:** Right, right, right, right. **Nabeel:** ... and it's like American dynamism. Like, everyone's, like, "Raah, raah," right? So great, uh, but I- I do have a lot of respect for people who were able to kind of make those unpopular calls back then. And I think, I think it's also, like, I don't think the critics are wrong either. I just think it's this dialectic, it's this debate, and both sides have good points and we just have to work it out as a society. But to me, like, disengagement is absolutely the wrong stance to take. ## [01:07:06] Palantir's Culture of Indepedent Thinking: People who speak their mind but aren't douchebags **Jackson:** How did Palantir internally maintain a culture that was like... In theory, if you're gonna engage in category three, you wanna be in this constant state of, like, flux on the line and a, a lesser... And, and I don't, I don't technically know. My, my read from the outside is the perspective seems to be that Pal- Palantir and Alex do a good job of towing that line versus somebody lesser might just kind of like, "Oh, we're in gray area, so I guess we'll do everything," which, which might be the argument Google could have made. I don't think that would have been necessarily a great argument. But broadly, do you think... What do you think Palantir culturally does well that allows for that type of... To, to go back to the other idea, having a loose grip on a bunch of complex ideas and being able to make hard decisions over and over and over again? **Nabeel:** Yeah. Uh, I think that's basically... The essence of it is they hire... They, they tested very rigorously for people who they felt were independent thinkers, and they did that in all kinds of ways including, you know, founder interviews and whatnot. Like, they wanted people who were kinda weird, and then they wanted people who would s-... It's basically this combo of two rat traits. It's like people who'd speak their minds, but also people who were not douchebags. And I, I asked, I asked Karp this in my interview with him. I was like, "How do you keep the culture as you grow?" And he was just like, "As soon as somebody's a douchebag, we fire them instantly." **Jackson:** What do you mean by douchebag? **Nabeel:** Yeah, it's... I mean, it's just like somebody who is, you know, behaves unprofessionally. Maybe they shut people down in certain ways, or just any kind of bad conduct, any conduct that's, like, lacking in integrity, right? **Jackson:** I mean, a lot of people... I, I don't think this is right, but I think a lot of people would say that, uh, is true about people who speak their mind. **Nabeel:** Right. That's what I'm saying. It's like such a rare intersection of these two traits. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** Uh, it's like somebody who's very respectful and good but also, like- **Jackson:** Speaking the truth. **Nabeel:** ... is willing to be like, "Ah, this is bad. I don't like it," right? And so I think, I think when, what happens when you get those people is then, one, is like they're willing to buck the societal trend of, like, "Oh, we think this is good or bad," and they're willing to say, "No, actually, I'm okay with this gray area for these, you know, principled reasons." But then conversely, if you overstep the line, like let's say you go work with a cigarette company. They're gonna be the people typing in Slack like, "This sucks, man. I thought we were making the world better." **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** Like, "Karp is scamming all of us," right? **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** Um, and, and this, this actually did happen. Uh, I mean, we refused to work with a cigarette company who wanted to work with us. Um, it's not like there, there had to be some outcry. I think Karp was just like, "No, we're not doing this." And yeah, you just, you just need those kind of people, and I think it's really... The question is just, like, how do you select for them? And that's what they got right. **Jackson:** Mm. ## [01:09:38] Government Bureaucracy, DOGE, Power **Jackson:** Uh, we're at a time now where obviously, like, government bureaucracy is very top of mind. There are two brief excerpts from you that I think are interesting in this to, to contrast here. First you say, "When we were allowed to work within an organization..." This is from the Palantir essay. "When we were allowed to work within an organization, this tended to work very well. The obstacles were mostly political. Every time you see the government give another $110 million contract to Deloitte for building a website that doesn't work, or a Healthcare.gov-style debacle, or SFUSD spending 40 million to implement a payroll system that, again, doesn't work, you are seeing politics beat substance. See SpaceX vs NASA for another example." And then more recently you said, "I'm long USA, but expect significant volatility in 2025 to 2028. We're not used to change happening this fast because it hasn't in our lifetimes." And so in a sense you painted, with these two quotes, like, both a very optimistic case for why something like Doge could be really good and you basically said, like, "Brace for impact." Can you expand a little bit on broadly why... And you don't, if you don't want, you don't have to explicitly comment on Doge from a, um, very tactical standpoint, but broadly why something like Doge could be good, what you think the risks are, and how you actually think about bracing for what could be a very volatile next few years? **Nabeel:** Yeah, for sure. Again, lots there. Yeah, I've... So I, I've touched the government sector in some way or another for a long time in my career now, right? And I think it's just this painful contradiction of the people in government are very, often very well intentioned. Like, the number of civil servants I've met who I admire hugely are, is very high and, you know, people there are trying to do their best. It's an unglamorous job. You have to work with shitty computers. You're earning less salary than you could in the private sector, and yet you're base, you are serving your country at the end of the day. And it just made me mad, dude. It's like you can only watch so many times as a contract for a billion dollars goes to some systems integrator and they spend five years, and you know for a fact that it's a simple Ruby app. It's, like, crazy to me that this happens, and it happens again and again. Like, I think just now I, I was tweeting about, um, Doge just went into the IRS and they found some modernization effort. And the modernization effort took, you know, 50 years and it's cost billions of billions of dollars- **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** ... and it's still not finished, right? And so this stuff should be simple. We know how to do it. Um, the cost of good technology has gone down over time, and so... And, and it's going down further with AI, right? And so you can cut all of these costs now and you can actually implement good systems for the government. Like, try using a government computer for a day. It is a horribly painful experience. Um, in the UK, you know, Dominic Cummings gave a great interview to Dwokash about this where he said... He tells this story of how they took two years to decide between, I think it was Google Drive and Microsoft Office or something, and eventually he was just like, "Please, for the love of God, just choose one and do it." Any, any, like, normal private company would be out of business if they acted that way, and so I've always been obsessed with this thing of like, well, government's so important and it can be used to do so much, so why does it operate in this very inefficient way, and what would it take to actually change that? And so I was ex- I was very excited about Doge 'cause I think...It's an actual attempt to do this and it has more of a chance of succeeding than any previous attempt. Part of that is, you know, Elan being a very extraordinary person, right? And part of it is, like, the mandate he has. That's a very historically unique thing. Cummings tried to do this in the UK, it didn't quite work out for sort of contingent reasons. Um, but basically every state in the world is going to have to do something like this because this isn't a U.S.-specific phenomenon, it's not a UK-specific phenomenon. Everywhere, this kind of technical debt builds up in time over government and you have to figure out a way to clean that, otherwise you become sclerotic and, like, some more dynamic government overtakes you. And so, yeah. Like, that, that's where the kind of efficiency stuff comes from. But then, it's like, in order to do that, it's going to be incredibly volatile, right? You have to... I don't know. Like, basically the, when I, I spoke to a lot of people in DC about it when it was announced, so this is kind of, you know, October to December timeframe, and the kind of conventional DC take on Doge was, "Well, we've seen this movie before. We've seen these government efficiency initiatives. You know, what happens is people say, 'Yeah, we wanna be more efficient,' and then we stand up at committee and then we, you know, take six months to schedule the meeting and then before you know it, four years have passed and nothing has got done." And in fact, like, that was Curtis Yarvin's prediction of what would happen. And so then it's like, okay, well how do you operate an environment where everybody is constantly putting these blockers in your way? You basically do what they are doing right now- **Jackson:** Bustle. **Nabeel:** ... which is just like- **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** Yeah, blitzkrieg, right? It's like, you go in and you grab control of the HR system and you grab control of the payments system and you force your way into buildings and you say, "No, we are terminating this lease," and, like, "Yeah, we'll fight you in the courts." And, um, look, I don't agree with every single decision that they've made, I don't think they agree with every decision they've made, but, uh, this is something that has to be done. Otherwise, over time we will just become a less and less dynamic society. And so I think everybody, I think more people, including smart people in my sphere who I'm friends with, should be more in favor of the goal and, like, a little bit more understanding about, you know, the volatility and the difficulty of actually doing this. It's a real quagmire. ## [01:14:51] Why can't governments be better at error correction and healthy renewal? **Jackson:** I think it ties in t- to this. You, we talked about fallibilism a little bit. You've talked about Popper and politics, and you brought, even brought up Dominic Cummings. Y- y- you had said, "The most important criterion for society overall is that it makes progress and creates knowledge at the fastest rate possible on how to make its citizens affluent. In order to do this, citizens must be able to make mistakes and correct them. Thus, the essence of democracy isn't who should rule, but the ability to remove a bad ruler, which is the same as being able to correct a mistake." Put simply, again you, "The most important thing in knowledge creation, including political knowledge, is error correction. This is Popper's criterion." Why, beyond bureaucracy and a desire for maintaining power, is it so hard to get this? Is it so hard, wh- why can't we design systems that are better at understanding people's incentives and, like, allowing for error correction? At least at a government level? **Nabeel:** Yeah. I mean, it's, I think it's a historically rare and unique thing, right, that, you know, somebody loses an election and then they sort of voluntarily relinquish power, right? If you read history you're just like, "This is crazy," right? **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** There's the king and then he or she, either king, right, he fights to the death and against, eventually gets murdered and a new king arises and that's how it's always been. Um, I don't know, I, it feels very deeply rooted in human nature to me of this, of this, like, this, uh, you're going against a lot of very strong and powerful incentives in humans to kind of maximize and, like, acquire resources. Uh, and so yeah, democracy's this very kind of unnatural miracle. I think for the same reason, like, the fact that we do have an open political culture and an open ability to criticize is so important about the U.S.. Um, like, I- I do think that is something that does differentiate us from a place like China, which is otherwise, you know, it's a little scary in some ways, right? They're doing very well in all these dimensions, they're making drugs much better and more cheaply than us, their electric cars are pretty good, deep seek AI, right? So, um, there is all of that but I do think in the long run, the more open political culture still should win, right? And we'll, we'll see what happens. ## [01:17:03] Technologists and Power **Jackson:** Speaking of maybe technology and hanging onto power, or acquiring power, you discussed, I think on another podcast with Dan, you discussed the Henriad in, in Shakespeare and how Hal is sort of, like, showing up in one context around power and in a totally different context in his private life, and how those are really disparate. And specifically, how you have to be really manipulative to maintain power. I'm curious for your perspective on what seems to me, at least, to be a growing trend of technologists moving in on power, seemingly prioritizing power above almost everything else if not everything else. That, that, to me, seems to be certainly distinctly notable in the last year, and probably quite distinct from what technologists spent their time on 10 years ago. **Nabeel:** Yes. Uh, I agree. I mean, it's a very mixed thing, isn't it? I think, I think for me, the, the, the mystery I felt for a long time was technology is so powerful and yet we are not in the world at all in some sense, right? **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** We're not building libraries, we're not building museums, we're not building physical things, we aren't interfering in politics. We really just want to be in a garage in Palo Alto and kind of tinker and, like- **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** ... occasionally we make a social media app and it ends up causing a, you know, revolution in Myanmar or something. Um, and, and I think- **Jackson:** It's like classic 2014. Pre- **Nabeel:** Exactly. **Jackson:** At least pre-Trump. Like, it was, "Oh, I don't really, yeah, hands up." You know? **Nabeel:** Yeah, right. And, and, and so there was this huge asymmetry between how important tech actually was and then how much it was playing in fields like this. And I think what happened was, like, it's the classic, you know, if you're not interested in politics, eventually politics becomes interested in you, right? **Jackson:** Yeah [laughs] . **Nabeel:** Where, you know, Zuckerberg gets hauled before Congress and he's sitting there kind of pale in a suit and he's like, "Oh, Senator, like, we sell ads." You know, I think, I think eventually, like, savvy people in tech realized, okay, we actually have to play this game, otherwise the game is gonna play us and it's gonna be pretty, pretty bad for us, right? And so for example, like, I think with Elan, what radicalized him was, well, I'm making all these cars in the USA, I am revolutionizing space flight, like, quite literally with SpaceX, and yet, you know, the previous administration doesn't even wanna say my name except in a pejorative context, right? I don't get invited to the White House. Whenever Biden talks about electric vehicles, he talks about General Motors, which, like, nobody cares about anymore. So it's all very confusing and I think this, he's one of the first to spot, like, okay, we actually have to, in some sense, take power or influence power if we're gonna actually achieve our goals. And for him this is, at least, like the way he says it, is like, "We have to go to Mars. We have to, you know, be able to produce things in the U.S. and things like that." Um, and I'm, I'm, on net, like, I'm glad. Like, I do think there are distasteful aspects of this, right? You watch people suddenly flip their political positions and you're like, "Hey, what happened to you a year ago?" You know, y- th- you know, you watch them saying things that are kind of silly on X, right? And, and kind of doing it in a very positive way and it's easy to just be like, "Ugh, this is so gross." But, I think it's actually existentially [laughs] important. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** It's like, okay, what is, okay, what is really important in the next 20 years? AI. Okay, what does AI need? Chips. Okay, where are all the chips made? The Republic of China, i.e. Taiwan, right? That's, that's the name of Taiwan is the Republic of China. So, so yeah, all the chips are made at TSMC, which is, like, all the way on the other side of the world. This seems like a problem and so I think if technol- if tech does not play politics then ultimately we end up losing these things in a way that's irreversible. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** And we don't want that world. **Jackson:** One instinct or read I might have would be that, we, we talked about in the Palantir culture, like, how do you have this balance? It doesn't seem to me that a number of these technologists, classically Elan but, like, Marc Andreessen is another easy example, these people maybe seem...... c- certainly capable, w- less attuned to, like, holding that balance and that tension. It, it seems that it would be very, very easy to paint a picture of why absolute power, a- corrupts absolutely. In three years, is Elon gonna be more focused on Mars or less focused on Mars? I think, like, to be somewhat critical, it seems to me that he's, like, his game has very much clearly... But yet I'm a- I'm also sympathetic to your point, which is that I don't know if he had another choice. I think he probably believed he was going to jail if the Democrats won. And maybe he was, um, seems crazy to say, but maybe he was right? But it seems, yeah, it just seems that unless... Whereas, maybe Peter Thiel, he's obviously a controversial person. Someone like Alex Karp, like, seems to be more used to, like, balancing technology, mission, vision, and also, like, playing the political game. And now we have all these new entrant- entrants to the political power game, and they're all very, very eager to play it, but yeah. [laughs] **Nabeel:** It's the classic Peter Thiel thing, man. He was, like, at least, at least five, probably, like, ten years early to this game. **Jackson:** Yeah. [laughs] **Nabeel:** And then he basically exited it- **Jackson:** Right. [laughs] **Nabeel:** ... when it became mainstream. **Jackson:** Right. [laughs] Right. **Nabeel:** [laughs] Like, 2016, I remember how shocking it was when he- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... went to the Republican National Convention, and he was like... **Jackson:** He seems less obsessed with power than your average VC these days, which mi- maybe that's just the, the public per- perception thing. But Peter actually seems, like, a little bit more restrained- **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** ... in the power grab. **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Granted, you could argue he's pulling all the strings, but yeah. **Nabeel:** I don't know. I mean, yeah, I, I don't know. But it was interesting. He was very early to realizing this, and then he made a very bold play. And, you know, he, he basically won, right? I mean, JD Vance, I think used to work for him or something. **Jackson:** Yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** And so, yeah, I, I, I think ultimately there's aspects of it that don't look so great, but we basically have to play this game. I do think someone like Elon always has his, his eye on the ball. He does... He is very serious about getting to Mars. He is very serious about regulation, basically choking us from building anything. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** He's really serious about onshoring a bunch of production that should not be, uh, you know, living in other countries. And I think, like, those themes are what is going on with the tech crowd. Now, what remains to be seen is, like, well, will the administration actually execute effectively on those priorities- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... right? Or will they get distracted and create a bunch of noise? I don't know. Like, politics is a very, very messy game. It's a very difficult game to play. But I do think that's where all those tech people are coming from. Like, what, what, you know, a16z, Marc Andreessen, whatever, what they're doing right now is a direct consequence of what they said a few years ago when they said, "It's time to build. Software's-" **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** "... eating the world." **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** Like, all of that. It's a literal expression of those beliefs. And I think they would have liked to make it work with the previous administration too, but the previous administration kind of just wasn't that interested. **Jackson:** Yeah. ## [01:23:47] Nabeel's next company and the idea maze: "context is that which is scarce" **Jackson:** You are building a new company. You haven't talked about it publicly yet, but I'd love to talk a little bit about some of the lessons around the idea maze and the exploration, founding, team and people, especially going from working one place for eight years, big place. What did you come into this experience, at least when you decided to go from sabbatical mode, exploration mode, to actually doing something, what did you come into that with, um, holding maybe most precious around what to work on, the team, the people, the problem? **Nabeel:** Yeah, yeah. I learned, I learned a lot here. Um, I think, you know, one, [laughs] one thing Tyler likes to say a lot is, "Context is that which is scarce," which is just such a rich saying. It's so, it's so wonderful. I think one of the things that I realized was just how true that was, right? So, um, I think, you know, when I, when I left, like, I'd spent a lot of time working with, you know, government and kind of big complex customers like Palantir does, and [laughs] I think my initial urge was like, "Okay, I'm gonna go do a pure software thing now." **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** [laughs] Like, "I'm gonna make-" **Jackson:** Easy mode. **Nabeel:** "... dev tools or something. I don't wanna deal with people anymore." [laughs] And, um, so, you know, I, I explored a bunch of different markets, which I- which we can go into if you want. But, um, I kind of realized, no, like, especially me and then, you know, the co-founder I, I go- I brought in and, and the team that I founded this with, all of us have a very specific set of context that was built over many, many years. And ultimately the opportunities that arose came directly out of that context that we built up. **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** And, like, not out of approaching a new sector from first principles- **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** ... and being like, "All right, how should this work?" Like, I, for ex- I'll give you one example, is, like, I, I looked pretty hard at education, and, you know, I, again, like, I think any sector you can build a good business in, right? I, my personal conclusion looking at education was it would be very hard to build the kind of business that I wanted to build, like, in an idealistic way. Like, I very much cared about, like, okay, how do I improve learning? How do I... You know, like, I wanna build the, the Young Ladies Illustrated primary. I wanna build Ender's Game, right? Like, how do I do that with AI? And, you know, when you l- when you actually go into the business of education, then you end up with something that's like, huh, like, what if I made a better SAT- **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** ... you know, SAT textbook or whatever? [laughs] **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** And it's just a little bit depressing when you, when you try and do the calculation of like, okay, what's gonna make a lot of money? And so, like, um, like, in terms of, like, keeping the business running. So, yeah, I, I, I iterated through a few versions of this, but then it was just kind of hilarious that the thing that I came to was kind of, like, almost exactly what you would predict if you knew a lot about what I'd done at Palantir- **Jackson:** Ah. **Nabeel:** ... and what my co-founders had done, and it's, like, a very natural extension of that, and some of the stuff that we've been discussing as well. Um, and so, I don't know. Like, I, I think my, my lesson, my big lesson that I was just like, well, basically, if you want to be an entrepreneur, it's, like, build very deep context in something, and then, like, you will naturally arrive at the edge. And then it's not that hard to arrive at the edge actually. Um, like, the tough part is getting access to the problem. But once you're at the edge, a bunch of really obvious ideas are gonna stand out to you, and that's where really good company ideas come from. It's very- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... hard and very rare for a good company idea to just come from somebody standing back and looking at a sector with a spreadsheet and being like, "Oh, I think this might make sense." Like, it's possible. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** It's just, like- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... I didn't find that worked for me. **Jackson:** And rarely, uh, oftentimes people aren't actually at the edge. **Nabeel:** Yes. **Jackson:** Which is why the problems aren't so obvious. ## [01:27:11] Scientist brain vs. founder brain and context vs. details **Jackson:** Uh, we- I, I mentioned it super briefly earlier, you talk about scientist brain and founder brain. Um, maybe I would even add in a third of, like, artist brain. In an era where the default things are really easy to do, or faster to do, or on- only going to get easier to do, and maybe even ties into our conversation around care, like, maybe caring about the details is going to matter more incrementally. And so I'd be curious how you think about... You, you talk really eloquently a bit just about how founders need to be incredibly good at being really high contacts on so many different things, and as a result, they definitionally can't go on these rabbit holes or, like, go way too into the weeds. Do you think... Part of this is a personal question maybe for you as a leader, and maybe this is, part of this is a broader question around, like, what the entrepreneurial founder leader of the future will look like. Do you think they're... there's a world where they actually are gonna be more artist-like or, or, or scientist-like in the way that they are deeply, deeply attuned to maybe more specific details of the problem? **Nabeel:** Yeah, it's really interesting. You know, one thing, one thing I was thinking about, uh, with regards to Doge and Elon, actually, was, like, he... One thing that's very unique about him is he has the ability to basically summon up 100 software engineers on demand. **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** And almost nobody else has this ability. He can just pull people out of Tesla, SpaceX, and- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... you know, he can just be like, "Hey, Stanford grads, come follow me," and, like, a bunch of 20-year-olds will join him. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** And, and, and actually, yeah, it's like, who can magic up that army very fast, right? And so, I think, I think, like, uh, yeah, future, future successful entrepreneurs will often look like they have a kind of deep and wide network, both, let's say, in customer relationships. They have maybe some unique access. They have, you know, some kind of, some kind of brand or something where it's like they can, like, pull people to them and draw talent to them, and that's, I think...... maybe only gonna matter more, actually. Whereas, like, I think for people in their early 20s or kind of younger, you know, maybe the stereotypical YC founder, I do think there's a bit more, like, m- there's a lot of them throwing spaghetti against the wall. And then, you know, the, the failure rates will be quite high, I think. And so yeah, I think, I think the returns to, like, unique or proprietary access or knowledge just get higher and higher, because any more, like, sort of generic idea, basically, becomes more and more doable with- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... AI over time. So for example, like, if you know all these esoteric processes that are mostly captured offline, or if you know these esoteric industries like shipping, for example, [laughs] like, you're probably gonna do pretty well, because AI can re- reinvent ev- like, the way that anything is done in that industry now, right? And so yeah, I think, I think a lot of interesting... Like, the, the la- the latest trend that I've kind of heard people talk about a lot is buying services companies that have this deep moat or kind of distribution figured out already, and then basically AI-ifying them. **Jackson:** Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** And that, I think, will actually become much more of a, much more of a thing. **Jackson:** You and Jeremy Giffin were just going back and forth about, like, secrets being incrementally better today than they used to be. **Nabeel:** Yeah. Yes. **Jackson:** I think that's inside that too. **Nabeel:** Yeah. If you, if you have a secret, just shut up about it. Don't tell anybody, right? [laughs] **Jackson:** All right. Well, we are not announcing the company today, speaking of secrets. ## [01:30:18] Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and what art is for **Jackson:** Changing back gears, uh, and some of this will probably tie into part of the beginning of the conversation, but I wanna talk a bit about art. First, you criticized Tolstoy, specifically later in life, saying essentially he had this sort of, like, incorrect theory that art is about communicating moral purpose and teaching what is right and good. Uh, you, uh, you have maybe one answer, I found. But before I talk about that, I'd, I'd be curious for you to think about what, what you think art is for. **Nabeel:** Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics. Um, also, it's hilarious to come to this right after talking about uncreated. [laughs] **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** It's, it's such a confusing- **Jackson:** There was no super obvious transitions, or just like, "We're gonna-" **Nabeel:** Confusing to listen to. Um, no. Okay, yeah, this is, this is really fascinating, right? So basically, Tolstoy writes some of the greatest books of all time. He writes War and Peace. He writes Anna Karenina. And then later in his life, he writes this kind of notorious essay called, uh, it was something like Leo Tolstoy and the Fool, but whatever, I'll look it up. But it's about Shakespeare. It's this huge rant about how Shakespeare is actually bad. And he's just like, "You know, Shakespeare, everyone looks up at Shakespeare as the best author ever, and I think he's just bad." And his basic critique of Shakespeare is like, "Shakespeare has no moral vision. He just depicts a bunch of people, you know, getting killed for random reasons, right, or, or just killing each other, or having problems. But he... There's n- there's no message that his plays are promoting. Um, it's just kind of chaos, right?" And so, he, he articulates this vi- this vision of art as actually the job of art is to show you goodness and moral goodness, and, um, therefore the best kind of art is almost like parables, like didactic parables. So then, he spends the rest of his life after that writing these parables that honestly nobody ever reads. Um, but they're, and they're, they're like really just like homely, Christian parables about how somebody, like, you know, gets robbed, and then he gives, gives the thief his coat and whatever, like all this kind of stuff. And nobody reads that. They read Anna Karenina, and what I find really interesting about this is like, you can actually see this tension. And I don't know if you've read Anna Karenina. **Jackson:** I haven't. **Nabeel:** It's amazing. It's like my favorite novel. **Jackson:** Our friend Ava's been trying to get me to read it. Um, uh, yeah, this year will have to happen. **Nabeel:** Make it your summer project. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** Seriously. But, uh, you can see this division in Anna Karenina. It's a deeply religious book. Like, the epigraph to it is from the Bible. It goes, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." Uh, I think it's from the Hebrew Bible. And, you know, basically, like, the, the m- one of the main characters, Levin, has this moral journey, which kind of culminates in his converting to Christianity, like in his heart. And then there's Anna, who's the subject of the novel, and she's, she's almost this, like, devil figure, right? She's seductive, she's charming, she's beautiful, and, and basically, like, she, you know, commits adultery with somebody, and that's kind of the other plot line in the novel, right? So, you have this parallel plot. So, you have Anna, and then you have Levin. Levin finds his way to moral goodness, and Anna... I won't spoil the book, but, um, what's interesting is Tolstoy is clearly in love with Anna too. Like, he- **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** ... he is so charmed by Anna. He describes her charm so compellingly- **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** ... and how seductive she is. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** He clearly enjoys writing the scenes about Anna more than, you know, he enjoys writing some of the other scenes, let's say, where he's promoting his moral ideas. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** And so, I feel like this conflict was deep in him. And, um, there's a very similar phenomenon in literature, which is in the poem Paradise Lost by John Milton, right, which is about the fall of man and, and Christianity. It's a very common thing to say by critics that the most compelling scenes Milton writes in that are all about the devil. Like, he's actually very boring when he's just depicting Adam and Eve frolicking in the Garden of Eden- **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** ... but when he's writing about the devil, it's kind of sexy and cool and interesting. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** And so, yeah, like I, I think Tolstoy ends up proving himself wrong, because the art that he writes that he thinks exemplifies morality is actually very boring and nobody reads it. But like, people read stuff like Anna Karenina, which is much more kind of in the, in the world that we all live in, right? And so, uh, you know, I, I think there's a bunch of things to take away from that. But yeah, that's, that's kind of my take on Tolstoy. ## [01:34:02] Art for defamliarization **Jackson:** You've another maybe answer to this question, which is that art is good at defamiliarization, and particularly how it sort of, like, gets us past the defaults, or even, like, allows us to experience ordinary life in a new way or at a new rhythm or a new pace. Do you find that to consistently be true, or at least be true in any specific mediums? **Nabeel:** Yeah, right. I think it's back to what we were talking about at the beginning around original seeing, right? So, actually, Tolstoy uses a technique all the time, is he will take a familiar phenomenon, and then he'll describe it as though an alien is seeing it- **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** ... in, like, very unfamiliar terms. And then you'll be like, "Oh, he's describing somebody, like, whipping a horse to make it go faster." But he'll describe it in the most unnatural way. **Jackson:** Right, right. **Nabeel:** And, and in a way that makes you horrified. Like, you, you almost see it afresh, where you're just like, "Oh, shit, this is actually bad." [laughs] **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** Uh, whereas when you see it, maybe you're just like, "Whatever, it's a routine thing." So yeah, I think it's like, you know, any- **Jackson:** Uh, you know what it makes me think of is, um, Remember the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. **Nabeel:** Consider the Lobster, yeah. **Jackson:** Consider the Lobster, yeah. **Nabeel:** Yes. **Jackson:** Little bit of that. **Nabeel:** Yes. I fully agree. Um, and, and Wallace was also amazing at this, right? Uh, yeah. **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** So I think it, it does apply to every medium. And I think to me, it's like a fl- it's just a flip side of the idea that strangeness is- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... a characteristic of art. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** I think, I think everything is... Everything really good is kind of jarring in some way. **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** Like, as a simple example, like Frank Ocean album, uh, Blonde. Like, the first time I listened to that, I was like, "I don't know if I like this." **Jackson:** Right. This is not Channel Orange. **Nabeel:** It's not- **Jackson:** What is this? **Nabeel:** ... at all Channel Orange. **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** And then you listen to it a second time, and you're like, "This might be good." **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** Then the third time, you're like, "This might be the greatest album I've ever listened to," right? [laughs] **Jackson:** Yes. Yeah. **Nabeel:** But, but initially, you're like, "Why is he using autotune in this bizarre way? Like, why is the voice so high randomly?" **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** Like, "Why is the-" **Jackson:** I had that experience with Yeezus, same thing. **Nabeel:** Yeezus. I think probably Kanye's best album. **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** But the first time, I was like- **Jackson:** First time I heard it, I hated it. **Nabeel:** "... this hurts my ears." Yes. **Jackson:** [laughs] Yeah. **Nabeel:** Like, on sight, right? **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** So, yeah. ## [01:36:00] What makes film special **Jackson:** You said, uh, movies are like waking dreams? I know you love film. Why is film special? **Nabeel:** I think with film... Well, you know, there's a bunch of different reasons, right? But basically, you're watching it in this physical setting, and it's fully dark. And it's, it's almost like you're going to sleep, and then the dream appears on the screen- **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** ... in front of you, right? And so, that's why I think going to the theater and watching it in the theater is so important. It's also interesting, because it u- it uses so many different media in one, right? So, you have music in film, you have visuals in film, you have film scripts, right? So, there's like writing, there's visual, there's, there's all these different things. And different films, I think, will emphasize kind of different aspects of that. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** Um, so I think that's interesting too. I, I think it's just like, it's one of those things that, um, it's as visceral as music in some ways, 'cause it's taking place in time, and it's taking place on this big screen in front of you, right? Um, but because it has so many kind of degrees of freedom-It can be more morally complex, maybe. Like, I think a really good film can really put you through an experience. It can simulate an experience that you'll never have. And you can come out of it, like, very different. Yeah. **Jackson:** Mm. ## [01:37:15] Depth in text and other mediums **Jackson:** I saw you read Amusing Ourselves to Death, I think last year. I recently, uh, actually just read it. **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Um, you read a ton of long form and, and seem to really appreciate it. I think my question is, like, do you have a either a plea or a s- form of encouragement for people listening who maybe want... Have experienced it or want to experience it more, but like aren't, aren't getting there? Maybe back to the very beginning of the conversation of, like, our trend towards slop and our, our, our even trend to no longer appreciating things that are deeply cared. Beyond maybe... We talked about reading speed, but anything else you might say on, on a society who seems to be moving further and further away from this sort of, like, textual society? **Nabeel:** Yeah. I th- I think people will work their way to this. Like, I'm optimistic about that. Right? I mean, like, everyone, everyone has something that they do really care about in this way. So people will be into, you know, anime or manga, or they'll be, they'll be making these long playlists on Spotify, right? And when they listen to those, they kind of retreat to, you know, like, a place inside of themselves, right? And so, I think it's, it's basically just go further out of your comfort zone and, and consume things in lots of different media and things that might be hard or unnatural for you. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** Um, like go, go to, go to weird, out of the way art galleries or, you know, read that random old poem that, like, you never quite got and just kind of stick with it for a while. **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** I think the thing that was really helpful for me was in... When I realized, like, okay, art isn't just something that is saying stuff, but in a way more complicated way. It's actually okay if you don't understand it at all. Like, it's okay to read a poem and not get it completely. **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** That really unlocked it for me because then I was like, not feeling bad when I read some vaguely obscure poem and I was just like, "Oh, what am I supposed to take away from that?" [laughs] **Jackson:** Can you ex- So when you say that, um, did you still... Are you just saying like, "Oh, that wasn't for me," or are you saying, "I enjoyed it despite not fully getting it"? **Nabeel:** I, it's both, right? So and it, and it's like some things you read will still activate some kind of inner response. **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** Um, and, and some things you read will just leave you completely flat. **Jackson:** Right, right. **Nabeel:** Uh- **Jackson:** This is the Robert Irwin thing a little bit though, too, which is just like, you don't necessarily know how it's gonna work on you. There's this book I read, uh, a year and a half ago or so called The Overstory about trees, and like, I liked it reading it, but like, I think about that book all the time still a year later. And it's like, it's working, so. **Nabeel:** Yeah, yeah. Like there's, there's a full on poem by Ezra Pound which I love and I think about it almost every day, right? And but I think it's quite mysterious, too. And I will recite it, if you don't mind. It goes, um, "And the days are not long enough and the nights are not long enough and life slips by like a field mouse, not shaking the grass." Yeah, and I think about the poem all the time. Like, wh- why the mouse? But it works so well. I don't know. It creates a mood. **Jackson:** I think I really appreciate the holding off the temptation that feels dominant in today's society, which is like everything has to be processed and understood and completely compressed right now or else... Yeah. Hmm. Thank you for that. Uh, ## [01:40:32] Patterns across Nabeel's taste: the unfamiliar **Jackson:** last question on this. Any patterns across different mediums, music, books, ideas, patterns in your taste that you recognize? **Nabeel:** Yeah, my, it's, it's very eclectic, I guess, right? Like, I was talking to someone about music today, and they were just like, "Oh, you seem to be into softer." I was like, "Yeah, but I'm also into, like, heav- heavy metal." **Jackson:** [laughs] **Nabeel:** "Like, I love Slayer, I love death metal, you know?" So it's, it's, I, I think it's just, um, it's the urge to explore completely new domains and, um, again, like, I, I've mentioned him several times, but I think Tyler is my model for this because he's just more extreme on this dimension than anybody I know. He'll be, like, into Mexican folk art or Haitian folk art or Indian classical music, or he'll be able to talk about Bach, right? And I, I just, like, I model that trait on him, and I force myself every now and then to... Like, I just get bored, man. I'm just like, "All right, what's new? What's good?" And then I'll be like, "Okay, well, I've not explored, you know, '20s American blues music from-" **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** "... Louisiana." So then I'll just- **Jackson:** There are so many things to explore. **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** There really are. **Nabeel:** Yeah, and I think it's just, like, the only common theme really is this, like, love of exploring unfamiliar domains and then try and, trying to, like, crack them and understand w- how they operate and how they work, and I'm kind of addicted to that feeling of being... That initial thing of like, "Wow, this sounds so odd. Like, this really sounds weird." And then kind of getting it and then being able to tell, "Okay, this feels better. This feels worse." I think just, like, being able to run that cycle and ag- again and again is very rewarding. **Jackson:** My first guest on the podcast, Jason Lu, uh, has this line, "Confidence is the memory of success." And I find that it just keeps applying to new ways, and I, I think even in something like this, like, knowing that you can go into a totally d- new domain and find something really invigorating or interesting about it. Like, the more that compounds, the more you do that- **Nabeel:** Mm-hmm. **Jackson:** ... the easier it is to, like, pick the next, like, random, arbitrary thing that feels... Whereas I think many people sort of, like, stay in their lane, not only professionally or learning or skill-wise, but maybe even interest-wise. And it's like, that, I think that can compound in both directions, which is cool. **Nabeel:** Yeah, yeah. One thing, um, I'm friends with, uh, Nick Cammarata, and he, he's always talking about how people don't randomize enough. They don't explore. Like, basically everyone always under explores, right? It's like, you eat a certain number of foods, but, like, did you try randomizing this aspect of it? **Jackson:** Yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** Yeah, and so I think, I think that applies to basically every area of life because, you know, it's hard to experiment and you need a routine and there's just, like, some cost and habit things going on. **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** So it's just, like, you know, go... Like in travel, just like, go somewhere you wouldn't go. Like, travel to South Dakota or something, right? **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** And like, go drive around there for a while. Uh, yeah. **Jackson:** All ## [01:43:11] Lighting round: travel **Jackson:** right, my... As we wrap up, I have kind of like a... It's not a lightning round. You don't have to go lightning speed but miscellaneous, let's call it. Speaking of, what does it mean to travel well? **Nabeel:** I think, [laughs] it sounds obvious, but I think truly talking to and hanging out with locals and getting locals to show you around, yeah. Because I think it's just like, there's the, the city as it appears to be and then there's the city as it really is, and you cannot access that latter thing without somebody taking you, I don't think. Like, New York. We're both in New York. You know, the first time you visit, you go to Times Square [laughs] and you go to Midtown, right? **Jackson:** Yes, yes. **Nabeel:** And then you talk to a New Yorker and they're like, "No, like, you know, go out to Brighton Beach and have Russian food or something." **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** It's not- **Jackson:** And every place is like that. It turns... To your earlier point about tr- yeah, yeah. **Nabeel:** Yes, yes, exactly. Uh, and so for me- **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** ... like, every kind of quote unquote travel hack that I think is important has involved just like ways of doing this. And yeah, like the, the travel experiences that I remember most, I would say a lot of them are, um, I had a friend who was from there maybe. Like, I, I went to the Czech Republic once with a Czech friend of mine and he was just like, he took me out drinking with his buddies and that was so memorable, and I know that if I'd just gone to Czech Republic by myself, I'd have just been like, "Oh, Czech people are so unfriendly and I didn't really like the food." **Jackson:** Mm-hmm. **Nabeel:** And like, you know, all this. But like, w- through him, it was a completely different experience. **Jackson:** Hmm. **Nabeel:** Yeah, so it's like, find these entry points into places and then it will be so much more rewarding. ## [01:44:37] Stories Nabeel tells himself **Jackson:** Are there any important stories you tell yourself about yourself? Obviously we all have lots of stories we tell ourselves, I suppose, but any that come to mind? **Nabeel:** I think, um, I truly think it's the thing around not being too fixed about any opinions and beliefs and keeping your... Yeah, keeping your identity small, right? So it's just like, um, you don't, you don't know everything.It's also like, I think, [laughs] I don't know if it's healthy or not but I, I always just tell myself, like, "You've really not achieved anything yet." Like, you just don't, I don't know, maybe it's like a little messed up but I'm always just like, every day is the first day of your life and you need to look forward to your next year and you need to be excited about, you know, the projects that you're going to do. And I think that is just very fundamental to living life in a good way. **Jackson:** Mm. ## [01:45:31] Agency and being told what to do by AI **Jackson:** There's this sense I have, that I'm sure I'm not, lots of people have, have talked about, which is that we may be increasingly told what to do by AI, in life and in work. How comfortable are you with this idea, both for people generally and for yourself? **Nabeel:** The version I expect to happen, I think, is that, well it's always voluntary, right? AI is never forcing you. And so, my experience has been that basically there's a bunch of grudge work and then the AI just helps me do it quicker, so far. Right? It's just been like, oh, I don't really wanna write this script but like, okay, sonnet chapter- **Jackson:** You're decide, but you're the top level decision on everything. **Nabeel:** Exactly, exactly. And so I think the things that I actually care about and want to kind of sit with for a while, I won't use AI for. I will just do it myself. Um, whereas, yeah, if I have to fill out some form then I will go and ChatGBT will do it for me. **Jackson:** You don't expect to, 18 months from now, wake up and ask ChatGBT how you should spend your time? **Nabeel:** [laughs] I already do some- **Jackson:** That's an extreme example. **Nabeel:** ... I s- I do some version of this. You know, like I'll give it, I'll give it my to-do list sometimes. I'll be like, look, tell me what to do. **Jackson:** Okay. **Nabeel:** I'm just gonna execute it. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** It's kinda good though. I mean, it's just like- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... it's like having a really smart friend and it's in the nature of advice. Like, the c- it can't make you do it, right? [laughs] **Jackson:** I, I ta- I mean, I've, I found, I found myself really impressed in the last week or two by GBT40. There's some change they made where it's just way better at, at the end of whatever you asked for, being like, "By the way, do you want me to do X or Y or..." And I found myself just being like, "Yes, yes, yes." So- **Nabeel:** It's kinda cool, right? **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** It's like when you're in cursor and you're pressing tab, tab, tab and you're like, oh the AI is, it's like surfing. **Jackson:** Yes. **Nabeel:** It feels very nice. **Jackson:** Yes. But it, it also, in this sense it makes me feel like it's giving you more agency, which obviously could be an illusion or- **Nabeel:** Yes. Yes, yes. I, I think, I, if you talk to people in the AI world, some of them are kind of doomery about this where they'll say like, "Well, AI's gonna get hyper persuasive and it's gonna basically addict you- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... and you're gonna- **Jackson:** Right. It's insidious, yeah. **Nabeel:** ... be obsessed with talking to it." Yeah, and I don't believe that. I, I don't know. I'm a bit more optimistic than that. Like, my experience has just been that, um, it enhances my agency and as soon as I, uh, as soon as I feel the opposite of that happening, uh, I will just switch it off. **Jackson:** That's the hope. ## [01:47:49] Negotiation and creating optionality **Jackson:** You wrote about negotiation, you say good founders have an instinct for reading rooms, group dynamics and power. This isn't usually talked about but it's critical. Founding a successful company is about take, taking part in negotiation after negotiation after negotiation and winning on that. Hiring, sales, fundraising are all negotiations at their core. It's hard to be great at negotiating without having these instincts for human behavior. Since you wrote that, as you've started a new company, any updated views or deepened views on negotiation or how to get better at it? **Nabeel:** Yeah. I, I think, I think this is one of those things where the core principles are really simple and can be explained very quickly but then basically you have to live them in a bunch of contexts and you get better at it. And, uh, so it's like, you know, BATNA is a really important concept, right? So that's best alternative, right? So, if you don't, like, say you're applying for a job, like, what is the thing you're gonna do if you don't get that job, right? And so if you wanna strengthen your BATNA you'll get five job offers and then you don't have to, like, get stuck on any one. It's like really simple stuff like that but, um, the art is, I think applying it to a bunch of different contexts- **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** ... where it can get increasingly hard. So as a simple example, like, um, I, I, I think like one thing I've just realized is like, ex- exceptionally good founders are very good at creating options even when none really exist, right? So like, say you are running out of cash and the only thing that's gonna save you is this one acquisition, right? But you don't wanna look mega desperate. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** Like, there's all these stories about Travis Kalanick doing stuff like this, like, he will just convince himself in his head like, "No, I don't need these people, these people are dumb." Like, uh, uh, okay, like the other option is like I'll, you know, lay off X percent of my company and I'll just like, eat ramen and like, I'll do this and like you- **Jackson:** But it's a real option in my mind. **Nabeel:** But it's a real option and so then I can walk into that room and it, it comes off in my vibe and that's a very non-verbal thing. And so yeah, like, to me, like, creating options has been a very core concept. **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** Um, I think the other thing is just, uh, for me, like, not, I don't know, like it's easy to get kind of psychologically mogged by people in the room, right? [laughs] Like especially people who are more experienced than you. And the best position to just put yourself in is like not needing anything from them. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** Right? **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** And then they, they can't do too much to you. **Jackson:** Yeah. Some of this is more emotional than it even is strategic or tactical, I think. **Nabeel:** Yes. **Jackson:** ... in some cases. Yeah. **Nabeel:** Yeah, yeah. Like, people will do all kinds of things to you, like, I don't know, for example, VCs will make you feel like, oh if you don't take this money, like, you're gonna fail or you're not ambitious enough or whatever it is. And I think you just have to, you really just have to stay focused on what's important to you and not buy into other peoples' frames. **Jackson:** Mm. ## [01:50:28] Palantir's Vocabulary **Jackson:** Mm. I think it's in the Palantir post, but you talk about this in a different context and you really admire people who are good at language and coining memes and coining language. **Nabeel:** Yeah. [laughs] **Jackson:** Whether it be Palantir or Tyler. There's a, Jeff Bezos is good at this too, this compression of vocabulary. You, you have this little section in there listing a few of them. Ontology is an old one but then there is Impul, Artist Colony, Compounding, The 36 Chambers, DOTS, meta- Metabolizing Pain, Gamma Radiation. I'm not gonna make you explain all of those but are there any of those or otherwise that feel really memorable? **Nabeel:** Yeah. There are a lot, right? **Jackson:** Or even the, um, the sort of geneal, like what makes, the ones that are most effective, like what makes them so effective? **Nabeel:** [laughs] I think again, they're, they're just sort of surprising, right? So like, you know, the Artist Colony thing, I think, I think it's just things that stick, right? And there's, there's that really good book, I think it's called like Made To Stick or something. **Jackson:** Okay. **Nabeel:** And it goes into what, what actually makes ideas stick in your head, right? So often they're quite visual in certain ways. **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** Um, they, uh, yeah, they, often they're like almost like puns. Like I think Artist Colony sounds a bit like ants colony in some weird way. Uh, but yeah, like, I don't know, Kapoitos have this bit of like, everyone we hire is, like we don't do performance reviews basically because you can't measure people on this like unidimensional axis. Like, everyone we hire is super multi-dimensional and like, you know, I think he, he believes it and like I believe it and there is, there is like a deep element of truth there. But there is also a marketing aspect to it too, right? Of like, you know, we're hiring these Picassos or whatever. Uh, but yeah, it, it goes pretty deep to the culture of you are, you are like getting to know a person like fully all around and then like admitting to them, admitting them in almost as though they're joining a cult. [laughs] Uh, so yeah, I think that was one where it's kind of interesting. The gamma radiation one is like this idea that you have to go through and feel a lot of pain very directly and that pain basically kind of like, quote, radiates you into becoming a superhero or something like that, right? So it's like an Incredible Hulk reference. **Jackson:** Right, right, right. **Nabeel:** And, and but like the thing it translates to that is that you basically want to be with the customer and you want to be doing the same workflows as them and you want to be there at like late at night trying to fix them very directly. And if you are not feeling pain, like if you are just in your nice air conditioned office in Palo Alto and you're having your LaCroix and, you know, you're like around a whiteboard designing the optimal workflow, you're probably doing it wrong. And so this phrase gamma radiation just like compresses all of that. **Jackson:** Strong imagery too. Right. **Nabeel:** Exactly, exactly. **Jackson:** Right. **Nabeel:** Into a very pity phrase of like, wait, am I doing the wrong thing? Should I be like out there instead? **Jackson:** Mm. **Nabeel:** Yeah. ## [01:53:07] Lessons from Tyler Cowen **Jackson:** He's come up a bunch in this conversation so maybe you even answered the question already but what do you think the rest of us could most learn from Tyler Cowen? **Nabeel:** Well, I think Tyler... You know, I, I mentioned a bunch of his concepts, right? So, I think one thing he says is, like, cracking cultural codes, and that's kind of the same thing as what I was mentioning around, um, taking areas that are unfamiliar to you, like the blues music or whatever, and, like, very quickly kind of acting as an anthropologist of them and learning how they work. And the fact that only immersing yourself in those contexts is, is... There's, like, no substitute for it, basically. Yeah, so cracking cultural codes is, like, a really big one. I think, I think for him, like, the importance of writing is something I've taken away a lot. So just, like, write out your views on something. You will realize that your opinions are not that thought out. **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** And, like, not- **Jackson:** Yeah. Paul Graham says, "It converts your ideas from vague to bad." **Nabeel:** Yeah. **Jackson:** Which is a banger. **Nabeel:** That's a great- **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** ... great way of putting it. Yeah. So, so a big fan of, like, writing. I th- I think maybe what doesn't come out about him so much, actually, in his writing or whatever is just, like, he's, like, a very kind person. **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** He's, like, really kind. Like, he will... He... It's very hard to get him to say bad stuff about basically anybody. **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** And he's very good at, like, finding the positive about people and, like, situations and basically anything, right? He's kind of a natural cheery optimist. So I think, for me, like, the, the thing I try and take away from him is, like, this kindness and, like, optimism and positivity thing. **Jackson:** Very willing to speak his mind and not a douchebag, to, to the other point. **Nabeel:** Yes. So rare. I'm like, "How has this guy not been canceled?" [laughs] ## [01:54:41] Fighting Inertia **Jackson:** My final question or topic I think has come up in a, a couple of ways already a bit. This is an excerpt from you. You say, "A common thing I see in late 20-plus, 20-something-plus adults, they've tried a few things to make big improvements in their lives and they mostly haven't worked that well, so they give up on trying new things and instead settle into whatever grooves they happen to be in. Keep experimenting. Massive improvements are possible, are possible, but you probably need to 10X the number of experiments you're doing because you're sampling from a heavily tailed distribution. Majority of rolls will be zero, but a few will be massive." Uh, you talked about an idea I'm, I think about constantly, life and, and sort of, like, defying inertia. Maybe this is a blueprint for care? What advice do you have for experimentation and eventually finding that groove? Perhaps it, again, returns back to this, like, quality without a name, you know it when you feel it. But do you have any further advice on that? **Nabeel:** Yeah, I think some things do just kind of lock in and become constants in your life, right? Like, for example, for me, um, running ... became a, a constant, like. And the funny thing is, like, I absolutely hated it. Uh, so I played, I played squash in college, which is, like, a very specific sport, but, um... And I played cricket, which is, like, the most English thing ever, right? But, like, cricket games are like eight hours long, and so- **Jackson:** I didn't know that. **Nabeel:** ... it, it's so long, man. And, um, I... You know, I had exams. I was a dedicated student, so I was like, "Okay, I'll just run because I hate it, but it's a very efficient way. Like, 30 minutes I'm exhausted and I've done my exercise." **Jackson:** Could do it everywhere, yeah. **Nabeel:** Yeah, and then it just sort of stuck. And then, you know, um, without going into too much detail, like, there was a bunch of stuff I was dealing with and I found it actually weirdly therapeutic. Like, initially it was literally, like, masochism. It was like the pain was therapeutic or something. But eventually that kind of transmuted itself into pleasure, and I've run consistently every week, like, since then unless I've been injured. And, um, yeah. So some things it's, like, you don't need to try and over optimize. Like, that, that is just something that feels pretty core to my being. Um, same with, like, I don't know, journaling. Like, I don't journal consistently, but I kind of have always had some notebook going since I was, like, 13 or something, right? So I think some stuff, it's, like, it's good, it's a constant in your life, and then you don't mess with it. I think with other stuff it's important to just be like, "Ah, maybe I don't have this dialed in." So, um, you know, your eating habits is a really simple one, right? Um, I'm on a, like, really nice routine right now, but I recently just, like, changed everything, basically, and just tried a completely different diet. And it, I found it worked a lot better and it made me feel a lot better. So, I think that you have to have this intuition about your life of, like, what is- **Jackson:** Hm. **Nabeel:** ... working well, what is maybe working not so well. And so some things you hold constant. Like, for me, the exercise thing I basically hold constant. But other stuff like, you know... I just, I said the thing to you earlier about not really believing in note taking. It's not a fixed thing with me. Like, I will... I, I think I originally tweeted that when I saw some new note taking thing and I was like, "Ah, I don't want to try that. Note taking doesn't work." Then I was like, "No, man. Like, you know, if you stop experimenting, like, you get, [laughs] you get stuck in these grooves." I think that's when I tweeted that, but yeah. I will always try the new thing, and if it doesn't stick that's fine. And so yeah, maybe note taking is an area where I could use some improvement. **Jackson:** What I like about that, too, is that stability in certain areas is part of what can maybe allow you to take the risk or the change. One of my, one of my previous guests, Stephen, he talked about just in finding a long-term life partner, the amount of f- added freedom 'cause he had, like, that, that net. And I think that probably applies in lots of big and small ways. **Nabeel:** Yeah, yeah. I remember I took, uh... It was from Tim Ferriss, and it was... He, he was just like, "Have five things going on in your life, and then basically, yeah. Like, two of them will suck at any given time, but you're sort of hedging the time, right?" So, like, you know, maybe your running is going really well and your company's going really badly. I mean, you don't want it to be that way. **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** But at least the running means you're not in, like, the deepest depths of depression. And so- **Jackson:** Yeah. **Nabeel:** ... I try and always have these parallel threads. **Jackson:** Nabeel, that's all I got. Thank you very much. **Nabeel:** Thank you. **Jackson:** This was a wonderful, wonderful conversation. I think lots of, lots to come back to. Thanks again. **Nabeel:** Thanks, man.