Podcasts about SPF

Jared and Kay come into this 27th season with their side eye and skepticism but that doesn't stop them from talking all about the premiere of The Bachelor. Jared kindly refers to this franchise as the McDonald's of television and Kay wants to know just how many Dyson Airwraps were used in the making of these intro looks. They also ask the important questions like, is Jesse Palmer a frat bro ghost haunting the halls of the Bachelor mansion, and who the fuck are the Mandrell Sisters?! Not to mention, Jared's one sided beef with the SPF police continues. Enjoy the episode! Follow @ thebetchelor on Instagram and Twitter to stay up to date with all things reality tv. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SPF and DMARC use on 100k most popular domains https://isc.sans.edu/diary/SPF%20and%20DMARC%20use%20on%20100k%20most%20popular%20domains/29452 Sysmon Exploit Released CVE-2022-41120, CVE-2022-44704 https://github.com/Wh04m1001/SysmonEoP ManageEngine CVE-2022-47966 Technical Deep Dive https://www.horizon3.ai/manageengine-cve-2022-47966-technical-deep-dive/ Netcomm Router Vulnerablities https://kb.cert.org/vuls/id/986018 Microsoft Pushes Outdated Office Install Check https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-pushes-kb5021751-to-check-for-outdated-office-installs/

How does someone with ADD organize a fridge so that the spinach never goes bad? How do all of these boys know all of these line dances? How does Sally not wear SPF everyday?! All of this in more in today's episode, where we welcome our #TheyInSTEM Sally Tamarkin as an official co-host of Gee Thanks! (!!!!!!!!) and talk about The Empty Awards, and the recs we have that will cost you exactly zero dollars.Products Mentioned:Lazy Susan ($15) (The $5 one seems to be gone?!): https://howl.me/ciUDDaVHH87 Super Goop SPF: https://rstyle.me/+JdiM9lUAIJNHCKSAYphBLA Line Dance TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/tag/tristarlinedancing?lang=en Tula Moisturizer: https://howl.me/ciUDTSOM7cX GO SHOPPING WITH US!Subscribe to the newsletter for exclusive discounts just for you: www.geethanks.substack.com Want to support Gee Thanks! by using our links? Do that here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s4YGOdQT-W7eqLAiYi4DowXExXaECbEW1rRAHVHOu4Y/edit#gid=1638968433 Shop our Amazon Storefront: https://www.amazon.com/shop/geethanksjustboughtit Gee Thanks! appreciates its supporters, especially Alley Peplinski, Becca Sheaffer, Allie Nagy, Angi James, Lindsay Creech and Erin Gibson! Join the Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/geethanks Follow along with recs (and share your own via DM) on the “Gee Thanks, Just Bought It!” Instagram: www.instagram.com/geethanksjustboughtitpod and shop all of our recs here: www.geethanksjustboughtit.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

About TimTim Gonda is a Cloud Security professional who has spent the last eight years securing and building Cloud workloads for commercial, non-profit, government, and national defense organizations. Tim currently serves as the Technical Director of Cloud at Praetorian, influencing the direction of its offensive-security-focused Cloud Security practice and the Cloud features of Praetorian's flagship product, Chariot. He considers himself lucky to have the privilege of working with the talented cyber operators at Praetorian and considers it the highlight of his career.Tim is highly passionate about helping organizations fix Cloud Security problems, as they are found, the first time, and most importantly, the People/Process/Technology challenges that cause them in the first place. In his spare time, he embarks on adventures with his wife and ensures that their two feline bundles of joy have the best playtime and dining experiences possible.Links Referenced: Praetorian: https://www.praetorian.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timgondajr/ Praetorian Blog: https://www.praetorian.com/blog/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they've been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching 'em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With 0 admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents. Check out what people are saying at canary.love today!Corey: Kentik provides Cloud and NetOps teams with complete visibility into hybrid and multi-cloud networks. Ensure an amazing customer experience, reduce cloud and network costs, and optimize performance at scale — from internet to data center to container to cloud. Learn how you can get control of complex cloud networks at www.kentik.com, and see why companies like Zoom, Twitch, New Relic, Box, Ebay, Viasat, GoDaddy, booking.com, and many, many more choose Kentik as their network observability platform. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while, I like to branch out into new and exciting territory that I've never visited before. But today, no, I'd much rather go back to complaining about cloud security, something that I tend to do an awful lot about. Here to do it with me is Tim Gonda, Technical Director of Cloud at Praetorian. Tim, thank you for joining me on this sojourn down what feels like an increasingly well-worn path.Tim: Thank you, Corey, for having me today.Corey: So, you are the Technical Director of Cloud, which I'm sort of short-handing to okay, everything that happens on the computer is henceforth going to be your fault. How accurate is that in the grand scheme of things?Tim: It's not too far off. But we like to call it Praetorian for nebula. The nebula meaning that it's Schrödinger's problem: it both is and is not the problem. Here's why. We have a couple key focuses at Praetorian, some of them focusing on more traditional pen testing, where we're looking at hardware, hit System A, hit System B, branch out, get to goal.On the other side, we have hitting web applications and [unintelligible 00:01:40]. This insecure app leads to this XYZ vulnerability, or this medical appliance is insecure and therefore we're able to do XYZ item. One of the things that frequently comes up is that more and more organizations are no longer putting their applications or infrastructure on-prem anymore, so therefore, some part of the assessment ends up being in the cloud. And that is the unique rub that I'm in. And that I'm responsible for leading the direction of the cloud security focus group, who may not dive into a specific specialty that some of these other teams might dig into, but may have similar responsibilities or similar engagement style.And in this case, if we discover something in the cloud as an issue, or even in your own organization where you have a cloud security team, you'll have a web application security team, you'll have your core information security team that defends your environment in many different methods, many different means, you'll frequently find that the cloud security team is the hot button for hey, the server was misconfigured at one certain level, however the cloud security team didn't quite know that this web application was vulnerable. We did know that it was exposed to the internet but we can't necessarily turn off all web applications from the internet because that would no longer serve the purpose of a web application. And we also may not know that a particular underlying host's patch is out of date. Because technically, that would be siloed off into another problem.So, what ends up happening is that on almost every single incident that involves a cloud infrastructure item, you might find that cloud security will be right there alongside the incident responders. And yep, this [unintelligible 00:03:20] is here, it's exposed to the internet via here, and it might have the following application on it. And they get cross-exposure with other teams that say, “Hey, your web application is vulnerable. We didn't quite inform the cloud security team about it, otherwise this wouldn't be allowed to go to the public internet,” or on the infrastructure side, “Yeah, we didn't know that there was a patch underneath it, we figured that we would let the team handle it at a later date, and therefore this is also vulnerable.” And what ends up happening sometimes, is that the cloud security team might be the onus or might be the hot button in the room of saying, “Hey, it's broken. This is now your problem. Please fix it with changing cloud configurations or directing a team to make this change on our behalf.”So, in essence, sometimes cloud becomes—it both is and is not your problem when a system is either vulnerable or exposed or at some point, worst case scenario, ends up being breached and you're performing incident response. That's one of the cases why it's important to know—or important to involve others in the cloud security problem, or to be very specific about what the role of a cloud security team is, or where cloud security has to have certain boundaries or has to involve certain extra parties have to be involved in the process. Or when it does its own threat modeling process, say that, okay, we have to take a look at certain cloud findings or findings that's within our security realm and say that these misconfigurations or these items, we have to treat the underlying components as if they are vulnerable, whether or not they are and we have to report on them as if they are vulnerable, even if it means that a certain component of the infrastructure has to already be assumed to either have a vulnerability, have some sort of misconfiguration that allows an outside attacker to execute attacks against whatever the [unintelligible 00:05:06] is. And we have to treat and respond our security posture accordingly.Corey: One of the problems that I keep running into, and I swear it's not intentional, but people would be forgiven for understanding or believing otherwise, is that I will periodically inadvertently point out security problems via Twitter. And that was never my intention because, “Huh, that's funny, this thing isn't working the way that I would expect that it would,” or, “I'm seeing something weird in the logs in my test account. What is that?” And, “Oh, you found a security vulnerability or something akin to one in our environment. Oops. Next time, just reach out to us directly at the security contact form.” That's great. If I'd known I was stumbling blindly into a security approach, but it feels like the discovery of these things is not heralded by an, “Aha, I found it.” But, “Huh, that's funny.”Tim: Of course. Absolutely. And that's where some of the best vulnerabilities come where you accidentally stumble on something that says, “Wait, does this work how—what I think it is?” Click click. Like, “Oh, boy, it does.”Now, I will admit that certain cloud providers are really great about with proactive security reach outs. If you either just file a ticket or file some other form of notification, just even flag your account rep and say, “Hey, when I was working on this particular cloud environment, the following occurred. Does this work the way I think it is? Is this is a problem?” And they usually get back to you with reporting it to their internal team, so on and so forth. But let's say applications are open-source frameworks or even just organizations at large where you might have stumbled upon something, the best thing to do was either look up, do they have a public bug bounty program, do they have a security contact or form reach out that you can email them, or do you know, someone that the organization that you just send a quick email saying, “Hey, I found this.”And through some combination of those is usually the best way to go. And to be able to provide context of the organization being, “Hey, the following exists.” And the most important things to consider when you're sending this sort of information is that they get these sorts of emails almost daily.Corey: One of my favorite genre of tweet is when Tavis Ormandy and Google's Project Zero winds up doing a tweet like, “Hey, do I know anyone over at the security apparatus at insert company here?” It's like, “All right. I'm sure people are shorting stocks now [laugh], based upon whatever he winds up doing that.”Tim: Of course.Corey: It's kind of fun to watch. But there's no cohesive way of getting in touch with companies on these things because as soon as you'd have something like that, it feels like it's subject to abuse, where Comcast hasn't fixed my internet for three days, now I'm going to email their security contact, instead of going through the normal preferred process of wait in the customer queue so they can ignore you.Tim: Of course. And that's something else you want to consider. If you broadcast that a security vulnerability exists without letting the entity or company know, you're also almost causing a green light, where other security researchers are going to go dive in on this and see, like, one, does this work how you described. But that actually is a positive thing at some point, where either you're unable to get the company's attention, or maybe it's an open-source organization, or maybe you're not being fully sure that something is the case. However, when you do submit something to the customer and you want it to take it seriously, here's a couple of key things that you should consider.One, provide evidence that whatever you're talking about has actually occurred, two, provide repeatable steps that the layman's term, even IT support person can attempt to follow in your process, that they can repeat the same vulnerability or repeat the same security condition, and three, most importantly, detail why this matters. Is this something where I can adjust a user's password? Is this something where I can extract data? Is this something where I'm able to extract content from your website I otherwise shouldn't be able to? And that's important for the following reason.You need to inform the business what is the financial value of why leaving this unpatched becomes an issue for them. And if you do that, that's how those security vulnerabilities get prioritized. It's not necessarily because the coolest vulnerability exists, it's because it costs the company money, and therefore the security team is going to immediately jump on it and try to contain it before it costs them any more.Corey: One of my least favorite genres of security report are the ones that I get where I found a vulnerability. It's like, that's interesting. I wasn't aware that I read any public-facing services, but all right, I'm game; what have you got? And it's usually something along the lines of, “You haven't enabled SPF to hard fail an email that doesn't wind up originating explicitly from this list of IP addresses. Bug bounty, please.” And it's, “No genius. That is very much an intentional choice. Thank you for playing.”It comes down to also an idea of whenever I have reported security vulnerabilities in the past, the pattern I always take is, “I'm seeing something that I don't fully understand. I suspect this might have security implications, but I'm also more than willing to be proven wrong.” Because showing up with, “You folks are idiots and have a security problem,” is a terrific invitation to be proven wrong and look like an idiot. Because the first time you get that wrong, no one will take you seriously again.Tim: Of course. And as you'll find that most bug bounty programs are, if you participate in those, the first couple that you might have submitted, the customer might even tell you, “Yeah, we're aware that that vulnerability exists, however, we don't view it as a core issue and it cannot affect the functionality of our site in any meaningful way, therefore we're electing to ignore it.” Fair.Corey: Very fair. But then when people write up about those things, well, they've they decided this is not an issue, so I'm going to do a write-up on it. Like, “You can't do that. The NDA doesn't let you expose that.” “Really? Because you just said it's a non-issue. Which is it?”Tim: And the key to that, I guess, would also be that is there an underlying technology that doesn't necessarily have to be attributed to said organization? Can you also say that, if I provide a write-up or if I put up my own personal blog post—let's say, we go back to some of the OpenSSL vulnerabilities including OpenSSL 3.0, that came out not too long ago, but since that's an open-source project, it's fair game—let's just say that if there was a technology such as that, or maybe there's a wrapper around it that another organization could be using or could be implementing a certain way, you don't necessarily have to call the company up by name, or rather just say, here's the core technology reason, and here's the core technology risk, and here's the way I've demoed exploiting this. And if you publish an open-source blog like that and then you tweet about that, you can actually gain security support around such issue and then fight for the research.An example would be that I know a couple of pen testers who have reported things in the past, and while the first time they reported it, the company was like, “Yeah, we'll fix it eventually.” But later, when another researcher report this exact same finding, the company is like, “We should probably take this seriously and jump on it.” It sometimes it's just getting in front of that and providing frequency or providing enough people around to say that, “Hey, this really is an issue in the security community and we should probably fix this item,” and keep pushing others organizations on it. A lot of times, they just need additional feedback. Because as you said, somebody runs an automated scanner against your email and says that, “Oh, you're not checking SPF as strictly as the scanner would have liked because it's a benchmarking tool.” It's not necessarily a security vulnerability rather than it's just how you've chosen to configure something and if it works for you, it works for you.Corey: How does cloud change this? Because a lot of what we talked about so far could apply to anything. Go back in time to 1995 and a lot of what we're talking about mostly holds true. It feels like cloud acts as a significant level of complexity on top of all of this. How do you view the differentiation there?Tim: So, I think it differentiated two things. One, certain services or certain vulnerability classes that are handled by the shared service model—for the most part—are probably secure better than you might be able to do yourself. Just because there's a lot of research, the team is [experimented 00:13:03] a lot of time on this. An example of if there's a particular, like, spoofing or network interception vulnerability that you might see on a local LAN network, you probably are not going to have the same level access to be able to execute that on a virtual private cloud or VNet, or some other virtual network within cloud environment. Now, something that does change with the paradigm of cloud is the fact that if you accidentally publicly expose something or something that you've created expo—or don't set a setting to be private or only specific to your resources, there is a couple of things that could happen. The vulnerabilities exploitability based on where increases to something that used to be just, “Hey, I left a port open on my own network. Somebody from HR or somebody from it could possibly interact with it.”However, in the cloud, you've now set this up to the entire world with people that might have resources or motivations to go after this product, and using services like Shodan—which are continually mapping the internet for open resources—and they can quickly grab that, say, “Okay, I'm going to attack these targets today,” might continue to poke a little bit further, maybe an internal person that might be bored at work or a pen tester just on one specific engagement. Especially in the case of let's say, what you're working on has sparked the interest of a nation-state and they want to dig into a little bit further, they have the resources to be able to dedicate time, people, and maybe tools and tactics against whatever this vulnerability that you've given previously the example of—maybe there's a specific ID and a URL that just needs to be guessed right to give them access to something—they might spend the time trying to brute force that URL, brute force that value, and eventually try to go after what you have.The main paradigm shift here is that there are certain things that we might consider less of a priority because the cloud has already taken care of them with the shared service model, and rightfully so, and there's other times that we have to take heightened awareness on is, one, we either dispose something to the entire internet or all cloud accounts within creations. And that's actually something that we see commonly. In fact, one thing I would like to say we see very common is, all AWS users, regardless if it's in your account or somewhere else, might have access to your SNS topic or SQS Queue. Which doesn't seem like that big of vulnerability, but I changed the messages, I delete messages, I viewed your messages, but rather what's connected to those? Let's talk database Lambda functions where I've got source code that a developer has written to handle that source code and may not have built in logic to handle—maybe there was a piece of code that could be abused as part of this message that might allow an attacker to send something to your Lambda function and then execute something on that attacker's behalf.You weren't aware of it, you weren't thinking about it, and now you've exposed it to almost the entire internet. And since anyone can go sign up for an AWS account—or Azure or GCP account—and then they're able to start poking at that same piece of code that you might have developed thinking, “Well, this is just for internal use. It's not a big deal. That one static code analysis tool isn't probably too relevant.” Now, it becomes hyper-relevant and something you have to consider with a little more attention and dedicated time to making sure that these things that you've written or deploying, are in fact, safe because misconfigured or mis-exposed, and suddenly the entire world is starts knocking at it, and increases the risk of, it may really well be a problem. The severity of that issue could increase dramatically.Corey: As you take a look across, let's call it the hyperscale clouds, the big three—which presumably I don't need to define out—how do you wind up ranking them in terms of security from top to bottom? I have my own rankings that I like to dole out and basically, this is the, let's offend someone at every one of these companies, no matter how we wind up playing it. Because I will argue with you just on principle on them. How do you view them stacking up against each other?Tim: So, an interesting view on that is based on who's been around longest and who is encountered of the most technical debt. A lot of these security vulnerabilities or security concerns may have had to deal with a decision made long ago that might have made sense at the time and now the company has kind of stuck with that particular technology or decision or framework, and are now having to build or apply security Band-Aids to that process until it gets resolved. I would say, ironically, AWS is actually at the top of having that technical debt, and actually has so many different types of access policies that are very complex to configure and not very user intuitive unless you speak intuitively JSON or YAML or some other markdown language, to be able to tell you whether or not something was actually set up correctly. Now, there are a lot of security experts who make their money based on knowing how to configure or be able to assess whether or not these are actually the issue. I would actually bring them as, by default, by design, between the big three, they're actually on the lower end of certain—based on complexity and easy-to-configure-wise.The next one that would also go into that pile, I would say is probably Microsoft Azure, who [sigh] admittedly, decided to say that, “Okay, let's take something that was very complicated and everyone really loved to use as an identity provider, Active Directory, and try to use that as a model for.” Even though they made it extensively different. It is not the same as on-prem directory, but use that as the framework for how people wanted to configure their identity provider for a new cloud provider. The one that actually I would say, comes out on top, just based on use and based on complexity might be Google Cloud. They came to a lot of these security features first.They're acquiring new companies on a regular basis with the acquisition of Mandiant, the creation of their own security tooling, their own unique security approaches. In fact, they probably wrote the book on Kubernetes Security. Would be on top, I guess, from usability, such as saying that I don't want to have to manage all these different types of policies. Here are some buttons I would like to flip and I'd like my resources, for the most part by default, to be configured correctly. And Google does a pretty good job of that.Also, one of the things they do really well is entity-based role assumption, which inside of AWS, you can provide access keys by default or I have to provide a role ID after—or in Azure, I'm going to say, “Here's a [unintelligible 00:19:34] policy for something specific that I want to grant access to a specific resource.” Google does a pretty good job of saying that okay, everything is treated as an email address. This email address can be associated in a couple of different ways. It can be given the following permissions, it can have access to the following things, but for example, if I want to remove access to something, I just take that email address off of whatever access policy I had somewhere, and then it's taken care of. But they do have some other items such as their design of least privilege is something to be expected when you consider their hierarchy.I'm not going to say that they're not without fault in that area—in case—until they had something more recently, as far as finding certain key pieces of, like say, tags or something within a specific sub-project or in our hierarchy, there were cases where you might have granted access at a higher level and that same level of access came all the way down. And where at least privilege is required to be enforced, otherwise, you break their security model. So, I like them for how simple it is to set up security at times, however, they've also made it unnecessarily complex at other times so they don't have the flexibility that the other cloud service providers have. On the flip side of that, the level of flexibility also leads to complexity at times, which I also view as a problem where customers think they've done something correctly based on their best knowledge, the best of documentation, the best and Medium articles they've been researching, and what they have done is they've inadvertently made assumptions that led to core anti-patterns, like, [unintelligible 00:21:06] what they've deployed.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Uptycs, because they believe that many of you are looking to bolster your security posture with CNAPP and XDR solutions. They offer both cloud and endpoint security in a single UI and data model. Listeners can get Uptycs for up to 1,000 assets through the end of 2023 (that is next year) for $1. But this offer is only available for a limited time on UptycsSecretMenu.com. That's U-P-T-Y-C-S Secret Menu dot com.Corey: I think you're onto something here, specifically in—well, when I've been asked historically and personally to rank security, I have viewed Google Cloud as number one, and AWS is number two. And my reasoning behind that has been from an absolute security of their platform and a pure, let's call it math perspective, it really comes down to which of the two of them had what for breakfast on any given day there, they're so close on there. But in a project that I spin up in Google Cloud, everything inside of it can talk to each other by default and I can scope that down relatively easily, whereas over an AWS land, by default, nothing can talk to anything. And that means that every permission needs to be explicitly granted, which in an absolutist sense and in a vacuum, yeah, that makes sense, but here in reality, people don't do that. We've seen a number of AWS blog posts over the last 15 years—they don't do this anymore—but it started off with, “Oh, yeah, we're just going to grant [* on * 00:22:04] for the purposes of this demo.”“Well, that's horrible. Why would you do that?” “Well, if we wanted to specify the IAM policy, it would take up the first third of the blog post.” How about that? Because customers go through that exact same thing. I'm trying to build something and ship.I mean, the biggest lie in any environment or any codebase ever, is the comment that starts with, “To do.” Yeah, that is load-bearing. You will retire with that to do still exactly where it is. You have to make doing things the right way at least the least frictionful path because no one is ever going to come back and fix this after the fact. It's never going to happen, as much as we wish that it did.Tim: At least until after the week of the breach when it was highlighted by the security team to say that, “Hey, this was the core issue.” Then it will be fixed in short order. Usually. Or a Band-Aid is applied to say that this can no longer be exploited in this specific way again.Corey: My personal favorite thing that, like, I wouldn't say it's a lie. But the favorite thing that I see in all of these announcements right after the, “Your security is very important to us,” right after it very clearly has not been sufficiently important to them, and they say, “We show no signs of this data being accessed.” Well, that can mean a couple different things. It can mean, “We have looked through the audit logs for a service going back to its launch and have verified that nothing has ever done this except the security researcher who found it.” Great. Or it can mean, “What even are logs, exactly? We're just going to close our eyes and assume things are great.” No, no.Tim: So, one thing to consider there is in that communication, that entire communication has probably been vetted by the legal department to make sure that the company is not opening itself up for liability. I can say from personal experience, when that usually has occurred, unless it can be proven that breach was attributable to your user specifically, the default response is, “We have determined that the security response of XYZ item or XYZ organization has determined that your data was not at risk at any point during this incident.” Which might be true—and we're quoting Star Wars on this one—from a certain point of view. And unfortunately, in the case of a post-breach, their security, at least from a regulation standpoint where they might be facing a really large fine, is absolutely probably their top priority at this very moment, but has not come to surface because, for most organizations, until this becomes something that is a financial reason to where they have to act, where their reputation is on the line, they're not necessarily incentivized to fix it. They're incentivized to push more products, push more features, keep the clients happy.And a lot of the time going back and saying, “Hey, we have this piece of technical debt,” it doesn't really excite our user base or doesn't really help us gain a competitive edge in the market is considered an afterthought until the crisis occurs and the information security team rejoices because this is the time they actually get to see their stuff fixed, even though it might be a super painful time for them in the short run because they get to see these things fixed, they get to see it put to bed. And if there's ever a happy medium, where, hey, maybe there was a legacy feature that wasn't being very well taken care of, or maybe this feature was also causing the security team a lot of pain, we get to see both that feature, that item, that service, get better, as well as security teams not have to be woken up on a regular basis because XYZ incident happened, XYZ item keeps coming up in a vulnerability scan. If it finally is put to bed, we consider that a win for all. And one thing to consider in security as well as kind of, like, we talk about the relationship between the developers and security and/or product managers and security is if we can make it a win, win, win situation for all, that's the happy path that we really want to be getting to. If there's a way that we can make sure that experience is better for customers, the security team doesn't have to be broken up on a regular basis because an incident happened, and the developers receive less friction when they want to go implement something, you find that that secure feature, function, whatever tends to be the happy path forward and the path of least resistance for everyone around it. And those are sometimes the happiest stories that can come out of some of these incidents.Corey: It's weird to think of there being any happy stories coming out of these things, but it's definitely one of those areas that there are learnings there to be had if we're willing to examine them. The biggest problem I see so often is that so many companies just try and hide these things. They give the minimum possible amount of information so the rest of us can't learn by it. Honestly, some of the moments where I've gained the most respect for the technical prowess of some of these cloud providers has been after there's been a security issue and they have disclosed either their response or why it was a non-issue because they took a defense-in-depth approach. It's really one of those transformative moments that I think is an opportunity if companies are bold enough to chase them down.Tim: Absolutely. And in a similar vein, when we think of certain cloud providers outages and we're exposed, like, the major core flaw of their design, and if it kept happening—and again, these outages could be similar and analogous to an incident or a security flaw, meaning that it affected us. It was something that actually happened. In the case of let's say, the S3 outage of, I don't know, it was like 2017, 2018, where it turns out that there was a core DNS system that inside of us-east-1, which is actually very close to where I live, apparently was the core crux of, for whatever reason, the system malfunctioned and caused a major outage. Outside of that, in this specific example, they had to look at ways of how do we not have a single point of failure, even if it is a very robust system, to make sure this doesn't happen again.And there was a lot of learnings to be had, a lot of in-depth investigation that happened, probably a lot of development, a lot of research, and sometimes on the outside of an incident, you really get to understand why a system was built a certain way or why a condition exists in the first place. And it sometimes can be fascinating to kind of dig into that very deeper and really understand what the core problem is. And now that we know what's an issue, we can actually really work to address it. And sometimes that's actually one of the best parts about working at Praetorian in some cases is that a lot of the items we find, we get to find them early before it becomes one of these issues, but the most important thing is we get to learn so much about, like, why a particular issue is such a big problem. And you have to really solve the core business problem, or maybe even help inform, “Hey, this is an issue for it like this.”However, this isn't necessarily all bad in that if you make these adjustments of these items, you get to retain this really cool feature, this really cool thing that you built, but also, you have to say like, here's some extra, added benefits to the customers that you weren't really there. And—such as the old adage of, “It's not a bug, it's a feature,” sometimes it's exactly what you pointed out. It's not necessarily all bad in an incident. It's also a learning experience.Corey: Ideally, we can all learn from these things. I want to thank you for being so generous with your time and talking about how you view this increasingly complicated emerging space. If people want to learn more, where's the best place to find you?Tim: You can find me on LinkedIn which will be included in this podcast description. You can also go look at articles that the team is putting together at praetorian.com. Unfortunately, I'm not very big on Twitter.Corey: Oh, well, you must be so happy. My God, what a better decision you're making than the rest of us.Tim: Well, I like to, like, run a little bit under the radar, except on opportunities like this where I can talk about something I'm truly passionate about. But I try not to pollute the airwaves too much, but LinkedIn is a great place to find me. Praetorian blog for stuff the team is building. And if anyone wants to reach out, feel free to hit the contact page up in praetorian.com. That's one of the best places to get my attention.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:30:19]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Tim Gonda, Technical Director of Cloud at Praetorian. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment talking about how no one disagrees with you based upon a careful examination of your logs.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Team Skinfluence is on a little break over summer, but we didn't want to leave you without a weekly dose of beauty chat! So over the next few weeks we are delivering some 'best of' content straight to your ears. This week - SPF! Do you have a topic you would like discussed on the show? Maybe you have a specific skincare concern you want help with? We would LOVE to hear from you. So write us an email, or send us a voice memo (you could feature on the show!) and let us know -  skinfluence@novapodcasts.com.auNova Entertainment acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which we recorded this podcast, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respect to Elders past and present.  CREDITSHosts: Alisha Bhojwani & Michael BrownSenior Producer/Editor: Hannah Bowman LINKSAlisha's Instagram @alishabhojwani_Michael's Instagram @mbrown_beautyNova Podcast's Instagram @novapodcastsofficialSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Impacts of Smoking & Vaping on Your Skin Dr Ryan De Cruz spills the tea on the real impacts smoking and vaping has on our skin, what changes you can expect to see in your skin when you quit, and how to look after your skin when travelling and surrounded by smokers.   Dr Ryan De Cruz is a Specialist Dermatologist and the founder of Southern Dermatology. Find him at https://southern-dermatology.com.au or follow him on IG: @drryandecruz   Jo's Tips for Managing Summer Skin It's well and truly summer down under, so it's only fitting that Jo shares her top tips for looking after our skin during Aussie summers! She even throws in a few hacks for dealing with a sunburn, removing multiple layers of SPF, and how she likes to remind herself to reapply. Remember, SPF is a non-negotiable, so Slip, Slop, Slap!   PWDKWN: Jo: CeraVe SA Smoothing Cream 177ml Hannah: Bioderma Atoderm Intensive Balm 500ml Product Mentions: Aspect Phytostat 9 Viviology Ceramide Moisturiser 50mL Bioderma Sensibio Defensive 40ml Hada Labo Absolute Smoothing & Moisturising Cream 50ml CeraVe Facial Moisturising Lotion PM 52ml La Roche-Posay Toleriane Dermallergo Fluid 40ml Bioderma Sensibio H2O Micellar Water Pump Bottle 850ml L'Occitane Almond Shower Oil 250ml CeraVe Daily Moisturising Lotion 473ml Skinstitut Laser Aid 200ml asap soothing gel 200ml La Roche-Posay Anthelios Wet Skin SPF50+ Body Sunscreen 250ml asap super B complex 30ml Viviology Niacinamide + HA Serum 30mL The Ordinary Supersize Niacinamide 10% + Zinc 1% - 60ml CeraVe SA Smoothing Cleanser 236ml   Whether you're on the hunt for skincare advice, wanting to share your best beauty tips, or are just looking for someone to indulge in a cringey convo with, the Beauty IQ FB Community has got ya covered! Join our FB group today.   Want to listen to Beauty IQ Uncensored while you shop? Download the Adore Beauty today.   Hosts: Joanna Fleming & Hannah Furst Guests: Dr Ryan De Cruz Disclaimer: https://www.adorebeauty.com.au/disclaimer.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

SPF and DMARC use on GOV domains in different ccTLDs https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/SPF+and+DMARC+use+on+GOV+domains+in+different+ccTLDs/29384/ CVE-2022-47939 ksmbd Vulnerability https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2022-47939 Netgear Vulnerabilities https://kb.netgear.com/000065495/Security-Advisory-for-Pre-Authentication-Buffer-Overflow-on-Some-Routers-PSV-2019-0208 PyTorch Malicious Dependency https://pytorch.org/blog/compromised-nightly-dependency/

During the holiday season in Australia, it's hot and summery, and we're all told to slip slop slap. But what is sunscreen, and how does it actually work? What does SPF mean? Does sunscreen cause cancer? Kade and Matt are joined once again by friend of the show, Dr Catriona Nguyen-Robertson, to talk all things sunscreen. If you loved what Cat had to say and want to find more from her, you can follow her on twitter @CatrionaNR, Instagram @nyuroscientist, and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_NtXSj9jH06SHNmsKhyfuQ). And, as always, you can find us @curiosityrat on twitter, instagram, and facebook, and send your listener questions in to curiosityrat@gmail.com. We also now have a Patreon! If you love our content and want to support us you can jump on to https://www.patreon.com/curiosityrat and become a patron. There is absolutely ZERO pressure but if you have as little as $1/month you can chuck it our way to help us out and show you appreciate all the time and effort that goes into making this show. How your skin looks to UV light: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9BqrSAHbTc Is Benzene in Sunscreen Giving You Cancer? Lab Muffin Beauty Science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykdJ7yj6snA    

This week on the Coaching Studio, I am happy to introduce you to Georgina Woudstra, MCC. This conversation centers around Coaching teams, not facilitating or advising teams, but using your coaching presence and curiosity to hold the space to support teams to self-discovery. It's an important and powerful distinction. Team coaching, with a capital C, is coaching at the heart and lends itself to Teams having insights and agency.Georgina shares how to stay a coach and empower teams. Team coaching takes a coach able to hold space. Remembering that there is Self, Team, and Situation. Georgina says, "I'm going to say it depends on the SPF because every team is different. Different sizes, contexts, lengths of programs, and levels of maturity. So my answer here is, in an ideal scenario, with a team that can hold it, and you may need to do more work to get the team to that place. But ideally, we mess around with the process as little as possible. See, the moment we facilitate breaking into small groups, and bring them back together, that's facilitating. They're not managing their own process. Right, but if the only invitation is to talk amongst yourselves for ten minutes, then you see, and they get to see how they self-organize. And, um, that's when the learning happens, not when we organize for them. Otherwise, they need us with them organizing their process. So if we get out of the way, the system will reveal itself good, bad, or indifferent."Georgina Woudstra is much more than an executive coach. She is a chief executive coach with more than 30 years of experience and a proven track record in coaching CEOs, executive boards, senior leaders, and top teams. She specializes in coaching new and established CEOs as well as CEOs in the making. Georgina is one of the leading lights globally in team coaching. In 2017, she founded the Team Coaching Studio to provide coaches with a pathway to mastery in team coaching, ultimately leading to professional accreditation with the leading professional bodies. She is one of the first coaches globally to be recognized by the International Coaching Federation with the Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching.Georgina Woudstra is much more than an executive coach. She is a chief executive coach with more than 30 years of experience and a proven track record in coaching CEOs, executive boards, senior leaders, and top teams. She specializes in coaching new and established CEOs and CEOs in the making. Georgina is one of the leading lights globally in the field of team coaching. In 2017, she founded the Team Coaching Studio to provide coaches with a pathway to mastery in team coaching, ultimately leading to professional accreditation with the leading professional bodies. She is one of the first coaches globally to be recognized by the International Coaching Federation with the Advanced Certificate in Team Coaching.Check out Georgina's book, Mastering The Art of Team Coaching, plus various book chapters and a regular column in Coaching at Work magazine called "Talking Teams."You can find Georgina on LinkedIn.Visit her website Team Coaching StudioFind the full transcript here. Host: Lyssa deHart, LICSW, MCC, BCC Music: Frolic by Harrison Amer Production Editing: Lyssa deHart Social Media and Communications: Michele Logan

Theme: What we got wrong? Look back at predictions and the year in NFTs   How did our predictions pan out?  Coinbase NFT Superbowl Games Music World cup NFT tracking tool value (NFTs as SAS) Don't trust solana The MERGE will boost the market Project: Etch by Deca  NFT News Justin Bieber, Jimmy Fallon Among Celebrities Sued Over BAYC Endorsements  O.G. Audio App Winamp Adds Ethereum and Polygon Music NFT Support - Decrypt  NFT Minting Goes Stratospheric on Sound.xyz  Apple Plans to Allow External iOS Apps in Potential Boon for Crypto, NFTs - Decrypt      Rough Transcript: [00:00:00] today on all about affordable NFTs, what went wrong, celebrated our wins, right? What went wrong? What went so wrong? We're looking back at our predictions, uh, and, and the year in NFTs a little bit. . I think this is what I like about the episode we did a little while back that just reviewed every single project that we recommended and just held up the mirror, and this is kind of doing that, but with what we were speculating about around this time last year, December, January, periods of time, and seeing how it either held up or didn't. [00:01:16] Uh, gosh. Anything new in your wallet? What's going on for, for you? Right. [00:01:21] Uh, no, nothing too new in my wallet. Recently, I talked a bit about that edge project. Haven't done much, uh, much else since then. Um, You know, I guess, uh, you know, looking at, uh, looking at moving some of the, the, the mistakes that I've made, you know, those, uh, end of year, uh, tax harvest, tax loss harvesting, so working on that a bit, but that's, uh, you know, that's not that exciting to talk about the, the lose the losses, right? [00:01:50] No, but I guess that's, that's true. I've also been doing a lot of, moving of, of pieces that I had. I, I think it's super important because, you know, I, I look back and there were moments where, Liquidating staked coins to buy NFTs. And like both went down, but at the moment of liquidation, those coins were actually worth quite a bit. [00:02:08] So really spend some time doing that because frankly, it's locked on the blockchain and if you don't do it now, you're gonna kick yourself to earn tax time. So, you know, go back, uh, and, and really, uh, look through those, look through those losses. And also think about any moments, like, I'm, I'm thinking back to my Peg Axi stuff where I was like, you know, VIS was pumping that was like that, like fake coin. [00:02:30] these like, uh, flying horses threw off and I couldn't believe how much money he was coming in. Sorry, which, which fake coin from which horses? Which fake coin? This is from Pey? Uh, not, uh, no, no. Not my, my very legitimate horse racing. Um, on Zed, which I love. But no, but like, here's the thing. Those coins were worth a lot. [00:02:50] I was getting them, I was selling them, but then I was like half of those money I was using to buy more stupid flying horses. Um, and so the part I saved, I don't regret, but the part I spent technically, those were taxable events. I bought an asset then, then went down. So just play that out in your mind as you're like doing your your N F T harvest. [00:03:09] Yeah, we talked about this a bit more on a recent episode, so if you didn't give that a listen, you know, because it said taxes in the, the title, um, might wanna go back and just give it a, a quick listen as you're, uh, getting towards the end of the year here. Yeah, yeah. I, that's true. All right. What have we got in the news? [00:03:27] Oh, right. So, man, we talked about some of the. It's the big grifts that were happening in. Man, this looks a bit , a bit like some of the ones, some of the items that we talked about in that last episode. But there are, uh, people coming after Justin Bieber, Jimmy Fallon, uh, for their basey, the, their board ape endorsements. [00:03:49] I'm not saying that those are related, but man, this does, uh, it doesn't look great and it, there were a lot of suspicions at the time of, you know, how much they were maybe getting paid. , you know, that wasn't on the chain. Uh, and that they were being, these were basically being purchased by Moon Pay on behalf of celebrities. [00:04:06] So it's not entirely clear how much, uh, the celebrities were paid versus getting paid. And we may see, uh, some of that information come to light with these lawsuits. Yep, yep. There's a big difference, right? If you're getting paid to sponsor a thing, you're need to disclose. , if we were running ads, if we were like, we were also try to be clear on, you know, this podcast when we talk about, oh, like I, you know, I make my jokes about Polygon, but yes, I hold polygon. [00:04:35] Like when we own a project, we, like I hold this project. You also have to say if that project was given to you or paid for by someone else, because there's an assumption from the market that you chose to freely of your own will go and, and buy a thing versus, no, no, I've been just paid. Paid to drink smart water. [00:04:53] Okay. That's. But you need to disclose that. And I think because of this like gray area of like, oh, it's an N F D, like it's, you know, totally on the blockchain, no one will tell like, if you're doing something wrong and you know it, like people are gonna find out , like, especially if you're a celebrity. Uh, I'm here, I'm here for those, uh, for those investigations. [00:05:14] I'm here for that. Yeah, I'm, I'm very curious to see what happens with those. Some get some, uh, some juicy information on those deals. All right. We get the next one, man. Actually, you called this. You freaking called this without. I never even saw it in the news. You were always calling this though, so you're good to have a I told you so. [00:05:32] Woo. Nice. . You get no money, no fanfare. Yeah. , I afraid. Oba. A whole bunch of smugness. You can be so smug. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. , smug mug. . Oh man. So we've got another old, you know, early internet era, nineties internet era, uh, company making it a comeback. I guess some of those. Os, uh, like Limewire and some of the others, but this one we've got Win amp coming back with a N F T with a music player that will support NFTs music. [00:06:05] NFTs. I actually think this is kind of cool idea. I don't know how to play music NFTs other than going to a website, and I know that that's not very, it's just not a way that I'm gonna ever listen to a collection of any, or, uh, listen to my music. It's having to go to a website for. Specific song that I wanna listen to. [00:06:24] So I haven't tried this out. I like the idea of actually being able to bring all of your collected music into one interface and play it all there. I can't, I, I was actually a little surprised to hear that Win Amp was, was around it all. Not clear to me if this is an original, you know, original, uh, company that's still working on this, or if it's been bought out. [00:06:47] But, eh, I used this project for, for years, back in the day. , there's something romantic about this. I, I, I was so ready to hate this, and I have to take a step back and say, yeah, I'm from also like an era where I would play a record. I would play a cassette, I'd play a cd, but I could, you know, in those moments, you'd be showing to the audience or to whomever, like especially if you're playing a record, like I have that record. [00:07:14] And for NFT music, a lot of it in your mind, you're like, oh, just play it on Spotify. You're like, that doesn't exist on Spotify. Yes, you could right click save, dump it into a file, push it onto a server, connect that server to your spot, like it gets a bit of headachy. But then there's also this like, oh, if you're playing it for friends or doing something like that, I could see it whole like device standalone to be like, in the same way that we're talking about digital picture frames, my mind immediately goes to, you know, it's an N F T player and it could have N FFC functionality so that if somebody else were. [00:07:48] They could be like, Hey, here's my album that I have. Like Oh cool. Just makes it a touch. More romantic. An I R L sense. Yeah, it does. And I, you know, I think they, yeah. They're onto something here. You know, we've , I dunno, this next one actually is, is maybe somewhat related. Uh, the SOUND XYZ platform has seen some, some impressive usage recently. [00:08:10] Uh, that's the, the title here is say that the NFT Minting goes Stratospheric on sound. . So this is, you know, I know what that, I'm not sure if I'd quite go that far, but, uh, you know, we do see. The, it's getting used. There are more people, uh, starting to get into, into music NFTs. Um, you know, it's something that actually I, well think, we'll maybe touch on this later, uh, that, you know, I had talked about early in the year, and for the most part I would say that we haven't seen music NFTs be a major, uh, Major impact on the N F T marketplace, um, overall this year. [00:08:45] And there's a lot still happening. Uh, you see a lot of new marketplaces, a lot of new tools being introduced for, for music creators. And you know, like to see that, that there are mints, uh, happening, even if it's not maybe, uh, you know, the, on everyone's, you know, the, you know, it's not the front page of open sea or anything like that, but there's a lot happening here. [00:09:06] But still alive. And they, uh, share some of their data. They've onboarded 240 artists, dropped 709 tracks, reached 6,200 unique collectors, minted 33,000 NFTs and paid 4 million directly to artists. I think that's, you know, pretty great. I think on the, the million, 4 million to artists, uh, that's something pretty impressive because, you know, it takes a whole lot on Spotify to like earn enough 0.0000. [00:09:34] You know, units of money to actually get there. So, uh, I like that final stat. I'm less impressed actually by, uh, by the mint volume there, you know, in terms of 33,000, you know, like that's like, you know, a, a Tuesday on, um, Tuesday and Open Sea. Hey, I mean, Reddit's, uh, certainly putting up much bigger minting numbers than that, but yeah, 4 million directly to artists. [00:10:00] I think there is something there. You know, as you said, the, the, the royalty structure in streaming music is not very good at all for, for artists, and I think that there's a, a real, uh, potential to solve, uh, some, some problems there anyway. Oh man, what a reversal here. So Apple, we talked about Apple a couple weeks ago in that they were going to impose a 30% tax on all transfers, including going, uh, trying to get a cut of gas fees, Ethereum gas fees for, for any transfer if even a from of a, of an N F T from one wallet to another. [00:10:38] Now, uh, seems like they, they maybe are, are listening to feed. Seems unlikely that Apple would do that. But, uh, I suppose if they actually do once in a while, listen to what people have to say and they have reversed that they're going to allow, uh, external, um, apps in that could bring in crypto and NFTs. I, I'm quite surprised by this, the idea that they will allow external with apps, This is, I mean, they've never allowed external apps at all. [00:11:05] So I think there is some something here, like there probably, there seems to be a distinction of what they'll allow in the, in the app store. These are, if you, early on there, there are many features that were not available on on iPhones and there are a lot of, uh, and he would jailbreak them, definitely used to do that, to even able to get a lot of other features that, uh, from apps that weren't allowed. [00:11:28] So I think it'll be somewhat like, That you'll be side loading these. Um, most Android phones also do this where you don't necessarily have to get an app through the official play, the Google Play Store, you can get them from unofficial, um, you can get an unofficial app. Uh, but it's sort of a use at your own risk, uh, mentality on those from, from Google, from Apple, I assume, with this one as well. [00:11:54] So, uh, Hey, I think this is better. You know, I think they maybe realize that there's , you know, that's a potential huge loss of, of a cust of customers if there's really no option to, to interact with, with crypto outside of paying 30%, which is, you know, just completely unfeasible. So what I'm reading, and obviously the news is updating by the, by the day here is. [00:12:18] They're preparing to open iOS competing app stores and that N F T component only for the European market, but not the American market. I missed that part. . Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but uh, as I go down that article, like, uh, oh yeah. Mark Irman writing for the Bloomberg says Apple is preparing to do this. [00:12:42] So it wasn't clear to me if I, I see that they're doing it to comply with those, if I've read it as they were, that was sort of the impetus. But not that it would be different for the two stores, but that is possible that they would act. Yeah, that it could just be that they allow it where they have to and, uh, and not allow it in the us. [00:13:05] Yeah, this isn't, I'm not dancing, I'm not dancing yet in terms of this being like, oh my God, everything's gonna change. I'm not heading back to Apple with my phone, but also choice anytime soon. . No, no, no. Uh, also though, like just as a reminder is technically impossible to charge a 30% fee of gas because that would change the transaction amount, which would change the gas, which would change the transaction. [00:13:33] It is a recursive loop that doesn't end a snake eating itself if you try to take it in Ethereum. But if you just said you try to take it in the actual transaction to it, if we're going to just say, well that was $12 and 38 cents in gas, we're going to charge you 30% on your Fiat Apple Pay connected credit card or whatever. [00:13:53] Um, , I'm sure they'd be happy to do that and, and send you the accounting for it too. Figured the way to do it, I guess. Yeah. , but absurd. Absurd. [00:14:04] Okay. I think, I think you talk about the, the project Etched by Deca. I know you were excited about it on the last episode. I've actually minted one of these and I, I think it's like pretty cool. So here's my, like, layman's understanding of this. Like I connected my wallet, I. It looked through my NFTs and said, Hey, take one of these and then shove it through this algorithm that makes it into this cool etch, which is like, you know, uh, obviously a generative art piece, circular multiple colors. [00:14:38] It looks like one of those, like, uh, Steno grafts. I'm pronouncing it wrong, but like, you know, where you have those like various designs where the pencil goes around in a circle? In a circle and, uh, it's a good looking thing. I guess I don't fully understand it. Maybe you can explain a bit more. Yeah. Uh, I could try to, I know that it's a, it's a experimental project from Deca, as we talked about. [00:15:01] And, and Matt Cain. And Matt Cain is the, uh, he's a very, one of the earlies. OG crypto artist. He's been around the space for a long time. He's, uh, one of the early, uh, super rare artists, has a lot of pieces there, um, that, um, go for a, a very premium price. He's also the artist behind the Gazers Arc Blocks collection that, um, I think is now at something like a 35 eighth floor. [00:15:26] Um, and it's a very interesting collection. He's a. Big time in the big time coder in the way he goes about his art. Um, those pieces, the, the Gazers collection changes over time in response to the moon phase. Um, and this project is definitely experimenting with his, with his coding and bringing in, uh, bringing in. [00:15:45] The, your own bringing in collections or pieces from your own N F T collection and then combining it with, um, with these works as just like, as George was saying, I think it's a stenograph maybe, is that ? I dunno the exact word wrong. I love somewhere someone was like, they don't know the answer. It's stenograph. [00:16:04] So then, yeah, then you've got the idea here is that you can etch these words onto the blockchain. You know, he's saying that we don't actually get words typically etched on the blockchain. So you, when you, you have to add text into this, um, in order to sort of commemorate, them to, to remember these words on, on the blockchain. [00:16:23] I don't know where this project. obviously in the future. I think, you know, there's a lot of potential for, you know, maybe using these to combined in, in further ways or even, you know, to string different words together. Um, you know, I have no idea what may play out here. I would just, I'd be surprised if this were the end of it. [00:16:43] Um, other projects that they, I mean, their DECA project is an ongoing, um, Just an ongoing creative project where you, they keep adding new levels that you can get to with points. Um, I think they, well, they've done, they've done a piece with, uh, with X copy in the past, um, that has given a holders access to, or given them, I, I think, I mean access, but has given raffle, um, Raffle entry, uh, two. [00:17:13] And I, you know, there, I just think that there's a, a good chance that they will, they will end up doing more with this. So probably worth minting, uh, one at least. And, you know, maybe a couple if you want to experiment with, uh, you know, putting maybe a phrase together. Yeah. I put my, one of my favorite, my noun, uh, my noun 83 in there, and I minted that out. [00:17:34] I think it's worth it for mint price, uh, and has upside to get to play with some tech. Um, yeah, I like this project. Uh, so it's deca.art. Yeah. Show us, show us your, your, your cool ideas in the, the discord. You know, show us the words that you came up with and, you know, just, just don't say anything too bad about us in, in, in the description. [00:17:52] Hello. That's right cuz whatever you put in the description is actually minted there. Worst idea ever. Terrible. It's actually kind of interesting. Um, Alrighty. So the theme, what we get wrong, so we're looking at back, you know, we scanned through our, what we were excited about, kind of podcasts and what was top of mind. [00:18:13] So last year around this time, we were very excited about. Coinbase, n f t. It was like when, when we actually have an episode when Coinbase, n f t as though it were like some magical event that would automatically turn all of the users of Coinbase into fervent rabid N F T monsters. Uh, how did that play out, Andrew? [00:18:38] Ah, I mean, Coinbase NFT is out , um, it's. Uh, maybe it's maybe not as big of an impact as we thought. Is that, does anybody understating it? ? I'd put it at the top because I think it's the number one thing we got wrong. I learned a lot actually. Whenever my expectation versus reality is like that high a delta, it really helps me like look back and be like, like, what don't I understand? [00:19:06] And I. From that point, I, I think was too much in the world of like how excited I just was about the ownership of NFTs. And I thought when other people got this opportunity, my assumption was that it was a barrier to entry. Like it was some sort of like, oh, too hard to cross into this ability to purchase things and Coinbase will make it easy. [00:19:28] And it's, it's not about ease of purchase necessarily, uh, or at least the way they. . Um, it's really about the different ways that functionality has to be built into things. So, you know, I, uh, I had this assumed thing that would be automatically adopted by everyone has of the market, and instead it was like a dead feature out of the door. [00:19:48] Yeah, I think there was maybe more self selection than we realized in the people who were interested in NFTs. They had largely already found their way to. To self custody to to use meta mask. Yeah, largely meta mask. , maybe some other , some other, you know, extensions, you know, and at the end of the day, you know, we're we're saying it was a huge hurdle and there's a lot of people, if you've really wanted to get into it, it's not as, as, you know, people listening to this, you know, you know that you can get into NFTs and, um, it's not the most technically challenging thing if you, if you really want to do it. [00:20:25] So, you know, the idea that maybe that was the biggest hindrance, um, to holding. You know, to holding people back, you know, that were, were into crypto, but didn't want to, to get into, or that, that wanted to get into NFTs and just didn't have access to it. Yeah, I think we made a big mistake there and it's definitely something I've tried to keep in mind. [00:20:45] you know, as, as new projects have come out, new products are released, . Okay. Another one, sort of a prediction thing we were looking forward to was the Super Bowl. We thought that NFTs would be featured prominently and crypto would be featured prominently. Following onto adoption, what we didn't realize is that one of the biggest advertisers for crypto in the Super Bowl was actually one of the largest, uh, perpetrated Ponzi schemes in recorded history. [00:21:12] Ftx being the leader out there paying for a lot of place. . And so it actually had the complete inverse effect. Yeah, there was, I mean, we did see a few ads, huh. Um, from some big companies, but yeah, it definitely did not bring people in, in the, yeah. In the end we saw a lot of celebrities pumping N F T or probably crypto, that's not looking so good anymore. [00:21:36] It definitely, again, you know, I think we're, it was the idea that, you know, More exposure, just gonna bring people in. And you know, we had already, we had seen that wave. I think that wasn't what was going to do it, man. That's, uh, that was a big miss. I think it's surprising that, uh, we're still seeing some companies talk about trying to do a another, uh, or to. [00:21:59] Invest in a Super Bowl ad, um, after we saw a pretty considerable amount spent last year and ooh, I can't imagine that the R ROI has been good on any of the, that money . Yeah. I feel that people are still feeling the rug burn, but we'll see. Uh, okay. Another one, games. We were incredibly bullish. I was leading the charge on this, I'll say like every game. [00:22:21] I was like, someone's gonna figure this out. Someone's going to. , you know, the next big thing out there. And what happened was there would be hype cycles, and they were far shorter than I realized. Uh, you know, I started this episode talking about like some of the things I'm, I'm selling from Pegasi, which completely imploded, but you know, I, you know, you can look at all pretty much games. [00:22:45] Even Red Village. We were really excited about it. Just, uh, it wasn't there in terms of being able. Figure out an economic model that sustains right play to earn or play and earn. We were kind of always like, oh, which will, you know, be the thing that the truth is, it doesn't work yet. You know, if the game doesn't start off as fundamentally fun, addicting, something I wanna be a part of. [00:23:09] uh, you, you, you really have a hard time, I think starting with an N F T first mindset versus a game first. Um, and we haven't seen it in the market. We haven't seen, uh, even the largest ones like Atlas, um, you know, come to fruition in any meaningful way. Yeah. I don't know. What do you see on this? Yeah, I mean, I think there was, I know there's been a ton of investment in different gaming projects and we have not seen the. [00:23:38] Uh, the adoption that you'd expect at this point? You know, I thought, and I know that there, there, it can take some time. I am hoping that, you know, we still see something. However, I think we've talked about this before. I think that there's a strong, a stronger chance that we get a simple mobile app type of game that's. [00:23:57] You know, maybe not all that impressive. And it is just what, you know, it gets a lot of users and, and you slowly, or people don't even realize that it's happening. Um, and maybe isn't this, this nf this huge invested, uh, investment, um, N F T project that everybody's paying attention to. You know, I think maybe that's too obvious and. [00:24:19] Trying to go about it a little, uh, too head on. Um, you know, I could be wrong, but it feels like there's gonna be a different, a different tactic that ends up working here that, that maybe, uh, makes better use of the blockchain or integrates with a blockchain in ways that we beyond just owning an asset in a game. [00:24:39] Yeah, I mean, for all that said, you know, AXI Infinity for the past seven days has done 364 Eth Ethan. , like that's real, right? 37,000 sales, like people are still playing as Yeah. There's still interest. There's still, I mean, I think that's the thing, you know, you're seeing that there's still interest, there's still people there and you, maybe we are out of some of the hype cycles. [00:25:00] You know, the, the prices have certainly come down, but that's true everywhere. And uh, uh, there was a ton of investment. As I said. I think that probably, uh, Increase the, the value of some of these with the, the expectations that there was going to be things come, you know, releases coming right away and, and more investment and, and more, uh, more public players coming into the space. [00:25:23] And, uh, you know, gets, gets back to what we've said. You know, it's, this is a. We haven't seen a sudden surge. This is more of a slow growth, uh, type of, uh, at least right now, that's where we are in, in, in the crypto space in general. I mean, we are not at the stage of seeing, uh, you know, just a, a surge of people come in and. [00:25:43] I think that's gonna be true with the games too. We're gonna have things that are crypto native, that, that maybe get some, get some, get some buzz in the crypto area first and then hopefully can, you know, lead to things that, that get more mass adoption. I don't know if those are actually the same type of game though. [00:25:58] Yeah, yeah. It's a good question. Uh, another one we were, I think you, so you, you were a bit more excited about this than I music, you know, looking at the opportunity for music, NFTs, I mean, on the heels of hearing sound, X, y, z calling, calling their numbers stratospheric, which, you know, I, I don't know, 30, 33,000, I dunno that I would say stratospheric, but hey, but you know, we got win amp. [00:26:24] Um, you know, that's what's, you know, no, I'm not gonna take this as a win. But, you know, I, I do think there's still something more coming here. There is a lot of investment as said, there are. There is real usage. It's relatively small, and the fact that there is a problem with, with how music is distributed and, and paid for in the, like the digital distribution of, of music is, is broken. [00:26:49] I think there is, you know, potential here because of that more so than than industries where you see it working pretty well. Um, you know, there's a bigger opportunity. . Yeah. I think it's got a more near term success probability because you're talking about artists with true fans, and those are two critical ingredients, I think, to generating that type of value, um, and utility. [00:27:14] It can also, you could imagine, blend, uh, blend into IRL events pretty elegantly. Um, I think there's tremendous opportunity there. I think it's just, uh, Got a bit more road, thank goodness, get to that market that Taylor Swift did not get involved with ftx. There, there there's a story that they had tried to sign here to a hundred million deal, but if they had actually done, I don't know, maybe it would've turns out that would've saved them or something. [00:27:41] You know, they, they would've handled the ticket thing and just pocketed all that money. , yes. Yeah. The joke that I was like, Aaron is just like, I mean, It's, uh, I'm very impressed. I, I keep waiting to hear any sort of statement from, uh, Taylor Swift's team, but like what, um, what remarkable presence of awareness to be like, why, eh, I don't like it. [00:28:04] Something smelled like, cuz a hundred million dollars is, yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, for anyone, a lot of money. I don't care who you. . And so something must have thrown off an alarm bell. But the joke of the matter is that Sam made a calculation, right? Like this is a smart human, that he would've just taken all of the fans money, who would've obviously wanted to buy NFTs on their platform and paid her with it, and then kept everything left over, right? [00:28:31] Like, can you make more money? Right? Like that's essentially what you're doing. You're buying someone's celebrity, monetizing. taking the people's money who think that they're saving money and putting money into an investment account or savings account or stablecoin on your platform, buying an n f e on your platform, uh, and you're just taking and paying that person and you can just keep repeating that again and again, which is very interesting. [00:28:53] Um, and it's destructive force in it. So that did make me think the other part of this, you know, we're talking about the music distribution and how digital music is played, and we also know. The ticketing industry is very broken, and that's where I think you could see some of these come together. And I know that there's a problem with, with the access to venues, and a lot of the artists that we're talking about on, on these, you know, that are producing on sound at X z I don't think are, are at the level of, of needing to worry about that, you know, the, the larger venues at this point, you know, maybe this does need to start from a, you know, a, a more grounds up kind of, of, of manner. [00:29:30] And there's something to, to, to combining those, giving access to your biggest fans, giving them the option to buy tickets ahead of others, and you really understand who the fans are. Not giving access because they're a, you know, a Capital One Gold, whatever member, you know, that doesn't show that you're a, a fan, you know, if you, if you have a, yeah, you can have that n ft. [00:29:49] You, I mean, yeah, maybe you bought the N F T, but you've at least had to do something to. To, to show you're a fan and if you're, you know, if you've been along for a long time, you've got that NFT cheap, you know, at when before they were, before they were anything. And it, it's almost like, yeah, I, I knew the band before they were played, you know, before they made it to the top 40, whatever, you know, that kind of the idea before they blew up and, and you can prove it. [00:30:12] Yeah. And, and those artists, those artists are there now. So maybe we do an episode where we look at Sound X, y, Z and be like, are there. Are there upsides there? Can we play in that? Um, or is, oh boy, that's a tough one. No one of many, right? It's really hard. I'm like, I like listening to music, but I'm sure someone can do it. [00:30:30] Pacemaker or someone. Yes, someone can do it. Uh, all right, I like that music tee. Uh, I can go quickly through this one. World Cup. , I thought, uh, the number one attentive sporting event in the world combined with NFTs and soccer would do something. It didn't. Um, new coins were sort of created fan coins. Uh, there's definitely people making money, but the people that are making money are the ones that are launching projects, not holding onto projects and flipping. [00:30:56] I've seen, yeah, I think they're running some those riff play. See last episode. What do you need? A major event with attention. Uh, yeah. So not, not much there. If you were gonna make money, you would've done stupid soccer balls based on the country and seen how many, like, go and do some incentive there, like it, um, a nothing burger. [00:31:20] And so a thing that I'm gonna realize similar to Coinbase and Super Bowl. is that future event is already priced into whatever asset you're looking at, um, in many ways, uh, because the new attention is not bringing new customers at a level that's gonna move the price in any substantive way. And that's what I'm seeing. [00:31:42] All right. Uh, another one. We were very bullish on N F T tracking tools, um, and NFTs and sas, and we're like, oh, despite our own reservations, The SaaS. Yeah, no, we pointed out the problem and then we still, I mean, you know, I still like my wagni, uh, wagni tool, but like, I didn't need it, use it enough that it's been worth it, but it's not the value of, of the, the NFT itself is certainly not worth it. [00:32:08] Yeah, no. Um, and so NFTs is SaaS, um, don't really work. And when we say that, we just mean when you buy this subscription access to some software. that requires ongoing maintenance, but you just have a one-time fee forever, like very clearly, like doesn't necessarily work. Um, anyway, we didn't see the value there. [00:32:28] Um, how about this one? We had a general, uh, shade against Solana and like not trusting Solana NFTs and things on there. Uh, we did, Hey, we had an open mind. We had an op. I like that about us. We had an open mind. We did dabble on there. We did play on there. Um, but how, how do you feel like this turned. In terms of our prediction, oh man, pat and I, pat and ourselves on the back here. [00:32:52] Right. We have stayed away from that. Yeah. It's a bit of a, um, you know, I think it is one that was easy to get caught up in. And look, it's not that like everything else has been perfect, but that has had risk from the start. You know, when you don't have access, some of the time it's as good as like, , I mean essentially never. [00:33:12] Um, so I, that always scared me, the downtime over there and, whew, I'm glad to, to not be involved in that ecosystem. My fear was also around the percent that investors held and would be dumping on the market. Mm-hmm. . And again, if you are paying a price for a thing in that currency, and then, I don't know, let's say a bunch of investors are looking to dump their bags on you as quickly as. [00:33:38] Possible gonna do it. Uh, that's gonna have a very, very negative impact on, um, on the price. Um, you know, and then like the SPF debacle dropped that price from 30 from, it was dancing in the thirties for a while down to less than half. So it was dancing in like $12 range. But, uh, a year ago, do you wanna play the game, Andrew? [00:33:59] Guess that price? What was Solana at? Well, a year ago it was Solana at. . Yeah. A year ago, if we were like, buy some one OFTs, that's the place to be. One 30. You plan at home. Gotta get a higher number. A little higher than one 30. Keep going. One 60, keep going. Uhoh. Two 30, . There we go. It got up to 1 97 so like, oh boy, just take a pause. [00:34:26] Right? Like this time last year we were throwing shade and so on it cuz we were saying, I don't know if I trust the underlying asset. Now, yes, you can throw eggs at Ethereum all you want, but it sure as shit didn't do this type of drop where it goes from 1 97 down to a. $14. What happens to that N F T? You bought a 200, remember that episode? [00:34:46] You did. What is, you know, when a a hundred percent gain is in a gain? This is exactly what we were talking about. Yeah. Oh, my N F T went up three x in value. I'm sorry, the coin you were on went down 99% in value. What does that look like? Well dig aloe. Look at Solana. Well, that's what that looks like. [00:35:02] That's what that looks like. So, um, you know, you're, you're picking up pennies in front of a steamroller if you're trying to flip on a, on a platform that's got that much hype. Um, so the things we've got wrong, I will take it. But, um, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty, pretty bullish on that one. I think we, uh, hopefully guided somebody away. [00:35:23] Decisions like that. All right. Uh, and we were, you know, related here. We nailed this. I love, we're laughing on this. We nailed it. did we, we really focused on, on the eth the Ethereum network. We did. Uh, so we have in here, the merge will boost the market. And this was sort of a broad sentiment that I think we had moving in the air. [00:35:46] I can't wait for the merge. It was, it was gonna come out in June, then it was gonna come back, whatever. Uh, No, you don't think, has that not I haven't really looked at, no, no, you, no. I've been holding off and looking at the price cuz you know I'm gonna be untake and I didn't really wanna look at the price until I could Untake so. [00:36:07] We're not, not doing so good. Not so hot . No, it's uh, it's not right. Like, so the merge, here's what I will say. I'm excited that the NFTs that I own on Ethereum are green by the sort of measurement of energy storage usage. Ah, not in the green. I like that. Uh, they're not in the green . They are green, but not the way I kind of wish they were. [00:36:32] Right. So the market didn't respond. It didn't. , uh, the type of, um, I guess hype and adoption of the Ethereum network. You know, it's just people still building. So, uh, even when the event impacts the underlying technology of the thing, making it more stable and secure. Uh, and by the way, ultrasound money, because guess what Ethereum is doing, the operation of it, selling block space is technically reducing the overall supply. [00:37:03] you know, month by month, uh, because of the new way that staking works, uh, which is pretty cool. Uh, but no one cares. Uh, no one cares about that. And we thought they would, they don't . Oh, that, yeah, it was, you know, glad that it was, uh, a relative non-event because if it had, it had a potential to, to really go bad if it didn't go smoothly. [00:37:26] So I guess that's good, but it definitely was not a catalyst for, for, uh, the market in any way. ? Nope, Nope. Thought it would be. So I think here's a big takeaway. Like, um, the news is already priced in there. It is. Don't get excited about a thing in the future. The news is already priced in. Um, . I would, I would say playing in the right areas makes a lot of sense. [00:37:54] So like, in a macro sense, uh, I still like the idea of playing in the, the domain of music. I, I am very wary about games. I have learned a lot about the game dynamics that don't work. I, I'm nervous about like, going all in on any other game. Um, so I'm probably not doing that anytime. We may have to get into another, maybe we'll have to get another predictions for what's coming, but I guess wanna go through predictions. [00:38:19] I'm sorry. We'll do a prediction episode so we could be really wrong. Again, , I would definitely steer away from, from any of the ideas that any a signal event would be a, a big catalyst for either price or participation in, in NFTs. You know, that's, I, I've, everyone is not coming. That's the banner. Everyone is not coming. [00:38:41] It's gonna be a trick. . Yeah. I mean hopefully incoming, you know, hopefully it's a , I think. I'm kidding. Not a slow trickle out . Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't say which way. Uh, alright, well there we have it. Um, I think maybe, we'll, we'll go for our predictions episodes. If, if we feel, uh, if we feel motivated, we'll come up with some stuff. [00:39:05] Yeah. We're really, we're coming up to the end of the year again, man. It's, uh, yeah, definitely been a different year than, than what a, than what either of us thought it would be. And I think than, than what most people thought it would be. Man. Have you look at back at just the crypto has been dominated by, Uh, just scammer after scammer and grifter and, uh, all looking like it was the legit stuff. [00:39:28] And man, I'm, I'm ready for, ready for something new. . Yeah, I, um, I, I think if you survive, like you weren't, you certainly weren't early when you were coming in to 2020 ones like hot market. But if you're coming in now and you've survived this, like you are officially. Yeah, you're official og. I think if you've survived this market and are still interested in doing this and, and experimenting hurting stripes, whether or not that's rewarded, who knows? [00:39:55] Yeah. You have stripes. I'll mint them for you at the low, low price of how much you willing to pay. Yeah. . . Alrighty. Yeah. Uh, hey, if you haven't gotten us a gift already, leave us a review on whatever player. Are you happening listening. and uh, yeah, we'll probably have another episode, but in case we don't, uh, have a happy holidays.

Nadia Asparouhova is currently researching what the new tech elite will look like at nadia.xyz. She is also the author of Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software.We talk about how:* American philanthropy has changed from Rockefeller to Effective Altruism* SBF represented the Davos elite rather than the Silicon Valley elite,* Open source software reveals the limitations of democratic participation,* & much more.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Timestamps(0:00:00) - Intro(0:00:26) - SBF was Davos elite(0:09:38) - Gender sociology of philanthropy(0:16:30) - Was Shakespeare an open source project?(0:22:00) - Need for charismatic leaders(0:33:55) - Political reform(0:40:30) - Why didn't previous wealth booms lead to new philanthropic movements?(0:53:35) - Creating a 10,000 year endowment(0:57:27) - Why do institutions become left wing?(1:02:27) - Impact of billionaire intellectual funding(1:04:12) - Value of intellectuals(1:08:53) - Climate, AI, & Doomerism(1:18:04) - Religious philanthropyTranscriptThis transcript was autogenerated and thus may contain errors.Nadia Asparouhova 0:00:00You start with this idea that like democracy is green and like we should have tons of tons of people participating tons of people participate and then it turns out that like most participation is actually just noise and not that useful. That really squarely puts SPF into like the finance crowd much more so than startups or crypto. Founders will always talk about like building and like startups are like so important or whatever and like what are all of them doing in their spare time? They're like reading books. They're reading essays and like and then those like books and essays influence how they think about stuff. Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:26Okay, today I have the pleasure of talking with Nadia Asperova. She is previously the author of Working in Public, the Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software and she is currently researching what the new tech elite will look like. Nadia, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, okay, so this is a perfect timing obviously given what's been happening with SPF. How much do you think SPF was motivated by effective altruism? Where do you place them in the whole dimensionality of idea machines and motivations? Nadia Asparouhova 0:01:02Yeah, I mean, I know there's sort of like conflicting accounts going around. Like, I mean, just from my sort of like character study or looking at SPF, it seems pretty clear to me that he is sort of inextricably tied to the concepts of utilitarianism that then motivate effective altruism. The difference for me in sort of like where I characterize effective altruism is I think it's much closer to sort of like finance Wall Street elite mindset than it is to startup mindset, even though a lot of people associate effective altruism with tech people. So yeah, to me, like that really squarely puts SPF in sort of like the finance crowd much more so than startups or crypto. And I think that's something that gets really misunderstood about him. Dwarkesh Patel 0:01:44Interesting. Yeah, I find that interesting because if you think of Jeff Bezos, when he started Amazon, he wasn't somebody like John Perry Barlow, who was just motivated by the free philosophy of the internet. You know, he saw a graph of internet usage going up into the right and he's like, I should build a business on top of this. And in a sort of loopholy way, try to figure out like, what is the thing that is that is the first thing you would want to put a SQL database on top of to ship and produce? And I think that's what books was the answer. So and obviously, he also came from a hedge fund, right? Would you play somebody like him also in the old finance crowd rather than as a startup founder? Nadia Asparouhova 0:02:22Yeah, it's kind of a weird one because he's both associated with the early computing revolution, but then also AWS was sort of like what kicked off all of the 2010s sort of startup. And I think in the way that he's started thinking about his public legacy and just from sort of his public behavior, I think he fits much more squarely now in that sort of tech startup elite mindset of the 2010s crowd more so than the Davos elite crowd of the 2000s. Dwarkesh Patel 0:02:47What in specific are you referring to? Nadia Asparouhova 0:02:49Well, he's come out and been like sort of openly critical about a lot of like Davos type institutions. He kind of pokes fun at mainstream media and for not believing in him not believing in AWS. And I think he's because he sort of like spans across like both of these generations, he's been able to see the evolution of like how maybe like his earlier peers function versus the sort of second cohort of peers that he came across. But to me, he seems much more like, much more of the sort of like startup elite mindset. And I can kind of back up a little bit there. But what I associate with the Davos Wall Street kind of crowd is much more of this focus on quantitative thinking, measuring efficiency. And then also this like globalist mindset, like I think that the vision that they want to ensure for the world is this idea of like a very interconnected world where we, you know, sort of like the United Nations kind of mindset. And that is really like literally what the Davos gathering is. Whereas Bezos from his actions today feels much closer to the startup, like Y Combinator post AWS kind of mindset of founders that were really made their money by taking these non-obvious bets on talented people. So they were much less focused on credentialism. They were much more into this idea of meritocracy. I think we sort of forget like how commonplace this trope is of like, you know, the young founder in a dorm room. And that was really popularized by the 2010s cohort of the startup elite of being someone that may have like absolutely no skills, no background in industry, but can somehow sort of like turn the entire industry over on its head. And I think that was sort of like the unique insight of the tech startup crowd. And yeah, when I think about just sort of like some of the things that Bezos is doing now, it feels like she identifies with that much more strongly of being this sort of like lone cowboy or having this like one talented person with really great ideas who can sort of change the world. I think about the, what is it called? The Altos Institute or the new like science initiative that he put out where he was recruiting these like scientists from academic institutions and paying them really high salaries just to attract like the very best top scientists around the world. That's much more of that kind of mindset than it is about like putting faith in sort of like existing institutions, which is what we would see from more of like a Davos kind of mindset. Dwarkesh Patel 0:05:16Interesting. Do you think that in the future, like the kids of today's tech billionaires will be future aristocrats? So effective altruism will be a sort of elite aristocratic philosophy. They'll be like tomorrow's Rockefellers. Nadia Asparouhova 0:05:30Yeah, I kind of worry about that actually. I think of there as being like within the US, we were kind of lucky in that we have these two different types of elites. We have the aristocratic elites and we have meritocratic elites. Most other countries I think basically just have aristocratic elites, especially comparing like the US to Britain in this way. And so in the aristocratic model, your wealth and your power is sort of like conferred to you by previous generations. You just kind of like inherit it from your parents or your family or whomever. And the upside of that, if there is an upside, is that you get really socialized into this idea of what does it mean to be a public steward? What does it mean to think of yourself and your responsibility to the rest of society as a privileged elite person? In the US, we have this really great thing where you can kind of just, you know, we have the American dream, right? So lots of people that didn't grow up with money can break into the elite ranks by doing something that makes them really successful. And that's like a really special thing about the US. So we have this whole class of meritocratic elites who may not have aristocratic backgrounds, but ended up doing something within their lifetimes that made them successful. And so, yeah, I think it's a really cool thing. The downside of that being that you don't really get like socialized into what does it mean to have this fortune and do something interesting with your money. You don't have this sort of generational benefit that the aristocratic elites have of presiding over your land or whatever you want to call it, where you're sort of learning how to think about yourself in relation to the rest of society. And so it's much easier to just kind of like hoard your wealth or whatever. And so when you think about sort of like what are the next generations, the children of the meritocratic elites going to look like or what are they going to do, it's very easy to imagine kind of just becoming aristocratic elites in the sense of like, yeah, they're just going to like inherit the money from their families. And they haven't also really been socialized into like how to think about their role in society. And so, yeah, all the meritocratic elites eventually turn into aristocratic elites, which is where I think you start seeing this trend now towards people wanting to sort of like spend down their fortunes within their lifetime or within a set number of decades after they die because they kind of see what happened in previous generations and are like, oh, I don't want to do that. Dwarkesh Patel 0:07:41Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting. You mentioned that the aristocratic elites have the feel that they have the responsibility to give back, I guess, more so than the meritocratic elites. But I believe that in the U.S., the amount of people who give to philanthropy and the total amount they give is higher than in Europe, right, where they probably have a higher ratio of aristocratic elites. Wouldn't you expect the opposite if the aristocratic elites are the ones that are, you know, inculcated to give back? Nadia Asparouhova 0:08:11Well, I assume like most of the people that are the figures about sort of like Americans giving back is spread across like all Americans, not just the wealthiest. Dwarkesh Patel 0:08:19Yeah. So you would predict that among the top 10 percent of Americans, there's less philanthropy than the top 10 percent of Europeans? Uh, there's... Sorry, I'm not sure I understand the question. I guess, does the ratio of meritocratic to aristocratic elites change how much philanthropy there is among the elites? Nadia Asparouhova 0:08:45Yeah, I mean, like here we have much more of a culture of like even among aristocratic elites, this idea of like institution building or like large donations to like build institutions, whereas in Europe, a lot of the public institutions are created by government. And there's sort of this mentality of like private citizens don't experiment with public institutions. That's the government's job. And you see that sort of like pervasively throughout all of like European cultures. Like when we want something to change in public society, we look to government to like regulate or change it. Whereas in the U.S., it's kind of much more like choose your own adventure. And we don't really see the government as like the sole provider or shaper of public institutions. We also look at private citizens and like there's so many things that like public institutions that we have now that were not started by government, but were started by private philanthropists. And that's like a really unusual thing about the U.S. Dwarkesh Patel 0:09:39There's this common pattern in philanthropy where a guy will become a billionaire, and then his wife will be heavily involved with or even potentially in charge of, you know, the family's philanthropic efforts. And there's many examples of this, right? Like Bill and Melinda Gates, you know, Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Dustin Moskovitz. So what is the consequence of this? How is philanthropy, the causes and the foundations, how are they different because of this pattern? Nadia Asparouhova 0:10:15Well, I mean, I feel like we see that pattern, like the problem is that what even is philanthropy is changing very quickly. So we can say historically that, not even historically, in recent history, in recent decades, that has probably been true. That wasn't true in say like late 1800s, early 1900s. It was, you know, Carnegie and Rockefeller were the ones that were actually doing their own philanthropy, not their spouses. So I'd say it's a more recent trend. But now I think we're also seeing this thing where like a lot of wealthy people are not necessarily doing their philanthropic activities through foundations anymore. And that's true both within like traditional philanthropy sector and sort of like the looser definition of what we might consider to be philanthropy, depending on how you define it, which I kind of more broadly want to define as like the actions of elites that are sort of like, you know, public facing activities. But like even within sort of traditional philanthropy circles, we have like, you know, the 5.1c3 nonprofit, which is, you know, traditionally how people, you know, house all their money in a foundation and then they do their philanthropic activities out of that. But in more recent years, we've seen this trend towards like LLCs. So Emerson Collective, I think, might have been maybe the first one to do it. And that was Steve Jobs' Philanthropic Foundation. And then Mark Zuckerberg with Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also used an LLC. And then since then, a lot of other, especially within sort of like tech wealth, we've seen that move towards people using LLCs instead of 5.1c3s because they, it just gives you a lot more flexibility in the kinds of things you can fund. You don't just have to fund other nonprofits. And they also see donor advised funds. So DAFs, which are sort of this like hacky workaround to foundations as well. So I guess point being that like this sort of mental model of like, you know, one person makes a ton of money and then their spouse kind of directs these like nice, feel good, like philanthropic activities, I think is like, may not be the model that we continue to move forward on. And I'm kind of hopeful or curious to see like, what does a return to like, because we've had so many new people making a ton of money in the last 10 years or so, we might see this return to sort of like the Gilded Age style of philanthropy where people are not necessarily just like forming a philanthropic foundation and looking for the nicest causes to fund, but are actually just like thinking a little bit more holistically about like, how do I help build and create like a movement around a thing that I really care about? How do I think more broadly around like funding companies and nonprofits and individuals and like doing lots of different, different kinds of activities? Because I think like the broader goal that like motivates at least like the new sort of elite classes to want to do any of this stuff at all. I don't really think philanthropy is about altruism. I just, I think like the term philanthropy is just totally fraud and like refers to too many different things and it's not very helpful. But I think like the part that I'm interested in at least is sort of like what motivates elites to go from just sort of like making a lot of money and then like thinking about themselves to them thinking about sort of like their place in broader public society. And I think that starts with thinking about how do I control like media, academia, government are sort of like the three like arms of the public sector. And we think of it in that way a little bit more broadly where it's really much more about sort of like maintaining control over your own power, more so than sort of like this like altruistic kind of, you know, whitewash. Dwarkesh Patel 0:13:41Yeah. Nadia Asparouhova 0:13:42Then it becomes like, you know, there's so many other like creative ways to think about like how that might happen. Dwarkesh Patel 0:13:49That's, that's, that's really interesting. That's a, yeah, that's a really interesting way of thinking about what it is you're doing with philanthropy. Isn't the word noble descended from a word that basically means to give alms to people like if you're in charge of them, you will give alms to them. And in a way, I mean, it might have been another word I'm thinking of, but in a way, yeah, a part of what motivates altruism, not obviously all of it, but part of it is that, yeah, you influence and power. Not even in a necessarily negative connotation, but that's definitely what motivates altruism. So having that put square front and center is refreshing and honest, actually. Nadia Asparouhova 0:14:29Yeah, I don't, I really don't see it as like a negative thing at all. And I think most of the like, you know, writing and journalism and academia that focuses on philanthropy tends to be very wealth critical. I'm not at all, like I personally don't feel wealth critical at all. I think like, again, sort of returning to this like mental model of like aristocratic and meritocratic elites, aristocratic elites are able to sort of like pass down, like encode what they're supposed to be doing in each generation because they have this kind of like familial ties. And I think like on the meritocratic side, like if you didn't have any sort of language around altruism or public stewardship, then like, it's like, you need to kind of create that narrative for the meritocratically or else, you know, there's just like nothing to hold on to. So I think like, it makes sense to talk in those terms. Andrew Carnegie being sort of the father of modern philanthropy in the US, like, wrote these series of essays about wealth that were like very influential and where he sort of talks about this like moral obligation. And I think like, really, it was kind of this like, a quiet way for him to, even though it was ostensibly about sort of like giving back or, you know, helping lift up the next generation of people, the next generation of entrepreneurs. Like, I think it really was much more of a protective stance of saying, like, if he doesn't frame it in this way, then people are just going to knock down the concept of wealth altogether. Dwarkesh Patel 0:15:50Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's really interesting. And it's interesting, in which cases this kind of influence has been successful and worse not. When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, has there been any counterfactual impact on how the Washington Post has run as a result? I doubt it. But you know, when Musk takes over Twitter, I guess it's a much more expensive purchase. We'll see what the influence is negative or positive. But it's certainly different than what Twitter otherwise would have been. So control over media, it's, I guess it's a bigger meme now. Let me just take a digression and ask about open source for a second. So based on your experience studying these open source projects, do you find the theory that Homer and Shakespeare were basically container words for these open source repositories that stretched out through centuries? Do you find that more plausible now, rather than them being individuals, of course? Do you find that more plausible now, given your, given your study of open source? Sorry, what did? Nadia Asparouhova 0:16:49Less plausible. What did? Dwarkesh Patel 0:16:51Oh, okay. So the idea is that they weren't just one person. It was just like a whole bunch of people throughout a bunch of centuries who composed different parts of each story or composed different stories. Nadia Asparouhova 0:17:02The Nicholas Berbaki model, same concept of, you know, a single mathematician who's actually comprised of like lots of different. I think it's actually the opposite would be sort of my conclusion. We think of open source as this very like collective volunteer effort. And I think, use that as an excuse to not really contribute back to open source or not really think about like how open source projects are maintained. Because we were like, you know, you kind of have this bystander effect where you're like, well, you know, someone's taking care of it. It's volunteer oriented. Like, of course, there's someone out there taking care of it. But in reality, it actually turns out it is just one person. So maybe it's a little bit more like a Wizard of Oz type model. It's actually just like one person behind the curtain that's like, you know, doing everything. And you see this huge, you know, grandeur and you think there must be so many people that are behind it. It's one person. Yeah, and I think that's sort of undervalued. I think a lot of the rhetoric that we have about open source is rooted in sort of like early 2000s kind of starry eyed idea about like the power of the internet and the idea of like crowdsourcing and Wikipedia and all this stuff. And then like in reality, like we kind of see this convergence from like very broad based collaborative volunteer efforts to like narrowing down to kind of like single creators. And I think a lot of like, you know, single creators are the people that are really driving a lot of the internet today and a lot of cultural production. Dwarkesh Patel 0:18:21Oh, that's that's super fascinating. Does that in general make you more sympathetic towards the lone genius view of accomplishments in history? Not just in literature, I guess, but just like when you think back to how likely is it that, you know, Newton came up with all that stuff on his own versus how much was fed into him by, you know, the others around him? Nadia Asparouhova 0:18:40Yeah, I think so. I feel I've never been like a big, like, you know, great founder theory kind of person. I think I'm like, my true theory is, I guess that ideas are maybe some sort of like sentient, like, concept or virus that operates outside of us. And we are just sort of like the vessels through which like ideas flow. So in that sense, you know, it's not really about any one person, but I do think I think I tend to lean like in terms of sort of like, where does creative, like, creative effort come from? I do think a lot of it comes much more from like a single individual than it does from with some of the crowds. But everything just serves like different purposes, right? Like, because I think like, within open source, it's like, not all of open source maintenance work is creative. In fact, most of it is pretty boring and dredgerous. And that's the stuff that no one wants to do. And that, like, one person kind of got stuck with doing and that's really different from like, who created a certain open source projects, which is a little bit more of that, like, creative mindset. Dwarkesh Patel 0:19:44Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. Do you think more projects in open source, so just take a popular repository, on average, do you think that these repositories would be better off if, let's say a larger percentage of them where pull requests were closed and feature requests were closed? You can look at the code, but you can't interact with it or its creators anyway? Should more repositories have this model? Yeah, I definitely think so. I think a lot of people would be much happier that way. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting to think about the implications of this for other areas outside of code, right? Which is where it gets really interesting. I mean, in general, there's like a discussion. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. Nadia Asparouhova 0:20:25Yeah, I mean, that's basically what's for the writing of my book, because I was like, okay, I feel like whatever's happening open source right now, you start with this idea that like democracy is green, and like, we should have tons and tons of people participating, tons of people participate, and then it turns out that like, most participation is actually just noise and not that useful. And then it ends up like scaring everyone away. And in the end, you just have like, you know, one or a small handful of people that are actually doing all the work while everyone else is kind of like screaming around them. And this becomes like a really great metaphor for what happens in social media. And the reason I wrote, after I wrote the book, I went and worked at Substack. And, you know, part of it was because I was like, I think the model is kind of converging from like, you know, Twitter being this big open space to like, suddenly everyone is retreating, like, the public space is so hostile that everyone must retreat into like, smaller private spaces. So then, you know, chats became a thing, Substack became a thing. And yeah, I just feel sort of like realistic, right? Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:15That's really fascinating. Yeah, the Straussian message in that book is very strong. But in general, there's, when you're thinking about something like corporate governance, right? There's a big question. And I guess even more interestingly, when you think if you think DAOs are going to be a thing, and you think that we will have to reinvent corporate governance from the ground up, there's a question of, should these be run like monarchy? Should they be sort of oligarchies where the board is in control? Should they be just complete democracies where everybody gets one vote on what you do at the next, you know, shareholder meeting or something? And this book and that analysis is actually pretty interesting to think about. Like, how should corporations be run differently, if at all? What does it inform how you think the average corporation should be run? Nadia Asparouhova 0:21:59Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think we are seeing a little bit, I'm not a corporate governance expert, but I do feel like we're seeing a little of this like, backlash against, like, you know, shareholder activism and like, extreme focus on sort of like DEI and boards and things like that. And like, I think we're seeing a little bit of people starting to like take the reins and take control again, because they're like, ah, that doesn't really work so well, it turns out. I think DAOs are going to learn this hard lesson as well. It's still maybe just too early to say what is happening in DAOs right now. But at least the ones that I've looked at, it feels like there is a very common failure mode of people saying, you know, like, let's just have like, let's have this be super democratic and like, leave it to the crowd to kind of like run this thing and figure out how it works. And it turns out you actually do need a strong leader, even the beginning. And this, this is something I learned just from like, open source projects where it's like, you know, very rarely, or if at all, do you have a strong leader? If at all, do you have a project that starts sort of like leaderless and faceless? And then, you know, usually there is some strong creator, leader or influential figure that is like driving the project forward for a certain period of time. And then you can kind of get to the point when you have enough of an active community that maybe that leader takes a step back and lets other people take over. But it's not like you can do that off day one. And that's sort of this open question that I have for, for crypto as an industry more broadly, because I think like, if I think about sort of like, what is defining each of these generations of people that are, you know, pushing forward new technological paradigms, I mentioned that like Wall Street finance mindset is very focused on like globalism and on this sort of like efficiency quantitative mindset. You have the tech Silicon Valley Y company or kind of generation that is really focused on top talent. And the idea this sort of like, you know, founder mindset, the power of like individuals breaking institutions, and then you have like the crypto mindset, which is this sort of like faceless leaderless, like governed by protocol and by code mindset, which is like intriguing to me. But I have a really hard time squaring it with seeing like, in some sense, open source was the experiment that started playing out, you know, 20 years before then. And some things are obviously different in crypto, because tokenization completely changes the incentive system for contributing and maintaining crypto projects versus like traditional open source projects. But in the end, also like humans are humans. And like, I feel like there are a lot of lessons to be learned from open source of like, you know, they also started out early on as being very starry eyed about the power of like, hyper democratic regimes. And it turned out like, that just like doesn't work in practice. And so like, how is CryptoGhost or like Square that? I'm just, yeah, very curious to see what happened. Dwarkesh Patel 0:24:41Yeah, super fascinating. That raises an interesting question, by the way, you've written about idea machines, and you can explain that concept while you answer this question. But do you think that movements can survive without a charismatic founder who is both alive and engaged? So once Will McCaskill dies, would you be shorting effective altruism? Or if like Tyler Cowen dies, would you be short progress studies? Or do you think that, you know, once you get a movement off the ground, you're like, okay, I'm gonna be shorting altruism. Nadia Asparouhova 0:25:08Yeah, I think that's a good question. I mean, like, I don't think there's some perfect template, like each of these kind of has its own sort of unique quirks and characteristics in them. I guess, yeah, back up a little bit. Idea machines is this concept I have around what the transition from we were talking before about, so like traditional 5.1c3 foundations as vehicles for philanthropy, what does the modern version of that look like that is not necessarily encoded in institution? And so I had this term idea machines, which is sort of this different way of thinking about like, turning ideas into outcomes where you have a community that forms around a shared set of values and ideas. So yeah, you mentioned like progress studies is an example of that, or effective altruism example, eventually, that community gets capitalized by some funders, and then it starts to be able to develop an agenda and then like, actually start building like, you know, operational outcomes and like, turning those ideas into real world initiatives. And remind me of your question again. Dwarkesh Patel 0:26:06Yeah, so once the charismatic founder dies of a movement, is a movement basically handicapped in some way? Like, maybe it'll still be a thing, but it's never going to reach the heights it could have reached if that main guy had been around? Nadia Asparouhova 0:26:20I think there are just like different shapes and classifications of like different, different types of communities here. So like, and I'm just thinking back again to sort of like different types of open source projects where it's not like they're like one model that fits perfectly for all of them. So I think there are some communities where it's like, yeah, I mean, I think effective altruism is maybe a good example of that where, like, the community has grown so much that I like if all their leaders were to, you know, knock on wood, disappear tomorrow or something that like, I think the movement would still keep going. There are enough true believers, like even within the community. And I think that's the next order of that community that like, I think that would just continue to grow. Whereas you have like, yeah, maybe it's certain like smaller or more nascent communities that are like, or just like communities that are much more like oriented around, like, a charismatic founder that's just like a different type where if you lose that leader, then suddenly, you know, the whole thing falls apart because they're much more like these like cults or religions. And I don't think it makes one better, better or worse. It's like the right way to do is probably like Bitcoin, where you have a charismatic leader for life because that leader is more necessarily, can't go away, can't ever die. But you still have the like, you know, North Stars and like that. Dwarkesh Patel 0:27:28Yeah. It is funny. I mean, a lot of prophets have this property of you're not really sure what they believed in. So people with different temperaments can project their own preferences onto him. Somebody like Jesus, right? It's, you know, you can be like a super left winger and believe Jesus did for everything you believe in. You can be a super right winger and believe the same. Yeah. Go ahead. Nadia Asparouhova 0:27:52I think there's value in like writing cryptically more. Like I think about like, I think Curtis Yarvin has done a really good job of this where, you know, intentionally or not, but because like his writing is so cryptic and long winded. And like, it's like the Bible where you can just kind of like pour over endlessly being like, what does this mean? What does this mean? And in a weird, you know, you're always told to write very clearly, you're told to write succinctly, but like, it's actually in a weird way, you can be much more effective by being very long winded and not obvious in what you're saying. Dwarkesh Patel 0:28:20Yes, which actually raises an interesting question that I've been wondering about. There have been movements, I guess, if I did altruism is a good example that have been focused on community building in a sort of like explicit way. And then there's other movements where they have a charismatic founder. And moreover, this guy, he doesn't really try to recruit people. I'm thinking of somebody like Peter Thiel, for example, right? He goes on, like once every year or two, he'll go on a podcast and have this like really cryptic back and forth. And then just kind of go away in a hole for a few months or a few years. And I'm curious, which one you think is more effective, given the fact that you're not really competing for votes. So absolute number of people is not what you care about. It's not clear what you care about. But you do want to have more influence among the elites who matter in like politics and tech as well. So anyways, which just your thoughts on those kinds of strategies, explicitly trying to community build versus just kind of projecting out there in a sort of cryptic way? Nadia Asparouhova 0:29:18Yeah, I mean, I definitely being somewhat cryptic myself. I favor the cryptic methodology. But I mean, yeah, I mean, you mentioned Peter Thiel. I think like the Thielverse is probably like the most, like one of the most influential things. In fact, that is hard. It is partly so effective, because it is hard to even define what it is or wrap your head around that you just know that sort of like, every interesting person you meet somehow has some weird connection to, you know, Peter Thiel. And it's funny. But I think this is sort of that evolution from the, you know, 5163 Foundation to the like idea machine implicit. And that is this this switch from, you know, used to start the, you know, Nadia Asparova Foundation or whatever. And it was like, you know, had your name on it. And it was all about like, what do I as a funder want to do in the world, right? And you spend all this time doing this sort of like classical, you know, research, going out into the field, talking to people and you sit and you think, okay, like, here's a strategy I'm going to pursue. And like, ultimately, it's like, very, very donor centric in this very explicit way. And so within traditional philanthropy, you're seeing this sort of like, backlash against that. In like, you know, straight up like nonprofit land, where now you're seeing the locus of power moving from being very donor centric to being sort of like community centric and people saying like, well, we don't really want the donors telling us what to do, even though it's also their money. Like, you know, instead, let's have this be driven by the community from the ground up. That's maybe like one very literal reaction against that, like having the donor as sort of the central power figure. But I think idea machines are kind of like the like, maybe like the more realistic or effective answer in that like, the donor is still like without the presence of a funder, like, community is just a community. They're just sitting around and talking about ideas of like, what could possibly happen? Like, they don't have any money to make anything happen. But like, I think like really effective funders are good at being sort of like subtle and thoughtful about like, like, you know, no one wants to see like the Peter Thiel foundation necessarily. That's just like, it's so like, not the style of how it works. But you know, you meet so many people that are being funded by the same person, like just going out and sort of aggressively like arming the rebels is a more sort of like, yeah, just like distributed decentralized way of thinking about like spreading one's power, instead of just starting a fund. Instead of just starting a foundation. Dwarkesh Patel 0:31:34Yeah, yeah. I mean, even if you look at the life of influential politicians, somebody like LBJ, or Robert Moses, it's how much of it was like calculated and how much of it was just like decades of building up favors and building up connections in a way that had no definite and clear plan, but it just you're hoping that someday you can call upon them and sort of like Godfather way. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. And by the way, this is also where your work on open source comes in, right? Like, there's this idea that in the movement, you know, everybody will come in with their ideas, and you can community build your way towards, you know, what should be funded. And, yeah, I'm inclined to believe that it's probably like a few people who have these ideas about what should be funded. And the rest of it is either just a way of like building up engagement and building up hype. Or, or I don't know, or maybe just useless, but what are your thoughts on it? Nadia Asparouhova 0:32:32You know, I decided I was like, I am like, really very much a tech startup person and not a crypto person, even though I would very much like to be fun, because I'm like, ah, this is the future. And there's so many interesting things happening. And I'm like, for the record, not at all like down in crypto, I think it is like the next big sort of movement of things that are happening. But when I really come down to like the mindset, it's like I am so in that sort of like, top talent founder, like power of the individual to break institutions mindset, like that just resonates with me so much more than the like, leaderless, faceless, like, highly participatory kind of thing. And again, like I am very open to that being true, like I maybe I'm so wrong on that. I just like, I have not yet seen evidence that that works in the world. I see a lot of rhetoric about how that could work or should work. We have this sort of like implicit belief that like, direct democracy is somehow like the greatest thing to aspire towards. But like, over and over we see evidence that like that doesn't that just like doesn't really work. It doesn't mean we have to throw out the underlying principles or values behind that. Like I still really believe in meritocracy. I really believe in like access to opportunity. I really believe in like pursuit of happiness. Like to me, those are all like very like American values. But like, I think that where that breaks is the idea that like that has to happen through these like highly participatory methods. I just like, yeah, I haven't seen really great evidence of that being that working. Dwarkesh Patel 0:33:56What does that imply about how you think about politics or at least political structures? You think it would you you elect a mayor, but like, just forget no participation. He gets to do everything he wants to do for four years and you can get rid of in four years. But until then, no community meetings. Well, what does that imply about how you think cities and states and countries should be run? Nadia Asparouhova 0:34:17Um, that's a very complicated thoughts on that. I mean, I, I think it's also like, everyone has the fantasy of when it'd be so nice if there were just one person in charge. I hate all this squabbling. It would just be so great if we could just, you know, have one person just who has exactly the views that I have and put them in charge and let them run things. That would be very nice. I just, I do also think it's unrealistic. Like, I don't think I'm, you know, maybe like modernity sounds great in theory, but in practice just doesn't like I really embrace and I think like there is no perfect governance design either in the same way that there's no perfect open source project designer or whatever else we're talking about. Um, uh, like, yeah, it really just depends like what is like, what is your population comprised of? There are some very small homogenous populations that can be very easily governed by like, you know, a small government or one person or whatever, because there isn't that much dissent or difference. Everyone is sort of on the same page. America is the extreme opposite in that angle. And I'm always thinking about America because like, I'm American and I love America. But like, everyone is trying to solve the governance question for America. And I think like, yeah, I don't know. I mean, we're an extremely heterogeneous population. There are a lot of competing world views. I may not agree with all the views of everyone in America, but like I also, like, I don't want just one person that represents my personal views. I would focus more like effectiveness in governance than I would like having like, you know, just one person in charge or something that like, I don't mind if someone disagrees with my views as long as they're good at what they do, if that makes sense. So I think the questions are like, how do we improve the speed at which like our government works and the efficacy with which it works? Like, I think there's so much room to be made room for improvement there versus like, I don't know how much like I really care about like changing the actual structure of our government. Dwarkesh Patel 0:36:27Interesting. Going back to open source for a second. Why do these companies release so much stuff in open source for free? And it's probably literally worth trillions of dollars of value in total. And they just release it out and free and many of them are developer tools that other developers use to build competitors for these big tech companies that are releasing these open source tools. Why did they do it? What explains it? Nadia Asparouhova 0:36:52I mean, I think it depends on the specific project, but like a lot of times, these are projects that were developed internally. It's the same reason of like, I think code and writing are not that dissimilar in this way of like, why do people spend all this time writing, like long posts or papers or whatever, and then just release them for free? Like, why not put everything behind a paywall? And I think the answer is probably still in both cases where like mindshare is a lot more interesting than, you know, your literal IP. And so, you know, you put out, you write these like long reports or you tweet or whatever, like you spend all this time creating content for free and putting it out there because you're trying to capture mindshare. Same thing with companies releasing open source projects. Like a lot of times they really want like other developers to come in and contribute to them. They want to increase their status as like an open source friendly kind of company or company or show like, you know, here's the type of code that we write internally and showing that externally. They want to like recruiting is, you know, the hardest thing for any company, right? And so being able to attract the right kinds of developers or people that, you know, might fit really well into their developer culture just matters a lot more. And they're just doing that instead of with words or doing that with code. Dwarkesh Patel 0:37:57You've talked about the need for more idea machines. You're like dissatisfied with the fact that effective altruism is a big game in town. Is there some idea or nascent movement where I mean, other than progress ideas, but like something where you feel like this could be a thing, but it just needs some like charismatic founder to take it to the next level? Or even if it doesn't exist yet, it just like a set of ideas around this vein is like clearly something there is going to exist. You know what I mean? Is there anything like that that you notice? Nadia Asparouhova 0:38:26I only had a couple of different possibilities in that post. Yeah, I think like the progress sort of meme is probably the largest growing contender that I would see right now. I think there's another one right now around sort of like the new right. That's not even like the best term necessarily for it, but there's sort of like a shared set of values there that are maybe starting with like politics, but like ideally spreading to like other areas of public influence. So I think like those are a couple of like the bigger movements that I see right now. And then there's like smaller stuff too. Like I mentioned, like tools for thought in that post where like that's never going to be a huge idea machine. But it's one where you have a lot of like interesting, talented people that are thinking about sort of like future of computing. And until maybe more recently, like there just hasn't been a lot of funding available and the funding is always really uneven and unpredictable. And so that's to me an example of like, you know, a smaller community that like just needs that sort of like extra influx to turn a bunch of abstract ideas into practice. But yeah, I mean, I think like, yeah, there's some like the bigger ones that I see right now. I think there is just so much more potential to do more, but I wish people would just think a little bit more creatively because, yeah, I really do think like effective altruism kind of becomes like the default option for a lot of people. Then they're kind of vaguely dissatisfied with it and they don't like think about like, well, what do I actually really care about in the world and how do I want to put that forward? Dwarkesh Patel 0:39:53Yeah, there's also the fact that effective altruism has this like very fit memeplex in the sense that it's like a polytheistic religion where if you have a cause area, then you don't have your own movement. You just have a cause area within our broader movement, right? It just like adopts your gods into our movement. Nadia Asparouhova 0:40:15Yeah, that's the same thing I see like people trying to lobby for effective altruism to care about their cause area, but then it's like you could just start a separate. Like if you can't get EA to care about, then why not just like start another one somewhere else? Dwarkesh Patel 0:40:28Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting to me that the wealth boom in Silicon Valley and then tech spheres has led to the sound growth of philanthropy, but that hasn't always been the case. Even in America, like a lot of people became billionaires after energy markets were deregulated in the 80s and the 90s. And then there wasn't, and obviously the hub of that was like the Texas area or, you know, and as far as I'm aware, there wasn't like a boom of philanthropy motivated by the ideas that people in that region had. What's different about Silicon Valley? Why are they, or do you actually think that these other places have also had their own booms of philanthropic giving? Nadia Asparouhova 0:41:11I think you're right. Yeah, I would make the distinction between like being wealthy is not the same as being elite or whatever other term you want to use there. And so yeah, there are definitely like pockets of what's called like more like local markets of wealth, like, yeah, Texas oil or energy billionaires that tend to operate kind of just more in their own sphere. And a lot of, if you look at any philanthropic, like a lot of them will be philanthropically active, but they only really focus on their geographic area. But there's sort of this difference. And I think this is part of where it comes from the question of like, you know, like what forces someone to actually like do something more public facing with their power. And I think that comes from your power being sort of like threatened. That's like one aspect I would say of that. So like tech has only really become a lot more active in the public sphere outside of startups after the tech backlash of the mid 2010s. And you can say a similar thing kind of happened with the Davos elite as well. And also for the Gilded Age cohort of wealth. And so yeah, when you have sort of, you're kind of like, you know, building in your own little world. And like, you know, we had literally like Silicon Valley where everyone was kind of like sequestered off and just thinking about startups and thinking themselves of like, tech is essentially like an industry, just like any other sort of, you know, entertainment or whatever. And we're just kind of happy building over here. And then it was only when sort of like the Panopticon like turned its head towards tech and started and they had this sort of like onslaught of critiques coming from sort of like mainstream discourse where they went, oh, like what is my place in this world? And, you know, if I don't try to like defend that, then I'm going to just kind of, yeah, we're going to lose all that power. So I think that that need to sort of like defend one's power can kind of like prompt that sort of action. The other aspect I'd highlight is just like, I think a lot of elites are driven by these like technological paradigm shifts. So there's this scholar, Carlotta Perrins, who writes about technological revolutions and financial capital. And she identifies like a few different technological revolutions over the last, whatever, hundred plus years that like drove this cycle of, you know, a new technology is invented. It's people are kind of like working on it in this smaller industry sort of way. And then there is some kind of like crazy like public frenzy and then like a backlash. And then from after that, then you have this sort of like focus on public institution building. But she really points out that like not all technology fits into that. Like, not all technology is a paradigm shift. Sometimes technology is just technology. And so, yeah, I think like a lot of wealth might just fall into that category. My third example, by the way, is the Koch family because you had, you know, the Koch brothers, but then like their father was actually the one who like kind of initially made their wealth, but was like very localized in sort of like how he thought about philanthropy. He had his own like, you know, family foundation was just sort of like doing that sort of like, you know, Texas billionaire mindset that we're talking about of, you know, I made a bunch of money. I'm going to just sort of like, yeah, do my local funder activity. It was only the next generation of his children that then like took that wealth and started thinking about like how do we actually like move that onto like a more elite stage and thinking about like their influence in the media. But like you can see there's like two clear generations within the same family. Like one has this sort of like local wealth mindset and one of them has the more like elite wealth mindset. And yeah, you can kind of like ask yourself, why did that switch happen? But yeah, it's clearly about more than just money. It's also about intention. Dwarkesh Patel 0:44:51Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, it's interesting because there's, if you identify the current mainstream media as affiliated with like that Davos aristocratic elite, or maybe not aristocratic, but like the Davos groups. Yeah, exactly. There is a growing field of independent media, but you would not identify somebody like Joe Rogan as in the Silicon Valley sphere, right? So there is a new media. I just, I guess these startup people don't have that much influence over them yet. And they feel like, yeah. Nadia Asparouhova 0:45:27I think they're trying to like take that strategy, right? So you have like a bunch of founders like Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg and Brian Armstrong and whoever else that like will not really talk to mainstream media anymore. They will not get an interview to the New York Times, but they will go to like an individual influencer or an individual creator and they'll do an interview with them. So like when Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta, like he did not get grant interviews to mainstream publications, but he went and talked to like Ben Thompson at Strategory. And so I think there is like, it fits really well with that. Like probably mindset of like, we're not necessarily institution building. We're going to like focus on power of individuals who sort of like defy institutions. And that is kind of like an open question that I have about like, what will the long term influence of the tech elite look like? Because like, yeah, the human history tells us that eventually all individual behaviors kind of get codified into institutions, right? But we're obviously living in a very different time now. And I think like the way that the Davos elite managed to like really codify and extend their influence across all these different sectors was by taking that institutional mindset and, you know, like thinking about sort of like academic institutions and media institutions, all that stuff. If the startup mindset is really inherently like anti-institution and says like, we don't want to build the next Harvard necessarily. We just want to like blow apart the concept of universities whatsoever. Or, you know, we don't want to create a new CNN or a new Fox News. We want to just like fund like individual creators to do that same sort of work, but in this very decentralized way. Like, will that work long term? I don't know. Like, is that just sort of like a temporary state that we're in right now where no one really knows what the next institutions will look like? Or is that really like an important part of this generation where like, we shouldn't be asking the question of like, how do you build a new media network? We should just be saying like, the answer is there is no media network. We just go to like all these individuals instead. Dwarkesh Patel 0:47:31Yeah, that's interesting. What do you make of this idea that I think, let's say, that these idea machines might be limited by the fact that if you're going to start some sort of organization in them, you're very much depending on somebody who has made a lot of money independently to fund you and to grant you approval. And I just have a hard time seeing somebody who is like a Napoleon-like figure being willing long term to live under that arrangement. And that so there'll just be the people who are just have this desire to dominate and be recognized who are probably pretty important to any movement you want to create. They'll just want to go off and just like build a company or something that gives them an independent footing first. And they just won't fall under any umbrella. You know what I mean? Nadia Asparouhova 0:48:27Yeah, I mean, like Dustin Moskovitz, for example, has been funding EA for a really long time and hasn't hasn't walked away necessarily. Yeah. I mean, on the flip side, you can see like SPF carried a lot of a lot of risk because it's your point, I guess, like, you know, you end up relying on this one funder, the one funder disappears and everything else kind of falls apart. I mean, I think like, I don't have any sort of like preciousness attached to the idea of like communities, you know, lasting forever. I think this is like, again, if we're trying to solve for the problem of like what did not work well about 5.1c3 foundations for most of recent history, like part of it was that they're, you know, just meant to live on to perpetuity. Like, why do we still have like, you know, Rockefeller Foundation, there are now actually many different Rockefeller Foundations, but like, why does that even exist? Like, why did that money not just get spent down? And actually, when John D. Rockefeller was first proposing the idea of foundations, he wanted them to be like, to have like a finite end state. So he wanted them to last only like 50 years or 100 years when he was proposing this like federal charter, but that federal charter failed. And so now we have these like state charters and foundations can just exist forever. But like, I think if we want to like improve upon this idea of like, how do we prevent like meritocratic elites from turning into aristocratic elites? How do we like, yeah, how do we actually just like try to do a lot of really interesting stuff in our lifetimes? It's like a very, it's very counterintuitive, because you think about like, leaving a legacy must mean like creating institutions or creating a foundation that lasts forever. And, you know, 200 years from now, there's still like the Nadia Asparuva Foundation out there. But like, if I really think about it, it's like, I would almost rather just do really, really, really good, interesting work in like, 50 years or 20 years or 10 years, and have that be the legacy versus your name kind of getting, you know, submerged over a century of institutional decay and decline. So yeah, I don't like if you know, you have a community that lasts for maybe only last 10 years or something like that, and it's funded for that amount of time, and then it kind of elbows its usefulness and it winds down or becomes less relevant. Like, I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. Of course, like in practice, you know, nothing ever ends that that neatly and that quietly. But, but yeah, I don't think that's a bad thing. Dwarkesh Patel 0:50:44Yeah, yeah. Who are some ethnographers or sociologists from a previous era that have influenced your work? So was there somebody writing about, you know, what it was like to be in a Roman Legion? Or what it was like to work in a factory floor? And you're like, you know what, I want to do that for open source? Or I want to do that for the New Tech Elite? Nadia Asparouhova 0:51:02For open source, I was definitely really influenced by Jane Jacobs and Eleanor Ostrom. I think both had this quality of, so yeah, Eleanor Ostrom was looking at examples of common pool resources, like fisheries or forests or whatever. And just like, going and visiting them and spending a lot of time with them and then saying like, actually, I don't think tragedy of the commons is like a real thing, or it's not the only outcome that we can possibly have. And so sometimes commons can be managed, like perfectly sustainably. And it's not necessarily true that everyone just like treats them very extractively. And just like wrote about what she saw. And same with Jane Jacobs sort of looking at cities as someone who lives in one, right? Like she didn't have any fancy credentials or anything like that. She was just like, I live in the city and I'm looking around and this idea of like, top down urban planning, where you have like someone trying to design this perfect city that like, doesn't change and doesn't yield to its people. It just seems completely unrealistic. And the style that both of them take in their writing is very, it just it starts from them just like, observing what they see and then like, trying to write about it. And I just, yeah, that's, that's the style that I really want to emulate. Dwarkesh Patel 0:52:12Interesting. Nadia Asparouhova 0:52:13Yeah. I think for people to just be talking to like, I don't know, like Chris just like just talking to like open source developers, turns out you can learn a lot more from that than just sitting around like thinking about what open source developers might be thinking about. But... Dwarkesh Patel 0:52:25I have this, I have had this idea of not even for like writing it out loud, but just to understand how the world works. Just like shadowing people who are in just like a random position, they don't have to be a lead in any way, but just like a person who's the personal assistant to somebody influential, how to decide whose emails they forward, how they decide what's the priority, or somebody who's just like an accountant for a big company, right? It's just like, what is involved there? Like, what kinds of we're gonna, you know what I mean? Just like, random people, the line manager at the local factory. I just have no idea how these parts of the world work. And I just want to like, yeah, just shadow them for a day and see like, what happens there. Nadia Asparouhova 0:53:05This is really interesting, because everyone else focuses on sort of like, you know, the big name figure or whatever, but you know, who's the actual gatekeeper there? But yeah, I mean, I've definitely found like, if you just start cold emailing people and talking to them, people are often like, surprisingly, very, very open to being talked to because I don't know, like, most people do not get asked questions about what they do and how they think and stuff. So, you know, you want to realize that dream. Dwarkesh Patel 0:53:33So maybe I'm not like John Rockefeller, and that I only want my organization to last for 50 years. I'm sure you've come across these people who have this idea that, you know, I'll let my money compound for like 200 years. And if it just compounds at some reasonable rate, I'll be, it'll be like the most wealthy institution in the world, unless somebody else has the same exact idea. If somebody wanted to do that, but they wanted to hedge for the possibility that there's a war or there's a revolt, or there's some sort of change in law that draws down this wealth. How would you set up a thousand year endowment, basically, is what I'm asking, or like a 500 year endowment? Would you just put it in like a crypto wallet with us? And just, you know what I mean? Like, how would you go about that organizationally? How would you like, that's your goal? I want to have the most influence in 500 years. Nadia Asparouhova 0:54:17Well, I'd worry much less. The question for me is not about how do I make sure that there are assets available to distribute in a thousand years? Because I don't know, just put in stock marketers. You can do some pretty boring things to just like, you know, ensure your assets grow over time. The more difficult question is, how do you ensure that whoever is deciding how to distribute the funds, distributes them in a way that you personally want them to be spent? So Ford Foundation is a really interesting example of this, where Henry Ford created a Ford Foundation shortly before he died, and just pledged a lot of Ford stock to create this foundation and was doing it basically for tax reasons, had no philanthropic. It's just like, this is what we're doing to like, house this wealth over here. And then, you know, passed away, son passed away, and grandson ended up being on the board. But the board ended up being basically like, you know, a bunch of people that Henry Ford certainly would not have ever wanted to be on his board. And so, you know, and you end up seeing like, the Ford Foundation ended up becoming huge influential. I like, I have received money from them. So it's not at all an indictment of sort of like their views or anything like that. It's just much more of like, you know, you had the intent of the original donor, and then you had like, who are all these people that like, suddenly just ended up with a giant pool of capital and then like, decided to spend it however they felt like spending it and the grandson at the time sort of like, famously resigned because he was like, really frustrated and was just like, this is not at all what my family wanted and like, basically like, kicked off the board. So anyway, so that is the question that I would like figure out if I had a thousand year endowment is like, how do I make sure that whomever manages that endowment actually shares my views? One, shares my views, but then also like, how do I even know what we need to care about in a thousand years? Because like, I don't even know what the problems are in a thousand years. And this is why like, I think like, very long term thinking can be a little bit dangerous in this way, because you're sort of like, presuming that you know what even matters then. Whereas I think like, figure out the most impactful things to do is just like, so contextually dependent on like, what is going on at the time. So I can't, I don't know. And there are also foundations where you know, the donor like, writes in the charter like, this money can only be spent on you know, X cause or whatever, but then it just becomes really awkward over time because

דף הוובינר בבלוג (נדרשת הרשמה לניוזלטר)  בין הנושאים בוובינר: אימייל וספאם. אז והיום. האבולוציה של סינון ספאם ודוא”ל. החשיבות של אימייל מרקטינג בתמהיל השיווק. מיתוסים באימייל מרקטינג. אתגרי דיוור מודרניים. מה זו מערכת דיוור? איך לא לבחור מערכת דיוור? מי אחראי על העבירות?  אחריות המדוור / אחריות מערכת הדיוור ויחסי הגומלין. דיוור ל-B2C לעומת דיוור ל-B2B. Gmail וטאב קידומי המכירות. השפעות שינוי הפרטיות של אפל (Apple MPP). מה זה Sender Reputation? אימות דומיין במערכות דיוור (SPF, DKIM ומה זה לעזאזל DMARC?) איך לבצע אימייל מרקטינג ולא להגיע לספאם. אתגרי עבירוּת בסטארטאפים. cold email – הטוב הרע והמכוער. דאטה, סגמנטציה ופרסונליזציה. פרקטיקות דיוור נכונות. ועוד…  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On today's show we discuss inflation rolling over, the possibility of a soft landing, Santa Claus rallies, SPF getting arrested, what a housing market comeback would look like, picking stocks vs. picking stock-pickers, The White Lotus season 2 and much more.   Find complete shownotes on our blogs...  Ben Carlson's A Wealth of Common Sense  Michael Batnick's The Irrelevant Investor  Like us on Facebook  And feel free to shoot us an email at animalspiritspod@gmail.com with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.      (Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, received compensation from the sponsor of this advertisement. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information.) 

Troy Ericson is the owner of Email Paramedic, the leading Email List Management Agency that has generated over $50,000,000 for their clients since 2019 by improving email copy & deliverability. He was ranked as the #20 Copywriter in the world by Peter Tzemis from Traffic & Funnels. He is also a musician, former college baseball player, and lives in Tampa, Florida Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. Pay attention to three things: DKIM, SPF, DMARK. those things should all say pass. If any of those say fail or neutral, or in some cases if your DMARK doesn't even show up, that is a red flag. That basically means you are failing one of the three kinds of verifications, more or less. 2. Quality is always more important than quantity. Everybody wants a really big list, but at the end of the day you got to make sure that they want to be there and they're excited. 3. Understand that you can try and reengage those other people later. But for now, you have to solve the bleeding wound that is in your e-mail list and your open hearts are suffering from. Have access to every single question about email marketing and answers to it - FAQ Email Sponsors: HubSpot: Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com. ZipRecruiter: Discover hiring joy with ZipRecruiter! Try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com/fire. ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire.

Troy Ericson is the owner of Email Paramedic, the leading Email List Management Agency that has generated over $50,000,000 for their clients since 2019 by improving email copy & deliverability. He was ranked as the #20 Copywriter in the world by Peter Tzemis from Traffic & Funnels. He is also a musician, former college baseball player, and lives in Tampa, Florida Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. Pay attention to three things: DKIM, SPF, DMARK. those things should all say pass. If any of those say fail or neutral, or in some cases if your DMARK doesn't even show up, that is a red flag. That basically means you are failing one of the three kinds of verifications, more or less. 2. Quality is always more important than quantity. Everybody wants a really big list, but at the end of the day you got to make sure that they want to be there and they're excited. 3. Understand that you can try and reengage those other people later. But for now, you have to solve the bleeding wound that is in your e-mail list and your open hearts are suffering from. Have access to every single question about email marketing and answers to it - FAQ Email Sponsors: HubSpot: Learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better at HubSpot.com. ZipRecruiter: Discover hiring joy with ZipRecruiter! Try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com/fire. ZipRecruiter. The smartest way to hire.

Four time zones, two counties, and an ocean can't separate these heavy hitters in publishing! This is why I still do the podcast! It is so much fun being with all of you and I want to share the wisdom of this hive.Today's show is for the writers out there who want to level up their author careers! My guests, that's right guests, are none other than Author and Host of the Self Publishing Show, James Blatch, and best-selling authors Cecelia Mecca and Jodi Burnett!We chat about the new and improved Self-Publishing Formula course formerly known as SPF 101, now SPF Launchpad with James and these two wildly successful authors who have benefited from the course. We also talk about what is selling books for them in this super competitive marketplace. In today's episode we discuss:·      How James, Cecelia, and Jodi started their author careers. ·      When and what book in your catalog should be converted into an audiobook.·      Best use of Facebook and other ads. ·      Getting the most out of social media, especially TikTok. ·      The benefits of SPF Launchpad and how to maximize its effectiveness.·      How Cecelia and Jodi have had their spouses assist them in their author business.  All of this and more on today's episode of the Cops and Writers podcast.Come visit James Blatch at his website and Self Publishing Formula.Head on over to both of Cecelia's author websites. Visit Jodi Burnett on her website!Check out Field Training (Brew City Blues Book 1)!!Enjoy the Cops and Writer's book series.Please visit the Cops and Writers website.If you have a question for the sarge, hit him up at his email.Join the fun at the Cops and Writers Facebook groupConsider buying me a coffee :-)Do you enjoy gritty, action-packed real-life police dramas to get your fill of blood, heartache, and cop humor? You've come to the right series!Book one of Brew City Blues, Field Training, is now live and book two, Probation is now on pre-order and will be available for purchase on December 30, 2022, only on Amazon!Support the show

my birth date is tomorrow. i’m no longer in my mid-thirties i guess. i have lots of feelings about this but will just keep chuggin along *doot doot doot*DOWNLOAD/STREAM RECORDING00:00 (intro by omar)00:20 Susan “Now I Know Why” As I Was02:12 New Balance “Guitar Improvisation #4” 29th Birthday Blues: Solo Guitar Improvisations On My Dad’s Old Guitar03:51 The Oilies “Anywhere With You” The Oilies07:14 Gal Gracen “Today or Tomorrow” FANTASY GARDENS10:31 Sheena, Anika and Augusta “Billboards + Bodies” Simple Pleasures13:11 Daikon “No One Sees The Wizard” At Least It’s Short16:56 La Rabbia “Statues in Ash” Shock Tactics18:47 PROM NITE “No Motivation” Dancing To This Beat…20:47 EXEK “Commercial Fishing” Some Beautiful Species Left23:40 Walter Mitty and his Makeshift Orchestra “Funny Faces” Puddles of Alligators24:47 Maybe Don’t “MK2K3” Maybe Don’t27:24 Cat Scan “Lysol” In Nature debut30:02 Bright Ideas “Falling Down” Saturdays and the Turning Tide32:47 Mermaidens “I Might Disappear” Look Me in the Eye35:53 Morning Hands “Simple Speak” Morning Hands39:32 Sonoda “Half-Life” Half-Life / The Mark42:25 Animal Actor “Not Enough” Not Enough44:27 Frankie Cosmos “With Great Purpose” Close It Quietly45:48 SPF “Curb Appeal” Paul’s McCartney47:59 Haircut “El Tiempo” Sensation49:20 Secret Shame “Comfort” Dark Synthetics52:25 Pom Pom Squad “Again” Ow

Welcome to episode fifty-two. Our most unhinged and “wrapped” episode yet. We're talking: The best of the best of GFU 22' Lauren Hayne's sexy unique scams to watch SPF scams with Chelsea Naftelberg, and her take on embracing your palest and most ghostly self The rise and demise of the Girlboss archetype and The Glass Cliff Book stylists. How do we sign up? BookTok and what TikTok has done for the book publishing industry Fall trend predictions. Did they land? We thought we burned the underwire bras … Free! Write us an apple podcast review to win this week's prize: A pack of these super cool Chunks hair clips Experience Open for 30 days free here! Join fellow ghouls in The Grext, our free sexy unique group chat, where you'll get the tea on the latest products and which scams to avoid. Check out our ShopMy shelf for the DL on our latest haunted carts Our theme song is by Parallel Dance Ensemble This podcast is edited by Softer Sounds.Studio! Check em' out --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/goodforu/message

Christmas time in Texas is a very different experience from traditional motifs. Perhaps you too can relate to some of these things. We talk about the song from our Christmas EP. It's all on the Brobdingnagian Bards Podcast #73 THANK YOU NAGIANS! Brobdingnagian Bards are The Original Celtic Renaissance music duo. They take traditional Irish and Scottish songs and give them a comedic twist. Their unique brand of music on the autoharp, recorder, and mandolin put Austin, Texas on the Celtic music map. Brobdingnagian Bards music is financed entirely by their fans in the Nagians Only Club. For just $5 per month, you can support the Brobdingnagian Bards and help them create new music while enjoying bootleg concerts, videos, and first access to new songs. Join the Nagians Only Club on Patreon today! 0:02 - NAGIANS ONLY: Live Brobdingnagian Bards Bootleg Concert in Rome, Italy! 13:59 - SONG: “Little Drummer Boy” from Christmas in Brobdingnag, Vol. 1 17:21 - NAGIANS ONLY: CLOSING REMARKS 20:05 - HOW LONG IS A BROBDINGNAGIAN MINUTE? Today's theme… What's new? Marc: Show at The Lost Druid. Andrew: Louisiana Ren Faire review What song would you like to hear us talk about? 22:41 - UPCOMING SHOWS Dec 10: Pontoon Brewing, Sandy Springs, GA @ 2:00 - 5:00 PM Dec 17: Three Taverns Craft Brewery, Decatur, GA @ 12:30 - 3:00 PM 2023 Jan 6-8: GaFilk, Atlanta, GA Jan 21: Maggie McGuinness Pub, Huntsville, AL @ 7 PM Jan 28: The Lost Druid, Avondale Estates, GA @ 6:30-9:30 PM 23:14 - WHAT'S NEW? 36:26 - TODAY'S STORY: How do Bards Celebrate Christmas Time in Texas? 50:10 - SONG: “Christmas Time in Texas” from Christmas in Brobdingnag, Vol. 1 The Brobdingnagian Bards Podcast was produced by Marc Gunn and Andrew McKee. Sign up to our mailing list to download free MP3s and get monthly updates of what's new. Find it all at thebards.net SONG LYRICS Christmas Time in Texas by Marc Gunn & Andrew McKee There's no white Christmas day less you drive a white Chevrolet You won't hear sleigh bells ringing less the Salvation Army is Santa-ing In your...Christmas time in Texas. And if you feel the holiday blues, Go outside with no shoes And when Santa Claus arrives, He'll be wearing SPF 45 In your...Christmas time in Texas. O The sun is shining bright. Don't expect snowflakes tonight. And if you hear Kris Kringle outside His sleigh won't get stuck, He's flying in style In his monster truck During Christmas time in Texas. So don't bother with Christmas lights. Buy your cold winter clothing half-price. Then the presents beneath your tree, Will all smell just like mesquite. In your... Christmas time in Texas. O The sun is shining bright. Don't expect snowflakes tonight. Santa, won't come down your chimney That's not what their for, In Texas we're friendly. He'll use the front door. During Christmas time in Texas. Christmas morning, you will hope In your stocking, there's a new rope Forget eggnog. Drink lite beer As you wrastle your new steer In your...Christmas time in Texas. O The sun is shining bright. Don't expect snowflakes tonight. And if you hear in your chimney, A man that is stuck. Load up your shotgun. This stranger is Fu… in trouble. During Christmas time in Texas.

SPECIALAVSNITT! Hannah och Amanda tänkte spela in ETT avsnitt om beauty, men innerst inne visste nog de - och vi! - att det inte skulle hålla. Ett poddavsnitt kan inte vara hundra timmar långt, eller hur? Så det bidde ett fullmatat avsnitt om deras morgon- och kvällsrutiner. Cleanser! Serum! SPF! Micellärt vatten! Tips på bra produkter (allt kommer läggas ut på sociala medier, eftersom vissa märken är svåra att uttala och minnas). Nä, varför skriva mer? Tag och lyssna! Producent: Johan Dahlberg

We get in the chair with PA-C Whitney Buckland of Shoreline Aesthetics to discuss all things cosmetics -LPA lasers -Botox, Dysport, and Xeomin -Lip and facial filler -Skincare -Is botox dangerous? -What can I do on a budget/ how much do I need? -What do I ask for with my Doctor? Mention Hotter Than Health for a deal on your visit to see Whitney! BOOK HERE GIVE

Would you believe it, if we told you that there's a lip liner out there that's....  $2.25!  Yep, you heard it here first. Kelly has found not one, but two super savey lips buys to help you save money this Christmas.  Plus, Leigh finally got her hand  on the foundation everybody has been talking about.  THE END BITS Subscribe to Mamamia RECOMMENDATIONS:  All the wonderful products mentioned in today's episode can be found below! SPENDY  Leigh:  Ere Perez Oat Milk Foundation, $54 Kelly: Thin Lizzy Blurring Brush, $32 SAVEY:  Leigh: Ms Brown Geranium Body Lotion, $32 Kelly: OXX Cosmetics Lip Liner - Peony, $2.25 SHOP MY STASH: Leigh: Bondi Sands Juicy watermelon SPF 50+ Lipbalm, $xx Kelly: Nivea Blackberry Shine Kip Balm, $4.50 GET IN TOUCH: Got a beauty question you want answered?  Email us at youbeauty@mamamia.com.au or call the podphone on 02 8999 9386.  Join our You Beauty Facebook Group here. Want this and other podcasts delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe to our podcast newsletter. You Beauty is a podcast by Mamamia. Listen to more Mamamia podcasts here. CREDITS: Hosts: Leigh Campbell & Kelly McCarren Producer: Mikayla Floriano Audio Producer: Leah Porges  Mamamia acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land we have recorded this podcast on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Just by reading our articles or listening to our podcasts, you're helping to fund girls in schools in some of the most disadvantaged countries in the world - through our partnership with Room to Read. We're currently funding 300 girls in school every day and our aim is to get to 1,000. Find out more about Mamamia at mamamia.com.auBecome a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Perhaps the most interesting episode so far.Byrne Hobart writes at thediff.co, analyzing inflections in finance and tech.He explains:* What happened at FTX* How drugs have induced past financial bubbles* How to be long AI while hedging Taiwan invasion* Whether Musk's Twitter takeover will succeed* Where to find the next Napoleon and LBJ* & ultimately how society can deal with those who seek domination and recognitionWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoy this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast.Timestamps: (0:00:50) - What the hell happened at FTX?(0:07:03) - How SBF Faked Being a Genius:  (0:12:23) - Drugs Explain Financial Bubbles (0:17:12) - On Founder Physiognomy (0:21:02) - Indexing Parental Involvement in Raising Talented Kids (0:30:35) - Where are all the Caro-level Biographers? (0:39:03) - Where are today's Great Founders?  (0:49:05) - Micro Writing -> Macro Understanding (0:52:04) - Elon's Twitter Takeover (1:01:28) - Does Big Tech & West Have Great People? (1:12:10) - Philosophical Fanatics and Effective Altruism  (1:17:54) - What Great Founders Have In Common (1:20:24) - Thinkers vs. Analyzers (1:26:17) - Taiwan Invasion bets & AI Timelines TranscriptAutogenerated - will not be perfectly accurate.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:00Okay, today I have the pleasure of interviewing Bern Hobart again for the second time now, who writes at thediff.co. The way I would describe Bern is every time I have a question about a concept or an event in finance, I Google the name of that event or concept into Google, and then I'd put in Bern Hobart at the end of that search query. And nine times out of 10, it's the best thing I've read about that topic. And it's just so interesting. It's just like the most schizophrenic and galaxy brain it takes about like how, you know, the discourses of, you know, Machiavelli's discourses relate to big tech or like how source of serial reflexivity explains hiring in finance and tech. So just very interesting stuff. I'm glad to have him back on again.Byrne Hobart 0:00:47Yeah, great to be back. Awesome.Dwarkesh Patel 0:00:50Okay. So first, I really want to jump into the FTX saga. What the hell happened? Let me just like leave an open ended question for you.Byrne Hobart 0:00:59Yeah, so I think the first thing to say is that there's a lot we don't know. There's a lot we may never know, because so many of the decisions at FTX were made through self like auto deleting encrypted chat. So like there are some holes we will never be able to fill in. The lack of accounting is also going to make it tough. Like basically, I think you can tell a bunch of different stories here. The really obvious one is fraud. And you can debate over exactly when it started, like one version of the story, which is getting some currency is that SPF had this entity Alameda, and it was supposed to be this really hot crypto trading fund, but maybe it was a Ponzi scheme all along. And then maybe at some point that Ponzi scheme started to run short on cash. So he decided to start an exchange and the exchange got more cash, and then he used the cash to pay off previous bachelors, whatever. I think that's one version. And then kind of the maximally exculpatory version, which actually is still really bad is Alameda was a real company. They really made money trading. They took tons of risks. And SPF has talked about why he thinks that's a good thing, that FTX cut some corners when they were raising money and that they had really bad internal accounting. And that basically the extended entity of Alameda and FTX sort of lost track of whose money was where and it ended up with Alameda spending FTX customer money, which I think is like, one way to look at that is like, if you think, okay, fraud is like twice as bad as just incompetently losing money. Well, it's not as if we had a $4 billion fraud instead of $8 billion fraud, everyone would be like, well, that's fine. That's normal. Like, why are you giving sky high time? It's bad no matter what. Running a big company that is systemically important in crypto and then having that company completely vaporize over the course of a couple of days, really, really bad and worth understanding what happened. But it's partly worth understanding what happened because there are just different solutions that present themselves depending on what you think the story is. Like if the story is fraud, it's actually a lot harder to solve because there are just a lot of people who are willing and able to commit fraud and to lie. If the story is bad accounting, then that's actually a lot more solvable because then you could say things like, the solution is make sure you never invest in a crypto exchange that doesn't have a real auditor and make sure that they have their proof of reserves calculation and it's happening consistently and that you can audit that. There are different solution sets. And then I think the actual story is going to be somewhere in the middle of extreme risk tolerance plus extremely poor accounting plus fraud at some point. But I suspect the fraud actually happened pretty late. If it happened, which I think there's like 80, 90% chance that there was some level of fraud versus pure incompetence. But if so, I think may have happened fairly late in the story and as kind of a last desperate move. I think part of what drives the response to what happened with FTX and Alameda is that if you think the story is pure fraud, it's very easy to say you would never do that. I can say very easily, I would definitely never start a Ponzi scheme and then start another bigger Ponzi scheme to pay off the first Ponzi scheme. That's not me. That's not most people. But I think if you draw the scenario where they discover at some point like a couple months ago or even a month ago, they realized, hey, we actually there's a billion dollars plus that was supposed to be customer money, but we thought it was Alameda money and we actually spent it and now it's gone. We've lost it. What would you do in that circumstance? And I think the ideal answer is, well, I'd immediately come clean and step down and commit myself to getting everyone paid back and made whole. And I think there's also the possibility that the realistic answer is more like, well, I would scramble and try to make sure that that didn't cause the company to collapse and try to pick up later. And so at that point, you've sort of backed your way into fraud through earlier episodes of incompetence. But I think like one of the problems with the fraud story is frauds have to be good at accounting because they have to like, you know, there's very rough schematic sense. They have to be twice as good at accounting as everybody else, because not only do they have to have the real books that tell them how much money the business has and whether or not the next check they're at will bounce, but they have to have the fake set of books and they have to have a way to make those tie out with one another. So they actually like frauds, accounting frauds tend to be fairly sophisticated. They tend to really dive into edge cases. I was reading up on MF Global, which was a big futures brokerage that collapsed in part because they were dipping into customer funds and making some investments they shouldn't have. And they did a lot of clever and shady stuff. Like one of the things they would do is there was one point where they were transferring money at the last minute out of their consumer, out of their customer funds in order to make margin calls. And what they would do is they would send the wire from the customer account to a different company account. And they'd send it a couple of minutes before the wires closed for the night. And then they would send this email right after the wires closed saying, Hey, we just realized we set this transfer fraud account got to reverse tomorrow. So that gave them at least one night of enough liquidity to survive. Now, you can only do that kind of fraud if you are actually keeping really close track of where your money is, where it's supposed to be, what the rules are, so that you know exactly how to break those rules. I don't think FDX was in any position to commit that kind of fraud. I think that if they tried to do something like that, like they wire the money from an account that didn't have any money in it or something or send it to the wrong account. There are these stories about them accidentally burning a bunch of USDC by sending it to an address that didn't exist or something like that. The operational slip ups actually make it harder for them to have committed fraud. And it's unquestionable at this point that their record keeping was very bad.Dwarkesh Patel 0:07:03Yeah, to your point about the fraud being harder. I mean, it's like a classic story about if you just tell the truth, it's just gonna be much easier for you. You just don't have to keep track with that many things. But the one thing I've been thinking about, I interviewed him for like an hour. And before that, I tried to do quite a bit of research into how FDX worked and what was going on. And I had this impression that this guy was like the most competent genius that had ever graced finance. And this was like a common impression. This wasn't just... And then, but it turns out that, you know, they were like, it just like out of sheer incompetency loses track of billions of dollars, the internal operations, it just like him putting together spreadsheets and throwing them around and putting emojis on slack messages, asking for payments. And I just like, I want to understand how it is that this guy put out the impression out there that he is just hyper competent. And it turns out that it's like the opposite. It's not even that he's mediocre. It's the opposite.Byrne Hobart 0:08:09Right. Yeah. So I think you can tell a couple stories there, like one story. And I know I've been saying a lot, like you can tell multiple stories. There are multiple stories that fit the facts. We have lots of different weird things to explain and therefore many different weird explanations that fit them. So I think one version is, okay, he's never all that smart and decided that he could just play up this weird, you know, eccentric genius thing. And that would be able to get away with it. And there are these anecdotes about how someone told him to cut his hair and he said, no, I have to look kind of crazy for this. And so that fits in. And it is kind of an MIT thing to do that, to play up your eccentricity because you know there are these super brilliant, very eccentric people and you can be like them. It's kind of like, a lot of people, they read about Steve Jobs and they're like, well, the secret to success is be this brilliant perfectionist who can always see the future and also be just a giant a*****e to everyone you meet. And I'm going to try to do both of those things. And it turns out one of those is really, really easy to do. And then one of them is really, really hard and you have to do both to be Steve Jobs. But you can sort of give this surface level impression of Jobsy and this by just being really obnoxious to everyone. So I think some of it is that. But the other is that if you get really good at just very narrow domain specific stuff, you might miss what other stuff people have to be good at for that skill set to be valuable. And so I think thinking about his previous background where he worked at a prop trading firm and seemed to do well there. It's Jane Street. They're very, very selective with who they hire, very hard to get in and they're very profitable. So good to get in. It's entirely possible that part of what happened was just that Jane Street has its operations people, they have their trading people. And it may there may have been enough siloing within that, that if your job is just identify discrepancies in ETF prices and take advantage of them, you don't actually have to know things like how do we figure out which counterparties are credit worthy? How do we make sure we have enough liquidity? How do we have backup plans upon backup plans upon backup plans in case something goes wrong with our liquidity situation? Because part of the Jane Street model seems to be there. They're very, very opaque, but like very opaque in terms of their trading operations. But part of the model seems to be that they want to be the trader who is there and trading and making a market when everything fell apart. And what that means is that like the way you make the most money in trading is when markets are insanely volatile, volume is very, very high, and you're still trading. But the reason that markets get really volatile when prices collapse and there's a lot of trade going on is that other people who would love to be trading can't trade because maybe the broker they use is suddenly insolvent and they can't get to a new broker, their money is frozen. So if you're planning to be there when everybody else is out of the market, then you have to have lots and lots of contingency plans. And it's not enough to buy lots of deep out of the money put options as Jane Street does. You also have to make sure that you're buying those options from counterparty who will actually send you the money when you need it or that you want to structure those things so the actual cash gets to your account at the time that needs to be there. And that maybe is something that a prop trader should not be spending most of their time thinking about. Like, it's one of those things where it's like, if you own a house and you like if over the last 24 hours, you learned a whole lot about electrical wiring, or you learned a whole lot about how plumbing works or how septic tanks work, like, that's not good. That means something very, very bad happened in your house. And it could be nice to be an expert on those things. But if you suddenly became an expert, it's because somebody else wasn't doing their job. So I think you could you could be a trader like that where they can be very good at the finding little pricing discrepancies thing and have just no awareness of what the operation stuff is, especially because the better the operations team is, the less anyone else needs to be aware of them. Like they like you only email them when something is going wrong. So if nothing is going wrong, you never email them and then you forget they exist.Dwarkesh Patel 0:12:23Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good point. In fact, in the interview I did of him, he mentioned that I asked him what is the difference between Jane Street and FTX. And he mentioned that at Jane Street, there was like this button he could press to like buy. And all that's all the intermediaries, all the servers, it was just taken care of. And what was really funny is then he said, and just getting a bank account and he goes, and let's talk about that. Just getting a bank account is so hard when you're in an infinite. It apparently turns out it's so hard that you might have like commingled funds because you couldn't manage to separate them out. Yeah, no, that's crazy. You had this really interesting take. I think one point we were talking about how every single market crash can be explained by the drug that was common in the industry at the time. And we finally achieved like the hypergrade meth stage of I forgot the name of like that patch you was taking, but it's like stronger than Adderall or whatever.Byrne Hobart 0:13:23So it was, I think it's saying every crash can be explained by the drug they're taking at the time. That takes a little, but I do think that the impact of drugs, of new drugs on financial markets is underrated. And you can have examples of this going back pretty far. Like there is some connection between caffeine consumption and like extroversion and risk taking like you temporarily get a little bit more willing to do deals when you consume caffeine and in Lloyd's of London before it was this insurance consortium, it was a coffee shop. It was Lloyd's coffee shop. So you do have some history of coffee shops being associated with financial centers. And then you have to zoom forward because we just haven't had that many novel stimulants, I guess depressants, deliriums, whatever, like other drug categories probably just don't lead to that much financial activity. Like I don't know how someone would trade differently or invest differently if they had a really strong acid trip or took ecstasy or something. But the stimulants where people can just consistently reuse them, they keep people alert, they make them active and wanting to do things. It seems like stimulants would have a connection to financial markets. So yeah, that theory is like if you look at the 1980s where there were a lot of these hostile takeover deals where someone would find a company that's underperforming and when you look at the spreadsheets and say this company is underperforming, what you're often looking at is a story that is more like this company believes that they have this social obligation to the community where people work and that they have an obligation to give their customers a fairly priced product and maybe they give them really good customer service that doesn't really pay for itself and it's the right thing to do. Well maybe especially if you are a coke head with kind of coke head morality, you decide well that's not the right thing to do at all. You should actually just take the money and we should fire these people and replace them with cheaper employees. So you know levering up a company and then like levering up in order to buy out a bigger company and then firing everyone and you know shutting down the pension plan and distributing the surplus to shareholders like it is just very standard coke head behavior. Whereas if you look at the mortgage backed securities boom and structured products generally in the mid-2000s, the way that people made money in that was just by being very very detail oriented and being able to make these incredibly fine grained distinctions between different products that were basically similar but one of them pays 5.7% and one of them pays 5.75% and if you lever up that difference enough times you're actually making really good money consistently. It's super boring but maybe with enough Adderall it's actually very tolerable work that you can enjoy. So I do think that just like within stimulants the difference between short acting stimulants and long acting stimulants does mean the difference between a hostile takeover boom and a structured products boom. And then yeah there's I think the drug is called M-sem or something which is like a Parkinson's treatment and there's some evidence from pretty small sample size studies that one of the side effects of this drug is compulsive gambling. So yeah and the drug story there have been very very fun tweets about this claim and then there have been these official denials from the company doctor on the other hand if you're a company that has a company doctor maybe that says something about the level of medication you're consuming and maybe the company doctor's job is partly to say as a doctor I can assure you I would never give someone three times the normal dose of Adderall just because their boss hired me to do that specifically. I think dealers don't exactly have patient confidentiality norms, doctors do so maybe you hire a doctor instead of a dealer specifically to get that plausible deniability.Dwarkesh Patel 0:17:12Other than drugs I also want to ask you about the phenotype of the founder. You wrote a post I think it was like just a couple of weeks before this crash happened where you were pointing out that this idea of a founder who comes in shorts and a t-shirt and a crazy haircut. By the way so FTX had a barber who would come in every Tuesday to cut everybody's hair it might have been Thursday and that so he could have just like sat in line and gotten his haircut like that was that was completely unnecessary the way he dressed and it was like very purposeful. But yeah so if that archetype of a founder who's in a t-shirt and shorts if that's been priced in and that's beta instead of alpha now what is the new phenotype and physiognomy of the founder? Where are you looking for alpha?Byrne Hobart 0:17:58Well I guess I would draw the distinction between like the physical type of someone versus their presentation and their dress. Yeah I don't know I'm sure someone could run some interesting numbers on that but I don't have a good sense of what exactly they'd get from that but in terms of you know how people public people publicly present that present themselves my guess is that yeah there will be this swing towards investing in people who look a little bit more formal a little bit more boring and these things are somewhat cyclical. Like I think part of you know part of the norm on investing in or you know treating basically treating the suit as a negative signal is that a lot of investors have this view that when the MBAs come into an industry a lot of the alpha is gone and it is true that MBAs at least you know there's it's like a decent market timing signal apparently that if a lot of people from Harvard Business School go straight into some field that field is probably peaking. So there's a little bit to that where the suit is some example of conformity on the other hand wearing a suit in Silicon Valley is an example of non-conformity and I guess outside of outside of New York within the US most of the time wearing a suit as a tech company founder would be this weird sign that you know you're either like you don't know what you're doing you don't know what the right signals are or you know you're about to testify to Congress and that's why you have a suit now. You're not not generally a great sign but maybe it is a sign that you are willing to do some more conformist things and that you could pay attention to details the details are boring and also that you are putting some you're making some kind of financial investment in in that particular appearance. So yeah I would I would guess that there is there will be a tilt away from the hyper informal founders but I also think that if you treat that hyper informality as either this attempt to gain the system and just say like I'm going to be as much I'm going to try to remind people of Mark Zuckerberg circa 2005 as much as possible so I can raise money and pretend to be the next big thing that is that's one thing people are signaling and then the other thing is they're just accidentally signaling total indifference to anything except the thing they're working on and maybe that's a good thing but maybe maybe it's a good thing in unregulated domains and then a really really bad thing in regulated domains like if you're investing in a medical devices company you you probably don't want a founder who just cannot focus on anything except the product because there are rules they have to follow and you know norms and things and yeah it gets bad if all they're focused on is this one element you know if the hyper focus is like just right perfectly calibrated that's good but then maybe maybe adjusting your appearances this way to say that you have correctly calibrated your hyper focus and you're going to get one thing right and it's going to be really really right like you're going to get things right they're going to be really really right and you've identified what things matter what things don't.Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:02Yeah you'll lose track of your bank accounts. That's the dress itself but I also want to ask about the other characteristics you had this really interesting point in that blog post about how you know when you try to scout for talent when the talent is young you're over indexing for parental involvement and I'm curious if you had to identify somebody who had to be under the age of 18 or under the age of 20 what is the metric you're looking at that least indexes for parental involvement where they're being forced or encouraged by their parents to do it?Byrne Hobart 0:21:35I think the closest you could get is something that is either totally illegible to the parent's status like understanding of status or something that is actively low status and it's hard to hard to enumerate those and not just get swamped in well should this thing be low status the high status is actually terrible to say that you ever want to hire someone who was really good at x for some value of x but I do think that you so basically the origin of that point was that I was arguing that when you if you look at people who are at some percentile and they're in their 20s or 30s like a lot of like at a high percentile like a lot of it has to be that they have some combination of talent and have tried really hard there's probably been some element of luck but over time the luck starts to starts to wash out hopefully but the younger you go and this is probably just my experience of having kids like if you talk to your kids every day about multiplication they will start doing multiplication at a pretty early age and it's not that they are you know really really smart and they got to multiplication a couple years early it's that you push them in that direction and they were able to do it early so like the earlier you go the more you are over indexing on what the parents did what they emphasized and also what they told the kids was just part of the script and there are anecdotes about this from none of the specifics coming to mind but I remember anecdotes about people who grew up in lower middle class or below circumstances but would have one distant relative who owned a business and that made them aware that they could own a business and this is like a thing they could do it's part of the script now and that wasn't the only reason that they would have started business but it could be a reason that they decided to do that when they did and you have to imagine that for everyone who had one uncle who owned a scrap dealer or something that maybe there are five or ten or fifty people who grew up in similar circumstances had a similar level of innate ability and just didn't have anyone in their social circle who demonstrated to them that this was something you could actually do so I think like getting getting back to the talent identification problem but part of my thesis there was that it's it's really hard and it's getting harder that you had Y Combinator going after the relatively young talent versus what the medium BC was going after when YC started and then stuff like Pioneer and Emergent Ventures is going even younger and the younger you get the more it is this luck driven thing that is about what they got exposed to with the exception of prodigies so I'd like to think that if I encountered an eight-year-old Mozart I would be able to identify this person as just an extraordinary talent where like even if their parents were making them practice ten hours a day they couldn't be that good without talent and maybe something similar with the Polar Sisters where okay if I you know encounter a six-year-old who can routinely beat me at chess and so I go Google some you know read some chess books and then go back and try to beat them again and they're actually better and they're laughing at me and things like at some point you decide that this is actually natural talent but there's for a lot of other domains there's just so much room for parents to push one thing and do some combination of their kids talent and their own emphasis to get their kids really good at it and that's very hard to adjust for especially because if you ask the parents they're going to underestimate how much they overemphasize things because to them this is just a normal thing that everyone should be interested in and so you won't you won't get a good signal from asking parents and then you won't get a good signal from asking other people because they don't know how this family spends time at home and you know if if the medium family has more more YouTube and Netflix time and less you know less math practice time that family's just going to assume it's pretty pretty much their behavior is normal.Dwarkesh Patel 0:25:25It's a bit confusing because you also want to potentially include parental involvement in your estimate of how good this person will end up being if you think for example that giving somebody a shot to get started programming early is actually a big factor in putting them on that sort of like loop where they get better by practicing and they enjoy it more so on you might expect momentum more than mean reversion in that kind of like early start.Byrne Hobart 0:25:54Sure so I think part of part of what this gets to is the question of what are you optimizing for when you're doing a talent search and I think this is maybe one reason there could be some alpha left in talent search among people who are super young is that a lot of the academic institutions that are doing some form of talent search what they're pretty much optimizing for is how does this person do over the next year so you know if someone is a math prodigy and they get to join the math team at that school the school is not trying to optimize for will this person be proving novel theorems when they're 25 it's really will this seven-year-old be doing you know algebra by the time they're eight and that's that is still very tied to parental involvement especially once you know parents like kids they like structure and if you tell them this is the appropriate next thing to do with your kid then they're more likely to do it so you can post on that momentum for a while but what I think you the trap you can run into is that you identify people who are like 95th percentile talent with 99th percentile just super aggressive parents and that combination gets them to 99th percentile performance until they leave home and then they never do whatever that thing is ever again because they didn't really like it it was just something their parents pressured them into now maybe the ideal would be you get 99 percentile on both so the parents are putting them on this trajectory but the parents are actually aiming you know a very powerful rocket ship and it's going to go right in the right direction which is ideal and I think there's a there's a reasonable possibility that like I think there are there's like some level of just imprinting that young kids have where a lot of kids learn about programming when they're very young and that's something that they do from a very very early age and then it becomes the thing that they work on for their entire career obviously that has to be fairly new because it's not like they're you know from like anyone who was born before 1970 just had this constant yearning to program computers and could never satisfy it like those kids found something else to do maybe a generation before it was repairing transistor radios like mine did when he was a kid and maybe a century before that it was experimenting by building little internal combustion engines and seeing whether or not they explode like Henry Ford did with his friends at school and maybe before that like the earlier you got the harder it gets to really map these activities to anything concrete that we understand and can relate to but there's there's probably some extent to which you can you can sort of direct kids into whatever the modern instantiation of this long-term enduring tendency is and I guess one so one interesting example of that I've been reading the Robert Caro LBJ biography and there's this bit towards the end of the first volume where LBJ is put in charge of this fundraising organization for Democrats in Congress and when you read about it he sounds like a traitor he sounds like someone who was just born to be slinging currency derivatives or something because he is constantly on the phone constantly picking up rumors constantly sending money here and there and everywhere else and he's like always sending money overnight and then sending someone a telegram the day before saying you're going to get a package from Lyndon Baines Johnson and you're welcome so he's like he's doing this thing where he's constantly relentlessly optimizing every little tiny detail of some very complicated process clearly requires enormous working memory requires a very strong basically a very strong poker face like he has to be able to differentiate between someone who is begging for money because they are at they're pulling at 49% and with a little bit more money for newspaper ads they get to 50.1% versus someone who just wants the money or just is constantly freaking out by their nature so it requires a lot of the same character traits but 1930s were just not a great time to go to Wall Street maybe if LBJ had been born at a slightly different time that's that's just what he would have done and it would have been a very successful private equity executive or something but sometimes those these general skills they can translate into a lot of different areas and they get honed into very specific skills through through deliberate practice in those areas so if you have that combination of natural tendency and some level of motivation which in LBJ's case his dad was also a politician so he had this example of this is part of the life script you can't do it but he also had the example of his dad was broke after a while and so he he had this example of what not to do and ended up making good money for himself in addition to his political career yeah yeahDwarkesh Patel 0:30:35I'm glad you brought up the biography I'm reading it right now as well and the other biography by Robert Caro the power broker just for the audience the last episode or the second to last episode in the feed is we go deep into deep into that biography and talk about why it might be inaccurate in certain respects but what is what it is accurate and I think what Caro has a genius in is talking about the personalities of these great great men about the people who have really shaped their cities or their countries for decades and centuries there's many places where I mean I'm sure this is true for you if you understand like the economics of an issue he's talking about there's a lot to be left to care his explanation but the actual like the sort of breakdown of the personalities is just so fascinating and worth a reading care for but you know come to think of it so maybe the difference between the cases where you want to price in the parents involvement and the ones where you don't is where in situations like maybe being a politician where it really is about building a network building know-how building this sort of inarticulable knowledge from an early age it might be the case that in those situations just having connections and having parental involvement gets you far but if it's like becoming a programmer sure you'll like have done data structures by the time you're 16 but eventually you'll get to the point where you know everybody knows the basics and now you actually how to do interesting and cool things in computer science and now you're like a 95th percentile of spatial reasoning IQ is not going to get you that far but let me ask you about the care of biography because you had a really interesting comment that I've been warning you about as well in your in your review of the book or in your comment about the book you said it's worth speculating on how many lbg level figures exist today perhaps in domains outside of politics and how many caro level biographers there are who could do them justice so do you have some idea of who these figures are or if not that at least what areas you'd expect them to beByrne Hobart 0:32:34in I think a lot of people who are close to that tier and have some of the same personality types are in sales and corporate development and stuff like that where they you know they're they're building a big network they are constantly building out this giant levered balance sheet of favors you know favors out to them favors they owe to other people and like all forms of leverage it does allow you to grow a lot faster but you occasionally want these big big blowups so that's that's one place I would look I think if you try to look at the more you know pure executive founder types then it gets harder to find someone who would have exactly that kind of personality it's like part of what made lbj's methods work was that he was adjacent to a bunch of these really big institutions and he could sort of siphon off some of the power that these institutions had and in some cases could make them more powerful so I'm about a third of the way through master of the senate right now so it's it's just getting to the point where he's really getting cooking and really making the senate more more effective than it used to be and also making it an organization where someone where it's less seniority based so you kind of you need to be attached to something much bigger than yourself for that particular skill set to work really well that said you could have a really big impact because it is it's another form of leverage so if you are one of a hundred senators or I guess at the point at that point it was 96 senators and you're you're able to exert a lot more influence and be you know be the equivalent to 40 senators for example then you can get a whole lot done because it's it's the us senate but if you have that same kind of skill set and you're the ceo of your company well you're you're already in front of the company like there's only so much extra force you can exert so you you kind of see a figure with exactly that kind of personality trait in a case where there are big institutions that have slowed down somewhat and this is another interesting point that is raised early master at the senate is that the senate was getting old and if you look at these long-term charts of average age of politicians we're we're definitely in a bull market for extremely extremely old politicians in the u.s right now but we've gone through cycles before and one of the things that that tends to cause a reset is the war where wars among other things cause this huge reset in social capital so the people who made mistakes in the early stages all get discredited and then the the social bonds that people forge from actually fighting alongside one another and the the prestige you get from actually being part of the winning side that is very hard to replicate and so you end up with much younger people in much you know in positions of a lot more power whereas the the way that that worked a decade and a half earlier was the 1930s there just weren't a lot of organizations that were hiring heavily and looking for really ambitious young people who are going to shake things up but the u.s government was so that's that's how lbj got in and started on his path was that the new deal created these big programs like the national youth administration and they needed people like johnson to to run them so when you look at um you look at an industry that is aging it's usually an industry where um ambitious people stay away from it like they recognize it's becoming more seniority focused and there's just less going on but there becomes this huge opportunity when the aging stops because a bunch of people either retire or they get discredited and have to leave and suddenly the average age of the industry ratchets down and you can basically look at the set of opportunities that were missed over the previous decade for example because um because the industry was like the whatever this institution was was too risk averse you you get to take all of those opportunities at once so you have tons and tons of low-hanging fruit when that shift happens so i think that's that's the other thing to look for is look for cases where there's some some institution some part of the economy or society that has just been slowing down for a long time clearly getting to the limit of whatever its current operating model is hasn't found a new model and there's someone young and disruptive who's just entering it so i mean maybe maybe the place to look for the next lbj is um someone doing independent films and someone who looks at the top box office results and sees that everything is a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off and it's you know 50 percent marvel and says this is disgusting we have to destroy it and i'm going to build something completely different like maybe that person is actually the kind of lbj archetype now the other half of this question is the caro archetype and part of what i found fun about this was that um i felt like caro had this kind of um like he was kind of disgusted with himself when he realized how similar his some of his methods were to lbj's because he's writing this story about this guy who's will do anything to make a sort of friendship but it's really a fake friendship just to accomplish his goals and he's constantly doing doing the reading that other people aren't doing and doing the work and making the calls and reiterating and reiterating iterating just endless patience and then you read about how caro works and he does things like moves to dc for a while talks to everyone in dc befriends people goes to um texas talks you know moves to the hill country and gets to know people there he has these anecdotes in the book because the book is like um it's sort of has these hints of gonzo journalism where sometimes caro will just narrate it's that he'll he will go from here's what happened in 1946 to here's what happened to me in the 70s while i was talking to this guy about what he did in 1946 and sometimes he he will basically come out and say i waited until the person who paid this bribe had alzheimer's and then i asked him if he remembered paying the bribe and he remembered that he did it and didn't remember he wasn't supposed to say it so that's how i know and um there's this line that caro keeps quoting from lbj which i think was from lbj's speech coach days or speech like debate team coach days where his line was if you do everything you will win and caro does everything um so i think probably the population of caros is smaller than the population of lbj's because the people who have that skill set probably have ambitions other than writing a canonical book about one particular person or you know writing two canonical books two canonical works on um two important people but maybe a lot of those people are just doing thingsDwarkesh Patel 0:39:03other than typing man there's so many threads there that i i'm like tempted to just spend the rest of the episode just digesting um and talking about that but one thing that i like there's so many interesting things about caro's story uh and i guess the impact is that one of them is there's been this focus in terms of thinking about impact especially in like circles like effective altruism of trying to crunch the numbers and there's no reasonable crunching into the numbers you could have come up with before the power broker is written where you say i'm going to spend by the way this is he tries to downplay his accomplishments as a journalist before he wrote the power broker but he was nominated for the pulitzer prize for his journalism before the power broker so he's like a top level uh investigative journalist and then you say here's i'm going to spend my talents i'm going to spend eight years looking into and researching every conceivable person who has even potentially been in the same room as or been impacted by robert moses and i'm going to document all this i'm going to write a book where that's like million words or something and but in fact that's he probably didn't think about it this way right but what was the result he probably that book probably changed how many of the most influential people who came up through politics uh think about politics think it probably changed how urban governance is done how we think about accountability and transparency for good or ill right depending on your perspective um and just that example alone really makes me suspect the sort of number crunching way of thinking about what to do and rather just like i don't know i gotta understand how the you know from procurus perspective i gotta understand how this guy accumulated this power he doesn't and it like completely transforms uh you know how urbanByrne Hobart 0:40:41governance has been yeah you know it actually uh kind of looping back to the the parental influence thing i think part of what happened was that the more caro dug into it the more he realized this is actually a big and compelling project and there's there's this kind of fun phenomenon that you can get when you're researching something where you you you've read enough that when you read something new and you see that there's a footnote you actually know what is going to be cited in that footnote and maybe you've also read the thing about how the thing in that footnote is wrong and here's why and um you know you're picking up information a lot faster you get that that nice convexity where you can skim through the stuff you know and everything you read is new information and challenges something about what you what you previously knew and that's just a really intoxicating feeling and i can imagine that it's even more fun if you're actually digging up the primary sources so you know if you're caro you've gone through the new york times archives you've read through all of the all the external coverage of what people said about most time and then you start talking to people and you realize here are things that were we got completely wrong like we thought moses didn't want x to happen and it turns out that he kept scheming and plotting to make x happen and just wanted to pretend that it wasn't his doing um you so i think that but what happens is you you build this ongoing motivation and then you can you can make something that you just wouldn't be able to make before and i think if um if you start out saying i'm going to write a million words about how cities are run um you will probably fail but if you keep writing another 500 words a day about how robert moses operated and what he did and then you have some reflections throughout that on what that means for cities then then maybe maybe you actually get there and yeah so um and and maybe some of this is like you you want to have an adversary like a lot of these like the carol books do seem partly to be this cross-examination of of who he's writing about and often he he seems to have very mixed feelings like he you know with um i think one of the one of the really interesting things in um in the years of lyndon johnson is the carol's description of um coke stevenson and how they contrast him with lbj because it's really clear that uh carol's politics are completely opposed to stevenson's and that when carol's writing about lbj there's like the good stuff he did which is the great society and his his participation in the new zealand and there's a bad stuff which is anything that wasn't bad and um so he clearly like he likes what lbj accomplished and despises the person and then really likes the person of coke stevenson and kind of wishes him well but also doesn't actually want people like that to be in charge of anything and so it's like a you know it's partly partly carol debating with his subject and interrogating his subject and partly debating with himself and asking these very long-standing questions about whether or not justify the ends and you know would it be worth it to not have a great society in exchange for not letting lbj steal an election in 1948 and i don't think that like if he's good at his writing he shouldn't be coming to firm conclusions on that and he should be presenting this very very mixed picture where you really only get the things you really want if you also accept that there are some very bad things that come along with that as long as as long as the things you want come from powerful ambitious people who will do anything to win hey guysDwarkesh Patel 0:44:14i hope you're enjoying the conversation so far if you are i would really really appreciate it if you could share the episode with other people who you think might like it this is still a pretty small podcast so it's basically impossible for me to exaggerate how much it helps out when one of you shares the podcast you know put the episode and the group chat you have with your friends post it on twitter send it to somebody who you think might like it all of those things helps out a ton anyways back to the conversation yep yep no and it's worth remembering that it takes him a decade to write each of those volumes and each of that i guess in the case of the power broker or that entire book but in the course of a decade just imagine how many times you would change your mind on a given subject and you really notice this when you read different paragraphs of like for example the power broker where you notice um early on if you just read the first third or the first half the power broker you're like clearly caro is like writing about uh uh robert moses the way he writes about robert linden johnson where it's like yeah this guy had some flaws but like look at the cool s**t he did and the awesome stuff he did for new york um and then the tone completely changes but you gotta remember it's he's just writing this so many years and uh in between i do want to uh talk about the thing about you know young people being able to you know young people i guess a war being a catalyst for young people entering an arena i did an interview of um alexander mikorovitsky i forgot his last name but anyways he wrote a really interesting book about the polyonic wars and this is actually one of the things we talked about um there's a line from war and peace where one of the russian aristocrats is mad that his son is joining uh is joining the war and he goes you know it's is that man napoleon you you've all seen him and now you all want to like go off to war and i'm curious um like filmmaking doesn't seem like we're super quantitative and super smart and super competent like somebody who has thymus and the desire to dominate and the desire to achieve recognition uh i mean do you really think he's making films like where where is he really i mean is he like still trying to start a startup or is that like now a decade too old and now he's trying to dominate some other arena i mean maybe the lame answer is we don'tByrne Hobart 0:46:31actually know because um the way like you know paul graham has that essay about the trope of startups starting in garages and i think it's called the power of the marginal and it's all about how the the really interesting projects are the ones that can barely get off the ground because they're so weird and so out there that there is no infrastructure to support them and what that ends up doing is selecting for people who are extremely passionate about that project and also people who are extremely willful and will get impossible things done so you it's hard to just rattle off a bunch of examples of that because you your hit rate would be like 99 things out of 100 are just like things you read one fun blog post speculating about and they're actually never going to happen and then you know one of them maybe maybe you're right but it's very hard to tell which one it is and you know if it were very easy venture capital would not have such such skewed returns so yeah so maybe maybe it is like harder to harder to optimize for what area do you look for maybe it's actually easier to do the meta optimization of identifying the things you would quit you know quit podcasting and go work on given the opportunity and you know it's like good to have that sort of dread list like I I had that mental list of like you know if someone at Spotify ping me and they're like we really need a product manager who can help us display classical music such that we don't list like tons of redundant information and the first 50 characters of the track name and the actual incremental useful information in the 10 characters you have to wait for it to scroll through unless it doesn't actually scroll through like if someone pinged me it was like we really need someone to fix that can you come and do this I'd be sorely tempted feel the same way about Google Finance like if if if someone emails me and says you have a mandate to make Google Finance good I'd be tempted but I think thinking of like what industries would have that kind of pull for you and then what can you do to really dig into those industries you probably find the the the proto successful people in spaces like that versus trying to optimize in advance for well if I were you know if I were someone who thinks like nobody else thinks and we're a true natural contrarian and also had spent several years learning about different opportunities which one would I have ended up picking because then you're sort of magicking away all of the things that actually make the person you're looking for it's looking for so yeah can't quite be done that way yeah yeah yeah I want to go backDwarkesh Patel 0:49:05to that thing you said a moment ago about how you couldn't have written a million words that were as impactful about just you know how cities work but if you just wrote 500 words at a time about how Robert Moses accumulated power did the things he did you can actually have a really interesting and influential piece of work is that how you see the diff that you can't write one million words at a time about where where technology is going what's happening with the productivity slowdown what's happening with all these emerging industries but if you just write 2,000 words a day about what's happening with any particular you know company or industry then you can compile this really interesting overall worldview aboutByrne Hobart 0:49:44finance and tech that's the hope and I might be projecting things about my own attention span on to on to Cairo when I say that you can't just set out to do a million words on topic X and then do it but I do think you know I hope that I am by increments producing something that is a lot more than the sum of a bunch of business profiles and a bunch of you know strategy breakdown things like that like and that's that's one of the reasons that I spent time on things like reading Machiavelli and thinking about how Machiavelli's thoughts not just not just the the totally cynical amoral stuff but the other stuff you wrote at the same time which he may have met more seriously about how to build a sustainable and good republic rather than how to be a completely amoral monarch I try to read that kind of thing because I do think that it's valuable to have that more rounded view of the human condition and and I think that it contributes a lot to to writing about these individual companies like you know technology changes a lot humans change very slowly so if you if you want to understand technology you do have to study that this specific object level case of what is this thing what does it do differently what is it a substitute for what are the compliments to it etc but if you're trying to understand things like why did this company do X like why why did they fire fire this person and not that person and why did they choose to acquire this other business why is the CEO dumping tons of money into this thing that seems like it's it doesn't make much sense well you can find lots of historical examples of people in power making these decisions that just get continuously worse and continuously more costly and they refuse to back down sometimes they turn to be right sometimes they turn to be very very wrong but you'll find more examples of that if you go back further in history and they're often just a lot more fun to read about whereas like you know if you you can read about things like board spending too much money on the pencil and it not working out or IBM investing a ton in the 360 and that working out very nicely but you know you can also go back to the Iliad and read another case where sunk cost fallacy dominated rational strictly rational decision making and you know only divine intervention could ultimately lead to a good outcome for for the attacker and even then maybe not suchDwarkesh Patel 0:52:04great outcome often considered the that particular question about where trying to predict if somebody is overstepping or if they're making the best bet of their life is something that I've been trying to think about and I really have no reasonable method for I mean if you think about like what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter is this like Napoleon trying to conquer Russia and it's this super ego filled and pride filled you know completely illogical bet from somebody who has just had like 20 consecutive wins in a row and he thinks he's invincible or is it like Elon Musk like 20 years ago where he's like yeah I did PayPal and now let's you know let's build some rockets and let's build some electric vehicles yeah exactly and in each of these cases there's there's like so many analogies to like complete bust and there's so many analogies to oh this is just like part one of this grand plan and how do you figure out what which one is happening like how do you distinguish the visionary from the collapsing you know star the cynical answer is you wait about 200 years and thenByrne Hobart 0:53:18you write about how it was obvious all along like yeah you you really don't and I mean even there are a lot of cases that are actually still ambiguous so like Alexander you know conquered most of the known world at least most of the world that that people knew of around where he grew up and and then just goes to Babylon and drinks himself to death and that's the end right you know there there could have been an alternate story where he gets his life together a little bit and runs a giant sprawling empire on the other hand like reading the story battle to battle a lot of it it actually is basically this Ponzi scheme where every time he conquers a city he gets enough enough to pay off the people he hired to help him conquer the city and then has to move to the next city because they want to get paid again and so he's sort of you know was sort of being chased by his his obligations the entire way through until he finally got got just ahead of them enough to get a lot of loot and and a lot of land that could give people instead of just giving money so giving them like bars of silver and things so so yeah even even that story it's very hard to say you know he he rolled the dice a bunch of times and he won every time so clearly he was just one of those people who's born to win maybe it was sort of like he actually backed himself into a bunch of corners over and over and over again and then desperately fought his way out every single time and then was just completely sick of it and burnt out by the time he was in his early 30s in terms of how you would figure it out in advance like I think some of it does come down to getting a sense of whether they're responding to circumstances or whether they actually have have a long-term plan but then lots of like you know there's probably nothing more dangerous than a long-term plan that someone actually has the means to execute you know five-year plan does not have a good connotation Stalin had some of those and didn't turn out well for for a lot of people so even within that there's there's some difficulty in evaluating like I think there's kind of that that meta-cynical layer where if they don't know what they're doing then probably it's dumb luck they keep succeeding on the other hand if they do know what they're doing then maybe you hope that the world is lucky enough that they get unlucky and can't actually pull off whatever it is that they're they're planning to do maybe I guess another thing would be is there is there like an end state that they can get to because I think you know someone like Alexander he basically just kept going until he couldn't go any farther until his troops were basically on the point of mutiny and then just turned around and went not all the way home but went to like the nicest place halfway home and hung out there and partied but you know if if the story if you look at someone if the story is less about conquest and more about reconquest and restoration of something then there are these natural limits you can say like you go this far and you don't go any farther because you've actually finished your task so something like you know I think like I don't actually know who was who what which generals were on the other side of Napoleon but the ones who chased him out of Russia like for them the master plan was not we're going to conquer all of Europe the master plan was like we're getting our country back and then we're going to chase him far enough that he doesn't feel like he can just wait a year and do this again when it's not winter so so maybe that's that's another way to constrain it but then then you end up naturally selecting for less ambitious people it's like one way to one way to have these guardrails on your behavior is just don't have very big ambitions so you might and in that case those people are also stuck responding to circumstances so so maybe maybe you just end up with many different iterations of the same thing on different scales where everyone is stuck in certain historical circumstances they have they have their skills they have their opportunities they can they can go after some things maybe they achieve great things maybe they fail but either way eventually their luck runs out or they run out of ideas and then there's nothing to do except go home or just keep trying to keep keep being bolder until you eventually fail on most particularly I I don't really I don't really understand it I think there's like a remote possibility that he actually has a bunch of specific concrete ideas for how to increase Twitter's free cash flow and how to pay down the debt and make it a more profitable company maybe he just had that sense that it was overstaffed and that it should survive with a smaller headcount and if you cut headcount enough then you you end up with with a profitable business it could also just have been fun and seems fun so far and I think like that you know the the pursuit of fun is is not to be discounted like you if you're super rich you can afford to do all sorts of things varying levels of entertainment but it may be that the only thing that is actually like truly novel thrill seeking fun opportunity is something like buy Twitter and then turn it into you know what it is and it is like there's I think Rostad that at this this point about how the nature of Twitter's legitimacy has changed and that now it is a it is under the rule of a single monarch instead of ruled by these sort of faceless bureaucracies so now you know if something if Twitter does something you don't like there's actually a specific person you can blame and because you have Twitter you can actually yell at that person and potentially get an answer whereas if Twitter bans you because you made a joke and the joke looked like it was serious there's really there's no recourse and you know there's there's nothing lower status than someone like arguing with someone in authority about how serious or they should take your jokes there's like you know it's like a weird component of and it works both ways so like there's I think I started noticing this years ago because there are these underscore TXT Twitter accounts where they're just posting out of context comments from some niche community and the comments always sound deranged in a lot of cases to me the comments read as someone who is doing a bit they're playing a role they know it's funny they're exaggerating for their friends and then you take it out of context and read it as totally seriously and then you get to say these people are all like this they're all crazy but it is like it is a marker of high status to be able to not get jokes and to you know be able to be like righteously angry at someone because they made a joke and if they've been serious that would have been an appalling thing to say but they obviously weren't if you if you can get away with saying no I actually don't think it was a joke at all these people are humorless and they must have been totally serious then that's that's actually you know that's cool that's high status makes you impressive but yeah must like must must rule as this more you know personal monarch I think it's a it speaks to this question of legitimacy like why do people trust moderation and why do they trust sites to operate in the way that they do and you can either say these are like really high quality institutions so you know you can take the discourse as the oblivion approach and say we built these systems such that anyone can be dropped in and can do a reasonably good job

This week in Beauty Land...  So you've probably heard, our very own Leigh has launched a beauty brand. In today's episode Leigh brings in some of her Brillo Beauty products for Erin to try live on the show!  Plus, people on TikTok are using their period blood as a face masks? We breakdown why it's probably not the best idea.  THE END BITS  Subscribe to Mamamia You can find out more about Brillo Beauty on www.brillobeauty.com Read Erin's article 'It's disgusting': 5 things a skin scientist would never do to her face on www.mamamia.com.au Read Hannah English's article, This is exactly how much foundation with SPF you'd need to wear to get enough sun protection on www.mamamia.com.au CREDITS Hosts: Erin Docherty & Mikayla Floriano Producer: Mikayla Floriano Audio Production: Leah Porges GET IN TOUCH: Got a beauty question you want answered?  Email us at youbeauty@mamamia.com.au or call the podphone on 02 8999 9386.  Join our You Beauty Facebook Group here. Want this and other podcasts delivered straight to your inbox? Subscribe to our podcast newsletter. You Beauty is a podcast by Mamamia. Listen to more Mamamia podcasts here. Mamamia acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land we have recorded this podcast on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Just by reading or listening to our content, you're helping to fund girls in schools in some of the most disadvantaged countries in the world - through our partnership with Room to Read. We're currently funding 300 girls in school every day and our aim is to get to 1,000. Find out more about Mamamia at mamamia.com.au Become a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thank you for joining us for our 2nd Cabral HouseCall of the weekend! I'm looking forward to sharing with you some of our community's questions that have come in over the past few weeks…   Donna: Hi Dr Cabral! I was recently diagnosed with a renal AML of 1.3cms and focal nodular neoplasm on my liver was noticed on my ultrasound. I need to now do an MRI to further investigate. I can't find any archived podcasts on these issues. Some background info: I was on “Yas” birth control pill for 8 years from 14-22 years old, and in the last 2 years I took antibiotics 8 times for UTIs. I'm someone who normally NEVER takes medication. I eat well, don't drink or smoke, but I've undergone a lot of stress since becoming a mom 4 years ago and feel like it's been since that time that my health has started to deteriorate as I try to juggle motherhood with running my own growing business. I'll be running the big 5 labs in 2 weeks, as I'm convinced they will shed more light on my health. Any input from you would help! Will these tumors ever go away in your experience? Thank you so much, I value your consideration and time!   Maria: Hi Dr Cabral! I would love to hear your thoughts on lecithin as a supplement. Do you recommend it? If so, how does it support the body and what benefits are there? I've heard it connected to cognitive functions, nerves, skin, cholesterol etc. Could it be helpful for someone who has signs of dementia? What about when there's loss of sensitivity, tingling and numbness in lower parts of the legs and feet? Or is there anyone is particular that is at risk of being low in lecithin? Many many thanks for all you do, your podcast is like my encyclopedia on all health related matters.   Jesseca: Hi Dr. Cabral, Thank you so much for all of the education you share. I've learned so much from you and am so grateful to have resources like yours to empower myself and my family to live happy, healthy lives. I have two separate questions that I asked in the Facebook support group, and they don't appear to have been answered before: 1) What is your opinion on chemical peels and products like retinol as part of a regular skin care routine? As I understand it, both make your skin very sensitive to the sun (requiring very diligent SPF application), which raises some red flags for me. What do you think? 2) What is your opinion on using mushrooms like lions mane, chaga, and cordyceps while pregnant? I'm planning on getting pregnant in the next year and am thinking about how to replace my morning coffee. When I've decided to give up caffeine in the past, I found mushrooms like this (e.g. FourSigmatic's functional creamer) to work really well as an alternative. I know you recommend reducing herbs while pregnant. Would mushrooms like this fall in the same category? Thank you! Jesseca   Tina: You are amazing, and thanks for all you do! My 13-year-old son was just diagnosed with severe swelling in his sinuses, a deviated septum, and sinus polyps. I have him on daily omegas, daily activated mullti, periodic balanced zinc, daily probiotic, 3 HistPro 2 X per day, and I just ordered the alkalizing vitamin c (all Equilife products). I was forced to start him on Flonase, but I also have him on the nutribiotic GSE nasal spray. They want to do surgery, but they agreed to see if his nose improved after three months on the Flonase. So, three questions: 1-How much alkalizing vitamin c should he take? 2- Is it fine to keep him on all of these other things, and for how long? 3-Is there anything else I could be doing before this follow-up visit to help him so that his nose improves and they don't want to push us into the surgery? He's just over 100 pounds and very fit and active. He has all of the seasonal allergies and allergies to peanuts, tree-nuts, and sesame. I know it will take a while for you to answer, and I did ask on Facebook as well, but I know this will be an ongoing issue, so I wanted to get your opinion since I really value it.   Jackie: My practitioner has recommended the Candida and Bacterial Optimizer (CBO) protocol. He is not an expert on Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth, however. He has noted that my good bacteria diversity is really low. I have been on antibiotics and antimicrobials for 10 months to combat my SIBO. So far, no luck. My hydrogen level remains elevated. My question is this. Is this particular protocol good to disrupt established and tough biofilms? Or is this protocol better for someone who would be using this protocol as a first round against SIBO? Has it ever been used with success on SIBO patients who had tough biofilms to break down? Finally, is there a reason why EDTA is not included in the biofilm buster formula?   Ales: Hello Dr. Cabral, I have a question regarding earth probiotic strains like B.coagulus, B.clausii, B.subtilis. Lately, I have seen many products of these particular strains being used, especially in combination with botanicals and biofilm removers to help with SIBO. Is there any real evidence regarding soil based probiotics or you aren't convinced of their efficacy? With SIBO or in general?   Ales: Hello Dr. Cabral, in my last question I forgot to add that I work in a functional medicine clinic, where we analyse gut microbiom. We see very often low counts of akkermansia muciniphila, which is critical for healthy gut barrier. Soil based probiotics are suppose to indirectly increase akkermansia. Do you see any valuable evidence of that?   Thank you for tuning into this weekend's Cabral HouseCalls and be sure to check back tomorrow for our Mindset & Motivation Monday show to get your week started off right!   - - - Show Notes and Resources: StephenCabral.com/2487 - - - Get a FREE Copy of Dr. Cabral's Book: The Rain Barrel Effect - - - Join the Community & Get Your Questions Answered: CabralSupportGroup.com - - - Dr. Cabral's Most Popular At-Home Lab Tests: > Complete Minerals & Metals Test (Test for mineral imbalances & heavy metal toxicity) - - - > Complete Candida, Metabolic & Vitamins Test (Test for 75 biomarkers including yeast & bacterial gut overgrowth, as well as vitamin levels) - - - > Complete Stress, Mood & Metabolism Test (Discover your complete thyroid, adrenal, hormone, vitamin D & insulin levels) - - - > Complete Food Sensitivity Test (Find out your hidden food sensitivities) - - - > Complete Omega-3 & Inflammation Test (Discover your levels of inflammation related to your omega-6 to omega-3 levels) - - - Get Your Question Answered On An Upcoming HouseCall: StephenCabral.com/askcabral - - - Would You Take 30 Seconds To Rate & Review The Cabral Concept? The best way to help me spread our mission of true natural health is to pass on the good word, and I read and appreciate every review!