This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
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NAN:
You’re looking at this report, that is, like, the canonical climate change report, the IPCC report, and you’re like, everybody’s looking at these numbers. Everybody who cares about climate is looking at these numbers. And then you go out and talk to everybody in this space, and it takes you three weeks, and you’re like, what is going on here?
It is on us to sort of, like, figure out what that pipeline looks like. What is the PM-to-GM pipeline? How do we create these talent on-ramps and, for great people, help them find a problem that they are really excited about and can wrap their arms around and want to work on for long periods of time? And we have to do that at a pretty large scale. This is a sort of wartime mobilization effort.
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REID:
The climate conversation has long focused rightly on reducing emissions. But there’s another piece of the math that is becoming unavoidable. We also have to remove vast amounts of carbon already in the atmosphere and oceans and store it durably. Not offsets, not vibes, real tons measured and paid for.
ARIA:
Carbon removal is a public good, which means everyone benefits, but no single buyer naturally steps forward. So the question becomes, who builds the market? Who takes responsibility for the whole field? And what does new philanthropy look like when the work is not just writing checks, but creating the conditions for an entire industry to exist?
REID:
Every new field needs a first customer, someone who buys it before it’s cheap, before it’s obvious, before the rest of the market believes it exists. That was true for vaccines, for solar, and it’s true now for carbon removal.
ARIA:
Nan Ransohoff has spent the last several years trying to create exactly that market. As head of climate at Stripe, she leads Frontier, the advance market commitment that has contracted nearly $700 million to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. But Frontier is more than just a buyer. It’s a blueprint for how to shape a market around a public good that no single institution would otherwise fund.
REID:
Through all this, we also have a management story. Nan has argued that the world’s most important problems are orphaned. Plenty of people work on pieces, but no one feels responsible for the whole. Her answer? General managers for civilization-scale problems who define the outcome, find the bottlenecks and pull whatever levers the moment requires.
ARIA:
Carbon removal is a climate problem, but it’s also a market design problem, a management problem, and a philanthropy problem. Nan is one of the people trying to own all three. Welcome to Possible.
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REID:
You co-run a scone-review website called Scone Heads with your sister. This feels important. So what does a perfect scone look like and is there a climate angle that I’m missing?
NAN:
This is the best branding that Scone Heads has ever had. What makes a perfect scone? Well, there are really many things, but I’d say one is density. You know, you want some heft to your scone, it’s not cake here. So that’s kind of an important quality. Moisture, you know, you don’t want it to be too dry. And then flavor profile, which I think is very personal. But you know, I think savory scones are kind of underdone. There’s no climate angle. It was what we thought at the time was a funny pun, you know, Scone Heads. That’s pretty funny. Anyway, like years later we’re now maintaining a website and like vaguely reviewing scones occasionally, but has been like a fun side hustle with my sister and a friend.
ARIA:
It’s inspirational. But let’s get to climate. So you grew up in North Carolina, you got interested in climate, I think studying abroad in India, you spent time at Opower, Nest, Uber, Nuro. We all care about climate. When did climate go from I care about this as an individual, as a hobby, as a passion to I have to work on this for my job?
NAN:
There were sort of like two versions of that. The first was after undergrad. I worked in consulting for a couple of years and while I learned a lot, realized that sort of it doesn’t pass what I now call my 2 a.m. test. Like am I excited to work on this until 2 in the morning? And I thought climate would be that. And that is what got me into Opower and Nest. I got into carbon removal essentially. I did climate for a couple of years. I kind of got a little away from it and I was essentially in North Carolina helping my dad through a bone marrow transplant.
NAN:
A lot of downtime at the hospital and I was like, I’m gonna reread, I’m gonna read the 2018 IPCC report to reeducate myself for fun like we all do as one does. And in that report there’s of course all of the emissions reduction that we need to do and there’s this big thing about carbon removal. And I was reading this and sort of looking around like, wow, these numbers are quite large. And who is working on this? And just because I was, I started to kind of like poke around different folks who were working on it and it took me three weeks to talk to like everybody that I could in the field. And that was spooky to me, right?
NAN:
Like ostensibly we need to do tens of billions of tons a year, a trillion tons over the next 150 years. Like, how is that going to happen? That is when I panicked and decided that I wanted to work on carbon removal full time.
REID:
Let’s start digging into this. And, you know, probably a number of our listeners are new to this. So what counts as durable carbon removal? And why is emissions reduction alone not enough?
NAN:
The spirit of durable carbon removal is essentially around counteracting a ton of emissions. So, like, a ton of CO2 in the atmosphere is effectively permanent. And so you want to take it out permanently as well. I think people can debate the exact numbers, but that is the spirit of what you’re trying to get at. I would say in the thousand to tens of thousands of years is sort of like a good proxy for durability. And if we sort of collectively had done a better job with emissions reduction decades ago, we wouldn’t have to do carbon removal now. And that’s the world we all would have liked to be in. But it is not the world we’re in.
NAN:
So we have to radically reduce emissions and we have to suck CO2 that is already in the atmosphere out and store that somewhere permanently. We’re going to have to do a huge amount of both. And roughly, I would say, you know, we think about it like 90% ish should go to the reduction side, and then 10%, roughly, is on the removal side. But, like, these are very large numbers at the scales that we’re talking.
ARIA:
So Frontier has contracted nearly $700 million worth of carbon removal, and portfolio companies are building toward 1.4 million tons of annual removal capacity. Can you tell us why those numbers are a drop in the bucket? Like, what do we actually have to do? And then also just tell us what Frontier is.
NAN:
Frontier is carbon removal — durably sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it somewhere over the next 100, 250 years to stay within warming targets. We’re talking a teraton. So a trillion tons of carbon removal, 150 years, that’s a lot.
ARIA:
Do we have to do some of it more now though, or–no, it doesn’t matter. Evenly over the next hundred years, it’s–
NAN:
Not going to be like, there’s no way that we could ramp up to like 10 billion tons a year right now.
ARIA:
Because we’re not there.
NAN:
We’re not there. And the starting gun for carbon removal was functionally the 2018 IPCC report. Like, through that lens, carbon removal has made a huge amount of progress over a very short period of time. And when you compare it to the teraton that we need to do, we are still closer to zero than any other number. The point of Frontier and why we started Frontier was essentially to try and help build a market for carbon removal to catalyze the technologies that are needed. Carbon removal is a public good, right? When you are sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it somewhere, that does not directly benefit any end buyer, it benefits all of us. But as a result, there have been no natural customers for it.
NAN:
And without that, if you are an entrepreneur, why would you start a company if you have nobody to sell your product to? And if you are an investor, why would you invest in a company that is not going to generate revenue? So the idea with Frontier was to — it’s called an advance market commitment. And the idea is to send a really loud signal to entrepreneurs and investors that there is going to be at least a seed of the market for the thing that you want to build. And a billion dollars compared to the cumulative $30 million that had been spent on revenue for customer carbon removal companies at the time, is a lot of money.
NAN:
Compared to the hundreds of billions of dollars per year that we’re going to need to spend on carbon removal, a billion dollars is a drop in the bucket. But to the point of every technology has to start somewhere, we’re starting from zero, we’re moving quickly, and we are not out of the woods yet.
REID:
So let’s look at some of the technology of this, which is across the different pathways. There’s direct air capture, maybe enhanced weathering, ocean alkalinity mineralization. Has anything particularly gotten more promising in the last year? And maybe anything less?
NAN:
We think that one area that is very underexplored relative to its potential is rocks. So most of the world’s carbon is actually in the lithosphere, it’s in rocks. It just takes a really long time to get there. And if you can find a lot of reactive rock, grind it up, expose it to air, give it some water, it essentially acts like a sponge and sucks CO2 out of the air and it mineralizes so it will stay there permanently.
NAN:
So imagine just to give you a sense of scale here, if you were to take all of Mount Everest — we’re not doing anything with Mount Everest, but for a sense of scale — took all of Mount Everest, which is about three teratons of Earth, and you turn that into, you know, not all of that is going to be reactive rock, et cetera. So you took that and turned it into 50-meter-tall piles the size of Honduras that could probably get you all of the carbon removal that you need to do, period. Which is to say that is obviously a huge amount. It’s a size you can wrap your arms around. Sort of.
NAN:
The nice thing about rocks is they can potentially be very cheap. We have a huge mining industry. We know how to move earth at scale. We know how to grind things up at scale. And the technology here is, quote-unquote, not very technology forward. The Earth’s been doing this for all of time. So that’s an area that I think — we think — has huge promise and has been very underexplored by entrepreneurs and scientists in the space.
ARIA:
What’s keeping us from doing more? It sounds like we have the tech, but we just need to drive down the cost.
NAN:
Part of the way that you get — we call this surficial mineralization — to be really cheap is by giving it more time. So if you can trade time for cost, and because the market today is largely voluntary buyers who are quite time-sensitive, they want a ton in year to be able to meet their accounting requirements. You don’t get a lot of exploration. It’s not as attractive to that end market. But if in the end we’re talking about countries that are going to be the ones that are the market makers at scale, potentially this could be — they would absolutely trade time and cost for one another. And so I think for that structural reason this has been underexplored and yet it could be a teraton of removal for less than $80 a ton.
NAN:
There’s this weird sort of structural disadvantage to it today, but that structural disadvantage should not exist.
ARIA:
Might go away.
NAN:
Yeah. In the future.
REID:
But I’m sure you’ve thought about this because I know you think a lot in markets and so forth. So it’s a question to scratch at the depth of it. $80 a ton, obviously a hugely better number than all the other numbers, so therefore worthy of focus. Why don’t we set up specifically new accounting rules that allow it to be treated as like — to have essentially a different version of advance market commitment. Like you can account for it now with this kind of commitment of what you’re doing that goes over time. I mean, like we do things like this before, like this asset can depreciate 100% in year one, et cetera, that kind of thing.
NAN:
Yep.
REID:
What would it take to do that and would that be a sufficient unlock for this?
NAN:
The challenge is that, like, the voluntary market today isn’t that big anyways. So I think that that type of question is very relevant for countries, and countries should be thinking about that question, and they should be thinking about questions like, how do we make it such that if I buy a ton of carbon removal in Japan that is out of country, for me, that definitely counts. Right. So there’s this whole thing called Article 6 that needs to get sort of renegotiated. And I think that the accounting rules around both geography, both space and time are things that need to get included in that.
ARIA:
So you mentioned, you know, companies are doing this and they’re on shorter time horizons. They need to get the carbon removed this year in order to sort of meet their accounting. What do you say to people who say, like, that’s great, but companies are just going to emit more now because they can carbon-capture later, or like, this is actually a moral hazard, you doing this, and it’ll just lead to greater emissions?
NAN:
Yeah, the moral hazard thing has sort of been like the thing folks have been worried about with carbon removal since the beginning. And I think that the unfortunate reality is that the science tells us we have to do both now. We have to do emissions reduction and we have to do removal. So that’s unfortunate, but that is the world that we’re in. So we got to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time. I think in practice that hasn’t — you know, carbon removal isn’t cheap enough right now for that moral hazard to actually be a thing. If we get it to be cheap enough that dumping in the future opens up, that would be a good problem to have. We’re not there yet.
REID:
Probably some of our listeners will be surprised at how long it took us to get to an AI question, but we will now also steer into there, which is, so what are you — what you’re thinking about, how AI could most help Frontier, and are there any areas where it could distract, weaken, create additional risk, et cetera?
NAN:
If AI creates the economic growth that we think it could, that increases the likelihood that we are going to be able to buy the carbon removal that we’re going to need to buy. So, as we talked about, carbon removal is a public good. It is going to, at $100 a ton, you know, these numbers add up very fast. It’s going to be hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and the likelihood that the world is going to be able to afford that goes up as AI makes the world richer. I think that that is like genuinely the single best thing that could come from AI growth.
NAN:
I think the risk is that in the short term, AI requires a lot of energy and what we build to power these data centers can create that energy with emissions or not with emissions, depending on what we choose to do. I basically got very nervous about this a couple of years ago and then did the math and convinced myself that it’s probably not that big a deal — I was like, should we stop working on carbon removal and go work on, you know, data centers or something like that? And long story short, I think that there will be more emissions in the short term, but long term we will figure this out and clean energy is going to be cheaper and faster over the long term.
NAN:
In the short term, we will probably build more natural gas, at least in part. But I think that’s in the short term. It’s a — it’s a sort of, what’s the time horizon that you’re looking at? And I think that is overcomeable.
ARIA:
Very related. Like the minute you mention — well, the minute I mentioned AI in New York, someone says, like, what about the energy? What about the environment? Like, you don’t use AI. I thought you cared about — that’s just like such a top critique. And so similar to what you just said, AI companies are some of the biggest new creators of emissions. And yet I think AI is also some of the biggest — some of the folks who are working on carbon removal the most. Is that just good PR? Do they genuinely care? Like, what do you say to people who sort of bring up that critique?
NAN:
I think that, like, the — also the interesting thing about the hyperscalers is that many of them have great margins and they also have climate commitments. And like Google, for example, has done a lot, spent a lot of money trying to bring down the cost of clean energy. And that’s fabulous. They should do more of that. So I guess I see it as a “yes, and” — like, it is both of the things, both of the things have to be true. And if we can use the climate orientation and margins from these hyperscalers to help accelerate the rest of these clean technologies down the cost curve, that’s a real win. And I think in the long run, maybe I’m being Pollyannish, but I do think that will happen.
NAN:
And in the meantime, doing some carbon removal is, I think, also a smart thing to do.
REID:
I think you’re 1,000% right. On carbon removal also, of course, in reducing emissions. And one of the things that I — you know, I answer the, let’s call it the New York critique on is essentially that all the hyperscalers, all of them, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera, are doing an enormous amount of funding of green energy.
NAN:
Yes. Right.
REID:
And part of what we should be doing is saying, look, you must be — advance market commitments, whether it’s geothermal and all that wind. Do all of that. Because then, by the way, that could be by building that tech and building that infrastructure, not only does it get a bunch more clean power, but it funds the tech infrastructure for creating all the additional electricity, including for the thing that people don’t really track, which is like HVAC systems and so forth, which is a huge contribution here. Like, everyone goes, well, AI is in the news, and you’re like, yeah, no, it’s your hot summers, which, by the way, do come from climate change and all the rest, that then cause a huge amount of additional electricity. Then, by the way, more emissions, et cetera.
REID:
And that’s the problem we need to be most focused on.
NAN:
I think that’s totally right. It’s like all these positive externalities of driving down the cost of these technologies for the rest of the world that are above and beyond just the direct benefits of the clean energy from your own data center. I think that’s exactly right.
REID:
AI, even as you build data centers, moves at software speed, carbon removal — it’s more geology speed, maybe a little faster than that, but not a lot.
NAN:
We’re trying to make it go faster.
REID:
Yes. What are the impedances in putting them together? What are the things that could benefit from the AI side? What are the things that break thinking about these different timeframes? Because part of the thing that’s obviously to Aria’s earlier question, is thinking about this as, okay, we have a compounding problem which we need to temporarily get ahead of, and so speed matters. Anyway, that was kind of the angle of this, because part of thinking about AI speed, I’m trying to figure out how to apply it usefully.
NAN:
I don’t have a super satisfying answer to that question. I’m curious what you would say. I think one of the — I think in some sense, hard tech building real things in the world just takes time. And one of the things that I worry about, maybe this is a squishier answer to the question than where you wanted to take it, is AI is training us all to expect everything to move at AI pace, and not everything does move at that pace. But that doesn’t mean it is not worthwhile. There are things that take a long time to do and you have to — that progress compounds over years. It doesn’t mean that it’s not worthwhile. And I think that the juxtaposition between the two, because they are–
NAN:
And it’s not just carbon removal, it’s like everything in the real world, those are worthwhile endeavors. And I think that my hope is that we don’t abandon those because AI sucks up everything and sort of all–
REID:
Of our–
NAN:
Collective attention span, as important and great as it is.
REID:
No, I 1,000% agree. I mean, part of, you know, I frequently talk about the world of bits, world of atoms. Bits moves fast, easy, cheap, etc. Atoms is much harder. But of course, part of the problem is we live in a world of atoms and atoms affects everything. So you really want to be doing it. And it’s part of the reason, like I co-founded this AI company for trying to cure cancer because it’s biobits. It’s kind of in between. And I think one of the things you generally want to do is think about — one wants to think, including you. But it’s the how do we benefit the attributes of bits to help with the world of atoms?
REID:
And so like, for example, if I was thinking about the AI side I’d be like, well, you know, can — what are all the different ways that AI might take shots on goal? Right? It’s kind of the — it’s super intelligence and it’s going to invent fusion maybe. And by the way, great, if so. But there’s many things short of that which are, well, how can you analyze the grid and make the grid more efficient? Can you make smart appliances in terms of knowing like your washing machine or your HVAC runs much more intelligently and doesn’t just run the whole time. Like when you — you don’t have to leave your air con on, it’s tied to your phone and when it says, oh, you’re 30 minutes out and you’re coming home, I turn the air conditioning on.
REID:
You know, this kind of stuff as ways of doing it. It might be ways of working with AI to say what are bolder science things that might make a difference? And so it’s kind of like always looking for the interface points where the bits can help us accelerate to atoms. And I 1,000% agree with you. You can’t forget we live in a world of atoms and this is what life is.
NAN:
Yeah, I like that lens a lot.
ARIA:
When you’re thinking about this hundred-year time frame, it feels like a lot has to go right for us to get there. And we talked about right, AI data centers are creating emissions in the short term. But AI can help with the electricity, the grid being better, things being made more cheaply, more efficiently. It can help entrepreneurs get technology to drive the cost down. What path — like how do we get to the right path on this stuff? Is it just better technology? Is it more philanthropy? Is it more voluntary commitments from companies? Like what is necessary for us to take the right path as it relates to AI and carbon removal?
NAN:
The thing that has plagued carbon removal to date, and that is going to continue to plague carbon removal at larger and larger scales, as it scales, is who’s going to buy it, what does the market look like? And so I think that the way that Frontier approaches it was to guarantee a market for $1 billion worth of carbon removal. And like, how do you get to–
ARIA:
$2 billion, I guess is my question totally.
NAN:
And I think that like, eventually if the scale is needed, that demand is going to have to come from governments. And governments can put that in place in lots of different ways. But government’s job, part of their job is to solve collective action problems and to sort of manifest public goods. And so the sort of — they could decide they want to buy this themselves and procure it directly. They could decide that they want to put a — they would tax the negative externality that is a ton of emissions and ask emitters to pay. There’s lots of different policy mechanisms to use, but if you’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year, you know, global GDP is $100 trillion. Like it’s not going to come from voluntary commitments. It has to be driven by governments.
NAN:
And so a lot of our work right now is focused on how do we figure out what the baton pass between the voluntary market and policy-driven demand looks like. I think that’s really hard. It’s really important. And policy takes years to become operational before it can actually start paying out to companies and giving them the revenue that they need. So we’ve got to get going now. And you know, some of that has been historically in the U.S. — we’re spending a lot of time in Europe and other parts of the world now as well. But you know, this is going to be a kind of collective effort from lots of different countries.
NAN:
I’ll say one other thing, which is half a percent to a percentage of global GDP on carbon removal is a lot. There’s some precedent for this though, because a lot of the OECD countries came together and were like, we’re going to do this for global health. The commitment was to commit 0.7% of GNI to global health. Many of them exceed that commitment, some don’t. But that has been a very — there is some precedent for doing this kind of public goods work at scale and to the point of AI, if the world becomes richer, that becomes a lot easier to justify.
REID:
So let’s talk about method a little bit. I mean, I think one of the things that’s great about what you’re doing with Frontier is creating a kind of a proof point on how demand-side commitments can bootstrap a market. And obviously it needs to scale. It’s kind of like this initial thing. How do you look at this as a generalizable method? And are there areas you say works better here, works less well here?
NAN:
So Frontier — the mechanism that Frontier is — is called an advance market commitment. And the job of an advance market commitment is essentially to guarantee future demand for a product if it can be successfully developed. And we borrowed this initially from vaccines. There was the first AMC was for the pneumococcal vaccine in the mid-2000s. It was invented by a group of economists and funded by Gates and a number of other countries. And this was a sort of the first application outside of global health. It’s a very specific kind of market-shaping mechanism and it works well, better for some problems than others. But the kind of problem that AMCs work for are ones where you have a product that you want to exist that would benefit the world in some way.
NAN:
And the reason that it doesn’t exist is because there is some demand uncertainty, either because the market isn’t big enough or because the price, the willingness to pay for a product is not big enough. And an AMC is a way to sort of help fix that problem. The other thing that an AMC is good for as opposed to like a prize — so a prize is another way one could solve that problem — an AMC is good for, and prizes actually are good for this too. But an AMC is good for the types of problems where, like, you don’t know who the best inventor is. Like there’s some information asymmetry of who can actually invent the thing. And an AMC is kind of a tech-agnostic demand signal to pull forward the best ideas.
NAN:
I think there are lots of applications outside of this. Green steel and cement are another one. The U.S. government should do that. The U.S. government buys nearly 50% of cement in the United States. They would be a great organizer for an AMC for green cement. But there’s lots of other applications. But that’s the shape of the problem that I think AMCs are especially a good fit for.
ARIA:
Can I just ask, why is Stripe doing this? Why are they committed?
NAN:
Well, our sort of foray into carbon removal — it started as a small account experiment back in 2019 with initially a blog post that Christian Anderson wrote who since founded Watershed, but it was to buy a million dollars of carbon removal at any available price. And it kind of ratcheted up from there. The reaction from the market was really positive when we announced that. And we got a lot of notes from Stripe Climate users saying like, hey, I want to do something for a while in climate, but like I’m busy, can I just send you some money? And you figure out what to do with it.
NAN:
And that led to Stripe Climate, which is the software product that we build for Stripe users and to make it really easy for them to direct a fraction of their revenue to carbon removal. And then that led to Frontier. We essentially were like, how do we add another zero to this? And the advance market commitment idea was one that we sort of came out of a group brainstorm and came out of that. But that’s a long-winded way of saying this was not some like preordained thing. It was a little like we tried something and then new adjacent possibilities opened up and we kept leaning into them.
REID:
On advance market commitments, which I think is an excellent new mechanism. I think the parallels between health and climate that you are kind of working on are exactly right in a lot of different ways, not the least of which, which is, well, our health is dependent on the climate. So, you know, it is just another kind of health initiative. Is there any way to get a bunch of forces to align to creating advance market commitments? Sometimes you have a leadership thing, like for example, the Gates Foundation doing this with health and vaccines. But it’s like could, for example, we get — and it’s interesting because part of the reason I’m asking this question is I think about each of the hyperscalers as kind of solving their green energy thing separately.
REID:
And yet actually, in fact, it’s probably a lot more positive if they just kind of got together and said, look, we’re all going to do this, we’re going to compete on our data centers, but we’re going to do these advance market commitments together. Because then, by the way, you have a much broader base of entrepreneurs, other kinds of things doing it because it’s adding it all up. Is there any coordinating function for getting a bunch of people behind an advance market commitment?
NAN:
So Google and Microsoft and a couple other companies I believe did that for some of the technologies that you described. It was geothermal, nuclear and maybe one other. But I think some of that is naturally happening. Coordinating is really hard. That has been one of the hardest parts of Frontier. We have amazing partners and it’s just coordinating at a company — whenever, you know, that is just a hard thing. So my instinct is only coordinate if you have to. And so if you have huge pots of money, like a country, for example, just drive it. Yeah, they can do it all themselves. So I think that, like — and I think that, you know, for example, the OpenAI Foundation has put in a lot of money.
NAN:
Has a lot of money now that’s sort of endowed to it. And they could probably do a lot of these unilaterally. Absent that, if you do need to get folks to coordinate, you need, you know, it’s tricky and I don’t know if there’s like a perfect recipe for it. You need people who are willing to run through walls to make that coordination happen. And, you know, Godspeed to them.
REID:
Part of the reason I asked this, I was thinking about, like, what are the things that government can be doing?
NAN:
Yeah.
REID:
And obviously the spend is important, public — you know, all the things you mentioned earlier. But on the other hand, and one of the reasons that doesn’t happen is because it’s very difficult politically. Like in a democracy, what people tend to do is, how do I throw some money in your pocket right now? And just like, for example, building up huge amounts of national debt, we’ll charge that to the future. And that’s part of the problem that a lot of governments kind of run into. And that’s one of the problems. No, no, we’re going to spend money now for that advanced thing. But one of the things they could do is potentially coordinate these. Like, say we’ll create the incentive such that there is a benefit in coordinating for these advance market commitments.
NAN:
Like, for example, you want to incentivize the coordinators. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
REID:
This discussion is just making me think about that because it’s another tool that the governments and policy could be thinking about as, okay, we should of course be getting to spending the money, but maybe we could do this in parallel or with it. Because obviously the more that you get — because this is one of the things I like about the — there’s this idiocy of, oh, let’s ban data centers or restrict them. It’s like, no, no, no, let’s encourage their construction in a way that gives us a whole bunch of benefits. Some benefits in jobs, but also benefits in developing the grid, the clean energy technology and all the rest. And then you’re powering the natural commercial incentive into these things that are good and that you can do smartly from a government.
NAN:
I agree. I don’t — I totally agree. I wonder how much of that — again, to the point of like if you can avoid coordination, like try to avoid it. One way — the one like you could, you know, prioritize permits for clean energy development. So like these folks, the hyperscalers, are more than, even more than price-sensitive. They are speed-sensitive.
REID:
Yes.
NAN:
They’re time-sensitive. So like what are incentives you could play into there that are kind of also free, so to speak, to the U.S. government? I think there’s a ton of things to be done there. The other thing that I think is nice about AMCs from the perspective of governments is that the cash isn’t due up front. You only pay if you succeed. And from a tax-dollar perspective, that’s a really nice property of these things. It’s very de-risking to sort of sell that internally because you’re not on the hook. If it doesn’t go well, you’re not on the hook. And I think that like the power of Frontier was sending a billion-dollar demand signal very early.
NAN:
We haven’t paid out a billion dollars because those companies haven’t delivered yet. There’s a sort of time arbitrage that you get from AMCs that I think is underleveraged.
REID:
Like another thing they could do is say hey, we as a government will provide a matching AMC to actors who are doing this within a certain environment, et cetera, et cetera. In terms of doing it, there’s a set of other ways of — I’m thinking about amplifier and I — by the way, look, as a fellow Silicon Valley person, I totally agree. It’s like, no, no, drive to it. Don’t have a committee talking about it. Totally get it. And I think that’s important. I just want that it also is like if you can make a network ecosystem work, like as part of the thing that makes Silicon Valley work, some of your thinking and work is kind of causing me to think, I wonder if there’s a way of putting that together. Anyway, that’s the reason I was asking.
NAN:
I think the matching thing is also an interesting thread to pull on because I think it can accelerate both sides. Like the public sector likes to pull in capital from the private sector, and it makes it easier for them to sell to their constituents. And same goes for the private sector. So there’s some nice complementary benefits of that that I think are probably underexplored as well.
REID:
So one of the things I love about the work you’re doing is it’s part of the thing I think is really important as leadership amongst all tech companies to be saying, what are the ways that we can be leading in these problems that are not just our market development? So because when you’re in a very successful industry, you should be saying, okay, great, successful, how do I help society, how do I help the world, et cetera. And so part of what I love about Stripe’s involvement in Frontier is, I think it gives us some examples about what a tech company’s relationship to civilization problems might look like going forward. I’d love for you to talk a little bit more about Stripe and Frontier and the work you’re doing on this.
NAN:
When we look at corporate philanthropy, for example, in the U.S. corporates spend about $50 billion a year on sort of philanthropic activities. That’s a lot of money. I think that that’s not something to be scoffed at. And one of the things that we sort of observed in starting Frontier is that it’s a bit of a weird mechanism, right? Like AMCs are not a — I guess — a traditional thing that corporate philanthropy would sort of spend time on. I think one of the things I learned from it was like, if you take kind of outsized risk, you can also get outsized return. And my sort of hope is that corporates can spend more of their philanthropic dollars in this way.
NAN:
It’s interesting because in Silicon Valley we apply kind of power-law mentality to all of the work that we do. And yet those same companies often don’t always apply that to their philanthropic work. And so my suspicion is that there are a lot of really great outcomes that we could deliver if we were more risk-tolerant. For some reason, corporate philanthropy has become quite risk-intolerant. And I think as a result, we’re leaving a lot of good on the table. So what can we do there to sort of like permit or encourage folks to take bigger swings? And I think that like higher than — sort of unusually high risk appetites could result. Won’t definitely result, but it could result in sort of outsized returns.
NAN:
We’ve done that with Frontier and it’s given us a lot of other ideas for sort of other things that we might start kind of in a similar vein.
ARIA:
I also think, I mean, $50 billion is great and it’s always good when companies give money. I am very pro that. And you can give so much more. You can give expertise, you can figure out which of your customers can join in, you can figure out what’s your tech network so you can get the other hyperscalers involved. Like there’s just so much more than money that a tech company can give because of everything that it has. And it just feels like this is using all of your assets as opposed to just one.
NAN:
I think Stripe Climate is a really good example of that. Like the software product that we built to make it really easy for Stripe businesses to put money into carbon removal. This would never have worked as a standalone app. Nobody cares enough about climate to set up their own app to give a little bit of money to carbon removal. But if you can piggyback on someone’s — on sort of like other services that they’re using and make it really easy, a single click to do this and give them that option.
NAN:
Stripe has amazing distribution and so that — I don’t know if Stripe Climate would have worked outside of this context, but I think that’s a really good example of exactly what you’re saying — is like what are the other assets that we can sort of bring to bear for problems that matter to the world?
REID:
One of the things I think you’ve demonstrated is a market-shaping method needs a leader, needs a champion, needs someone running it. You, I think have called that person a general manager for an orphaned problem. Lots of problems are orphaned, but many probably should stay that way. How do you tell which ones are worth a world-class leader?
NAN:
I can share what my instinct would be to that question, but I am not the arbiter of which problems get worked on. I think it’s probably some combination of what is the benefit that it could give to the world. That’s one. Two is, is it tractable? Like, do we think that it is possible to make progress in some set of realistic-ish constraints? And then the third is, am I the person considering working on this, really excited about it? Do I want to devote a lot of time to it? I think those are like three broad criteria. In practice, it’s probably more opportunistic than that. Like these waves come in somewhat unpredictable times. We’re not going through some sort of like stack-ranked list of problems and just picking off the next one.
NAN:
Like you have to find — to me, in some sense it’s not dissimilar to the private sector. It’s like all of the conditions have to be there for the right person, the right team, the right funding to come together to sort of like manifest these new organizations and general manager combos. But yeah, probably broadly, some combination of tractability, how big the problem is, and interest in the problem.
REID:
And I like your 2 a.m. measure too. Part of passion is, would you work to 2 a.m.?
NAN:
I think that’s part of the third. It’s like, do I want to do this and run through walls? Because doing anything, starting anything is really hard. You’d better be. Got to be ready for that.
ARIA:
I mean, I think, Reid, you talk about this so often when you think of companies or NGOs or whatever things that you want to exist in the world and you just say to yourself, who’s the CEO? And even if something’s number one, two, three, four on your list, like, it’s not going to get done unless you have the CEO. So we might be doing things 8, 9, and 10 because we have the best CEOs for that, because you need someone who’s going to run through walls. And so related to that, we have so many problems. And I mean, in every situation you’re like, ah, man, I wish there was an ice cream shop in my neighborhood. I wish someone would — I wish someone would start that. And it’s like, what about you?
ARIA:
And you talk about this bystander problem, like, especially for these big problems, you’re like, someone must be working on whatever — global poverty, global hunger, climate change, carbon removal. Like, do you think actually the bystander effect, like, ah, someone else is doing it, is one of the big barriers here?
NAN:
I really do. I think that’s a huge, a huge problem. And it’s certainly — that definitely describes my experience in carbon removal of — you’re looking at this report that is the canonical climate change report, the IPCC report, and you’re like, everybody’s looking at these numbers. Everybody who cares about climate is looking at these numbers. And then you go out and talk to everybody in this space and it takes you three weeks and you’re like, what is going on here? Who’s got the ball? And I think that we would all benefit from a little bit more institutional distrust that somebody else has this as their number one priority. If you do, go find that person, great.
NAN:
But I think we assume that that is the case and markets are efficient and everything is efficient more often than it actually is.
ARIA:
Absolutely.
REID:
Let’s talk about kind of the characteristics of general managers or CEOs for these problems. So D.A. Henderson didn’t invent the smallpox vaccine. He changed the strategy, which is frequently what you’re looking for in a founder, a CEO, et cetera. What the data loops were, the accountability, the will. Presumably this is at least part of the kind of leadership that the world needs on these problems and perhaps undervalues. How would you characterize the kind of leadership attributes? What should we try to promote and evolve? What kinds of people should we be trying to support? How should people identify themselves as this kind of leader? Talk about the leadership for all orphaned problems.
NAN:
I think it’s probably like the specifics of what’s needed probably depend on the problem itself. Like in the case of Henderson, in the case of smallpox, it was strategy, it was execution, it was will. I think in the case of many of the topics that we’re grappling with today, with AI, around risk mitigation and with human flourishing, my suspicion is that it’s also one of vision. Like what is the future that we want to build toward? And we are probably short on vision. But I think it probably is person dependent. The shape of person though that I refer to when I think about general managers that I would love to see working on more kind of public-goods-shaped problems are Silicon Valley founder types.
NAN:
It is like, I think that especially this new wave of funders is going to be hesitant or like a little bit wary of funding kind of more traditional NGO folks. And we grew up in Silicon Valley and we’re familiar with this sort of execution and the hustle and the smarts and the strategy around this kind of work. And I think that’s sort of what I — the spirit of what I mean when I say general manager is like these are founder-mentality people, they’re just working on public goods.
ARIA:
Does the founder mentality break down? When you think of a GM, you think about sort of one person who holds that accountability over time and they are sort of laser-focused on that problem and they’re sort of holding all the strings. But when you think about institutions, you think about that committee, you think about governments, foundations, international bodies. You have to have cooperation, you have to have all of that. And they’re specifically designed to prevent the one person who’s holding all the power. Do you think like the general manager model is, is like the workaround for the broken institutions we have, or it’s just a critique saying, like the current institutions we have aren’t, aren’t up to the challenge because they need to have more of a GM framework?
NAN:
Well, I think the current — like a current institution also in theory has a GM, which is their leader, like the CEO, the executive director, et cetera. So I definitely don’t think those are intrinsically or definitionally at odds. I think the difference is that there are a lot of problems that have nobody who thinks that it’s their problem to solve. That is thing one. And I think there are a lot of institutions that are too narrowly scoped, that have not scoped themselves to deliver a specific outcome rather than — they’re working on a slice of the piece and that’s okay. We don’t need every institution working on the whole thing.
NAN:
But I would love to see more institutions saying like here’s the outcome that we’re going to deliver and we’re going to pull whatever lever that we need to in order to make that happen.
ARIA:
It’s sort of like when these institutions tout like we’ve been working on this problem for 40 years. 40 years of experience.
NAN:
Is that good? Yeah.
ARIA:
What has it done?
REID:
Did you fix it?
ARIA:
I guess you don’t know the counterfactual. Maybe we would have backslid and now we’re at even. But right. If you’ve been working for 40 years, let’s see some results.
NAN:
Yeah. And there are lots of great institutions out there. Of course I think that just the number of orphaned problems and I think the number of amazing people that could be working on this shape of thing to me seems far, far lower than it should be.
REID:
So this leads to a natural question which is if you could assign one world-class general manager to an orphaned problem tomorrow other than carbon removal, because we’ve already talked about that at length. What problem would you pick?
NAN:
I can talk about one that I have gotten nerd-sniped by basically this time last year, which is that of respiratory infections. You know, most otherwise healthy people get sick two to four times a year. We spend 5% of our lives sick with respiratory illnesses. It’s very bad for the economy. Probably $500 billion to a trillion dollars per year due to lost productivity. These things are probably really bad for us in the long run. We just haven’t done a great job characterizing that. And yet they also periodically threaten civilization through pandemics. I think that these are just bad. They are bad and they are also one of these problems that is so — we just accept it because it is part of life.
NAN:
And like, oh, your kid’s sick and everyone’s out, that’s fine. It’s annoying but we tolerate it.
ARIA:
Why?
NAN:
I think that this is the kind of thing that is really hard and I don’t want to minimize that. There’s a lot of viral diversity, they mutate a lot. But the tools have gotten much better in the past couple of years and I think that this is increasingly a tractable problem. So I have been spending a lot of time sort of thinking about what would GMing respiratory infections look like? If the goal is to make respiratory infections a thing of the past, could we do that? How would we do that, is it possible and over what time frame? I think that this has definitely been something that’s been on my mind.
ARIA:
How do you start to figure out that it’s tractable? What gave you the confidence to be like, you know what, like, ah, we could do this.
NAN:
Okay, that’s a great question. So last spring when I was sort of — I initially got into this topic because I was talking to David Veesler at the Institute for Protein Design. I was thinking about some of the sort of incentive structures that we could do to fix this, but I’m not — this is not my sort of technical area of expertise. So we ended up hosting a symposium at Stripe with sort of 40 people, largely scientists, but also policymakers and folks from pharma companies. And that was a big part of the question, like, is it possible? Is this technically possible? And so we had, we flew all these people in and they were giving these sort of seven-minute lightning talks. And it was a day and a half of just intense focus on this question.
NAN:
And we left basically being like, this is hard, but it probably is — and it’s not definitely. But to the point of you don’t get big outcomes if you don’t take some risks.
ARIA:
You have enough confidence that this might be–
NAN:
Yeah, we have enough confidence this could be a thing. And there is some risk, but like you’ve got to swing to sort of get the benefits. And so that gave us enough confidence to ultimately spin up a new Frontier-shaped initiative that is going to be focused on trying to make respiratory infections a thing of the past.
ARIA:
That’s amazing. I was sick so much this year. That’s incredible. Okay, so you just put out a Substack on the new philanthropy that I was obsessed with and saw so many people chattering about. And one of the things you discussed is all seven Anthropic co-founders have pledged to donate 80% of their wealth, which will be potentially $37 billion, conservatively. We’ll see. And that’s 10 times what the world’s largest research-driven grantmaker has given away in its entire history. And so we had the last — you know, you talked about sort of three waves and we had the Rockefellers in terms of philanthropy. And then sort of the next wave was the early 2000s tech philanthropy. Gates, Moskovitz, Zuckerberg. I might say Hoffman.
ARIA:
Does that offer a useful model for what’s going to happen next? Or why is this next wave different?
NAN:
Okay, just in terms of scale. I would even like broaden it. Outside of the bucket that you mentioned, there’s sort of like these — there’s the Anthropic founders and their Anthropic employees. And OpenAI has put initially 26% in the OpenAI Foundation. All of those numbers add up to a lot of money. Do some math. It’s probably around $37 to $100 billion per year. That’s kind of like what we’re looking at in terms of scale. Global and U.S. philanthropy is about $600 billion a year. So it’s a lot. It’s not doubling that. I think that the reason that this is — part of the reason that this is different is, is a couple of things. One is the shape of the problems that these funders care about.
NAN:
These funders are rightly worried about the AI transition. And there are sort of two components of that. There is how do we navigate all the minefield of risk to get to the other side. And if and when we do, how do we help humanity flourish from that? And so I think there’s a problem area, problem set that they’re especially interested in. The second sort of core belief is one around speed. Like if AGI is coming quickly, we need to get to work very fast. And then the third sort of difference here, and I don’t think this third difference is actually that different than the last wave, but it’s really around talent. And what are expectations of the types of people that — that sort of they would be excited about funding and we’d be excited about funding.
NAN:
I think it’s the combination of these three things in my mind that makes this wave potentially hugely impactful. So $50 billion a year — if you look at some of the projects that this group would be excited about funding, $50 billion a year would fund 333 Arc Institutes per year, fully fund their budget. It would fund 5,000 Institutes for Progress. There’s a huge — you know, the potential for impact here is huge. And as I was doing the math to write this piece, the thing that stuck out to me was just like, we don’t have the organizational capacity to absorb that money. And so what are we going to do to fix that?
REID:
Well, let’s talk about one part of that. We’ll start with one part of that organizational capacity, which is capital allocation. So what do you think it would take to get to an effective capital allocation kind of layer? And a manager — what would be the kind of program managers, the venture capitalists, the kind of equivalent of the capital allocation? And what is their capabilities and skill set look like? And then what will they need to do to be able to be good stewards of this particular flood of capital? And then what kinds of things will they need to be doing? Because they’ll have to probably be developing their market some. What would that look like as well?
NAN:
At the risk of overfitting everything to Silicon Valley, which is, you know, where I do it all the time, I think that this essentially is a sort of Silicon Valley for public goods is what this could look like. And the components might look quite similar. You have funders and then you have capital allocators which are kind of like philanthropic VCs and then they’re giving money to call it like philanthropic startups. And there are some of these capital allocators. Today the OpenAI Foundation is definitionally going to be a huge one. Coefficient Giving is another good example. Renaissance Philanthropy. But at $50 billion a year, if you’re giving away on average — Coefficient Giving’s grant last year was a million dollars a year. That is 50,000 grants that you’ve got to distribute in a year.
NAN:
That’s just a very large number. And so we probably need many more of these philanthropic VCs, so to speak. And we also need many more of these philanthropic startups. So again, I think that from a — who do you want working on these? It’s probably not dissimilar to the kinds of folks who are VCs today. It’s identifying excellent talent, figuring out where the space is going and how do I make sure that there are great people working in each of those. And I think that that is also true on the startup side. It’s like again, looking for these GMs, looking for these founders, helping them get into this space, find their problem and start an organization. The thing — you know, again, I ended up starting like I did this math for myself.
NAN:
I was not intending to write a piece and then I was like, oh my God, who is going to do this? Essentially the main takeaway is like, we don’t need just a few more people in philanthropy. We don’t need just a few more people doing capital allocation or working on public goods. We’re talking about thousands of organizations that we need and as an implication, thousands of founders and probably hundreds of thousands of people working to power those organizations. This is a pipeline — a sort of workforce reorientation problem. And how exciting — you get to be working on some of the problems that matter most for humanity. I think that’s a really — this is a very exciting time for that reason, in my opinion.
REID:
One of the things I thought was an important thread in your piece was that this capital will come in with expectations about what kinds of founders, what kinds of projects will be good. For example, I could easily see, for example, universities say, oh great, this is more endowment for us and so forth. And they’re unlikely to be — understanding where the folks who have put the work into building this kind of thing, what they think about an AI universe, et cetera, how that applies. Go into a little bit more depth about what should people who think, oh, I’m going to come help solve this capital allocation problem — because I wouldn’t say the advanced commitments, potentially becoming advance market commitments of we’re doing this on the philanthropy, will only get unlocked in certain kinds of projects.
REID:
And I thought that was one of the important threads in your piece.
NAN:
I think the expectation for leaders of these organizations is that they are sort of tech-caliber people. These are PMs and otherwise founders who are working on problems that are good for the world and are counterfactual. If those people don’t exist or don’t move into public goods and don’t start organizations, I think the money isn’t going to get spent. And so it is on us to sort of like figure out what that pipeline looks like. What is the PM-to-GM pipeline? How do we create these talent on-ramps and high-status on-ramps, and for great people, help them find a problem that they are really excited about and can wrap their arms around and want to work on for long periods of time.
NAN:
And we have to do that at a pretty large scale. This is a sort of wartime mobilization effort to get great people working on problems that are good for the world.
ARIA:
It’s interesting because when you talk about the money might not be spent, I wish I had the numbers in front of me, but I’m sure there are — or like there are more than, let’s call it, you said, you know, $37 to $100 billion over 10 years. There is more than that much money already on the sidelines right now that isn’t being spent in DAFs, in foundations, in whatever that is allocated for charitable. And so this isn’t actually just a problem of the new AI money that’s coming. Like, we literally have this much money already that’s not being allocated for many reasons, and some is because they don’t feel like there’s a good place to put it. They feel like philanthropy is not meeting the moment. But then there’s other critiques.
ARIA:
People don’t want to give because, you know, the OpenAI Foundation would get yelled at for giving to the wrong things. Like there’s all sorts of reasons why the capital that we have isn’t being deployed philanthropically. And certainly one of the things you talk about is how do we get all these amazing PMs? How do we get these — you know, you’re essentially a philanthropic product manager right now for these social good problems. How do we make this the career pipeline for the best people? Like, what needs to change in order to push them into these new fields?
NAN:
I think there are a bunch of things that need to change, to be honest. I think the first is we have to make the problems that need to get solved more legible. So I would love to see Coefficient Giving, OpenAI Foundation, other folks who have vision in the space, especially who are thinking about AI, make the problems and the vision for how to solve those problems more legible so that somebody can learn enough about a problem to get nerd-sniped by it. I think the second thing is we want to create high-status on-ramps for great folks to work on philanthropy. I sometimes am surprised. I work in philanthropy. Like that is not where I expected to be.
NAN:
And I think the way I sort of rationalize myself through that is like, this is a very different shape of philanthropy than sort of traditional philanthropy. But I think a lot of people — philanthropy has that baggage for a lot of people. And so I think we need to shift that. And so, you know, I was thinking like we should — what is YC for, like, a sort of talent and startup accelerator for public-good-shaped problems? That would be really cool. I think another thing that we need to fix is pay in philanthropy. I think we’ve sort of — it’s been gauche to talk about. We haven’t really made much progress on this.
NAN:
But in theory, if these are really big problems for the world, we should be excited to pay people who fix those problems a lot of money. And I think a unique property at this moment is that the funders where this money is coming from are some of the sort of most coveted companies in the world, like Anthropic and OpenAI — all this hypothetical money is sitting in equity right now. And I think that’s never really been the case before. So can we figure out a way to sort of give people incentives and bonuses, et cetera, in the form of Anthropic or OpenAI equity? I think that the pay piece feels like uniquely tractable.
NAN:
I mean, I have not looked into it that much and I’m sure that this is a deeply naive thing to say, but I want to chase that down. That feels tractable to me.
ARIA:
I’ll say two things on that which I think are interesting. I feel like people are like, LeBron James, get rich playing basketball. Beyonce, sell some records and get rich. Don’t you dare solve childhood hunger and get rid of hunger and get rich. Like, how dare you? Like, no, no, no. You should be living on poverty wages. So I do think some of it–
REID:
Says the former DoSomething CEO.
ARIA:
That’s right. I also do think it’s interesting because this has happened in so many industries that right now the nonprofit sector is mostly women. And it’s actually more diverse certainly than Silicon Valley. And it’s low-paid. Actually 80% of nonprofit CEOs are men, but the rest of them are women and more people of color than Silicon Valley. And so I do think it’s going to be interesting if all of a sudden we have higher salaries to solve global problems and it’s all going to white men. Like all of a sudden it’s tech people who are more sort of white men, Asian men, et cetera, just, you know, by demographics. And then we give them the higher salaries.
ARIA:
Like I’m also imagining a — you know, some people complaining about that, some people saying, like, what the hell, I’ve been working in this forever and I haven’t afforded that, or I could have done better if I was able to get that equity or I was able to afford this. So I don’t think you’re naive. I think that is a huge piece of the problem. It’s money and then it’s also status. Like you said you didn’t picture yourself being that way because it’s higher status to be sort of a startup at a for-profit than a nonprofit. But I do think there’s some other hiccups in there.
REID:
Yeah, you wrote something that had some parallels to some kind of talks I’ve given in Italy, which was Silicon Valley as, you know, kind of styles itself as a new renaissance. And one of the things that I’ve wanted it to do is to upgrade the way that it thinks of the full renaissance. Like, how do you bring art in? How do you bring humanism? Not just the kind of central invention of technology, science creating new networks and roads for commerce and all the rest. And so you wrote that San Francisco might be entering a romantic revival. More beauty, emotion, real-life spaces, maybe less optimization. And so I think of this potentially as a humanist frame. What goals should technology ultimately serve? Not just what can it do.
REID:
And is romanticism pointing out a humanist outcome, pointing out something different than a humanist outcome? What made you write about the Romantic revival?
NAN:
I’ve lived in San Francisco for over a decade now, and I have felt a vibe shift recently. This piece was not backed by data. It was purely anecdotal on sort of how I have felt. This city has been showing up now versus a decade ago. I’m curious what your experience here is, and I can’t tell totally what’s a reaction to. Maybe it is a reaction to sort of AI is taking off. So what does it mean to be human and wanting to embrace our humanness? Maybe there are sort of strands of nihilism in there, of like, you know, and sort of a more hedonist origin. But SF has felt like it’s starting to care more about aesthetics.
NAN:
Talking about religion feels more acceptable now than it did 10 years ago. Starting to, like, care about how you dress feels acceptable, if not cool, in a way that 10 years ago would have been like, you’re spending time on sort of the wrong things. I don’t really know what to make of it, but it does feel like a shift to me. What has been your observation in SF?
REID:
I don’t have as much direct experience with SF. I tend to be more of a peninsula person, but I do go there. Yes, in the area, but didn’t go there. I don’t know if I’m seeing it yet. And part of the reason why, you know, giving these speeches at Perugia and Bologna and other kinds of things, I would like to see more of an explicit cultural focus on kind of humanist virtues. And by the way, it can be how we live our lives. Like, do we go out for walks? Do we have intellectual salons? Do we — you know, I still — maybe I swim a little bit too much in the YouTube Shorts culture of like, you know, like, too much discussion of peptides, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you’re like, okay, right?
REID:
And so. But like. And it, like, it was funny. Aria and I were at a dinner last night, and one of them was like, I’ve recently discovered The Brothers Karamazov. And you’re like, well, good.
NAN:
Been around a while.
REID:
Yes, it’s been around a while. But it’s — but that could also be looked at as a positive, like, encountering more of that. Like, what is the human condition? What should it be? How should we be living our lives individually and together and more woven through everything, including, of course, your work. And that was the reason why the Romantic revival piece spoke to me a little bit as a hope. But I don’t know if I’m actually seeing anything. And I get your data point. I mean, I’m not quite sure how. I guess we could kind of run a poll or something.
NAN:
But what do you think is driving that to the extent that it is happening?
REID:
I do think your point about AI — there’s this old book from earlier tech revolutions called Megatrends by John Naisbitt. And the very first megatrend was high tech, high touch. And as you get to high tech, which is alienating, you tend to get a high touch, which is more humanizing. So you tend to get to like, oh, no, I want something with a wood circle. I want to — I want to. You know, and it’s one of the reasons why there’s a frequent attraction to Japanese aesthetics within this, you know, kind of thing.
ARIA:
On a record that you just put on a turntable.
REID:
Exactly. So AI music, but on a record. Precisely. And so I think there’s at least some of that. And I think part of the question kind of comes down to how do we make these things that we are doing which are trying to make a difference to humanity at scale, but how do we make them human, too? I think there’s at least threads of that now. There’s also weird other threads. Transhumanism. I’ve lost track of the number of times that people have blithely told me we’re going to be uploading ourselves into robots. And you’re like, you have no idea what you’re talking about. It’s like, what is that? I mean, it’s a little bit like people going, well, I understand the Star Trek transporter.
REID:
It’s like, I get in here and I disappear and I appear over there. It’s like, well, okay, look, there’s two framings. One is you’re disintegrated and there’s a clone. And the other one is you’re transported. You really should have a theory about why it’s one and not the other one. Right? I mean, it’s like you know, and so. And it’s kind of a similar kind of thing, but that dialogue. And it’s also, I think — so I think that’s part of the thing that’s hitting us is that the technological environment where, okay, what happens when we get to AGI, et cetera, et cetera. And what would that mean? And what would that mean to be human? And what does that mean for work? And what does that mean for meaning?
REID:
And a bunch of other questions. But I think it’s also the scale of the tech industry because 20, 30 years ago, we were all happily the pirate challengers of institutions, and now we’re much more like, well, none of the things we do affect the entire world. And so you also — I think it’s a simple line that comes from Voltaire, but with power comes responsibility. It’s one of the things. So you’ve gotta — okay, now start being responsible for this. And by the way, responsible is not — well, I have a theory. It’s like, great, your theory should be in dialogue with other people. Because by the way, you have a theory, I am the one God person who knows everything. Oh, you have a problem.
NAN:
Yeah, right.
REID:
So it’s like, no, no, be in dialogue with people and find out, like, okay, what are other perspectives and what kinds of things should be shaped? And that’s the kind of — that was the reason why when, like, Bologna called me and said, hey, would you do a commencement speech? I think they were surprised when I said yes, because I’d been thinking about this, right? And I was like, no, I think this is important to do. So I’m hopeful. I’m not sure how strong the signals are yet within the valley, but I would love to see it grow.
REID:
So we have a section called Rapid Fire, which actually you can answer at any depth that you like, because it’s really just the questions that we ask every guest because it kind of creates like a tapestry across the different Possible podcasts. So is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
NAN:
There’s a collection of essays and talks by Richard Feynman called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out that I — I’m not really sure how I discovered them in the first place, but whenever I feel like I need a, like, mental tune-up or a reset or kind of a — yeah, a dose of optimism. I find spending 15 minutes with one of those essays does the trick. So they’re really fun. You can kind of bounce around a bit, but it’s like they’re ostensibly about science, but really they’re about a lot of things about life. They’re about, you know, curiosity and mischief and learning things and sort of growing up. And I think that they’re a real joy. So highly recommend.
REID:
I love giving Feynman as an answer.
NAN:
Have you read those?
REID:
I haven’t, but I’ve read other Feynman.
NAN:
I’m going to get you that book.
ARIA:
What is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?
NAN:
I find that the questions that, for me, there’s like a category of questions that tend to be very useful for me and they are sort of like constraint-lifting questions. So versions of, like, what is the 10x version of what you’re working on? Or if you had — you know, if you’re working on something and someone’s like, what’s the — you know, if you had $10 million to spend on this, or $100 million. And not to say they’re giving you that money, but I find that having other people ask questions that sort of permits you to think more broadly are sort of surprisingly useful for me. I think Patrick’s really good at this, actually. There have been a number of things where, a number of times where he sort of asked–
NAN:
He sort of like gently asked these like nudging questions and just the asking of them permits you to think more ambitiously or more creatively. So I love getting those and try when I can, to, you know, ask them to other people as well.
REID:
Well, somewhat. This leads us to our third rapid fire question, which is, so where do you see progress or momentum outside of, say, your areas, which are climate, markets, and AI? That inspires you. So where outside of that are we seeing–
NAN:
A ton of progress right now in biology. I think that’s a really, really exciting area. I think in another world I would have — I wish I had been a biologist. I think AI is driving — you know, is of course related to AI — is driving huge advances in our understanding and also what we can do with that understanding. And so like, you know, every day on, you know, Twitter or reading, reading different pieces, it’s like we live in an age of miracles. Like, what a time to be alive. I think the pace of progress is staggering and of course this is going to run up against the real world and we’ve got to do clinical trials and we’ve got to do, you know, we’ve got to turn the bits into atoms, so to speak.
NAN:
But it’s very thrilling to watch.
ARIA:
Absolutely. Can you leave us with a final thought on what is possible to achieve in the next 15 years? Oh, and if everything breaks humanity’s way. I forgot that piece. And what’s our first step to get in that direction?
NAN:
I think the next 5, 10, 15 years are going to be very consequential for humanity. Right. And at the risk of sounding too AGI-pilled, there are these two sets of questions that we’re going to need to grapple with. One is how do we navigate the AI transition and manage all of these risks? And two, if we can do that, what does human flourishing look like? The next 10, 15 years are going to matter a lot in answering those questions. And I think there are — we’ve talked about many of the things that need to get done, but I think a good first step is taking some of these newer and squishier ideas and trying to more crisply define what are potential visions for them. Human flourishing is a word that gets thrown around a lot.
NAN:
But what does it really mean? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do I imagine it, get me excited about what that future could look like so that I want to quit my job and go and work on it. I think that we are short on vision and sort of really thinking about shaping what those visions could look like is a really concrete and possible and tractable first step toward driving all the attention and resources that we need to go and actually make the world look like that.
ARIA:
Awesome. Thank you.
NAN:
Great. Thank you guys so much. Pleasure. This was really fun.
ARIA:
So fun.
REID:
Possible is produced by Palette Media. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Thanasi Dilos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Yimu Xiu, Aman Suri, Lexxi Kiven, Danny Garrison, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nemarundwe.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Parth Patil, and Ben Relles. And a big thanks to Freddie Williams, Florian Maganza, and the team at Greylock Partners.