Hello, my friends, and welcome to the 101st episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I've got a really interesting talk for you today about sociology. It's tempting to look at various structures that emerge in society and make a moral judgment about them. This institution is bad and is harming people. As somebody who has rather libertarian tendencies, I often look at the structure of government as a profoundly negative thing. But prior to making moral judgments, it's wise to first try to understand mechanics of society. How does society actually function and operate? One example of this would be the ruling class. It seems to me that in every society there's something like a ruling class, and that tends to bother me. But maybe the ruling class serves a real valuable function. I'm not sure. I don't have a clear answer to the question, but I do find it fascinating. So I'm speaking this week with Samo Buria, who is a sociologist, who is the founder of Bismarck Analysis, a consulting firm in the Bay Area that investigates our political and institutional landscapes. He's also the creator of Great Founder Theory, which is an interesting paradigm to understand various sociological phenomena with. Samo's just a straight up interesting guy that I've really enjoyed my conversations with in the past few years. And you can find his work at samoberia.com, that's S-A-M-O-B-U-R-J-A.com. He also has a YouTube channel, youtube.com slash samoberia, and you can find some of his public work there. All right, I hope you guys really enjoy our conversation. I certainly did. All right, Samo Buria, thanks so much for joining me on Patterson in Pursuit. I've known you for a few years.  I know you're an independent researcher that's starting to put more content out there, so I'm sure my audience is going to appreciate hearing some of your work today. Well, thank you very much for having me on the show, and I'm also looking forward to the conversation, the overlap on institutions and epistemology. That's right up my alley. Yeah, one of the reasons I've enjoyed some of your work and I enjoyed when we've spoken is that your sociological analysis is slow to moralize. And I see in all kinds of different areas of thought, there's like a premature moralization going on where people start saying, well, this is good or this is bad before maybe understanding the mechanics of what they're talking about. So with the minimum wage, people have very strong opinions. Well, everybody has a right to a $15 an hour minimum wage, or no, it's immoral to have a minimum wage because it interferes with the voluntary contracts of two people, but most people don't seem to kind of sit down for long enough to say, okay, well, what actually happens in the real world when there are increases to the minimum wage? Maybe it's economically inefficient, but there are psychological benefits to the general public. Like maybe there's a trade-off here that's economic inefficiency for something like political or social stability. And so I really appreciate that slowness to moralization.  I think all oughts are really informed by what is in this very basic way. And unless you make this distinction, right, unless you make the distinction to understand that it takes work to first understand what's going on, that it's not just given to our senses immediately, what some economic facts might be about the minimum wage or what might be facts about political stability or what might be a crucial institution and what might be a non-vital institution and what might be an important legal norm and what's essentially an irrelevant, at least for institutional purposes, legal norm and so on and so on. Right? Like there's nuance in many levels here and lots of interdependencies. It's sort of like if we decided and said, well, you know, carbohydrates are bad for the human body. Like you can say something like that, but we're to eliminate all carbohydrates that's probably not quite healthy for you. Certainly your body has a lot of them, just part of its structure. So why do we expect society to be any less interdependent as an organism is? Yes, and I've seen this error in reasoning in my own thought, because I have tended to come at things from a, let's say, highly libertarian individualistic perspective. And I place a lot of weight on economic analysis. I think that if you understand economics, it's this powerful tool for understanding how the world works. You understand like market dynamics. But now I'm starting to see that while those economic analyses might be correct, that's incomplete because as you say, you know, society is larger than just the economics. It's actually this very complex and interdependent system. And so kind of what I want to do in this conversation, at least at the beginning, is start with some observations about how society is structured in a very complex way. And then just really get your thoughts. If you agree with the observations or have you add some of your nuance to it? Does that sound like a good plan? I would love to. I'd love to. Sounds great. OK, OK. So before we started recording, we were saying that, you know, sometimes just making pure social observations can rub people the wrong way. And it comes across maybe as cold or politically incorrect at times or you're rude or you don't like people. But I think there's it's actually in the long run, it's deeply compassionate almost to try to say, OK, let's hold off on the shoot statements and just try to see things as clearly as they are. And then maybe we can make decisions about making the world a better place. So the basically the it is deeply pro-social to try to study society. Now, studying society, the need to describe what you're seeing is very important. If you are overly burdened with the descriptions of what you are seeing, if you're overburdened by existing social expectations, let alone something like legal limitations, the investigation becomes notably more difficult, right? Like we can't we couldn't expect without some tolerance of basically free inquiry into society and perhaps even some toleration for eccentricity among the people looking into society, be the economists, be the historians, be the philosophers, be the sociologists, we would have a great difficulty making any sort of any sort of progress in this understanding, let alone making any body of publicly available knowledge on it. Right. OK, so let's start that process. Here is one observation. So it seems to me that built into all political structures is an inescapable kind of class hierarchy for lack of a better term, that there are there's some group of individuals, some small group of individuals that have a mixture of intelligence and ambition and power, that they they essentially form among themselves a ruling class that by its nature is trying to control the behavior of the general public. And that ruling class part of them making the rules for the general public is that they don't really follow the rules that they lay out. There's kind of baked into it. There's this assumption of, look, I'm the rulemaker or I'm part of the class of rule makers, you are the non rule makers. Therefore, we're playing by a different set of social and maybe even moral rules. You think about that observation. I think this kind of observation that there's the fundamental division and that all societies tend to have some sort of elite for lack of a better term, some sort of ruling class that just holds, right? Like this is also an observation made by economists such as Wilfred Pareto at the start of the 20th century and others where societies find they have different moral legitimacies for elite classes, but all societies, all complex societies seem to have them, right? Anything that's beyond the level of a simple village and even villages usually have something that's more like economic inequality. But here when we're talking about elites, I think it's not correct to merely think of it in terms of economic inequality. Like, again, on paper, the Soviet Union had no economic inequality, clearly had power and equality, of course, in practice, right? Not on paper. There was also economic inequality there. The Brezhnev had his dacha and you have a driver. It might be the people's driver, but they're your chauffeur in practice, right? So if you if you had a certain kind of position, but I think it's something that's driven not primarily by material differences. I think it's possible to be quite wealthy and be relatively locked out of power. And I think this might sound counterintuitive to many people, but I think it's really not. If you think about eliteness as the ability to operate the machinery of social control, it's certainly possible to make a lot of money and basically gain no skill at operating machinery of social control, either because of your own personal ethics might be directed in that way. And you think that social control is always bad or you simply don't specialize it and you're just actually seeking returns. And sometimes this interfaces with power and other times it doesn't. So in a very real way, I think over time you can be outcompeted by those that are pursuing power. And in the case, sometimes are sometimes pursue money, but sometimes pursue other types of things like intellectual authority, right? Cultural authority, social networks, legal legal statuses and exemptions and so on. So it seems to me, let's say from outside this, this set of individuals because I've not spent much time pursuing power in my life right now. It seems if I could pinpoint the kind of discerning feature of what makes up this class, it's not just intelligence. Definitely not. It's not just ambition. You know, they do have both some ambition and intelligence for sure. Yes, it's not just wealth. It's not just power. The thing if I could say, okay, what is the common threat among all of them, it seems to me something psychological, some kind of belief that they are, in fact, the ruling class. Because I, when I've had some of these conversations and when I observe what they say and how they act, I think, okay, this is somebody that truly thinks of themselves. I'm at the center and I'm going to exert my control because I want to and because I can on the rest of society. Now, and also I would say as an addendum, for me, I automatically feel some negative emotion in that psychological, in seeing that psychological, I say, what is wrong with you? Like, why can't you just be content with a more normal life? Something like that. So I already have the, I'd like a young moralization about this. But what do you think about that? Is that the, the unique trait among all individuals in part of that ruling class is that belief in their, in their difference in class? I think belief in the specialness and uniqueness of your class and having this be like quite visible when you talk to someone for even a few minutes, I think something like that is something like that feature is real. I would caution here that, for example, a ruling class may easily again have an ideology that says there's no rule in class. Right. So you might have this person that in their attitude and their behavior clearly displays the I am in charge statement. And then very authoritatively says, while in this body language, in this implicit belief, betraying through like a thousand little things in action that, you know, they are in charge, they can very authoritatively say, well, no one is in charge.  All of these statements can be said and even believed on some level. Well, simultaneously, this other contradictory belief persists. I would be certain that it's a future of all of them. I think that's a difficult statement to make. I do think it's definitely the case that, you know, I've talked to several, several people that by all measures are, are elites. Um, they do have this belief, right? And it's something interesting that it's so universal, right? It must be, it might be pretty ancient, actually. It could be something that, you know, if you had the ability to talk to Pharaoh or had the ability to talk to Caesar, or then talked to a 19th century, you know, British Prime Minister, um, they might have something very similar in their composure, right? They might have something that's very, very much the same in, in the way they speak, in the way they think. And also, like, if I, if I respond, well, perhaps we can analyze it. Maybe it's a personal flaw on their part, but maybe on the other hand, though, maybe society structurally needs elites, right? And if that's the case, then, well, actually, they're just fulfilling their role in society in a way it's not really about them. And there certainly have been elites. And again, I would caution here when I, when I say about this, I don't automatically endorse, but when I propose that, for example, there might be an elite, that on an emotional level believes and behaves as an elite, that on a cognitive level, like claims to not believe that there are any elites in our society, there might easily be an elite that says it's a reluctant elite. Says, yes, there are elites, but if I could, I would be a simple farmer. Right? Like that's certainly something that has been stated, has been said. Some elites even act on this. Like, do you, do you know by any chance, like the example of a Cincinnati's? No. Okay. Cincinnati's was an ancient Roman statesman called by the Senate to be a dictator. And in Roman times, you know, basically dictator was a temporary emergency position for things such as wars or other general crises. And Cincinnati's was called to be dictator, became dictator, and then retired and went back to his farm. And when the next crisis arose, the Senate again, like kind of pressured him into that position, and he went off and served the state, but returned back to his farm. And, you know, Cincinnati's was so admired, especially in early America thought that, you know, well, we have place, a place called Cincinnati, and he's, you know, he was the person that people would compare George Washington to when George Washington, you know, after two terms did not run again for a third term, even though that was totally constitutionally permissible at the time. Um, so this is this is something that people have thought about and observed for a while. And again, now in ancient Rome and maybe in Athens and maybe an 18th century America, you have as an, you have an elite that says it is a reluctant elite. But then just because they say it, this doesn't mean that it's, you know, in fact, that earnest, right? It's not clear it's earnest. But, you know, if they are necessary, it easily could be earnest, right? If elites are necessary, you know elites are necessary, you know, someone has to be in charge, are you going to pretend you're not in charge, right? If you are self undermining in your everyday action, like if they had a negative emotion to being in charge, they couldn't get up in the morning, right? They can get out of bed. They couldn't do that writing. They couldn't tell their assistant what to do. They couldn't be charismatic on stage. All these things break down. So perhaps what you're observing, and I think it's a real observation, I think it's something that at least like 90% of elites, if not 100% like you proposed, have is this fundamental belief that, yes, is right for me to do this. And I can look myself in the mirror. So, so a point in that a question, I think what you say is, unfortunately, maybe exactly correct that the even if you could say this is a type of a flaw, let's just say this is a simple way over some vacation, let's call it vanity. Let's say it's a type of a narcissism, even if that's the case, it might be that they are still serving a necessary social function as much as I think that's a tragedy in a sense, that might be correct. And it actually connects to some things happening in my personal and professional life where I have a buddy who is very big in the business world, let's say he like started a few businesses, raises a bunch of money is super focused in how does the business world actually work. And I was talking to him about some difficulties, let's say I've had with employment, that for me, I the idea of professional leadership seems kind of unnecessary. And this is this kind of funny to say, but I'm thinking, okay, I don't need that. I don't want that. I don't need that when I've been in circumstances where I've been employed by others and not working for myself. I disagree with the judgments of people that are my bosses and it's a problem, because I sometimes substantially disagree. And so I have concluded, oh, well, so leadership things kind of gimmick, like it's not, it's just people who want to feel some feeling of power, but don't have high quality judgment, but it's not really necessary. Now I'm starting to realize that might be a completely mistaken way of thinking about things that leaders might not, good leaders might not even want to be leaders, but they see that the way humans are in the world is that they require leadership, that they aren't independent minded individuals. They are very much hierarchical. And this friend I was talking about said, Steve, ideally, the good boss doesn't want to be the boss. Like the boss wants to be able to find employees that he doesn't have to micromanage and regulate and constantly bring their behavior in accordance with the overall vision and the goal. Like ideally, they wouldn't need any of that, but that's not the world we live in. It's an unfortunate role that people are placed in, in those leadership positions. And that might be true just in the elite and in government in general. Yes. I think that also there is a distinction between different methods and styles of leadership. I think in particular it's very important, it's important to consider what can be the basis for various kinds of authority. The Romans had the term auctoritas, which basically meant knowledge, basically authority coming from special situational knowledge. If the house is on fire, firemen arrive, you listen to the firemen. Why do you listen to the firemen? Because you assume they have special knowledge. Do you immediately recognize that they have special expertise? Can you immediately fully verify it? Well, no, but it is a reasonable conjecture. Again, possibly some people feel that way about their doctors. Now, there are also individuals who are very skeptical of doctors, arguably with very good reason. Further, like say if you have a defense trial lawyer, you might actually, you might, you might listen, listen to that lawyer and their legal advice. There can be an argument made for this kind of technocratic authority. Yes. The question then becomes with the, with the verification of it and which institutions are conferring it and whether there is a bait and switch happening where, you know, the fireman is like, well, you should listen to me. Also, you should listen to me when we take out cats out of trees. Actually, you should listen to me about cats in general and buildings in general. I'm now at the firemen and fire and building inspector and veterinary general. And pretty soon you're the general secretary. So people do overstretch their authority. Now, we see some of this, by the way, in academia as well with intellectual authority, where I think academia has overstepped its intellectual authority in interesting ways. You see this in interesting ways with celebrities, where many celebrities have overstepped, you know, what they really know or understand when they speak about things. And again, in a way, perhaps politicians in the United States, well, there's an argument to be made that they're, they're their actual expertise. They have a real study of craft, like if you imagine a congressperson, a correct wise congressperson, according to the explicit justifications of how Congress is supposed to work, they should be a great legislator. They should understand law. They should have wisdom and knowledge of people. They should have literacy and economics, not even at an extremely high level. But if you just imagine that they were like at a basic undergrad level, we would be quite happy with that compared to what we actually have. Well, that's a case where they're not living up to their authority. It's the firemen that doesn't know how to put out the fire or save the cat or the doctor that's, you know, prescribing you leeches even when leeches are inappropriate. I was recently told that in some cases leeches are actually good for you. We don't take that, that's quite interesting, right? That's quite interesting to me because we give it as an example of a medieval quackery, right? Yeah. Well, it's funny you mentioned that. Maybe afterwards we can talk about it or at some future point. But my wife Julia has been doing a whole bunch of health research at I think a pretty high level now. And there is something to be said about the letting of blood in particular that the body does not have a mechanism for getting rid of iron from the body. And so because modern diets are super high in iron and I think it's iron fortified, there might be a reasonable case that things like leeches and bloodletting do have a medical role. In fact, bloodletting is because there's too much iron in the body. There's too much iron in the body. Yeah. And it turns out that bloodletting is still standard practice for dealing with hemochromatosis, which is where you have a genetic condition where iron builds up in the body anyway. So there is there is something very fascinating there. So but you pointed out something which is near and dear to my heart here and I really don't know how to make up my mind because when I look at our society right now and you know, part of my independent research has been investigating the quality of the ideas that are being put out by experts in various domains and it appears to me that the quality of ideas and research and theories is incredibly low that you have like a handful of excellent theoreticians and thinkers and then 90% that are very bad and their expertise might be in something like raising fund raising grant funds from the state to conduct research rather than actually getting closer to truth. But when I see this applied to politics, I look at the American system. This might be my American bias and I think, OK, who in American Congress is truly a competent legislator? It seems to me just looking at it that that that it's it's kind of a joke right now. And so I might have prematurely concluded that therefore law making in general government in general politicians as a as a group are kind of a joke, but I recognize that might be that might be a little bit that might be too fast to jump kind of to the anarchist conclusions. But but you've done a lot more careful research on the functioning of legislatures. What is your analysis of our let's say the the American the state of the American politic? Yeah, you know, I think I think the American the American body politic has a gaping hole where Congress should be, where a lot of the functions of Congress have been taken over by the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court, given what it's been called to do is doing an OK job. It's just the sort of way where you might consider like, you know, a water pipe is no replacement for a functioning dam. And you know, sorry, a water pump is no replacement for a functioning dam. And it's also been partially replaced by various bureaucracies that are nominally in the executive, nominally under the control of the president, but are actually not under the control of the president. There's a very interesting European terminology. There's a piece of European political discourse, something called the democratic deficit. Have you ever heard of it? I've heard of it. Yeah, it basically proposes that, you know, European states today based their legitimacy on being democracies, yet we also propose that European integration is clearly a political good and a benefit to democracy. Yet every step of European integration removes control of politics further away from the voters, puts it into the hands of basically unelected Brussels bureaucrats as the as the statement likes to go. Now, I have a nuanced view on both the European Union and on on thorny issues like Brexit and so on. So I'm not just repeating this discourse for no purpose. What I'm going to propose that I think America has a democratic deficit. Congress should actually be this organ through which wise legislatures are chosen and through which laws that reflect the general good are chosen. In the absence of this, we've had a merely technocratic mechanism going through the Supreme Court and essentially a self-serving bureaucratic process going through the civil service. Now, at best, maybe the civil service is good at picking people that got good grades at Harvard, but then you have to ask yourself, well, you know, are the people that got good grades of Harvard anything more than moderately competent paper pushers? Right. I think the case is to be made that. No, there's no reason to think that. And, you know, Harvard or Yale or Stanford, again, these like might be fine schools. But again, I'm asking the question, is this the place where the legislators are produced? And I think the answer is no. And then the closest we get to this is that Congress has an overrepresentation of legal experts. But law is its own narrow domain of study. Now, it might be deeply powerful and insightful, but much as economics, it hates its limits. When Congress was a place where you might meet a Benjamin Franklin, well, that was a very different Congress. That was also a Congress where public debates were held. Why? Well, in order to convince the other congressmen that they should vote your way because this is the best thing for the country. Can you imagine congressmen speaking to each other in Congress, debating and publicly changing their mind during the course of a debate? That happened, you know, that happened. So this is a claim I want to explore. That might be true, that that is what happened. And if you go back to the historical record, right, you read the public debate, but I think that's where the argument rests, like the whole idea of the legitimacy of Congress and that it is an important part comes from the belief that that was desirable and that could be maintained, right? But was that was that a show? Like I have become and this might be an error, but I look at the kind of the real functioning of our system. And I think, OK, competence is not to be found, though occasionally you you get high level sophistry. So oh, yes, then I look back and that is that is yes. So was that the case, though, back, you know, when you were when you're talking about Benjamin Franklin days, was it really fundamentally different and more competent and functional? Or was that essentially they had better sophistry and the record only shows the prettiest writing? Well, I'm going to say that, you know, I think that first off, there was a lot of stuff that was only for show. There's a lot of actually quite sketchy things happening on the on the side of the founding fathers when it comes even to the American Revolution. To the Revolutionary War and the Independence War. Many, many misdirections, many basically false claims. Like if you read the list of the complaints of the colonists and you didn't read the rebuttal of the complaints of the colonists written by the British counterpart. And then you look at the history books, you kind of are forced to acknowledge that the rebuttals were more correct than not, which is which is really funny exercise. I recommend it. Maybe maybe I'll share a link for your readers. But but I do think that, you know, it's not a. I think it was both more honest and most of it was still for show. I believe congressmen did talk to each other first and private and then in public. And sometimes the public discussion changed their minds. Just as a speech might change your minds. And now again, the question is then is, well, is the Gettysburg address is that high level Satha Street? Or is it high level intellectual content? And my claim would be it's both. It's actually combining a lot of guile and even trickery, you might say. And again, you know, maybe one could, you know, I can only say that, you know, Lincoln is considered a great statesman currently. And I certainly, you know, think highly of him is at least an operator of power. There's a reason autofund Bismarck, you know, greatly admired Lincoln. He thought Lincoln was a great state builder because he made these United States the United States. So Bismarck was admiring him in this like very slightly immoral way, where he was sort of like very interested in how you unify a state, build like a single political unit out of what were previously fragmented countries. Just as Bismarck himself did by turning the kingdom of Prussia into the into the German Empire, right, unifying states such as Bavaria with it. So I would say then that public speech making has always carried a high degree of craft and sometimes deceptiveness and sophistry. But it also had and could carry some amount of truth, where sometimes truth is, in fact, the most persuasive and you know, sometimes truth, correct information and impressive framework is the best way to change mind. So even if you're a very selfish persuader, all you want to do is have people agree with you and do what you want, you know, truth sometimes makes for the best propaganda, not always, but sometimes. And I think it's it's damning that contemporary speech has so little substance. It would be better propaganda. It would be better sleazy politicians if they had some substance, right, they're bad at their job. They're even bad at that. It's not even their job. It's like they're bad at failing at their job, right? Right. So so in their sophistry, let's be frank, it's no Gettysburg address, right? It's like, you know, I will say, for example, let's let's pick a controversial figure. I think Donald Trump is the great orator of our era. I think it's very clear. He's coining phrases that I hear people here. I live in San Francisco. People will repeat them. They'll say that's a very high energy statement or, you know, I'm a very stable genius. And these are these coining that they're repeating mockingly. Yeah. But then I hear them repeated mockingly once or twice. And then two weeks later, I just hear it used without the mocking undertones to describe a situation. My friend, your language has just been changed. If you the distinction and the confusion might come. So when we have all of these illusions that we assume have been here forever and these metaphors and these word plays and then you learn, oh, that came from Shakespeare, you're not surprised at all. Right. But Shakespeare is written language culture. And Donald Trump, I think in fact, does not read much. And in fact, watches a lot of TV. Yeah. But he is spoken culture. He is spoken culture in the in the age of electronic media. When you transcribe his speech into writing, it's not good writing. Right. The interesting we have the we have the opposite problem with most other politicians where if you read it on paper, it seems a good speech, but delivered at false flat. That's an excellent point. And I actually think this is part of the reason why he has been so successful is because what happens is those who place. Let's say.  And yet the rest of the people who maybe don't have the same value on the written word can say, no, no, you guys are just making a cheap, a cheap elitist point because we knew what he meant. Like if you listen to it, you can understand often, not all the time, you can often understand the points that he's making. And so it's nothing but an attempt to look intelligent, to be phrasing things in a way that looks good on paper. And I think that's a valid criticism. I think I think it's an important criticism. And then just to also move one one step back, one step back being the point that you made where you questioned, well, whether they were speaking to each other, I'm going to say people in Congress today are not talking to each other as much as they should really the, you know, the constitutional convention was the same group of people meeting. And it was not public, at least not at the time. So I'm fairly sure that the discussions and the speechmaking and so on that partially and fully later became public was in fact intended mostly to convince the other delegates. There were some people who refused to participate at the time because they felt this was an illegitimate, an illegal action. But then I have to ask, you know, if 300 of America's most powerful people show up in a city to discuss what the next constitution is, and they come to an agreement, well, who's going to stop them? Right. Even today, let alone in in the 18th century. And you know, George Washington, I think, was among the richest people in America at the time in a well respected military commander. The people that used to do this stuff were far more interesting. Now, of course, this carries with it again, this like a lot of personal power. I would argue that in a very real sense, like, you know, Benjamin Franklin probably had more personal power than almost any American politician today, except possibly, again, Donald Trump. But the presidency today is far more powerful as an office than the presidency of George Washington was. How to square that contradiction? Well, to make make the distinction between the president, the person and the presidency, the office, right, like the White House is already its own little bureaucratic machine where the president in order to exercise the powers of the White House for himself, rather than merely rubber stamp things, has to spend a lot of time managing the White House. When I did research at the Yorba Linda presidential library down in it's it's near LA and St. California, I was very interested to see and to spot that whenever Richard Nixon made a state of the union address, you know, at the time something aimed at, you know, about 200 million Americans, if we assume all of them had a TV back then. He was most interested in the response of their of his staffers. Was this because he was confused and he believed that the staffers and the employees of the White House offices that they are a representative sample of the American population? No, no. What actually was happening was that he primarily made a speech to the whole country so that when his staffers came in and said, you know, my mother-in-law has been giving me a hard time or my best friend won't talk to me because the New York Times says we're destroying the country. And the only voice he had that was as strong as a newspaper was the State of the Union address. These were often speeches with an audience of 200 million people focused on handling the morale of 200 people. Like that to me was so striking. That to me was so striking because I think this this this distinction, this correct push that you made earlier. Well, is it all just for show or is it for conversations among elites? I think the answer is yes, where you make a lot of it for show and then some of it is aimed for this audience that you're working with day to day. I know that when I go around and I just have a talk on any topic, be it civilization, knowledge or whatever, lots of my friends hear about it and they bring it up and they, you know, expect me in private to stand behind the words I say in public. Fortunately, I mostly stand behind the words I say in public. But if I didn't, then I have to, you know, take the simulation to the next level. I would have to either lie to them or I would have to explain to them that the thing is a sham. And well, then they would think less of me, wouldn't they? Right. If I told them it was a sham. So all right, so I want to tell a story and tell me tell me why this is this is wrong. Okay, that this is in human populations, there are inherently a small group of the intelligent, ambitious, relatively powerful individuals who will left to their own devices, naturally form states, and they will they will if left to their own devices, form the ruling class and control the lives of everybody else. And that structure that emerges from the ruling class is inherently inefficient, and perhaps even completely unnecessary in the sense that rules can be valuable for society, but they rules can also emerge without them being declared by the ruling class, you can have all kinds of emergent norms and rules that that can be functional. And so it's it's it's something it's something akin for lack of better analogy, something akin to a cancer. But just as a fact of reality, like humans left to their own devices, they get cancer, and societies left to their own devices or get the ruling class that makes the law, they get state. And if not, if not kept in in in control, then it becomes malignant and can become a big problem. So is that that's I don't I don't have a I'm not having concluded that this story is correct. But I must say I'm pretty persuaded by it just by observing what comes out of the ruling class in terms of laws over time, maybe not for short periods of time, but over time, it just seems like it always turns malignant to me. Well, I I think that anarchism is a difficult position to defeat. But then a lot of philosophically consistent positions are quite difficult to defeat. And the the information that we have available is is filtered so strongly, like one of the basic problems with studying society while living within a society is that no civilization and no society is obliged to tell the truth of itself or know the truth of itself or know the truth of itself, right? Like imagine you have this box and you kind of ask the box. So box, what do you contain? Right? Right. Like if that's your main method of studying it, right? And even if we pull 300 million Americans and ask them box, what do you contain? And they answer completely truthfully. Well, we've made some progress, but not that much progress and understanding the society of the United States alone the world, right? And it's it's history. So I think that it's a very intellectually respectable position. I've considered myself anarchist years ago. I don't currently think of myself as an anarchist, so I will take you up on that. I'm going to say that, you know, sometimes when you open up a cancer, you find fully formed teeth or hair or all sorts of these pseudo organ organ material, right? Depends on the type of tumor, the type of the cancerous tissue. I think that's because fundamentally it is disorder to tissue, right? It is an organ or a cell or a part of your body that is going off script, eventually to the detriment of the whole body. But fundamentally, it's tissue. So again, there are two ways to challenge this. One of them is that this class of people automatically forms a state. Well, there seem to have been anarchist societies in the Stone Age, right? Or at least societies that had perhaps power structures that we don't have really good evidence for. I do think it is an open question how egalitarian or non egalitarian societies were back in the day. In fact, we can barely make sense when we send an anthropologist, well, again, either from Harvard or from Stanford or wherever, and we sent them to Papa New Guinea, they disagree on what they see. We are not just asking society and society is not necessarily fully honest, we're asking individuals who are collecting essentially anecdotal data. And if it's not anecdotal data, if it's statistical data, well, then you're trusting the institution. Do we trust Soviet statistics on the production of tractors in the Soviet Union in 1953? Well, no, we don't and no, we shouldn't. Do we trust the Department of Defense on how much America is spending on defense? Well, no, we don't and no, we shouldn't. And actually, when they were asked to audit this by Congress, they said it's too hard. Yeah. They also, I think reported that years ago, there was something like multiple trillions of dollars that there was like a oops, a bookkeeping error. And there should be a two million over here. And we just don't know what happened to it. Oh, several billion.  And I think note that those billions, those bookkeeping errors, that's the data of political scientists are working on, right? So that's that's that's what I mean by statistical methods. Right.  These are personal observations and certainly there can be high quality observation and low quality observation. If this was not the case, we would not admit witnesses in trials, right? Ever. And there can be like credible and less credible witnesses, you know, an Air Force pilot says that they saw something weird up in the air. Well, that's worth an investigation. Maybe it's a Chinese plane, maybe it's a new type of drone, maybe it's a weird weather phenomena. You know, someone as a civilian that only flies, you know, once a year to visit their family, they see something strange in the air.  Personal reporting can be epistemically valid. However, the reporting itself, the fact of the reporting doesn't mean that the person has an accurate model of what's going on. And there are different levels of credibility of reporting. And the statistical methods we use to study society are dependent on the soundness of the institution doing the data gather, right? Like, it depends on the soundness of the measure of tractor production or the number of Amazon packages delivered. You know what? If I had to make a bet with someone say a $10,000 bet on whether Amazon's number when I asked them what is the number of packages delivered this year, whether it's correct plus minus 3%, I think I would take that bet. I think it would accept, expect Amazon's number to be correct. And I would expect the Soviet Union in 1953 to have an incorrect number, both because it would be less well organized than Amazon is right now, but also because the Soviet Union had a incentive to distort and misrepresent its activity. Note this can happen even in the private sector. There are certain numbers for certain companies, such as, you know, what are the emission numbers from your cars, right? That German companies that work quite well just outright lied about. This was a scandal a few years ago. I think it might have been. Let me think. I think it's BMW. Yes. Now note, are German companies good at assembling complicated machinery? Certainly vastly better than the Soviet Union. Ah, but do they have an incentive to lie? Oh, they certainly did. Did they lie? They did. So, you know, this this this this number of good in good, there's competence, raw competence in gathering the statistical information and then there's the incentive to lie. And I'm going to say I think the DoD, unfortunately, is probably more like the Soviet Union in 1953, where it's both somewhat incentivized to lie and not that efficient. So when you when you give up, when you give the example of the emissions and these cases where people have the incentive to lie and maybe you don't have the incentive to have a good data. I look at that and go, okay, I can trace that back to the same cancer. That's the car manufacturer is knowing. But I would say that that's like a broken institution, right? I would say that that's like a failure to find a positive some positive, positive some context for an institution to live. I would say that's more like the tooth inside the cancer instead of the tooth in my mouth. So I'm happy to have teeth in my mouth, obviously. So there may be a lot of truth here. And so my the the intensity of my anarchism was fortunately shaken a little bit when I was doing some traveling. And there were two places that made me go, okay, maybe there's more going on here. One was visiting New Zealand. We lived there for about three months. And the other was visiting just a lovely country. I've never been. I hope you really enjoyed your stay. Yes, all my friends who go there love it. Yeah. Well, what I saw I had some interviews with people I was down there and I spoke with a gentleman who was, I don't know, he was some high up political guy, but he had very libertarian tendencies. So we got along very well. He was describing how in New Zealand it was a scandal. They had some they had some scandal because, you know, some political leader was using public funds to pay for security. And it was it was some other scandal, laughable scandal, like where we would say, well, that's not a scandal at all. Like that you guys are that must have a very well functioning. You must be keeping this this cancer and check very well to have such high standards to say, look, if there's any tiny abuse of funds, if you think too highly of yourself, Mr. Politician, we're going to, you know, ride in the streets and be angry at you. And I thought, OK, well, that's that's a good sign because I hadn't growing up in the States. And I did just a little bit of traveling in Europe. I don't get that feeling that that there is that the general population puts the political leaders on a very high standard. So that was the first time where I was like, OK, well, that kind of like the idea of that of that dynamic. And then the other one, which really was much more impactful on me was visiting Japan, which I hadn't in Julia and I had no expectation whatsoever of Japan. We just meeting up some friends there and totally fell in love with the place, totally fell in love with the society and with the culture. And it was very and we were hoping to eventually move there or spend at least some percentage of our time there. And it was very clear to me that the first time I'd ever experienced a a functioning social social fabric that was so strong and delightful that it made the political inefficiencies less relevant. I don't necessarily know that much about the Japanese government.  But I think that society has something right where they where the politics don't matter as much. And then I come back to the states and I experience this culture and everything is so hyper politicized and the politics actually matters because you can get legislation that really negatively affects your life and and it's very dramatic and it's very toxic.  Would you would you describe this as close to the to the was it the the Watchman state or the the Night Watch state? The idea that it's or or minarchism perhaps related ideas in this area? Yes. But the weird thing to me about the experience in Japan is that I don't think they have a particularly menarchist system, right? Now, in some areas they do in some areas they clearly don't intervene and they seem to be more competent. There's some interesting going back to the medical thing. There's some interesting evidence that the some of the medical regulators are more responsive to to public health issues, let's say, then in the West, it seems to be less politicized. They actually seem to care about the health more of their population. And that that was a that was a new experience for me to be like, OK, well, that though I'm sure I would disagree with all kinds of decision making, and it's not exactly a small state, there's there's still it's still possible to have a society that's so great that it that it doesn't stress you out, you know, the political and they've had such political stability over there for a very, very long time. I think that's part of it. Well, you know, the political stability and the question of what political stability is good for and what what extent is politics bad or good? I think that I would see perhaps politics, at least what we see is visual theatrical politics, the kind that is likely to produce these strong interventions in people's everyday life as the battle, right? You know, Klaus of it says politics is war by other means. Now, if that's accurate, right, sorry, war is politics by other means, but I'm flipping it on its head. If that if that's right, then politics itself is just undesirable. Now, the question is, is everything the state does inherently political? It's not completely clear, right? A lot of civil, a lot of services can work very well. You can have, say public transit that functions very well, that's not politicized at all, that's not relevant to political battles. You might have a post office that works well. Some countries would claim you can have a healthcare system that runs well. Say Singaporean, the Singaporean model I think is the best state run healthcare system in the world that I know of better than the usual European example. Though there's always the obvious counter argument that while the consumers in Singapore might get their legs set for, you know, much more cheaply than in the U.S. All the high end services in the U.S. that the U.S. system has, and of course the U.S. system is this unholy mix of private and state incentives, you know, pre-tempting each other, you know, a pre-tempting village of weird incentives. Still, the U.S. spends more on medical research than almost any country in the world, and a lot of medical advances do come from the U.S., possibly the majority of medical advances in the world. So possibly everyone else is just being subsidized by American technology, so it's not really the state system that's there, it's that they're not investing in R&D, despite the claims that states should have a great incentive to invest in the R&D of keeping their population healthy and long-lived. You know, if this theory made, you know, straightforwardly the incentives were aligned, I would expect the European Union and Japan to be the world's greatest funders of anti-aging research, because it's the only possible thing. Neither immigration nor an increase in birth rates will come in time to stop the pyramid, the age pyramid from collapsing, right? Both states have completely unaffordable, both social and other expenditures. People like to focus on social programs, but honestly, even things like France's two aircraft carriers are just unaffordable if French demographics continue the way that they have for the last 60 years. So I went a little bit into detail here, into healthcare, but only because I want you to illustrate an area and a debate in an area, and the area being, can the state provide not just good services? Does it have perhaps a necessary role in society or does it have at least a role it can play in society? I would say states clearly have a role that they can play in society, where they can provide physical security. I would also say that states are probably or something very much like a state seems necessary to regulate cities. Now, perhaps it's not a national government, but I think a city government is necessary because of the sheer density of people. It seems to me that you have to, in order to build public infrastructure, do stuff that's essentially non voluntary. Now, in practice, I just think a city that will do that will out perform a city that very, very strictly adhere to voluntary principles in the sense of number of people living in the city, quality of public health, you know, quality of basically number of people economic activity. On any metric you choose, I think that city would out perform it. And of course, you can go too far. You can go to all the way to Venezuela or the state where like, you know, no and never are those rights respected. And I think that doesn't work that clearly doesn't work. But the the way the federal government in the US misuses real estate, in particular, federal land in the Western US States is a counter argument for the common good, you know, the government's like, we're building a highway here. It's for the common good, you have to sell to us. They seem to not be using land very well, at least the modern federal government. However, I think city governments, we're going to build a train station here. I'm sorry, you just have to move. We'll pay you. But you have to move, right? Like that have to and you have to sell. That is coercion. And Japan does this. And China does this. And again, I live in San Francisco. San Francisco does not do this. And I wish I wish I lived in a city that was at least a little bit more Japanese or Chinese in this regard, because then, you know, I wouldn't have to drive quite as much. I could use more public transit. And it would just make it a nicer, more walkable city as well and improve the quality of my life and the quality of many other people's lives. Yeah, I think that's very plausible that even in more extreme libertarian men, artists, even anarchist circles, the I think when people are speaking, honestly, the idea of the city state makes a lot more sense that that seems like it could be and the incentives are lined a lot more when you're rather than dispersed all over the place the way the US federal government. Exactly. I mean, the principle is truly preposterous when you think that this relatively small amount of people in Washington, D.C. are going to make the laws for people who are living in rural Montana. I mean, it's so it does not that does not make sense. I mean, it is a guarantee that the people in Montana are not going to be getting the laws that are best suited for Montana with this with the system. I think the system is too big. But if you're talking about, you know, the town, the little the little city states in the geography, the geographical location of Montana, yeah, maybe, maybe that would be, I don't know that they saw a healthy size of government where you know, if you're talking about Tokyo, if that was a city state, there's 40 million people or something in the metropolitan area, that's still a huge state to the extent that it's one central state. But I think it makes more practical sense to to have the natural limitations of the cancer or the tumor to be limited by this by the city than anything larger than that. Well, but if it's the city, then I think I've already established it's a liver, it's not a tumor, because if Tokyo to grow to 26 million people, you know, those 26 million people, I'm not, you know, an extreme environmentalist. So I don't think they're cancer. I think they're people living lives and ideally as good as possible lives as they can and there. And that is enabled by a high quality city government. Well, but it is an interesting question. I don't know the answer. It's very, it's a very interesting question theoretically overall.   Anyway, you might. And it's funny. I was talking to Julia about this parsley due to the conversations that we've had with you. We had an interesting conversation about some of the benefits of monarchism just from a right and open, you know, an abject perspective. It seems like a system that has historically worked over time, not necessarily that it's ideal. And she thought some of those arguments were really interesting and valuable to go down that line of reasoning. And we were talking about like our ideal, I don't know, political philosophy looks something like a poly monarchism, which is it's kind of like an anarchism. And it's kind of like a city statism. But it's kind of the idea that that over time through the even through the natural voluntary exchange of property rights, you're probably going to end up with large landowners that kind of look like the Kings that can set up the rules and the borders for their little domains. Because I can think about like I'm living in this beautiful little part of Arizona.  You know, I can see that plausibly, plausibly working. But it sounds it sounds weird to to mix anarchism with anarchism at the same time. But I think there's something there. I mean, the key the key thing here is the I think that well, we can go on the monarchy thing in particular. Again, I think it was useful thinking about the distinction between the president, the president and the presidency. Likewise, you know, when we think of, you know, the crown, like today in British law, if you see the here the term the crown, it's it's referring basically to to the state, all these bureaucracies that had grown within within this domain. The incentives of the queen herself, though, even arguably today, even when her role is so different from any sort of like actual rule, are arguably more aligned with the interest of the of the British people than many of the people in the civil service might have, right? And again, this sort of question of might a some amount of personal authority grounded in this real concrete management of a part of the country that you live in, right, perhaps a city, perhaps the district, perhaps a block, perhaps a county, a literal county with a count, perhaps that might align incentives very well. And I think there's some evidence for this in terms of the performance of say, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, right? Like Lee Kuan Yew's performance there was remarkable. He did an extremely good job governing that that city very well. And in a sense, his personal incentives were way better aligned than the incentives of the civil service as a whole, with the population as a whole, right? And today, you know, his son is prime minister.  So that you could even describe Singapore as an informal monarchy, right? And perhaps the next prime minister will also be descended. And the family name and the family legacy and the family's properties, which are all in the same place as the properties and the legacies and the families of everyone else. That means that you don't want to live in a bad city.  You don't want to live in a poor city. You don't want to live in a city that has is overflowing with ethnic strife and so on. You know, I would say in the 1960s, both Singapore and the United States had basically race, race riots. You know, today, America still has the occasional race riot and Singapore does not, right? So there's an interesting question even from would be progressive standards. Might this seemingly ultimate regressive form of government not be the best government for this like co-living and social evolution, where we come to and good spirits work together as human beings, because I think there's a strong pro social impulse in humans. Now, to maybe say a thought on elites back on elites, it's like the negative take on elites is that there's somewhat sociopathic and they're exploiting everyone's gullibility. The positive take on elites would be everyone has a very strong pro social desire to work for the common good. And there are people who need to direct that and who wish to direct us and allow us focal points for us to direct these these desires, right? And this positive take on them in this negative cynical take, I think are both true in part. It's a mixed role. It is not pure gullibility. It is also it is either is a positive pro social instinct and a lot of us like if you can make a city nice, you're not going to worry too much about how I'm making it nice as long as it is a livable city that I'm proud to be, you know, a member of. And I think that motivation should not be discounted even among some of the more like elite people, some more ambitious people. A lot of them, I think just do have this pretty positive motivation and might not be for a city. It might be again for building like a practically trillion dollar company. If it's not yet, it will be soon like Amazon and or or running or reforming some part of the judiciary or changing the laws of a country and so on. Well, so the part I definitely see that line of argument. But then I think, okay, we can also analyze the success of Singapore through different lens and say that to the extent it was a success that maybe the successful parts come from having a relatively free market, comparison to the area, relatively stable rules of the game. And it's precisely so Singapore is where it is. But it's maybe not where it could be. Maybe it's the case that actually were there more privatization, were there less maybe suppression of dissent in the case of Lee Kuan Yew. Maybe that would be superior. So it's hard, it's hard for me to know whether when we're looking at a case like Singapore, which is definitely an interesting example, we look at that and say, okay, that's a demonstration that the the competent many authoritarian model can work. Or we look at it and say maybe it actually, it can work better than other models. But maybe it's stunted compared to where it could be. How do you, how do you try to resolve that question? Yeah, I mean, the the interesting thing about social forms is that I think that preconditions have to be met. Right. So I tend to think of the world in terms of social technologies and institutions. And if we try to imagine a maritime system of law before ocean going vessels were a going affair, that just doesn't really doesn't really work. Right. You don't, it will be difficult to set up the economics to match up with the social realities to match up with the information constraints. Right. Of something like a ship at sea far away from the capital, still needing to have a code of conduct that's very local, that's locally applied, but is compatible with whatever is happening back home. That's inherently physically decentralized. It just has to be right, even if the ship itself internally on the sailor still uses coercion. This is what I meant by maritime law. And there's then a physical prerequisite of the ocean going vessel or at least the sea going vessel and possibly the prerequisite of writing and letter, the writing of letters. So you at least need a cheap enough paper or cheap enough waxed tablets and you need a system of writing and so on. So whenever we're thinking about say the ideal system or the theoretical optimum, it's a very productive exercise. But what has to also be considered is what are the material prerequisites for this to be implementable in the real world material and cultural, I think. Well, of course, exactly. And the cultural prerequisites are often made up in this distribution of knowledge norms, behaviors and social networks that they currently existing humans already have. So taking those. And of course those are those cultural patterns, I think are what produces the pattern of material abundance more than the other way around. So if there's material abundance or scarcity, sure, there are concrete natural limits to growth in the terms of like how many, you know, how many atoms of copper or silver or uranium are there on earth? It's a finite number. It's a high number, but it's a finite number. So if you think those are real, but in practice, we're just on this thin little crust of this apple, right? We're in the thin little less than one millimeter skin of the earth. And we we are just living on the surface, not even all of the surface, we mostly don't live in deserts. We mostly don't live in Antarctica or under the sea and so on. Our limitations, our material limitations seem to be mostly a reflection of the state of our knowledge and the state of culture. If by culture we can mean this social network and distribution of knowledge, you can imagine like a graph, you could draw a graph hypothetically for the distribution of different kinds of knowledge across society and who has it and what ways is it oriented? You know, if the welder doesn't know how to weld, you try to hire a welder to build your aircraft carrier, well, that's just not going to work at all, right? And again, if if there are people who simply cannot apply basic philosophical reasoning at scale, and your whatever ideal system requires people to have a basic grasp of some philosophical fundamentals, well, that's not going to work no more than the aircraft carrier would, right? So that would be an example of possibly a hypothetical cultural precondition. And I sketched out a different cultural precondition, which was literacy among ship captains, right? Or at least literacy among the officers who's needed on those ships sailing around the world for them to write letters and keep a ship's log and, you know, defend themselves back when they came home, because when they back when they came home, they would examine the ship's logs and they would examine the accounts of the crew and they would be like, well, you know, this conduct was unlawful, right? Or this conduct was lawful, right? This decision was made many months or years later when you were back. You know, people when they imagine, I think that's it's just an understudied area, I think. But that would be an example that the literacy was a cultural prerequisite for that, right? And it's a much more concrete and historical one. So I would ask back is like what do you think are the prerequisites for for something like that if that were desirable for the the question asked? If I'm being honest, I think that it would require extremely self developed individuals with some kind of a strong adherence to ethical or philosophical principles in the abstract. And because I think that's probably a requirement to have this this voluntary type of system work, I I don't think that is going to work at scale anytime soon. So in terms of my ideal, I think it it's right. I'm going to be a Marxist here, right? It's like we have to improve the quality of the man so that the man can live according to these values. I think that might be correct when you're talking about very high level and admirable philosophical and ethical principles about voluntary action and how that's good. In practice, I I think it's I think it is probably factually correct to say that in those areas in which rules and norms and cultural values have been non voluntarily imposed on a group of people, it might be that that that results in a long term, stronger flourishing. And I wish that weren't the case. But that seems plausible to me that if you just round up humans in the state of nature, that probably not going to adhere to the abstract principle of the respect for private property rights, then if you're kind of already coming in with that package of social technology and philosophical reasoning behind it, as much as I don't like that, I think that's probably the case. Right, right. And I think then we still are operating under this immense uncertainty, even if one could agree that there are prerequisites necessary for something like that. And even if we agree it's the correct theoretical principle or operating under immense uncertainties in evaluating the current situation. Right, if we don't trust, if we don't automatically assume that, you know, the DoD is completely accurate about its spending in 2020, or we don't assume that our public discourse is as bad or as good as people claim it is, or that we don't assume that the educational numbers we're getting out of the various statistics of international organizations for the state of education, or we don't perhaps even, you know, believe official estimates for what the population of a city like San Francisco is because, you know, there's the undocumented migration, right? Like you can you can make the case either way that it's actually a very tiny population. It's actually a very large population. Either way, you might not have an accurate number of the, you know, how many people live there, just as you might not have an accurate number of how many people are living in China, because the one child policy was circumvented at times by individuals obviously want to have more kids, but then they have unregistered kids. So those kids don't show up in the official census and so on. These uncertainties are are very difficult to overcome. So even if one were to, so the intellectual project, then I think for, say, improvement of society is this careful study of both theoretical ideals and principles, followed by figuring out whether practical preconditions for building out certain systems, you know, possibly at the scale of cities. And then finally, also establishing, well, what are the current conditions? How much of a delta do we need to push conditions to meet them? Yeah. It was there a specific moment? Oh, you said you used to consider yourself an anarchist or something close to that. What was it that changed your mind? I mean, it's a slow process because I was always cautious with with political identification. I think the main the main perspective that I was thinking about was well, the questions of morality and interpersonal morality are very important. We should all understand how to conduct ourselves well, and we should understand which are the things that, you know, we can think about and which are the things we can do and what can institutions do to actually treat people well. But then the question remained like significantly unanswered as to how do things currently work. And then slowly over time, I realized that careful study of current institutions be they, you know, but not all coercive institutions or government, interestingly, revealed that they had a deeply ambiguous nature where the negative aspects often pointed out by libertarian or anarchist critique were correct, essentially, but incomplete. And a lot of the positives people were describing that, you know, people bring up were also correct. So there's this strange position here where one is stuck with where, you know, this, this has clearly negative and positive aspects, they're both correct. This this contradictory strange reality. But it's not really contradictory, right? It's like the elephant with its trunk and ears and tail and legs. And it's thick hide. You're not quite sure what it is until you see the whole thing. Yeah. So I sort of feel like I moved into less certainty, and at least more certainty on a few narrow cases. And a few narrow cases is enough for me to be like, okay, I guess this was I think so it's 2425, like, okay, I guess I'm not anarchist anymore, because I believe these this set of things. And I might still be inclined towards notably less government or notably less authoritarianism than contemporary societies have. But I can't actually say that I see no cause for it. You know, this is interesting. It makes me think to going back to the company example that one could say, accurately, I think that the ideal company and hierarchy is so structured that every individual within that company has complete autonomy, and is so unified by the goal and the vision and the understanding that they don't feel like they're being oppressed by the managers above them. I think I think that's plausibly achievable, especially when you're talking about small companies, like a small startup, it totally by the idea that you can find that small group of people that are unified to such a high level, that they can make that kind of highly autonomous organization work. But in practice, that's the theoretical ideal. And in reality, you companies probably need strong leadership and the vision set. And there is a hierarchy that is that isn't forced. Right. All right, that was my conversation with Samo Buria on episode number 101 of Patterson Pursuit. Hope you guys really enjoyed it. And I'll see you next time.


the curator she curates that's what she does i think her um her branch marks just really really nice stuff thank you oh that was so yeah it's for the people the people this is the food this is ravioli but it looks like something else it smells good it smells really good like mom was gone it smells good and i can't wait for our food yeah i'm gonna have to take out my t-puses while we're sitting here can we eat that until we're done? that's uh no cheese and here's the split for your friends yes please thank you so that's i've got two breads no we all got one because she ordered her separately one of y'all ordered this separately let me see but that doesn't need to have two that's a lot let me ask her when you come back i'm sorry guys did i order two pieces of bread i ordered two what did i order one you ordered one i hope so um because one bread does come with the um wait you didn't get a stew right no i just got this or that what is that but i know i got no you only got two oh no your friend got bread too okay yes yes so yeah it's all three okay are we missing anything perfect thank you enjoy what i think it came that's what he said it came with so what do you feel like you need more food no i don't need no more food hey wait let me just grab you you watching so here's everything guys here's our scene it's kind of like a little floor that's that so hi richard i'm giving you a shout out hey guys welcome back to my channel it's chacarcoco styles and on this channel we talk about beauty fashion lifestyle and styling so guys i did not post a video last sunday you guys know i've been having issues with youtube and my laptop it's just a no-go but i finally got in my other chair and i got in my rug so i'm gonna show you guys i'm going out to go pick up a planter so i'm gonna walk downstairs with you guys you know what let me grab my let's put you guys down here and let's grab my trusty handheld situation here yeah so much better all right so i wish i had another one but this one doesn't have a like a stand i like this though it's really small but i'm gonna just throw on my flip flops or my thong stand and just run to i'm gonna go to at home and see what they have um as far as planter now at home has they usually have really nice planters that are cement for outdoors so i'm gonna go check out both i'm gonna put these little flip flops on having this little shirt i'm gonna go to two of them the one on the other side of town has a little to me has a better range of them but let me show you guys actually let me move some i'm just gonna turn you guys around so you guys can see let me turn on and i still definitely have my my grill in here so i have this sitting here right now oh let's move it back so you guys can get the whole view that side was just like up a little bit but i put a rug pad here it's not as big as and you probably can see it a little bit i don't know i may i don't know you you you probably can see it a bit over here but right about here is where it stops i didn't get it as big as the actual rug don't judge me um i really needed it for the table the table is extremely heavy they are bringing my new table on wednesday and just a side note for those of you guys who don't know the issue with my table from restoration hardware there is a slight situation right there it's really small but the table was expensive so you know but anyway they ended up giving me some money back from my mirror situation because it was already up on the wall i was not going to have my guy come out and take it down it was just too much and he would have pretty much charged me for that um this is for those of you guys who are just new to my channel this is not the tallest mirror this is the second one there is a there's one that's 110 i think 110 118 inches high that one you could actually just leave standing but this one had to go on the wall i'm six feet tall so next to me it's like it's awkward you know what to me if i would have left it on the floor but um here are the chairs i'm gonna move back so don't look at my girl guys i'm gonna move it i promise um so those are the chairs so now i have a rug in here that is separating my dining area from this area uh from my living room area i just got some stuff on the table just for now like i said before i got the new christian dior book and just a few things that i do want to put i may add something gold in the center there and i'm probably gonna get some task lights lamps so when i am sitting here reading um and definitely something in this corner this is just the same frames that i had from ikea i'm starting to put uh can you see it on here no i think it's oh it's over here i started to put these on the riba riba frames because you guys know that the other part is all the way in here so i'm still undecided on what to do with this over here that's a new painting that i did you guys know i don't know i may keep it but here is the living room let me know what you guys think i absolutely love everything super super love it in love i'm probably gonna get something to go on my fireplace um like i said get some planters for those over there i don't even know how to zoom on this camera uh let me see i don't even want to try it out but i am gonna get some planters for those plants over there and this one here i may even i'm not sure but all i know is that i'm gonna take these what it's sitting on and i'm gonna actually sit it inside of the planter and then that way when it's sitting in the planter it'll still be kind of high and then i'm gonna put some moss over it and i'll probably do both of them um this one is fake this one is real and kind of go from there this plant is holding on for dear life so i hope i can still keep it in good condition when i transfer it over um and then that is my snake plant again i think i told you guys those three four marks on the wall those are nails so those are gonna come out you probably can't see it and i'm going to put some huge wall art maybe like a gallery wall i'm just trying to find the best artwork to put on the wall so again here is the room it's coming it's coming this is exactly what i wanted i have less space here now and i know it's because my chandelier is centered you guys know my old chandelier used to be over there like super awkward so i never really centered my table at all i just kind of just forgot about it but now that it's centered i definitely do have less space here so if i did need to work out down here i'm gonna have to adjust my chairs but i think it looks really good so i'm gonna see if i can get something for the center here and this is like a little sitting area yeah and then back there i'm gonna get some stuff i'm not sure yet i don't know if it's gonna be like full lamps or i don't want to overdo it with photos next to that so i'm trying to figure out what's the best thing that i can get on the side of the mirror um and then my curtains so i am looking for like a nice gray curtain that has like multiple colors of grays in it and then i should be good and then i'll just start accessorizing the table some more in the center down there and adding in some more pillows and i think i'll be done after that with this area and then i'm gonna go into my bathroom okay so i'm gonna go into my bathroom and change out the photo that's in there um i'm gonna leave the color because i really do like that color in the bathroom it kind of goes with the specs on my granite in my kitchen so i'm just gonna leave it and maybe i'll just i don't know just get creative with it so right now i'm gonna go to at home and see what they have i did sell my console table that was over there i sold that i'm gonna add two more frame two more frames over there and have like a smaller table and center it over there and then i'm good yeah i'm excited so the the the issue with all right let me tell you guys let me put on my sandals so the issue with my chair i'm not sure if i told you guys but those are from they i got them from Wayfarer but i think they came from birch lane or something like that and let's sit down and put my shoes on and basically what happened was the first day they ended up not um um shipping i'm sorry no they shipped my stuff what happened was Wayfarer lost the chair i don't care what nobody says i saw they both had different tracking numbers and then they both were gonna be delivered on two separate days one one was um for friday and one was for saturday the one for saturday they just completely changed the entire it was just a mess so i had to wait a few days Wayfarer had to reorder it so they had to reorder it they reordered it yesterday it was supposed to come yesterday and it did not they pretty much said it was delayed like it was just a hot mess and and i swear it's from that one location like that one location is horrible and i don't i don't want to blame it i'm not gonna blame it on let's put you guys here i'm not gonna blame it i don't even know if this is gonna sit up guys because this is not even my tripod let's slide this over let me see is it gonna stay up i'm not gonna blame it on the driver i think it's the location they may be understaffed yeah i need to get an admissions test and i need to i need to do a couple of things so i'm gonna go and check out at home i'm gonna bring you guys with me anyway but i think i'm gonna put you on my other tripod or i may just use my phone not too sure not too sure yet but um yeah so let me get out the door and get over there i need an admissions test you know georgia georgia is just like we didn't have it we had uh registrations in new york what do we have not registration i think it was it was registration but we had to do something else it wasn't an admissions test and those folks used to let you get away with me out there in new york so i'm gonna head outside and go from there guys so let me know what you guys think about the living room i'm gonna pan over one more time let's move the um let's move the the weight out the way i think it looks really really really good i don't know if the color is coming up properly in here um i'm gonna link the rug and the chair and the table and if i can find the christian do your book because i got that from home goods i will link that and also i'll link the mirror again in the sofa but it looks really really really really good i'm super happy that i um actually went with this sofa the table the mirror the chairs i need something for the table i'm gonna keep my table guys i don't know like it doesn't look bad even though it's silver but i don't mind it i'm just gonna tone it down some more with the frames that's gonna be on the back of the wall and just kind of go from there but let me don't know what you guys think i'm gonna try to bring you in home goods and at home and go from there guys so i will catch you guys in a second let's just get up out of the house and get in the car and go from there i got some flats on let's make sure i have my keys and then we're out and i don't know if you guys can see the outfit it's just like a simple jeans and some some flat shoes that's what i need downstairs a full-length mirror downstairs that would be nice let me see if i can pan over again these are kind of hurting my foot the strap is oh there's a strap is twisted okay yeah i don't know if you guys can see that just a simple outfit today it's really warm outside so let's just head on out and go from there guys i think i am should i take you guys with me do i have space in here i think i do yeah i'm gonna take you guys let's turn the light out and go from there i'm really happy i got my new stove that's like a joy and i'm gonna try to pick up some things that i need okay let's go let's go my garage is felt oh i didn't bring my sunglasses i'm not going back upstairs all right guys so i will bring y'all along inside of each store listen oh age when you're struggling to get in your car that's how you know you're getting old literally so i will bring y'all inside i must have said that like 15 times but all right guys bye home depot i went to looking for like a like a huge planter to put in actually go to the at home on the other side of town because they had a lot more of the concrete ones and i'm gonna see if i can find one tomorrow you guys know i kept my glass table so typically you wouldn't put something heavy on it so i'm gonna try to find something nice to go on there just a centerpiece with like some moss but i didn't find anything today so right now i'm just gonna do some work i'm looking to book a trip somewhere for my birthday um yeah so that's it i'm gonna end the vlog uh i do i'm cooking some dinner right now i don't know maybe i'll show you guys that i'm making some wild rice for those of you guys who don't know i am a plant-based vegan and i was alkaline but i think i kind of transitioned over to just plant-based um still majority alkaline foods but definitely plant-based um so i'm making some wild rice and like some kale like cooked kale with like some peppers and stuff like that and that's my dinner for the night i'm probably gonna drink a juice and be done so right now i'm just gonna work on some work right here looking for i guess you could say ring is here i have not shopped guys i have been trying to focus on the living room let me tell you the stuff just takes so long to come and just trying to get the vision together i'll say this if you are furnishing your home over take your time go room by room don't go left on your vision stick to what you want in buy what you want guys okay so let's end the vlog i will catch you guys in the next one if you stay to the end of this video please comment koko we see you and don't forget to follow me on instagram at koko styles nyc and koko styles ny and my personal style blog koko styles nyc and my style services koko styles ny dot com and i will catch you guys in the next one bye guys


Hello and welcome to leaders room by Eclipse the leadership and governance center We're sitting here today at our annual leadership energy summit Asia where we have the privilege of sitting with leaders Not only from Asia from all over the world to talk about their Wisdom and insights so today is an honor for me and a privilege to be sitting here today with Isabel madam Founder and CEO of X-Runner. So hello. Good afternoon Good afternoon. So I guess we'll have about maybe 15 minutes to talk a little bit about what brought you here you know and So actually one thing that stood out when I was looking at your bio and reading your stories is the word entrepreneur And it made me realize that I didn't even really know what it meant So I had to go look it up in the dictionary and the definition that I found You know actually have it written here You know it's a little bit kind of left me a bit unfulfilled Because according to to my online dictionary it says Entrepreneur is a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money and That's it So I was just wondering you know I got to ask you What is your definition of entrepreneur what do you think of what do you think of this one? What it what does it mean to me? I think to me it means to take things into your own hands. So For me it has more of a definition almost almost activist like in the sense that You define something or you find realize that you care about something anything And it becomes so important to you that you just want to do something either about it or For it or sort of invent something new But it's something that you decide that you are gonna take into your hands as opposed to you know reaching the conclusion. Oh well Things won't ever change or I'm not good enough for that or other people You know if if it's such a good idea. Why hasn't anyone else done it already sort of ignoring those things and just saying well I'm gonna try it So yeah, that's what it means well What are the reasons I asked Isabelle's because she is one of the top, you know recognizes one of the top entrepreneurs in in the world and This has to do with obvious ex-runner. So maybe just take a moment. Tell us a little bit about What is extra on it? What is your story? Well ex-runner what we what what ex-runner does Is we provide low-income urban households with a safe and modern toilet system? That improves their lives in a way that Doesn't compromise dignity and doesn't affect the environment And we do that because there are millions and millions billions of people worldwide who don't have a proper toilet in their home They have everything else And everything other than a toilet to go to the toilet. So I think we're used to sort of modern comfortable Toilets that we don't even think about right? It's like oh, yeah, and several times a day every day and it's sort of choice it's not like you can say you want to not go to the toilet you have to go to the toilet and and and we have the privilege of Just not having to think about it But a third of the world's population does have every time they go have to deal with unhygienic scary sometimes even dangerous conditions and so our goal is to For each and every one of these people around the world replace that situation with a with a modern And safe and dignified version Wow Well, that is that certainly expands a lot more from that definition that I found on yeah, right? So um, so where is the bulk of the operation of X-Runner? The we operate in Peru in the in the capital, which is Lima And what kind of scale we're talking about here how many households We currently serve 600 households Which means that 3,000 people individuals use this toilet and and if you consider that we do all of this on a basis of First of all having developed a system that that tries to be complete and And sort of and good on every level so not just the toilet in the person's home because but also for instance We go and pick up the accumulated waste and then we turn it into compost So in order to provide people with a perfect and dignified toilet solution We also have to do everything else well We can't only just put a nice toilet and not care about what happens with it We have to do everything so given that and given the fact that we charge for the service 600 households is a lot because low-income urban households have so many priorities for spending their their limited resources that have sort of Trying to fit in one more thing that they would want to pay money for is very challenging It's a process. There's not just putting you know something there So I have to ask this Why this? There's so many other things in the world. Why the portable toilet I mean Now why this because I think I believe that everybody should have I mean It's a human right to have access to good sanitation and I think that All human rights should be sort of fulfilled. And so to me that's why it's important today back then It's a less glamorous thought. It was it was just that I didn't I didn't know what to do And I tumbled into X-Fender a little bit It didn't I didn't say I met a friend who she's now my friend and business partner who was thinking about doing that And I thought oh, well, it's an interesting idea. I'll give it a try but it but and that's how it started Well, I mean because it's you know, it's you can think of so many things that that that you can do in the world, right? And this would be perhaps not at the top of the list, you know, yeah, because you originally you're from Vienna, right? Peruvian At Eclipse, we like to think about leadership as being driven by this values and purpose How clear you are about what you want to get done with your with your life? So and oftentimes these leadership energy if you will is is you know, it's driven by By moments, you know where you Maybe perhaps you face the greatest challenge in the journey or then just before you decided to jump on the bandwagon Dedicated your life or cost like this So perhaps maybe I could ask to share some of these so defining moments Along this journey of establishing X-Fender. Yes I mean that there are that there are defining moments prior to X-Fender and then defining moments during X-Fender and I think prior to X-Fender One and that is a moment was When I would travel to Peru to my mother's country and suddenly see poverty because as I told you in Vienna I grew up in Vienna and Vienna is not a poor city all the con on the contrary And so seeing poverty in Peru just didn't make sense to me. I didn't I was so I didn't understand I was like wait, how come people live in those Conditions and then at the same time you have this whole other side of Peru where people live in a luxury that you also Don't find in Vienna. So and and that just was Very defining because I thought well, I I don't accept that. I mean, I don't think that's the way it should be Because I would see the poor houses of poor or lone income people And I would just start to imagine what I would feel like living in there and I didn't like that So I was like, well, I don't think they like that either and so let's do something about that and then during X-Fender, I think A defining moment that helped me Just continue was seeing that people accepted the solution and the way that I saw that was because they paid for it And paying for it is the best way to to see whether it really makes sense or not because then they could say no I don't want that. I'm not gonna pay that for this, right? But they said yeah, and so I could and then and then and that was super Inspiring because it said it showed us while you're on the you're doing something right, right? I'm actually sitting here thinking about the fact that you're right I mean, it's you know, putting putting a toilet in someone's house It's it's not just a matter of putting the toilet there There's so many other things that you have to think about to make sure that this you know, the circuit is completed Yeah, was there some things that came up during this journey that you sort of didn't think of it It's kind of surprised to you along the way about putting this Yes, sort of the for instance our toilet works with Sawdust so it's a toilet that is dry that doesn't use water And what it uses instead is sawdust that you pour over and that you that has to sort of dry and sort of cover up everything I didn't know that there are so many different types of sawdust and that one actually makes everything worse and another is actually really good And I was just like let's buy sawdust and put it there And then things were going wrong And I was suddenly we were confronted with having to do research about wood and the quality of wood and Types of sawdust and those are that that's very typical for for everything Entrepreneurial that you suddenly have to deal with things that you didn't think were important for for this Well, so what's next what's next is that we want to Overcome the the biggest challenge that we always face which is 600 households is a lot But then when you look every time we go to those communities and the Sun comes out and the sky is blue And we suddenly start seeing how big the community is to just sort of feel like oh my god this is really big and We want to do that by by really getting the government involved in this as well And Peru now has a new government from as of a couple of months ago A government that seems to be a little bit more interested in actually, you know doing something and And that's something that we really want to want to push sort of just to have the government understand that in order to get everyone To give everyone the proper sanitation They they must also look at options that are not traditional and have the courage to be a bit more Entrepreneurial themselves and and take a few risks and try out new things So it's kind of you clear the hills now you can begin to aim for the summits a little bit exactly Yeah, great. Yeah So we're coming towards the end of our session today. So Anything you'd like to leave for other leaders out there are the entrepreneur other entrepreneurs? Yes Yes So I was I thought about a couple of things and I think the first one is Links a little bit to what I just said about sort of seeing suddenly the the the larger scope And I think as leaders it is it's really important difficult but important to be able to to at the same time think big and do small things So sort of Have the huge vision and be like yes, that's where I want to go But also be able to see okay And now I have to do these small things to get a bit closer Because often I mean if you don't have a vision you'll get frustrated really soon because you won't understand the context of the things that you're doing But you also have to be patient enough and understand that it will take you a while that the vision is a guidance for you to do The small things that bring you closer to it. You have to be able to appreciate small successes as well The other thing is I think that's something that you always hear is that you have to be good at listening Really listening and also listen to yourself And then the last thing I would say is something that I learned in all of this is that you have to be Aware of your role as a leader. Maybe you don't want to be a leader. Maybe you don't You're scared of it, but it's a it's a great It's a role that if you take it seriously and if you start identifying with it has great potential because you can You know get people to on board for things that are important to you Now I know why you know We invited you Because a lot of what you say resonates really well with what our beliefs at at Eclipse as well and today actually have a Have a better definition for me. Anyway, you know entrepreneur So it's actually a short. It's a better one with a shorter one, too, which is think big and do small Okay, so thank you very much Isabel for sitting with us with us today and I have a great rest of the Lisa Summit mm-hmm, and then hopefully we'll see you again the future Thank you. Thank you for having me and for taking interest in in X-Runner something that's happening on the other part of the world Great. Thank you


Morgan is one of the people who really persuaded me that I should take the chancellor role and do that and Morgan and I talked every day about what it is what we should be doing how do you support people how you build teams and you know he always ended the call you'd say I'm always here for you unfortunately on June 15th of 2020 I've been here for six weeks his wife Kate calls me Morgan died this morning and if there's anything that drives me is serving his memory as well it's people like that who just give their entirety to a cause is why we're going to be a great success what do you think he'd say to you today I'm always here for you then you know where he'd in boil her up hammer down I love it yeah