Nadia Asparouhova — Tech elites, democracy, open source, & philanthropy

**Nadia Asparouhova** (0:00)
You start with this idea that democracy is great, and we should have tons and tons of people participating, tons of people who participate, and then it turns out that most participation is actually just noise and not that useful. That really squarely puts SBF in the finance crowd, much more so than startups or crypto. Founders will always talk about building, and startups are so important or whatever.
What are all of them doing in their spare time? They're reading books, they're reading essays, and then those books and essays influence how they think about stuff.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:27)
Today, I have the pleasure of talking with Nadia Asparouhova. She is previously the author of Working in Public, The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, and she is currently researching what the new tech elite will look like. Nadia, welcome to the podcast.
This is a perfect timing, obviously, given what's been happening with SBF. How much do you think SBF was motivated by Effective Altruism? Where do you place them in the whole dimensionality of IDM machines and motivations?

**Nadia Asparouhova** (1:02)
Yeah. I know there's conflicting accounts going around.
Just from my character study or looking at SBF, it seems pretty clear to me that he is inextricably tied to the concepts of utilitarianism that then motivate Effective Altruism. The difference for me in where I characterize Effective Altruism, is I think it's much closer to finance Wall Street elite mindset than it is to startup mindset, even though a lot of people associate Effective Altruism with tech people. To me, that really squarely puts SBF in the finance crowd, much more so than startups or crypto, and I think that's something that gets really misunderstood about him.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:45)
Interesting.
I find that interesting because if you think of Jeff Bezos when he started Amazon, he wasn't somebody like Jean-Pierre Barlow who was just motivated by the free philosophy of the Internet. He saw a graph of Internet usage going up into the right, and he's like, I should build a business on top of this. In a sort of loophole way, try to figure out what is the thing that is the first thing you would want to put a SQL database on top of to ship and produce, and books was the answer. Obviously, he also came from a hedge fund. Would you play somebody like him also in the old finance crowd rather than as a startup founder?

**Nadia Asparouhova** (2:20)
Yeah, it's kind of a weird one because he's both associated with the early computing revolution, but then also AWS was sort of like what kicked off all of the 2010s startup. And I think in the way that he's started thinking about his public legacy and just from sort of his public behavior, I think he fits much more squarely now in that sort of tech startup elite mindset of the 2010s crowd more so than the Davos elite crowd of the 2000s.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:48)
What in specific are you referring to?

**Nadia Asparouhova** (2:49)
Well, he's come out and been like sort of openly critical about a lot of Davos type institutions. He kind of pokes fun at mainstream media and for not believing in him, not believing in AWS. And I think because he sort of like spans across like both of these generations, he's been able to see the evolution of like how maybe like his earlier peers function versus the sort of second cohort of peers. And he came across.
But to me, he seems much more like much more of the sort of like startup elite mindset. And I can kind of back up a little bit there. But the what I associate with the Davos Wall Street kind of crowd is much more of this focus on quantitative thinking, measuring efficiency, and then also this like globalist mindset. Like I think the vision that they want to ensure for the world is this idea of like a very interconnected world where we, you know, sort of like the United Nations kind of mindset. And that is really like literally what the Davos gathering is.
Whereas Bezos from his actions today feels much closer to the startup, like Y Combinator, post AWS kind of mindset of founders that were really made their money by taking these non obvious bets on talented people. So they were much less focused on credentialism. They were much more into this idea of meritocracy. I think we sort of forget like how commonplace this trope is of like, you know, the young founder in a dorm room. And that was really popularized by the 2010s cohort of the startup elite of being someone that may have like absolutely no skills, no background in industry, but can somehow sort of like turn the entire industry over on its head. And I think that was sort of like the unique insight of the tech startup crowd.