Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI

**Nat Friedman** (0:00)
We have 600-plus kind of roughly intact scrolls that we can't open. And I heard about this, and I thought that was incredibly exciting, like the idea that there was information from 2,000 years in the past, we don't know what's in these things, if we could read all of them, then that would give us approximately doubling of the total text that we have from antiquity. There are thousands more papyrus scrolls in there, and we now have the techniques to read them, then there's gold in that mud, and it's got to be dug out.
I just fundamentally don't believe the world is efficient. And so if I see an opportunity to do something I used to, but I no longer have a reflexive reaction that says, oh, that must not be a good idea if it were a good idea, someone would already be doing it.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:43)
Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Nat Friedman, who was the CEO of Github from 2018 to 2021
Before that, he started and sold 2 companies, Ximian and Xamarin, and he is also the founder of AI Grant and California YIMBY. And most recently, he is the organizer and funder of the Skrull Prize, which is where we'll start this conversation. So, Nat, do you want to tell the audience about what the Skrull Prize is?

**Nat Friedman** (1:08)
We're calling it the Vesuvius Challenge. And this is just this crazy and exciting thing I feel like incredibly honored to have gotten caught up in. But a couple of years ago, I was reading, it was the midst of COVID, and I think we were in lockdown. And like everybody, I was sort of falling into internet rabbit holes. And I just started reading about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy about 2000 years ago.
And it turns out that when Vesuvius erupted, it was AD 79 It destroyed all the nearby towns. Everyone knows about Pompeii. But there was another nearby town called Herculaneum. And Herculaneum was sort of like the Beverly Hills to Pompeii. So big villas, big houses, fancy people.
And in Herculaneum, there was one villa in particular. It was enormous. And it had once been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. And so well connected guy.
And it was full of beautiful statues and marbles and art. But it was also the home to a huge library of papyrus scrolls.
And so when the villa was buried, the volcano actually, it spit out enormous quantities of mud and ash. And it buried Herculaneum in particular in something like 20 meters of material. So it wasn't like a thin layer. It was a very thick layer. Those towns were buried and forgotten for hundreds of years. No one even knew exactly where they were until the 1700s. And so in 1750, a farm worker who was digging a well, kind of in the outskirts of Herculaneum, struck this marble paving stone of a path that had been at this huge villa. And, of course, he was pretty far down when he did that. He was, you know, 60 feet down. And then subsequently, this Swiss engineer came in and started digging tunnels from that well shaft, and they found all these treasures. And that was sort of the spirit at the time was like looting. You know, they were taking out like incredible, they would, if they encountered a wall, they would just bust through it. And they were taking out these beautiful bronze statues that had survived. And along the way, they kept encountering these lumps of what looked like charcoal. They weren't sure what they were, and many were apparently thrown away until someone noticed a little bit of writing on one of them. And they realized they were papyrus scrolls. And there were hundreds, there may have been thousands of them. And so they had uncovered, really, this enormous library is the only library ever to have sort of survived in any form, even though it was badly damaged. They were sort of carbonized, very fragile, deformed. The only one that survived since antiquity. In the open air, these papyrus scrolls in like a Mediterranean climate, they rot and they decay quickly. And so they'd have to be recopied by monks like every hundred years or so, maybe even less.
And so we only have, it's estimated, you know, something less than 1%, less than 1% of all the writing from that period. And so to find underground hundreds of definitely not in good condition, but still present, you know, papyrus scrolls were, on a few of them you can make out the lettering was like this enormous discovery. People immediately in a well-meaning attempt to read them started trying to open them, but they're really fragile. Like, you know, they're like, they turn to ash in your hand. And so hundreds were destroyed. People did things like cut them with daggers down the middle. And, you know, a bunch of little pieces would flake off and they'd try to like get a few letters off of a couple of pieces. And then eventually there is a monk named Piaggio, who's an Italian monk. And he devised this machine kind of under the care of the Vatican to unroll these things very, very slowly, like half a centimeter a day, something like that. And a typical scroll I think could be 15 or 20 or 30 feet long. And managed to successfully unroll a few of these. And they found on them Greek philosophical texts in the Epicurean tradition by this little known philosopher named Philodemus.