Nabeel is a Visiting Scholar at the Mercatus Center focused on developing an optimistic vision for AI, but as you’ll see in this conversation his breadth of interests goes about as wide as you can imagine. We talk about foreign film, interpreting the Iliad, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, Derek Parfit, SF vs. NYC, AI, startups, and a lot more.

Episode transcript

Timestamps

(0:00:00) Intro

(0:00:49) Nabeel's favorite directors

(0:02:59) Underrated regions for film

(0:04:33) Nabeel's favorite Hollywood movies

(0:06:20) What makes a movie visually inspiring?

(0:09:34) Shakespeare on film

(0:10:31) Miyazaki

(0:12:03) Paris, Texas

(0:14:34) Jia Zhangke

(0:16:12) When is the movie better than the book?

(0:18:06) CGI

(0:18:44) Robert Bresson

(0:20:30) Love in film

(0:21:50) Director's Nabeel hasn't been able to "get"?

(0:22:34) Film theory

(0:24:15) Do the arts matter for founders?

(0:26:08) Going deep on great books

(0:29:31) The Iliad

(0:32:24) Tolstoy and Shakespeare

(0:34:21) Henry IV

(0:37:51) Shakespeare’s Sonnets

(0:38:56) Secondary literature

(0:41:18) Rene Girard

(0:42:57) Norman Rush's "Mating"

(0:44:27) Watership Down

(0:46:13) Harold Bloom

(0:48:04) Sci-fi

(0:49:32) Authors Nabeel hasn't been able to get

(0:50:35) Tech pessimists

(0:54:40) LLMs and the big questions

(0:57:59) Peter Hacker

(0:59:58) Wittgenstein

(1:01:47) Derek Parfit

(1:03:55) Moral intuition

(1:05:13) Do EAs make good CEOs or founders?

(1:07:20) Selfishness

(1:09:43) Favorite albums

(1:10:26) Beethoven

(1:11:27) Modernized opera

(1:12:38) NYC

(1:13:38) Chess

(1:14:31) California

(1:17:57) Fashion

(1:18:57) Eating in NYC

(1:19:52) Travel

(1:21:40) High school

(1:22:30) Twitter

(1:31:05) SF and AI

(1:32:38) AI doomers

(1:34:28) AGI timelines

(1:36:07) Nabeel's LLM usage

(1:43:42) Science brain vs founder brain

(1:47:48) Iteration vs conviction

(1:51:02) Is art education or entertainment?

(1:54:53) Sabbaticals

(1:58:53) What makes Nabeel imbalanced as a personality?

(2:00:05) Cold emails

(2:01:43) Meditating

(2:04:09) Regret

(2:05:16) Reminding yourself you will die

(2:08:04) GoCardless and startup culture

(2:13:37) Ideas vs execution

(2:16:10) Peter Thiel and Alex Karp?

(2:18:38) Philosophers in tech

(2:21:19) Learnings from Palantir

(2:23:18) Conclusion

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Links

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