Meet The VC Who Invests In High Schoolers

Michael Gibson shares insights on identifying extraordinary talent in young people from investing in them early via his VC fund 1517.

He explains how classic predictors like test scores fail to capture entrepreneurial gifts like courage, initiative, and "insider-outsider" status. Homeschoolers often excel as they're self-driven. Malcolm notes EA types who use funds practically tend to thrive.

They discuss why cities lack on-ramps for talent, risks of attaching to "smart" identity, and how youth's fluid intelligence enables conceptual leaps elders miss. Overall Michael concludes talent ID is tough, but development is key - we must cultivate qualities like grit young.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Michael Gibson. He is the co founder of the VC fund, the 1517 fund, which invest in young people typically before they've gone to college,

Malcolm Collins: how do you judge the competence of somebody who's young,

Michael Gibson: yeah, we learned a lot. Well, when we started the fellowship, we had an application a lot like colleges. We asked for test scores, GPA, what school you went to. And that was good at, certainly signaling cognitive ability, but we quickly learned it was not a strong predictor of success out in the wild. And so we had to start looking for other things . There were even negative correlations that were surprising.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello. Today we are joined by Michael Gibson. He is the co founder of the VC fund, the 1517 fund, which is game changer in terms of venture capital investment, because they invest in young people typically before they've gone to college, sometimes during but he also wrote a book that I've enjoyed very much called paper belt on fire, which I really encourage you to.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Check out, but we're not going to be [00:01:00] talking so much about the book today. We really want to get into Michael's work with the 1517 fund with how he spots young talent with things he's learned from his investments and the people he's worked with and the people he's found through this fund, because I mean, Oh my gosh, the talent you're meeting, it's, it's insane.

Simone Collins: So we're really excited to dive into this and thank you so much for joining

Michael Gibson: us. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Simone Collins: So the biggest thing that I'm really curious about, cause it's been a while now, you know, you're like, you've been, you've been doing this for years at this point. And you've done a lot of hustling.

Simone Collins: I mean, like sleeping on couches, staying up all night, going to these crazy young person parties. I couldn't do this, you know, like young people stay up late and I'm like, my bedtime's at eight 30. you're doing these. I

Malcolm Collins: went, I, sorry, I got to take a little detour here. So I went on this trip to, I don't know, somewhere in Central America.

Malcolm Collins: With a bunch of Peter Thiel fellowship kids and they like they went out like I, I hadn't gone to a party, like a club in years, but I was like, maybe it's gotten better. Maybe it's not as bad as I remember. And I get there and I'm [00:02:00] stuck there until 1 30 in the morning and it's loud and it's sweaty and it's gross.

Malcolm Collins: And it was just as pointless as it always was. And you have to deal with this stuff. I think professionally. It's all about how you. Get these young geniuses interested in working with what you guys are doing. How do you sell yourself to them?

Michael Gibson: Man, well, that is certainly part of it. Yeah, it's funny is it's such a slippery, tough craft that we're constantly reexamining the foundations of what we do.

Michael Gibson: And, and one of the I guess, two different problems that we constantly wrestle with, or, or, you know, we, I guess we're trying to figure out which problem we're, we're. Operating in one is if you are a fisherman, is it better to be in a well stocked river? Our pond. So it's you're one of those bears just grabbing salmon cause they're flying in your face where in this case, the fish are, you know, talented people building startups or is it better to focus on the craft [00:03:00] of fishing, like being the best, you know, it's like you could identify the one fish that's in the stagnant pond and find it and fish it out.

Michael Gibson: You know, that's, so this is like the two problems we struggle with. We're like, okay, which one is it better to be? Is it better to find the location where just talented people are and then figure out what they're working on? Or is it better to, you know, hone your skill pattern matching skill at okay, does this person have the right stuff and just, you know, go out there, you know, looking for that.

Michael Gibson: And so, so, so that is a trade off. Or, you know, I can't, I guess I'm saying it's two problems. It's just one problem. It's which one are we in? So to that end is yeah, I've been in hacker houses. I've lived in ecosystems and, you know, tried to go native to the extent that I can, but now that I'm getting older, I've lost the steps.

Michael Gibson: So maybe I, like you said, it's. It's tough to keep pace with a 21 year old.

Malcolm Collins: Let's talk about what a hacker house is, because our audience may not even know what this is. And I think for young people who don't [00:04:00] grow up or maybe live in like more rural environments, it's useful to know that this other world exists that they can then move into, which is a quick path.

Malcolm Collins: to move up. Hacker houses are houses where near tech hubs, because it's often too expensive to have a house yourself. A number of young people get together and put together a house. Now, hacker houses have variable levels of prestige. And so you want to make sure you get into a prestigious hacker house, which typically means you're gonna want to find someone in the hacker house ecosystem and ask them in the city you're planning to move to typically San Francisco or New York.

Malcolm Collins: If you're moving into hacker houses or London, I suppose. Which are the most prestigious hacker houses right now in this area? My brother and his wife actually ran a hacker house for a long time in Silicon Valley house. It was one of the high, high prestige ones. Yeah. Yeah. The icebreaker was probably the one that everyone knew about during that

Michael Gibson: time period.

Michael Gibson: Yes. I, that was on the boat. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Some

Malcolm Collins: people got, so hacker houses are usually pretty weird. So they would the icebreaker, what they did is they got an old icebreaker, it's like a Norwegian icebreaker and they [00:05:00] converted it into a house that was on the pier by San Francisco and people would have parties there and stuff.

Malcolm Collins: Can you talk about some of the more modern hacker houses you've seen? What they're like? It's interesting.

Michael Gibson: Yeah. I wish. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be great if they had some intelligibility, meaning you could, you know, find a list of hacker houses. You could find an ordering of okay, here's what you get out of these.

Michael Gibson: But I, it's, it's much more underground and not widely publicized. I guess you got to hear about them through word of mouth or some Reddit chat group or something of that nature. Yeah, they come and go too. And and, and, and, and they're driven by the people who are managing them. There was one in the mission.

Michael Gibson: That we helped start called mission control mission, San Francisco. Yeah. What they didn't know, I guess, God, it's funny. I think there's like a sex club or S and M shop called mission control. They didn't know that for them, but yeah, it was more about these guys are all software engineers that type of hacker.[00:06:00]

Michael Gibson: There were 10 people. At a time living in the house and sometimes people work at companies. Sometimes they start companies. They tend to be very creative. They're, they're almost like a studio artist studio in a sense of yeah, building things. Some people are working, they change, they swap, they come in and out.

Michael Gibson: So yeah, we, we, we, I know of a few in different places. We're starting to see more now like in, at the university. Oh, they tend to also be associated with universities. Like it'll be a university town where you see these things pop up. And there were some students at the university of Michigan recently who started a house devoted to brain computer interfaces that issue.

Michael Gibson: So I thought that was cool. Cause it wasn't just, you know, yeah, you know, like me today. I'm so San Francisco. I've got the It was not the coding you know, the code monkey wearing a hoodie. It's they're actually working on some on hardcore science, which, which is cool to see. So it's tough for me. I was like, I do want to know about these places cause they can be gravity wells for [00:07:00] talent.

Michael Gibson: But on the other hand, they're not well advertised. So you got to hear about them through word of mouth. Well, and

Malcolm Collins: another thing that used to be a real gravity well for telling I don't know if it still is is maker spaces. Sure. Yeah, I would also look up if you have a city. So they're called hacker spaces, Baker house spaces, or you can look for biohacker like labs, which cities, which will have most of the equipment you need to do this sort of more advanced science stuff.

Malcolm Collins: And they're typically sort of like. All of our guard, the one that I was really into back in the day was the hacker dojo. Yes,

Michael Gibson: I was just going to say the hacker

Malcolm Collins: dojo. Yeah, I used to hang out there every, every party, every week. It was fantastic. It was really basic. If you've ever seen the movie hackers, like the 19.

Malcolm Collins: So. I don't think that that movie was based on a real culture that exists, but I think it's generations of nerds grew up with that movie and they basically recreated a funny thing when you were mentioning about, Oh, this is the name of a sex place. I was like, yeah, but a lot of hacker houses do have regular.

Malcolm Collins: What's true. Yeah.

Michael Gibson: Well, they tend to be very [00:08:00] countercultural. They have that. That's so funny. Yeah. Hackers. Was that the Angelina Jolie movie? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well worth a watch. It is one of the things I love in movies about. And computer engineers is they always face the problem of how to dramatize or visualize what it is to work on a computer.

Michael Gibson: And that one was great because it was like, they're actually running through like a street of code or something. That's like a

Malcolm Collins: city. And Hacker Dojo, by the way, for people who didn't know, for the old version of Hacker Dojo, there's like a new version that's really corporate and boring, but the old one, what they had bought was an old stained glass show factory, because it was where they were trying to sell stained glass.

Malcolm Collins: So like the whole thing was like weird and designed and like hanging platforms and everything. It was nuts and big mechanical beasts that they had beat that they would take out to maker fairs and stuff. But, okay, so next, tell me about the type of person that you're looking at, because when you're talking to young people, how do you judge the competence of somebody who's young, and how do you know when they're, like, too arrogant, and can you give me any of the weird stories you've [00:09:00] had dealing with these young geniuses?

Michael Gibson: Yeah, we learned a lot. And I guess it is a lot like pattern recognition as it relates to, let's say, computer vision or deep learning. In the sense of you have a data set and then your algorithm has to train on that. There's deep learning. It operates in a black box. So oftentimes it's It's shooting out answers, and you can't figure out why it arrived at that answer.

Michael Gibson: Well, I think human expert intuition is quite similar because you're building up a algorithm across this data set. So what's our algorithm? Well, when we started the fellowship, we had an application a lot like colleges. We asked for test scores, GPA, what school you went to. And that was good at, certainly signaling cognitive ability, but we quickly learned it was not a strong predictor of success out in the wild. And so we had to start looking for other things . There were even negative correlations that were surprising. So one of them, the funnier ones to me was like the [00:10:00] winners of the Intel science award tend tended to fare poorly.

Michael Gibson: As entrepreneurs and why? Well, okay. It's because to win those awards, you have to be a good like ESG salesperson, not a innovator. You know, it's just who, who can, you know, signal the most virtue for a committee rather than actually build something. So over time, yeah, we started to develop our rules of thumb.

Michael Gibson: Certainly the traits we look for can't guarantee success, but they, they became contributors to success. Like one of the weird esoteric ones is something we call insider outsider. This is from Peter Thiel's work with Rene Girard. So Peter studied philosophy or literature with Rene Girard.

Michael Gibson: He's a French literary theorist who became a. Bit of an anthropologist and historian and Gerard was obsessed with crowd dynamics, witch hunts, mobs and scapegoats, and he has a monograph on the scapegoat in which he canvases the world mythologies and religions [00:11:00] and examines all these episodes where the crowd picked a scapegoat.

Michael Gibson: And sacrifice them or, or, you know, sometimes what's interesting is that the hero is often a scapegoat who has resistance sacrifice. And so for Peter, this became a way of looking for founders, a trait to look at for founders. And people to hire and what Gerard found was like the people that the crowd doesn't just pick a complete foreigner to sacrifice because if there's a social crisis at hand and they need to blame someone, you can't just grab a foreigner who couldn't possibly have anything to do with it.

Michael Gibson: Yeah, on the other hand, you can't. Pick the king's right hand man. You know, that's just too close to the center of things. So oftentimes that scapegoat is, is this boundary figure who somehow paradoxically is both an insider and an outsider, and you can see this. I mean, think about Christ, you know.

Michael Gibson: Classic scapegoat story is he's he's on the one hand Jewish preacher and on the other hand, you know, excommunicated [00:12:00] by the Pharisees and so on. You can see this in the myth of Oedipus where, or the, the play Oedipus where, you know, Oedipus is. He is, there is a plague that is destroying the city and he, he sets out to discover its cause.

Michael Gibson: He is the king. He thinks he was born in a foreign country. Actually, he turns out he was born in the city. But, but because he came from somewhere else, it's like he's both an insider and an outsider. So Peter looked at the, you know, when he examines. When he's looking at a founder, so when he's always looking for some kind of insider outsider story, one easy, clear example is, let's say immigrants.

Michael Gibson: So immigrants who come to the United States, there's long tradition of creative immigrants in Silicon Valley who have done great things. And I think it's this insider outsider dimension where on the one hand they are U. S. citizens or green card holders, but on the other, they are outsiders. You know, they're new to the country.

Michael Gibson: They might see things in different ways. Maybe I myself am an insider outsider and, and[00:13:00] I, I was working towards a PhD. I spent many, many years in grad school. I've seen the insides of the temple of academia. And, and and yet I, I left, I, I, I Dropped out and became a heretic. So maybe that's, you know, possibly why Peter hired me.

Michael Gibson: So, so that insider outsider thing is something we're, we're always looking for. And, and, and I like talking about it because it's just so weird. Cause it comes from French literary theory. And then the other thing is, yeah, you got to have the know how, the

Michael Gibson: IQ and EQ to work with customers and co founders and so on. But no one thinks about, you know, that dimension. So that's why, you know, I think it's worth meditating on. What's really

Simone Collins: interesting is I, go

Malcolm Collins: ahead, Malcolm. Well, I want to provide an alternate theory as to why insider outsiders do so well. Okay, great.

Malcolm Collins: What you're actually capturing with insider outsiders is to, to be an insider, to be a competent or move up within the inside system. That's typically a measurement of just general like EQ, IQ, everything like [00:14:00] that. To be an outsider, to be willing to outside yourself when you have already risen within a traditional power structure to any extent, you have to have enormous initiative, a willingness to take calculated risk, confidence in yourself.

Malcolm Collins: And belief that you understand something about the way the world is working that the insider system doesn't see yet. And so, you know, this is seen with immigrants, right? To be an immigrant, you have to have an enormous amount of individual initiative, individual belief in yourself, everything like that.

Malcolm Collins: Well, to be an immigrant with... It could be, look,

Michael Gibson: that could even be a genetic... Selection effect, right? I mean, one theory about the American frontier is that it was filled by people who had that risk loving gene to just set out to the frontier and face nature. Or, and we have

Malcolm Collins: another episode on this called genetic vortexes.

Malcolm Collins: And we talked specifically about Silicon Valley and we say it's probably not a surprise that Silicon Valley, as we understand it started that venture capital started in the same area that people were coming to during the gold [00:15:00] rush, which was selecting specifically for. High risk, high reward focused individuals,

Michael Gibson: right?

Michael Gibson: Yeah. And then, and then, okay. To move on to another trait we look for, sometimes I call this edge control. And which I take from skiing, snowboarding, motorcycle racing. Cause there is a, there look, there's a there's a mode, there's some amount of courage that's necessary to want to do something new and different.

Michael Gibson: And to challenge the status quo and majority opinion. But the, the thing is it's not just like an extreme sport though, where you jump out of the airplane once and get that adrenaline thrill. It's an everyday day after day. Are you prepared to, you know, negotiate that boundary between chaos and control on a daily basis?

Michael Gibson: And I think it takes a certain type of person to do it. It dawned on me that also that. You know, I say I like edge because that signifies danger and risk control is okay, but you gotta keep everything in order. And so [00:16:00] with the skiing example, you can't just go down a black diamond, like the fastest skier doesn't win olympics and to.

Michael Gibson: Olympics. So there's some Italian phrase that's you know, the best skier isn't the fastest skier because that person crashes and breaks a leg and has a career ending injury. So they don't get to participate in all the races they could have after that. So it's like the best skiers, the one who goes as fast as possible while surviving.

Michael Gibson: And I think there's something to that in startups where there's, there are people who, who push the edge of things, but not too much where they blow up the company. And on the other hand, they're not so conservative that they don't experiment or do anything at all.

Malcolm Collins: So what I really love about what you just said, because it reminds me of something I've seen, and I consistently seen this in people who end up being successful is you don't want to be Gosh, what's the word?

Malcolm Collins: It's from the family guy episode of South Park. You know, those are something pushing balls, right? And

Malcolm Collins: they, they stopped working whenever you would take a single idea ball out of the tank.

Malcolm Collins: And then, oh, right, right,

Michael Gibson: right. Yes.

Simone Collins: Oh, manatees, right?

Malcolm Collins: Manatees. Yeah. You don't have the manatee [00:17:00] we say because the manatees in this episode, they would stop coming up with ideas. They'd stop producing episodes. The moment you took one idea ball out of the tank, the people who I find who I think.

Malcolm Collins: Represent the highest likelihood of like actual success, especially I'm talking about young people is they love surfing on the edge of controversial issues, but they never go over the edge to the point where they would get canceled or anything like that. Understand the game that they're playing, and I'm gonna be honest, this isn't a game that we really like to play in our videos, I think people see it.

Malcolm Collins: A great example of an individual who's doing this more and more now, and I think we're gonna see great things for him in the future, he's actually, I think you guys identified him, he might have been a Teal Fellow, or he might have been something else, but is he? What if his guy? He runs another? Oh,

Michael Gibson: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Definitely. And he definitely is really good at getting right up next to how controversial it might be without ever going over the edge. And I think that that is a really good [00:18:00] indicator of somebody who has a like of living on the edge, but doesn't actually ever want to do real risk. And that's what's true.

Malcolm Collins: I think about good entrepreneurs. It's been said entrepreneurs. Are risk mitigators, they take an idea that is big or something like that, and then they say, how can I mitigate all of the risk associated with this idea? Right?

Michael Gibson: Yeah. They're, they're not just going straight down the mountain as fast as they can and crashing into a tree, right.

Michael Gibson: There's a way to, or to climb the wide, I don't know the analogy, but there's something where there's a plan. You know, actually one book I, I recently, I read this week just came out was the new Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk. Oh,

Simone Collins: I'm in the middle of that. It's so

Michael Gibson: fun. Yeah. God, it's great.

Michael Gibson: Yeah. Really fascinating. I love how you know, Isaacson just had so much access to, to Musk. So. Insane. Yeah. All the, all the. You just see Musk for everything he is at work and in his personal life, which is wonderful. But, but there's this I noticed, I guess, in production meetings or some, you know, whenever [00:19:00] they're discussing assembly lines, Elon Musk has this thing he just calls the algorithm, these 5 steps about the processes.

Michael Gibson: And one of them is. Is to constantly delete unnecessary superfluous things, but how do you know if it's, if it's necessary? Well, you got to delete it and if the thing's not working then you bring it back.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And if you're not adding at least 10 percent back, you're not doing

Michael Gibson: it. So if you're not adding 10 percent back, then you're not deleting enough.

Michael Gibson: And that to me is a good example of like how to negotiate these boundaries of the known and the unknown is like you're going to have to go back and forth. And if you're not doing some amount of deleting and then bringing back, you're not doing it enough. And likewise, I think flirting with controversial ideas when you're getting up on the edge of these things, it's like you're it's it's so hard to maintain the balance and hit that edge.

Michael Gibson: So you like, sometimes you go a little too far. Sometimes you're coming back.

Malcolm Collins: The personal assistant story. That's from Elon Musk, right? Simone. What personal assistant story? I think it was a story, it was one billionaire anyway, where his personal assistant was like, I want [00:20:00] some more money, like I want equity.

Simone Collins: Oh, that was from the 2015 biography of Elon Musk. No, no,

Malcolm Collins: no.

Michael Gibson: It's not from the new. The Ashley Vance.

Malcolm Collins: But it is, it is a good example of what he's talking about, where they're like, I want equity in the stuff you're doing. And he goes, well, you do seem to provide a lot of value. Okay, let's try this. How about you stop working for me for a month and I see if I miss you.

Malcolm Collins: Oh my God. Yes,

Simone Collins: it is smart. It is smart. And she also didn't have a job when she came back. It is, it is. I mean, I like that ruthless optimization. I also love this way of looking like these little. Weird corollatory details. It oddly reminds me of autism diagnoses. Cause there's like all the stuff that they do to diagnose people with autism.

Simone Collins: But then there are these like weird hints that like, Oh, that's a sign. If a kid lies on the floor and they like move a car back and forth, just look at the wheels and just do that for a long time, they're like, that's a sign. Or if you take off their shoes and they walk on their tiptoes, they're like, that's a sign.

Simone Collins: I've seen the tiptoe thing. [00:21:00] And so it's, it's like you have the autism cues for brilliant talent. One thing I worry about though, like with, with talent is there's, there are many people that we even know of now, like who, who have grown up in our generation who like were the wunderkind of their time.

Simone Collins: Yep. And then they, they flamed out, like they, they, they fell in a wrong direction. They, they just sort of got indulgent. They stopped working. Have you found any predictors for that grit that just keeps people working at it? Maybe Maybe

Michael Gibson: something else. Yeah That's the one of the challenging things is with the receiving applications and trying to judge people I often use the metaphor that it's like fruit you Starts off fresh and gets stale or rotten fast.

Michael Gibson: Cause it's here's a snapshot and then maybe they change or do something else that can be positive or negative. So what we decided is we just, the best thing we can do is try to get to know people over time. And if we have multiple interactions with someone. On some [00:22:00] level, we'll get a better sense of do they execute?

Michael Gibson: Do they push through? One thing we do at the, on at 1517 now is we give out 1k grants to people. If someone says they want to build a prototype, but they just need to buy some parts, we'll kick them a thousand bucks. Oftentimes that turns into nothing. But what we get out of it is a chance to interact with someone over a short period of time, could be two months, three months, they get to work with us.

Michael Gibson: And that gives us more information about, okay, do they follow through with what they say they're going to do? Other than that, you have to rely on stories, but those can be, those are like college admissions essays. They all follow the same pattern. Oh, you know, I, I had this tragedy, I had this setback, and then I dug within during the dark night of the soul and came back and found the answer.

Michael Gibson: Yeah. So those aren't as believable. It's best if you can actually see over time, which is tough. I'll give you

Malcolm Collins: some pattern recognition I've seen from the group that we were in. Because I was mentioning in the other interview we did that if you look at this old early EA, Less Wrong Rationalist group many of them grew into very influential people in today's, at [00:23:00] least scientific and economic ecosystem.

Malcolm Collins: I think the biggest thing that I saw as a predictor, which really aligns with what you're saying that they are going to spin out and do nothing, even if they're known as very smart, is are they task oriented with money that's given to them? If somebody gives them a lot of money and then they use it to write a Harry Potter fan fiction, they're probably going to end up doing nothing with their life and just degrading AI research for an entire generation.

Malcolm Collins: But I don't mean to be too spicy, but what I'm saying is I noticed this repeatedly is that some individuals, when they would get money or when they would get leeway, they would, they would spend it on sort of not exactly what they had originally envisioned while the people who were very task oriented, especially if they were willing to be task oriented on boring ish ideas, like it might not be like, Oh, I want to make shipping freight, you know, like marginally less expensive or something like that, even if they didn't succeed with that project, they typically eventually succeeded with

Michael Gibson: something. That's a good point. [00:24:00] I think 1 thing we noticed too, was the people who could set their own goals. And. Home schoolers were best at this right away.

Michael Gibson: They could schedule their day, they could, you know, move in and out of the world, make new friends out in the, in the real world. Whereas people who were even high achieving students at Ivy League schools, since their whole life has been structured for For 16 years and they've received the assignments and they've completed them.

Michael Gibson: Well, it's a whole nother world to just step into Hey, what do I do with my day? I have no schedule. How do I organize this? And, and I saw some people get paralyzed because there was a transition period where they didn't. No, how to set their own schedule and goals or didn't feel comfortable doing it in the same way that a homeschooler would, do you

Malcolm Collins: feel homeschoolers are better?

Malcolm Collins: Like within your program? Do they have an edge over the Harvard

Michael Gibson: kids? Yeah, we haven't done an account in a while, but I do recall in the early days of the fellowship that the homeschool or at least people who had some period of homeschooling. So it wasn't just like the full education, [00:25:00] but you know, it could be 2 or 3 years, especially in the high school period.

Michael Gibson: Those people tended to be high performing. Yeah. There, there was a strong correlation there. Of course, I don't know. We didn't look at all the homeschoolers in the world, so I don't know, but the ones who applied for sure were very strong candidates. That's so,

Malcolm Collins: so parents homeschooling still has high marks for the people who are the world experts on judging.

Michael Gibson: Well, you know, to go back to the point about courage and grit you know, schools don't teach that stuff. I don't, I don't know. Maybe we don't even know how to impart that. Like, how do you, how would you run a class on? Challenging the status quo and majority of the opinion or disobedience. If you had a class on disobedience, the first lesson should be, you don't show up.

Malcolm Collins: I love that you get, you get, you grade them based on whether or not they show up.

Michael Gibson: If you show up, you let them know you've failed. So

Malcolm Collins: I actually, so one thing I'd love to close this, this particular interview is, is [00:26:00] the craziest story of an entrepreneur or something like that, that you encountered.

Malcolm Collins: That only could have happened given the age of the people that you were interacting with.

Michael Gibson: Hmm. Well, one thing the young have that's just a general advantage is that I've seen is that they have no big duties and obligations that older people accumulate, like mortgages, pets, 22

Michael Gibson: year old who can just sleep on a couch and work. Night and day weekends that, that, you know, gives an advantage of speed and hard work. So that's just independent of that. But in terms of, let's see you know, some people I've worked with, I don't, I think there's just also something to. People don't want to admit this, but there's a biological life cycle to our creativity and our fluid intelligence.

Michael Gibson: And I think some of the people I've met are [00:27:00] certainly far ahead of the curve on, on IQ and creativity, but they, they, they have to accumulate some amount of knowledge in a field, but they still have fresh eyes when they come to it. And they've got that speed of mind. And so they're able to, to see things that I guess, you know, more established people aren't.

Michael Gibson: Aren't seeing. So, you know, the example of that could be Vitalik Budin or Austin Russell. You know, they, I don't wanna say they discovered what they discovered 'cause they were young, but certainly they had the energy and, and, and the fresh mind to see things that, that, you know, the more established people in their field weren't thinking about or, or in the case of the blockchain, I mean, maybe there's something where younger people are willing to experiment more with weird stuff and think about it.

Michael Gibson: That, that's very. Very strange. But to back to the larger point, I think it is true. You look at the psychological research on achievement, especially as measured by things like in the arts, it could be, you know, how many masterpieces someone has or in, in science, how many papers they publish and what papers win them [00:28:00] the Nobel prize and all of that.

Michael Gibson: And there's pretty clear. You know, there's a rise in the twenties and a peak in the, in the thirties, and then people taper off in middle age. And, and each field has different averages, but it's pretty constant that people are very productive in their youth. It was that they aren't later on. And, and I, I'll just say, I hate as a society that we don't admit this.

Michael Gibson: Because,

Malcolm Collins: because we were in his twenties, you know, in his twenties when he came up with all this. Yeah.

Michael Gibson: In the same way that I guess it's like feminism told women, you know, they could have it all or or they could wait and then There's just this biological reality that it becomes harder and harder to have kids in your 30s and 40s.

Michael Gibson: So, you know, I think it's a disservice to tell women that they can, they can wait. They should really think about that. I think it should be something. Okay. They don't, I'm not saying everyone has to have kids, although it would be great. But on the other hand, they should know Hey, there's this window where this is [00:29:00] possible.

Michael Gibson: And, you know, unless we invent new things. It's something you have to reckon with.

Malcolm Collins: Well, that's why I wrote all our books when we were still young. But yeah, no, I, I actually, there's a concept that we have brought up in some of our work before that hasn't been talked about in the mainstream society. But I think it's a way that you can sort of test this.

Malcolm Collins: We call it the concept of brain rot, and it seems to happen to some individuals as they get older. It seems to happen to everyone eventually, but the core sign of it in an individual. That we use to measure how much brain rot somebody has is in a social situation when they're interacting with you, how much of the time or how many times do they bring up the self narrative?

Malcolm Collins: So people with a high degree of brain rot. Will constantly be in self narrative loops, like this is what I was doing, or this is who I am, or this is the type of person I am. Whereas people without Brainwot are typically focused on efficacious ideas, like what's happening in [00:30:00] society and how do I affect it.

Michael Gibson: Yeah, yeah. Huh. I'll have to pay attention more. I think, yeah, that's interesting to brain rot. I think this is part of the longevity research. I think no one is really approaching enough or tackling or scratching on enough

Malcolm Collins: is well, they don't want to. I mean, I'll give you know that we're pretty against life extension.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Yeah. It's an inevitability, not just of our biology, but of the way that ideas sort

Michael Gibson: of begin. We think it's a feature, not a bug. Okay. Yeah, you just accumulate all these categories and concepts and frameworks. And then it's tough to, once they're set in at 70, you're not, you're so resistant to new concepts.

Simone Collins: Well, and you're also incentivized to encrench yourself in more power. You're not as distributed to begin new yeah, onto what you have. And you're going to resist anyone who's trying to change the world order. And that would

Malcolm Collins: also be my self narratives that are important to them. Because if they're in this position of power, they need to constantly reiterate self narratives that reinforce this position of power they have.

Malcolm Collins: Right.

Michael Gibson: Yeah, so one counterexample [00:31:00] of people

Simone Collins: We've met people in their 20s who have brain rot. Yeah. And we've met people who in their 90s don't. And I think with aging, which is so underrated. With it's just use it or lose it. Like it's shown with cognitive performance, it's shown with like different like organs.

Simone Collins: I don't think it's true.

Malcolm Collins: I think it's just I think, I think it's that people who don't have it aren't using it. And so you, anyway, Michael was going to say

Michael Gibson: something. Oh, the one counterexample people bring up when it comes to productivity in late age is the mathematician Paul Erdos. He's this God, he's like the Kevin Bacon.

Michael Gibson: They're mathematicians. Erdos number where it's like, how many people are in the network? Are you away from a paper from Erdos or something? I forget exactly how it's the index works, but at any rate, he apparently was very productive into his eighties, maybe even his nineties. But what stands out about him is that he was fearless when it came to dropping a field in mathematics and then just moving to a new one.

Michael Gibson: Late in life. So he reached, you know, I [00:32:00] guess he hit the point. He knew when, when his mind was saturated in a particular topic and then he just let it go and he had beginner's mind all over again and something new. And so I think there to the brain rot is like, there's this clutching at identity. Like you're known as this, you know, string theorists or a macro economist.

Michael Gibson: And there's no way. 55, all of a sudden you're going to give up macro economics and suddenly start working in some other field where you'll have to be a beginner and suck again. Yeah. Maybe

Simone Collins: this is also why parents are now so strongly dissuaded from saying anything about children's character. Like now everyone says.

Simone Collins: Never say, Oh, you're so smart. Just say, wow, you tried so hard. That was so clever what you did. Because if you have a child who starts to identify as smart, then they're more likely to not even try to do challenging things because the challenging thing might disprove

Michael Gibson: their smartness. That's right.

Michael Gibson: There's a complacency and a protectiveness that, that gets attached to that identity. Yeah.

Simone Collins: That leads to ossification. So any sort of like attachment to [00:33:00] identity is very dangerous.

Michael Gibson: Yeah, very much so.

Malcolm Collins: Well, this conversation has been spectacular. I am so glad you joined us.

Michael Gibson: I know, we can keep going on time flies.

Malcolm Collins: My understanding of things is a lot. I, and it, it, it, it caused me to reflect on a lot of things that I hadn't reflected on in terms of how we look for students and what we try to optimize for with

Michael Gibson: our own kids. Yeah. And, and one of the things that I'll leave with, I guess, is like talent identification is hard.

Michael Gibson: It's something we've been doing, but what I wish we knew more about was development is like back to that courage question. Okay, how could we inculcate courage and young people? Cause it just seems like it's really hard to do and no one's doing it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and, and, and to that end, if we have young viewers.

Malcolm Collins: Listening to this, you know, do you look into local hacker spaces? Do you look into moving to a hacker house for a while? Do you look into reaching out to your heroes? Because they're often a lot more receptive than you would imagine. And it's a good way you know, it, [00:34:00] it, it is this sort of immigrant mindset, which is, okay, this thing is crazy and would change everything for me, but I'm going to go out and do it.

Malcolm Collins: And I would encourage, cause I think sometimes you grow up in an environment where you don't even realize that's an option. And then it's you know, you could just email them. You could, you could just move to San Francisco. If you actually are competent, you will start being invited to these parties very quickly.

Michael Gibson: Absolutely. A lot of long ramps in San Francisco and cities that other cities don't have, like as great as Austin and Miami are I think they lack. A lot of the on ramps that San Francisco has

Simone Collins: like that. Nobody goes to Miami thinking, I'm going to work hard and build my future.

Malcolm Collins: I want to be clear. It doesn't have as many on ramps as it used to.

Malcolm Collins: Now, most of the on ramps I've seen to this cultural group are actually online on ramps. Yes. Discord threads of like nerds and stuff like that. That is where I see the actual on ramps occurring. But it is, it used to be that San Francisco was where you would go [00:35:00] to do this. Yep.

Michael Gibson: Yep. Anyway, enjoyed the conversation.

Michael Gibson: Thanks for having me.

Malcolm Collins: I loved it too. And let's hope San Francisco can ascend from its desiccated state right now. I don't know if it ever will, but

Michael Gibson: it might. Well, we can only hope. Let us pray.

Simone Collins: Yes. Oh, Michael, thank you so much. And everyone, please make sure you check out 1517. com and also paperbell on fire.

Simone Collins: Oh, and you're also on Twitter. But you're not Michael Gibson. You are William underscore Blake. So check them out on Twitter as well. Right. Thanks. Bye. .

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