Hey David, yep not our finest moment, that’s for sure.
The critique writes itself so let me offer some partial explanation:
Extemporaneous speech is full of imprecision like this where someone is focused on highlighting one point (in this case the contrast between appropriate individual vs altruistic risk aversion) and misses others. With close scrutiny I’m sure you could find many other cases of me presenting ideas as badly as that, and I’d imagine the same is true for all interview shows edited at the same level as ours.
Fortunately one upside of the conversation format is I think people don’t give it undue weight, because they accurately perceive it as being scrappy in this way. (That said, I certainly do wish I had been more careful here and hopefully alarm bells will be more likely to go off in my head in a future similar case!)
I don’t recall people criticising this passage earlier, and I suspect that’s because prior to the FTX crash it was natural to interpret it less literally and as more pointing towards a general issue.
You can hear that with the $10b vs $0/20b comparison as soon as I said it I realised it wasn’t right and wanted to pare it back (“Maybe that’s an even bet”), because there’s no expected financial gain there. I should have compared it against $5b or something but couldn’t come up with the right number on the spot.
I was primarily trying to think in terms of the sorts of sums the great majority of listeners could end up dealing with, which is only very rarely above >$1b, which led me to add “or not really on the scale of the amount of money that any one person can make”.
If you’d criticised me for saying this in May I would have said that I was highlighting the aspect of the issue that was novel and relevant for most listeners, and that by the time someone is a billionaire donor they will have / should have already gotten individualised advice and not be relying on an introductory interview like this to guide them. They’re also likely to have become aware of the risk aversion issue just through personal experience and common sense (all the super-donors I know of certainly are aware of these issues, though I’m sure they each give it different weight).
All that said, the above passage is pretty cringe, and hopefully this experience will help us learn to steer clear of similar mistakes in future.
Hey David, yep not our finest moment, that’s for sure.
The critique writes itself so let me offer some partial explanation:
Extemporaneous speech is full of imprecision like this where someone is focused on highlighting one point (in this case the contrast between appropriate individual vs altruistic risk aversion) and misses others. With close scrutiny I’m sure you could find many other cases of me presenting ideas as badly as that, and I’d imagine the same is true for all interview shows edited at the same level as ours.
Fortunately one upside of the conversation format is I think people don’t give it undue weight, because they accurately perceive it as being scrappy in this way. (That said, I certainly do wish I had been more careful here and hopefully alarm bells will be more likely to go off in my head in a future similar case!)
I don’t recall people criticising this passage earlier, and I suspect that’s because prior to the FTX crash it was natural to interpret it less literally and as more pointing towards a general issue.
You can hear that with the $10b vs $0/20b comparison as soon as I said it I realised it wasn’t right and wanted to pare it back (“Maybe that’s an even bet”), because there’s no expected financial gain there. I should have compared it against $5b or something but couldn’t come up with the right number on the spot.
I was primarily trying to think in terms of the sorts of sums the great majority of listeners could end up dealing with, which is only very rarely above >$1b, which led me to add “or not really on the scale of the amount of money that any one person can make”.
If you’d criticised me for saying this in May I would have said that I was highlighting the aspect of the issue that was novel and relevant for most listeners, and that by the time someone is a billionaire donor they will have / should have already gotten individualised advice and not be relying on an introductory interview like this to guide them. They’re also likely to have become aware of the risk aversion issue just through personal experience and common sense (all the super-donors I know of certainly are aware of these issues, though I’m sure they each give it different weight).
All that said, the above passage is pretty cringe, and hopefully this experience will help us learn to steer clear of similar mistakes in future.
Thanks!