Where did you grow up?
Morocco, the Western frontier of the Roman Empire.
Aside from family, who made you who you are?
I think I underestimated how much of an influence a lot of things have had on me. There's aspects that are based off of coolness, like who did I think was cool? Under that rubric, I started listening to lot of punk rock as a teenager, and that got me introduced to a lot of, I guess, leftist politics or anti-war, anti-imperialist politics that definitely had an impact.
And then throughout college was just learning, reading more writers. Ayn Rand has had a lot of impact. There's a French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, who I really appreciate. He died at the age of like, 46, but he wrote in such a pleasantly simplistic, really fun way. He wanted to convey economic ideas. This is like in 1840s Paris. And he would just take premises that he thought were absurd, but then just go and run with them and showcase just the absurdity by applying it and iterating on that. And I really, I really liked that approach. And it seems to have played a big role in just like how I lay out arguments now.
I could go on. There's a lot of people. I'm grateful for a lot of humans that came before me.
What's important to you?
Truth. Correcting errors. Epistemological humility. Those are the ideas. Materially, sex and weed.
In five words, how are you different than others?
I'm trying to think of the ways I'm different and then filtering it by five words. This will be parsed as a whole. Egotistical, humble, doesn't follow rules.
What do you want from the future?
To know it. That's it.
I don't know what to ask of the future because it's not going to give it to me. So I haven't contemplated, thinking like what do I want? I feel like I'm just at the edge of an abyss looking at something incomprehensible, illegible. So the only thing I would want from this is know what it is, which just comes with time.