Patrick Collison: New Aesthetics, New Life | ZOË 2026

transcript

[music] It's my great honor to introduce Patrick Collison. He's the co-founder and CEO of Stripe, the co-founder of the Arc Institute, and the founder of Stripe Press. I also learned backstage that he is not a fan of Virginia Woolf because her novels contain too much interiority and writing novels with too much interiority is as some of you know, my entire life's work. I still very very very much look forward to this conversation regardless. Patrick and Luke, let's give it up. [applause] Patrick, thank you so much for being here. thank you for having me. And

I think it's apocryphal, but you know, there is the line about Freud having said that the Irish are the only people impervious to psychoanalysis. [laughter] Good. Freud is in Andre's camp with the interiority, it sounds like. Yeah. the original Maxer. The original Maxer. Yes. well, thank you. So, you know, you I want you to explain in your own words. You're here because full disclosure, I'm the recipient of a New Aesthetics grant and Patrick announced a new program with Tyler Cowen to give grants for sort of a aesthetic experimentation late last year. And it doesn't seem like last year

is the first time that you've ever thought about aesthetics. you know, Patrick is the founder of Stripe Press. very strange for a technology company to start a publishing company that makes hands down and I truly mean this, my publisher might not like this, but the most beautiful books as objects of any publisher in the world. So, you've clearly been thinking about aesthetics for a very long time. So, where did you personally get interested in this topic and what is the origin story of the New Aesthetics grant process? Where where did it come from? Yeah. So, you know,

context for all of this is, I guess as you mentioned, I started, so Tyler Cowen and I started this together. And Tyler and I disagree on most matters aesthetic. so the the whole thing is a bit of an improbable collaboration, but I I'll give my perspective at least, and you know, if Tyler was here virtually, he might dissent at some parts. so the first thing is and I think Dana is here somewhere but various people including Dana have commented on how so much of culture and how so much of aesthetics is stuck. It's not really changing very much. And

so if you look at the Bauhaus Dessau building built in 1926, it's this sort of modernist glass steel office building or you know something that has the appearance of an office building. If you look at that photo and you didn't know it's from 1926, you might guess that it was built last year. and and you know this phenomenon in architecture has you know is also exhibited and recapitulated across many other visual domains. I mean there just some strange phenomenon where we appear to be stuck and the thing and I agree on is this question of well you know what could come

next. From my standpoint, there's a second thing which is you know what exactly modernism is is obviously not you know rigidly defined. but there was of course a movement in the early 20th century with the explicit conscious goal of repudiating beauty and prettiness and harmony and truth and virtue and dignity and and I think that program I mean you got to hand it to them was extraordinarily successful. they really did revector art as a whole. And now so much of and and by the way I don't say these you know I don't offer these characterizations to impugn

these people like you know I think the the best way to to prove this case as to the motives of these people is simply to to just go read them in their own words read their manifestos like they weren't hiding it if you read what the creators of De Stijl or any of these movements or Neue Sachlichkeit you know they they say themselves we want to tear down beauty we we disagree with harmony. so anyway, I I think art has been these people were extraordinarily successful and aesthetics has largely continued in that lineage

for the past century. And then the third thing with newthetics is just this question of to what degree can you intervene at the last stage of the funnel, right? Because obviously aesthetics and art is a product of culture and of of of education and craft and technical skill and galleries and selection you know there's many steps involved and we were sort of curious well by by intervening at at the last step with with these grants to what degree could you could you repoint things and you know I guess it's it's too soon to judge but that's where it came from.

So you're using words like virtue and beauty. these are sort of very charged almost religious sort of words you know. this conference is about life. Is there then some connection between aesthetics and ethics or aesthetics and the good life as Aristotle might put it? Do do you believe that or or else why or if and if not why is aesthetics so important to you? I think it's complicated. I you know obviously for most of for most of western history we've thought there's some connection there. and the Greeks thought so and Plato thought so and Horace thought

so. and actually the best thing I've read this year is we're just talking about The Nature of Gothic by John Ruskin and Ruskin sure thought so. but again it's you as someone pointed out last night actually maybe 1930s Germany was one of the most aesthetically educated polities and cultures in history and it didn't rescue them. It didn't save them. So it's it's you know it's whatever relationship that's there is is nuanced. for me I don't know there's it's hard to it's hard to you know distill it all I guess but I was very moved by Solzhenitsyn

line in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech where he talks about you know we've the ancient triad of be beauty goodness and truth and goodness and truth people can dissemble and they can obiscate and misapprehensions can develop and so forth. And he argues that beauty is special because it bears within it its own verification. You can't really fake beauty like the the heart knows. and that seems like something very precious and special to me and especially in a time where again at least in my subjective view the world does not

suffer from a surfit of beauty. it seems worth trying to trying to fan the bellows. Would you go so far as to say there's an an objective dimension of beauty that we can deliberate about? I think it's intersubjective as in I think well in in surveys people there's there seems to be broad actually there's a there's a great book on this actually the title beauty by gosh I'm forgetting his name hey I'll I'll the name will come to me in a second but he marshals a lot of evidence about Stefan Sagmeister he marshals a lot of evidence about you know

the degree of general ascent and agreement as to what constitutes beauty. and he finds that most people do in fact agree on that which is beautiful. And you kind of know this intuitively as in people tend to go to the same sorts of places on on vacation, right? Like lots of people go to Toledo in Spain and not that many people go to Toledo in Ohio. they sorry to anyone from Limerick, Ireland is not very beautiful either. Have you been to Toledo, Ohio? I've not I've not and yeah, maybe maybe we should all be going to Toledo. Maybe

it's just a branding thing, but but yeah, people in general there there seems to be a lot of convergence and a lot of agreement. You see this in the literary canon to some extent. although he points out in this book that that there there is a wrinkle which is experts tend to have somewhat divergent views. And so, you know, the the masses like things that are harmonious and melodious and embody, I don't know, conventional conceptions of beauty. Whereas, if you're a real expert, especially today, you like disharmony and and discordance and things

that are more complicated and challenging. and I think part of what's happened in aesthetics over the last century is that this divergence has increased. there was more concordance between what what cultural elites believed was beautiful and what the regular person did. and now I think we we we kind of have two camps. You bring a you bring a kid to the modern art museum and they're pretty confused. but I think you bring a kid to the Louvre, they have a they have a better sense for what's going on. [snorts] well, I can affirm so a little known fact about

Cluny is that every single team member that we have is either a writer, an artist, or a poet. every single one of us and we diverge dramatically on on sort of questions of aesthetic sometimes. So, sorry to put you on the spot, but I I speaking of of the kind of question of beauty and things that we can all agree on, I want to show you something by some of my favorite artists, Elmgreen & Dragset. They're an artistic duo based in Berlin. And [clears throat] this is one of their art pieces. There's actually a street outside that is a silicone woman

who [clears throat] appears to be asleep at her desk and we're going to do a caption contest. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We should do that live. and appears to be asleep at she looks completely realistic and they provoke reactions from people passing by in the street. And another famous piece of their artwork is this is in Marfa, Texas. They put a fake Prada shop in the middle of a basically a deserted highway. Okay. and it's meant to provoke discourse. So, is there a I guess a place I mean I don't think anybody would argue that the silicone exhausted worker asleep at her desk is

a beautiful piece of art, aesthetically beautiful, but is there a place I guess for art that provokes or probes and gets people asking fundamental questions? It's a very modernist kind of thing to sort of probe and and and to to the sacrifice sometimes of beauty. Is there any place for that? I used to argue a lot with the EAS about EA ship and effective altruism and I think one of the best arguments for EA is to simply ask the question you know what fraction of all philanthropic dollars in the world today are given in accordance with EA principles. I mean,

who who knows exactly what that number is? Maybe it's higher now than it was 10 years ago, but let's just say arbitrarily it's 1%. Right? And so the claim does not have to be that all efforts or all resources or the you know totality of society's altru altruistic endeavors ought to be pursued in accordance with the EA principles. Maybe you can be an effective altruist in the sense you think it's 1% and perhaps it should be 5%. and I sort of feel that way about provocative art. I mean, clearly there are many instances through artistic history where

things that we now view as as cherished and wonderful and and straightforwardly beautiful. were were seen as outrageous and provocative at the time. You know, Dylan going electric at the Albert Hall. and now we, you know, it's a it's nostalgic to to listen to that and, you know, many many examples before that. but I feel like provocation occupies way too central a position from my standpoint in in contemporary aesthetics. And you know that I don't know what fraction of contemporary work aims to be provocative. It's impossible to objectively define

of course, but you know whatever the fraction is, I think perhaps it should be, you know, a fifth of that. So, since you mentioned EA, I want to ask you a question about sort of the patronage and funding and the allocation of capital to the arts. Okay. So, the New Aesthetics grants correct me if I'm wrong, range from $10,000 to $250,000. And $250,000 is a lot of money to a lot of people, especially artists. However, it's not enough to build a new building or something like that, right? so and you and you admitted you're sort of coming into

the last stage here, right? So what what are you thinking you can change at that stage with that amount of of money? and also, you know, is there some kind of correlary to EA that could be applied to the domain of aesthetic? Should more money be allocated towards beautiful things? And how would that even what would that even look like? It's very difficult from an EA perspective to evaluate that question. Yeah. well, first off, a disclaimer I meant to give up front is, you know, I am a a tech bro sort of masquerading as you know, somebody who knows

sort of tiny fragment about aesthetics, but under actually under no delusions or illusions as to, you know, the the extent of of my knowledge here. And so may maybe you know rather than anything I say being of sort of meritorious substance just maybe I'm just a metanom of the broader phenomenon of Silicon Valley starting to become somewhat more interested in aesthetics and so perhaps to these patronage questions that's that's somewhat hopeful. I wonder a lot about this though to your question I I was recently in Detroit. has anyone been to the

Detroit Institute of Arts? Yeah. Yeah. Amazing museum, right? Detroit was only rich for a few decades. Like again, it's hard to define to demarcate definitively, but let's say Detroit was rich because like the the the depression happened. and so you have from like the invention of the automobile to the depression, like not very long. And so Detroit was rich for much less time than Silicon Valley has been. And yet you've Detroit and and by the way, not only the museums, but the architecture as well, right? and and you know we could we could do the Silicon Valley

art tour in a coffee break. [laughter] so there is something strange going on with the patronage. But then when I think about that I mean there's Burning Man, right? and that's not it's not fine art but clearly there's some latent demand to produce things of aesthetic wonder. and it's not I mean it maybe seems uncharitable and presumptuous and inappropriate for for the demand side for the the patrons or the wouldbe funders or whatever to kind of complain about the supply. But I do think there has to be something where again whe whether or not you view it as

desirable. I think the production apparatus of art has descriptively changed enormously over the last 60 70 years. we we used to train people at much earlier ages. We we they we used to train them much more in classical techniques. there was much more of a sense of continuity with the past where you're sustaining a tradition rather than sort of iconoclastically trying to define your own little patch. I mean something I think a lot about is kind of the idea of groups right and that you know we speak about art in terms of all these these movements

Art Deco Art Nouveau Viennese Secession whatever Futurism and these people intentionally consciously willfully affiliated in these groups like they published manifestos together in the newspaper and now to be associated with a group is kind of porative. every artist is idiosyncratically doing their own thing with with complete independence, but they becoming offended if you told them that they're part of some larger group or or movement. and so anyway, my point is just I think the supply dynamics have really changed a lot. And yeah, for for whatever reason, I mean, I think on the East Coast, people still are still really into that, but for

whatever reason, either because we here are all Philistines or because, well, something else. it it it doesn't People seem to prefer the Burning Man stuff. I don't know if you know that I'm from Michigan and we've got some Michiganers in the house here and we love Detroit. Detroit Lions. I was there for the first time recently. I thought it was amazing. It is. It's a great city. But have you been to West Michigan? I went to North Michigan. North Michigan. Okay. Well, you got to come to West Michigan, Southwest Michigan. I will be your your your hosting guide. But is

there a question of so Y Combinator for instance, which which you have been involved in, I know you're very familiar with there there seems to be a nice mix of identification with the group in a positive way. Yeah. Combined with it's my company with a healthy sense of individuality. So it seems like there you have a both end. [snorts] Is is do we need a Y Combinator or something for art and aesthetics? Is there a place is there a market for that? Would that help? Well, I don't know this for a fact, but I've always assumed that YC was based on art

ateliers and studios, right? where I mean, so Paul Graham, the YC founder, he he studied painting in Florence, right? and so you know Rodin's studio and and the the idea of the idea of this kind of intensified hot house sort of environment where you're both trying to pass on a a doctrine and set of practices and knowledge and so forth but also foster the emergence of the individual's creativity and originality. I I mean again Paul never told me this but I've always assumed that he was in fact influenced by the by the art world.

it seems that the atellier the studio the sort of master artists that that's that has receded somewhat as as a phenomenon in the art world. I think it goes back to this broader point about just you know changes in training and the supply and the production apparatus more widely. So I guess my view is it would seem exciting to me to return to that to see what new forms could be. it probably requires new patronage networks. and but by the way you mentioned effective altruism here as an example and I think I think it's an interesting one to

think about in the sense that EA had from an early stage still has a whole ecosystem right it has it has websites it has communities it has events it has funders it has companies it has projects like it it truly is a tapestry and my takeaway from New Aesthetics again it is just a small one-time one-off grants program is that to actually catalyze the emergence of things that are truly new, we probably need we probably need a a a more complete ecosystem approach. I you know I think what Nicholas Boys Smith does anyone know Nicholas Boys Smith or Create Streets

in the UK? No. Okay. Sorry. Okay, one person does. All right. So he's a he was a former consultant. I think he worked at McKinsey. and you know, like many people, he became puzzled as to why all the buildings are getting so ugly. like he's walking to work. and in London, and you know, this fact literally towers over you. and it's sort of hard to ignore. and so he has, over the last decade or so, he's written extensively about this. He has led to the creation of artistic prizes. He's got involved in certain projects. He's brought

certain funders into the ecosystem. He's now thinking about training and the next generation of architects and so forth. But he's he's really taking a a holistic view of the whole thing. there there's now a Nicholas Boys Smith cluster in London and I suspect yeah true progress here is probably going to have to have that shape. as you were describing the network, are you familiar, you know, our friend Nadia, a friend of Cluny, Idea Machines. Yeah. So, that that was very much part of the inspiration of what we're trying to build here. and it seems like Idea Machines. I

think maybe that essay needs a a better title because it's I think it applies to more than just ideas, but the way that ideas are incarnated, and I think it probably applies to art as well, but I think that was the first thing that I thought of as you were you were describing that. Yeah, I think she really gets how these communities work, whether it's in open source or other domains. and yeah, so I've been fascinated by a book by Lewis Mumford called The Brown Decades about the time between 1860 and 1890. And he called them the brown decades because brown

was the color that was most associated with them. The world sort of looked brown. It's after the Civil War. and and he said this is like a drab period. it seemed like a low point in aesthetics in the United States, but he's just an excellent writer. it's it's a really good book, but he said there was a quiet renewal happening even in the brown decades. The Brooklyn Bridge was constructed and conceived Central Park. he talks about you sort of parks as changing the context of an entire city. So the whole point of the Brown decades was that there was a quiet

renewal going on. So my question would be I don't know does our time have a color I guess and then but the deeper question the real question is where do you think the quiet renewal may be happening right now the sort of invisibly the things that are that we don't see on Twitter X I've always been puzzled about Mumford being so bleak about the reconstruction period because I think and look maybe it's it's always hard to appreciate one's country you know having as much as somebody who arrives at it stareyed. But I think I think

American architecture between 1870 and 1920 is basically unquestionably the best in the world. other other places built amazing things in at other times and I mean there was other good stuff happening even in those years elsewhere but if you go to any American town most of whose stock was built in that period you're basically guaranteed to find it to be beautiful so so yeah I I think his his pessimism is a bit overstated in terms of renewal I mean I think I think Twitter has been social media has not been great for everything. [laughter] it's not a it's hardly

an unadorned good for society, but I think it's actually back to the Solzhenitsynian point. I think it's been very good for aesthetics. because beauty bears within it its own verification. and there are so many dipticks and side bysides floating around the the ecosystem where you do have to wonder what's going on. and I think you're starting to see hopeful grassroots in particular in architecture. There's the I mean we mentioned Boys Smith in London, but there's there's a similar movement in Scandinavia the the Scandi revival movement where they've you know decided to some architects have decided to kind of put their

foot down. I mean has anyone looked at recent work with Iranian brick architecture? yeah, there's amazing I would actually love somebody to write this article, you know, explaining how this emerged and and why, but there's some really cool stuff being built there. so I think I think social media has been good for architecture and I think there's there's some signs of hope. And then this is just maybe my parochialism speaking, but but I there's definitely I to me there's a palpable interest in Silicon Valley that wasn't there 10 years. I mean, Silicon Valley was always

into design, but I don't feel like it was into the larger cultural project of aesthetics and how that is codependent upon with the culture at large. whereas I mean maybe it's just it's the Stewart Brand thing, you know, we are as gods, we might as well get good at it. I think that as tech becomes more powerful and influential in the world, I think at least some people are starting to feel the sense that well, we have to figure out our larger place in the cultural universe. And by the way, I noticed somebody carrying on the Hamilton Society

protocols by pounding the table when they heard something that they like. So, you can feel free to do that. You can hiss if I say something that you don't like, not something that Patrick says. So, feel feel free to keep the spirit moving here as we continue. Okay. and I I I saw the drinks outside, which I assumed serving alcoholic beverages was in honor of the Irishman speaking, but I understand it was actually for the debate. It was a request for the debate itself. We should still have it in here. I don't know. feel free to keep drinking. I I want to move now into

sort of aesthetics and the sacred. And the question is basically what is the single highest leverage point for aesthetic renewal today? And I I I think that it used to be churches, you know, it it used to be if you were a patron or an artist and you wanted to do something that would really move the needle, you would get a commission to, you know, paint the ceiling of a chapel or a church or something like that. So that in my view was the single highest leverage point. It

does not seem to be anymore. If somebody painted the walls of my parish in Washington DC, I don't think that's the highest leverage thing that that artist could do to get recognized. They might, I hate to say it, they might be better off making art that they post on X or something like that. that sort of pains me a little bit, but maybe it's not a bad thing. So So what is it? And is the sac The sacred does seem to be important to aesthetics and to beauty? I I I think that it always will be.

So has the sacred migrated somehow? you know, is has it migrated to Silicon Valley or or or or what is the single high le leverage point because you're the New Aesthetics grants were kind of agnostic on the question of where and how and I I know you got a wide variety of of of ideas. well, two thoughts. so, first I think the sacred is an endangered species right now. it's not had a good century. so, you know, I rather than, the, the owl of the sacred, I'm not sure what aven species the sacred is, but,

the, whatever. Is there a suggestion? No. whatever whatever it is. I'm not sure like I I don't know that the right model is that it migrates. I think it can just be, it can just be under threat. And you know there's this question of to what degree or how does I mean the life can can shape and influence aesthetics in various ways and you know has and you know Neoclassicism reemerged in part ormer neo Neoclassicism emerged in part because of the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii and you know we were reminded of the the wonders of

the ancient world. So, I mean, it's kind of obvious life influences our there's obviously the question of, you know, how does aesthetics influence life? Does it influence life? And, you know, you never know definitively, but something that Ruxandra who's here and I have been talking a lot about and thinking about for the last couple of months is, you know, there's of course the question that probably a lot of people here are preoccupied with about, you know, WTF happened in 1971. and you know why why is everything so slurotic? Why is everything so slow?

Why is why are undertakings in the physical world now so so challenging? Peter Thiel who I guess spoke at this event two years ago is one of the people who really directed attention at this question but now it's caught on more more widely and you know Ezra Klein of course wrote the book and you know the usual explanation is something like well we were just doing so much stuff in the post-war period that eventually people got a kind of future shock and you know pulled the pulled the handbrake but we were building roads and bridges and skyscrapers

and the interstate highway system and you know the whole the whole thing and and this is basically the explanations you get in Ezra's book and in most other accounts I don't think it actually works as an explanation I don't think it matches the evidence because if you just look objectively at periods in history where in a material sense society changed the most the post-war period while a lot happened was not actually an outlier. the US changed way more in the 19th century and you know specific year in the reconstruction period as we were just discussing

you can look cross-sectionally across different countries and the there does not appear to be any obvious correlation between the magnitude of the post-war change and the aggressiveness of the of the regulatory or the procedural response to everything that was happening. So it's it's it's really not clear that that's that that explanation is satisfactory. I think there's another explanation that another possible explanation that hinges much more on the sacred and that is that until you know you can't pinpoint these things exactly but until the early 20th century people and elites people in positions of decision-making power were broadly

motivated by you know very imperfectly and and and so forth were broadly motivated by a a set of ideals and and and beliefs about what should exist and how things should be done that accorded with that of the populace at large. There was a kind of legitimacy to their work. and when the medieval housing stock of London was torn down and replaced with Victorian buildings or Georgian buildings, people thought that that was at least not a grievous downgrade, right? and when ideology changed because aesthetics is never just aesthetics, it's a broad broader worldview. I

think that changed elite outlooks. and when you when you look at the specific objections to what was happening in this the 50s and the 60s that led to the backlash, they are very commonly expressed in explicitly aesthetically oriented terms. And so I think there may be a way in which the loss of the sacred is you know why we can't have nice things anymore. and in in particular why progress in the world of atoms has slowed so much. so as to how we revive the sacred I mean that's I that's a hard qu I mean the the only the only solace I

take is you know there are instances from the past it it has happened like Petrarch in the 14th century was feeling pretty grim about Europe and the dark ages and and the inter nessine conflicts and all the rest and you know called for a revival in the culture and he kind of got it. I mean again we don't know the causality but the renaissance at least chronologically followed. so I think I think one of the questions of our era is what exactly leads to that return of the sacred. So I have to ask this question given what how you just framed that up. So the

most momentous change in the 20th century related to the sacred and aesthetics. I want to situate you around 1965. Does that ring a bell? Same. Vatican II, the Second Vatican Council. Do you have any thought? You can you can say no comment, but do you have any thoughts on the way that may have affected the sacred and aesthetics and the interplay between the two worldwide? I think I can only comment on one domain for which I'm extravagantly unqualified rather than also venturing into theology. Okay. to be continued over drinks at dinner

with for the many Catholics that are in the audience. I know. Okay. How about this? This is like you're asking that question with a thesis glimmering in your eye. Well, well, [laughter] there's a book in there. Yeah, there there's a book in there, and I I will I will not do it justice in in the in the couple of minutes that we have here. But I I certainly think that when Peter talks about technological stagnation in 1971, my mind always goes to 1965 and Vatican II. And I don't think it's unrelated to technological stagnation. And I am a Vatican II

guy. And I don't want anybody to interpret that as I want to go back to pre-Vatican II. But I we do not talk enough, Silicon Valley does not talk enough about how even that event within the church probably affected the way that we think about innovation. By the way, René Girard has an excellent essay called Innovation and Repetition that I recommend everybody read and it's about the relationship between imitation and innovation because remember innovation used to be associated with heresy and then that was somehow reversed. So to be continued,

but I let me ask you a question now that is very much in your domain, AI, artificial intelligence and the way that it comes to bear on the question of aesthetics. We're all thinking and worried about AI slop. I saw Substack now has an AI detector built right into the platform. how are and then you said it in the New Aesthetics proposal call for proposals that you are agnostic on AI. there was a question in the proposal or the call that said if jazz did not exist could AI invent it? and I don't think you answered your question I don't know

now that it's seven eight months later do you have an answer to that question or how are you thinking about the role of AI? A few thoughts. okay can anyone name a work of art made with AI? I heard one. Yes. I I can't and it is interesting that we'll have a little meet up afterwards to share our favorite AI art. you know it's probably the case that most art that has ever been produced I mean already has been created with AI, right? It's I mathematically I think that

must be true. and yet you know maybe at best you know a handful of people can can name one or two workers. So it it hasn't broken through in some sense. Now maybe it will. I'm not saying it won't and you know potentially be wonderful if it did and maybe when we do this event in you know another 10 years there'll be a cacophony of voices yelling out their favorite AI artworks. So, I think the difficulty with AI art ties to something I've been thinking about with with math and science and physics. So, you know, obviously we're getting this

Cambrian explosion of proofs of you know, long-standing math math theorems and conjectures and reputations and the whole thing. And I mean it's it's wonderful and we seem to be headed towards at least a kind of golden era in math and probably in other sciences. But there's sort of an interesting question for math because you know what is math? It's not really just a collection of Lean proofs for different propositions. It's a mental scaffolding and set of abstractions and formalisms and ways of viewing things and thinking about things and you know things like the calculus or or Riemannian geometry or you know whatever these

were conceptual breakthroughs and and new new kinds of tools that could be brought to bear you know algebraic whatever and all of the AI proofs with the magestisterial sophistication. These models are being constituted in terms of the abstractions and the formalisms and the the the toolkit that mathematics has already developed and that has reached a kind of community ascent among the mathematicians. But there sort of a question of well if mathematics was really going to advance with AI what we actually need is for new abstractions to emerge. But the sort of a question

of just like how would that work like you know fine the let's just say the model comes up with it but how does it get adopted by the community of other AI mathematics models? [snorts] like how does that sociological process work? It's pretty useless if your model uses a whole set of formalisms that I've never seen before. Right? and so any that that's kind of the math version, but I think there's a kind of homologous version in aesthetics of well it's not it's not defined in it's a contextual phenomenon. it's it's embi embedded in the culture

and you know how like is it necessary that it'll have to be mediated through through people for that process of convergence and agreement and adjudication to happen. I mean I I don't know I assume so. And then the other question I think with AI is you know thing about AI art sort of very much puts the emphasis on the on the supply side on on these models and how sophisticated what they produce is. but you know probably 19th century France is when we saw the the greatest flourishing and efflloresence of new kinds of visual art. And

part of what was characteristic and distinctive of 19th century France was how visually educated the elites were. And so sort of a question for us of how do we uplevel ourselves to be worthy and capable of the new possibilities of all this new AI stuff. And you know I think a lot in this context about Germany where you know Germany has been in certain ways is preeminent in so many aesthetic domains right whether it's classical music or literature or philosophy or the the the the list is long but who's ever of their own valition gone to get food at a German

restaurant? [laughter] and you know it's sort of an interesting question like well why is the food so bad right? and you know it's surrounded by places with good food like you know west south even these days north Germany is kind of standout in its in its deficiency here and you know maybe instinctively you tell a a climatic story you know they can't get the produce but that doesn't actually work when you think about it and you're like well maybe they're just not rich but no that that obviously doesn't work I mean Italy is much poorer and so what is the reason as far as

I can tell The reason is is is it has to be a demand side one. They just they just don't want it enough. they're they're like in in many domains Germans of great taste, but in matters of food, you know, go west, young man. so so any I think in in all these AI AI art questions, there's the reciprocal question for us of how do we become worthy on the demand side? made me hungry. So, as the I want to go back to science. So, as as the founder of the Arc Institute, you're obviously

thinking deeply about science and also aesthetics. Is there a link between science and beauty? which maybe the deeper question there may be, is there a link between beauty and truth? I mean, I've heard the the story, I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but that in the discovery of the DNA molecule, they knew that they had it. They knew that it was true because of how beautiful it was. So, have you thought about the link? I mean, we typically think of science is kind of divorced from questions of aesthetics and beauty, but do you believe that there's a connection?

I think there's I think in certain sciences I think there's a connection in physics where and I don't know you can come up with some explanation where like to be able to explain very complex phenomena with a fairly small number of free parameters or something that's a a kind of like it it's very clever and surprising when so much emer like that so much emerges from general relativity but you can write the equations of general relativity in just a couple of letters when you when you get the right formalisms like that's beautiful And you know the the Ricci

tensor is amazing. but now I spend most of my time in science thinking about biology and biology is so ugly man. [laughter] like it's I love biology but you you [laughter] cannot look at you know a biology does not respect any abstraction boundaries or you know any you can't model any part of DNA as only encoding the sort of narrow semantic information you also have to think about its like conformal structure and how it can be methylated and you know whether just it's it's it's horrifically messy. You just look at you know any look at the STING pathway

and you know what interacts with it, how it interacts with it. It's it's biology is just is you can tell that it's this it's this competitive I mean look you know such a large fraction of our DNA are these transposable elements you know they're that are just useless payloads as far as we can tell although it seems like some of them might have now been repurposed for for for hey it's the more you look at biology the more you're like wow this is such a tower of hacks. so it's and maybe it's beautiful in like a like a toddler's painting.

It is beautiful in the sense that somehow the ugliness produces such beauty but but it's a very different kind of beauty to to physics beauty. I wonder if we could transpose the qu I mean biology may be ugly but should hospitals be more beautiful right? Well, to be clear, I think that I think the techniques you have to use in biology to deal with the complexity, I think those techniques are incredibly beautiful. and like when I first won't bore everyone with the explanation, but like when I first understood the relatively recently invented technology of

genetic screens where you kind of test in parallel, you make a bunch of changes in parallel across the genome and then you sort of test the results. That's so clever and it's so cool. And biology is in this obstreporous way making your life so hard because it's so like there's so much combinatoric complexity and so many interactions and so forth and then you have this really elegant thing for bringing some order to bear in it. So yeah, may maybe the answer is the beauty lies on the interrogation side rather than on the phenomenon

side. Yeah. they just turned the lights up. I don't know what kind of a signal that is here, but so I'm going to ask one more question and then I think we have time for just a couple audience questions. So my last question in the spirit of your project and what you're seating here and what might emerge from the new aesthetics grants. Try to finish this sentence and you don't need to do it in one word. but New Aesthetics will have succeeded when there are multiple independent groups pursuing higher ideals that are having noticeable impact on the culture. Thank you. Sure.

There's there's nothing to add to that. So, let's take a couple of questions from the audience. And I want to start with my colleague Brandon Vaidyanathan. if he's in the audience, if you could raise your hand, if somebody could get Brandon a mic, and then we'll take one one or two more questions after Brandon. I don't not yet. Not yet. Hello. There we Oh, this is working. Great. Patrick, wonderful wonderful talk. really really appreciated the the dialogue. so my name is Brandon. I work with Luke at the Catholic University of America where I studying

beauty empirically as a sociologist for the past 10 years. I also run a platform called Beauty at Work. One of the things we're organizing this fall is actually a conference on beauty, space, and the sacred. Nicholas Boys Smith will be coming. We're celebrating Gaudí's 100th anniversary. So everyone please join us if you can. I want to share with you a couple of data points from my research Patrick and then then ask you a sort of a piece of practical advice from them. So the first one is is on this thing on beauty and science. We actually conducted the world's first ever

international study of the role of beauty and science. Surveyed thousands of physicists and biologists. We can tell you where biologists find beauty. There's a lot of it to be found. but one of the one of the challenges that that that we found is so so where scientists agree that they find beauty is in the beauty of understanding. So grasping the hidden order and inner logic of things that's a key motivator but they say that their institutions make it hostile for them to pursue that kind of beauty. So that the state of modern science right the second question also

about work is this. So we also just finished a population survey of the US and the UK 10,000 people nationally representative and we can tell you there's a lot of convergence as you said in where people find beauty there's also convergence in where people don't find beauty ranking at the bottom are work and the digital world right right at the bottom where people find beauty in their work is is in a number of places but what really matters for their flourishing is finding beauty in accomplishment. so so we have business leaders who who come and talk to us and and want to know

what to do with our data. So if you have any advice for folks in either Silicon Valley or or business leaders who want to bring this this data to bear on their work, who want to bring beauty into their context where maybe people desire it, but they don't quite know how to instantiate it. What would be the first thing you would ask these leaders to change in their organizations? Hm. on the scientist front, just kind of a a side comment, but, I think I think one of the great tragedies of, of modern science is the, the the fraction of scientists who

aren't doing what they want to be doing. And sort of to your point, I think scientists are like being a scientist is such a hard career, right? In so many ways. the, you know, the the system makes things hard. nature makes things hard and it's hiding all its secrets from you. it's much worse paid than being in the like it's it's it's a it's a tough life. and the fact that we deprive scientists of the most beautiful gift that we could give them, which is the ability to pursue a research agenda of their own choice, I think is a is really

a grievous mistake. We ran a survey a couple years ago and 78% of top biologists said that if they had not more money, but flexible money that they could direct whoever they so choose, 78% of them said they would change their research agenda a lot. which is, a stat of reflect on. to the last part of your question about advice for leaders, you know, I'm a I'm a newcomer to all this beauty stuff, so I don't I don't presume to know yet. I've been very struck by we we've really over the last four years or so at Stripe increased our emphasis on how much we

want people to do beautiful things and how our utility function is not just the standard ones that one might expect of a company. and that we want to be and we're excited to be surprised by the different ways in which people interpret that. and I now find myself regularly surprised. just telling a friend recently just u this past week somebody proposed for we're we're issuing a new kind of card for one of our products and this person proposed you know without my suggestion that we commission a bunch of artists

with this sort of particularly cleverly thought through brief and hey they like a whole thing but the point is it was very much bottoms up and now people in our workplace team are coming to us with ideas as to how they can do some kind of unusual things in the offices to at least in their eyes bring more beauty. So, I've just been I think there's a real again the the the most I'm not a conspiracy conspiratorial person by disposition but you know sometimes you know late at night I I feel that there's been an anti-beauty conspiracy

in the culture going on again about a century and I think the good news if that's true is there's so much latent demand that when you just sort of unccort it and give people permission, there's actually just a lot of enthusiasm there. Time for just about five minutes. Time for a couple more. Hello, I'm Lila. I'm a writer at The Atlantic. we've been circling this question of new aesthetics somewhat abstractly. And to make it more concrete, I want to ask, do you see specific new aesthetic clusters already emerging? And if that's too difficult a question,

do you have intuitions as to what sort of shape these new aesthetic clusters may take? Or to make it even easier, what do you personally find compelling in the projects that you are funding? The most striking cluster was international architecture. it's definitely more creative outside the US than in the US. And I don't totally know why. You know, we mentioned the Iranian brick architecture, but it's definitely not only there. And and and to be clear, it's not just like there's a bunch of Twitter accounts, you know, promoting various versions of trad,

you know, compared to much of what is built today that might be better and preferable, but there's also a lot of very contemporary stuff happening in Latin America, happening in actually Spain seems to be particularly propitious for some reason. So hey it's it's in international architecture at large I'd say seems seems very promising. we funded Alihan an architect in in Barcelona for example as a as one of the awards. the the thing that I really hope to see and this was not like the point of the pro program or the

project but just kind of my hope is again there there's a lot of desire for to you know return with a V to to you know various forms of classicism neoen whatever and Art Deco go. And I'm not opposed to that as such. Maybe some people can really make that work. But what I really hope for is a return to the prior lineage. Like we we had a great thing going and the question I wonder about a lot is what not how do we recapitulate Art Nouveau and Art Deco and you know

various other contemporary like Frank Lloyd Wright but like what would their successors have been? the International Style came to the US around 1930 and just essentially won overnight. And kind of a lot of emergent American architectural styles never reached what I think their potential was or never birthed their logical successors. So personally I hope to see a return to that logical continuity. One one more question. Yeah, we have one more question here and it's from me. Patrick, you to make the question even more concrete. would you react to a piece of artwork

for us live right now? This is one of my recent favorites behind you. Just just a reaction [clears throat] or you can pass. Well, I mean the I don't fashion myself an art critic. so I we just want to we just want to hear from you. you know, there's a lot that it's definitely true that to appreciate many forms of art, it it first requires, you know, some amount of education. and [laughter] I I don't I don't understand enough of the cultural context of beeswax art. Thank you. I feel like that was a plant by my team. So,

that does not count. I'm going to get one more question. One more question somewhere. I don't know where the microphone is. Let's Let's make it two minutes. If it was submitted to New Aesthetics, it would not have received an award. I don't know if if somebody on my team wants to say a word about what I think that is. Okay, wait. I I don't want to hear Lincoln. Okay. thank you for passing on beeswax art explanations. so Patrick, my question is getting back to AI art and sort of that conversation about jazz. I like to think

about how like exciting and aspirational the opportunity set is with AI accelerated research, AI accelerated coding, all these things and just the leverage that's going to compound and with art. I think the goals and the validation and the evals are maybe more unclear and like like would it create jazz if you but I think the question is if you played jazz to somebody and jazz didn't exist would they have liked it like it was a cultural receive there was a go to market for jazz and it worked and but very but very controversial initially right right yeah totally

there was a go to market for LGBTQ and was very controversial and it ultimately worked in Obergefell. But like anyway to my question, sorry in AI art if we think about how simple a Julia set is like the Mandelbrot set and how complex the boundary can be that I almost think of jazz as occupying you know one of these beautiful colors on the exotic race to zed plus C. So in a more complex multi-dimensional who knows what that we discover with AI maybe we can discover AI

art maybe it's beautiful but how are we going to tell like what are the eval going to be and how can we as humans evolve our verification set to understand beauty at large I mean I think that's not just one of the central questions for AI art. I think it's one of the central questions for AI, right? How what do we do about the domains in which hill climbing the evals is is not going to be easy because as you say that either the evals aren't there or

the things we want to eval. And so I think it's I think it's one of the big open questions in AI. Thank you, Patrick. We know how busy you are. I've watched CNBC the last couple of weeks, so I really know how busy you are. So, it means so much that you would take the time to be here. This is a wonderful event. Thank you so much for putting it together. Thank you to the whole team. [applause]