13: Nabeel S. Qureshi - The Will to Care
Nabeel S. Qureshi (Website, X, Substack) is a writer, entrepreneur, and former Palantir product lead known for his writing on technology, AI, Palantir, culture, and learning. After a brief hiatus writing and researching and spending nearly a decade at Palantir working across government, healthcare, and intelligence, he's now founding a new company.The first half of the conversation focuses on two big ideas. First: the growth of "slop" across media and culture and how "care" is its opposite. Then: how to think, learn, and understand more deeply across domains over a lifetime. We discuss how both of these sit against the backdrop of AI's rapid challenging of what it means to make and what it means to think.Then we discuss Palantir and "grey areas" that many technologists avoid working on or thinking about, government bureaucracy and DOGE, and how technologists are pursuing and accumulating power. We also chat about Nabeel's idea maze ahead of the new company, art and what it is for, and a range of other topics that showcase how curious, polymathic, and considerate Nabeel is.As the world changes at a breakneck pace thanks to technology and AI, Nabeel embodies a deeply humanistic approach that also accepts change as the default.
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Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic, episode 13 with Nabil Qureshi. Nabil's a writer, entrepreneur, and spent much of his career working at Palantir. He recently started a new company, but he's also known for his amazing writing on technology, AI, culture, understanding and learning, Palantir, and much more. He's someone who consumes an unbelievable amount of information and seems to just have a polymathic interest, curiosity, and understanding across so many different domains, and I was thrilled to interview him. I decided to focus at least the first half of the conversation on two big ideas that feel connected to so much of what I've been thinking about and reading and even talking to people on this show about.
The first is based on a tweet thread Nabil wrote recently titled, The Opposite of Slop is Care. As Nabil states, slop is one of the defining aspects of modernity. And one of the reasons that I think so much of our experience with media and culture these days can feel meaningless. We spend some time trying to interrogate what actually makes for slop. And then we talk about how to create things that do have meaning with care at the root. This is not a science. And as you can tell, I think he and I are both thinking through this live, but it was a conversation I found to be really meaningful.
And I think one of the most important aspects of it is Nabil's contention that a a critical part of creativity is a kind of strangeness or surprise or unpredictability. The second big topic is his rigorous approach to thinking, learning, and understanding things more deeply regardless of the domain. Obviously, both of these ideas tie in deeply with what's happening in AI, and that is a backdrop to much of the conversation. We spend the second half of the conversation covering a wide range of things from Palantir, government bureaucracy, Doge, gray areas, technologists in power, art and why it's meaningful and why it matters.
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