Nat Friedman describes his own project-selection pattern as impulsive and enthusiasm-driven, against a stated disbelief that 'the world is efficient'

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Asked, in a March 2023 Dwarkesh Podcast interview, how he identifies opportunities like the Vesuvius Challenge and California YIMBY — his other major project outside his professional AI investing — Nat Friedman gave an explicit, general account of his own decision process, not one scoped to either project specifically: "I just fundamentally don't believe the world is efficient," he said, so he does not reflexively assume an available opportunity must be bad because "if it were a good idea someone would already be doing it." The second component is a stated trust in his own enthusiasm: "if I get really enthusiastic about something and that enthusiasm persists, I just indulge it. And so I just kind of let myself be impulsive." He summarized the pattern directly: "The commitment to do it is impulsive and it's done out of enthusiasm and then you get into it and you're like — oh my god, this is really much harder than we expected."

Pressed on whether the inefficiency premise is general — whether it holds particularly for projects like California YIMBY "where there isn't a direct monetary incentive" — Friedman qualified it rather than extending it: "No. Certain parts of the world are more efficient than others and you can't assume equal levels of inefficiency everywhere." The stated prior is therefore a disbelief in uniform efficiency, not a claim that opportunity is lying around everywhere.

Applied to the Vesuvius Challenge specifically, Friedman characterized his own contribution as small relative to Brent Seales's decades of prior research: "I thought this project would be relatively straightforward... But of course 99% of the work has already been done by Dr. Seales and his team at the University of Kentucky. I am a kind of carpetbagger" — a funder arriving late to indulge enthusiasm for someone else's existing research, on his own account, rather than a strategist initiating a program of his own.