Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Jason Calacanis,
00:00:03 who’s an entrepreneur, investor, author of Angel,
00:00:06 How to Invest in Technology Startups,
00:00:08 and as many people may know, he’s a fun, brilliant,
00:00:13 long time podcast host of This Week in Startups,
00:00:17 and co host of the All In podcast
00:00:20 with Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sachs, and David Friedberg,
00:00:25 who all happen to be poker buddies
00:00:28 and self proclaimed besties.
00:00:30 The result is always a great listen
00:00:32 due to both the love and the heated disagreements.
00:00:37 Quick mention of our sponsors,
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00:00:42 Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee,
00:00:44 and Rev Speech Detect Service.
00:00:47 Click the sponsor links to get a discount
00:00:49 and to support this podcast.
00:00:51 As a side note, let me say that I’ve been learning a lot
00:00:53 about real world finance in the past few months.
00:00:56 To give you a bit of context on the side,
00:00:58 I’ve studied trading from an algorithmic trading perspective
00:01:02 as a machine learning and a game theory problem
00:01:04 off and on for a few years in undergrad and grad school.
00:01:08 I found the distributed complex system aspect of finance
00:01:12 and economics in general fascinating,
00:01:14 but now I find even more fascinating
00:01:17 the human side of the whole thing,
00:01:19 ideas of greed, power, freedom, and truth.
00:01:23 Wall Street bets, Robin Hood, and the whole beautiful mess
00:01:26 around this topic allows us to have great conversations
00:01:30 about human nature and the systems that underlie
00:01:33 the rise and fall of civilizations.
00:01:36 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
00:01:39 review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
00:01:42 support on Patreon, connect with me on Twitter
00:01:45 at Lex Friedman.
00:01:46 And now, here’s my conversation with Jason Kolokanis.
00:01:50 I have a million things to talk to you about,
00:01:53 but we do happen to be living through
00:01:57 what I would think of as a historic event
00:02:00 in terms of its impact, in terms of almost philosophically
00:02:04 thinking about the role of people
00:02:07 and how they can fight power
00:02:09 with this whole Wall Street bets and GameStop situation.
00:02:13 I was wondering, you’ve covered in your amazing
00:02:17 all in podcast, you guys have been having
00:02:19 fascinating battles over this whole situation.
00:02:22 I was wondering if you could tell maybe
00:02:23 from your perspective, as it’s unrolling
00:02:27 the saga of Wall Street bets and GameStop,
00:02:30 what are some interesting insights
00:02:33 that you have about this whole set of events?
00:02:36 In full disclosure, I was an angel investor
00:02:38 in Robin Hood before they launched.
00:02:40 And when I met the founder, Vlad, and his partner,
00:02:44 you know, they pitched me at a bar,
00:02:46 not too far from where we are right now in Palo Alto,
00:02:48 called Antonio’s Nut House.
00:02:51 And my friend Adeo, it’s a really good story,
00:02:54 my friend Adeo had asked me to speak
00:02:56 at his founder’s institute, which is kind of like
00:02:57 an accelerator for people who were thinking
00:02:59 about starting a company.
00:03:01 And so I gave a talk, and then he said,
00:03:02 hey, let’s go to Antonio’s Nut House
00:03:04 and we’ll meet Elon for a drink.
00:03:07 And so Elon met us for a drink there.
00:03:09 And it’s the divest of dive bars.
00:03:12 Like you’ll take a beer and it will…
00:03:14 I love the image of all of this.
00:03:15 You hang out with Elon at a crappy bar.
00:03:18 Yeah, I mean, it is the worst bar in the peninsula.
00:03:23 Like just garbage on the floor, and like cheap beer,
00:03:27 and warm beer, and like you’ll pick up your pint glass
00:03:29 and be lipstick on it.
00:03:30 It’s brutal.
00:03:31 Classy.
00:03:32 Not your lipstick.
00:03:33 You understand, somebody else’s lipstick.
00:03:35 And so we’re sitting there and Vlad walks up
00:03:39 with his partner and he says, you’re Jason Calacanis.
00:03:43 And I said, tell me about your startup.
00:03:44 He said, how do you know I have a startup?
00:03:46 I said, you recognize me.
00:03:47 And I mean, that’s the only way.
00:03:50 And he goes, is that Elon Musk?
00:03:51 And I said, yes, Elon, come say hi.
00:03:53 And he came over and said, hi.
00:03:54 I said, tell me what you do.
00:03:55 He said, well, I’m a quant.
00:03:57 I said, what’s that?
00:03:57 And he said, quantitative analysis.
00:04:00 And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, I know about that.
00:04:02 That’s like you guys make algorithms
00:04:04 and then try to beat the market, right?
00:04:05 He’s like, yeah.
00:04:06 I was like, so you’re gonna pitch me on a startup
00:04:08 and you’re gonna sell your algorithm to other people.
00:04:10 And if it was so good, why wouldn’t you just use it yourself
00:04:13 and print money?
00:04:13 He’s like, yeah, yeah, no, no, that’s not our business.
00:04:15 Our business is we’re gonna create an app
00:04:17 to get millennials to trade stocks.
00:04:19 And he said, hmm, you do realize
00:04:22 there’s no retail investors anymore.
00:04:23 Like the dot com crash plus the 2008 financial crisis
00:04:27 eliminated any individual’s belief
00:04:29 in participating in the stock market.
00:04:31 And he said, that’s the opportunity.
00:04:32 I said, okay, I like it.
00:04:34 Tell me more.
00:04:35 He said, well, we’re gonna get these millennials to trade.
00:04:37 I said, the same ones who live in their mom’s basements
00:04:40 and take Uber and Lyft and are on their parents,
00:04:43 have no money, got screwed and went 250K into debt
00:04:47 for school and now can’t get a job.
00:04:49 Those people?
00:04:50 And he’s like, yeah.
00:04:51 I’m like, okay, they have no interest in their future,
00:04:54 but they’re gonna trade stocks.
00:04:55 He said, yeah, that’s the opportunity.
00:04:56 I was like, how are you gonna make money?
00:04:58 And he said, well, that’s the best part.
00:05:00 It’s gonna be free.
00:05:02 And I said, so your idea is to get a group of people
00:05:04 who have no interest in saving for their future
00:05:06 to trade and your business model is free.
00:05:08 And he said, yes.
00:05:08 I said, I’m in.
00:05:10 Because in almost all cases, the crazy outlandish ideas
00:05:14 that nobody believes in are the ones
00:05:16 that have the greatest returns.
00:05:17 I mean, Uber, I introduced to about 25 investors
00:05:20 and three of us said yes.
00:05:22 So a full 12% of the community who saw that deal
00:05:26 decided to do it.
00:05:27 So your sense about this idea being good
00:05:30 had to do with the fact that this guy was just crazy
00:05:33 and ambitious and bold thinking,
00:05:35 or was it that there was something here
00:05:37 in allowing a much larger magnitude of people
00:05:41 to be able to be investors?
00:05:42 Yeah, the way to do really well as an angel investor
00:05:46 or just in technology or in life
00:05:49 is to not say what could go wrong,
00:05:51 but to say what could go right.
00:05:52 And then to just imagine for a moment,
00:05:54 if it does work, what would the world look like?
00:05:58 And so when Elon was investing in Tesla
00:06:00 and some other guys were running it
00:06:02 and he was trying to save the company,
00:06:04 it wasn’t, is this gonna work?
00:06:08 It was almost positively not gonna work.
00:06:11 And he knew that, but if it does work,
00:06:14 what does the world look like?
00:06:16 And so that’s really what you’re looking for
00:06:18 is not the chances of success,
00:06:21 but if it does succeed, what would that look like?
00:06:25 And that’s what the world needs more people doing.
00:06:28 And so when you looked at Robinhood, it was like,
00:06:30 well, if he does succeed, what would the world look like?
00:06:32 And now we’ve seen what it looks like.
00:06:34 You have a generation who are so financially sophisticated
00:06:39 that they know how to do puts and calls
00:06:41 and shorts and research at a level
00:06:45 that dominated the hedge fund industry.
00:06:48 So let’s pause for a second.
00:06:50 These traders sitting there on a subreddit
00:06:52 in a discord server are able to do analysis and research
00:06:56 and then act in unison to say,
00:06:58 we’re going to beat in the Robinhood sense,
00:07:03 this group of sophisticated insiders
00:07:05 who have more access and more access to capital,
00:07:08 but we will figure out how to solve this problem.
00:07:11 And most things don’t work.
00:07:14 It’s like the Wikipedia.
00:07:16 There’s no way the Wikipedia would ever work, except it did.
00:07:21 You’re like, how is this ever gonna work?
00:07:23 You’re not paying anybody,
00:07:24 but it’s both the largest corpus of an encyclopedia ever.
00:07:27 So I think Robinhood actually succeeded.
00:07:29 And then what we saw was this system
00:07:33 and a lot of the systems in our society,
00:07:35 whether it’s the political system,
00:07:37 the constitution of the United States,
00:07:39 education, higher education, which you’re involved in,
00:07:42 and then even the financial system,
00:07:44 we have not stress tested and stress tested it,
00:07:47 and we don’t actually know all the edge cases
00:07:50 and how it works.
00:07:51 So Trump was able to just really put this crazy stress test.
00:07:56 Is the democracy going to hold?
00:07:59 Are we gonna break this two or three,
00:08:01 200 someone year old experiment?
00:08:03 And then we looked at the financial markets
00:08:04 and it turns out there were more people shorting the stock
00:08:07 than stocks and shares were available.
00:08:10 I don’t know how that’s possible.
00:08:11 And then I’m trying to uncover,
00:08:13 where can I see a list of people who have shorted the stock?
00:08:15 And it’s like, you can’t,
00:08:16 but we can tell you sort of how many every two weeks
00:08:19 or maybe twice a week, we can create a report.
00:08:21 Maybe we know.
00:08:23 I was surprised that nobody knows
00:08:24 the list of people who were shorted
00:08:26 and you guys are trying to figure that out.
00:08:27 Yeah, there’s no transparency on a lot of these systems.
00:08:30 And if you call to try to short a stock,
00:08:32 it’s almost like they’ll tell you on the phone,
00:08:34 let me see, I think I might know a guy
00:08:35 who has shares to loan out.
00:08:37 So it’s like, am I calling to try to find
00:08:39 like a 73 Mustang Grande in gold?
00:08:43 You’re gonna call around, it’s like,
00:08:45 shouldn’t this be like on a ledger somewhere
00:08:47 and be completely transparent?
00:08:49 So now we’re seeing those things.
00:08:50 And I think the investigations will make it super clear.
00:08:52 But of course, in a vacuum without information,
00:08:57 there are so many investors in these startups
00:08:58 that conflicts can start to appear.
00:09:00 And then you know how it is with people
00:09:01 in conspiracy theories, the mind starts to wander, right?
00:09:05 And so in some cases, there is actually a conspiracy.
00:09:08 And then in other cases, people’s mind will fill in like,
00:09:11 oh my God, there’s some grand conspiracy here.
00:09:13 I can tell you Robinhood’s only goal
00:09:15 is to get more people to trade stocks
00:09:17 and to democratize it even more.
00:09:18 And they apparently were on the brink of seizing as an entity
00:09:24 if they didn’t get more money to cover all these trades.
00:09:28 I mean, they were on the brink
00:09:30 and they raised $3.5 billion or something like that
00:09:32 in a week.
00:09:33 Yeah, so in some sense, Robinhood enabled this very,
00:09:37 like the magic of this distributed system
00:09:39 of WallStreetBets, right?
00:09:41 You said Wikipedia, which is another,
00:09:43 which is probably one of my favorite websites
00:09:45 and one of my favorite examples of like a distributed system
00:09:48 somehow coming together in a way,
00:09:50 just like you said at that crappy bar,
00:09:53 I would have guessed it would never work.
00:09:55 But if it does work, it changes everything and it did.
00:09:58 And Robinhood in that same way probably enabled
00:10:02 or was one of the major enablers of WallStreetBets
00:10:05 of giving power, like empowering young kids to learn
00:10:10 about how this whole messy financial system works
00:10:13 and take on the big elite centralized players.
00:10:17 Yes, and it’s very easy.
00:10:20 When these companies get big,
00:10:21 one thing that’s changed is the footprint of these startups
00:10:26 and the velocity at which they grow.
00:10:28 So something like Airbnb is another perfect example
00:10:30 of something that should really not work in practice,
00:10:33 but it does.
00:10:33 Like I’m gonna rent my couch or my extra room to somebody
00:10:38 like a serial killer,
00:10:39 or I’m gonna stay in somebody’s house,
00:10:41 like a serial killer’s house.
00:10:42 And it’s like, it really sounds scary,
00:10:44 but it actually works and it has not destroyed
00:10:49 the hotel business.
00:10:51 It has added.
00:10:52 So the best startups induce a market to exist.
00:10:55 If you look at Uber or Airbnb, people replace their cars
00:11:01 and Uber was not competing ultimately with taxis.
00:11:05 They were competing with car ownership,
00:11:07 public transportation, walking, or just not going out.
00:11:11 And then you look at Airbnb,
00:11:12 a lot of people who stay in an Airbnb
00:11:14 would not be taking a trip to Kyoto,
00:11:17 if not for the fact that they could get a $75 beautiful room
00:11:20 with great reviews in Kyoto for three weeks.
00:11:24 It inspires people and it manifests the market
00:11:27 because the product is so transcendent, right?
00:11:30 And I think that’s one of the things that Robinhood did.
00:11:33 You can’t learn how to do this options trading
00:11:36 and puts and calls and all this sophistication stuff,
00:11:38 unless you actually do it.
00:11:40 It’s just too hard to learn except in practice,
00:11:42 just like poker.
00:11:43 If you wanna learn how to play poker or guitar
00:11:45 or tennis or skiing, like you can talk about it.
00:11:47 You can watch YouTube videos,
00:11:49 but at a certain point, you gotta get on the mountain.
00:11:51 At a certain point, you gotta put some chips in the pot
00:11:54 and it’s gonna be painful.
00:11:55 Like poker is gonna be painful.
00:11:57 You’re gonna lose a lot of money
00:11:58 and that’s why you should play at the small tables first.
00:11:59 And even in trading, like you look at people
00:12:02 who are doing this crazy trading and GameStop,
00:12:04 a company that’s worth maybe a couple of billion dollars,
00:12:07 but certainly not tens of billions of dollars.
00:12:10 Of course, the people who are throwing their money in last
00:12:12 are gonna lose it.
00:12:13 I think everybody knew that.
00:12:15 And so it was a momentum play
00:12:16 and they’re betting against the hedge funds.
00:12:19 So I think it’s good for people to learn
00:12:22 and become financially literate
00:12:23 and just always understand the concept of the risk of ruin.
00:12:27 The good news is for a young person,
00:12:29 the risk of ruin might be like they lose $5,000 or something
00:12:31 and then they have to build their stack back up.
00:12:33 But that’s really the only thing I am concerned about
00:12:36 is there are people who will play poker or blackjack
00:12:40 or sports betting or whatever it is and lose control.
00:12:43 Just like there might be people who try alcohol
00:12:45 and lose control.
00:12:46 But we can’t build a system based upon limiting
00:12:51 the average person’s behavior based upon somebody
00:12:53 who can’t control their ability to drink.
00:12:56 Two glasses of wine instead of 20.
00:12:58 How does this whole thing end?
00:13:00 Probably in tears.
00:13:01 For who?
00:13:02 Yeah.
00:13:03 Who’s crying?
00:13:04 Is everybody crying?
00:13:05 Exactly.
00:13:06 Who’s crying when?
00:13:06 So I think there were some of the hedge funds
00:13:08 that were crying initially.
00:13:09 That maybe some of the Wall Street Bets people
00:13:10 who bought last would be crying.
00:13:13 And then eventually there’s probably another set
00:13:15 of hedge funds or even the Wall Street Bets mob
00:13:19 and that army, some of them might’ve broke ranks
00:13:22 and then shorted the stock.
00:13:23 So nobody knows.
00:13:24 So everybody has to be aware of what’s happening
00:13:26 in the game.
00:13:27 So if Wall Street Bets said, hey, let’s squeeze
00:13:29 these hedge funds because they have too much short interest.
00:13:32 Let’s all buy the stock.
00:13:33 Then some of them might’ve said, okay,
00:13:35 you know, it’s at two or $300.
00:13:37 Maybe I’ll join the short movement now that they’ve covered.
00:13:40 And they could have shorted their been like double agent.
00:13:43 So people have to understand like this stuff is gnarly
00:13:46 and it’s a free for all.
00:13:48 I mean, it is a literal free for all.
00:13:49 There’s a kind of morality,
00:13:51 like a big statement that Wall Street Bets made
00:13:54 in terms of like the elites can’t just push us around.
00:13:57 They can’t bully around.
00:13:59 But at the same time, you know,
00:14:01 they’re also interested in making money, right?
00:14:03 What’s your sense?
00:14:05 You said that some of the people in the Wall Street Bets
00:14:08 might’ve broken off and shorted the stock.
00:14:10 Are they more interested?
00:14:11 There was an emergent like morality that emerged
00:14:15 and said like, we’re not gonna put up
00:14:17 with the centralized elites,
00:14:19 but is that going to continue?
00:14:22 Are they going to fight the power structures
00:14:24 that are bad for society?
00:14:26 Or are they going to now like,
00:14:28 I mean, are they ultimately going to introduce more chaos
00:14:31 that’s going to damage the economy and damage the world?
00:14:33 Or are they going to continue being the good guys
00:14:35 and fighting the evils that manipulate the market?
00:14:40 What’s your sense?
00:14:41 You know, it really feels like the Dark Knight series
00:14:44 of films where like some people
00:14:46 just want to see the world burn.
00:14:48 I think there is a contingent of people
00:14:49 who just literally want to see chaos.
00:14:52 Like, you know that contingent on some of these forums
00:14:56 who just want to create chaos, right?
00:14:58 So there’s certainly that chaos contingent,
00:15:00 but I think overall what the arc will show
00:15:02 is a group of people getting massively educated.
00:15:05 You see it in crypto as well.
00:15:06 There was like a three year period
00:15:08 where all of these failed entrepreneurs who I knew
00:15:13 who couldn’t build companies were then coming back to me
00:15:17 after their companies has failed or after they gave up
00:15:19 or couldn’t clear market raising money
00:15:21 with the venture capital community
00:15:22 and they were doing ICOs.
00:15:24 And I was like, I met you before, right?
00:15:27 And they’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:15:28 No, I’m doing an ICO now.
00:15:29 I’m like, okay, where’s your company at?
00:15:32 And they’re like, here’s a white paper.
00:15:33 And I was like, this white paper with spelling errors in it
00:15:36 that says you’re going to destroy Airbnb
00:15:39 because everybody’s apartment
00:15:40 is gonna be on an immutable ledger.
00:15:42 Like, wouldn’t that be better in a regular database
00:15:44 that was private and not public?
00:15:46 Like, why does it need to be on an immutable ledger?
00:15:48 It can’t change.
00:15:49 I’m like, not changing the database is a feature?
00:15:52 That does not seem like a good feature.
00:15:54 And they couldn’t explain it.
00:15:55 They’re like, well, just people are interested in ICOs.
00:15:57 And there was that ICO mania.
00:15:59 And what it showed was there’s a global appetite for risk.
00:16:01 People want to try new things.
00:16:05 This is one of the great things about the human spirit
00:16:07 is one of the great things about capitalism.
00:16:09 And one of the things that concerns me most
00:16:11 about where we’re at in society
00:16:12 is the sort of socialism, communism,
00:16:17 entrepreneurship is bad, technology is bad,
00:16:19 and polarization of wealth,
00:16:21 and people getting rich is a bad thing.
00:16:23 When I grew up, I’m 50 now,
00:16:24 but when I was a Gen Xer growing up,
00:16:26 we kind of maybe too much idolized Bill Gates
00:16:29 and people who were doing interesting things in the world.
00:16:31 And we thought capitalism was a force for good.
00:16:32 I still believe capitalism is a force for good
00:16:35 because when a group of people build a product or service
00:16:39 that changes the world and it gets globally distributed,
00:16:42 whether it’s Tesla or SpaceX or Google or Airbnb
00:16:46 or Uber or Robinhood,
00:16:48 everybody gets to benefit from that product or service
00:16:51 having to compete.
00:16:52 And if you look at the places where there’s no competition
00:16:55 like public education or less established colleges
00:17:00 and something like that,
00:17:00 less competition for accreditation degrees,
00:17:03 like things tend to get a little weird, don’t they?
00:17:06 And people tend to be protected and that’s not good.
00:17:09 You need competition.
00:17:11 Doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have global healthcare.
00:17:14 It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have a safety net,
00:17:17 but we need to keep capitalism vibrant,
00:17:18 especially because China has now coopted capitalism
00:17:22 and created their own version of capitalism,
00:17:24 which is communism with capitalism.
00:17:26 It’s like this weird operating system
00:17:28 like we still want to keep communism
00:17:30 so we can take any of your gains at any time,
00:17:33 but we’d like you to be entrepreneurial.
00:17:35 And then you have somebody like the founder of Alibaba,
00:17:40 Jack Ma, who disappears for a couple of weeks.
00:17:42 Who’s that?
00:17:43 No, I’m just kidding.
00:17:45 Who’s Jack Ma?
00:17:45 I was like, he kind of disappears for a couple of weeks
00:17:48 and then he comes back and he’s really sorry
00:17:49 about the things he said and then he disappears again.
00:17:52 And like, we have to be very careful.
00:17:55 You know, we have to be very careful if China wins
00:17:58 capitalism, this is going to be an existential threat
00:18:03 for humanity.
00:18:05 The Chinese are no joke.
00:18:07 I mean, they are seriously focused
00:18:09 and they are picking the winners.
00:18:11 It’s a very weird system because it is in fact,
00:18:14 I don’t know what you call it.
00:18:15 Like communism and capitalism is such a overloaded terms,
00:18:19 but they do encourage entrepreneurship,
00:18:22 but they, and they do a good job of it.
00:18:25 Oh, yes.
00:18:25 But then they’re like, they’re like the surveillance thing
00:18:28 and they’re controlling things in a way.
00:18:31 It’s weird because it seems to work really well for them
00:18:35 in the short term.
00:18:36 Yes, it’s definitely got short term benefits.
00:18:38 So the question is like, how that gets distorted
00:18:42 and it becomes worse and worse and worse,
00:18:44 which it potentially might be.
00:18:45 And I think on, you know, the entrepreneurial spirit,
00:18:51 which you have a podcast all centered
00:18:53 around the entrepreneurial spirit,
00:18:56 is one of the magical things that makes this country great.
00:18:59 I don’t know if money is deeply tied into that.
00:19:02 I do get bothered by people, you know,
00:19:05 treating the word billionaires if it’s a bad word.
00:19:08 But in general, like all the hard things,
00:19:12 all the difficult things we’re going through in this country,
00:19:14 it seems like the way out is going to be
00:19:19 making the entrepreneur the hero of society
00:19:22 of like letting that young kid with a big dream
00:19:26 and the guts to take the big risks
00:19:28 and build something totally new,
00:19:31 giving them a chance and whatever that involves.
00:19:34 I don’t think it’s about taxes.
00:19:35 I don’t think it’s about like regulation, all that stuff.
00:19:38 It’s about us and just public discourse saying
00:19:42 that kid, that guy, that girl, they’re bad asses.
00:19:45 Like encourage them to do it.
00:19:47 We have to have people buy in
00:19:49 to the fact that they have that opportunity.
00:19:52 And I think one of the problems in society is
00:19:55 there’s a group of people who actually don’t believe
00:19:57 that they can succeed or they don’t believe
00:20:00 even more perniciously that other people can.
00:20:02 And that’s the group of people that I think are highly vocal
00:20:06 but a small group of people,
00:20:07 which are generally people of incredible privilege,
00:20:11 rich parents, white city dwellers, liberals.
00:20:15 They kind of look and say,
00:20:16 poor people cannot change it a lot.
00:20:18 And they’re battling in their minds
00:20:21 to protect poor people.
00:20:23 But they have this very weird
00:20:24 patriarchal kind of approach to it,
00:20:26 which is they think that they’re not capable
00:20:28 of changing their lot in life.
00:20:29 And they’re like, it’s not possible.
00:20:31 And then once in a while, I’ll tweet something where I say,
00:20:34 it’s really incredible that every piece of knowledge
00:20:36 you could possibly want is now available for free on YouTube.
00:20:40 And every course from MIT and Harvard and Stanford
00:20:43 is available on edX or Coursera.
00:20:46 And all that information is there freely available.
00:20:49 And you can take the lectures.
00:20:50 This is amazing.
00:20:51 And then people will be like,
00:20:52 yeah, but people don’t have access to it.
00:20:54 I’m like, they do.
00:20:55 It’s free.
00:20:56 Here’s the link.
00:20:57 And they’re like, yeah, but they don’t have internet.
00:20:59 And I’m like, here’s the chart
00:21:01 of internet penetration in America.
00:21:03 And they’re like, well, poor people don’t have internet.
00:21:05 And I’m like, really?
00:21:07 Find me any downtrodden person without a smartphone
00:21:11 with a high speed connection
00:21:12 that capitalism provided for $12 a month or $15 a month.
00:21:16 It’s very hard to find that.
00:21:18 And we have it so well in this country
00:21:20 and there’s so much opportunity,
00:21:23 but people don’t believe it.
00:21:25 And that’s actually one of the problems.
00:21:27 See, the average American still watches
00:21:28 four or five hours of television a day.
00:21:30 And often I meet people and they’re like,
00:21:32 I need a technical co founder.
00:21:35 But all I need is a million dollars.
00:21:36 And I’m like, okay, well, what is your skill?
00:21:37 And they don’t have a skill.
00:21:39 And I’m like, well, are you a designer?
00:21:41 No.
00:21:42 Are you a product manager?
00:21:43 No.
00:21:44 Are you a developer?
00:21:44 No.
00:21:45 Are you a sales executive?
00:21:46 No.
00:21:47 Do you have an idea?
00:21:48 Well, as my friend, Sam Harris,
00:21:50 I think your friend as well says like,
00:21:53 everybody has like a million ideas an hour.
00:21:55 Like you don’t really get credit for those.
00:21:57 Even when you’re asleep, your idea is spewing ideas.
00:21:59 Like zero credit for your ideas.
00:22:01 It’s all about execution.
00:22:03 And we’re seeing.
00:22:04 You have to believe that you yourself
00:22:04 can be the core of that execution.
00:22:06 You yourself can build the thing in every,
00:22:08 no matter what your circumstances are.
00:22:10 I mean, we could talk about like structural racism
00:22:13 and all those kinds of things that push things down.
00:22:15 But from the individual perspective,
00:22:17 when you just like are coaching
00:22:18 or giving advice to an individual,
00:22:20 you can literally change the world.
00:22:22 I mean, Wall Street Bets is an indication of that
00:22:24 in the financial space that you yourself can have,
00:22:27 can change the world.
00:22:28 That’s why this country is amazing.
00:22:30 Still the best country in the world, right?
00:22:31 I mean, it still is amazing the opportunity
00:22:33 provided to people.
00:22:35 All this educational experience is online.
00:22:37 And the ability, what I tell young people
00:22:39 who are looking for advice, I say,
00:22:42 the skill you need to refine
00:22:43 is the ability to learn new skills.
00:22:45 Like if you become good at learning a new skill,
00:22:49 and Tim Ferriss, a friend of mine has really pioneered this,
00:22:52 he can get to 60 or 70% of like the knowledge
00:22:57 in a skill in some incredibly short period of time.
00:23:00 And I’m not saying he’s gonna become a virtuoso drummer
00:23:02 or a great basketball player,
00:23:03 but Tim and I were on vacation together
00:23:06 in like a group vacation in Italy
00:23:07 and there was a basketball court.
00:23:09 And I said, let’s go shoot some hoops.
00:23:11 I’d never shot before.
00:23:13 And I was like, okay, come on, I’ll teach you.
00:23:15 And Tim is fabulously uncoordinated.
00:23:17 People don’t know this.
00:23:18 Like he tried to dribble a basketball and do a layup
00:23:24 and it looked like he had a blindfold on.
00:23:26 I mean, you’ve never seen something less elegant
00:23:29 than Tim Ferriss doing a layup in basketball.
00:23:32 And then he watched me do it three or four times
00:23:34 and I watched him study me.
00:23:37 And listen, I’ve been playing basketball in Brooklyn
00:23:39 since I was a kid.
00:23:40 I got a couple of moves and he was just taking notes
00:23:43 and taking notes and taking notes.
00:23:44 And by the end of a couple of hours of doing this,
00:23:46 I could just watch him checking his form
00:23:48 and figuring it out.
00:23:50 That’s every skill in the world now.
00:23:52 And what I tell people is like, I’m like,
00:23:55 did you watch Game of Thrones?
00:23:56 And they’re like, yeah.
00:23:57 Watch Breaking Bad?
00:23:58 Like, yeah, I’m like, okay, that’s about 400 hours.
00:24:02 How about you don’t watch the next two
00:24:05 and you put that 400 hours into learning
00:24:06 how to be a graphic designer, a UX person,
00:24:09 a developer, whatever it is and learn how to add skills.
00:24:13 That’s what I did my whole life.
00:24:14 I was a kid from Brooklyn, went to school at night,
00:24:17 but I was very quick to get to maybe 50%
00:24:20 of the knowledge base of graphic design
00:24:22 or being a writer or being a sales executive,
00:24:24 whatever it was, a developer even.
00:24:26 And I was just good enough to not have people
00:24:29 be able to bullshit me like when I hired them.
00:24:31 And that was a big unlock.
00:24:33 When you know enough that people can’t snow you,
00:24:35 that’s a really good one.
00:24:36 And look at yourself.
00:24:38 You figured out how to set up an entire podcast,
00:24:40 people don’t know this,
00:24:41 but you don’t have a team around you.
00:24:43 I have a team of like five, six people working on my podcast.
00:24:45 With even knowing enough about to set this up,
00:24:48 you would then be able to hire a team.
00:24:50 Correct.
00:24:50 And you’ll be able to call them on their bullshit
00:24:52 if they’re not doing a good job.
00:24:53 And that’s really important.
00:24:54 And I don’t know that much about this whole thing,
00:24:56 but I know enough to be able to then see
00:24:58 who knows their stuff and not.
00:24:59 You’re absolutely right.
00:25:00 And the process of learning how to learn
00:25:03 is essential there because I did martial arts,
00:25:08 jiu jitsu and so on.
00:25:09 And it’s so funny to watch.
00:25:11 I did Taekwondo, yeah.
00:25:12 Taekwondo is awesome.
00:25:13 It’s funny that there’s some people
00:25:15 that do an activity for years,
00:25:17 because just sort of elaborate on something
00:25:19 you were saying about hours.
00:25:21 It’s not always the amount of hours,
00:25:24 it’s the quality that you put in.
00:25:26 Deliberate practice versus just doing some behavior.
00:25:29 I mean, literally I’ve been playing chess
00:25:31 and trying to get that going again
00:25:33 after watching Queen’s Gambit and I got chess.com.
00:25:35 And I realized I was just playing
00:25:36 and I’m not getting better.
00:25:37 And then I was like, oh wait,
00:25:38 there’s a little analysis feature here in chess.com
00:25:40 where it will show you your blunders and mistakes.
00:25:43 And I’m like, oh, I’m spending no time
00:25:45 reviewing my losses in chess
00:25:47 and I just wanna play the next game.
00:25:49 I should really review these losses
00:25:50 and figure out what mistakes I made.
00:25:52 And when I started doing that,
00:25:52 I was like, oh, I’m getting better.
00:25:54 So some deliberate practice really works.
00:25:56 And if you wanna take it all the way,
00:25:58 Magnus Carlsen, shout out to the guy,
00:26:00 he has an app, but there’s a few other coaching apps
00:26:03 where you focus on the end game,
00:26:04 you focus drilling a particular,
00:26:07 you basically don’t play the game at all.
00:26:09 You just focus on drilling the different aspects.
00:26:11 The openings, the end game, the end game, yeah.
00:26:14 And there’s different kinds of puzzles.
00:26:15 So you can really make it into a deliberate practice.
00:26:18 Not to make this episode sponsored by chess.com,
00:26:20 but they literally have puzzles.
00:26:22 So I was like, oh, and it’s $100 a year for this product.
00:26:25 And I just thought to myself, this is capitalism.
00:26:28 They don’t need to charge you $100 an hour for a lesson.
00:26:32 They can charge you $100
00:26:34 and they’ve created the ability for you to play chess
00:26:36 24 hours a day against opponents
00:26:38 who are perfectly matched against you based on your rating.
00:26:41 And they analyze every game and they have puzzles
00:26:44 and they have tutorials and they’ve got everything else.
00:26:46 It’s like, just think about how much value
00:26:50 is being provided to society because of capitalism
00:26:53 and because competition.
00:26:54 If you want things to get better
00:26:56 and you wanna step up your game,
00:26:58 just make it slightly competitive.
00:26:59 It is one of these things in human existence
00:27:03 that is so powerful.
00:27:05 I don’t know, did you see the Michael Jordan documentary,
00:27:07 The Last Dance?
00:27:08 Like half of it, I’m still working through it.
00:27:10 He’s so competitive and petty.
00:27:14 It’s so inspiring that all he cares about is just winning
00:27:19 to the level of which he literally,
00:27:21 there’s like this running meme, I took that personally
00:27:23 and I took that person.
00:27:24 I don’t know if you’ve seen the images of him
00:27:26 sitting smoking a cigar,
00:27:27 looking at like an iPad or a video clip
00:27:29 and it’s like, I took that personally.
00:27:30 And you can make a super cut
00:27:32 of every time he took something personally,
00:27:33 he literally takes everything personally
00:27:35 to give himself that competitive motivation to win.
00:27:38 That’s capitalism.
00:27:39 And when people are competing,
00:27:42 man, look at what Elon did to the space of cars.
00:27:46 Like every, they were literally laughing at him
00:27:49 in the first 10 years.
00:27:50 Electric cars, ha ha, that company will go out of business.
00:27:53 And now every single company is like,
00:27:55 we’re going fully electric by 2035.
00:27:58 And he kicked their asses so brutally
00:28:02 that they had no choice but then to step up their game.
00:28:05 And that’s what we want, right?
00:28:07 And this virus and this pandemic,
00:28:09 I think the great thing that will come out
00:28:12 of this horrible experience that we’ve all had
00:28:15 is psychologically death, learning,
00:28:17 just so many bad things occurred,
00:28:19 the economy, people losing their jobs.
00:28:21 But we also got to see the human spirit
00:28:22 with these mRNA vaccines and just how,
00:28:27 if we took out some of the regulation
00:28:29 and people were super motivated,
00:28:31 we might actually be able to eliminate
00:28:33 all pandemics from ever happening again.
00:28:38 And before that, Bill Gates was banging his fist
00:28:40 and Jeff Skoll was doing the movie Contagion.
00:28:43 I mean, for two decades, people have been banging their fist.
00:28:45 We have to be prepared for this.
00:28:47 And everybody’s like, yeah, whatever, YOLO.
00:28:49 It’s not gonna happen.
00:28:50 And now it’s happened and people are like,
00:28:53 we need to be able to destroy every pandemic and virus
00:28:57 before it happens.
00:28:58 And listen, you know a lot more about science than I do,
00:29:01 but these mRNA has been around for a while.
00:29:04 We’ve just never gotten aggressive about doing it.
00:29:06 And then you think about challenge trials.
00:29:09 I don’t know if you’ve been following this,
00:29:10 but they’re doing challenge trials now in the UK this month
00:29:13 where they’re introducing COVID into healthy young patients
00:29:17 and then giving them the vaccine or, you know.
00:29:19 And that is against all rules and regulations
00:29:24 about do no harm.
00:29:27 But then you think about it.
00:29:29 We kind of celebrate people jumping out of planes
00:29:31 and we got that one guy, Alex Honnold,
00:29:33 who’s climbing up mountains without a rope
00:29:35 and they give him a North Star, you know,
00:29:37 back page ad and an endorsement deal.
00:29:41 And we celebrate that.
00:29:42 We celebrate people surfing with sharks.
00:29:45 We celebrate people doing deep welding.
00:29:47 We pay them extra to go 200 feet underground
00:29:50 and weld stuff.
00:29:51 And people do dangerous stuff all day long, astronauts.
00:29:57 But we won’t, soldiers, firefighters,
00:30:00 but we won’t let people get paid to do a challenge trial.
00:30:04 Yeah, we’re weirdly risk averse in certain areas
00:30:06 that completely don’t make any sense.
00:30:08 And this is where the world needs it.
00:30:10 We could have said these thousand people, young people,
00:30:13 who we know are in all likelihood
00:30:14 not going to have a bad outcome,
00:30:16 but there’s a possibility.
00:30:17 There’s a possibility.
00:30:18 But it’s very low.
00:30:19 It’s certainly lower than riding a motorcycle.
00:30:22 It’s lower than riding a motorcycle.
00:30:23 People ride motorcycles everywhere.
00:30:24 We have ads for motorcycles.
00:30:26 We could have just said to those thousand people,
00:30:27 we’ll give you a million dollars each to do this.
00:30:30 Okay, there’s your billion dollars.
00:30:33 We’re printing trillions of dollars of money
00:30:35 to deal with this.
00:30:35 If we had just done a thousand people
00:30:37 for a million dollars each to do a challenge trial
00:30:40 in March, April, May, when they had the mRNA vaccines ready,
00:30:45 we could have deployed the vaccines in the summer.
00:30:47 We would have been done with this.
00:30:49 We would have been over by now.
00:30:50 So we get to challenge all of that thinking.
00:30:52 I think that’s what the great pause did.
00:30:54 It’s letting everybody challenge that thinking is,
00:30:57 why do we have that rule?
00:30:58 Okay, yeah, we don’t want to have people,
00:31:01 you know, like give up their organs for money.
00:31:03 Like we obviously understand,
00:31:05 but there’s a reasonable discussion about,
00:31:08 well, maybe there’s a level of risk in a global pandemic.
00:31:10 I mean, we fought the Nazis, right?
00:31:12 We defeated the Nazis.
00:31:13 That took a lot of deaths to do that,
00:31:15 but we had to kill that evil.
00:31:17 This is another evil, which we must fight.
00:31:20 And it’s going to result in,
00:31:22 it’s already resulting in thousands of people dying a day,
00:31:24 but we could have actually stopped it earlier
00:31:26 if we just had a reasonable discussion.
00:31:28 This is why podcasting is our respect what you do.
00:31:31 This is why intelligent people are so drawn to podcasts
00:31:34 because you and I can expand on this
00:31:36 and not cancel each other over this very suggestion.
00:31:40 When I make this suggestion,
00:31:41 are challenge trials reasonable or not?
00:31:43 If I were to do that on Twitter, they’d be like,
00:31:45 oh, Calacanis wants to give poor people coronavirus
00:31:49 in order to save rich people.
00:31:50 It’s like, no, I didn’t say that.
00:31:52 But you and I could have a reasonable discussion
00:31:55 about a challenge trial is something we should consider
00:31:57 in a acute situation
00:32:00 where millions of people are going to lose their lives.
00:32:02 Right, so that’s an example
00:32:05 of capitalism competition working really well.
00:32:07 There’s one of the, to me, sad thing to see
00:32:10 about coronavirus is that, for example,
00:32:11 testing at scale should have, it seems obvious.
00:32:16 I was a little clueless about it,
00:32:18 but because I thought there’s no way you can have
00:32:21 like antigen tests at hundreds of millions,
00:32:24 like order hundreds of millions of them and make them cheap.
00:32:26 But actually I realized recently
00:32:28 that there have been available since about like May.
00:32:31 Yeah. You were able to.
00:32:32 In Korea, in Finland, all over the place.
00:32:34 You could have done mass manufacture.
00:32:36 So there, there’s a little bit of a failure
00:32:40 of capitalism to step up.
00:32:43 And I don’t know if you agree with this,
00:32:45 but it seems that the blame is to be placed
00:32:47 at the regulators and the various institutions.
00:32:52 Chrony capitalism in all likelihood
00:32:54 is what stopped it here in America.
00:32:55 I mean, I had friends who had imported them
00:32:58 from other countries, the testing kits.
00:33:01 And you’ve probably been to parties
00:33:02 where people had these kinds of testing kits
00:33:04 from other countries and we’re sitting here
00:33:06 and they’re just approving them now.
00:33:07 Really, in February, month 11 of the pandemic in America,
00:33:11 we’re gonna have testing online, really.
00:33:13 I mean, even if these tests were 80% effective
00:33:17 and they’re 95% effective, mass producing them,
00:33:20 we should have sent them in every postal,
00:33:23 anybody with a post office box with a mailing address
00:33:27 should have had 10 of them put in their mailing address
00:33:29 just for free from the government.
00:33:30 And then everybody would be testing
00:33:32 and we would have contained it.
00:33:33 We don’t have test and trace here in the United States.
00:33:35 Well, all the countries that are on the other side of COVID
00:33:39 did it by having testing, tracing
00:33:42 and closing their borders and masks.
00:33:44 That’s the combination that works.
00:33:46 The problem with the coronavirus
00:33:48 is while there’s a lot of institutions
00:33:51 did not behave their best,
00:33:52 it’s also the case that there’s a lot of uncertainty.
00:33:54 So I tend to give a little bit of a pass
00:33:57 to everybody involved for the uncertainty.
00:34:00 We were all.
00:34:02 I give them that until June.
00:34:03 I wonder how history will remember this whole period.
00:34:06 I’d love to ask you,
00:34:07 because you were an early investor in Robinhoods
00:34:10 and you’re in a very nice place
00:34:14 of being a huge supporter of the sort of Wall Street bets
00:34:19 kind of distributed power of the people.
00:34:22 And at the same time, because of you being an investor,
00:34:27 like intellectually giving a chance to Robinhood
00:34:31 in this kind of chaotic time of conversations
00:34:33 to think about like, well, what did they do right?
00:34:36 What did they do wrong?
00:34:37 So you have a kind of a balance view on the whole thing,
00:34:40 which is really nice.
00:34:41 We’ve talked about what Robinhood did right, I think.
00:34:46 Can you sort of steel man at your mouth’s argument
00:34:51 of what Robinhood did wrong in the last few days?
00:34:56 Yeah, I mean, communication is always
00:34:59 the number one issue with these startups, right?
00:35:00 And if you, you have to get ahead of any problem
00:35:04 and you have to put all the bad news out immediately.
00:35:07 And in the case of Robinhood, it seems based on
00:35:09 what has been in the papers and what Robinhood said publicly
00:35:11 is that they had this kind of liquidity crisis, right?
00:35:14 Where they were being, because of these exchanges telling
00:35:17 them you have to put up this amount of money in collateral
00:35:20 and them being pinned at number one in the app store.
00:35:22 There were so many people trying to buy five shares
00:35:25 of this stock, five shares of this meme stock
00:35:28 that it kind of broke their system.
00:35:30 And then the people who clear the trades for them,
00:35:32 they said, you gotta put up a billion dollars,
00:35:33 two billion dollars, three billion dollars.
00:35:35 We can’t do that overnight.
00:35:36 And I think that they were in an uncomfortable situation
00:35:40 of like going on TV and saying, we have a liquidity crisis.
00:35:44 Like that could be like a run on the bag.
00:35:46 Everybody then logs in at the same time to Robinhood
00:35:49 and tries to sell every share they own
00:35:50 because they’re afraid that the whole thing’s
00:35:51 gonna collapse, right?
00:35:52 So I think there was this kind of like black swan event
00:35:55 and they probably didn’t communicate it all that well.
00:35:57 At the center of that, this is really interesting.
00:36:00 Maybe you can comment on the nature of communication.
00:36:03 Vlad, the CEO, the guy you met at the bar,
00:36:07 was I think at the center of the communication, right?
00:36:10 So Elon is an example of a guy who also is
00:36:13 at the center of the communication
00:36:14 for his particular set of companies.
00:36:16 And that on Twitter seems to be a really powerful way
00:36:19 to communicate.
00:36:20 And there was something, this is me saying it,
00:36:23 there was something about Vlad that sounded
00:36:26 like he’s hiding stuff.
00:36:29 As opposed to Elon, it doesn’t sound
00:36:32 like he’s hiding stuff.
00:36:33 It could be the nature, the beat,
00:36:36 the timing of the conversation.
00:36:38 Same thing with Mark Zuckerberg.
00:36:40 Mark Zuckerberg for some reason often sounds
00:36:42 like he’s hiding something.
00:36:43 And then there’s like Jack Dorsey is much less so.
00:36:47 And I don’t know what that is about the CEOs
00:36:49 that makes you trust them and not.
00:36:51 Might be the point in time, like in terms of escape velocity.
00:36:57 There might be nondisclosures in place
00:37:01 that we’re not aware of where they’re not allowed
00:37:03 to talk about certain relationships.
00:37:04 I see.
00:37:05 And that results like in Vlad’s case,
00:37:08 and that results in you being like acting weird and nervous.
00:37:12 Or nervous.
00:37:13 Yeah, it could just be the person is nervous.
00:37:15 So it’s really hard to be building one of these companies
00:37:18 and you’re at scale and oh my Lord,
00:37:21 the entire thing’s coming apart
00:37:23 and you’re the most hated person for that day.
00:37:25 You know how the rage cycle works
00:37:26 and the media is just so crazy
00:37:29 when they get their hooks into something.
00:37:31 I saw it happen with Uber.
00:37:32 We saw it happen with Facebook and even Tesla.
00:37:34 There were times when people did stupid things
00:37:37 with autopilot and it’s like, okay,
00:37:39 somebody is watching a movie and sleeping in their car
00:37:42 or leaving the driver’s seat
00:37:44 against all the rules of autopilot
00:37:46 and somehow Tesla’s responsible for that.
00:37:47 It’s like we have people who stand on top
00:37:49 of their motorcycles and drive down the road
00:37:51 on a motorcycle.
00:37:53 And we don’t blame Yamaha or Harley Davidson
00:37:56 for some idiot standing on the seat of their motorcycle
00:37:58 on a highway going 60 miles an hour.
00:37:59 We just say, that person’s an idiot.
00:38:02 But when new technology comes out,
00:38:04 we blame the technology, not the person operating it.
00:38:07 And if you are going to operate,
00:38:11 we basically vilify it and demonize it.
00:38:13 I think that is part of it.
00:38:14 Like when the person at, I remember Airbnb,
00:38:16 we always thought, what if somebody trashes your apartment?
00:38:19 And then sure enough, a bunch of meth heads
00:38:21 rented this poor woman’s apartment.
00:38:22 She left all of her stuff in it.
00:38:24 And then a bunch of meth heads had a drug party,
00:38:27 destroyed her apartment, ripped up all her photos
00:38:29 and went crazy.
00:38:31 And we knew that day would happen,
00:38:32 but nobody remembers it now.
00:38:33 But it was the number one story on every news channel
00:38:36 because wow, that’s an exciting story.
00:38:38 And I just thought to myself,
00:38:40 I wonder if there are any parties in hotel rooms
00:38:43 where the hotel room is being trashed
00:38:45 and people are doing drugs and crazy things.
00:38:47 It’s like, yes, that’s basically every hotel
00:38:49 in Los Angeles right now is being destroyed
00:38:52 by some rock band that’s throwing a TV out the window.
00:38:55 Like we expected in a hotel,
00:38:58 we just didn’t expect it in somebody’s house with Airbnb.
00:39:00 And then Airbnb created rules around,
00:39:02 you can’t rent an Airbnb for a party and they learn.
00:39:05 So I think there’s a learning curve with these companies
00:39:07 and they do get to scale at a level
00:39:09 that is unprecedented.
00:39:11 It used to take decades for a company
00:39:13 to become an international phenomenon.
00:39:15 Now it happens in two, three, four years.
00:39:17 I mean, look at Clubhouse.
00:39:18 This thing went from being a private beta six months ago
00:39:22 to being the number one app in Germany
00:39:24 and in Japan and here.
00:39:26 Like just like that, boom.
00:39:28 And it’s because there’s an ecosystem
00:39:30 that has never existed, the app store.
00:39:32 Then there’s payments online.
00:39:35 And then everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket.
00:39:38 The thing people got wrong
00:39:40 about entrepreneurship technology and business
00:39:44 over the last couple of decades
00:39:45 was just how big the market was
00:39:48 and then how quickly you could achieve relevancy
00:39:53 in these markets.
00:39:55 We thought the market was like the 60 million homes
00:39:58 were broadband.
00:39:58 And originally it was like maybe 10 or 20.
00:40:00 Then it became 60 million.
00:40:02 Then it was like, okay,
00:40:02 well, how many hours are you at your desktop computer?
00:40:05 Well, like probably at our computers for five hours a day,
00:40:07 10 hours a day at work, three hours a day on our own.
00:40:10 And then it was like,
00:40:11 yeah, nobody’s on their desktop computer.
00:40:12 Everybody’s on their mobile phone.
00:40:14 Oh, and by the way, they have it with them.
00:40:15 So the people with mobile phones
00:40:16 are now using this high speed device with an app store
00:40:20 with their credit card in it.
00:40:21 In the early days of the internet,
00:40:23 people were scared to put their credit card on the internet.
00:40:25 That was considered a really dumb thing to do.
00:40:27 If you put your credit card on the internet,
00:40:28 you’re gonna lose all your money.
00:40:30 They’re gonna hack you or whatever.
00:40:32 And now it’s just amazing to me
00:40:34 how quickly when a company hits,
00:40:37 how quickly it can get to a million subscribers
00:40:39 or 10 million or a billion users, right?
00:40:42 And there’s all these networks, like social networks
00:40:44 that allow the spread of the viral spread
00:40:47 of like a new startup, a new company, a new app
00:40:51 to be announced.
00:40:52 Anything.
00:40:53 An idea, a podcast, right?
00:40:55 A single thing, a single meme could change the world.
00:40:58 Speaking of Clubhouse, I just wanna,
00:41:00 we’re saying so many interesting things,
00:41:01 but there was a magical moment with Vlad and Elon
00:41:04 on Clubhouse.
00:41:05 I don’t know if you got that.
00:41:06 That was wild.
00:41:07 Yes, is there, do you have thoughts about that interaction
00:41:13 which felt like so many aspects of this whole situation
00:41:17 feels like totally novel, surreal,
00:41:20 like it’s defining a new era.
00:41:22 It is, yes.
00:41:23 Like a billionaire, the richest human on earth
00:41:25 is interviewing the person at the center
00:41:30 of one of the most interesting mass scale
00:41:34 like power battles in finance ever, perhaps.
00:41:39 And by the way, seven movies have been sold two weeks.
00:41:43 Just think about how fast things are moving, Lex.
00:41:46 This thing happens.
00:41:48 Like people had the idea to short the stock six months ago.
00:41:51 They start doing their research.
00:41:52 They build an army.
00:41:53 They execute the trade.
00:41:55 The system goes down.
00:41:57 Robinhood raises $3.5 billion in four days.
00:42:00 Elon is interviewing them on Clubhouse on Sunday
00:42:03 after the Wednesday it happened.
00:42:04 And now here we are, it’s 10 days later.
00:42:08 Doesn’t it feel like it’s been 10 months?
00:42:12 It’s been 10 days, Lex.
00:42:13 It’s been 10 days.
00:42:14 10 days.
00:42:15 Plus, there’s like a new president,
00:42:16 all these things, and everyone forgot.
00:42:18 Oh, and there was an insurrection.
00:42:19 By the way, we also almost had a revolution at the Capitol
00:42:21 where a bunch of crazy people who have guns
00:42:26 and body armor, and then a bunch of them
00:42:28 who are just yoloing in cosplay, took over the Capitol.
00:42:32 Well, so, and the other more dramatic thing to me is.
00:42:35 That was one month ago.
00:42:36 That was one month.
00:42:37 And the president of the United States got banned
00:42:39 from every major social network,
00:42:42 and which I think I’m still deeply troubled by
00:42:47 is Parler being removed from AWS.
00:42:49 That changed the way, that changed a lot of things.
00:42:53 As somebody who’s an aspiring entrepreneur,
00:42:56 that changed the way I see the world.
00:42:58 That little, maybe I’m being over dramatic, but.
00:43:00 No, you’re not.
00:43:01 I think you’re paranoid for a reason.
00:43:03 You’re paranoid for a very good reason,
00:43:05 which is as big as these companies can become,
00:43:08 they are beholden to the mob.
00:43:10 And if the mob says, hey, this person needs to be canceled,
00:43:14 they’re going to get canceled
00:43:16 because you can’t lose your entire audience.
00:43:18 You could lose your whole customer base,
00:43:19 and you could lose all your employees.
00:43:21 I think what’s interesting about your fear
00:43:24 about Parler and AWS taking off
00:43:25 is we went from being like a social network,
00:43:27 which is the software layer.
00:43:30 And then we went to like the infrastructure layer,
00:43:33 and they’ll even go after like Cloudflare,
00:43:36 which is a CDN provider, right?
00:43:37 They’re just like a plumbing,
00:43:39 it’s like sort of like the telephone.
00:43:41 So we’re basically holding everybody responsible
00:43:44 on the whole chain of events here.
00:43:45 And what that’s going to do is,
00:43:48 I’m not a huge believer in crypto,
00:43:50 but distributed computing,
00:43:52 where nobody in decentralized
00:43:54 and distributed computing platforms and open standards,
00:43:58 podcasting is an open standard,
00:43:59 the web is an open standard, FTP was an open standard,
00:44:01 but Twitter and Facebook are closed.
00:44:07 And what’s going to happen is we will see
00:44:09 a group of individuals create peer to peer networks
00:44:12 for social media, where nobody can control it.
00:44:15 And the same for cloud computing,
00:44:16 where there’s a crypto project where everybody will,
00:44:22 and I invested in a company that tried to do this
00:44:24 and got sold and it didn’t work out,
00:44:26 but take your hard drive on your computer at home,
00:44:30 you give a terabyte of your 10 terabyte drive
00:44:33 over to the cloud,
00:44:34 and then everybody else does their terabyte.
00:44:36 And then all of a sudden you’ve got this virtual cloud
00:44:38 and anybody can store stuff on it and it’s all encrypted,
00:44:40 and then nobody can stop it.
00:44:41 And that could be tweets, it could be videos.
00:44:43 And so this idea that YouTube will be able to tell people,
00:44:48 to kick people off because they’re skeptics of,
00:44:50 I don’t know, the pandemic or the vaccine,
00:44:52 or they’ve, they’ll make things
00:44:55 that are more censorship resistant.
00:44:57 I think that’ll be the reaction to all of this.
00:44:59 This is my question for you,
00:45:00 going back to that crappy bar and people pitching you,
00:45:03 is there, like with Clubhouse, do you see competitors,
00:45:08 do you think it’s possible that another,
00:45:11 perhaps more decentralized or another kind
00:45:13 of social media will emerge
00:45:15 that will take on Twitter and Facebook
00:45:17 and might be able to replace them?
00:45:19 If you look at the whole landscape with Clubhouse
00:45:22 and everything else,
00:45:23 do you think some other company might emerge?
00:45:26 There’ll be 10 versions of Clubhouse.
00:45:28 We looked at social networking.
00:45:29 We thought Friendster was it.
00:45:31 Like Friendster was so good,
00:45:33 nobody would be able to compete with that.
00:45:33 It was growing so quickly.
00:45:35 And then MySpace was a juggernaut
00:45:36 and they hit a hundred million in revenue
00:45:38 and a hundred million users.
00:45:39 And it was like, well, that’s game over.
00:45:40 And then Facebook and LinkedIn and Snapchat
00:45:43 and FriendFeed and countless others.
00:45:46 So there’s usually 20 people who will win in a category
00:45:50 and 80% of the category will be owned
00:45:53 by the top two or three players.
00:45:55 But will those players change, do you think?
00:45:57 What’s your sense of that?
00:45:58 Oh yeah, for sure.
00:45:59 I mean, if Facebook hadn’t bought Instagram,
00:46:01 it would be a company in decline right now.
00:46:02 People would be shorting the stock, right?
00:46:04 Facebook peaked and then was sort of heading down
00:46:07 and Instagram saved them and WhatsApp saved them.
00:46:09 So, you know, that’s another kind of weird moment
00:46:11 in history that they were able to accumulate
00:46:13 that much power and consolidate that much power.
00:46:15 Instagram should have never sold to them.
00:46:17 That should have gone public.
00:46:18 They had just raised money from Sequoia
00:46:20 and they had raised $50 million at a $500 million valuation
00:46:23 and they didn’t need to sell.
00:46:24 And that was a big mistake to sell.
00:46:27 They should have kept going
00:46:27 and they should have took on Facebook.
00:46:29 And if Instagram was a standalone company right now,
00:46:31 it’d be worth 500 million, 500 billion, yeah.
00:46:35 Do you think Facebook might buy Clubhouse has been?
00:46:38 Oh, they’ll probably copy it.
00:46:39 I mean, Zuckerberg has no moral compass
00:46:42 or ethics or anything.
00:46:43 I mean, he’s a marauder.
00:46:44 I mean, he basically copied Snapchat seven times.
00:46:48 Like he did poke and he just kept trying
00:46:50 and trying and trying.
00:46:51 Part of the reason why the WhatsApp founders
00:46:53 and the Instagram founders left
00:46:54 is they found Zuckerberg so distasteful
00:46:57 in terms of his ability to copy.
00:46:59 What do you think makes a great leader in that sense?
00:47:02 Because, okay, so when I look at Zuckerberg.
00:47:05 He’s a great executor.
00:47:06 Is he a great executor?
00:47:07 I don’t think he’s a great leader.
00:47:09 I was bullish on,
00:47:10 I was excited by Facebook in the very early days.
00:47:13 I thought it was an exciting opportunity to connect people
00:47:15 and stuff started going wrong in certain kinds of ways.
00:47:18 And again, maybe it’s our human nature,
00:47:22 but I attribute a lot of that to the leadership.
00:47:25 Absolutely.
00:47:26 I mean, the guy started it because he was unable
00:47:29 to ask girls if they were single and on a date.
00:47:31 I mean, that was his explicit.
00:47:32 That could be a good motivator.
00:47:33 That could be a good motivator.
00:47:33 Well, I mean, it does.
00:47:34 I mean, listen, the motivation of 18, 19 year old men
00:47:36 or his, yeah, pretty clear.
00:47:39 He was just trying to, he had no game.
00:47:41 He had no game and he needed to know who was single
00:47:44 so he could at least have a shot at getting a date.
00:47:48 It’s a little creepy.
00:47:48 A little creepy, yeah.
00:47:49 He, I think, was so obsessed with engagement and winning.
00:47:54 And he’s kind of like one of those friends you have
00:47:56 who’s just really good at playing a video game,
00:47:58 but maybe doesn’t see the bigger picture in life.
00:48:00 And I mean, there’s a reason why everybody who worked
00:48:02 for him hates him and doesn’t talk to him anymore
00:48:04 and then actively derides him.
00:48:06 Like so many, the people who sold WhatsApp to him
00:48:10 then backed other projects like Telegram
00:48:13 and said horrible things about him on the way out.
00:48:15 These are the people he made billionaires.
00:48:16 And they really don’t like him.
00:48:19 So I think there is something that he does
00:48:21 that does not breed loyalty,
00:48:23 but he’s very successful in his focus,
00:48:25 which is growth is all that matters.
00:48:27 He’s a marauder and taking friction out of products
00:48:30 and processes is the playbook of Silicon Valley
00:48:32 for the last decade or two.
00:48:34 So whatever the friction is.
00:48:35 It’s like poetry what you’re saying right now.
00:48:36 It’s like you’re speaking so fast
00:48:37 that I almost forget that you’re dropping bombs.
00:48:40 But so removing the, removing friction.
00:48:43 And you’re saying Facebook is exceptionally good
00:48:45 at removing friction. He was the best at it.
00:48:46 I mean, at Uber, they were like,
00:48:49 we’re gonna take out tipping.
00:48:50 We’re gonna take out the need for you
00:48:52 to take out your credit card and do payment.
00:48:54 It’s just gonna be in your wallet.
00:48:56 You got picked up, you leave, that’s it.
00:48:59 And I was like, we should have tipping.
00:49:00 And they’re like, it adds a step.
00:49:02 And we’re trying to have no steps.
00:49:03 You put your address in, you click the button
00:49:06 and you do nothing else.
00:49:07 And so we’ve been obsessed here in Silicon Valley
00:49:09 is how many clicks can we take out of the process?
00:49:12 I guess Amazon is incredible at that as well.
00:49:13 Absolutely, one click was the start of it.
00:49:15 And then you look at Clubhouse as an example,
00:49:17 you open Clubhouse and you see rooms,
00:49:19 you click on it, you’re listening.
00:49:21 So in one click, you’re listening.
00:49:22 And then in one click, if you raise your hand
00:49:25 or you get invited and you say, yes, you’re speaking.
00:49:27 So it’s two clicks to speak, one click to listen.
00:49:31 I mean, the only way they could make that app work
00:49:34 even faster is if you opened it up
00:49:35 and your microphone was turned on,
00:49:37 which is kind of scary, but that is the next evolution.
00:49:41 And what happens when you go that fast
00:49:43 is you get unintended consequences.
00:49:46 And so this is why Facebook has had more fines
00:49:48 than any company in the history of Silicon Valley,
00:49:49 just giant fines for doing stuff like this.
00:49:52 And one of them was, I don’t know if you remember
00:49:54 when they created groups
00:49:55 or if you have a group for your podcast,
00:49:57 but you can just add people to a group
00:49:59 without their permission.
00:50:01 And there was this famous case
00:50:02 when they first came out with it.
00:50:04 Somebody created a Nambla fake group,
00:50:07 National Man Love Boy Association or whatever,
00:50:10 like pedophilia association.
00:50:12 And they added Zuckerberg, Mike Arrington, myself,
00:50:14 and like 20 other famous people in Silicon Valley.
00:50:17 And I was like, and then somebody takes a screenshot of it
00:50:19 and they’re like, you’re in Nambla?
00:50:20 And I’m like, no.
00:50:22 Facebook, and then Zuckerberg’s response was,
00:50:25 well, if your friends put you in that Nambla group,
00:50:26 you should get new friends.
00:50:27 And it was like, you got put in there too.
00:50:29 And then the sad part about it was
00:50:33 there were a group of young men who were gay
00:50:35 and who were in college
00:50:36 and there was a gay choir in their college
00:50:38 and the person who was coordinating their Facebook group
00:50:41 added them.
00:50:42 So Zuckerberg, it wasn’t enough for Zuckerberg
00:50:44 to make it so anybody could add anybody to any group
00:50:48 because it will grow faster,
00:50:49 let alone you have to confirm
00:50:50 you wanna be added to the group.
00:50:52 What it also did was posted it on their walls
00:50:54 to increase engagement.
00:50:56 And what they inadvertently did was
00:50:58 they outed a bunch of 18, 19 year olds in college
00:51:01 to their families
00:51:03 because they joined the gay men’s choir at some college.
00:51:06 And this is the kind of way,
00:51:08 this is where Silicon Valley needs to check itself
00:51:11 and to do better is you have to really think,
00:51:14 well, there is my incentive to grow faster
00:51:16 and then there’s what’s right for society
00:51:18 and for the individual.
00:51:19 You gotta think it through, think it through.
00:51:21 It’s sometimes very difficult.
00:51:23 This is where vision is required
00:51:25 to anticipate the unintended consequences.
00:51:28 And it seems like Mark Zuckerberg is not very good at that.
00:51:33 You’ve talked to so many great leaders in this world,
00:51:37 privately and publicly.
00:51:39 What do you think makes a great leader
00:51:42 of these tech companies?
00:51:44 Do you have an example?
00:51:45 Is Elon to you a great leader?
00:51:47 He’s also a controversial one, right?
00:51:49 There’s a love and hate, a controversial sense
00:51:52 that there is, and I know a lot of people work with him,
00:51:56 for him, that there’s also a love, hate relationship.
00:52:00 The hate comes from the fact
00:52:01 that they get pushed extremely hard.
00:52:04 It’s a very competitive environment,
00:52:07 but it’s a positive one
00:52:10 because there’s a vision that’s underlying.
00:52:12 It’s similar to the Steve Jobs thing.
00:52:15 And it has to do with the,
00:52:17 back to our Michael Jordan discussion as well,
00:52:19 that there seems to be the demons involved in tension
00:52:23 and just anxiety, all those kinds of things.
00:52:27 If you wanna do great things,
00:52:30 there will be some suffering
00:52:32 and there’ll be some pain,
00:52:34 and it’s not easy if you wanna change the world.
00:52:37 And then some people have this expectation
00:52:39 that it’s going to be easy.
00:52:41 And what you’ll typically find for any great leader
00:52:44 who’s trying to do something super ambitious,
00:52:47 like if you wanna be like,
00:52:48 if you’re a rich guy and you start a restaurant
00:52:50 and you don’t care about making money
00:52:52 and people have made restaurants before,
00:52:54 you could be high fives
00:52:55 and everybody could love you or whatever.
00:52:56 But if you wanna change the world,
00:52:58 you wanna do something hard driving,
00:52:59 there’s gonna be sacrifice involved.
00:53:01 And so the problem is people are looking at something
00:53:05 that is an Olympic caliber sport
00:53:08 or a Navy SEALs like effort.
00:53:10 In other words, an effort that requires massive sacrifice.
00:53:13 We would not look at somebody who wins a gold medal,
00:53:16 like Michael Phelps and say,
00:53:17 oh my God, he had to get up at 4 a.m. every day
00:53:20 and he had to swim and he had to do an ice bath.
00:53:22 Oh my God, that poor guy, he suffered, he was tortured.
00:53:25 People were super mean to him,
00:53:27 they put him in an ice bath.
00:53:28 It was like, no, he wanted to be
00:53:30 the greatest swimmer of all time
00:53:32 and he knew what the sacrifice entailed.
00:53:34 And that what happens in work, in business,
00:53:37 is that people conflate like,
00:53:39 oh, well, I went to work to make a living to pay my bills
00:53:43 versus Michael Phelps approach to getting gold medals
00:53:47 or Michael Jordan or pick the person,
00:53:49 Elon or Jeff Bezos.
00:53:50 And when you look at the reviews of like a place like Amazon,
00:53:54 there was this incredible story in the New York Times
00:53:56 where people were, I don’t know if you remember it,
00:53:58 this is the worst place you could ever work, Amazon.
00:54:01 And we talked to 200 people and they all told us,
00:54:04 they all described for us in the New York Times,
00:54:07 a culture of cutthroatness and brutality
00:54:10 that has never before been seen.
00:54:11 And then you see all these people who work for Bezos
00:54:13 for 24 years from when they graduated
00:54:16 with their MBAs until today.
00:54:18 And they’ve never left the company
00:54:19 and they are ride or die forever.
00:54:23 And what you’re seeing there is,
00:54:26 there’s a mismatch of people going to work
00:54:29 in an extreme sport or an extreme endeavor
00:54:32 who should not do that.
00:54:34 There are people who should go out into the rice fields
00:54:37 and pick rice.
00:54:39 And then there’s another group of people who are samurai
00:54:42 and who wield a sword and who take on missions
00:54:46 that are dangerous.
00:54:48 But if you’re a rice picker and that’s what you do
00:54:50 and you feel safe, just getting a couple grains of rice,
00:54:53 put them in a basket, cleaning it and then whatever,
00:54:56 that’s valid work, no big deal.
00:54:58 I’m not deriding it, I’m sort of,
00:55:00 but that is one group.
00:55:02 And then there’s people who are samurai
00:55:03 and you cannot conflate the two,
00:55:05 you cannot compare the two.
00:55:07 And that’s what is happening right now in business.
00:55:10 Whenever you see these stories about,
00:55:12 this person at this company is like a tyrant
00:55:14 and they’re so horrible and they yelled at somebody.
00:55:17 Like if you’re in the field
00:55:19 and you’re taking the beach at Normandy and it’s D day
00:55:22 or you gotta take the hill
00:55:23 or you gotta whack Osama bin Laden
00:55:25 and you’re the Navy SEALs and like a rudder,
00:55:27 a rotor gets knocked off the back of the Black Hawk,
00:55:31 like this is serious shit.
00:55:32 Like don’t do it if you’re not serious.
00:55:35 And if you’re not serious about changing the world,
00:55:37 why would you go work for Bezos?
00:55:39 Why would you go work for Elon Musk?
00:55:40 Don’t do it, don’t go work there.
00:55:43 This is, let me just sit back
00:55:46 and enjoy the beauty of all of that.
00:55:49 That’s music to my ears,
00:55:50 but I’m not sure what to do with it
00:55:52 because it’s conflicting to a lot of the things I hear
00:55:57 from the way you’re supposed to kind of act.
00:56:00 And I think in order to do great things,
00:56:03 you have to, I always admired people
00:56:06 that lose their shit a little bit
00:56:08 because they’re so passionate.
00:56:10 And I apologize and all those kinds of things,
00:56:14 but like there’s a tension,
00:56:15 there’s a drama to the creative process
00:56:18 when especially in the early startup,
00:56:22 this is not like the work life balance idea
00:56:26 doesn’t even apply.
00:56:27 Work life balance, it’s ridiculous.
00:56:28 It’s a ridiculous concept.
00:56:30 Like the idea that there’s like work life balance
00:56:33 in a startup is ridiculous.
00:56:34 If you’re looking for work life balance,
00:56:36 do not go to a startup or any kind of ambitious company.
00:56:39 There is a series of places you can work in the world
00:56:43 where you do not need to do anything more
00:56:46 than what’s put in front of you.
00:56:48 And you just put the round peg in the round hole
00:56:52 and the square peg in the square hole and you go home.
00:56:55 And you get your little bits and grains of rice
00:57:00 and you go heat them up and eat them, that’s it.
00:57:03 And then there’s this other thing,
00:57:04 which is the extreme pursuit of changing the world
00:57:07 and sacrificing.
00:57:09 And we have a generation of people,
00:57:11 multi generations of people who are soft.
00:57:14 They’re just soft.
00:57:15 I mean, what is the big struggle we’ve had to deal with
00:57:17 in America in our lifetimes?
00:57:19 Like 9 11 and we didn’t have the Vietnam War
00:57:21 and then we had this like weird Iraq Wars
00:57:23 and Middle East Wars that were kind of like a small number
00:57:26 of people went and we sent drones.
00:57:27 Like we have not had to sacrifice.
00:57:30 Gen Xers, maybe the tail end of boomers
00:57:33 experienced the Vietnam War regrettably.
00:57:35 But we’ve had a couple of generations now, three I guess,
00:57:38 that just haven’t had to suffer.
00:57:40 And so we’re soft as Americans, we’re soft.
00:57:42 And then you look at people in China and we’re like,
00:57:44 oh my God, these poor Chinese people are living
00:57:46 in these tiny cramped apartments.
00:57:48 Like they were living in like essentially lean twos
00:57:52 in Northern China with no running water
00:57:56 or like one spigot of ice cold water for the entire village.
00:57:58 Like they’re thrilled to be joining the middle class.
00:58:01 Even if it’s the bottom of the middle class, right?
00:58:04 They’ve taken hundreds of millions of people in China
00:58:06 and moved them into the middle class.
00:58:08 And we’re like, oh my God, these people are suffering.
00:58:10 It’s like, they’re up to $4 an hour,
00:58:12 three or $4 an hour in the factories there.
00:58:14 And they were just two decades ago at,
00:58:17 I don’t know, it was probably 50 cents an hour,
00:58:20 something crazy like that.
00:58:22 And now they’ve improved the quality of life there so much,
00:58:26 just like America did 200 years ago or 100 years ago.
00:58:28 They’ve improved it so much in China
00:58:31 that now they’re getting outpriced for factories
00:58:33 from Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India,
00:58:36 and people are moving and people in China
00:58:39 are moving the factories out of China into other countries.
00:58:43 Because the Chinese are now outsourcing to Vietnam
00:58:46 and other countries.
00:58:46 So this is the way of the world.
00:58:48 People move up and they get a better lot in life
00:58:51 for their families.
00:58:51 And just in America, we’ve gotten soft.
00:58:53 And there’s a generation.
00:58:55 How do people die in America now?
00:58:57 Suicide, obesity, heart attacks, anxiety.
00:59:01 I mean, we’re suffering from things
00:59:04 that if you told people 100 years ago
00:59:05 that the number, the top ways Americans would die
00:59:09 would be overeating and suicide,
00:59:11 they’d be like, what?
00:59:13 You’re literally killing yourself
00:59:14 or eating yourself to death?
00:59:15 That’s what’s happening in America?
00:59:16 And when everybody, not everybody en masse,
00:59:20 there’s a large number of people
00:59:21 who have become softer and softer.
00:59:23 Capitalism creates an environment
00:59:25 where there is people that still step up amidst that
00:59:28 with a big dream and challenge the conventions.
00:59:31 And that human spirit just arise above that.
00:59:33 Elon’s example of that, Jeff Bezos’s example of that.
00:59:36 Countless, countless examples.
00:59:37 And they push the limits of those,
00:59:42 of human beings that are willing to step up.
00:59:45 And I think about sort of how to create a company
00:59:49 that amidst all of this softness
00:59:54 still creates a revolution.
00:59:56 It’s not, it doesn’t seem trivial.
00:59:58 It seems like how do you build a culture
01:00:00 that’s once healthy, but also unhealthy
01:00:06 in the way that an Olympic pursuit is.
01:00:09 It’s all top down.
01:00:10 Everybody just, you asked earlier what leadership was
01:00:12 and I never answered the question.
01:00:13 I think what leaders do is they set the example,
01:00:16 they set the bar.
01:00:17 And if you look at someone like Elon,
01:00:19 we’re personal friends for 20 years
01:00:22 and he is indefatigable.
01:00:24 Like, I mean, the guy has a stamina that is just phenomenal.
01:00:29 Like he does not get tired.
01:00:30 He works relentlessly
01:00:32 and he sets that standard for the rest of the team.
01:00:36 And I think Bezos is very sharp
01:00:38 and likes to debate stuff and is very,
01:00:41 and Jobs was just incredible at design
01:00:44 and figuring out how to bridge that gap.
01:00:46 So they just, leaders set the standard.
01:00:48 They set the standard.
01:00:50 And you know that your time is over as a leader
01:00:52 when you can’t set the standard.
01:00:53 And that’s when you have to pass the baton, right?
01:00:55 And Bezos did that.
01:00:57 And Bezos now is saying, you know what?
01:00:58 I’m 57, I’m the richest guy on the planet,
01:01:02 depending on the week.
01:01:03 And I would like to do some other challenges,
01:01:06 but I don’t wanna grind it out at Amazon
01:01:08 for another 25 years.
01:01:10 I wanna do other things.
01:01:11 And so he passed the baton.
01:01:13 And that’s the healthy thing to do in that regard.
01:01:15 I do think there is a time period
01:01:17 in which you can run that hot.
01:01:18 And then at a certain point you have to then change.
01:01:20 Just like an athlete might go to be a coach, right?
01:01:24 Or a commentator.
01:01:25 And so being an entrepreneur is brutal.
01:01:29 It’s seven days a week, 12 hours a day.
01:01:31 Anybody who says anything differently
01:01:33 is kidding themselves.
01:01:34 You’re gonna have to sacrifice.
01:01:36 And this competition, and America has to fight.
01:01:39 If America does not win capitalism, and China does,
01:01:43 it is literally the end of the human species.
01:01:47 It’s over for humanity.
01:01:49 Right now, everything has been going really well
01:01:52 in terms of the number of people living in poverty
01:01:54 is plummeting.
01:01:57 Lifespans have been rising.
01:01:59 Science is booming.
01:02:01 The economy is booming.
01:02:02 All these things are incredible.
01:02:02 The one thing that’s kind of stagnant right now
01:02:05 is the number of people living in democracy
01:02:07 versus under authoritarian rule.
01:02:09 It’s flat.
01:02:10 So when you look at all Steve Pinker’s charts,
01:02:11 and he’s really excited,
01:02:13 there’s one you’re gonna see that’s flat.
01:02:15 And I think we peaked with 53 or 54% of people
01:02:18 on the planet Earth being in a democracy,
01:02:20 and now it’s going below 50.
01:02:22 And it’s because some of the democratic Western countries
01:02:26 don’t have the population growth
01:02:27 of some of the communist and socialist countries
01:02:30 and authoritarian countries.
01:02:31 And we have to make sure that we win capitalism.
01:02:35 We must win economically.
01:02:38 That is the battlefield.
01:02:39 The battlefield is science, technology, and money,
01:02:41 and economy, finance.
01:02:43 That’s the battlefield.
01:02:44 China wins, authoritarians win.
01:02:47 And at any time, Xi Jinping can pull Jack Ma into a room
01:02:51 and say, it’s time for you to be reeducated.
01:02:54 Or they can put three or four million people,
01:02:56 Uighurs, into prison camps and say, you know what?
01:02:59 This religious thing,
01:03:00 that’s counter to what is productive for us.
01:03:03 Therefore, we’re gonna shave your heads
01:03:05 and we’re going to have you
01:03:06 literally pick cotton in the fields.
01:03:08 They have Uighurs with no sense of any kind of
01:03:12 arc of history in the fields picking cottons
01:03:15 as slaves in what can only be described
01:03:19 by every humanitarian organization as a concentration camp.
01:03:22 And every Jewish person I know takes great offense
01:03:24 when somebody uses the Holocaust as a metaphor,
01:03:27 except in the case of the Uighurs right now.
01:03:29 And every Jewish person I’ve talked to has said to me,
01:03:32 that is a Holocaust.
01:03:33 That is millions of people going to genocide
01:03:37 because of their religious beliefs.
01:03:38 And I’m an atheist,
01:03:40 but if people wanna believe a certain religion, fine.
01:03:43 But China’s approach is we need to win capitalism so bad,
01:03:47 we need to win on the global stage so bad,
01:03:49 we can’t have any of this religious stuff going on here.
01:03:52 That is a distraction from winning and beating America.
01:03:55 And then in America,
01:03:56 the people who are gonna make us win are the entrepreneurs
01:03:59 and the scientists and the technology
01:04:00 and our education system and finance.
01:04:02 And we’re vilifying those things.
01:04:04 It’s pretty dark.
01:04:05 It’s dark, but I still believe that the vilification
01:04:09 is just in the space of Twitter and the space of ideas.
01:04:11 I think that’s probably a good.
01:04:12 And entrepreneurs win out in the end.
01:04:14 They don’t listen to that.
01:04:15 I believe we’ll win.
01:04:16 And they’ll build, we’ll get the rocks up.
01:04:17 Some of them do actually in their darkest moments,
01:04:19 I can tell you that they turn off their Twitter accounts
01:04:21 and they, I’ve had to sit down
01:04:23 with a number of entrepreneurs and say, turn off Twitter.
01:04:26 This is not healthy for you.
01:04:28 This is not a healthy pursuit because,
01:04:30 don’t read the comments.
01:04:31 If you do, it’s like a full contact sport.
01:04:33 You should just take it as like professional wrestling
01:04:35 or something, but stay focused on building companies
01:04:38 and advancing the human species
01:04:41 through science and technology.
01:04:43 I mean.
01:04:43 As you’re describing, you’ve hosted this week in startups
01:04:47 for how many episodes?
01:04:49 11 years, almost 1200 now.
01:04:51 1200.
01:04:52 Yeah.
01:04:52 So you’ve talked to some of the great leaders
01:04:54 in business in general.
01:04:56 Is there a common thing that you see or?
01:05:01 Really, I’m in a relationship with their parents.
01:05:03 Like just find me a great entrepreneur.
01:05:06 I will, show me the trauma.
01:05:08 Their dad was like, you’re not good enough.
01:05:10 In the teenage years, is that truly, is there something?
01:05:14 There is definitely something.
01:05:15 Hardship at some point in their life kind of thing?
01:05:18 Yeah, I think so.
01:05:18 I mean, and there’s definitely something
01:05:20 with immigrant parents that is a bit of a stereotype
01:05:24 out here, but I’ve heard from many investors,
01:05:26 like that’s like their, oh, were your parents immigrants?
01:05:29 And did they beat into you that you have to succeed
01:05:32 and you feel the need to succeed
01:05:34 because they suffered to get you to this country?
01:05:35 Like there is an archetype there that I hear.
01:05:38 When I started investing, I heard from a lot of people.
01:05:40 It’s like, yeah, you wanna find those immigrant founders
01:05:43 who are coming out of Stanford
01:05:44 because they had to fight to get there
01:05:45 and their parents had to fight, right?
01:05:47 So it was like two huge fights and there’s so much at stake
01:05:50 as opposed to somebody who’s fifth generation
01:05:52 and like had everything handed to them
01:05:54 and they were legacy and got into schools for free.
01:05:55 But I think in general, the ability to get people
01:05:59 to join you on that journey is so critical.
01:06:03 So you have to be charismatic
01:06:05 and it doesn’t mean like you’re an extrovert.
01:06:07 There are introverts who are super charismatic
01:06:10 and there are soft spoken people.
01:06:11 They don’t have to be like super vivacious
01:06:14 or rambunctious people.
01:06:16 They could be just quiet assassins,
01:06:18 but you need to be able to get people
01:06:19 to come on the journey with you.
01:06:21 You have to be that storyteller
01:06:22 and you have to have that passion
01:06:23 and then you have to transfer that enthusiasm to investors,
01:06:26 the press, to customers, to all the stakeholders.
01:06:29 And if you’re enthusiastic about it and you’re engaged,
01:06:33 then it’s easier for people to come on that journey.
01:06:35 And that’s why people really start to think about,
01:06:37 well, what is the purpose of what I’m doing?
01:06:39 And it sounds corny and when I first heard that,
01:06:42 I was like, it’s kind of corny.
01:06:43 But then I read this book by,
01:06:44 I’ve got his name, Rick something.
01:06:47 He wrote the purpose driven church
01:06:49 and he had spoken at a TED or something
01:06:51 and everybody went crazy about it.
01:06:53 And he’s like, a church should have one purpose,
01:06:56 one single thing they do.
01:06:57 And like his church,
01:06:58 which was like one of these mega churches in San Diego,
01:07:01 just wanted to do education for this specific country.
01:07:05 And that’s all they did.
01:07:06 And they just, they benchmarked.
01:07:08 I think it’s very important to have a purpose and a mission,
01:07:10 not everything, but a specific purpose of some kind of joy
01:07:16 that you wanna put into the world.
01:07:17 You wanna solve some kind of big, hard problem.
01:07:20 And then everybody knows
01:07:22 why you’re coming to work every day.
01:07:23 And then for the founder,
01:07:24 when you dread going to work that day
01:07:27 and you don’t feel like solving that problem anymore,
01:07:29 that’s the tell.
01:07:31 And a lot of times I meet young founders,
01:07:32 I’m like, why are you doing this?
01:07:33 And they’re like, well, I was looking for an idea
01:07:36 and this is the one I came up with
01:07:37 because I think I’ll make a lot of money.
01:07:38 And it’s like, you’re gonna quit.
01:07:41 You’re gonna get to month nine or 10 of this
01:07:42 and you’re gonna run out of money
01:07:44 or like your CTO is gonna quit,
01:07:46 then your CFO is gonna quit
01:07:47 and you’re gonna lose your biggest customer
01:07:49 and you’re just gonna say, this is not worth it.
01:07:52 And if using Bezos or Elon as examples,
01:07:57 they just needed to see the world change
01:08:00 in very specific ways.
01:08:02 And Steve Jobs, they needed to see a change
01:08:04 and it doesn’t matter if they made money
01:08:06 or they were losing or winning,
01:08:07 they just went to work every day and they had to change it.
01:08:10 It’s almost like they didn’t have a choice.
01:08:12 No choice.
01:08:13 Elon makes it sound like his torture, his whole journey,
01:08:15 but he can’t help it.
01:08:16 Having been a witness to it, just as friends for that long,
01:08:22 I have never seen an entrepreneur suffer more than him.
01:08:25 And he’s been public about that, like you do not wanna be me.
01:08:28 He has suffered for those companies.
01:08:31 He has suffered to get them where they are.
01:08:32 It has not been easy.
01:08:34 Can you second analyze Elon in that aspect?
01:08:36 Like, is it just he can’t help it?
01:08:39 He must see the change that he hopes for in the world.
01:08:44 He’s just incredibly hardworking
01:08:46 and he’s very talented as well.
01:08:49 I don’t think people understand that.
01:08:51 He actually is a really brilliant man.
01:08:53 He actually is a really brilliant engineer.
01:08:56 At the end of the day, he actually knows what he’s doing
01:08:58 and he asked the right questions.
01:09:00 I mean, people were kind of aghast
01:09:02 that he was asking Vlad such good questions.
01:09:05 And they’re like, oh my God,
01:09:06 Elon’s the best journalist on the planet.
01:09:08 And it was like, anybody who knows Elon knows
01:09:11 he has great questions.
01:09:12 I mean, I used to have dinner in LA
01:09:15 and my book agent also was Sam Harris’s agent.
01:09:18 And Sam and I met through John Brockman
01:09:22 and we became friends because we lived near each other
01:09:24 and I was friends with Elon.
01:09:25 And then I used to invite them to both dinner in Brentwood
01:09:27 because one lived in Bel Air,
01:09:29 one lived in Santa Monica and I lived in Brentwood.
01:09:30 And we would go to this place,
01:09:31 Popone, this Italian restaurant.
01:09:33 And every Tuesday for years, we would just,
01:09:36 the three of us, every other Tuesday or so,
01:09:38 we’d have dinner and I’d sit there
01:09:40 and Sam wanted to know about AI
01:09:42 and Elon’s talking about artificial intelligence
01:09:43 because he’s on the board of DeepMind.
01:09:46 Elon wanted to know about atheism and meditation
01:09:49 and all this other stuff that Sam was an expert on.
01:09:52 I got to sit there and just listen to these two guys talk.
01:09:56 And they have both piercing intelligences,
01:09:58 but Elon, he goes straight to the gut,
01:10:02 like the questions that no engineer wants to hear
01:10:06 is just the basic stuff that,
01:10:08 it’s like, why the hell are you doing it this way
01:10:11 when the obvious solution is much easier or this or that?
01:10:15 Why haven’t you tried this?
01:10:17 He can figure things out.
01:10:18 I mean, he’s a problem solver.
01:10:19 I mean, and that’s another thing,
01:10:20 like I think the great entrepreneurs
01:10:22 can look at a problem with very fresh eyes,
01:10:24 like almost consistently.
01:10:25 And Bezos described that as day one thinking, right?
01:10:30 Like just pretend this is day one every day.
01:10:32 And then other people use the term first principles,
01:10:35 but it basically means like when you see a problem,
01:10:38 pause for a second and really think through
01:10:41 what is the best possible solution here?
01:10:43 What are some alternative solutions and get from everybody,
01:10:45 like how do we solve this problem?
01:10:47 What people do sometimes they get in a rut.
01:10:49 They just come to work and they just go through their email.
01:10:51 They do whatever they did the day before.
01:10:53 They don’t think, why are we doing this?
01:10:55 And is there a better way to do it?
01:10:56 Now you can get so obsessive about that
01:10:58 that you can over engineer stuff
01:11:01 and you can never actually ship a product.
01:11:03 So there have to be some pragmatism and some goals
01:11:06 and some dates associated with that.
01:11:08 But it is a very cool thing to really think like,
01:11:12 I wonder if we actually made the batteries ourselves,
01:11:14 what that would look like.
01:11:15 Or I wonder if we could get to two day shipping,
01:11:18 or what if we do same day shipping?
01:11:20 Like you need to have somebody who’s willing to say,
01:11:23 you know what, fuck it.
01:11:24 Let’s set a crazy audacious goal.
01:11:26 Two day shipping of any product
01:11:28 anywhere in the United States.
01:11:29 And once you throw the gauntlet down like that,
01:11:31 now everybody knows they’re rolling in the right direction.
01:11:34 Two day shipping, Amazon Prime.
01:11:36 And that’s what people didn’t realize about Amazon.
01:11:37 The business wasn’t shipping all those products.
01:11:40 It was getting you to sign up for Amazon Prime.
01:11:43 They have hundreds of millions of people doing Amazon Prime
01:11:46 for 10 bucks a month.
01:11:47 I think globally it’s probably cheaper.
01:11:48 But that was the driver of that business
01:11:51 was all of those people.
01:11:53 Cause they would, you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber?
01:11:55 Do you know how much you pay?
01:11:57 No.
01:11:58 Exactly.
01:11:58 It started at $50.
01:12:00 And I think they even had like 40, 50, $60
01:12:02 was like the testing in the early days.
01:12:03 And now it’s, I think $149, 12, $13 a month.
01:12:08 If you pay for the year,
01:12:09 I think it goes down to 10 bucks a month, 120.
01:12:11 And you’re like, wow.
01:12:12 And it’s like, yeah, you’re paying $13 a month
01:12:14 for the privilege of shopping at Amazon.
01:12:19 But you say it’s the greatest thing in the world
01:12:21 because anything I need,
01:12:23 if you forgot a microphone or a cable goes bad
01:12:25 or a camera goes bad, you get it here within a day or less.
01:12:28 It’s pretty amazing.
01:12:29 You’ve already been dropping bombs,
01:12:31 incredible advice on startups in general.
01:12:33 But let me maybe go straight in and ask,
01:12:38 is there advice for somebody that wants to go big
01:12:41 to build the big startup to help them succeed?
01:12:44 Yeah, it’s very similar to the advice I give to investors
01:12:47 because now I teach angel investing
01:12:49 because there’s so many people who want to invest.
01:12:51 And so I wrote a book on that angel
01:12:53 and then I do a course called Angel University
01:12:55 that I teach six times a year.
01:12:57 And then I have a syndicate called thesyndicate.com
01:12:59 where I invest in companies.
01:13:00 There’s 6,500 people who are members of that.
01:13:02 It’s the largest syndicate in the world.
01:13:04 In fact, the first deal we ever did was calm.com,
01:13:06 the meditation app.
01:13:07 We put $378,000 into it
01:13:09 when it was a $5 million product.
01:13:11 A $5 million company.
01:13:12 So we bought six or 7% of the company.
01:13:13 It’s now worth 2 billion.
01:13:15 So you can do the math on that.
01:13:15 We still own 5%.
01:13:16 What year was that?
01:13:18 Six years ago.
01:13:18 So probably seven, yeah, maybe 2015, 2014.
01:13:23 And nobody else would invest in calm.
01:13:25 But Sam Harris was the reason I did because I asked Sam,
01:13:29 tell me about meditation.
01:13:30 And he’s explaining it to me.
01:13:31 And I said, what about this?
01:13:32 You have to have like a mantra.
01:13:33 How does it work exactly?
01:13:34 I know positive.
01:13:35 He was like, well, you know, you should just go to UCLA
01:13:37 and talk to Diana Winston.
01:13:37 And like, there’s this whole project there.
01:13:39 And I’m like, UCLA does meditation?
01:13:42 He’s like, yeah, there’s a mindful institute.
01:13:43 They’re like teaching people to be Tahitian meditation.
01:13:46 And they’re doing PTSD and I’m doing brain scans.
01:13:49 And I was like, oh.
01:13:50 And then I talked to the UCLA people and they’re like,
01:13:53 it’s real, yeah, like we taught Phil Jackson
01:13:55 and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O Neal did,
01:13:59 you know, that’s how they won their championships.
01:14:01 They meditated.
01:14:02 And I was like, hmm, if UCLA is doing it,
01:14:05 Sam says it’s cool.
01:14:06 Well, fuck it, I’ll put money into that.
01:14:08 And that’s the second biggest investment
01:14:10 in my career after Uber.
01:14:11 And it will in all likelihood become the biggest.
01:14:13 I mean, it’s between Uber, Robinhood and Calm.
01:14:18 And long story short,
01:14:19 when I’m teaching people to angel invest,
01:14:20 there’s really two things that you cannot fake.
01:14:23 One is a product that is built really well.
01:14:26 So if you look at Calm, Robinhood, Uber, Tesla, Amazon,
01:14:30 these products are transcendent.
01:14:33 They’re well constructed.
01:14:34 There’s craftsmanship to them.
01:14:35 They’re great products.
01:14:37 So you’re saying not fundamentally like the idea,
01:14:39 but the execution of the actual craftsmanship
01:14:41 of the construction.
01:14:42 The actual product is amazing.
01:14:45 Then there’s customers.
01:14:48 And that every business has ultimately a customer.
01:14:51 And that customer, if they are in fact delighted
01:14:54 by that product, that’s the magic.
01:14:57 Because you need a team to build the product.
01:15:02 And then you need customers to use the product.
01:15:05 And really those three vectors are undeniable.
01:15:08 Now, you can have great teams that build a bad product,
01:15:12 doesn’t happen too often.
01:15:14 Or you can have customers who don’t like the product,
01:15:16 but generally speaking,
01:15:18 a great team will build a great product
01:15:20 or a good product that iterate,
01:15:22 and then eventually delight customers.
01:15:25 And so most people say the team is the most important,
01:15:28 but there’s a lot of smart people out there.
01:15:32 And let’s assume that you can raise money for your idea,
01:15:36 or you have money,
01:15:37 or you can just convince people to do it for free.
01:15:39 If you make a great product and it connects with users,
01:15:41 that’s the magic.
01:15:42 You look at Clubhouse,
01:15:43 it’s actually a really well designed product.
01:15:45 And that product is connecting with customers.
01:15:47 And if you were to talk to the customers
01:15:49 or look at the product,
01:15:50 you would see a well constructed product
01:15:51 and a delighted customer.
01:15:53 And you can tell the delighted customer
01:15:54 by just the amount of time they use it.
01:15:56 That’s called engagement.
01:15:58 It’s the fancy word for how much they use it.
01:16:00 And Snapchat, when that was going around
01:16:02 and they were trying to raise money,
01:16:04 they had a fraction of the number of users,
01:16:07 but the top maybe third were opening the app every hour.
01:16:12 And nobody had ever seen that before.
01:16:14 People were using Facebook a couple of times a day,
01:16:17 the top users,
01:16:18 but nobody had ever seen people using it every day
01:16:22 for a hundred days in a row, every hour.
01:16:25 And I was like, what’s going on here?
01:16:26 It’s like, oh, the ephemeral messaging,
01:16:28 and then the streaks.
01:16:30 They had created these streaks between people
01:16:31 where every day and then people would be like on vacation,
01:16:34 like, I just have to open my streak
01:16:35 and keep my streak with Lex
01:16:36 that we chatted every day going.
01:16:38 And so they had this like addictive nature to it.
01:16:40 And that’s why Clubhouse was able
01:16:41 to garner so much investment
01:16:43 is the number of hours people were using it every month
01:16:46 was just unbelievably off the charts.
01:16:49 Some of that is execution,
01:16:50 but some of it is the weird magic of the…
01:16:53 Product market fit.
01:16:54 Yeah, so there’s something, I mean, Clubhouse,
01:16:57 there’s a, it’s still a mystery to me
01:16:59 because I also use Discord voice.
01:17:01 There’s an intimacy to voice.
01:17:03 Oh, for sure.
01:17:04 Well, you have people’s, yeah, tent.
01:17:06 It’s, well, but like the video gets in the way actually,
01:17:10 in a weird way.
01:17:11 There’s a privacy when you just use voice.
01:17:14 People are not taking showers now, Lex.
01:17:15 I mean, we’re in a pandemic and people just roll out of bed.
01:17:18 And the hair thing, nobody’s getting haircuts.
01:17:20 Nobody’s hair is good, nobody’s getting haircuts.
01:17:22 People are wearing gym clothes.
01:17:24 I mean, Zoom is just horrific to be on Zoom
01:17:27 for five hours a day.
01:17:28 It is exhausting.
01:17:29 Well, it does make me wonder what,
01:17:32 once we emerge from the pandemic,
01:17:33 whether a product market fit,
01:17:36 how that evolves with Clubhouse
01:17:38 and all those kinds of things.
01:17:39 Yeah, I know Clubhouse is a beneficiary
01:17:41 of the pandemic for sure.
01:17:42 When do you think the pandemic,
01:17:43 when do you think deaths will be under,
01:17:47 let’s say 200 a day and we’ll have 200 million people
01:17:50 on the other side of this?
01:17:51 Because that’s kind of what it takes, right?
01:17:52 You gotta get to 150, 200 million people
01:17:54 on the other side in America?
01:17:55 I haven’t, you know,
01:17:57 I personally stopped deeply thinking about this
01:18:00 because I’ve been frustrated for so long that.
01:18:03 You checked out.
01:18:04 I almost checked out
01:18:05 because it psychologically allows me to carry on
01:18:10 because I thought for many months now
01:18:14 that testing needs to be done at scale.
01:18:16 And it still hasn’t gotten done.
01:18:17 It hasn’t been.
01:18:18 It’s so ridiculous.
01:18:19 We gave up basically on testing.
01:18:20 We gave up.
01:18:21 Because we’re, and we’re all sitting there
01:18:23 waiting for vaccine to come along.
01:18:25 And the distribution of the vaccine is not, you know,
01:18:29 it’s struggling from the same kind of things
01:18:31 as the testing.
01:18:32 It’s gonna take quite a bit of time.
01:18:33 So it does, if everything goes great,
01:18:36 meaning there’s not a second strand of the virus
01:18:39 that’s going to create a second major wave
01:18:44 that I am cynical enough to think
01:18:46 that it won’t be until mid summer
01:18:49 that we start opening back up.
01:18:51 Yeah, I think it’s gonna be May, June.
01:18:53 I’m a little bit earlier than you.
01:18:54 I’ve been tracking it.
01:18:55 There are 1.5 million shots in arms a day.
01:18:57 I think this vaccine’s been undersold.
01:19:00 I mean, it’s a miracle.
01:19:00 Not one person who was in the trials died, who took it,
01:19:04 and only one went to the hospital
01:19:05 and they weren’t even put on a ventilator.
01:19:07 So, and the hospitalizations are plummeting
01:19:10 and we’re at 10% now in the United States.
01:19:12 At the pace, we’re going at 1.5 a day.
01:19:14 I think when the Johnson & Johnson one comes out next month,
01:19:16 it’ll be 3 million a day maybe, two and a half.
01:19:19 And we already have 100 million people
01:19:21 who’ve likely had it.
01:19:22 So I’ve been doing the math.
01:19:22 I think we’re like 60 days away, February, March.
01:19:26 Yeah, sometime in April, I think.
01:19:28 Anybody’s gonna be able to get a shot
01:19:29 and the number of deaths is gonna go below 200 a day.
01:19:33 And once that happens,
01:19:34 I think people have had enough of this.
01:19:36 They’re just gonna go YOLO.
01:19:38 But see, the crucial piece for me
01:19:41 that I’ve been focusing on is the social media aspect
01:19:44 of how the, it’s not just about the reality of deaths.
01:19:49 It’s about the state of the collective intelligence
01:19:53 of the human species,
01:19:54 which is determined by our communication on social media.
01:19:58 So yeah, we can be collectively afraid,
01:20:02 the fear can spread, or it could be YOLO can spread,
01:20:05 or it could be like all different kinds of misinformation.
01:20:10 And of course, during the election year,
01:20:12 the politics influences our perception of what is true
01:20:16 and not, but having real rigorous nuanced conversation
01:20:21 about this kind of stuff is the way out of this.
01:20:25 And that’s where social media really comes in
01:20:27 because social media drives division,
01:20:30 where people form tribes and so on.
01:20:32 And it feels like it’s honestly a technology problem.
01:20:37 People say it’s a human problem,
01:20:39 but it just feels like, I believe humans are good.
01:20:42 Technology can enable them to be thoughtful.
01:20:44 We talked earlier about the magic of Silicon Valley
01:20:49 and then maybe going too far
01:20:51 with the Facebook groups example,
01:20:53 where you take out all that friction.
01:20:55 What happened was we used to have something called Rchron,
01:20:59 reverse chronological order.
01:21:01 That’s how you consume to feed.
01:21:03 So any kind of social feed,
01:21:04 like Twitter was in reverse chronological order.
01:21:06 The newest thing was up top
01:21:07 and you would just work your way backwards.
01:21:09 And so it gave this like really fresh feeling.
01:21:12 And then a guy named Dave Moran
01:21:13 and the team over at Facebook realized,
01:21:16 you know, there are some things
01:21:18 that got a lot of attention two hours ago.
01:21:21 And the stuff since then has not been as important.
01:21:23 But if you miss that, there was a really good tweet
01:21:25 where there was a really good update.
01:21:27 Like somebody had a baby.
01:21:30 Can we get the baby one at the top?
01:21:32 And it was like, well, how would we do that?
01:21:34 How would we know that that’s the important one?
01:21:35 It’s like, well, let’s put a like button on it
01:21:38 and let’s see how many comments there are.
01:21:40 So if it gets a lot of likes or comments or retweets,
01:21:42 let’s show those first
01:21:44 and then we’ll kind of mix in the most recent stuff.
01:21:47 And so when you’re on Twitter,
01:21:48 and then when Facebook did that,
01:21:50 Facebook became so addicting
01:21:52 because Facebook was on,
01:21:54 what has got the most engagement?
01:21:55 Put that first.
01:21:56 So every time you opened up Facebook,
01:21:58 you get the dopamine hit.
01:22:00 And then what happens when you see the Bar Mitzvah photo
01:22:02 or, you know, the enraging story
01:22:06 about some injustice in the world?
01:22:07 You retweet it, you write a comment,
01:22:09 you share it on your wall.
01:22:11 And thus this addiction to the outrageous,
01:22:15 the outlandish, the inspiring occurred.
01:22:18 And it used to be like inspiring stuff,
01:22:20 puppies or some heartwarming story.
01:22:24 And then it got dark.
01:22:25 And then people started to realize,
01:22:27 if I wanna show up on the top of my friend’s feeds,
01:22:30 if I say something controversial or I’m outraged,
01:22:33 I get to the top.
01:22:34 And then that’s when outrage culture came in.
01:22:36 And then that’s when cancel culture came in.
01:22:38 Everybody started to realize,
01:22:39 if I try to cancel that person for being a racist
01:22:42 or a sexist or a horrible human being
01:22:45 or whatever they did that’s wrong,
01:22:47 I get to the top of the feed.
01:22:49 And we all collectively started playing
01:22:51 a very weird video game,
01:22:52 which is how outraged can we all be?
01:22:55 And to get to the top of the list.
01:22:56 And then of course, with Trump, he realized it.
01:22:59 And he’s like, okay, yeah,
01:23:00 I’m just gonna make fun of a celebrity
01:23:01 and I get more retweets.
01:23:03 Okay, I’m gonna make fun of Rosie O’Donnell
01:23:05 for being overweight or something.
01:23:06 And he just starts attacking people.
01:23:08 And people are like, oh my God, what did he say?
01:23:10 And he copied that from Howard Stern.
01:23:12 Cause he was in New York and he used to be on Howard Stern.
01:23:14 Howard Stern took over all the dialogue
01:23:16 in the eighties and nineties because he was outrageous.
01:23:18 And then Trump did that.
01:23:19 And then social media incorporated that
01:23:22 into the operating system.
01:23:23 It became the actual device of social media
01:23:26 was the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
01:23:28 We’ve got something incredible for you.
01:23:29 Everybody salivates like Pavlov’s dog.
01:23:32 Oh my God, I can be outraged.
01:23:34 That’s what’s gotta be undone.
01:23:36 And the only way for that to be undone
01:23:37 is these things can’t be billions of people
01:23:39 where the most outrageous thing
01:23:42 that happened in the world today
01:23:44 in the last five minutes is now in front of you.
01:23:47 And that’s why people have anxiety.
01:23:48 They don’t sleep and they doom scroll all night.
01:23:51 It’s because the human mind was not meant to process
01:23:54 this much suffering, pain, anger.
01:23:56 And that’s why we have all this mental health issues.
01:23:59 Also, young girls or even adults watching other people
01:24:03 post their private jets and their vacations
01:24:06 and YOLO adventures on their Instagram
01:24:10 to the point at which young people are now faking
01:24:13 being on private jets to put on their Instagram
01:24:17 and creating this crazy FOMO around their Instagrams.
01:24:23 We wonder why people are unhappy.
01:24:25 If you think everybody’s on a private jet
01:24:27 going to some Michelin star restaurant
01:24:29 or whatever the coolest thing in the world is today,
01:24:32 going to the Grammys, going to whatever,
01:24:34 Coachella, Burning Man.
01:24:36 You’re like, ah, but I’m home.
01:24:39 I’m in my house and I’m not at Burning Man.
01:24:43 Getting inadequate.
01:24:44 Exactly.
01:24:45 So this whole system is creating
01:24:47 the wrong set of incentives.
01:24:48 I tend to believe it’s possible
01:24:50 to still have extremely high engagement
01:24:52 and create a successful profitable business
01:24:55 while encouraging personal growth,
01:24:58 like encouraging people to be the best version of themselves.
01:25:01 I just think we haven’t,
01:25:02 we got the first generation of social networks.
01:25:05 I think a new generation needs to be built.
01:25:07 Absolutely.
01:25:08 Is that your plan for a business?
01:25:09 Well, I have a longer term plan in terms of ambition,
01:25:13 which is I believe in being able to have deep connection
01:25:19 between human and AI systems, like partners, friends.
01:25:23 There is a connection to there with social media.
01:25:26 I do think AI has a strong role to play in representing us,
01:25:31 in guiding us in how we consume social media.
01:25:37 So this algorithm that controls the feed for Facebook
01:25:41 is a somewhat centralized algorithm,
01:25:43 but instead to give more power to the people,
01:25:47 individuals to where each one of us have our own algorithm.
01:25:50 Bring your own algorithm.
01:25:51 Bring your own algorithm.
01:25:52 BYOA.
01:25:52 BYOA, I like it.
01:25:54 Instead of bringing your own alcohol,
01:25:55 bring your own algorithm.
01:25:57 Well, I mean, if you thought about it,
01:25:58 if we came and said, when I look at my Twitter feed,
01:26:02 I would like to see the people with,
01:26:04 who are the most helpful in the world,
01:26:06 generous, kind, intelligent, considered,
01:26:11 commenting on things that I don’t already know about
01:26:15 because I want to open my worldview.
01:26:17 That could be a beautiful thing for society.
01:26:19 And actually Jack was talking about potentially on Twitter,
01:26:22 letting people bring their own algorithms
01:26:24 and sort their feeds themselves.
01:26:26 This would be a wonderful thing.
01:26:27 I think it’s one of the reasons Clubhouse has resonated
01:26:30 is it’s such a diverse group of people
01:26:32 that I’ve been able to drop in on conversations
01:26:35 with people who are nothing like me
01:26:37 and listen in and hear conversations
01:26:40 that I wouldn’t normally be privy to.
01:26:42 And everybody’s like, oh, come join as a speaker.
01:26:45 I want to do a room with you.
01:26:46 I get asked every day, can we do a room?
01:26:47 Can we do a room?
01:26:48 Ask an angel investor, talk about startups.
01:26:50 And I’m like, my usage of Clubhouse
01:26:54 is going on my Peloton treadmill,
01:26:56 putting Clubhouse on, picking a room and just listening.
01:26:59 It’s so delightful for me as a podcaster
01:27:02 where my job is to talk, to sit back
01:27:05 and just put in a couple of miles and play chess
01:27:08 and listen to a Clubhouse discussion
01:27:10 that is about relationships or some fashion or hip hop
01:27:16 or whatever it is that I’m not part of.
01:27:17 I just sit there and I listen and you learn.
01:27:20 It’s like such a delightful thing.
01:27:21 I always think about these kids who go to college
01:27:23 and I’ve always been so jealous of these Ivy League kids.
01:27:25 They go and they’re like, oh, I got to go to class.
01:27:26 And I’m like, I would just love to sit there
01:27:29 and listen to Professor Lex talk.
01:27:33 What a privilege to sit there
01:27:34 and let somebody else drive and talk and listen and learn.
01:27:38 Yeah, that’s the beauty of podcasting.
01:27:40 But of course, Clubhouse creates a whole nother experience
01:27:42 where it’s conversations, it’s different.
01:27:44 I think it’s going to be the in between.
01:27:45 I like it as a, you release your podcast.
01:27:48 Like you and I are going to release this podcast, right?
01:27:51 And then at some point I’ll have you on my pod
01:27:52 when you want your startup.
01:27:53 And then at some point somebody is going to be like,
01:27:56 you and I will run into, and I ran into you.
01:27:58 I saw you were on Clubhouse the other night
01:28:00 and I was busy, but I was almost going to click on you
01:28:03 and say, let’s start a room together.
01:28:05 But you and I will start a room together
01:28:06 with Eric Weinstein or somebody
01:28:07 or Sam Harris will jump in or Elon
01:28:09 and we’ll have a different experience,
01:28:10 which would just shoot the shit.
01:28:12 And it’ll act as like a fabric
01:28:15 and a little filler between the tent pole podcasts, right?
01:28:19 Like you and Eric, you’ve done three, I think, with Eric.
01:28:22 Yeah, it was your four, I haven’t released the fourth yet.
01:28:24 Oh, okay, so I watched all three
01:28:26 because I really thought your you way
01:28:28 and him like giving you advice
01:28:30 is very interesting dynamic.
01:28:32 I thought it was very interesting dynamic.
01:28:34 And I find him like a fascinating cat.
01:28:36 We know everybody in common, except we’ve never met.
01:28:39 It’s very weird because you think about the social graph
01:28:41 in the real world.
01:28:42 This is why I think augmented reality
01:28:44 is going to be such an amazing product.
01:28:48 I just have one killer feature I want
01:28:50 for augmented reality, we wear our glasses.
01:28:54 And when I look at you above your head,
01:28:57 I see the relationships we have
01:28:59 and the things we’ve done together, right?
01:29:01 So I see, oh, you both know Sam Harris
01:29:04 or you had Elon on the podcast on this date
01:29:06 or you and I were both at Burning Man in 2016.
01:29:11 So it’s the most meaningful element
01:29:12 of our connection in the network, yeah.
01:29:14 And then, cause we would discover that through small talk,
01:29:16 but imagine you’re like at a party and you look
01:29:19 and it just, people glow and you just see a glow
01:29:23 around a person and like green means
01:29:25 you have some financial relationship.
01:29:27 Blue means you have some friendship one
01:29:29 or yellow means you have friendship one.
01:29:30 Blue means you know nothing about each other.
01:29:33 You have no connections.
01:29:34 You’re like, wow, these blue people have no connection to.
01:29:37 These people, that one’s glowing red.
01:29:38 We know seven or more people in common.
01:29:41 And those are the seven people.
01:29:42 Oh, we should go talk about how we know each other.
01:29:45 That could, and that sort of happened with Facebook member
01:29:47 or MySpace where you were like, oh, you know that person,
01:29:49 friend of a friend.
01:29:50 But that’s what is going to be AR is like,
01:29:53 this is why I think if Apple figures out AR or Snapchat
01:29:57 and they just have those glasses, you know,
01:29:59 forget about VR, it’s just nauseating and whatever,
01:30:02 but AR where you put the glasses on,
01:30:04 you see the real world, but you augment it.
01:30:06 You make a, just like you were saying,
01:30:08 you make a frictionless, a very low friction
01:30:12 to make a deep human connection
01:30:13 because you have all the basic elements there already.
01:30:17 Now think about the unintended consequences
01:30:18 of what I just described.
01:30:20 It could get creepy and weird.
01:30:21 The privacy thing.
01:30:23 I mean, people will, here’s the thing,
01:30:25 people, your privacy is an illusion.
01:30:28 Like all this information is there.
01:30:30 And then people are more than willing to give up privacy
01:30:35 in exchange for some value, you know, it’s a value trade.
01:30:39 And giving, if my Tesla,
01:30:43 when I’m driving in the direction of my house,
01:30:45 just starts the navigation and saves me three clicks
01:30:47 and that friction’s gone,
01:30:49 I’m willing to give Tesla my location
01:30:51 and my home address, right?
01:30:53 I’m not willing to give Zuckerberg anything
01:30:55 because I don’t trust him, but you get the idea.
01:30:56 I mean, it will be that way with like DNA and other things
01:30:59 at some point we’ll just be like, yeah, just take my DNA.
01:31:01 Like I don’t, yeah, sure.
01:31:02 People can look and see that I’m a mental midget
01:31:05 and my IQ is like lower than,
01:31:06 I don’t want to bring the bell curve up or whatever,
01:31:08 but you could figure out,
01:31:10 like if we all put our DNA in a sequence online
01:31:13 and be like, oh yeah, you know, Lex has got 10 more IQ points
01:31:17 than Jcal and, you know, Sam’s got 10 more than Lex.
01:31:20 And all of a sudden people are like all bed out of shape
01:31:22 about it, but what if they, we did that?
01:31:23 And they were like, and by the way, you also,
01:31:25 all three of you are going to get Parkinson’s
01:31:27 unless you do X, Y, and Z,
01:31:29 unless you eat more blueberries or whatever we figure out.
01:31:31 They’re going to accept it pretty quickly.
01:31:33 Yeah, that’s brave new world.
01:31:35 Brave new world.
01:31:36 I have to ask you, you’re, just like you were saying,
01:31:39 you’re one of the world experts in investing
01:31:42 and in startups, yeah, VC and so on.
01:31:47 From the perspective of the startup,
01:31:50 I was always kind of skeptical of raising money.
01:31:54 It feels like people do it too quickly, too easily,
01:31:57 but I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.
01:32:00 When is the, when should a startup raise money?
01:32:04 And from the perspective of the investor,
01:32:07 when should the investor invest in a startup?
01:32:10 Like, is there a timing thing here?
01:32:12 Is there a, what, yeah, what?
01:32:14 It’s a very important question
01:32:16 because the venture capital community
01:32:19 is only going to fund, you know, sub 1% of enterprises
01:32:24 started in the United States every year,
01:32:26 like maybe 10 basis points of them, like one in a thousand.
01:32:29 And the reason is it’s jet fuel.
01:32:33 You only want to take that money
01:32:35 if you really want to build something big
01:32:36 and you want to build it fast.
01:32:38 And when you put jet fuel behind a startup,
01:32:42 as we’ve seen with other rockets,
01:32:43 things can blow up and people can die.
01:32:45 You know, it’s not people literally dying,
01:32:47 but the business can go up in smoke, right?
01:32:49 Like rockets get blown up all the time at SpaceX
01:32:52 as part of their ambitious plans.
01:32:54 And startups, seven out of 10 startups we invest in,
01:32:57 go to zero.
01:32:58 Now, if you were to start the business
01:33:00 and only build it off customer revenue
01:33:01 and use your own money and go nice and slow
01:33:03 and grow 10% a year,
01:33:05 the chances of you blowing up the rocket are very low
01:33:09 because you’re riding a bicycle.
01:33:12 You can go a little faster,
01:33:13 but the bicycle can only go so fast.
01:33:15 And once you start taking that money,
01:33:18 the way venture capital is constructed
01:33:21 as in the mix of like MIT or Harvard’s endowments is,
01:33:28 you know, we’re going to put some money into safe things
01:33:31 and then we’re going to have
01:33:32 these really binary things over here.
01:33:33 And they probably put 5% in venture capital traditionally.
01:33:38 It’s grown to 20% just as a function
01:33:40 of how successful it’s been.
01:33:42 So, you know, the Harvards of the world and MIT
01:33:44 is probably want five or 10% in venture,
01:33:48 but it’s grown to 25% because, you know,
01:33:50 companies like Airbnb and Uber have grown so big and Tesla.
01:33:53 But the goal is in these venture funds,
01:33:56 we’re going to invest in 30 names
01:33:58 and one or two of them are going to return three times
01:34:01 the capital we’ve deployed.
01:34:03 So it’s a $300 million fund and there’s 30 names
01:34:05 and they each got 10 million.
01:34:06 That means one of the 10 million
01:34:08 is going to return the fund plus.
01:34:11 So that means it has to grow 30X and then 60X
01:34:15 to double the fund.
01:34:17 And you’re really supposed to be doing
01:34:18 three times cash on cash.
01:34:19 So that $300 million funds,
01:34:21 the expectation is in 10 years to return 900 million,
01:34:25 triple the person’s money as opposed to the stock market,
01:34:27 which doubles your money in the same period.
01:34:29 So you’re supposed to do 25% annualized returns
01:34:32 in order to triple the money.
01:34:35 And maybe I have an outlying chance
01:34:36 of four or five times the money,
01:34:38 which does happen sometimes when you have an outlier
01:34:39 in your portfolio like Uber or Facebook was.
01:34:42 And what that means is the venture capitalist behavior
01:34:46 in the game they’re playing is different
01:34:47 than you as the founder.
01:34:48 You as the founder, you may really care about this
01:34:51 and it dying really matters to you.
01:34:53 And then you got a venture capitalist who’s like,
01:34:55 we’re betting on 30 names,
01:34:56 we need two of them to hit it out of the park, maybe three,
01:34:59 and nothing else is meaningful.
01:35:01 So now you start thinking about the game theory there.
01:35:05 You’re dealing with money that is coming in
01:35:09 that only cares about you going 100X.
01:35:13 It’s a whole different ball game.
01:35:17 Whereas if you build off revenue, you don’t have to do that.
01:35:19 And if you look at a company like com.com,
01:35:20 we invested at 5 million, the next round they did was 250.
01:35:23 They were so capital efficient
01:35:25 that they grew from $10,000 a month in revenue
01:35:27 to millions of dollars a month in revenue
01:35:30 over those four years since we invested
01:35:32 and they didn’t raise money in between.
01:35:34 It was unbelievable.
01:35:35 And I’ve only seen this happen three or four times.
01:35:37 So it doesn’t happen all this capital efficient meaning
01:35:40 based on customer revenue alone
01:35:43 plus some small amount of fundraising, you’re able to go.
01:35:47 Like how hard is it to do that?
01:35:49 It takes extreme product market fit.
01:35:52 You have to have a great price for your product
01:35:54 that has a great margin.
01:35:56 Yeah, and if you’re doing something in hardware,
01:35:59 it’s probably impossible
01:36:00 because it’s super capital intensive.
01:36:01 So it’s probably gotta be a software business.
01:36:03 Hardware businesses take a lot more.
01:36:05 Do venture capitals get in the way at all of the business
01:36:08 or is it possible to get out of the way?
01:36:11 Yeah, if you get young venture capitalists
01:36:13 who are starting their career,
01:36:14 they’re very nervous and scared
01:36:16 because they’re putting all these bets.
01:36:18 And then there’s a very weird thing that happens.
01:36:21 The bad news comes first.
01:36:23 So companies that don’t work out
01:36:26 go out of business immediately.
01:36:28 So if it’s not gonna be Com or Robinhood or Uber,
01:36:32 you know you have one of those great successes
01:36:35 somewhere in your five, six, seven, eight as an investor.
01:36:38 What is the first five years like?
01:36:40 First five years, you feel like an idiot.
01:36:42 Let’s say you make these 10 bets.
01:36:47 In year two, two or three of them come back
01:36:49 and they don’t have product market fit
01:36:50 and they’re out of money.
01:36:51 And they say, can we have more money?
01:36:52 You say, no, we have to go get it from somebody else
01:36:54 because you have to prove
01:36:55 that there’s still a market for it.
01:36:56 We may keep our pro rata.
01:36:58 We may put a little bit in
01:36:59 to maintain our percentage ownership,
01:37:00 but we’re not going to give you another big chunk of money.
01:37:04 And that company dies.
01:37:06 So now you’ve got 10 million, poof, up in smoke.
01:37:08 Boom, 10 million up in smoke.
01:37:10 So this is called the J curve
01:37:11 where your performance goes down.
01:37:14 And then it’s only in years four or five and six
01:37:16 it starts going up.
01:37:17 And what you’re seeing right now is the people
01:37:18 who started like I did in 2000,
01:37:21 you know, just 11, 12 years ago.
01:37:22 In 2009, I started investing.
01:37:24 We all look like geniuses.
01:37:26 Why?
01:37:27 We’re at the end of the cycle.
01:37:29 We invested after when the stock market was on the floor
01:37:32 after the financial crisis.
01:37:34 And it’s gone straight up since.
01:37:35 So everybody looked,
01:37:36 there’s a couple of little blips in there,
01:37:37 but generally speaking,
01:37:38 there hasn’t been like a major crash
01:37:40 with the exception of the pandemic crash,
01:37:41 but that bounced right back.
01:37:42 And so, you know, it takes a decade to figure out
01:37:45 if you’re good at it.
01:37:47 And then if the market crashes again,
01:37:48 everybody feels like an idiot again,
01:37:49 the cycle starts again.
01:37:50 So you are now as a founder,
01:37:53 you are now inserting yourself into that casino.
01:37:56 And now you’ve got all these other forces
01:37:58 pushing and pulling.
01:37:59 And you’re growing,
01:38:00 let’s say your company was growing 50%.
01:38:03 You feel like, wow, I’m successful.
01:38:04 I made a million dollars last year.
01:38:05 Now I’m doing a million and a half.
01:38:07 And the first thing a VC is gonna say to you is,
01:38:09 how do we triple?
01:38:10 We’re growing too slow.
01:38:12 See, but that’s, like you said,
01:38:13 that beautifully is a rocket fuel.
01:38:15 It’s, in a sense, it’s a kind of motivation.
01:38:19 It’s a drive.
01:38:19 I mean, it’s a positive.
01:38:21 So if you want that.
01:38:22 Yes, if you want that.
01:38:23 If you want that,
01:38:24 if you want to go to Navy SEAL school,
01:38:27 you’re gonna be in pain
01:38:28 and they’re gonna put that hose in your face
01:38:29 while you’re underwater
01:38:30 with your hands tied behind your back in the pool
01:38:32 and you’re gonna be choking.
01:38:34 And they may have to do CPR on you.
01:38:35 And like every couple of years, tragically,
01:38:38 somebody dies in Navy SEAL school.
01:38:40 Yeah, well.
01:38:41 Does it mean we’re getting rid of the Navy SEALs?
01:38:42 Brock, if he dies, he dies.
01:38:43 I don’t know if you know David Goggins
01:38:45 as by any chance.
01:38:46 I do.
01:38:47 I mean, I don’t know him personally,
01:38:47 but oh my Lord.
01:38:48 So I’m running 48 miles together with him in person
01:38:52 in a month.
01:38:53 What, you’re doing an ultra marathon?
01:38:55 With him and probably other stuff
01:38:58 because he enjoys just breaking people,
01:39:01 making them cry.
01:39:01 Oh my God, I’m so jelly.
01:39:03 So no, well, I offered,
01:39:05 we agreed a while ago to do a podcast
01:39:08 and he’s like, oh yeah, come, we’ll do it this day.
01:39:10 Is he in the Bay Area?
01:39:13 I don’t know where the hell he is,
01:39:14 but we’re doing it.
01:39:15 And I don’t think I’m supposed to say where it is,
01:39:17 but it’s not anywhere close to anywhere of this.
01:39:19 It’s in the middle of nowhere.
01:39:21 But he seems to be in a bunch of different locations.
01:39:24 Like he’s in Oregon or something like that.
01:39:27 What does he do for outside of writing books
01:39:29 and being inspirational?
01:39:30 Does he actually train people or like?
01:39:31 No, he’s just, he’s a full time insane.
01:39:35 Like he fights forest fires like for a few months a year
01:39:40 as a farmer, like unpaid labor.
01:39:42 Like he, you know, there’s a bunch of people
01:39:45 who are like him, like Navy Seals and so on
01:39:47 that kind of make a career,
01:39:49 automotivational speak and all that kind of stuff.
01:39:51 He’s not interested in any of that.
01:39:53 He’s literally interested in just doing hard shit
01:39:57 all the time.
01:39:59 Breaking himself.
01:40:00 Breaking himself personally.
01:40:00 He seems like he wants to break himself.
01:40:03 And that book is amazing.
01:40:04 And the audio book’s amazing
01:40:06 when he’s talking about how fat he was
01:40:08 and how he just had to go and keep running
01:40:10 and his like legs are broken and he’s just super pain
01:40:14 and he just goes through it.
01:40:15 It’s really inspiring.
01:40:16 Inspiring thing also.
01:40:17 You could have videotaped yourself doing this.
01:40:19 I can’t wait to see you get destroyed.
01:40:22 This is gonna be so entertaining for the lax audience.
01:40:26 The pain.
01:40:28 But the other inspiring thing is he’s happily married
01:40:32 and there’s a partnership there that’s, you know,
01:40:34 everybody finds this attention as a push and pull
01:40:38 that’s beautiful, I think.
01:40:40 But in speaking of a beautiful push and pull,
01:40:44 how about that transition?
01:40:45 Yeah, here we go.
01:40:47 You and Chamath on, he’s a friend of yours.
01:40:50 Besties. Besties, yeah.
01:40:52 Yeah, good friend.
01:40:53 I mean, there’s very few people in my life,
01:40:55 him, Elon, David Sachs, John Brockmans.
01:40:58 Very few people have supported me as much as those folks.
01:41:01 I mean, I’m a huge debt.
01:41:02 So he’s also cohost on the All In podcast.
01:41:05 We taped episode 21 today.
01:41:07 Oh, today?
01:41:08 Yeah, every Friday now.
01:41:09 They wanna do every Friday.
01:41:10 They’re addicted like me and you are to podcasts.
01:41:12 So you’re going to release it when?
01:41:14 It’s probably released as we’re sitting here.
01:41:16 Okay, beautiful.
01:41:17 Special guest on it.
01:41:18 We had Draymond Green from the Warriors phone in.
01:41:22 So we had our first guest.
01:41:23 Awesome.
01:41:24 Yeah, so it’s really funny
01:41:25 because he plays poker with us and we’re all besties, so.
01:41:28 Beautiful.
01:41:28 So you guys went pretty heated against each other
01:41:33 versus on Robin Hood.
01:41:35 There’s just two things I wanna ask.
01:41:37 First, on the actual Robin Hood discussion
01:41:41 and the Wall Street Best discussion,
01:41:42 can you steel man his argument?
01:41:44 What was the nature of the disagreement?
01:41:45 Where, yeah, what is the little,
01:41:49 because I don’t think it’s as big as spaces
01:41:51 it came off as sounding.
01:41:53 What is the nature of the disagreement?
01:41:55 He felt that Robin Hood turned off trading
01:42:01 because the hedge funds told them to
01:42:04 and that they were bowing down
01:42:07 to the pressure of the hedge funds.
01:42:08 That’s not true, but in a vacuum of information,
01:42:12 you know what happens to people’s minds,
01:42:13 conspiracy theories abound.
01:42:15 And sometimes there is a conspiracy theory
01:42:16 and sometimes there’s just the appearance of impropriety
01:42:21 or a bunch of related things.
01:42:24 Like when you look at the Trump situation with Russia,
01:42:26 like was Trump trying to coordinate with Russia
01:42:29 or the Russians just screwing with a bunch of like neophyte
01:42:34 idiotic dipshits like Donald Trump Jr.
01:42:37 who don’t know any better.
01:42:39 And they don’t know that you shouldn’t meet with the Russians
01:42:42 and if you do meet with the Russians,
01:42:43 you are probably a useful idiot.
01:42:45 You probably should tell the FBI.
01:42:46 Like they’re just a bunch of idiots in all likelihood,
01:42:48 who knows?
01:42:49 And there’s a vacuum of information.
01:42:51 And there’s a vacuum of information, we don’t know.
01:42:53 And the Russians are trying to compromise everybody.
01:42:55 So would you call it a conspiracy
01:42:57 or would you call it an attempted conspiracy?
01:43:02 There was no conspiracy here.
01:43:03 What it was was Robin Hood needed to raise billions
01:43:07 of dollars to say solvent in all likelihood.
01:43:10 And they weren’t allowed to talk about it.
01:43:13 So they were forced into not talking about it
01:43:15 in all likelihood and had to come up with that money
01:43:18 or shut down.
01:43:19 And then what got me upset with Chamath
01:43:21 and we had a talk afterwards that people don’t know about,
01:43:25 I’ll talk about it here for the first time.
01:43:27 On Sunday, we had to have a little, we had to air it out.
01:43:30 Yeah, in the episode after you guys sound like
01:43:33 you’ve had a private, you’ve made up.
01:43:35 We had a private discussion, just one on one.
01:43:37 And we said, listen, we love each other, we’re besties.
01:43:39 We’ve always been there for each other.
01:43:41 What happened here?
01:43:42 And what happened there is I’m fiercely loyal to my folks,
01:43:46 whether it’s Chamath or Travis from Uber or Saks or whoever.
01:43:50 I’m just a loyal guy.
01:43:51 And I’m always ride or die with my founders.
01:43:54 If I invest in them, even if they make a mistake
01:43:56 and Uber made plenty of mistakes,
01:43:57 I always went on CNBC, on my podcast and said,
01:43:59 hey, we’re gonna fix these things.
01:44:01 I’m in touch with the team.
01:44:03 Mistakes were made, we’re gonna solve them.
01:44:06 This is a group of people with great intent
01:44:08 who want to make the world a better place.
01:44:10 And you know what?
01:44:11 I was hated for a period of time with Uber.
01:44:13 I was hated for it last week with Robinhood.
01:44:15 I got a lot of blowback.
01:44:18 But I think in both of those cases, eventually I was right.
01:44:20 Uber is doing great stuff in the world.
01:44:22 Robinhood is doing great stuff in the world.
01:44:23 And I like to be loyal to my investments
01:44:26 and my partners to just,
01:44:27 I feel like if you invest and you’re on the team,
01:44:31 you have really three choices.
01:44:32 You either fight for your team, you can go silent,
01:44:35 or you can throw your team under the bus.
01:44:37 And I’ve watched investors throw the team
01:44:39 that they invested in that made them a bunch of money
01:44:41 under the bus, not acceptable to me.
01:44:42 And being quiet’s not acceptable to me.
01:44:44 So I always ask the founder, do you want me to,
01:44:46 is it okay if I go out and defend you publicly?
01:44:48 If they say yes, I do it.
01:44:49 And then.
01:44:50 That’s beautiful, by the way,
01:44:51 because what else do we have in this world
01:44:52 if not friendship?
01:44:53 Loyalty means everything to me.
01:44:54 I grew up in Brooklyn where if you were not loyal
01:44:57 and you were not loyal to your crew,
01:45:00 then you were a Ronin.
01:45:03 You were out there on your own flailing in the,
01:45:07 trust me, you do not want to be on your own
01:45:09 in 1970s, 80s, Brooklyn, Manhattan.
01:45:12 You need to have a crew with you.
01:45:13 I’ve gotten into, you don’t want to get into a fight
01:45:15 with 10 guys and be alone or just be with,
01:45:18 you need a crew to survive.
01:45:19 So I just learned early on, my dad owned a bar,
01:45:23 just drilled into me being loyal.
01:45:25 And so for whatever reason,
01:45:26 I’m a bulldog when it comes to loyalty.
01:45:28 And Shemov came out and said,
01:45:30 these guys need to go to jail and they’re scumbags.
01:45:32 And I’m trying to defend them.
01:45:34 And I’m in a position where I can’t defend them
01:45:36 because I don’t have complete information.
01:45:38 There is no complete information.
01:45:39 It’s in the heat of the moment.
01:45:40 And then it becomes the number one story.
01:45:43 And it’s my number three investment.
01:45:46 And Shemov has a competing company, SoFi.
01:45:49 And he’s killing my guys.
01:45:50 And then I started killing his guys.
01:45:53 And then all of a sudden we’re like,
01:45:54 wait a second, we’re best friends.
01:45:56 And we’re swinging our swords at each other.
01:46:00 And we’re a group of the seven samurai who fight together.
01:46:04 When did we turn on each other?
01:46:06 And then everybody else who’s on the pod,
01:46:07 the two Davids, you know, both on the spectrum a bit,
01:46:10 they got a little Asperger’s or whatever.
01:46:13 No offense, Les.
01:46:15 None taken.
01:46:16 None taken.
01:46:16 I’m not saying, you know,
01:46:17 but there is, you’re into AI and you might be somewhere.
01:46:22 It’s not a coincidence, yeah.
01:46:23 Might not be a coincidence.
01:46:24 Anyway, we upgraded the two Davids firmware.
01:46:26 We’re gonna upgrade your firmware after this.
01:46:27 I’ll give you, yeah, you’re on the 1.5.
01:46:30 You have the three emotions now.
01:46:32 Or should we add a fourth?
01:46:32 Do you wanna go with joy?
01:46:34 I’m on the 2.0 already.
01:46:35 You’re on the 2.0, you got the joy.
01:46:37 How’s it working out for you, the joy chip?
01:46:38 It’s difficult.
01:46:39 It’s painful. It’s difficult.
01:46:40 You’ll get there.
01:46:41 Just let it happen, Lex.
01:46:42 Just let the joy happen.
01:46:44 So anyway, we just talked about it offline
01:46:47 and we decided like, listen,
01:46:49 we didn’t pregame that episode.
01:46:52 And I happened to be skiing with my family.
01:46:53 I had taken the first like vacation
01:46:55 since this goddamn pandemic started.
01:46:57 And I was having a wonderful time.
01:46:58 And then this whole thing blows up.
01:46:59 I’m coming off the mountain,
01:47:01 just having a great time with my daughter skiing.
01:47:04 And you know, and then I’m mixing it up with him.
01:47:06 And you know, he had a short fuse about it
01:47:07 because he was triggered, he told me,
01:47:09 because he really feels like he’s fighting
01:47:12 to defend, you know, the every man.
01:47:14 And I was like, that’s what my team’s doing.
01:47:16 That’s why they named the company Robinhood.
01:47:19 We’re on the same side here.
01:47:21 And then over time,
01:47:22 we’ve started to see the explanation come out.
01:47:23 And you know, people who are friends
01:47:26 are gonna have disagreements.
01:47:28 In the podcast, it happened to happen very publicly.
01:47:30 And we didn’t know it was gonna become
01:47:32 the number one story in the world.
01:47:35 If Trump still had his Twitter handle,
01:47:36 this would not have been a story.
01:47:39 Trump would have said something about GameStop
01:47:41 and he would have coopted the entire conversation.
01:47:44 So in a way, going back to our censorship discussion,
01:47:47 I might actually be in favor of Trump being censored
01:47:51 only because how delightful has it been since January 20th
01:47:57 that we can all focus on something other than him.
01:48:01 He was exhausting.
01:48:03 I mean, the amount of cycles he took on our processors.
01:48:06 He monetized the conversation.
01:48:08 And now this is a little bit more of a distributed,
01:48:12 like this bunch of.
01:48:12 Yeah, everybody gets a chance
01:48:13 to be the number one news story.
01:48:14 Everybody gets a chance to discuss it.
01:48:17 So on a scale of one to 10, how much do you love Chamath?
01:48:20 Oh, it’s 11.
01:48:21 I mean, I love Chamath.
01:48:23 I mean, we played cards last night.
01:48:24 We’re besties.
01:48:25 And you know, I would literally jump
01:48:27 in front of a bullet for him.
01:48:29 I mean, what’s the lesson in that discussion?
01:48:31 Because it was super, I wouldn’t.
01:48:32 I think the love was felt and the respect was felt
01:48:35 throughout even when you guys
01:48:36 are going pretty vicious on each other.
01:48:38 Is there a lesson to be learned?
01:48:40 Do you regret any of that conversation?
01:48:41 No, I mean, I think he told me
01:48:44 that he regretted some of the things he said.
01:48:45 He said publicly on the podcast,
01:48:47 like, listen, I was a little hot.
01:48:48 I may have said things in the heat of the moment.
01:48:50 But I don’t live with too much regret
01:48:52 because I always think about intent.
01:48:54 As one of the nuance and intent have been totally lost.
01:48:58 The idea that we could have any kind of a nuanced discussion
01:49:01 about things seems to have been forgotten.
01:49:04 And the fact that people don’t look at people’s intent.
01:49:07 If you hurt somebody’s feelings or you disrespect somebody
01:49:11 or you do something mean or whatever,
01:49:14 I always look at the intent, you know?
01:49:16 And I’ve had people attack me and I look at the intent
01:49:20 and I’m like, that person feels bad about themselves.
01:49:23 Or maybe I said something and I insulted them
01:49:25 and that’s why their blowback’s there.
01:49:27 So I always try to think what’s the intent of the person.
01:49:29 And then almost universally,
01:49:30 you talk to somebody and you find out,
01:49:33 you ascribe some crazy intent that’s not there.
01:49:37 And they’re like, oh yeah, you know what happened?
01:49:38 I got in a fight with my spouse
01:49:39 and I didn’t sleep last night
01:49:41 and I’ve had a lot of anxiety about my business.
01:49:44 And I just snapped and said something about you.
01:49:47 And it’s like, oh, okay.
01:49:48 Like I literally had somebody on Twitter this past summer.
01:49:52 I had said something.
01:49:54 I was complaining about a New York Times journalist
01:49:57 and something I thought was wrong.
01:49:58 And this person was a fan of that journalist.
01:50:00 And they went, I kid you not, onto my social media account,
01:50:04 found a picture I’d taken about how blue the sky was one day.
01:50:08 They reverse image search the tree line,
01:50:11 found the tree line on Google image search somehow
01:50:15 with a reverse image search,
01:50:16 found an old listing that some broker had listed
01:50:20 on their website of my house,
01:50:22 and then posted my home address, the value of my home,
01:50:25 and doxxed me on Twitter.
01:50:30 And I’m like, what is going on here?
01:50:33 So I call the person and I look them up
01:50:36 and they work in private equity in Boston.
01:50:40 And I look and I’m like, this person works in Boston.
01:50:42 This is July 4th week.
01:50:44 So, and when I look at the person’s LinkedIn,
01:50:47 we have seven people in common.
01:50:49 So going back to the AR conversation real quick,
01:50:51 I’m like, okay, this person literally just doxxed me.
01:50:53 I asked them to take it down.
01:50:54 They told me they won’t take it down.
01:50:57 And then I look at it.
01:50:58 So then I DM him back on Instagram, on Twitter.
01:51:01 And I said, by the way, your boss, Susan,
01:51:04 and I know seven people in common.
01:51:06 And these are the seven people.
01:51:08 Here’s a screenshot.
01:51:09 What is she going to think when I call her on Monday
01:51:12 and you’ve doxxed me?
01:51:14 Here’s my phone number if you’d like to talk.
01:51:15 He calls me.
01:51:17 I said, what’s going on?
01:51:18 Why would you do this?
01:51:19 He’s like, well, I really pissed off
01:51:20 about what you said about this person.
01:51:21 I was like, you understand I’ve had like two
01:51:23 or three stalkers and anybody who’s a high profile
01:51:25 like I am or medium profile,
01:51:27 you’re going to have weird things happen.
01:51:29 You literally put my home address.
01:51:30 You put my family at risk.
01:51:32 What if I put your home address on my,
01:51:34 I have 400,000 followers or 300,000 followers.
01:51:37 You have like 300.
01:51:38 What if I post your address?
01:51:40 He said, well, I wish you wouldn’t do that.
01:51:42 I was like, well, I asked you kindly
01:51:43 to take my address down.
01:51:44 And I said, are you married?
01:51:47 I said, how old are you?
01:51:48 Are you like 25 or something?
01:51:49 He’s like, no, I’m 42.
01:51:51 I was like, you’re 42 years old.
01:51:53 I was like, are you married?
01:51:53 Do you have kids?
01:51:54 He’s like, yeah, I just had a baby like six months ago.
01:51:56 I’m like, you’re home with your wife.
01:51:57 It’s July 4th weekend.
01:51:59 You’re doxxing Jason Calagans because you’re upset at me
01:52:02 because I said something about a New York Times writer.
01:52:05 He’s like, yeah, this is the biggest mistake of my life.
01:52:07 I said, I tell you what, let’s forget it ever happened.
01:52:11 And he wrote me back and he said,
01:52:13 I just wanted to thank you for how you handled it.
01:52:16 My wife said I’m a complete fucking moron.
01:52:19 And he literally sent me an email.
01:52:22 My wife says I’m a complete fucking moron.
01:52:24 And I’m really sorry, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:52:26 And I wrote her back.
01:52:27 I said, I wrote her back and I said,
01:52:28 my wife says the same thing to me all the time.
01:52:30 I said, welcome to the club.
01:52:31 It’s totally fine.
01:52:32 But intent, nuance, it matters, right?
01:52:36 And the person could be having a bad day
01:52:37 and they do something stupid they regret.
01:52:39 And what am I gonna do, cancel the guy?
01:52:41 Or if I had called his boss,
01:52:43 he would have been fired immediately.
01:52:45 And then I got to live with this guy got fired
01:52:47 and he’s got a kid.
01:52:49 And what is this personal destruction?
01:52:51 Why are we doing this to each other?
01:52:52 Life’s hard enough.
01:52:54 Life’s hard, right?
01:52:55 Like just getting through the day is hard.
01:52:57 Yeah, and that little bit of empathy,
01:53:00 thinking about the intent of the person
01:53:02 allows you to then sort of deescalate
01:53:04 this kind of conversation
01:53:05 that social media wants to escalate.
01:53:08 Yes, back to what we were saying.
01:53:10 If this, in my younger years,
01:53:13 I would have retweeted the guy’s home address
01:53:16 and my address and would have called his boss
01:53:17 and tried to get him fired or whatever.
01:53:19 And it’s like, now I’m just like,
01:53:21 why are we attacking each other?
01:53:23 Life is so hard.
01:53:24 I mean, this is what the pandemic,
01:53:25 I think we should make everybody realize is like,
01:53:27 look at how hard it is.
01:53:29 Life is hard.
01:53:30 And then just think about all the people suffering right now
01:53:32 who are at home, the single mom or dad
01:53:34 with two or three kids at home in public school.
01:53:38 Maybe they’ve been laid off
01:53:40 and their kids aren’t learning
01:53:41 and they’re in a tiny apartment.
01:53:44 I mean, this has been brutal for a lot of people.
01:53:46 Not to mention people losing loved ones
01:53:48 or maybe some people got Corona
01:53:49 and now their lungs are still not right.
01:53:52 Can I ask you about love?
01:53:53 Oh, sure.
01:53:56 I’m feeling it, you know,
01:53:57 like we’re an hour or two here, Lex.
01:53:58 Yeah, you’re feeling it.
01:53:59 Feeling like we could become besties.
01:54:01 We’re getting it.
01:54:02 I feel like we got a bromance going here, Lex.
01:54:05 I feel it too.
01:54:05 I don’t know if it’s Eric Weinstein level,
01:54:07 but I feel like it’s close.
01:54:09 Yeah, I’m feeling the love.
01:54:11 But we talked about those music to my ears,
01:54:16 your whole rant on the Olympic nature of a startup.
01:54:23 Is there a role,
01:54:25 like what role does love, family, friendship
01:54:29 play in that brutal pursuit of excellence
01:54:34 that is building a startup, building a company
01:54:37 or creating anything new in this world?
01:54:40 Such a great question and totally unprepared for it.
01:54:44 Because nobody would ever ask me about that.
01:54:46 So I think it’s why you’ve got quite a following
01:54:49 on your podcast is that you’re able to ask these questions.
01:54:52 And I can tell one story because, you know,
01:54:56 I don’t talk about,
01:54:57 I try not to talk about relationship with Elon that often
01:55:00 because, you know, he’s so famous now.
01:55:03 I mean, when we met, I used to go out to parties with him
01:55:06 and people were like, oh my God, you’re Jason Calacas.
01:55:07 I was like, yeah.
01:55:08 And like, who’s your friend?
01:55:09 I’m like, that’s my friend, Elon.
01:55:10 And they’d be like, what, he’s doing rocket ships?
01:55:11 But he’s told this story publicly.
01:55:13 So I can tell it,
01:55:14 and I would never talk about anything
01:55:15 that he hasn’t already talked about publicly,
01:55:17 especially since he’s so high profile,
01:55:18 but it was pretty funny moment.
01:55:21 There was a moment in time
01:55:23 when Tesla almost went out of business
01:55:24 and you’ve probably heard the story many times,
01:55:26 but it was during the financial crisis
01:55:28 and they were running out of money.
01:55:32 And they said, you know, let’s go get a steak.
01:55:36 And we’re in LA and we drove to BOA
01:55:38 and I had my orange Tesla Roadster
01:55:40 and he had his P1 or P2, like the red one
01:55:43 that I think is in space now.
01:55:45 And we drove to the valet and we had a steak together
01:55:48 and we’re sitting there.
01:55:49 And I said, you know, I read the story
01:55:51 and Gawker or whatever, you know,
01:55:53 and New York Times here,
01:55:54 you only got like five weeks of money left in Tesla.
01:55:58 He goes, it’s not true.
01:55:59 I was like, oh, thank God.
01:56:01 He goes, we have two weeks.
01:56:02 I was like, oh God.
01:56:04 I was like, well, what’s going on
01:56:06 with the rocket ship company?
01:56:07 You know, like, you know, I know you did the one last month
01:56:12 and don’t you have one coming up?
01:56:13 He’s like, yeah, we’ve got the third one coming up.
01:56:14 I was like, well, how’s that going?
01:56:16 I said, well, we blow that one up.
01:56:17 There’s no more SpaceX.
01:56:19 I was like, so two weeks of money left in Tesla
01:56:22 and SpaceX, you blew up the first two rockets,
01:56:24 you blow up the third SpaceX, it’s over.
01:56:25 He’s like, yeah.
01:56:26 I was like, I can loan you a couple million dollars.
01:56:29 I don’t have like a ton.
01:56:31 He’s like, it’s okay.
01:56:32 Our friend, beep, has loaned me some money.
01:56:35 And Elon’s been super public about this.
01:56:37 I would never tell the story unless he hadn’t been,
01:56:39 but he was talking, he never said who it was,
01:56:42 but somebody had loaned him money to keep him afloat.
01:56:45 He was functionally bankrupt.
01:56:47 I mean, he had the equity in the companies,
01:56:48 but the equity was quickly becoming worth zero
01:56:50 and the financial crisis.
01:56:51 And he’s figuring out if he’s going to go on vacation
01:56:54 for Christmas or not.
01:56:55 And he’s on the phone trying to, you know,
01:56:58 save both companies.
01:57:01 And I said, certainly there must be some good news.
01:57:04 And he takes out his Blackberry to date this conversation.
01:57:07 I don’t know iPhones.
01:57:08 Takes out his Blackberry and he starts swiping.
01:57:10 And he says, don’t tell anybody.
01:57:12 This is what I’m building.
01:57:14 And he shows me the Model S.
01:57:17 And nobody knew that he was working on the Model S.
01:57:19 We knew he was doing the roadster
01:57:22 and he was trying to save the company.
01:57:24 And I looked at it and I was like, that’s gorgeous.
01:57:27 It was the clay models.
01:57:29 So it was a full size clay model.
01:57:30 So there’s human beings standing around a clay version
01:57:33 of this tiny little Blackberry picture.
01:57:34 I’m scrolling through on the,
01:57:35 remember that little pad or the ball on the Blackberry.
01:57:38 I’m scrolling through it.
01:57:39 I’m like, this is fucking great.
01:57:41 And I just said to him, it’s like,
01:57:43 what’s the range going to be?
01:57:44 He says, well, I think we get 250 miles.
01:57:46 I was like, 250 miles?
01:57:48 He’s like, yeah, I think it’d be the safest car ever.
01:57:49 I said, what is it going to cost?
01:57:51 He says, I think this could cost eventually 50, $60,000.
01:57:55 I said, Elon, if you make that car,
01:57:57 you’ll change the goddamn world.
01:58:00 You have to, this company must survive
01:58:03 because the roadsters for like 2000 people in United States,
01:58:07 this car is for every person in the United States.
01:58:11 Every single person in the United States
01:58:12 will want this car if it’s $50,000.
01:58:15 And maybe some of the people who have 20 or 30,000 dollars
01:58:18 won’t be able to afford it, but they’ll all want it.
01:58:20 It’s gorgeous.
01:58:21 And he said, you really think so?
01:58:22 I said, yeah.
01:58:23 So I got home and I talked to my wife, Jade,
01:58:26 and I said, do you have the checkbook?
01:58:27 She does all the finances and stuff like that,
01:58:29 pays the bills and whatever.
01:58:30 And I said, don’t tell anybody,
01:58:33 Elon’s making this great car.
01:58:35 And I wrote two checks for $50,000.
01:58:38 And I just took out this paper and I wrote,
01:58:40 E, comma, love the new car, I’ll take two.
01:58:47 And I signed it.
01:58:48 I kissed the two $50,000 checks, put them in the envelope,
01:58:51 and I FedExed it to him for Monday delivery.
01:58:53 And I said to Jade, that $100,000 is going to be gone
01:58:58 in 48 hours because it will pay for one or two days
01:59:00 of payroll on Tesla.
01:59:02 So we just added like, instead of two weeks of runway,
01:59:04 he’s got 12 days.
01:59:06 And the checks don’t cash, but then I read a story
01:59:10 that he’s closed the money, saved the company
01:59:12 in like the next week or two.
01:59:14 And a couple of months later, the checks get cashed.
01:59:19 And I’m like, okay.
01:59:20 Three years later, I get an email,
01:59:22 your reservation number, it’s from Tesla,
01:59:25 your reservation number is 0000001.
01:59:29 And then five seconds later,
01:59:31 your reservation number is 000073.
01:59:35 And I forwarded the number one to Elon,
01:59:36 I said, you know, I can’t take number one,
01:59:40 a signature number one, I can’t take that, that’s yours.
01:59:43 And he’s like, oh, I got five of them.
01:59:45 And besides, you’re the first person who ordered it.
01:59:48 And I was the first person who had seen it.
01:59:49 You’re gonna get me to be teary eyed.
01:59:51 I mean, that’s beautiful.
01:59:51 No, it was a very…
01:59:52 That’s a beautiful moment.
01:59:53 It was an incredible moment for both of us.
01:59:55 And we talk about it sometimes, you know,
01:59:57 those moments in time.
01:59:58 And to your point about love, Elon…
01:59:59 That’s like the darkest moment,
02:00:01 one of the darkest moments in his life probably.
02:00:03 I think it was, I can tell you,
02:00:04 it was the darkest period of his life for sure.
02:00:07 And he’s been very public about how dark that was.
02:00:09 And I think, you know, this is why I have great sympathy
02:00:12 for the entrepreneurs of the world,
02:00:13 like the suffering and the pain.
02:00:15 And when he talks about the suffering and the pain
02:00:17 that all of these founders have felt,
02:00:18 and then we were throwing rocks at them
02:00:20 or criticizing them as they try to change the world
02:00:22 and save humanity, and in Tesla’s case,
02:00:24 I mean, they weren’t, you know,
02:00:26 they weren’t like delivering pizza.
02:00:28 I mean, they were trying to get us off of fossil fuels.
02:00:31 Like this was a big, heady mission
02:00:33 to literally save the environment, the planet, humanity.
02:00:36 And the way they shorted that stock and they attacked him,
02:00:40 it was always perplexing to me why any human being
02:00:44 who is standing on God’s green earth
02:00:47 would want to throw rocks at the guy
02:00:50 who is trying to stem the dam of global warming
02:00:53 that is about to engulf all of us.
02:00:56 How dare they throw rocks at that guy?
02:01:00 There’s so many people you could throw rocks at.
02:01:02 There’s somebody who’s making the Juul vaporizer,
02:01:05 throw rocks at that scumbag, no offense.
02:01:07 But like whoever’s making the Juul things
02:01:09 and is, you know, selling pina colada flavor
02:01:12 to 12 year olds, like throw rocks at them.
02:01:16 Somebody is doing something, you know, abhorrent,
02:01:18 but not E, I mean, and yeah.
02:01:21 Anyway, that car is, you know, up the road here,
02:01:25 sitting under a cover with 20,000 miles on it in my garage.
02:01:29 And then the Roadster number 16 is in the garage next to it.
02:01:32 And every day I walk by the two of them
02:01:34 and I get a warm feeling in my heart
02:01:35 because I know he did it.
02:01:37 Against all odds, against all odds, he pulled it off.
02:01:43 And it was that moment, that month in that 2000,
02:01:47 I think it was probably December, January,
02:01:49 December of 2008, I think.
02:01:51 You know, it’s just 12 years ago
02:01:52 when you think about 13 years ago, it was dark.
02:01:55 I mean, it was dark.
02:01:56 And they almost had the same thing happen,
02:01:58 you know, in the Model 3 production
02:02:00 in June of two years, three years ago.
02:02:02 And I remember him just trying to get the Model 3
02:02:05 out the door and the company almost crashed then.
02:02:07 Most of these companies have, you know,
02:02:09 these kinds of moments.
02:02:10 And I think friendship is you get what you give,
02:02:14 you get what you give.
02:02:16 And if you are there for people,
02:02:18 you’re gonna feel so good about having done that.
02:02:22 And then the reciprocation effect,
02:02:27 which you’d probably know very well,
02:02:29 is so great in the world that anytime you’re kind to people,
02:02:33 you build this incredible bond.
02:02:34 And then what are we at the end of the day, Lex,
02:02:37 besides a series of memories with the people we love?
02:02:41 That’s all it is.
02:02:42 It’s just a series of memories and moments.
02:02:45 It’s just moments.
02:02:47 You ever see Blade Runner?
02:02:48 Yes, of course.
02:02:49 Do you remember what Rucker Harris says at the end,
02:02:52 all of these memories gone, like tears in the rain?
02:02:55 I mean, that’s our existence.
02:02:56 It just all goes away at some point.
02:02:59 It’s just these drops of rain.
02:03:01 Each of those memories,
02:03:02 just like one snowflake or one drop of rain,
02:03:05 and they’re all lost at some point, but they’re here now.
02:03:08 And that’s why we have to be there for each other.
02:03:10 That’s why I feel like what I do
02:03:12 is so important in this world.
02:03:14 And I get such great meaning out of it.
02:03:16 Just being a friend, just having these conversations.
02:03:19 What you’re doing on your podcast,
02:03:21 just talking to intelligent people
02:03:23 and spreading the word and the gospel
02:03:26 of what they’re saying and amplifying it,
02:03:28 you’re inspiring so many people.
02:03:29 Every podcast, you get 500,000 people,
02:03:31 a million people watch these videos.
02:03:33 And there’s some kid in Sri Lanka
02:03:35 or some little girl in Afghanistan
02:03:37 who’s gonna stumble upon this on YouTube,
02:03:39 and they’re gonna change the world in the next century.
02:03:42 Because it’s not just about America.
02:03:46 Our story’s almost over, right?
02:03:48 We were the story of the last two or 300 years.
02:03:50 I hope it keeps going.
02:03:51 But there’s all these other places in the world,
02:03:52 Sao Paulo and Africa,
02:03:54 where people now have access to these videos.
02:03:59 And somebody will hear this video and go,
02:04:00 Elon did it.
02:04:02 Oh, and that guy Jason was his friend.
02:04:03 And, oh, and Lex does those interviews with him.
02:04:06 Oh yeah, I could do it too.
02:04:07 Your little magical moment of love
02:04:10 amidst the suffering with Elon
02:04:12 because you’ve talked about it,
02:04:14 it’ll have these ripple effects.
02:04:15 It’s fascinating to think about in decades to come.
02:04:18 And new entrepreneurs being born,
02:04:20 new, more love being put out there,
02:04:23 and more support through these rough times
02:04:26 when people are trying to create new things.
02:04:29 I mean, that’s a beautiful thing, that’s a beautiful,
02:04:31 I’m glad you think of friendship in this way.
02:04:35 I’m deeply grateful that you’re loyal.
02:04:39 Every time you invest.
02:04:40 In the way you are.
02:04:41 Here’s the thing,
02:04:42 it costs you nothing to make this investment either.
02:04:45 The amount of time it takes to be bitter or angry,
02:04:49 sitting at home, to be disappointed,
02:04:53 you could just channel that same amount of energy
02:04:55 into being loyal, loving, kind, and there for people.
02:04:59 It just only takes the intention, right?
02:05:02 The water is gonna, those emotions are gonna flow, right?
02:05:05 Like Sam would always tell me
02:05:06 when I was struggling in my life and I talked to him,
02:05:09 he’d say, you know, Jason,
02:05:10 your brain is spewing all these ideas.
02:05:12 Imagine you’re standing, sitting by a river,
02:05:15 and the river is all your ideas.
02:05:17 You are not a slave to any one of these ideas.
02:05:18 They’re just whipping by
02:05:20 like each of those little waves in the river.
02:05:22 You can pick one of those ideas out
02:05:23 and look at it and examine it,
02:05:25 and either keep it,
02:05:26 or throw it back in the river and let it go.
02:05:28 And I was like, wow, Sam, that was like,
02:05:31 of my entire friendship with Sam Harris,
02:05:32 that was like the one moment where I was just like,
02:05:34 oh my God, all my life,
02:05:36 I’ve wondered about all these thoughts in my head,
02:05:39 insecurities, you know, imposter syndrome.
02:05:43 Like I didn’t go to MIT, you know,
02:05:46 I’m not the smartest guy,
02:05:48 but somehow I made a career writing little 50K checks
02:05:52 and now, you know, $3 million checks,
02:05:54 but whatever, you know, little checks
02:05:55 and being a journalist and doing this little podcast,
02:05:57 and it’s ended up to something.
02:05:59 And I kind of, I’m proud of it.
02:06:01 I’m 50 and I’m kind of proud of what I did.
02:06:04 And I wake up every morning after I retired,
02:06:06 I say, I kind of like what I do.
02:06:09 I kind of like having the conversation
02:06:10 and writing the check and then being on somebody’s team.
02:06:13 And I got offered to be in these giant mega funds
02:06:17 and they said, Jason, you’re in it,
02:06:18 you invest in 60 companies a year,
02:06:20 you know, 500K at a time,
02:06:22 you put $30 million a year to work, come work with us,
02:06:25 write one $50 million check
02:06:27 and then you can go to Aspen and Cabo and Coachella
02:06:32 and not work.
02:06:34 But why are you doing all this work?
02:06:35 It’s like, well, the $50 million check
02:06:38 is like, it’s like a formality.
02:06:40 It’s just like being an ATM,
02:06:41 like the companies are already huge by that time.
02:06:43 I really want to meet the two people with the idea.
02:06:46 I want to meet them in year one.
02:06:48 I want to meet them on day zero.
02:06:51 I want to be the guy who wrote the first,
02:06:52 second or third check.
02:06:53 I want a guy who wrote the 3000th check, the last check.
02:06:57 It’s fucking boring.
02:06:58 And make that basic human connection
02:07:00 and also be with them through the rough times,
02:07:03 be with them with that first,
02:07:05 I mean, the first early successes,
02:07:07 I mean, that’s a beautiful.
02:07:08 So great.
02:07:09 When a founder and that team get product market fit
02:07:13 and you just know it’s going to work,
02:07:16 oh man, Lex, it’s,
02:07:18 when Comm would email me and they’d say,
02:07:21 we added, you know, the company’s been growing
02:07:24 and we’re not going to go out of business,
02:07:25 but we added some sleep stuff
02:07:27 and then we added this other function
02:07:29 and we have a streak now and we grew 10X
02:07:33 in the last, you know, three months.
02:07:36 And we’re good.
02:07:38 You know, I was like, ah, that’s nice.
02:07:40 It’s real nice.
02:07:41 It’s like, it’s a nice feeling when you,
02:07:42 well, because so many of them die.
02:07:44 We talked about that J curve early.
02:07:45 Imagine it’s like,
02:07:49 it’s like all these baby turtles going out to the ocean
02:07:51 and the seagulls are ripping them to shreds
02:07:53 and then the sharks are eating them.
02:07:56 But then like a couple of the turtles make it
02:07:58 and they become wise old 100 year old turtles, you know?
02:08:02 And you’re like, yep, I remember when you catched
02:08:06 and like all of your brothers and sisters
02:08:08 were ripped to shreds by the seagulls
02:08:09 and you made it into the water.
02:08:11 And then you made it out to the deep water.
02:08:13 Pretty great feeling.
02:08:14 I think there’s no better way to end it.
02:08:17 There it is.
02:08:18 The talk of the cruelty of life,
02:08:20 that suffering that is life
02:08:22 and the love amidst the suffering.
02:08:24 Jason, I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time.
02:08:26 You’re one of the most special people in Silicon Valley.
02:08:30 Thanks, Lex.
02:08:31 And maybe you’ll also call me in one of the rough times.
02:08:34 I’m sure there’ll be many.
02:08:36 There will be, yeah.
02:08:37 There’s one expression, nobody gets there alone.
02:08:41 Nobody gets there alone.
02:08:42 And anybody who thinks that they got there alone
02:08:45 is delusional and kidding themselves.
02:08:47 And they will at some point wake up and realize,
02:08:48 oh shit, there were a lot of people helped me get here.
02:08:52 I need to write a couple of gratitude letters.
02:08:54 I got a gratitude letter the other day
02:08:55 from a friend of mine who I helped.
02:08:57 And I was one of the,
02:08:59 you know about these gratitude letters people are writing?
02:09:02 It turns out Martin Seligman in, was it Authentic Happiness?
02:09:07 Anyway, the guy who really studied happiness and joy,
02:09:10 turns out one of the greatest amplifiers of joy in your life
02:09:15 is to thank somebody for doing something for you.
02:09:17 And somebody who I had helped just wrote me a letter
02:09:22 and I got in Christmas
02:09:22 and I had the stack of Christmas cards
02:09:24 and I hadn’t opened them.
02:09:25 And it’s the second week of January
02:09:27 and I was just getting to like the last stack
02:09:29 and I open it up and I almost missed it.
02:09:32 It’s incredibly heartwarming letter
02:09:33 about how meaningful like certain things I had done
02:09:37 to help along the way
02:09:38 and how he’d always appreciated my counsel.
02:09:41 And I was just like, well, this happened 25 years ago
02:09:46 and you wrote this letter now.
02:09:48 And it just hit me like a ton of bricks.
02:09:50 I was just like, wow, you know, if you’re hearing this,
02:09:53 there’s probably 10 people
02:09:54 who are really instrumental in your lives, in your lives.
02:09:58 Go ahead and call them on the phone,
02:10:00 write them an email or even better,
02:10:02 just write a letter and send it to them
02:10:05 and just tell them you’re thankful.
02:10:07 And let me tell you something,
02:10:08 the amplification of joy in your life will go a hundred X,
02:10:12 a hundred X when you tell somebody you love them
02:10:15 and that you really appreciate them
02:10:17 and that what they did for you was magical.
02:10:18 So just, and you can look it up, gratitude.
02:10:21 Gratitude is like one of these incredible forces.
02:10:23 Amen.
02:10:24 I’m grateful for being on the pod.
02:10:25 I’m grateful you wasted all this time with me.
02:10:29 I love it.
02:10:59 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.